Ryan Hall: Martial Arts and the Philosophy of Violence, Power, and Grace
Guests: Ryan Hall
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents30 chapters
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The following is a conversation with Ryan Hall,
one of the most insightful minds and systems thinkers
in the martial arts world.
He's a black belt in jiu-jitsu, accomplished competitor,
an MMA fighter undefeated in the UFC,
and truly a philosopher who seeks to understand
the underlying principles of the martial arts.
Jiu-jitsu is such an important part of who I am,
and I was hoping to share that with folks
who might know me only as a researcher.
I think there is no better person to do that with
than Ryan, who somehow, remarkably, I can say is a friend,
and also a modern day warrior philosopher
of the Miyamoto Musashi line,
of especially dangerous and brilliant humans.
Also, his amazing wife, Jen Hall, was there as well,
so if you hear a kind of voice of wisdom coming from above,
you know who it is.
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And now, here's my conversation with Ryan Hall.
Who, in your view, is the greatest warrior in history,
ancient or modern?
- That's a tough question,
and again, I'm no historian by any measure,
so I'll probably do the worst.
It's like, "What are your best bands ever?"
I'm like, "Metallica," and so I'll pick the--
- Metallica just came out with a new album, by the way,
with an entire orchestra.
- That's kinda cool.
That's important.
- Metallica will always be one of the greatest,
so I agree with you. - Yeah, they were a bad example.
They were a well-known yet awesome band.
Let me say Nickelback or something like that,
but that feels cheap
because everyone makes fun of Nickelback.
I don't know, I guess it depends
on how you wanna define warrior.
Something that I think about
when it comes to trying to evaluate
various people or situations
or things that I've read about or heard about
are the circumstances that they were involved in
because I think a lot of times
it's easy to look at the outcomes,
and obviously we live in an outcome-driven world
and outcomes do matter,
but at the same time, you look at,
let's say what Cuba's been able to pull off
from a combat sports perspective.
It's staggering,
the amount of successful Olympic-level competitors
they have in wrestling, boxing, judo.
I mean, they're a tiny little island
with no money and no people.
That's shocking.
§02Transcript · 08:34–16:26
When you think about the Olympics
and the United States doing well,
of course we should do well.
I mean, Russia should do well, China should do well.
India should do better than they do, honestly.
Obviously it means they're not into it as much,
or at least certain sports,
because they have the resources people-wise.
So talent's not gonna be an issue.
- So there's something to where the starting point is.
That's the argument with why people say Maradona.
I don't know if you're into soccer.
- Okay.
- They say Maradona is better than Messi
because he basically carried the team
and won the World Cup
with a team that wouldn't otherwise win the World Cup.
And then Messi was only successful in Barcelona
because he has superstars.
He's playing with other superstars.
- Right.
Yeah, that's fair to say.
I mean, like you know,
there's a lot of factors that go into,
let's say, winning a soccer game.
And obviously Barcelona,
particularly for various points in time,
had a ridiculous all-star squad of world-class players.
But, and let's say for instance,
maybe they didn't have the creative players in Argentina.
They needed to get the ball up to Messi.
You know, they didn't have like the NES,
and again, the backing there in the midfield.
But, because obviously Argentina's always had
ridiculous attacking players,
like even alongside Messi,
but they're like the three killers up front
and then a little less behind.
- So it's interesting you say that,
depends how you define warrior,
'cause you could probably take like
some of the civil rights leaders.
You can go into that direction,
like leaders in general.
But if we just look at like
the greatest martial artists in history in that direction,
do you have somebody in mind?
- I would say at least three.
Three that pop into my head would be Hannibal,
Alexander the Great,
and then maybe Miyamoto Musashi.
You know, the two commanders and then one guy.
But, so it's interesting.
And then again, you mentioned warriors
being able to make a lot out of a little.
Musashi's famous for winning duels,
you know, that were oftentimes one on one.
You know, the Alexander and Hannibal
were military commanders and one of them faced Rome.
And that was an interesting thing.
Oftentimes, you know, coming up with novel tactics,
different strategies, sometimes under resourced,
doing, having to do novel and crazy things.
There's skin in the game.
That's an interesting thing too.
I think a lot of times, you know, it's a,
if you're playing a video game,
I don't think you can be a warrior
because there's no skin in the game.
You get hurt, you lose, and it's a bummer.
It stings a little bit.
Maybe it makes you feel slightly disappointed,
but you know, Musashi loses, he loses.
Hannibal loses, he loses.
Alexander loses, he loses.
And they lose, I guess the people around them lose.
So that's almost like you could use,
even from a combat sports perspective,
Muhammad Ali, I mean, you consider also
their quality of opposition.
Musashi was fighting high quality opposition.
Obviously Hannibal and Alexander, particularly Hannibal,
were fighting unbelievable opposition.
Muhammad Ali fought phenomenal opposition,
but he had skin in the game, both in the ring and out.
And that actually meshes with, as you mentioned,
like a civil rights type of situation
where you are under-resourced,
you're pushing the stone uphill.
And that was a neat thing, I think,
about Muhammad Ali was how much personal conviction
the man had to have in order to pull off
what he was able to pull off,
both in and outside of the ring.
And that reminds me of, again,
some of the other great leaders
or great fighters throughout history.
- So what do you make of the kind of very difficult idea
that some of these conquerors like Alexander the Great
and somebody that, if you listen to hardcore history,
Oden Carlin, who apparently Elon Musk
is also a big fan of, is the Genghis Khan episode.
A large percent of the world
can call Genghis Khan an ancestor.
So the difficult truth is about some of these conquerors
is that there's a lot of murder and rape and pillage
and stealing of resources and all that kind of stuff.
And yet they're often remembered as quite honorable.
I mean, in the case of Genghis Khan,
there's a lot of people who argue,
if you look at historically the way it's described
in full context, is he was ultimately,
given the time, he was a liberator.
He was a progressive, I should say.
In terms of the violence and the atrocities he committed,
he, at least in the stories,
has always provided the option of not to do that.
It's only if you resist do,
so you basically have the option,
do you wanna join us or do you want to die and die horribly?
- Yeah, so that's the progressive sort of,
that's the Bernie Sanders of the era.
- Nice.
- So what do you make of that?
That there's so much of these great conquerors,
there's so much murder that to us now would just seem insane.
- It's funny you mentioned it.
I think that maybe it's a human nature thing
that we want to, or maybe a misunderstanding thing
that we want to cast all of our characters and ourselves
maybe as entirely good or as entirely negative
when I guess the phrase or the saying,
one man's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist,
is accurate.
And a lot of times I think you can understand
as long as you're able to look
from various people's perspective.
Like if you look at the TV show "The Wire,"
which was obviously widely, everybody loves "The Wire."
I thought that there were, everyone,
I'm not saying anything that's not been said before,
compelling characters from all angles,
whether you like the character, dislike the character,
you were able to understand the motivations
of people doing various things.
Even if they did wrongly, they did rightly.
We want to cast all of the demons throughout history
as completely inhuman when I think that makes it difficult
for us to understand them.
And we want to look back at the people
that we think of as great and entirely great.
And I think that we're experiencing the problems with this,
even right now, socially and politically
is we're trying to look back and decide
the people we thought were good or not good,
or people we thought were bad are now good,
rather than going, "Hey, there's good and bad to all things.
And there are, as you mentioned, the Genghis Khan thing.
You don't have to fight back."
You do, I respect you for it,
but then we're gonna have a conflict
and then we'll see what happens.
And if you lose, you're gonna be sorry that you did
because I have to make it that way
if I want to continue utilizing this kind of MO
because I need to discourage the next guy
from doing what you're doing right now.
And ultimately though,
I guess that's an interesting thing.
Imagine you put every single person
on planet earth in a cage, crime drops.
Also, there are certain positives to that.
And it's just things are as they are, it's difficult,
but that is ultimately more the law of the jungle.
And I think that we're able to supersede some of that now
in modern times, and I think we're fortunate.
But as you mentioned, we look back and say,
"Oh, this is horrible."
Say, "No, that just is what it is.
That's how life is at a base level."
And again, if you're a lion and I'm a gazelle,
I don't really like it very much,
but we don't call the lion the bad guy.
We don't sanctify the gazelle or the other way around.
So it's interesting when you pull back some of the controls
that we put on our behavior and in modern life,
which I think are generally speaking positive,
we get down to how things often are.
And at the same time,
modern life was built by people like Genghis Khan.
So then you get down to the ends justifying the means.
It's a tough question.
These aren't things with easy answers, or at least if they
are, I certainly don't have the smarts to figure out
the answers to them, but it's difficult.
I would just say people in the world are complicated
and layered, and depending upon which side of the line
you're standing on at various times,
you may like or dislike someone.
But I can't remember whose idea it was,
§03Transcript · 16:30–24:53
this is killing me, but it's the veil of ignorance,
I guess, the philosophical idea of the veil of ignorance
where I go, "Is sticking everyone in the cage
the right thing to do?"
And I say, or everyone but me, and I say, "Well, no, why?"
"Well, it would make my life easier if I just went over
and took all of your stuff as long as you couldn't stop me."
I mean, of course, that's a great idea.
That's what everyone does in every video game.
But in Skyrim, you steal stuff when people aren't around.
But ultimately you go, "Well, this isn't the right thing
to do because if I were on the other side of it,
I would not appreciate it.
It's inherently not a good thing to do.
I'm only doing it because I think I'm gonna win."
And that's a fine way to be, but you don't have
the white hat on, I guess I would say.
So I think without those philosophical underpinnings
to rein us in, I guess morally speaking,
it's very difficult to say what's right or wrong.
And you'd say certain actions have a reaction,
almost like a physics sense.
If you kill everyone in your way for as long as you're able
to, your life will be easier.
I mean, you're setting the table for someone doing the same
to you when you're no longer the tough guy,
but it is what it is.
- Yeah, if you look at the Instagram channel,
Nature is Metal, it hurts my heart to watch,
to remind me, a comfortable descendant of ape,
how vicious nature is, just unapologetically,
just, I mean, there's a process to it
where the bad guy always wins.
The violence is the solution to most problems
or the flip side of that, running away from violence
is the solution, depending on your skillset.
And it's funny to think of us humans
with our extra little piece of brain
that we're somehow trying to figure out,
like you said, in a philosophical way,
how to supersede that, how to move past the viciousness,
the cruelty, just the cold exchange of nature.
But perhaps it's not so.
Maybe that is nature, maybe that's the way of life.
Maybe we're trying too hard to,
we're being too egotistical
and thinking we're somehow separate from nature,
we're somehow distant from that very thing.
- I couldn't agree with you more.
In fact, I think actually Orson Scott Card,
who's the writer of a great book called "Ender's Game,"
this was a statement that the main character, Ender,
made in the book, his brother was brilliant.
His brother was like kind of sociopathic, brilliant kid
that was ended up kicked out of the school
that they were all into for battle commander.
Dealing with his brother taught him
that ultimately strength, courage,
the ability to do violence,
for all the good and the bad of that,
is one of the fundamental, most important things
to be able to do in life,
because if you can't cause destruction,
if you can't cause pain,
you will be forever subject to those who can.
And I think that you mentioned egotism.
I think that that's a disease
that could obviously strike any of us,
but it's something that we're looking at now.
We're, you know, I think we should be unbelievably thankful
as people that live in the world that we do,
that we can walk down the street
without having to worry that I'm like,
"Well, don't worry, that six foot six,
"270 pound person over there is just gonna leave me alone.
"And I have a Rolex on, but whatever, I'll be fine,
"because that person is deciding to leave me alone,
"because we've all agreed to live in this relatively,
"you know, sane and or, you know, constrained society,
"because it benefits all of us.
"And we're doing it because of a philosophical underpinning,
"not because nature dictates it be that way,
"because nature dictates it go
"in a very, very different direction.
"And the only person, the only thing stopping that person
"from doing something to me is either me, that person,
"or someone else that will stand in between us.
"And if I can't do it,
"and there's no one there to stand in between us,
"then the only thing stopping that person is that person."
And I have to hope that they're either disinterested
or disinclined to do that sort of thing.
And I think that, you know, it's keeping in mind
that that is the fundamental nature of the world,
whether we like it or not, is important.
And I think the quest to fundamentally alter human nature
is gonna be ultimately fruitless.
And then also it's, it is a little bit egotistical.
A lion does what a lion does, you know,
we can try to box it in and we can try to, you know,
guide this direction, that direction,
but, you know, nature is as it is,
and as it always will be,
unless we wanna start to constrain it significantly.
But now I'm starting to get into individual rights,
who put me in charge?
Who says that I should be the one
to make the choices constraining?
Because many of the most awful things
that have happened throughout history,
one group or one person has decided to constrain others.
And we don't like Genghis Khan doing that?
Well, I'll do that on a little level.
Are there gonna be benefits and beneficiaries?
Absolutely, but there'll be losers in that too.
So I guess it's a dangerous game.
It's almost like putting on the one ring.
You know, we remember when Frodo
offered the one ring to Gandalf,
and Gandalf said, "No, no, I would take it away.
"I would put it on.
"I would use it out of the desire to do good.
"But through me, it would wield a power
"so terrible you can't imagine."
I think that's the big question for anyone
that decides that's able to have reach
and able to have power.
I mean, obviously I can't speak to that,
but imagine you did have national level,
global level power.
How would you use it?
Would you try to change the world?
Would you be glad that you did down the line?
I don't know.
- Yeah, there's a, I mean,
that's the thing we're struggling now as a society.
Maybe it'd be nice to get your quick comment on that,
which is the people who have traditionally been powerless
are now, you know, seeking a fairer society,
a more equal society.
And in attaining more power justly,
there's also a realization, at least from my perspective,
that power corrupts everyone.
Even if you're, even if the flag you wave
is that of justice, right?
And so, you know, not to overuse the term,
but it'd be nice if you have thoughts
about the whole idea of cancel culture and the internet
and Twitter and so on,
where there's nuanced, difficult discussions
of race, of gender, of fairness,
equality, justice, all of these kinds of things.
There's a shouting down, oftentimes,
of nuanced discussion of kind of trying to reason
through these very difficult issues,
through our history, through what our future looks like.
Do you have thoughts about the internet discourse
that's going on now?
Is there something positive?
- Yeah, I mean-- - That we can pull out of this?
- It's an interesting thing to see, I guess.
As you mentioned, any time you're wielding power,
whomever you are, doing so carefully is important.
And it's very, very easy to look at the people
that have power and that are using it poorly,
or have used it poorly, and go, "Hey, you're the bad guy."
And then go, "Well, of course, if I had power,
"I'll use it properly, and I may intend to use it properly,
"and maybe I will."
But at the same time, we see a lot of times,
people are people are people.
I think that a lot of the, I think if you believe
that human beings are all one, which I do,
no matter whether you're here or you're there,
you got two arms, two legs, a heart, a brain,
we all live a similar experience.
And obviously, we have variations on a theme.
But you're no less a human being,
if you're a person I've never met from China,
than some person in Virginia.
It's, we're all people.
And I guess, ultimately, if I believe
that human beings are corruptible, and that power corrupts,
and that we're all fallible, and we say and do things
that either intentionally or unintentionally,
that we wish we'd not, I think that I have to allow
for a space, I guess, with the word,
it's almost a religious term,
but I guess I would just say grace.
And that's something that I see disappearing
from discourse in the public, or maybe it wasn't there,
I'm not sure, but it's interesting,
watching this occur on the internet,
because also now, no longer are you and I
just having a talk sitting on a bus stop,
it's now in writing, everything's in writing.
The old saying, like, don't put that in writing.
You're like, don't put anything in writing,
that's how you get in trouble.
And basically, with the degree
§04Transcript · 24:56–33:09
to which everything is recorded,
but recorded in tiny little bites,
it's very, very easy for me to waive
every last little foolish, ignorant, incorrect,
or correct thing that someone has ever said or done
in their face to support whatever argument
that I'm trying to make about them, or a situation.
And I think that you mentioned cancel culture,
or as it seems to exist, obviously this is poisonous,
on its face this is poisonous.
It's the sort of thing that doesn't
incentivize proper behavior.
I mean, you look at, let's say,
one of the great monsters of history, Adolf Hitler,
obviously, who's done awful, awful things,
but also for anyone that's even a minor student of history,
did some positive things as well.
We don't have to, I don't have to
embroider this person's crimes,
I don't have to act as if there was nothing good
a monster has ever done, and nothing bad
that a great person throughout history has ever done.
But imagine the ghost of Adolf Hitler were to pop up
and go, "Oh my gosh, guys, I'm so sorry.
"I know what I've done, but I'd like to apologize
"and start to make it right."
Well, I mean, you'd hope that,
if he popped up over here, you'd go,
"Well, I don't really like what you've done,
"and I don't like you, but at the same time,
"I'm glad to hear that you're attempting
"to make this right and push in a positive direction,
"even if you can't make it right."
Because otherwise, what am I doing?
I'm disincentivizing change for the better.
I'm looking to wield whatever power I have
in a punitive fashion, which does not encourage people
to do anything other than double down
on the wrongs that they've made,
knowing that at least they're gonna have some support
from the people that support that.
And I guess I want to, you would hopefully
look at the use of the internet as a tool that can educate,
and I guess, I don't like the word empower,
but empower people to do various things,
extend their reach, but educate and learn,
rather than to further solidify little tribal things
that exist, which I think everyone in humanity
and human history is vulnerable to.
I mean, look at the course of human history.
It's deeply tribal.
And the tribes or the groups that have been on top
at various points in time have done,
a lot of times, bad things to the ones that have not.
And you'd hope that we could learn lessons from the past,
and rather than committing the crimes
that were committed against us,
recommit in them when we slide into the top position,
say, "I could do this now, but I'll not."
I understand the urge to seek vengeance is strong.
Anyone that says differently, I wouldn't trust.
But at the same time, we go,
we have enough experience in history,
enough experience in life, enough, hopefully, wisdom,
time in to go, "This isn't the right answer.
This is only gonna replay the things,
the worst parts of our history, not the best."
And I want to encourage positive behavior.
And if I just, again, further lash out at people,
although understandably, done understandably,
I'm simply just gonna just perpetuate the cycle
that's gone on to this point.
So you hope that even though we're seeing
a lot of turmoil societally at the moment
and globally at the moment,
that I guess our better angels can prevail
at a certain point.
But it's gonna take a great deal of leadership.
And I think that we're sorely missing
like a Martin Luther King-style character at the moment
or a great leader.
And I just, I'm hoping that one will show up.
- For sure.
And by the way, a word I don't hear often,
and I think it's a beautiful one, which is grace.
That's a really interesting word.
I'm gonna have to think about that.
There is a religious component to it,
but it's exactly right.
You have to somehow walk the line between,
you know, you mentioned Hitler.
I've been reading "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich."
I'm really thinking about the 1930s
and what it's like to have economic...
My concern is the economic pain
that people are feeling now quietly
is really a suffering that's not being heard.
And there's echoes of that in the '20s and the '30s
with the Great Depression.
And there's a hunger for a charismatic leader.
Like you said, there's a leader
that could walk with grace, could inspire,
could bring people together
with sort of dreams of a better future that's positive.
But Hitler did exactly everything that I just said,
except for the word positive,
which is he did give a dream to the German people
who were great people,
who are great people of a better future.
It's just that a certain point
that quickly turned into the better future
requires literally expansion of more land.
It started with, well, if we wanna build a great Germany,
we need a little bit more land.
And so we need to kind of get Austria,
then we need to kind of get France,
mostly because France doesn't understand
that more land is really useful,
so we need to get rid of them.
- And look what they did to us in Versailles anyway.
- But so the Jewish, the Holocaust is a separate thing.
I don't know.
Well, I don't know.
I don't know what to think of it
because to me being Jewish and having a lot of,
the echoes of the suffering is in my family,
of the people that are lost.
I don't know because Hitler wrote all about it in "Mein Kampf,"
so I don't know if the evil he committed
was there all along.
I mean, and that's where the question of forgiveness,
I mean, Hitler is such a difficult person to talk about,
but it's the question of,
cancel culture, who is deserving of forgiveness
and who is not?
Like the Holocaust survivors that I've read about,
that I've heard the interviews with,
they've often spoken about the fact that
the way for them to let go,
to overcome the atrocities that they've experienced
is to forgive.
Like forgiveness is the way out for them.
It's interesting to think about.
I don't know.
I don't know if we're even as a society
ready to even contemplate an idea of forgiveness for Hitler.
It's an interesting idea though.
It's a good thought exercise at the very least
to think about all these people that are being canceled
for doing bad things of different degrees.
Think of like Louis C.K. or somebody like that
for being not a good person,
but what is the path for forgiveness?
- And also what's a good person?
- What is a good person?
- If that's a sliding scale
that we could all find ourselves looking at
the uncomfortable end of a gun on,
particularly down the line,
I mean, you hope for the best,
but these definitions, I guess, like you said,
are important and who's doing the canceling,
who's being canceled.
I'm not necessarily, as you said,
saying that that's entirely unjustified
or certainly not, it's certainly understandable.
And particularly you mentioned like a monster,
like an Adolf Hitler, but it's also interesting.
I couldn't help but notice, like you mentioned,
as a society, us being able to apply forgiveness
to someone who's done so much horror,
but people who are personal,
I mean, of course, many,
so many people have been personally affected,
but directly personally affected,
someone, a survivor of the Holocaust,
being able to let go on that,
I'm nowhere near big enough a person
for that sort of thing.
But I guess that's an interesting thing,
the person who was physically there
potentially able to let go.
I don't know, that's unbelievably powerful.
It's interesting.
I guess you have to wonder sometimes,
and this isn't obviously in regards to the Holocaust,
but why I'm holding on to various things.
Why, what is it doing for me?
And what is it doing to me?
Is it facilitative?
Is it not?
And I guess that's something else that I really enjoy.
When I was on "Ultimate Fighter,"
they don't let you have any music or any books
other than religious texts.
So I brought a Bible and I brought a Quran,
and I started to read them side by side.
And it was really interesting reading.
The Bible's a little drier,
Quran's more interesting, at least written.
§05Transcript · 33:11–41:16
But I think something that was consistently brought up
was the way, most merciful.
People want, I don't think any of us want justice.
We think we want justice,
but I don't think we want justice.
Justice is a dangerous, dangerous, dangerous game,
because maybe this person's wronged me deeply,
and I want justice.
I wanna balance it out,
'cause what is justice
if not a balancing of the scales?
And sometimes you can understand it,
and on a societal level, I think it's fine.
I mean, there's crime and punishment,
and we can go for the benefits and the drawbacks of that.
But I think what all any of us want is mercy within reason.
You know, grace, as you mentioned,
'cause justice is a very, very, very dangerous thing,
and it's a valuable and important thing.
But who gets to decide what's just,
what justice is actually meted out?
Maybe I get to mete out justice,
but I don't get my comeuppance.
Well, that sounds great.
But what happens when it's pointed back at me?
And I guess that comes back to the veil of ignorance.
You know, the idea that one day
I will have to live in the world in which I've envisioned,
the world in which I've created.
I think that a lot of times people love the idea
of they're a judge for your crimes and a lawyer for theirs.
And I heard that the other day.
I thought that was great.
And I think that's a dangerous thing,
and hopefully it gives us all pause before,
rightly or wrongly, but always understandably,
you know, wielding serious power.
- Yeah, justice is a kind of drug.
So if you look at history,
also been reading a lot about Stalin.
I mean, all those folks really,
I don't know what was inside Hitler's head, actually,
that he's a tricky one,
because I think he was legitimately insane.
Stalin was not.
And Stalin was like,
he literally thought he's doing a good thing.
He literally thought for the entirety of the time
that communism is going to bring,
like that's the utopia,
and is going to create a happy world.
And in his mind were ideas of justice,
of fairness, of happiness,
of yeah, human flourishing.
And that's a drug.
And it somehow, sadly, pollutes the mind.
When you start thinking like that,
what's good for society,
and believing that you have a good sense
of what's good for society,
that's intoxicating,
especially when others around you are feeling the same way.
And then you start like building up this movement,
and you forget that you are just like,
you're like barely recently evolved from an ape.
Like you don't know what the hell you're doing.
And then you start like killing witches or whatever.
Like you start-
- They did math, let's be honest though.
I mean, sometimes you got a witch has to go.
- Yeah, we can all agree there.
A witch has to go.
If it floats or sinks, which one?
I forget which one it is.
- Whichever one we need at the time, honestly.
Is it floating?
It should have sunk.
- Yeah.
Yeah, but yeah, we can definitely agree
that witches have to go.
Because you brought it up,
I tweeted recently, but also just,
one of the things I'm really ashamed of in my life
is I haven't really read almost any of the sci-fi classics.
- Really?
- Yeah, so like my whole journey through reading
was through like the literary philosophers, I would say,
like Camus, Hesse, Dostoevsky, Kafka,
like that place.
Like that's a kind of sci-fi world in itself,
but it just,
it creates a world in which the deepest questions
about human nature can be explored.
I didn't realize this, but the sci-fi world is the same.
It just puts it in a,
it like removes it from any kind of historical context
to where you can explore those same ideas
in like space somewhere elsewhere
in a different time, a different place.
It allows you almost like more freedom
to like construct these artificial things
where you can just do crazy,
crazy kind of human experiments.
So I'm now working through it.
The books on my list are the "Foundation" series
by Isaac Asimov, "Dune,"
"Snow Crash" by Neil Stevenson,
and "Ender's Game," like you mentioned.
That's just kind of,
and then, so I posted that,
and then of course like Elon Musk, John Carmack,
I don't know if you know him,
creator of "Doom" and "Quake."
- Oh, cool.
- See, they all pitched in.
These nerds, these ultra nerds just started like going,
like, "You need to read this, that," and the other.
So I've like started working out, okay.
But it seems like the list I've mentioned
holds up somewhat.
Is there a book, is there sci-fi books or series
or authors that you find are just amazing?
Maybe another way to ask that is like,
what's the greatest sci-fi book of all time?
- Well, I'd like to start by sharing something
that I'm embarrassed about,
is that I haven't read anything other than, you know,
Orson Scott Card, JR Tolkien, Frank Herbert, Tolkien.
- "Dune." - Yep, yep.
Yeah, I'm aware through Wikipedia
and through surface reading of things
that like a book called "The Republic" was written once.
There were some other, some other good ones.
- You're a prolific reader of Wikipedia articles.
- Well. - Or occasional.
- Occasional, yeah, exactly.
In between whatever else it is that I waste my time on.
- But yeah, so I also, I should say,
I posted on Reddit questions for Ryan Hall
and there's like a million questions,
but like half of them have to do with "Dune."
No, not really, but like people bring up "Dune."
I don't understand why, did you mention "Dune" before?
- Well, actually, we actually have,
Shari Roll actually made us a gi,
a "Dune" themed gi one time,
which I thought was kind of cool.
I'll send you one, I'll give you one, we got extras.
But actually to your point, actually,
this is a Orson Scott Card quote,
actually the writer of "Ender's Game."
Fiction, because it's not about somebody
who actually lived in the real world,
always has the possibility of being about oneself.
And I think that's a neat thing,
because I have heard, you know, other people whom I respect
and very sharp people actually every now and then
dig their heels and go, "I don't like fiction.
"I only like nonfiction, it's more instructive."
And I would go, "I completely disagree with that."
I think we have a hard enough time figuring out
what happened at 7-Eleven three hours ago that,
let me tell you what happened 600 years BC.
I'm like, "Hey, I'm interested,
"but don't tell me this isn't a story too."
There's factual components, I have no doubt,
but we struggle sometimes to,
like I guess what I like about fiction
is that you can tell me a story, it's all about people.
I mean, every now there's more and less believable things.
And I think "Dune" would be an unbelievably well-written,
in my opinion, for what do I know,
but I really like "Dune," I'll say that,
well-written example of human beings
interacting with one another,
the political component to that,
the emotional, the intellectual,
the relationship components to all of that.
And I think that "Dune" is neat because it's a sci-fi novel,
but only in the loosest sense.
It's really a story about religion, about group dynamics,
about human potential, about belief, learning,
politics, governance, ecology.
It's the best stories remind me of history,
the same way history, hopefully,
is not just a list of facts that I try to be able to recall
or factoids that I try to recall,
but a story that I can understand
and see how the threads of time kind of came together
and created certain things.
And a lot of times, like we say, I'm like,
"Oh, how the heck is, what's going on right now
"or 100 years from now or 100 years in the past happened?"
And you can look back far enough,
if we had accurate knowledge,
if we had that hypothetical perfect pool shot,
at the beginning of time,
we would see an unbroken chain of events
that led us to where we are
and where we are will potentially lead us
§06Transcript · 41:18–49:11
to where we're going, which is again, why hindsight's helpful.
But I think it's neat.
I guess I really enjoy, for instance, a book like "Dune,"
and they're actually making a movie out of it,
which I'm skeptical of, to be honest,
'cause it's gonna be difficult
to bring that to the screen for a variety of reasons.
- Yeah, there's at least 100 questions.
Ask Ryan, "What do you think about the new "Dune" movie?"
- I am not enough of an authority
to have any sort of decent opinion,
but I guess what I would say is
so much of it goes on in the character's mind.
Like how much of any of our day,
any lived experience, as it were, is internal?
The majority, how many times are people walking around
and they can, you can be like,
"Hey, what do you see right now?"
I'm like, "Oh, well, I see this picture, I see a wall.
"Hey, there's Lex."
But really, what I was paying attention to
was what was going on inside of my head for a moment,
and almost the rest of the world tuned out and kind of dimmed
and I guess that, I think that's gonna be a struggle
to any time you wanna bring that type of a written story
to a visual medium, I think it's gonna be more difficult,
but it'll be interesting.
It's definitely one of my favorite stories,
and it's been, it's honestly helped me become better at life
in my opinion, better at the martial arts,
and I think the writer, I think Frank Herbert,
was absolutely brilliant,
whether those were all his ideas, which in reality,
none of us are, all of our good ideas aren't ours,
we're a combination, maybe you came up with something,
you're a curator of other good ideas,
and some things you borrowed from somewhere
without even realizing it,
but I think the way, the messages and the themes
and the ideas that were conveyed,
particularly in the original novel
are just absolutely brilliant.
- Is that, is that to you one of the greats?
And the flip side of that, like,
or another way to ask that is like,
if somebody is new to sci-fi,
is that something you would recommend?
That is an entry point?
- I'm not well-read enough in the sci-fi world,
I haven't read a lot of like Isaac Asimov
or anything like that, but I just, I'll recommend Dune,
I'll be an obnoxious like evangelist for Dune
to anyone who'll listen.
- Great. - So yeah,
I would strongly recommend it.
- So the other thing you mentioned,
now I should probably be talking to you
about much more important things,
but the other thing you mentioned is Skyrim.
Do you play video games?
What's your favorite game?
What's, what would you say is the greatest video game
of all time?
I'm a huge fan of Elder Scrolls.
- Oh, cool. - Skyrim.
- Yeah, I mean, I play a little bit at this point,
you know, a little less, finally moved into a new house,
so I'm-- - So you're like an adult?
- No, no, no, no, I'm like a better funded 12 year old.
Yeah, that's, yeah, that's entirely accurate,
better funded 12 year old,
but somewhat better funded 12 year old,
not as well funded as I wish.
- But historically, did you play video games?
- Oh yeah, I played as a kid and I was, you know,
again, I've always liked playing sports and liked reading
and I always enjoyed video games,
but my favorite video game I think I've ever played
was Knights of the Old Republic.
It was a Star Wars game, I'm a huge Star Wars fan
until it become less so, so recently, Disney.
- You don't like the, I haven't watched it yet.
- Oh. - Mandalorian.
- Oh, oh, actually I like Mandalorian,
that was actually pretty cool, yeah.
- Just like the waving this off, canceled.
- Yeah, I will, if I could cancel one thing,
I would cancel Disney Star Wars.
- I'm gonna edit that part out.
Okay, let's go to the next.
- This is where, if people are wondering,
if you're watching this on YouTube
and like the dislike amount is like 80%,
it's because of that comment, so good job.
Good job for making the internet hate you.
- I regret nothing.
- Now what about Baby Yoda?
- Yeah, I guess, yeah, he's like, he's little,
he's got ears and he uses the force sometimes
and he passes out, I guess, no qualms with Baby Yoda, yeah.
- You don't have a heart, okay.
Let's go to Jiu Jitsu if it's okay.
So the audience of this podcast
may not know much about Jiu Jitsu,
or they do because it's really part of the culture now,
but they don't really know much.
They see that so many people have fallen in love with it,
have been transformed through it,
but they don't know much about like, what is this thing?
Is there a way you could sort of try to explain
the what is Jiu Jitsu,
what is the essence of this martial art
that's captured the minds and hearts
of so many people in the world?
- I think that Jiu Jitsu is a philosophy
that's expressed physically,
and that it's the kind of development
of the mental capacity and physical capacity
working in unison to move efficiently
and almost flowingly, unresistingly,
with a given situation,
with a physically resisting opponent.
Learning how to generate force on your own
and how to steal force from the floor,
how to steal force from the other person,
and move in concert with it, as opposed to clash against,
which if you watch two untrained people fight,
it's almost entirely a clash.
It's a runaway and clash, a runaway and clash.
If you watch Jiu Jitsu done well,
it looks like water moving around a solid structure.
And I think that that is expressed physically,
and I think that all of the things
that anyone has really been able to do very, very well
in Jiu Jitsu end up kind of exemplifying that.
But I think that that's true of martial arts in general.
I think that a lot of times,
like the clashing that we see going on
and working well is just the fact that
you get very, very physically powerful people every now
and then they're able to get away with this.
But I don't think that that's,
and that's fantastic,
'cause ultimately it's a results-driven thing.
But I think that the essence of the martial arts
is learning how to make more out of less
and how to move with and be yielding,
almost like real-life Aikido.
- So you think of martial arts, Jiu Jitsu,
as like water or flowing, so Aikido,
so moving around the force,
as opposed to sort of maybe the wrestling mindset
is finding a leverage where you can apply
an exceptional amount of force.
So like maximizing the application of force.
- I guess maybe that's a better way to,
I'd like to marry the two ideas,
because I think you flow until the point
at which you are the greater force,
at which point in time you can apply.
But if we look at the best wrestlers,
and then when I say best,
I don't necessarily mean most successful,
although of course, most successful
are always very, very good.
Throughout the course of history in boxing,
in wrestling, in Judo, they're magical.
They disappear and reappear.
It's like fighting a ghost that is like incorporeal
when you wanna find it,
but then when you don't wanna find it,
it finds you.
And I think that we see that
in the like the Buwaisa Saityus of wrestling.
And I guess you could look at Floyd Mayweather
or Willie Pepp or Pernell Whitaker in boxing
as brilliant examples of disappearing and reappearing.
And when you're strong, it's almost like guerrilla warfare.
When you're strong, I'm nowhere to be found.
When you're weak, you can't get rid of me.
And I think that's what we're looking for.
- Yeah, the Satya brothers are incredible at that.
They look like skinny Starbucks baristas,
and they just manhandle everybody effortlessly.
They look like they just kind of woke up,
rolled out of bed,
fighting for the gold medal at the Olympics,
and just effortlessly throw.
Like there's a match against, I guess, Yul Romero.
Yeah, so like if you look at like who is the guy
who's intimidating in this case,
and terrifying looking, it's Yul Romero,
just like a physical specimen,
obviously like a super accomplished wrestler.
I think this is for the gold medal, yeah, in 2000.
- 2000. - Yeah, Sydney.
And then there-
- This is the year you all took silver.
- And what you, just to show you,
like there's a inside trip, effortless.
§07Transcript · 49:15–56:05
Oh gee, he does it again.
You know, it's a really creative kind of wrestling where-
- It's organic.
- Yeah, you're throwing all these kinds of things.
There's just a mix of judo,
a mix of like weird kind of moves.
It's not like as funky as Ben Askren.
It's just like legitimate, basic.
- Well, it's not funky for funky's sake.
And I'm not poking Ben Askren to imply
that that's what he's doing, but it's like, it's funny.
It's like a lot of times, it's almost like Musashi
talked a lot about that.
You know, that the only goal of combat is to win,
is the outcome, it's outcome driven,
versus like flourishing, you know, cool looking movements.
It's like, unless that had a utilitarian purpose,
like what are you wasting your time with that,
both in the fight and also, you know, in practice.
But as you mentioned, it's almost like it looks like judo.
It looks like wrestling.
It looks like jujitsu.
It's almost like, I guess,
reminds me all of the martial arts
is again, deeply tribal as well.
I wanna learn Lex Fridman martial arts.
And then I wanna learn another, you know,
I guess transcendent person's martial arts.
And it just happened to be the set of movements
that you tended to do most of the time,
thanks to your body type and your opposition and whatnot.
But then I try to codify that and force those to work
as opposed to going, I wanna understand
how the body works in concert
and in Congress with something else.
And other forces and move appropriately.
And that's why it's like, it always struck me
that the Scythian brothers are great examples
of just moving like water,
but they use Bruce Lee, which is a little trite,
but again, he's brilliant.
It's like water can flow or water can crash.
And they would crash when they needed to crash.
And they would flow when they needed to flow,
but they would flow for the purpose of dissipating
and then crash when they would win.
And at the right moment,
then go back to flowing the second
that the other person found them.
And it's just, it's beautiful to watch.
It's artistic.
And I think that that great expression
of anything physical is ultimately studied as a science,
but expressed as an art.
And I think that that's something that gets lost
in jujitsu a lot of times when it gets a little bit,
a little nerdy, like do this hand here, hand here.
Like the more details I have, the better.
When in reality, that's just not in my experience,
how it's done.
- Might be fun exercise of saying like,
what are the main positions and submissions
in the art of jujitsu?
- You don't have to be complete.
That's a ridiculously, I apologize
for putting you on the spot like this,
but it might be a nice exercise to think through it.
- Sure.
I mean, I would just say that there,
you have your arms bend in various ways.
You have key lock Americana, straight arm locks,
Kimura Omoplata.
Omoplata is a Kimura, Kimura is an Omoplata.
It's just executed-- - Submissions.
- It's just a submission.
- Breaking off your arm in all kinds of ways.
- But ultimately, the question is,
let's say you were a Terminator, like a robot,
which of course you are.
- Go on. - Go on.
(laughing)
It's like, all right, we're being completely literal.
But, and I couldn't harm you with any of these things.
Would I still use these positions?
The answer is yes.
They create leverage, they create control,
they create shapes that I can affect
and that can affect me,
and they can be affected through other forces
and other objects or structures like the ground or the wall.
I really enjoy mixed martial arts
because there's another component
rather than just me and you and the floor,
there's me, you, the floor and the wall.
And it's another player in the game
that doesn't exist in a grappling context
within a non-enclosed, I guess, area of combat.
But you can strangle me or choke me,
what do you call it, without my arms being involved,
or you can use one of my shoulders
to pin one side of my, one carotid artery off
and you can enclose the other.
You can turn my knee in the exact same ways
that you can turn my arm, straight, this way and that way.
You can add a rotation to that
or it can be directly linear against the joint.
So I guess what I would say is
the more that I've been able to understand Jiu-Jitsu,
the more that I've been,
it's given me a look into how we learn language
where rather than learning five bazillion adjectives,
I go, I understand what an adjective is.
And of course, we are all read
into some degree of vocabulary.
I understand what an adverb does
and I understand what an adverb is.
I know what a noun is.
I know what the component parts of a sentence are.
I know what, I guess, a clause, a contraction,
any of these things.
And it allows you to be interesting and artistic
with your language to the extent that you can.
But I can't, like I can speak a degree of Spanish,
but I'm not even slightly artistic in Spanish.
I would be something,
I speak like a child with a head injury.
And anyway, the-
But your basic understanding of the English language
allows you to then be a student of Spanish.
100%, but I'm limited by my experience.
I'm limited by my understanding of techniques.
I'm limited by my understanding,
almost like let's say techniques are like vocabulary.
So even if I kind of sort of grasp the sentence structure
and the thought process and the thought patterns
of Spanish, which it's interesting
because just even the orientation
and the organization of a language,
and I've thought about this a great deal,
the way that I perceive the world
is affected deeply by the language that I learned.
Again, if I learned,
I have no idea how the Chinese language structures,
but I can only imagine that it would affect,
it's like a different lens.
We're all looking at the same thing,
but I have a different set of sunglasses on than you do.
And that's very, very interesting.
I'll use the Quran as an example.
Apparently it's unbelievably poetic in Arabic.
Still neat and was interesting reading in English,
but I'm told by people that I trust
that it just one doesn't bear a resemblance to the other.
And I think that's a very interesting thing
that you may be able to say the same thing,
but in a more, I guess in a different way,
in a more artistic way that may not translate
on a one-for-one kind of fidelity.
But the more that we're able to understand
about how the body works,
the more examples of the body working this way,
the body working that way,
the body working that way,
the more that I'm able to eventually become an artist,
but it has to be studied as a science first.
And it does start with technique collection,
vocabulary collection, the same way we learn in school,
where you remember how to say quickly 17 different ways.
And let's say I speak Spanish, I only know three.
So you might use quickly,
you might use an adjective like quickly in Spanish,
but use one of the many, many options to describe that,
that I don't understand.
And now I sit there and go like, wait, what?
I can't be artistic.
I can't be as organic with the language as I'd like.
So I believe that jujitsu a lot of times
starts with the acquisition of a lot of,
hey, do this, this drill, this technique.
Here's an Americana, Americana to an arm lock,
arm lock to a triangle.
But the problem with that is oftentimes
we get stuck in that phase.
And people eventually become move collectors
or sequence collectors.
And I noticed this when I'm trying to do DVDs
or I guess like an instructional series now,
or even teaching in class.
I don't believe in that form of learning anymore.
Not that it's not valuable,
but I don't believe,
I don't understand jujitsu on that level anymore.
So what I'm trying to do is get across
the basic ideas to people and say,
hey, you need to fill in the gaps
with going to class all the time.
You need to go, hey, learn this move,
learn that technique, learn that technique,
because otherwise I'm basically just throwing at you
like 75 different words that you could use,
§08Transcript · 56:08–1:03:48
but that hasn't really taught you how to speak a language.
Whereas if you give me a language structure,
you can fill in these pieces on your own
and then eventually speak organically in Lex form,
which will be ultimately unique to you
because otherwise you just end up being
like a weird facsimile of whatever it is that I'm doing
for mostly the worst, I'd say.
But-
- Yeah, that's what people, I mean, people comment,
like, is this, especially people
who haven't listened to me before,
is this guy drunk or high?
Does he, does MIT really allow slow people to be-
- Quotas.
- Quotas, yeah.
Like what's wrong with him?
Is he getting sleep?
Are you okay?
And does he need help?
So that's similar with my jujitsu.
It's like, is this guy really,
whatever rank I was throughout,
I remember just like, is this guy really this rank?
I just have a very kind of certain way of sitting
and being slow and lazy looking
that was ultimately the language that I had to discover.
And it was, yeah, it was a very liberating moment, I think,
of probably a few years of getting my ass kicked,
especially with "Open Guard" and "Butterfly"
to where you really allow yourself
to take in the entirety of the language
and realize that I'm not, I'm a unique,
I'm unique and like, I have a very,
I have a language, I have a set of techniques,
a way I move my body that needs,
that I'm the one to discover.
Like it's, you can only,
you can learn specific techniques and so on,
but you really have to understand your own body.
And that's the beautiful thing about Jiu-Jitsu,
like you said, is like the connection about your philosophy,
your view of the world with the physical
and like connecting those two things,
how you perceive the world,
how you interpret ideas of the world about exhaustion,
about force, about effortlessness,
like what it really means to relax,
all these kinds of loose concepts,
and then actually teach your body to like do those things.
And like, you know, and be able to apply force in spurts,
be able to relax in spurts
and like figure all that stuff out for my individual body.
- But it's, as you mentioned,
that's, I couldn't agree with you more.
It's a discovery process and no one can cheat that process,
which is at the same time,
it's almost like imagine I want to start writing books
in second grade, unless maybe I'm like staggeringly brilliant,
like which I can only conceptualize
someone being able to do that,
but maybe a Mozart of the English language
where you're out there doing it.
But for most of us, we don't have enough knowledge,
enough information, enough experience
to be able to express ourselves.
So we have to basically input, repeat, which is important,
but it's the process, as you say,
of going through that, of getting your ass kicked,
to just like, well, that didn't work,
well, that didn't work, that felt right,
but I don't know, nobody else does that.
I guess I don't believe in that,
versus eventually going, I don't know,
I'll just try going my own way and see what happens.
And now I'll get yelled at and people won't like me.
And if it works, they'll say I got lucky.
And if it doesn't work, they'll say I was dumb,
but which maybe all is right.
But basically, going through that iterative process
that allows you to eventually find your self-expression
and find your voice so that you fight
the same way that you speak, the same way that you write,
the same way that you think in a way that is uniquely you,
that will also ultimately allow you
to understand other people being uniquely them.
Because even if you can only conceptualize,
and I think about this a lot for society stuff,
where I go, well, this is how I feel about this,
but am I objectively right?
Maybe about a couple of things, but that's a small box
that I have to be very, very careful
about what I think is objective versus what's not.
And I have to be open to the possibility
that all the things that I think are objectively correct
may or may not be.
And that should allow me to have some degree
of compassion or consideration for other people,
both in their martial arts journey and in their journey
as people, as human beings,
because I understand that we're all on a path,
it's all, again, an iterative process
of eventual self-expression.
But I think that's one of the things
that we see having trouble when we see tribalism,
which, I mean, racism is expression of that,
political affiliation, expression of that,
all of these things that can go
in really uncomfortable directions.
People are looking for,
hey, where do I plant my feet over here?
Where's the thing that I know is right?
And we can all agree on the following.
And I think that we see that in martial arts.
We're like, oh, I do this style.
Well, I do that style.
I do that style.
It's like, hey, man, we're all just pushing forward
in a certain direction here, trying to do our best.
And I understand why you feel the way you do.
I may have felt like that at one point too,
but I'm just trying to learn and understand
versus I've already acquired enough knowledge.
Let me cross my arms and start to look
who's fucking up around here.
And I think that it's an interesting trap
that I think is a very human trap to fall into,
but it definitely happens early on.
It's, I mean, it's a joke in the jiu-jitsu world, right?
Like, oh, the blue belt that knows everything.
Well, initially it's like, what?
I know nothing, and I at least think I know nothing.
Then I'd learn a little bit, and I think it's a lot bit.
And then the more you learn, the more you go like,
I don't even know what I'm doing.
(laughs)
- Yeah, that's exactly right.
We kind of talked about it a little bit,
but once again, a lot of people that listen to this
have never been on the mat, have never tried jiu-jitsu,
but are really curious about it.
Everybody at all positions, like I think Elon Musk's kids
are now doing jiu-jitsu.
Andrew Yang is, like they're all, you know,
the world is curious.
It's a nice, it seems to be a nice methodology
by which to humble your ego,
which to grow intellectually and physically.
So people are curious about it.
So the natural question is, if they're curious about it,
how would you recommend they get started?
Maybe like, what do you recommend the first day, week,
month, year, first couple of years look like?
Like, how do you ease into it and make sure
that it's a positive experience,
and you progress in the most optimal and positive way?
- The first thing you can do is simply ask yourself why,
why you wanna be involved.
I remember the first day that I walked into Ronin Athletics
in New York City to train under my godfather,
my son now, Christian Montes.
And I didn't know what I was getting myself into.
I played baseball through high school,
and I was at Manhattan College in the Bronx,
and I wanted to go and learn martial arts
because it was always something that was interesting to me,
but it was never something that I knew was accessible,
and it definitely wasn't really around in Northern Virginia
where I grew up, whereas then you stick yourself
in Manhattan and there's stuff everywhere.
So anyway, I guess I didn't know what to expect.
I didn't know if I was gonna get beat up,
if people were gonna be nice,
if people were not gonna be nice.
But what I began with was, I think, expectation management.
And I think that that's something that I would,
that'd be the first thing that I would start
is almost imagining what is it that I'm getting myself into?
Because I love the martial arts.
Martial arts has given me everything in life,
and I'm so thankful I wouldn't be sitting here
without that experience, that journey.
The people that I've met, the places that I've gone,
I could never, ever have ever imagined.
And I'm just unbelievably thankful for that.
But I think that the thing that helped me most of all
was starting with going,
my mom said something to me one time,
and she said, "There's two types of people
"in various situations.
"There's why and there's why not."
And it's understandable to have questions,
concerns, things like that.
But maybe sometimes it's a little bit easier
when you're younger to just trust people
or just say, "I don't know."
But we go, "Hey, you wanna climb that rock?"
I'm like, "Yeah, why not?
"Let's go."
"Hey, you wanna jump in that river?"
§09Transcript · 1:03:49–1:10:37
"Yeah, why not?"
"Sure."
Versus if I have to reason my way into everything,
if I have to be taught into everything,
a lot of times I'll talk myself out of it.
And I think that a lot of times
this is the thinker's disease.
You wanna figure out what's gonna happen
and what you should expect to have happen
before you get involved
versus going using the old Bruce Lee's
saying, again, it's like no amount of thinking
or training on the side of the river
will teach you how to swim.
You have to jump in.
And there are risks associated with that.
And so, I guess, psychological
are usually the biggest ones.
That's the biggest hurdle.
And physical.
But the biggest thing that I guess
I would suggest to anyone to say,
"Why do you wanna do this?"
You're like, "Well, I wanna challenge myself.
"I wanna learn.
"I would like to learn to fight.
"I want to learn to fight
"so that I could protect myself
"and if anything else, other people,
"if only within arm's reach."
I perceived that if I had some small degree of power,
I generally wouldn't use it,
which is why I was like, "Yeah, I'll give it a try.
"I'll try to be reasonable.
"And hopefully, if I make a mistake,
"I'll apologize to people."
But basically, I said, "Yeah, I'd like to have that.
"And I know this is gonna be challenging
"and we'll see what happens."
And that means that getting beat up,
and I didn't get hurt,
but getting roughed up,
getting my arm bent this way or that way,
getting choked, I was like,
"Well, this is all supposed to happen.
"That's no big deal."
It would be like going and joining the army
during peace time,
and then going, "Oh, I'm just doing this
"for a college education."
You're like, "Okay, that's cool, man."
And then all of a sudden, war breaks out
and they wanna send me somewhere.
And I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
"I didn't sign up for that."
Actually, you did, whether you realize it or not.
You may not have thought that you did, but you did.
So getting your mind right
and just going, "What are my expectations of this activity?
"What is it that I'm looking to do?"
And of course, you're going into a gym,
you're going into a place that you don't know people,
or you probably don't know people,
and you don't know the coach.
And even if you do wanna, "Hey, how you doing?
"Shake your hand," type of level.
95% of my students don't know me, not really.
I try to be polite and not annoy them too much,
but they don't know me and I don't know them.
I understand if they don't trust me.
I wouldn't trust, trust me either if I were them.
But at the same time, someone has to take that leap.
And one of the things that I've noticed
as a martial arts instructor that's the biggest struggle
with dealing with adults,
which is why a lot of people like to teach kids,
is 'cause kids don't argue.
Now, that also means there's all sorts of pitfalls
with that sort of thing, and that can be an issue.
But I guess a lot of times people get to a point
in their life, in their 20s, early 30s,
where now I'm a manager now, I know what I'm doing.
No one talks to me like that.
First, it's like, "Hey, man, you go join bootcamp.
"I don't care if you are Elon Musk.
"They're gonna tell you to shut up and do pushups."
And that's what's great about it.
So you are taking a leap of faith into a world
that you're gonna be a tiny fish.
And you gotta hope that the people
who are guiding you in that journey are gonna have,
I can't even say your best interest at heart
because they don't even know you,
but they'll try to do no harm.
And they'll try to help you
in the way that they would understand.
And I guess that's, for instance,
that's what I would try to do with anyone
that comes into my gym.
I would try to help them in the way
that I understand they need as best I can,
and as safe and reasonable a way as possible.
But sometimes in a way
that's gonna make them uncomfortable,
particularly if physical combat,
and it's not something they've done before.
If they've, a lot of people go in
without even having played contact sports.
And so that can be a big jump.
And you have to understand
if that's where you're starting from, no worries.
But you're gonna have to kind of work your way to it,
and it's gonna be uncomfortable, and that's okay.
It's part of the process.
And you're gonna have some bumps and bruises,
and you're not gonna wanna roll with that guy in the corner
'cause that person's rough and they beat you up.
And they're like, "Okay, but is this a big hurt
or is it a little hurt?"
If it's a big hurt, okay.
If it's a little hurt,
it needs you to center up a little bit.
- It's such an interesting balance because to find,
I think one of the most important things,
as in anything, I think, in life,
is the selection of the people that you put around you.
I mean, that's true with getting married.
That's true with, if you go to,
if people ask me, like graduate students,
like your PhD advisor can be the difference.
It's everything.
It's like you spend five years with somebody,
they're going to basically define,
more impact on you than anybody you marry,
anybody you hang out with, there's a huge impact.
And the same with the coach selection,
which is like the school selection,
is it's going to be really important about,
in terms of like who you select,
will define how happy, like the trajectory of your growth
and how happy you are with the entirety of the experience.
And yet, like the flip side of that is,
especially if you have an ego,
especially if you are the manager
that needs to let go of some stuff,
you're going to feel like shit
with the best kind of coach.
That's what you need.
But there's a weird balance there to find.
I mean, and everybody needs a different thing.
Like I'm much more, I enjoy being sort of like,
it sounds weird, but like I'm,
from the wrestling background,
I enjoy feeling like crap in the sense,
like the coach, like getting beat up.
I don't actually enjoy it.
It's not like some masochistic thing or whatever.
- I know exactly what you mean.
- It's the growth.
Like I like the anxiety.
I like feeling like shit when I go home,
like emotionally, physically, it's growth.
- It's a sign of growth, right?
Like if you're not having to feel those things,
you're probably in your comfort zone, which is fine,
but that's not your growth zone, right?
- And everybody has a different threshold for that.
I mean, the beautiful thing about Jiu Jitsu is like,
it's also has like a yoga feel to it.
Like you're learning about your body.
So depending on the gym and depending on,
and in fact, the coaches, the people around you,
within the gym, you can select little groups too,
kind of like the people with who you roll.
Like if you're a smaller person,
it doesn't mean you have to go against big people.
You can go against the people who like smoke a lot of weed
and they're chill, or you can go against like that crazy,
ripped blue belt competitor
who's like out to destroy everybody.
And depending on like what your mindset is,
you can kind of select that.
It's such a fascinating journey
of like basically self-discovery.
- I couldn't agree with you more.
It's been what you need may change over time, right?
Maybe what you need today could change six months from now
or a year from now.
Something that I experienced,
I'll use my first coach, Christian again,
as a great example of someone
who I really look up to and respect
and someone who helped me a lot.
Like at a time when I really needed some guidance
and I needed to learn martial arts, but get into,
Henzo Gracie's gym was right down the street
from where Christian was teaching.
And Christian was a blue belt at the time.
He was teaching at a place called Fight House,
which was this awesome, like 90s, early 2000s,
§10Transcript · 1:10:41–1:17:31
warehouse area down on Fashion Avenue in Manhattan.
Off of like between 7th and 8th.
And it was like two basketball courts wide,
but like there was the Sambo guys over here.
There was the Kali guys over there.
There was a Wing Chun over there.
There was Jiu-Jitsu in the corner.
And Henzo's was one of the most famous academies
in the world at that time, still is.
And I just didn't know what Henzo Gracie was.
And I mean, it's a great gym
and it's a fantastic place for people to train.
But I think what was right for me at the time
was I stumbled into like a two-person elevator up
and found a place where six people trained at that time.
And I had someone that could give me some,
like in addition to martial arts advice,
like personal guidance.
And that made a big difference.
And then when initially we would have like competitions
or like intra-gym competitions with the Sambo guys,
we would roll with them.
And like, again, it was great
'cause they were just a bunch of like Russian dudes
from like Brighton Beach and they would come down
and then we would all fight and then everyone would train
and we'd all drink tea and then go home.
And anyway, what was-
- Oh, Russians.
- It was super tough.
And they were like, again, just a tough group of people.
It was great.
And then I remember when I decided
after like four or five months,
I'm like, man, I really wanna try to take this seriously.
And I told Christian about that.
And he's like, well, hey,
I think you need to do the following.
And it was like, hey, there was a guy named Jeff Ruth
who was a Purple Belt at the time,
which was a much bigger deal than it is now,
but it was 10 and O, he was an MMA fighter,
a lot of amateur box experience, super tough dude.
And Jeff was the best person at that time
that I'd ever trained with.
And I just got squashed.
Christian used to beat me up too,
but like Jeff would just absolutely
kick the crap out of me.
And I was like, this is awesome.
And this was back when I was at home.
I went home for the summer for that.
And Chris was like, hey, I think you should stay.
Because I told him that's what I was thinking.
And this was a coach that,
when initially was exactly what I needed.
And then he's like, well, hey,
that's not what I'm doing here.
Maybe they're gonna be able to help you onto a path
that's kind of commensurate
with what your goals are at the moment.
And then that was an interesting thing.
And I really got, I feel that I was fortunate to start
at a place where my coach was able to transition roles
and do so comfortably.
And I think that that also was probably a factor
of the fact that, where he'd done some of his training prior,
like there'd been issues with the coach there.
We're like not supporting, not having the support,
feeling like, hey, I'm gonna hold onto my students.
I'm gonna hold onto my best guy or my best girl,
even if I can't take them where they need to go.
So that was an interesting thing.
And just recognizing also though, that the people,
like the same way you're an individual
going into a gym and you don't know
what you're getting into, your coach is a person too.
And he or she, they may have been doing this activity
longer than you, but they're not some weird little,
all knowing God, they don't know anything.
They may say something that pisses you off.
They may yell at you.
They may help you.
They may inadvertently cause you some sort of issue.
And just being able to recognize that even though,
I say this to people and I've said this to people
in my gym, I'm like, we're in the service industry, man,
but I'm not at your service.
Like don't get it twisted.
Like I will absolutely do my best to help people.
I'm there to do my best as a martial arts coach,
but I'm here to do my best as a martial arts coach.
And I'll do my best and periodically I make mistakes
and I owe an apology or two,
and I'll try to give them out when I can.
But we're not McDonald's.
It's not, oh, you gave me a hundred bucks,
so you do whatever you want in here.
This is my house.
This is my gym.
This is my dojo.
This is a martial arts.
This is not a basketball team.
- Yeah, there's something beautiful about martial arts.
Like exactly as you said, is the coach,
like in wrestling and at least collegiate,
like high level wrestling,
it's like there's a dictatorship aspect to a coach
that is very important to have.
Like this ridiculous sometimes nature of like master
and so on and bowing, all these traditions.
There's something, it seems ridiculous
from the outside perhaps,
but there's something really powerful to that.
Because that process of, you said, why not,
of letting go of the leap of faith
requires you to believe that the coach
has your best interest in mind
and just give yourself over to their ideas
of how you should grow.
And that's an interesting thing.
I mean, I've never been able to really see coaches
I've had as human.
You always, it's like a father figure,
but like you always put them in this position of power.
And I think that's, I think at least for me,
it's been a very useful way to see the coach
because it allows you to not think and let go
and really allow yourself to grow
and emotionally deal with all the beatings.
- They'll push you where past oftentimes
where you would have stopped yourself, right?
Which is great.
And then hopefully they know if they're paying attention
and they're still a person, they can make mistakes,
but they'll push you further than you would have gone,
but not so far that it's not facilitative, right?
That's something that I can say like Faraz Zahabi,
the head coach at TriStar, my head coach for MMA,
Kenny Florin, one of the head coaches for MMA,
have both been phenomenal influences.
Paul Schreiner, who's one of the assistants
at Marcelo Garcia's Academy,
coached me in Jiu-Jitsu for a long time,
brilliant instructor, they've all been able to do that.
And I think what's interesting about all of those guys,
they're very sharp, but they're very intuitive as well.
And I think that Faraz actually told me about some
of the John Wooden said,
John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach,
just a simple philosophical idea.
Just he said, "Some people's life is a bowl of shit.
It needs some whipped cream in it.
Some people's life is a bowl of whipped cream.
Needs a little bit of shit in it just to balance it out."
And it's an interesting thing,
coaching everyone the same way doesn't work.
That's I think the difference
between a coach and an instructor.
And a lot of times people think they want to coach,
but they really want an instructor.
I'm like, "Hey Lex, tell me what to do, not how to do it."
And then other times people think they want an instructor
and they really want a coach.
And I'm like, "Man, this guy's just giving me information."
A coach is so much more than an instructor.
And that's a huge leap.
And that's something that I think that people need
to understand when they're going into martial arts.
And I can totally grasp why they don't,
because how would they know?
But I think about this a lot.
Like me giving you $150 for a month,
which is not nothing, that's for sure.
That does not, that pays for instructor really.
Coach is a relationship that gets developed.
Because can you imagine,
like just the amount of emotional investment
and time thinking away from like,
"Oh, Lex isn't here anymore, but what can I do to help him?
What does he need?"
Like that's serious.
And that's the difference between,
that's oftentimes the difference
that getting over the hump in various situations.
So it's an interesting bargain that's being made,
like commitment by the instructor who becomes a coach,
commitment by the student.
You know, like there's a financial transaction.
There's a lot of things going on there,
but I feel very fortunate to have had
not just instructors in my time, but coaches.
And that means sometimes we butted heads
and sometimes I look back and I think I was right.
And other times I look back on my own,
no, they were definitely right.
But there was always the trust
with the exception of one time
that I feel that trust was greatly betrayed,
that rightly or wrongly, whether mistakes,
§11Transcript · 1:17:34–1:25:40
mistakes will be made,
but everyone is attempting to do the right thing.
Under no circumstances
would I intentionally do anything malicious,
you know, versus, "Hey, I might've burnt your house down,
but you can be darn sure it wasn't on purpose."
And I think that as long as there's that mutual understanding
and mutual belief of goodwill,
which again, doesn't just magic up out of nowhere,
I understand.
I think that that's when then great things can happen.
And I look at all the athletes that I know,
the guys and girls that I've watched
become fantastic in various places, almost invariably,
it never happened alone.
- Yeah, I'm really torn about that.
Like maybe you can help.
Have you seen the movie "Whiplash"?
- Mm-mm.
- So it's, I would say from an outsider's perspective,
people should watch it.
It's a, I guess, jazz band,
it's a movie about a drummer and the instructor.
And he is a basically, I would say,
from the outsider's perspective, it's a toxic relationship,
but he's really the coach, whatever we call him,
pushes the musician, the drummer to his limits,
like to where he just feels like shit emotionally.
It looks like a toxic relationship,
but it's one that ultimately is very productive
for the improvement of the musician.
- I have the same, like in my own experience,
I had, I got a chance to train at a couple places regularly.
And so one of my coaches, who is a great human being,
a lot of people love him, but when I was a blue belt,
he was pushing me a lot for competition.
And every time I step on the mat,
I was anxious and almost afraid of training
because of the places I'm gonna have to go.
And then the, I can't, I don't know what's good or bad
because I think I've become a better person
because of that experience.
Like I needed that.
And on the flip side,
like the place I got my black belt from,
Balance Studios, I remember also a blue belt,
the coach sitting down and I was going to competition
and he saw something in me where he said,
good luck, but win or lose, we always love you.
I remember that because I really needed that at that time.
Like I was putting so much pressure on myself.
Like I'm not an actual professional competitor.
I just competed, like I'm a PhD student,
but it was clearly having a psychological effect on me.
And that's what a great coach does.
It's like, you know, it's like life is more important
than jiu-jitsu.
- That's for sure. - It's bigger.
So they find, you use jiu-jitsu when you need it
to grow as a person.
And when it overwhelms you,
you have to pull that person out.
Like look at the bigger picture.
Always look at the bigger picture.
It's fascinating.
And I don't know what to make of it.
I don't think I would have it any other way,
is both the anxiety and the love.
Yeah.
I think that's a really interesting thing
that you're describing that I guess it kind of brings me
back to a lot of the other things we've been discussing
is just almost like the reciprocal nature of everything
where no pressure, that's great.
Everyone's happy all the time.
I mean, let's use an example of sci-fi movies,
let's say "The Matrix,"
which of course the first one was amazing.
And then each subsequent movie made the series worse.
But basically--
- They're working on a new one, by the way.
- Yeah, I've heard.
We'll see.
I was hoping for the best.
But basically, let's say, hey, we started,
our first initial world, Agent Smith says to Neo,
he's like, "Our first world was a utopia
"where everyone was happy and nothing ever went wrong."
It's like your primitive cerebrum rejected it.
And I think that there's obviously,
I mean, what do I think?
But I guess, well, I'm here,
so I might as well say what I think.
I guess great things are fantastic.
A kind, gentle place is fantastic.
And this is, again, why I love "Dune"
because I think "Dune" does such a great job of expressing,
Frank Herbert does such a great job of expressing, again,
the reciprocal nature of these ideas.
Look at "Sparta," for instance,
or at least what I understand of "Sparta"
from reading and also watching "300."
- And reading the Wikipedia article.
- And reading the Wikipedia article about the movie,
not the place.
But that's a hard, brutal place.
And was there a benefit to that?
Like, absolutely.
Was there a drawback to that?
Absolutely.
Is it sustainable?
I would think probably not.
I mean, granted, it hasn't sustained,
but I mean, that type of a thing,
it burns too hot almost,
and it destroys the host at a certain point.
And I guess that type of unforgiving nature,
but entirely permissive has its own issues.
And I guess coming back to what your description
of describing a toxic relationship
is a very dangerous and tricky thing
because it's almost like a bird's eye view.
You see, let's say a husband and a wife arguing.
And you're like, all right,
well, sort of somebody hitting somebody.
I need to keep myself out of this
because I have no idea what, I'm seeing something,
but I don't know what's going on or why specifically.
And again, short of it going to a place
that's just out of bounds, I don't know who's right here.
I don't know who's wrong,
and I don't know what phase of this things are in.
So I guess coming back-
- And long-term what's good for both people.
- Right, it's dangerous.
So if I wanna put my finger on the scale,
I can understand the desire to do them.
I'm like, hey guys, let's break it up.
And that may be the right thing at the time,
but at the same time, I'm not sure.
So I think back to all of the times
that you mentioned your coach pushing you very, very hard.
And then other times going like,
hey, let's put it in perspective here.
I think that's an interesting thing for high performance.
And I think that we're seeing that again societally now,
or at least maybe that's just pops up
on my internet feed periodically.
But coaches shouldn't be allowed to do this
or yell at this person to yell at that person.
Like, well, have you ever been, go to a boxing gym.
It's not a commercial entity, not really.
A real boxing, not LA boxing, not a UFC gym,
like a real place.
You're gonna see what things are like
when it's entirely performance-based.
Go to a wrestling room at a high level.
You know, again, there's left and right limits
and there are such things obviously as abuse, of course,
but, and that should never be tolerated.
But it's not a commercial entity.
I don't need to be sweet to you if you're screwing up,
if you're dropping the ball.
And in fact, recognizing that I'm not doing you a favor
or the team a favor by being permissive
of that type of behavior, I think is important.
Everything in its context and at its time is important.
And I guess I can think again of the times
that I've been put, or had put on me,
like a great deal of pressure to do X, Y, or Z,
or to succeed or to push for success.
And I can't look back fondly enough on those times.
They were tough at the time,
but without that, I'm not sitting here.
Without that, I don't go from growing up
in a very nice family in the suburbs
to fighting at the highest level in jujitsu,
Gi, no Gi, and now in mixed martial arts,
starting a career at age 27.
You know, I don't, it just doesn't happen
because people, generally speaking,
from that background don't get pushed hard enough
physically to be able to make that transition.
And that has benefits and it has drawbacks.
You know, when you stare into the abyss, it stares back.
And I think that that's an important thing to understand.
You know, you stare long enough,
you can become something that you don't,
that you would be sorry that you did.
You don't look enough and you don't have perspective either.
You know, and I think that that's an interesting thing.
I can speak to someone who's relatively,
someone who's relatively articulate and reasonable.
I try to be reasonable, but you know, I'll say inspiring.
If people get crazy with me, they get a warning,
and then I'm gonna crack 'em.
And what did they expect?
Oh, they hear the guy on an interview,
but who did they think they were meeting?
'Cause there's also the guy in the ring.
§12Transcript · 1:25:42–1:33:03
- And there's layers there too.
I remember training with you, it's kind of funny.
There's like, there's, well, you didn't know who I was.
I mean, you still like, I-
- You have a really good straight ankle, by the way.
- Yeah, that, so I don't remember what rank I was,
but it might've been purple or something like that.
And I did some, like I, you had this look on your face,
which I've often seen in black belts.
It's like, here he goes again.
Like, here's him trying this thing.
And then when I kind of annoyed you a little bit with it,
now I get that, it was a good, like, I, you know,
I did something somewhat effective,
like some, like maybe a little bit off balance.
- Yeah.
- I just peeled off a little layer of Ryan Hall
to where I was like, okay, let me, let me like,
there's like layers underneath the-
- Ogres are like onions.
- Mike Tyson's somewhere in there.
Like, so it was like, okay, this like new guy rolls in here.
He thinks he can do this stupid thing.
And then you started to beat the hell out of me.
But the point is there's layers here
from the guy who was being interviewed now
to like Genghis Khan.
- But it's funny.
- It's all in the same body.
- Right, but it's like, all of us are like that, right?
In various different directions and recognizing that's okay.
It's just, there are consequences to all,
every choice that we make has a consequence.
Sometimes there's like objectively wrong
or objectively right, but at least in my mind,
that's a pretty small box.
Everything else is just, there's a consequence to that.
Do you like that consequence?
Do you not?
And who do I want to become?
What do I want to try to hone myself or anyone else into?
And also like, but this is something I've screwed up
as a coach plenty of times.
You know, like if someone says, if you're, if like,
I come to them like, Lex, I really, really want to take,
you know, research very seriously.
Like, okay, I believe you.
Now I haven't shown you that, but I believe you.
Like, okay.
And now me not showing up to research or to study
or not being up until three in the morning,
thinking about this is no longer acceptable.
There was a time like five seconds
before me making that statement that if I went to bed
without reading the book that I needed to read, no worries.
But the second that I made that statement,
your expectations for me changed.
And maybe it's something that's something
that I've screwed up a whole bunch of times in my,
as a teacher, 'cause it's an interesting thing,
obviously, you know, being a,
like running a martial arts school
as your principally an athlete,
is sometimes I don't pay enough attention
to what people are doing.
I just go, oh, okay.
You say X, Y, Z.
I'm like, Roger that, I believe you, cool.
I will now put you in category X.
And whether rightly or wrongly,
like maybe this person didn't understand
what they were asking for,
or I didn't express this or the other,
and it just, it caused cross wires.
And then most times you just, you hash it out,
you have a discussion, you figure out,
get to the bottom of what people are trying to do
or what they want.
But if I was paying more attention,
I think I could have been a lot more effective.
Or if I had more experience,
and sometimes maybe I'm not sharp enough,
or I don't, I'm not perceptive enough
to be able to see what's going on.
And maybe with years more down the line,
I'll be able to have a sharper perception.
But I think that's another one of those interesting things
that sometimes I would caution, or not caution,
but just inform a prospective martial arts student,
depending upon where you're going.
You know, both you and also your coach
or other people in the room, they wear many hats.
And sometimes there's a, I had the wrong hat on.
You were talking to me as Lex the guy.
I didn't realize you were talking to me.
I thought you were talking to me as Lex the guy.
I didn't realize you were talking to me
as Lex the martial artist.
I'm like, oh crap, I was talking to the wrong person.
So it's almost like if you had a,
like I run my gym with my wife, she's a black belt.
So she's my wife.
She's my peers as a martial artist in jiu-jitsu.
- She's here by the way in judging, so.
- Exactly, all right, well, all right.
So, but a fellow black belt, and I guess like another thing.
- She doesn't have a microphone,
so you can't hear all the trash she's talking about.
- Exactly, but it can be tough.
And that's something that we've had to work through a lot.
And it's like looking back,
and it's like now being where I'm at now,
and it's easy for me to say that
'cause she's in the room and I don't want her to stab me,
just continue to slowly poison me over time.
Which frankly, I understand.
You know, it's the sort of thing
that is now way more effective than anything else
I could really reasonably expect to have.
But there were times when both of us, you know,
were justifiably annoyed at the other
because of crossed wires.
And sometimes, you know, you just have a disagreement
anyway or a misunderstanding anyway.
But again, like I coach some of my friends.
I've coached my friend who I've known
since I was four years old.
You know, sometimes I don't go,
hey buddy, how you doing?
Sometimes it's like, what the fuck are you doing?
Put your hand over there.
How many times have we talked about this?
And then you walk away
and you can see him look at you crooked.
And you're like, oh crap.
Oh yeah, he thought I was talking to his friend.
Yeah, well, all right,
we need to talk this one out, hashing out.
And not, he's wrong.
How could he possibly think that way?
Like, oh no, I totally understand that.
But if I was 22, doesn't he know I'm a purple belt?
Some nonsense like that.
And it doesn't come from a bad place,
but it's just, I guess that comes back to society,
to anything.
We only have the perspective that they have
and the awareness that we have.
And so again, going back and going,
hey guys, grace, like I don't expect,
it's not fair for me to go, I fight UFC.
Why doesn't this guy who came in as an attorney
understand how hardcore this needs to be?
I'm like, how could he?
And at the same time though,
if I'm using the language of someone that is interested
in at least performance from a martial arts perspective,
I understand how that could be off-putting.
Let's say for instance, someone that's complete,
like all of that would be out of bounds
in their normal workplace.
But if they think of the gym as my office,
then whether they agree or disagree with what's going on,
they go, okay, I see why that might've happened.
Let's talk about this.
And we can, again, all push forward in a positive direction
that benefits, I guess, everyone's journey
throughout the activity.
- And on top of all that, there's moods.
Like I mean, especially lately,
I think two days ago, maybe yesterday, no, two days ago,
I've never been that cranky in my life.
I think, I don't know what it was,
but I wanted to tell everybody how much they annoyed me.
And it was like, I was just very conscious of this feeling
of like, why is this happening right now?
So I consciously decided, as I usually do in those cases,
to not say anything to anybody.
- How do you do that?
- Well, it's, yeah, meditate because it's not,
I tend to then visualize what's gonna happen in the next,
like how is this gonna make my life better?
Like if I say something that mean to somebody else,
I have just started a conflict that will just escalate,
will continue, will add more conflict to my life.
It'll make things, I just don't like the feeling
it will create, and so you live enough life to know
that it's just like with street fighting.
I would get into a lot of fights when I was younger,
just on the street, but then you realize it's not
like a jiu-jitsu match or something like that.
It's not, it'll escalate.
It might come back at you.
That person might find you again, but more importantly,
the anxiety of it, of having created little enemies
in this world, distorts the way you see the world.
So I've noticed that like, if I'm shitty to people
on the internet, which I haven't been, I think,
in a long time, is like it somehow brings the shittiness
to you more and more, it escalates.
§13Transcript · 1:33:04–1:41:01
Like the more love you put out there,
the more like the people who put love out like surround you.
- You mentioned forgiveness as well.
Like you said, I guess back to the original,
the Holocaust survivor scenario, where you're like,
oh my God, like you think of the ultimate,
and like I've never experienced one billionth
of that level of pain and horror, and it's like,
and I can't let this little thing go.
I guess that's an interesting thing.
I think you're just making the point in your personal life,
I guess, the same way, right?
- Yeah, and on the internet, it's hard.
I've somehow gotten, I mean, you've had a level
of celebrity for a while, I've recently gotten some level
of like celebrity, and like these people who are just shitty
for no reason come out from all places,
like calling me a fraud or anything else.
- You ever see "Giant Silent Bob" strike back?
They find out a movie's gonna be made about them,
and people are talking shit on the internet,
and they're like, what's the internet?
And then someone shows them, and they're like, what?
And they go to a message board, and they go to Hollywood
to try to stop it from being made,
and they eventually get money for their likeness,
and they use the money to buy plane tickets
and fly around and beat the shit out of all the people
that talk bad about them.
- Yeah, it's tough.
I mean, I'm having trouble with it,
'cause there's people like, yeah, there's posts and forums
and heated discussions about, is Lex Fabian a fraud?
I don't know, what has he really done?
And then there's people like, well, I think he's an all right
guy, but I'm not sure.
There's literal discussions, and I'm like,
if you increase the level of celebrity,
there's going to be, one of the things that hurts my heart
a little bit is some level of toxicity around Joe Rogan,
for example.
There's communities of people that now talk about him
selling out, for example, all that kind of stuff.
And I don't, and Joe, I've talked to him about it,
is amazing that he says don't read the comments,
he legitimately doesn't read the comments.
His heart and his soul doesn't give a damn
about the comments.
All he gives a damn about is his friends.
Like one of the things that's really inspiring to me,
and that's, I've had a conversation with him offline
about Spotify and the removed episodes.
People are curious for me.
- What's Spotify?
- It's a thing on the internet where I think you can play
Taylor Swift songs on.
- I'll write that down.
- But you can also now play Joe Rogan podcast.
- Oh, cool.
- And they gave him $100 million.
So that's, you know, that's--
- That's awesome, good for Joe.
- Yeah.
But the thing I've had a discussion with him,
and I made a video about it that I took down
because of the toxicity, is like,
it's hard to put into words,
but he will give away the 100 million in a second
if he ever has to compromise who he is.
Like he doesn't, I mean, he already said,
as he talked about, he's made quote unquote,
fuck you money a long time ago.
He doesn't need any more money.
He doesn't care.
It's nice to have money, whatever,
but he'll give it away.
So it's nice to see when people like him
at a level of celebrity, level of success,
and financial success, don't change at all.
They're just the same thing that makes you happy
is talking, in his case, talking shit with his friends,
in the case of most of us, really,
just hanging out with friends, doing the things you love,
in his case, doing the things he loves
without any, like, you know, the Texas way,
the freedom, like without any corporate bureaucracy bullshit
that rolls in and says, well, maybe you shouldn't say fuck,
you know, like more than 20 times a podcast
or something like that.
Those kinds of like rules, like people,
like he says in a suit and tie, they show up and say stuff.
- Oddly enough, people that could never have done
what he's done. - What he does, yeah, exactly.
And it's kind of inspiring to see that.
And I hope people realize how special of a human he is.
He's inspired people like me, like I'm a scientist, right?
So he inspired somebody like me
from a very different walk of life
to be like kind to others, to be open-minded.
I don't know, that is a special dude.
So like people need to support that and treasure that
as opposed to be toxic about it.
I mean, what I, 'cause people really, for a long time,
have told me that it would be awesome
if Ryan Halson goes on Joe Rogan.
I definitely think that would be an awesome thing.
Have you listened to Joe?
Has he been a part of your life in some kind of way?
- Well, Joe's always, I remember watching Joe
on "Fear Factor" when I was a little kid, which is cool.
So I've actually gotten to like from a bird's eye view,
watch his kind of just path through life.
But one of the things that I always appreciate,
and again, I barely know Joe other than to shake his hand.
He interviewed me briefly in the ring
after the BJ Penn fight.
But one of the things that I've always admired about Joe
is that I think he had fucking money from the start.
I think that $0 is fucking money for Joe.
I think, and that's something I respect about him
a great deal because as you say, it's interesting to watch.
It's like you hope that, George St. Pierre's like this.
It's really neat.
I'm not super close to George,
but we're teammates at TriStar
and he's never been anything but a gentleman.
He's one of those people that,
if you didn't know George was famous,
when you walk into the gym, you'd have no idea.
He's not holding court, not doing it.
He's just training and he'll help out an amateur doing this.
If you have a question for him, he'll help me.
Like I'm nobody, man.
He would give me advice and train me.
It was super cool.
And he didn't kill me, which I really appreciated.
He's a gentleman.
But it's like you meet someone and you go,
man, it's so cool that this is the guy who's the best,
that this is the guy who has been successful.
And then you go, well, why are they successful?
Like I said, true to what they're doing,
they haven't changed.
They're the same as they've been.
And I remember I got to TriStar in 2012
and George was already, George St. Pierre.
But I remember watching and talking to people
and they're like, oh man, George is the same
as he's always been.
And it's neat, I see him in the gym training now
and again, giving advice now.
And it seems like Joe has always been consistent.
And it's neat to watch someone not compromise
on their values and not change who they are.
And not, you know, periodically, like, you know, again,
we all make mistakes.
Like you have a bad day or this or that,
and an apology needs to be issued,
or even my bad or this or that.
And you're like, yeah, and they just move on.
They're not afraid to be themselves
and they're not afraid to be wrong.
They're not afraid to make a mistake.
As you mentioned, open-minded.
So I'm like, so what are the correct beliefs
to have about this that I know going in,
everyone's gonna be okay with what I'm saying?
Which is usually the beginning of a conversation
that's gonna go nowhere, right?
And it's neat to see the things, I guess,
that he's created on his own as a result
of the authenticity that's there.
And it reminds me of like Dave Chappelle.
And again, I don't know, I've never met Dave,
but it's neat to see someone that's clearly,
again, authentic in their own way, doing their own thing.
And because of that, they're above the corporate nonsense.
But what's funny, I think the message behind all of it is,
hey guys, we all are.
I can't promise you that I'm gonna have money.
Joe couldn't promise you that he's gonna have money.
Now it ended up working out,
but he was above that nonsense from the jump.
And he just continued to be above it
by never giving it any mind and just going like,
yeah, I'm gonna be a reasonable person.
I'm gonna try to learn.
I'm gonna try to grow.
And if I say something annoying,
you can come and talk to me about it.
We can get to the bottom of it.
And I'm like, if I need to say my bad, thanks, appreciate it.
And I will, and if I don't need to, I'm like,
hey, I still appreciate the talk.
Thanks, man.
I'll shake your hand and we carry on
and we go our separate ways
and hopefully I'll treat you with respect.
You treat me with respect.
And that's about it.
§14Transcript · 1:41:02–1:49:55
And I guess, I think it's a lesson that it can work out
no matter what.
You don't have to kowtow to like these weird powers that be,
and whether you're at this level or at this level,
but you can live your life the way that you want.
And as you mentioned, talk shit with your friends,
hang out, be happy.
And it just so happens that that resonates with people.
It actually reminds me of like speaking at MIT
and being in Boston is like a good will hunting.
You know, like, again, that's what do you really wanna do?
He could have gone this way, could have gone that way.
And it was an interesting story, but it's like,
this person wants to hang out with his buddies
and wants to do other things.
And again, happens to be brilliant
and happens to be able to do all these other things.
But there was, I guess it's like, at least in my mind,
a story of authenticity as well.
And it was both the same thing
in the Robin Williams character.
And I just think that that's a message
'cause watching things occur on the internet
as they do now, so many things playing out in the public eye,
I feel like so many private
or otherwise formerly private discussions and disputes
and interactions now become, they all have a,
well, what is this gonna say when it goes public?
So how can I couch what I'm saying?
Or how can I word this in a way
that's gonna get people on my side
to use the right buzzwords and not use the wrong buzzwords?
And it's just neat to see people, you know,
in their own way, flip the bird to the head
because I think that that's just not how a human being
is meant to think or interact.
- I'm curious what you think about the thing
that recently has, you know, me hosting this podcast,
I sometimes think about who should I talk to and not
in terms of like, it's the old Hitler question.
Now, Hitler, I would definitely talk to
because, post-World War II,
because everyone knows he's evil.
The question whether you talk to Hitler in 1937,
like when people who are really students of what's going on
understand that this is a very dangerous human being.
But a large number of part of the world are like,
well, he's a leader who cares for Germany.
So the question I have, it's interesting to me,
it involves a particular person named,
who also lives in Austin, Texas, named Alex Jones.
I don't know if you're familiar with the guy.
- I am familiar with Mr. Jones.
(laughing)
- I've actually recently just listened to Infowars,
like one episode of his show, I guess, that he does every day
and it kind of reminded me of a time in college
when I drank too much tequila.
There's no turning back.
- No.
- It's like, the mistakes you make that,
I mean, you don't know where you're gonna wake up,
you don't know who you're gonna kill or not kill
or steal or rob.
It's unclear.
So it felt like I was getting pulled into a dark place
where pretty much everybody is a pedophile
that's trying to control the world.
So Bill Gates definitely is a pedophile.
Everybody in power, anybody in power,
there's a kind of a deep skepticism about power
and a conspiratorial way to see the world
where everything is like dark forces in all corners.
It's like the way you feel when you're a kid
that there's a monster hiding in the closet.
- Which is also why you leap over the bed
from like four feet away.
- There's a strategy.
- Yes.
- But he says that you're just being weak,
you need to look under the bed.
Under the bed, there's monsters
and we need to be aware of them because they're growing,
they're multiplying, you should be--
- And they're touching children.
- They're touching children, exactly.
So it all connects.
But when I listened to him and I thought about
like do I wanna talk to him on this podcast, for example,
when I listened to his conversation with Joe Rogan,
the two times he talked on there,
to me it was somehow entertaining.
Like it was fun to listen to.
It's fun to listen to a madman go on for four hours
because it's almost like theater.
Like this is what I talked to Joe about
when people try to censor Alex Jones.
Joe says that the people who try to censor him
don't give enough credit to the intelligence
of human beings to like understand
that what a person says on a large platform
does not necessarily, is not the truth.
You can be a madman and say crazy things
and people are intelligent enough to hear certain things
when they're said like the earth is flat,
they can be intelligent enough not to all of a sudden
start believing that the earth is flat.
Like they're intelligent enough to sort of
select different ideas and be able to enjoy
the theater of a particular ridiculous
over-the-top conversation without being sort of influenced
the way they start believing like toxic set of beliefs.
Now there's a lot of sort of
other kinds of people, especially now with cancel culture
that say, well, you don't want to give platform
to crazy people that ultimately whose beliefs
might lead to dangerous consequences.
Like, and I see it very often now with conspiracy theories
that go like way too far.
Like for example, I'm not, I haven't looked into it.
So I'm sorry, I will look into it.
But it hurts my heart to see that on Bill Gates,
in my opinion, the person who has saved
and improved more lives than probably any human in history,
literally, because of the money he's invested in helping,
like just the work he's done on like malaria in Africa,
the number of people he's helped is huge.
And yet every interview, anything you see now on Bill Gates,
everyone is calling him, I believe, haven't looked into it,
but I believe everyone's calling him a pedophile.
I don't know the full structure of it,
but it's just a very, it feels like an army of like,
it feels like it's hundreds of thousands of people.
That's what it feels like.
It might be a much smaller percentage,
but it feels like a huge number of people
are calling him a pedophile.
So that's the flip side.
If you allow, if you give platform
to conspiracy theories like that,
then you start to have bigger and bigger percent
of the population believe in these crazy things.
I just, I wanted to put it out there
'cause I don't know what to think of that.
If you put yourself in Joe Rogan's shoes,
if you put yourself in my shoes,
if you put yourself just in your own shoes.
- I'm in my shoes right now.
- Great, if you're staying in your shoes,
just stay in your shoes.
- Can I have yours?
(laughing)
- Would you talk, would you give platform
to people like Alex Jones?
Would you talk to somebody like Alex Jones or not?
- Yes, I would.
And I feel very strongly about this, honestly.
Well, I think that it's an interesting thing.
And I would just say a lot of times,
I can understand very, very clearly
why people would take issue with the idea of,
I guess what they proceed to be amplifying,
this man's voice, this man's reach,
as a demonstrable negative.
But I think when you take a step back further,
the cure is more damaging than the disease
and significantly so.
I guess, I think that I'm very, very wary of,
I think being where, you mentioned Alex Jones being wary
of power and people with it.
That's, a lot of times, there's a lot of truth
and validity to crazy things that people say.
It's the conspiracy theories that stick
are the ones that sound credible,
at least quasi-credible in some aspect.
And it's almost like it seems to me
like an anchor in people's mind.
And it is also funny to me, obviously,
that Bill Gates, it's so funny to tar people
with things like pedophile, racist, rapist.
Like these are things that we're basically trying
to pick words that no one can ever support someone
who does these things.
And that's, you know.
- And that changes year by year.
Currently, pedophile is totally in as a thing
to call somebody just as a,
it used to be communist or Marxist.
- Cleveland Browns fan, you know, like, come on.
You know, who would want that?
- Actually, nobody likes the Browns, so I'll agree with you.
- I felt like that was, that's why I picked them.
That's the trick, is you find a group of people
that nobody likes, we're good here.
All right, that's the move.
But yeah, that's a creepy thing, though,
because that is the creepy thing.
It's like, people are always looking for,
groups of people are always looking for,
and I find this really deeply disturbing,
§15Transcript · 1:49:58–1:57:36
like, hey, so who's the guy that we can all get away with,
you know, just treating like dirt?
Who's the guy that I can be a dick to,
I can just walk up and punch in the face,
and no one's gonna say anything?
And it's, even if, you know, people do that,
whether it's literal Nazis or someone that I called Nazi,
you know, I guess what's the bigger issue?
This person's ridiculous beliefs or what I'm doing?
And you mentioned Hitler before,
and obviously, Mein Kampf being, you know,
like, the outline for some of the things he did later,
and when the evil, was it always there?
Did it take root later on or flourish later on?
But was Adolf Hitler a problem because he had crazy ideas
or because he did things?
I think, it's 'cause, it's not, I think,
I know it's because he did things.
Now, if I'm gonna start punishing thought crime,
I'm gonna have to start punishing thought crime,
and that's a terrifying concept.
Even if I'm right about the certain,
about the objectively correct,
about the things that I decide to call out of bounds,
who put me in charge and made me arbiter of good taste,
and how long until I decide that something else is,
is out of bounds?
It's always a sliding scale,
or it's always a sliding standard,
and I find that, you know, to be more of a concern
than people doing crazy things,
because I guess if you mention Alex Jones, you know,
putting out ridiculous ideas, ridiculous theories,
I think that most people don't look at Alex Jones
as a credible person.
Now, I'm not gonna pretend to be deeply read
into all of his beliefs or the things
that he's trying to peddle,
but there's plenty of things that are quasi-mainstream
that I think on, with this side or that side,
that maybe not comparably ridiculous,
but are, you know, particularly in hindsight,
or, you know, are, were not, or silly,
and I guess the idea of getting a group of people together
to decide what we're not going to tolerate
is a very, very tricky thing,
and I think that, you know, it reminds me of law,
or, you know, even, you know, religion,
when it gets to, like,
what are the things that we don't like?
How do we feel about rape?
It's like, no, under no circumstances
is that an acceptable behavior.
Murder, no, that's not an acceptable behavior.
Killing, I don't know, kind of depends on the situation.
Are you at war?
Were you justified?
Were you acting in self-defense?
Okay, so it's not, now, murder is a specific type of killing
the same way, you know, other things should be
a specific type of something else,
but I guess we draw the line on murder.
We say, if you want to exist in our society,
you can't do this.
This cannot be done, and then we go theft.
If someone said, hey, I murdered that guy,
can you understand where I'm coming from?
I might say, yeah, I'll hear you out.
Doesn't mean that I think you're right,
but I'm like, have you ever been wronged so deeply
that you could imagine that you could kill someone?
I'm like, no, I haven't,
but I could conceptualize someone doing that,
and I'm like, yeah, okay, and you still need to go,
you still need to face, you know, criminal justice
as we have it in our system,
or at least that's how we've decided.
- Yeah, it's interesting.
You have to be able to, like, there's,
if you look at the history of discourse in this country,
I think it's still true, but I'm not sure.
It's changed since 9/11,
is it used to be impossible to criticize a soldier.
It was easier to criticize war.
It was harder to criticize soldiers
for allowing themselves to be the tools of war.
I tend to be, maybe it's the Russian upbringing,
it's the combat thing.
I tend to romanticize war and soldiers.
I see soldiers as heroes,
but I've also heard people that not only say
that soldiers are, war is bad,
they say soldiers are bad.
- What's their argument?
- It's the kind of a libertarian view
that they're basically slaves to evil, right?
War is evil, and they're given,
they are suspending their moral and ethical,
like, duties as a human being to become the tools of evil.
That's sort of the argument, if you see war as evil.
I mean, I think it's useful to hear that,
but there for a long part in history,
that was completely unacceptable.
Same with abortion.
If you see abortion as murder,
I mean, if I classify it in that,
if I put it in that basket.
- It starts, we're living in the midst of a genocide.
- Looked at from that perspective,
could you feel how people could be deeply upset by abortion?
You go, of course.
Looked at from a different perspective,
you say, I don't believe it to be murder.
That's not how I see it.
Then you go, oh, well, if that's the genesis
of your thought process, then you're like, yeah, okay.
Now I see how we can come to a different thing,
but I guess we go, well, abortion is murder, period.
Therefore, if you support it, you support murder.
That's a convenient way for me to tar you, right?
But I guess that's kind of coming back to the Alec Jones.
- It's the nuance.
You have to have the nuance in these kinds of conversations.
- And I have to be willing to have the conversation
and I have to be willing to sit down.
If I can't sit down across from like the most violently,
racist, angry, hypothetical, internet, conceived person
that none of us have ever actually met in real life,
but hopefully not, and go like,
well, of course I believe that this person's wrong,
but allow me to change, do my best.
I'll hear them out and I'll go, no, I can go point by point
and explain why this guy or this girl is wrong
and hopefully bring them over to a more reasonable position
where they will have better beliefs
and they will like objectively better beliefs
and beliefs that will,
and they'll treat other people better.
Why would I wanna marginalize this person?
Now I might not wanna talk,
I might not wanna invite them to my barbecue
if they're acting like a jerk all the time,
but how could I, would it not make the world a better place
if I'd hear them out and they go, look,
if you're gonna sit down and talk with me,
we're gonna have to have a discussion.
I'll hear what you have to say.
And if I can't explain to someone
why their ridiculous belief is wrong,
then I must not be so confident in my position.
And I guess that's where I come back
to the Alex Jones thing, as you mentioned,
with Bill Gates and you're much more familiar
with the specifics of all the good that he's done,
but again, he's been an unbelievable force for good
in this world.
You can list A, B, C, D things that the man has done,
that his foundation has done, and positive things.
And then the other people could speculate
about ridiculous, crazy levels of evil,
but you can't produce any evidence for that sort of thing.
Because if you could,
the man would find himself in some trouble.
And anyway, I guess what I would say is that,
you can't force me to accept the truth,
the same way you could write down two plus two equals four
on a piece of paper and show me how it works,
and I could say, nah, but that doesn't make it not true.
And you've still given yourself an opportunity
to present your case.
You've presented it to me.
And you've also, for anyone listening and watching,
you've been able to critically assess what's gone on,
or critically address back and forth,
kind of the discourse.
And I think that you almost,
you're making your case for the public.
So I guess like, when it comes to just never,
not engaging with these people,
that seems to me to be cowardly.
And I think that that's something
that we're seeing in society right now.
I think we're seeing a crisis of courage in society
all over the place.
And I think that's where we're seeing poor leadership.
I think we're seeing understandable things
happening everywhere, but we need stronger voices
and stronger beliefs that have a conviction
and are willing to engage with others,
not just turning them to a shouting contest and not,
I didn't win because there's more of me.
Oh, I outvoted you.
That's nice too, but that's a stand in for bullets.
That's saying I won because there's more of me.
That doesn't mean that I'm right.
Because plenty of horrible and unpopular now things
have been very, very deeply popular in the past
and would have won a popular vote.
Does that make them right?
I'd say clearly not.
§16Transcript · 1:57:38–2:04:45
So I guess you'd hope that we engage with these people
and that you can do your best to bring them over
to a more reasonable position
if you believe that you have one.
And if you can't, well, at least you made the effort.
And I think that that's something where martial arts
shows the value.
It's like, do you know if you're gonna go
win your next fight?
I'm like, I have no idea.
I will proceed forward with full effort.
And I will fight with dignity.
I'll fight with honor and I'll fight with courage.
And I'll use everything that I have
and I will play within the bounds of the game.
And that's that.
And the result will be what it'll be,
but I will walk into and out of that ring
with my head held high
because I will know that I did my part.
I did my job.
The outcome, the specific outcome is not in my control.
It's just strongly in my influence.
And I think that that's something that helped me,
that martial arts has taught me
because other times, even when I was successful
or unsuccessful, I would focus on,
if I won, I won, therefore I'm good.
I lost, therefore I'm bad.
This other guy won or lost, therefore,
as opposed to evaluating their method.
And I think it's so easy
when we're taking a bird's eye view of things
to not evaluate how someone's doing things.
You're not evaluating my process.
You're simply evaluating my outcome.
And I could have stumbled into something very, very good
or very, very bad.
And we can look back and I think that's the value of history.
I mean, I don't mean to get on my dang high horse,
but it's like this value of history
is we can see the unbroken chain
or the chain of events that led us somewhere.
And then only with the eyes of history
can we truly evaluate things
unless we're in the room watching it happen.
And I guess that's again,
where we start to go most of the big, bad, scary things
that have happened in history
that are done particularly on an industrial scale,
which implies governmental power and things like that,
or the equivalent,
involve groups of people getting together and going,
"Hey, we're not gonna deal with that guy."
Giant groups of people.
So maybe we're right this time,
but maybe we're wrong next time.
And I guess I would be back to the Gandalf
putting on the one ring.
I would be very, very hesitant
even if we thought we were in the right
to simply try to marginalize just on general principle,
even people like Alex Jones
whom on their face are pretty ridiculous.
Like you said, you should sit down with Adolf Hitler
and talk to the man.
- I agree with you.
To play a little devil's advocate.
- Please.
- Alex Jones might be a bad example,
but if we look at, because he has a face, he is a human.
He's a real person.
There's also trolls on the internet for Chan.
The worry I have with those folks is that,
and there might be parallels to martial arts,
is they practice guerrilla warfare.
Meaning they don't necessarily want to arrive at the truth.
They just always want to cut at the ankles of the powerful.
Like they want to always break down the powerful.
And even if they, I mean, they turn everything into a game.
So they, let's see if we can make the world,
let's see if we can make a trend
that Bill Gates is a pedophile, right?
They make it into a game.
They get excited about this game.
They see the powerful.
Let's see if we can convince that,
like who is the most positive person we can think of?
Let's see if we can turn them into evil.
And they've tried that with like everybody.
And it seems to stick, and they're good at it.
Some would argue,
or whatever you think about our current president,
that he has some elements of that,
which is he's figured out whatever this music
of social discourse that's going on,
he's figured out how to always troll
the mainstream flow of consciousness, the media.
He always kind of says stuff
that annoys a very large number of people,
and he enjoys that.
Because it's like taking the powerful,
taking the way things were before,
and he shakes it up by saying the most inappropriate thing,
almost on purpose or instinctually and so on.
The problem I have with that is that doesn't,
the powerful thing there is it brings
those in power down a notch.
That's a great thing.
The negative thing is it doesn't push us closer
to a nuanced, careful, rigorous discourse towards truth.
It's like showing up to a party and just like starting
to yell, it doesn't create a good conversation.
It just makes everything into a game
where truth doesn't even seem like a thing
we can even hope to achieve.
- That makes sense, and I guess as you mentioned,
we'll come back to another movie,
'cause I don't do books, I do movies.
Some people just wanna watch the world burn, right?
And I guess that's a creepy, creepy kind of urge
that some people have.
And then also is some people, you're like,
hey, would you like to throw a brick
through that glass window?
You're like, yeah, sure.
Like, no, I'm not gonna do that,
because I think about what's going to occur.
Like something's gonna be hurt, someone's property,
you're not gonna do it, versus, hey,
you wanna see what'll happen?
You're like, yeah, sure.
Kids are always like, I have my son,
he just grabs Spider-Man and drops him on the table.
Spider-Man fell.
Like, Spider-Man didn't fall, Sean.
Like, you dropped him, you knocked him off the table,
and he'll grin.
And basically, it's an interesting thing, like you said,
playing that these people are appealing to,
and also almost like the little dog factor
of like people do wanna watch the powerful
get taken down a notch for all the good
and the not good of that.
There's plenty of people, it seems to me,
that have found their way to incredibly high positions.
Some have just found themselves there,
and many, many, many, many, many people,
you know, men and women of all backgrounds,
are brilliant and have worked hard.
And yeah, of course there's luck,
and there's luck into everything.
There, you know, LeBron James,
in spite of being the best basketball player
on God's green earth, is fortunate
that he didn't get hit by a car.
You know, it's fortunate that he didn't tear his knee,
but thankfully, we get to see all these things.
You know, but I guess it's,
if people don't have any skin in the game,
you never know what they're gonna do.
And I think that's the problem with the internet,
you know, that people get to be nameless, be faceless.
That's why guerrilla fighters are outside
of the bounds of war.
Like you don't have a uniform on.
You're like, I don't know who you're from.
You don't get the same treatment that a soldier gets.
For, and people go, well, that's crazy.
And actually there's reasons for this,
because otherwise people are able to assail things,
and there's no one responsible.
There's no way to go and say,
hey, where did this come from?
What's the root of this?
How can I address this?
And I think that's the problem of the internet,
it's the problem of Twitter,
it's the problem of places like 4chan.
I wouldn't mind seeing that type of stuff go away,
if I'm frank, but that's not the same thing
as people with a face, people who are willing
to stand there and say, hi, my name is so-and-so.
Even if I have ridiculous beliefs,
hopefully, you know, people will hear me out,
and then if I'm wrong, educate me.
But I guess you hope that the real, I guess,
in my mind, antidote to all of this silliness is education.
And I think that that's something that we're,
you know, critical thinking is not necessarily,
I went to school in America,
and I feel very fortunate,
but critical thinking is not something that's focused on.
I mean, and it's tough,
it's almost like talking about jujitsu.
It's tough to teach critical thinking
when I don't know any words.
You have to teach me techniques,
you can't teach me to be an artist.
But recognize that the techniques are the beginning,
§17Transcript · 2:04:47–2:13:07
not the end.
Ultimately, it's the artistry that we are searching for,
not just the science or the by-rote memorization.
And I guess, you know,
you'd hope that people's ability to think critically
and recognize that majority rule,
or whoever's loudest does not mean that they're right
by any stretch of the imagination.
And we don't appeal to that, and we don't bow to that.
We'll help them to,
help inoculate them against the ridiculous things
that come out of these places, these dark places,
that are objectively not great.
But I guess, all circling back,
if even if we swatted these, you know,
these bad things out of existence right now,
we've got to be very, very careful doing that,
because it's who's doing the swatting.
This political group that's in power right now,
the people that support our current president
would maybe feel a certain way.
The people that support another option
would feel differently as to what exactly defines toxic.
And, you know, I guess that that's what gives me pause.
- Yeah, and but also the grace thing.
I tend to believe that the technology,
you said education, but the platforms we use,
like Twitter and the Reddit and all these platforms,
have a role to play to teach us grace,
meaning they should help us incentivize
the kind of behavior that is incentivized in real life.
Like being a dick in real life is not incentivized.
Like one-on-one interaction.
There's cases where it is,
but usually being kind to each other is incentivized.
On the internet, it's not.
Like you get likes for mocking people
in a funny, in a humorous way.
And it can be dark kind of mocking,
depending on the community.
You can go to the appearance.
If somebody's a little fat or a little too skinny,
you can comment on their appearance,
the hair, the way their hair looks,
like the appearance stuff.
It could be on the people comment all the time,
on the level of eloquence of my speech.
Go fuck yourself.
- I like it.
It's creepy though, watching previously,
like this used to be lowbrow though,
like people doing this type of stuff.
It's creepy watching like our political figures
get into this type of game.
- Yes, but again, it's a little bit refreshing, right?
My hope with Donald Trump was,
is that he would shake up the people who wear suits usually.
Like if you're from DC,
I remember like showing up,
I actually didn't wear what I usually wear in DC
'cause I was like, everybody's wearing a suit and tie.
When I was like giving talks and stuff.
- Except for Mudge, who wears jeans and a T-shirt.
- Mudge doesn't give a damn.
Mudge is a forever renegade.
But I don't even remember what,
oh yeah, so my hope with Trump
was that he would shake up that system,
to say like, to inject new ideas,
to inject new energy.
Of course, the way it turned out is different,
but like there's,
it turns out that you might wanna have somebody
who's like an Andrew Yang type character,
who is full of ideas that are very different
and inject the energy, new energy into the system
through youthful new ideas versus through the troll
that like, that's very good at sort of mocking
and like playing outside the rules of the game.
But Trump did reveal powerfully,
I don't know what to think of it,
that it's just a game
and you don't have to play by the rules.
That's both inspiring and dark.
- Deeply depressing, right?
- Yeah, and I don't know what to do with it.
I don't, I mean the same,
I'm not drawing parallels,
not drawing parallels between our president
and Adolf Hitler,
but it's certainly, and there's a lot of,
in history, a lot of positive
and a lot of negative things happen
when charismatic leaders realize
they don't have to play by the rules.
You can just flip the table.
It's that Kevin Spacey show.
- Oh, "House of Cards."
- "House of Cards,"
where you just flip the table or whatever.
You don't have to play by the rules of the chess game.
You can flip the table.
- One wonders if that's always been done in private,
you know, I guess, 'cause that's,
I mean, even look, obviously,
the United States is a republic,
but we had Bush, then we had Clinton,
then we had more Bush,
then we had President Obama,
then we were about to have another Clinton.
That's fairly creepy, even on its own.
- But now we added another,
I mean, I'm sure we'll have a generation of Trumps now.
- Gee.
(Lex laughing)
- We, you know, I'm Russian,
so I think we humans like kings still and queens.
There's something,
we're attracted to the thing we talked about, coaches.
There's something in us that longs
towards that authoritarian control.
One of the beautiful things about America,
the Second Amendment,
is we also like individual freedom.
That's one of the unique aspects
at the founding of this country and still,
and for me, is the beacon of hope
that somehow there's the fire of freedom burns,
and like that Texas feel, that gives me hope.
The FU energy that revolts against the power,
which as we discussed, power corrupts
and ultimately leads to sort of degradation
of whoever's ruling the people.
- It's interesting, though.
It seems to me, maybe I'm just,
I don't know if I'm reading this properly when I see it,
but it seems to me that, like you said,
that flip the bird, I'm gonna do me within reason,
as long as I'm not hurting you,
is idea that very much, at least in my mind,
defines the American ideal,
or at least part of the consciousness of the United States,
is under attack to a certain extent.
If only I can think to maybe a generation behind us,
it's becoming more collectivist.
For all the good and also the not good of that.
And it's, not in terms of policy at this point,
but just in terms of consciousness.
And I wonder if that's an internet thing.
People are more in touch with one another
than they've, as far as I can tell,
they've ever been, or at least more than in my lifetime.
And the rest of the world seems much closer than it did.
Living in Virginia, California, seems very far away.
Being on the internet, it's just right there.
I can hear about it, I can see it.
I can interact with people from there.
I remember being in Tennessee at one time
and reading about events taking place in the Middle East.
And that just seemed like a mile away.
It seemed like an unbelievably far distance.
And then another time when you're in DC,
you just feel like, oh, you read about something
happening in Paris, and it just feels like
it's just right around the corner.
Because DC is a seat of power
where things are just occurring all the time.
And I guess you wonder about,
that's where I come back to the group decisions
to not listen to this person, or to cancel this,
or to, we all, the moral majority shall do the following
as opposed to, as long as you're not hurting me,
and as long as you're not hurting anyone else,
I have to let you do, I have to let you be
on general principle.
Even if I don't like you, I'm very free to not like you.
I'm free to speak out against you,
but it is not within my right, and it's not,
I would not be right to attempt to attack you.
And that is an interesting thing, though,
when we see words being redefined, or words being defined,
whether it's toxicity, whether it's violence.
If I think that what you're saying is,
your speech is by itself a violence,
or a precursor to violence, I'm justified
in doing all sorts of things.
You know, and that creeps me out significantly.
Because again, even if it ends up being pointed
in a good direction initially, it's only a matter of time.
And actually, that brings me to another--
Dune quote?
Oh yeah, I got all day.
How much are they paying you?
But, well, yeah, about, say, the Frank Herbert estate.
Not enough, frankly.
(ZDoggMD laughs)
Let's see.
And how many books are there in Dune?
That's a Jen question.
You're also a fan of Dune?
§18Transcript · 2:13:08–2:20:00
I read the whole series, but not a couple of the,
I read all the prequels as well,
with the exception of a couple.
Is there a book one for Dune?
Dune would be book one, and even the prequels,
it's still all better if you start,
like I read Dune and then read the original,
what is it, six?
And then I went back and started to read some other--
It's like just like watching Star Wars.
You wanna start at episode four or whatever.
Yeah, I think so.
That's the move, and then stop at six,
call it a day, watch The Mandalorian.
Well, I thought you're not walking back here.
No, I like The Mandalorian.
Yeah, it's not--
No, it's not The Mandalorian.
That is what I said.
I was told that I was heartless
for not liking Baby Yoda, who I--
We don't talk about a couple of the movies,
not including The Mandalorian.
The Mandalorian's fine.
It's the more recent movies
that we don't like to talk about.
Oh, the, what's his name?
The goofy guy.
Ryan--
No, no.
No, the creature, the goofy creature with the--
Jar Jar?
Yeah, Jar Jar.
Do you ever see the Jar Jar Binks is actually
like the Dark Lord of the Sith theory?
That fixed the whole initial trilogy,
where like he's like goofing around
and like making it all the way through battles,
and when you're like, wait a minute,
he oopsed his way, walks over to a pool,
does a triple backflip, falls in,
you're like, it's just bizarre that you--
This is the Alex Jones theory of Star Wars.
It's like he's actually running everything.
He was the one that actually was like,
hey, we should vote in Chancellor Palpatine,
or Senator Palpatine, like right before.
They put Jar Jar in charge.
First off, what did they think was gonna happen?
And second off, I just think that'd be great.
You're like, oops, oh man, I guess he's the emperor now.
That would have been great.
But actually, to the cancel and all the other stuff,
again, it's just, you'd hope that it gives pause.
And I think about this for fighting,
because a lot of times, I'll use this example.
People like fight fans and like UFC,
they love people that run out and try to murder each other.
And it's entertaining, and it's super entertaining,
but Floyd Mayweather doesn't resonate with people as much.
It's like people started,
I remember the time when Floyd was not as popular.
Now people think people love Floyd
because he's 50 and 0 Floyd.
And oh man, and finally he had so much success
that we all can't help but recognize
the man's genius and greatness.
But prior to that, oh, he's boring, he's this, he's that.
He fights, he's circumspect, he's cautious, he's pressing.
He's intelligent, deeply intelligent.
And when you watch people go out
and try to murder each other,
you can flip a coin 100 times,
and you could be lucky enough to get 100 heads,
but it's still a coin flip.
And I think that that's what's going on all the time
is people are getting an outcome that they want,
but it wasn't a well thought out situation.
So that's why you'll win by five in a row by knockout
and then lose three in a row.
And then people will go, well, what happened to that guy?
He used to be so great.
And you're like, no, he's doing what he's always been doing.
It's just, it was getting great outcomes
on a coin flip prior,
and it's getting negative outcomes on a coin flip now.
But I guess what I would say is it watches,
it's interesting watching, I guess,
societal beliefs become such a thing
that we're almost adopting on a religious level
if we're not careful.
If when I say religious level, I mean like pan life,
like this is guiding all of my choices
for all the good and the bad of that.
And this is a Dune quote,
is when religion and politics travel in the same car,
the writers believe that nothing can stand in their way.
Their movements become headlong
faster and faster and faster.
They put aside all thoughts of obstacles
and forget that the precipice does not show itself
to the man in a blind rush until it's too late.
And I think that that's, again, the pause.
We go, oh man, thank goodness.
We have this guy that wants to rebuild Germany.
He'll put us back where we need to be.
- And you stop questioning your own judgment,
your own, you stop thinking essentially.
- Right, I'm not allowed to question this.
Oh, well, of course this is correct.
Of course, I'm right.
I intended to do right.
So of course my actions are correct.
I mean, how many times have any of us
intended to do something helpful
and ended up doing something less?
And plenty of people who intend to do harm
could by accident do something decent.
And I guess it's, I'm not saying anything terribly insightful
but it's just one of those where it's hard to say
in the moment and that's where you hopefully caution,
you would counsel some degree of caution.
And that's what worries me with people deciding
that we're all so right about this
or we're all so right about that
and attempting to, rather than win the argument,
silence the counter-argument
no matter how crazy it may seem.
Because I just think that that idea,
even when it's pointed in a good direction initially,
it's only a matter of time.
- You're amongst many things a Jiu-Jitsu black belt.
One of the things that people are really curious about,
white belts and blue belts in Jiu-Jitsu
but also people who haven't tried the art
is what does it take to be a Jiu-Jitsu black belt?
- I think that everyone's journey is a little bit different
but the one thing that the, what is it,
Calvin Coolidge quote, "Determination, persistence
is the only thing that will win in the end."
It will always win in the end.
Not brilliance, not toughness, not education.
It's persistence.
And I think that having the belief
that no matter what happens to me, I will proceed forward
and I will figure out how to make this happen,
hell or high water,
I think is the one thing that ties together
all of the people that I've ever met
that made it through whatever it was
that they were going through.
Because sometimes you can get lucky
and you can have an easy time
or and that luck could be you had a good situation.
It could be, I mean, like in the obvious sense
of like where you're living, where you're training,
what's going on, you had a good situation,
you're unbelievably athletic.
Oh, you're gonna be an astronaut,
you're brilliant and an Olympic athlete,
you know, like, oh, well, that's a fantastic situation.
You know, you won the genetic lottery
and I'm sure you've worked hard as well,
but you also won the genetic lottery.
It's a determination is the one thing though,
because that person could have a very easy go of it
initially and then tear their knee.
And then they're no longer the superhuman
physical specimen that they were.
The only thing that will keep them going is persistence.
And I think that that, I would just say that persistence,
I say, I'll just put one foot in front of the other.
And sometimes I can see the path ahead.
And sometimes it's beyond my vision, but I will not stop.
I may even slow down, but I won't stop.
And that's the only thing that I can say
that I've seen tie everyone together
because there's so many ways to the top of any mountain
and there's so many different personalities
and skills and backgrounds involved,
but everyone carries on.
- So at the core, the foundational advice
is just don't quit, just keep going.
- That's the lesson of martial arts, I think.
We think it's like how to be strong or how to win,
but in reality, it's like how to persist, how to endure,
because all of us have been beaten so many times
and gotten beaten up so many times
and thought about quitting.
Have I ever thought about quitting?
Absolutely.
Have I ever quit?
Never.
I will never, ever quit, ever.
I can say it.
You might knock me out.
I will be damned if I quit.
- What's the darkest moment?
Is it injury related?
(Isaac sighs)
§19Transcript · 2:20:02–2:28:12
Is it?
- So to me, two possibilities.
I've fortunately never been seriously injured,
but I think that's a dark place to be,
having to be out for many months for,
as Jen was saying, with a head injury especially,
the uncertainty, that's one.
And then the other side is if you have big ambitions
as a competitor, realizing that you're not as good,
like those doubts where like, I kind of suck.
How am I supposed to be a world,
the greatest fighter of all time
if like several people in the gym are kicking my ass?
Those are the two things that paralyze you.
- I think that everyone's darkest moment is maybe different.
Looking from the outside for Ryan,
I wouldn't say that he's had injuries
and he's had bad ones.
I wouldn't say that was his darkest moment.
I think for me, I would say my head injury
was my darkest moment.
Absolutely, and I have torn my ACL twice.
I've torn my shoulders four times.
I've had lots of surgeries.
For me, the orthopedic injuries
were not the most difficult.
It was the brain injury.
For others, that might be the case for them.
Maybe they've never experienced an injury,
and maybe for them, that's their darkest moment.
From the outside, obviously, Ryan can speak to this more,
but for Ryan, I think it was the inability
to perform at certain points,
the missing of opportunities that for him,
from my perspective, watching him go through
and having seen various points of his growth
from early PurpleBot on,
I think the hardest time for him looking in, obviously,
was when he would hit moments
where he wasn't able to perform for various reasons.
He couldn't get fights.
He was having difficulties there.
I think that was the hardest points for him.
- Did you think, with a head injury,
that you might never be able to do jujitsu again?
- Yeah, I mean, mine was really bad,
and it was just the one hit,
but I had a looping memory for seven months.
Didn't know it, because when your brain's messed up,
you're not even aware that you're looping.
- That's great.
- And so, I saw two different neurologists.
I finally, it took a very long time.
I didn't know if I was gonna be able
to have linear thoughts or read a book.
I didn't know, at certain points,
if I could listen to music again,
without it making my head hurt.
And so, it was almost two years
before I woke up in the morning without a headache,
just waking up before I even start my day.
And so that--
- So that's even bigger than jujitsu.
That's just life.
- That's just hard.
And I think that you can experience so many things.
I've had all these injuries.
We lost a baby when I was 15 weeks.
And we've had all these experiences.
And what the hardest point for me,
not saying all those things weren't hard,
but it's kind of like,
when you go through these, you just realize life goes on,
and you have to keep working at it,
and you have to keep going.
And you asked me earlier offline, did I feel depressed?
Not from my head injury.
I don't think that, at least in the moment,
I had any recognition of that.
It's kind of like,
but I think different people's personalities,
I have kind of the like, buckle down and just keep going.
And sometimes it's not until lots of time later
that you realize, wow, that was really hard.
'Cause you're just struggling to live and function
and do the things that you need to do along the way.
- Do you mind jumping on just like this part
of the conversation just for a few minutes?
- I'm sorry, I need to over.
- Do you mind, no, just sitting together?
- Oh, no, no.
- Just for a little bit.
- Sorry about that, I didn't mean to jump in there.
- It'd be cool if we put a face to it.
- No, no, no.
Is it okay with you?
- Yeah, it's fine with me, it's fine with you.
- By the way, what was the head injury,
if you don't mind sharing?
- Someone had dropped their knee
on the back of my head during training.
It was a lot bigger than me.
So one strike to the back of the head is too much for,
there's a reason that's outlawed in MMA, right?
Someone 50 pounds heavier than you drops their knee
on the back of your head once and it's.
- That's the funny thing about getting hit, right?
You never can really be sure what's gonna happen.
I think that's actually one of the magical parts
about Jiu-Jitsu, where if you choke me,
we know what's gonna occur.
You hit someone, they might be completely unharmed.
You might be punching Tony Ferguson in the face
and you need to hit him with a sledgehammer
to affect this man.
And then other people, they could get really badly hurt,
which I guess, back to your point about street fighting
and things like that and the serious, serious potential,
second, third order consequences of any action that we take.
But yeah, that's a tricky thing about getting hit.
- How does it make you feel that,
like the really shitty thing about injuries to me
was that like, you start thinking like,
well, if I did this one little thing different,
like this wouldn't have happened today.
Like one moment changes your entire life.
Is that, do you think that way
or is that totally counterproductive?
- You can't help but think that way
when you've had the amount of injuries I've had now,
'cause I've had more than most people's fair share.
As my orthopedic says, you don't wanna win that.
You don't wanna win the contest of who's had the most.
- But since you have, thanks for building me a pool.
- Yeah, but I think you can't help but think that way
sometimes, but I definitely don't think it's,
I think it can be facilitative
if you don't beat yourself up too much.
Because thinking about why have I been subject
to so many injuries and a lot of it comes to just
almost all of mine in particular,
people a lot heavier than me.
But if I've been training martial arts 15 years,
I'm obviously on the much smaller side, I'm a woman.
I've done thousands and thousands of rounds
with people 50 pounds plus heavier than me.
I mean, years not training with anyone less than 50 pounds,
which is 50 pounds is almost half my body weight.
And when you also add testosterone
and the natural physiological advantages of men,
not just are they heavier with more mass,
they're faster and more explosive,
they're stronger if they're the same size.
And so I think that the willingness to be in that environment
over and over and over again creates a lot of strength,
resiliency, willingness to continue.
But it also, in order to do that, you almost have to,
for me, the way I was approaching it was like,
pretend like I wasn't more vulnerable
and just be willing to step in and step in and step in.
- Take it until you make it kind of thing?
- Take it until you make it kind of, yeah,
like I'll just one day I'll be strong enough.
- And you avoided injury for most of it.
- For most of those rounds I would injury.
The problem, as Ryan points out,
is that you could do thousands of rounds,
but if one person that size, that strength,
that hover reacts in a way that you don't expect,
it's not like an oops, it's like always major.
- Do you regret any of it?
- I think that most, no one I know has experienced
the degree of injuries that I've experienced.
And I started just at a time when,
in 2005 it was very different than now,
where you have, the coaches have more control
over what you're doing.
They're more aware in general about a lot of the injuries.
There's a lot more people who are hobbyists
than when I started.
They were hobbyists, but it was different kind of hobbyist,
you know, than now.
Now our girls can train with other girls.
They don't have to do thousands of rounds
with somebody significantly more powerful than them.
And for the drawbacks and the benefits of that,
you know, as with anything.
So I think that I don't think I would go back and change it.
There were times after one of my injuries
where I said to Ryan, I said, "I quit, I'm done.
"I'm not doing this anymore."
I probably said it more than once,
but there was one time I was really serious in 2012.
I was really serious.
I tore my shoulder.
I was looking at missing a big competition again
in the world for my second or third year in a row
after injuries.
And I said, I'd quit my job two years before.
And I'm like, I'm done.
§20Transcript · 2:28:15–2:35:05
And Ryan, before that had always been, you know,
keep me focused.
And then he kind of said, "Okay, if you want to be done,
"be done, just have a good time."
And I'm like, "No, I'm really done.
"I don't even want to train anymore."
He's like, "Okay, okay."
And then, you know, I think he helped facilitate a moment
for me to go visit a friend, some friends,
some girls that were doing a girls camp
who are close to my size,
who are some friends of mine to go train.
And I was like, "Oh, wait, I do love this thing.
"It's just harder for me on a daily basis,
"but that doesn't mean I don't love this thing."
And it really helped change my mind.
I started to connect with some other people,
travel more myself, 'cause previously he had done that,
but I hadn't really done that.
I think there was a point where,
when I started Jiu-Jitsu, it was just for fun.
I just wanted to sport after college.
I played sports as a kid.
I just wanted to exercise.
I wasn't into the martial arts.
He used to give me a hard time about it
'cause he was always very,
"How can you not care about martial arts?"
I don't know, I just want to play sports.
And Ryan was really big into kind of the philosophy side
of the martial arts aspect.
He used to give me a hard time.
And I think after that moment,
this moment where I looked at myself and I said,
"Do I want to keep doing this?"
Is when I started to appreciate Jiu-Jitsu.
It took off some of the pressure I'd been feeling,
I think, as Ryan's girlfriend,
but I had a full-time job a long time.
It was never my goal to be a Jiu-Jitsu world champion.
And I think after that moment where I was like,
"You know, I really do like this.
"I really do want to keep this."
I had this moment, like any time where you're like,
"I'm doing this for me.
"I'm not doing this for him."
And I think that that was really lucky for me
because how often in our lives do we have a kind of
a challenge where we have to stop and we have to say,
"Is this really what I want?"
How often in a relationship do you do that?
How often in any type of lifestyle or job do you stop
and do you really ask yourself,
does something really difficult happen that you look
and you go, "Am I just doing this
"because it's convenient and easy
"or is this what I really want to do?"
- Yeah, I've had those moments.
Like this podcast is one of those things.
It's like you stop and think like,
"I actually love this."
And I had that with Jiu-Jitsu too.
I don't think I had sat until like Brown Belt that I stopped.
I mean, yeah, it's when you first face real challenges,
you think like, "Why am I doing this?"
I think most of my progression was, "Why not?"
I think that's the leap of faith.
And then at a certain point you think like,
"Why am I doing this?"
And if you can answer honestly that because I love it,
it's kind of a liberating feeling.
Yeah, it's so powerful.
It's an acceptance. - Well, you feel thankful
for the opportunity to be there, right?
Because you love it and you go, "Man, I..."
- Yeah, it's great gratitude.
- Yeah, it's ultimately gratitude.
Yeah, let me ask you this.
So Ryan said like, what is it?
- I took over your thing.
- Yeah, no, nobody cares about Ryan.
- I wouldn't.
- Yeah, I'll Photoshop him out or whatever.
However you had to do that.
- If you do that, it'd be great.
Just put Sean Connery's head.
- Just like a Dune ad over here.
- Exactly.
(laughing)
- Sean Connery, I can get down that.
- Is that the sexiest man in Sean Connery?
- In the Dune universe, that's my understanding.
- I think in any universe.
- Yeah, well, my gosh, I didn't give him.
- We actually named our son after Sean Connery.
- Oh yeah.
- That's right.
- We did.
- Three, five nos and a yesh, yesh, yesh.
(laughing)
- He was in "The Rock."
I love all those lame,
- Nicolas Cage.
Oh yeah.
- Conair's probably the greatest movie of all time.
- Dude, his accent in Conair was so awesome.
- I don't know where it's from.
Alabama, I guess, or something.
- I love that they got like Steve Buscemi in there.
They're like, "We need Steve Buscemi in this thing."
And we got him.
- Dave Chappelle?
- Yeah, that's right.
- He's a prisoner in there.
- "8 Ball."
- That's right.
- Yep, greatest movie of all time.
Should have won an Oscar.
- Dave Chappelle also in "Blue Street" with Martin Lawrence.
And in, what do you call it, "Robin Hood Men in Tights."
- Oh, "Robin Hood Men in Tights"
was one of my favorites as a kid.
- I've baked, but yeah, that's a good.
Wow, we just listed off some really bad '90s movies, but.
- You take that back.
- For telling our age.
- Yeah, it's all right.
Speak for yourself.
- So what, like, in your view,
I don't mean to, from a smaller person, I guess,
that's an interesting thing about jujitsu is that small,
I don't, hopefully it's not a bad thing.
- Elf.
(laughing)
Elves are taller.
- Like, with all these bigger people,
you can still enjoy the art.
Like, what does it take to get a black belt,
to excel, to quote-unquote master the art?
- Gosh, everyone has such a different path.
Brian's promoted six, seven people.
- Something like that.
- And I think about half of them have had,
have kids, have families, have other careers.
At the time, some of them competed a lot,
some of them have never competed or rarely competed.
Some haven't competed in a long time.
Some had started different places.
Everyone's had different journeys,
even in our own little group of seven.
I think only, maybe only two or three
were high-level competitors of that group
at the higher belts, right?
Like brown, black, maybe.
And so, it's just different for every person.
And that's something that we try to tell our,
since we have 400 students,
and do we have, we don't really have anyone
who's a stated, other than like the coaches, like Adam,
but we don't have anyone that's like a stated
high-level competitor as a student at the moment.
People look at our gym and go,
"Oh, it's lots of competitors."
It's not lots of competitors.
It's never been lots of competitors.
And we've had ones and twos here and there.
But really, everybody's in it for the long-term
if they're in it.
Sometimes the high-level competitors
are the ones that are more likely to drop off
because they have a bit of success,
particularly at blue or purple,
and then they realize how hard it is at brown and black,
and then they have a hard time continuing on that path.
And then they can't look at themselves as a non-competitor.
They have a hard time continuing with jujitsu, I think.
Whereas sometimes it's the guy who comes in
as a white belt and he trains twice a week, every week,
and the next thing you know,
he's been there for two or three years.
Like, "Oh, he's a blue belt.
He's a purple belt.
He's a brown belt."
And he's just consistent over a long period of time
and willing to take the path.
And no two people's path is exactly the same.
No two people's lives are exactly the same.
We have students who started as a white belt,
as a young adult with no responsibilities,
and they train all the time.
And then they have a job,
then they graduate college,
then they have a job,
then they have married,
then they have kids,
then they have different points in their careers.
And at different points in your life,
jujitsu will be there for whatever way
that you're willing to accept it.
It's place, I think.
§21Transcript · 2:35:06–2:42:05
Well, that's actually kind of what,
back to the initial question we discussed about
what makes a warrior.
And also what makes something or someone
particularly impressive in my mind
is what they make out of what they have.
One of my favorite movies ever is Forrest Gump.
And it's obviously, it's just,
if you can't, 'cause I've heard people,
like, "Oh, Forrest Gump sucks."
I'm like, "I don't like you as a person."
And like, you have no heart at all.
But basically, it's the story of someone that tries hard.
And it's like, yeah, but it's a funny movie.
But it's like, I guess you meet each person where they are.
And obviously, you want, everyone needs to be pushed.
We all need to be pushed.
We need friends and people around us
that push us to be better versions of ourselves
all the time.
And as you mentioned,
the people you spend all of your time around
deeply impact you.
And we have to be willing to be pushed.
It takes a leap of faith for me to trust,
for me to put some of myself in my,
I guess, my ability, my control, my personal agency,
as it were, in the hands of someone else
that I trust and that I respect.
But if I can do that, again,
maybe I never become high-level black belt competitor.
But I had four of the things I was doing in my life.
I also have a family.
I have this, I have that.
What that person was able to accomplish
in the martial arts
relative to what they were able to put in this phenomenal.
Other times, someone could be a very successful black belt
and in my mind, be a bum
because they could have been a lot more.
And they could have done more.
They could have focused more.
And there's no shame in deciding
that you don't wanna do that.
But whatever it is that you're invested in,
I remember the "Take It Uneasy" podcast.
And that I loved because I'll just chill out.
I like resting.
It's like vacation.
Oh, who wants to go on vacation?
Yeah, I'll go on vacation for a day or two.
You wanna spend three weeks on vacation?
Like, I kill myself.
Like, get me out of here.
Like, this is horrible.
This is, I'm a waste of life.
I'm not doing anything useful.
- You're technically on vacation right now.
- Right, well, this is fun though.
- This is like a one-day vacation.
- Exactly, but if you had,
I'm sure you're thinking about jumping off
of the building right now.
But if you had to talk to me for like three days,
I'm sure you'd probably shove me off the building.
I don't blame you.
- I would be dead.
- People, yeah.
- Five hours in.
- But yeah, but you know,
it's like you wanna be pushing towards something.
'Cause otherwise, what's the purpose of being here?
You know, it's not just a college.
It's doing something useful,
building, growing as a person,
helping others do the same,
if that's within your power at any given time.
But I think that's kind of the neat thing
about martial arts is it can be many,
many different things to many different people.
You know, I finally, for instance,
was able to get a college degree this year.
That which, I mean, it's not a big deal for most people,
but for me, it was a big deal because I was--
- You went back and finished.
- Yeah, and I never envisioned ever going back.
And you know--
- That's a hard step to go back and finish.
That's a, it weighs heavy on you if you don't.
It's interesting.
- Yeah, I was just, I was more proud of that
than most things I've ever done, if I'm honest.
You know, and it was neat and I really enjoyed it.
And it was the process of doing it,
but you know, are my academic credentials impressive?
Like not in the least.
But for me, it's like it was a big deal for me personally
to take that step and to go back and do that.
And I was proud of the direction.
And 'cause it would have been easy.
Like, do I need to do it?
Like, no, I'm, you know, I have business.
I'll do okay.
I'll try, I'll keep fighting.
But I was happy to take the time in between fights
when I was unbooked for an opponent
to do something productive,
rather than just, I'll just hang out.
You know, like I can still train every single day,
but I can also train and go to school.
People go to the Olympics while going to school.
I can do martial arts and go to school.
- One thing I gotta ask is, you know,
a bunch of women listen to this podcast.
If they haven't done jujitsu,
I think it'd be kind of intimidating
to step on the mat with a bunch of bros
that like enjoy somehow killing each other.
Like, how do you succeed in that environment
to where you can learn this art,
learn how to beat all those people up?
- Oh gosh.
- Is there any advice?
I mean, another way to ask that is like,
and you women listening to this
are interested in starting jujitsu,
like is there advice for that journey?
- Honestly, I think it's just walking in the door
and starting.
Sometimes I don't know how to respond to that
'cause I'm not, I don't view myself as typically anxious,
particularly in interactions with other people
or new people.
Shy is not a word that has been used for me.
But if you ask my family and they joke
'cause our son talks a lot,
he's advanced verbally and they're always like,
oh, well, let's, we know where he gets that from.
Like, 'cause he just doesn't stop talking.
He narrates everything he does.
And so they always tease 'cause that's
like I'm known for kind of talking a lot.
But so I haven't been typically,
I'm not, I don't consider myself a shy person.
So for me going into a new room,
a new group of people is,
you know, there's always a,
you don't really know who they are,
how they're gonna treat you.
But I don't have a lot of anxiety with that.
So I don't, if that's something
that's gonna put something off,
I don't really know how to address that particular feeling.
But in terms of all of the rooms I've been in,
I have popped into jiu-jitsu gyms
before I knew Ryan in Florida.
Like I traveled for my jobs in Germany and Florida
and California and places where I don't know anyone,
they don't know me.
And I have never once had anyone be anything
other than kind and solicitous and helpful.
And long before when I was a white belt and a blue belt
and didn't know anything and didn't know anyone.
And I just think that it's a community of people
that it's so cool that no matter where you go in the world,
I walked into a gym in Prague one time
where only two people spoke English.
And it was just--
- Yeah, it's weird.
- You know, instantly you're like part of a group
and they're like, "Oh, let me tell you
what a place to go." - So being part of a cult,
right? - Yeah.
- Yeah. - But it's like a positive cult.
Like for sure--
- That's what we would say as cultists.
- Yeah, that's true.
(laughing)
That's true.
I mean, we do need to murder everybody
who practice Aikido.
- I mean, yeah.
- This cult deeply believes in.
No, but there is a, like if you look at different kinds
of games like chess and so on, like there's a skepticism.
I mean, there's not a brotherhood, sisterhood feeling
with jiu-jitsu.
It's like you can roll into most places.
Even like with judo, like I can see the contrast
'cause I've trained in judo places.
It's more like tribal.
Like you walk in and like, "Who is this?"
Like there's that kind of feeling.
With jiu-jitsu, there's less so.
There is a little bit with like the competitors.
There's always like the competitors feeling each other out,
usually like the blue belts.
But like outside of that, in terms of if you don't get the,
if you walk in with the vibes of just loving the art
and just wanting to have a good time, you're like welcome.
§22Transcript · 2:42:09–2:49:28
It's really cool.
It's really fascinating.
- It's a really great thing, I think.
And as a woman, I think you think you're walking
into these rooms of these big, strong, tough guys.
And if anything, I would say that they're almost like
much more solicitous when a woman comes in there
and not like they're just like hitting on you all the time.
It's just that you walk in and everyone is like,
"Oh, cool.
"You wanna do this thing that I love.
"Let me make sure you have a good experience
"and take care of you."
And I think that's an experience that I hope people have
when they come into our gym and that I've always felt
when I walked into other gyms.
And so we try our best to make that comfortable.
And it can be a little uncomfortable 'cause there are,
when you walk into a male-dominated environment,
there's conversations and topics.
There's a different style of camaraderie and joking
that a lot of men will do that maybe some women
are more uncomfortable with.
I grew up with four brothers, so I kind of maybe
was a little more desensitized to that.
And I worked for the Department of Defense for a while too.
So before I-
- So you're with the government.
- Yeah, so I did that for a while after college.
- I'm already skeptical.
- Yeah.
I left, I left.
- Oh, you left.
I'm not gonna ask you about UFOs then
because you're not gonna tell me the truth.
- No.
(laughing)
Fix it.
(laughing)
- Yeah, now you just freaked out a lot of people.
Okay.
(laughing)
But yeah, by the way, where's your school?
'Cause people always ask like where-
- Well, we're outside of Washington, DC
in Northern Virginia in Falls Church.
- You always wanna pick like, what's the best school
if I travel to this place or if I wanna move to this place?
So that's-
- Well, I mean, obviously we're biased,
but yeah, we're in the Washington, DC area.
- The best.
Okay, we just took a little break.
Now we're back.
Let me ask you one thing that a bunch of people
are curious about.
You're one of the innovators.
First of all, you're one of the great innovators
and philosophers and thinkers in jiu-jitsu, right?
But you're also one of the innovators
in terms of leg locks and the 50/50 position
and just like the fact that legs have something to do
in jiu-jitsu.
The other popularizer, innovator in the space
is Jon Donahuer and his whole group of guys.
Do you have thoughts about their whole system of leg locks
and their ideas about jiu-jitsu and so on?
- Sure.
I guess, obviously, Jon and the students at HENSO
who've been able to do fantastic things competitively
in the past number of years.
You mentioned innovators in that kind of section of jiu-jitsu
I would be, I'd love to bring up some guys
like Dean Lister, of course, Masakazu Imanari.
In fact, a lot of what was going on in 90s Japan
like combat submission wrestling,
there was some crazy gnarly stuff
that it's on grainy VHS tape.
But stuff that if people were doing now,
they go, "Oh my God, that's brand new."
I think these are things that have been around for a while
in various places.
I first learned the 50/50 position,
just like the leg entanglement of it, from Brandon Vera,
actually at a seminar at Lord Irvin's Martial Arts,
I think in 2005.
He learned it from Dean Lister
who used it to submit Alexandre Kakareko,
really, really tough no-gi guy at ADCC in the run
that Dean made to the gold medal in the absolute division,
which was a great performance at the time,
first American to do that.
And I actually saw a video,
I mean, first of all, Bas Rutten actually broke,
I think Guy Mezger's foot with a 50/50 heel hook.
He actually grabbed his heel and his toes
and went (imitates cracking)
and in pancreas, it's back when they had like the man panties
and the high boots on.
And dude, that was gnarly.
Bas Rutten is underappreciated.
- He double grabbed and just--
- Oh yeah, his leverage is leverage.
That's like a toehold that goes the other way
and it's like it either doesn't work or breaks in half.
- Well, people don't often think of Bas Rutten
as an innovator, but he is, in a way.
Talk about Elon Musk and first principles thinking
in terms of physics, he just feels like
he just gets the job.
He figures out the simplest way to get the job done
of breaking things and establishing control
and hurting people.
- Remember that was back in the day,
if you listen to Bas Rutten do any commentary
for any of the big MMA shows or any MMA show way back when,
anytime guys were clinching,
he's like, "The guys roll for a knee bar."
He was saying that way back when
and now people are doing it all the time
with varying degrees of success.
It's funny, it's also tough to be,
I think like a breakaway thinker.
I mean, group think is a real thing and group inertia
and it's neat to see, particularly at a time
when maybe that type of stuff was less accepted,
someone going, "Hey, I'm gonna run off
"in this other direction."
I think whoever, the inventor of electricity in my mind
is a lot more impressive than whomever,
not to say that the person down the line isn't impressive,
that comes up with an interesting way to use it.
Both are cool, but when you think about,
just can you imagine we're sitting here,
we're like, "Yeah, people, I'm gonna build an airplane."
You're like, "What are you talking about?"
- Crazy. - People don't fly.
I'm like, "No, I'm gonna do it."
And of course, it's not gonna be as good
as the airplane down the line,
the iterative things that happen later on,
but just being able to go to dream something into existence
that you haven't seen before and then make it happen,
takes an unbelievable strength of character,
almost like a force of will,
because you're blazing a trail
that hasn't been walked before.
That's the BJ Penn factor
in winning the Jiu-Jitsu World Championship,
first non-Brazilian to do that.
That was back in 2001.
And then Rafael Lovato later on,
both of those guys are so unbelievably impressive
in my mind for the same reason,
because they were out there winning at a time
when that wasn't a common thing.
Not that it's easy to win now,
it's just there's not a psychological hurdle
that needs to be left.
I remember when I was early in Jiu-Jitsu,
Americans weren't winning the World Championships
at any belt.
We all knew BJ Penn because BJ Penn did it,
but it was really, really uncommon.
Now it happens on a semi-regular basis.
Of course, the Brazilians are still strong,
Europeans are still strong,
and Australians are coming on as well.
But it's definitely kind of an interesting thing.
So to come back to John Danaher and the HENSO team,
obviously they're doing fantastic things.
John's had some really, really great innovation there.
And the systematization and the methodology
that they're using is great,
and it's neat to see that it's getting out there.
I would just also, I would encourage people
to make sure that they're catching up on their history,
'cause obviously John's a brilliant instructor
and has done things for the sport that are fantastic
that haven't been done before.
But none of us exist in a vacuum,
and I've learned things from everywhere else.
So John would say the same, I'm sure.
And Dean Lister would say the same.
And it's just neat when you can kind of trace
the history of all of this happening,
because we've had, humanity's had two arms and two legs
for some time, at least as long as I've been alive.
- But you mentioned airplanes.
Do you think there's something totally new
to be invented in Jiu-Jitsu still?
Not totally new, but like the, you know,
flying isn't new, but airplanes nevertheless
made that much more efficient.
Is there like new ideas to be discovered in Jiu-Jitsu still?
- I'd say, the reason I'd say yes
is the same reason I would say I believe in alchemy,
even though I don't.
No, I'm serious.
Like, I've got some backing for this.
§23Transcript · 2:49:29–2:57:23
- Okay.
- You know, I guess I talk about this
with a buddy of mine a lot, like,
and facilitative versus not facilitative beliefs.
And if I don't believe something is possible
and I do no investigation towards it,
I'll never find something, even if it's there.
It's almost like, it's no different than me walking up
on a group of people and going like,
"Oh man, look at these jerks.
This is gonna suck."
Versus me going, "Oh, I wonder what these guys are up to."
I'm about to have two very different conversations,
even though the players in the game are no different.
My internal constitution has changed
because of how I've decided to approach the situation.
So although I wouldn't personally want to spend all my time
trying to turn lead into gold,
because I don't believe that it's likely to work,
only a person who's willing to spend his or her life
in that pursuit will actually get to the bottom of that.
And also in the pursuit of that,
they're likely to find other things.
So I think a lot of times the idea is that humanity
is pushed forward by, you know,
again, it's another Orson Scott Carbon.
It's like, you know, human beings are in this slog.
It's, I'll paraphrase, just in this slog over time.
And then periodically, humanity gives birth to genius,
like someone that invents the wheel,
invents electricity, pushes us forward, you know,
comes up with the idea of governance that doesn't,
you know, just start and end with the point of a sword,
you know, and, you know, these aren't common things.
These are unbelievable advancements that, you know,
that I'm not just me sitting here.
I didn't come up with them, but I just get the benefit of it.
So I guess what I would say is a lot of times
these ideas are called crazy, you know,
like as we discussed on kind of offline,
it's like, you know, Einstein was brilliant in his twenties
and it was brilliant before that, I would suspect,
but basically, you know,
gets recognized later on in life.
And of course we all thought those were great ideas.
The man was probably roundly mocked
for giant chunks of his life.
And I guess, so it's neat to,
I would say there's definitely in my mind things that,
even if it's just combinations and new to me,
new ways to see things,
new ways to understand different depth of understanding,
possibly new things, new positions, new ideas,
because even if that's not true,
the process of going through and acting as if it is
and believing like that and focusing
and trying to investigate will make any of us,
will push us all forward.
Whereas sitting there, you know,
obsessing over the cult of our current knowledge,
I think is the biggest danger
and the biggest cause of stagnation that exists anywhere.
- Yeah, and it starts with believing the impossible,
which is kind of interesting.
One of the things that's really inspiring to me
is to see people out there, which sadly are rare,
who kind of have a combination of two things.
One is they have a worldview that involves,
that includes a lot of ideas that are crazy.
And the second part is they're exceptionally focused
and competent in bringing that,
whatever the ideas in that worldview to reality.
So there's certainly a lot of people with crazy ideas.
You know, there's a lot of conspiracy theorists.
They have way out there beliefs about things,
but they're not doing much to like make the,
like build stuff grounded in that.
Like they're not engineers or whatever.
They're just like espousing different crazy ideas.
But that's why you get like the Elon Musk type characters.
And the reason I bring him up a lot
is 'cause like there's not many others to bring up.
It's like, there's not many examples of it through history.
The people, I mean, the guy's convinced
that we're going to colonize Mars.
And basically everybody on earth thinks that's insane.
- Everyone except the guy that's gonna do it, right?
- Except that's gonna do it.
And like, you can imagine like a couple of hundred years
from now people will, I mean, first of all,
they won't, certainly won't remember the haters.
They won't remember all the people.
If they do remember them, they'll remember them in a sense
like people were silly to think
that this isn't the obvious path forward.
Like from a perspective, that's what Elon talks about.
Like it's obvious they were going to expand
throughout the universe.
Like so-- - From his perspective.
- From his perspective.
But to me it is also obvious
because like either we destroy ourselves
or we'll expand beyond earth.
Like there's not many, well,
maybe it's not completely obvious.
I guess I share that worldview.
There's the other possibility that we humans find
a sort of an inner peace where the forces of capitalism
will calm down and we'll all just meditate
and do yoga and jujitsu and like relax
with this whole tech thing
where we keep building new technologies.
But it's cool to have those kinds of people
that just believe the big, ambitious, crazy dreams
'cause that's where it starts.
If you wanna build something special,
you have to first believe that.
- When you also have to believe strongly enough
that you're not vulnerable and I'm speculating,
but it's like, I can only imagine how many people
have told Elon that what he's doing is crazy.
So not only did he dream it up,
he dreamed it up, went with it
and also went with it in the face of being told
that it's not gonna work.
And then also stepped away from the bitterness
'cause he's done a series of really crazy, impressive things
and that's only those little things that I'm aware of.
And also staying away from the bitterness
of every single time you did something good,
initially all I do is talk down about you
and then eventually I act as, of course, of course,
I never apologize.
And yet you don't let that dampen your spirits
for the next innovation, which is pretty incredible
to me to watch.
- Yeah, it's kinda cool.
I mean, it's contagious to spend time with the guy
because he's not, Rogen has the same look to him,
which is interesting about these people.
There's like a hater shield.
That he's like, he doesn't even like sense them,
it feels like.
He thinks to Elon, it's like, it's obvious.
I mean, he keeps calling it like first principles thinking.
Like physics says it's true, therefore it's true.
Like he's convinced himself that like his beliefs
are grounded in the fundamental fabric
of the way the universe works,
therefore the haters don't matter.
And I mean, that's kind of like a system of thought
he developed himself through all the difficulty,
through all the doubt, he's able to take huge risks
with basically putting everything he owes on the line
multiple times throughout his life.
Amidst all the drama, amidst all the doubts,
amidst all like the, he's still able to make
just clear, clear headed decisions.
I don't know what to make of it, but it's inspiring as hell.
- Well, I think it's something that's funny.
I think like, I can only imagine the, you know,
history will look back on him as a brilliant person,
but that's not the only, there's a lot of,
maybe not statistically speaking,
but a lot numerically on a giant planet
of billions of people, a lot of brilliant people.
Well, you know, time, place, luck, fortune,
all that other stuff, but at the same time,
that clearly isn't the only determining thing
in making Elon Musk, Elon Musk.
And obviously I don't know the guy from Adam,
but it's an interesting thing that it's not just his
intellect, his belief system, his structure,
how he's viewing the world.
Like that's, did he reason his way to that?
Did he not?
What other factors came in?
I'm really curious about that because I guess coming,
it's, again, I feel really strongly about
people's belief structure and this,
how they view the world being more important
than the engine behind it.
You know, it makes someone resilient or not.
It makes someone positive or not,
because you could have 10,000,
I think about this for competitive stuff.
You could have 10,000 things going properly
and one thing going improperly.
If you focus on the improper,
you'll probably fix it at a certain point,
which is good, facilitative for development in the longterm.
But if you had to go and try to perform a task
in the next five minutes,
and you're focusing on the negative,
your confidence and your belief in the positive outcome
of the future is likely to be damaged.
Whereas you could have 25 things going wrong,
but you go, man, I sure am happy to be alive.
How fortunate I am.
This is great.
§24Transcript · 2:57:24–3:04:04
I have problems to solve.
This is awesome.
Versus I list the problems and I start bitching about them.
Both of them are technically accurate,
but it's, I guess, different lenses.
And I think that's a really neat thing to see,
you know, someone exemplifying that for us.
- So maybe to look at the fighting world,
there's a million questions I can ask here.
Like one, you mentioned B.J. Penn.
You, first of all, you're undefeated in the UFC.
And one of the fights you've had is against B.J. Penn,
which is kind of an incredible fight.
You won performance of the night.
What did it feel like to face B.J. Penn
and to beat him definitively as you did?
Like what's that whole experience like?
- I'll be honest, I didn't know if I was going
to ever be able to fight again
after beating Gray Maynard in 2016.
And I've had a couple of periods of those.
I was about to join the army actually,
and when I was 30, before the UFC,
before Jen sent me over to Ultimate Fighter,
I didn't want to go.
'Cause I was like, one, they're never going to pick me.
Two, I'd be terrible for TV.
Three, I'll probably say something,
and I'm going to get burned to death in the streets.
You know, I'm like, this isn't a great idea.
And then she said, "Well, go out there, see what happens.
"Do it anyway.
"You'll regret it if you didn't."
And then I ended up doing Ultimate Fighter.
And then, so I fought three times on the show,
and then I fought for the finale.
So that's four times in like five or six months,
which was great.
And then it took me a year to get another opponent.
And that was Gray Maynard.
And then Gray was obviously a very tough guy.
Managed to get a good outcome there.
Then it took two years to fight BJ Penn.
And that was, you know, obviously I'm training
all the time, every single day, and that never stops.
But that was, I'll be honest, like pretty deeply frustrating
'cause, you know, as a human being, as an athlete,
you know, I think as an athlete, you die twice.
Like you have an athletic peak or area,
and then you go on with the rest of your life.
But it is a microcosm for the rest of your life.
It's like you're seeing the sand tick away
in the hourglass or drop away.
And you're going, "Man, these are the years
"between 31, 32, 33.
"I'll be at my best at this time,
"my absolute best physically.
"Now, not technically, I'm a lot better now
"than I was before in our plan."
But at a certain point, you will,
unless you're Bernard Hopkins,
you will reach diminishing returns.
And I guess that-- - The long wait,
you can feel the clock ticking.
It's frustrating. - Yeah.
- Why did it take two years for BJ?
That's the question people ask a lot.
It's like, "Why does nobody want to fight, Ryan?"
- I don't know.
They probably think they'll get infected
by whatever this is, but I don't blame 'em.
But I wouldn't want to-- - I mean, you're a really
tough opponent is the bottom line.
- I'll say that I'm different.
Maybe they perceive that the threat
is greater than the reward.
I'm hoping that now that we're ranked number 12,
you know, in the UFC rankings, that that will change.
And I know that if we're one more win
and then we're in the top 10,
that now you're there.
But what I've consistently found
is that like randoms wanna fight,
and I'm like, "Go away.
I didn't come here for you."
'Cause if I wanted to just fight anybody,
I could go down to a Waffle House
and yell until like DMX shows up and we can fight,
'cause he'll be at the Waffle House too.
Who am I kidding?
I really wanna hang out with DMX.
But it's like, you wanna, when I had the opportunity--
- Brian Hall and DMX at Waffle House.
- Oh my God, that was so cool.
I would never-- - Sounds like a Netflix show
or something. - I would never fight DMX.
We'd be on the same team.
- No. - But anyway,
I guess I accepted fights against,
I got asked about Lamas, I said yes.
I got asked about Dennis Bermudez, I said yes.
Like long periods of time, and at that time,
in between 2016 and 2018,
I was struggling to have opponents who would sign up.
And so I haven't turned down fights.
I've just said, "Hey, keep the,
I don't care about fighting the randoms."
And it's just-- - And you have
a successful school.
You're like, you're running,
you're a martial artist, broadly speaking.
So it doesn't make sense to take fights
that aren't like-- - Right.
- That fit a certain kind of trajectory for your career.
- And that's when BJ apparently said,
"Well, BJ's looking for an opponent."
I was like, "I'm your guy."
And I think that BJ accepted that fight
because I'm another jujitsu guy.
I don't think he perceived that I was much
of a threat on the feet.
And I was able to, it was neat to get it
to compete against someone who's one of my heroes,
one of the people I looked up to in MMA
for the longest time.
- Were you intimidated by that?
- No, no, I love competing.
I don't really get nervous or scared before fights.
I'm not afraid to get hurt.
I'm not afraid to win.
I'm not afraid to lose.
I'm just excited for the,
I feel thankful for the opportunity to compete
and the opportunity to play when it matters.
But that's the only time I'm interested
in playing anymore is when it matters,
when the opposition is, I know that,
it's funny 'cause people pick on a lot of,
some opponents, particularly after the fact.
Like if you get a good outcome,
well then, of course, let's beat that guy.
That guy wasn't that good.
I'm like, well, I wasn't, that's after the fact,
I get to say that.
And also as the person in the ring,
BJ Penn has hurt a lot of people in mixed martial arts cage.
And I could actually absolutely have been on that list.
So it was neat to get to compete against someone
that I really respect,
someone that I looked up to for a long time,
someone who has a great skillset.
And also I went up in weight to fight him
at his weight class.
He didn't have to come down to mine,
which is where he'd take.
Which was lightweight?
It was lightweight, yeah.
Generally a featherweight.
I walk around at like 158 pounds.
So.
What's lightweight and featherweight?
Lightweight is 155 with a day before weigh-in
and featherweight is 145 with a day before weigh-in.
So I'm a little bit more properly sized for featherweight.
But anyway, so I didn't feel like,
obviously he was giving up a couple of years of age,
but I was giving up size and all this other stuff.
And it was, I was just excited to have the opportunity
to step in against someone like BJ.
And we managed to get out of there with a good outcome
without getting too banged up.
But just, it was cool 'cause we tied up on the fence
and just even the second,
is when you're rolling with somebody and you touch
and you can feel what they're doing,
you go, "Oh man, this guy's really good."
You can feel the calm,
you can feel the small minor adjustments
that they're making,
the subtle things that they're doing.
And that was one of those things
that was really neat and gratifying
because you never know,
sometimes people that you've heard of
are a little bit less technically proficient
than you thought.
And other times you'll meet some guy that you're training,
like, "Who the hell is this guy?
"How have I not heard of this person?"
And BJ was exactly, as a jujitsu guy,
what I would have thought.
And another thing, that's another thing that bugged me
about how people reacted after the fight is,
basically going, "Oh, BJ screwed up this,
"screwed up that."
And I'm like, "All right, yeah, tell us."
That's so interesting.
That's sad.
That was one of the, to me, I mean, as a fan of both,
that was a beautiful moment,
§25Transcript · 3:04:06–3:11:36
is a kind of passing of a torch, in a sense,
of exceptional performance.
Like another one that stands out to me,
maybe you can comment, is I don't understand,
well, maybe I do, why Conor McGregor
gets as much hate as he does.
He probably revels in it.
But I think he doesn't get enough credit for Jose Aldo,
for basically knocking him out
in the first few seconds of a fight.
I mean, Jose is one of the greatest fighters ever.
- That's true.
- Maybe some people could even put him in the top 10.
- No question.
- And I don't understand why it doesn't get as much,
like Conor McGregor doesn't get as much credit
as I think he deserves for that, and for Eddie Alvarez,
and all the fights, for some reason,
whenever Conor McGregor beats somebody,
well, they were not that good then.
Like, it means like they were, something was off.
- Right, that's convenient, isn't it?
- Yeah, it's quite strange to me.
But I mean, what are your thoughts on Conor McGregor?
Maybe one way to ask that, I'm Russian,
so I'm obviously also a Khabib fan,
but I'm also a Conor fan.
It seems like there's not many of us
who are like fans of both.
- Right.
- What are your thoughts?
- You and Artem Lobov.
(Lex laughing)
- Yeah, right?
- Exactly.
- The two of us, which also is a good fight.
- Tough dude.
- Yeah, really, really tough dude.
- He speaks like five languages, really interesting cat.
- Also, oh, wow, I didn't know that side of it.
There's a brain there.
Well, on the Khabib versus Conor,
what do you make of their first fight?
What do you, do you agree with me
that they should fight again?
'Cause I think it'd be awesome
if they fought again in Moscow.
And do you agree with me,
I'm just gonna say things that piss people off,
but I believe, is that Conor actually
has a chance to beat Khabib.
- One, Conor absolutely has a chance to beat Khabib.
Conor has a chance to beat anyone
that he steps into that ring with,
and not just like a mathematical chance.
You're like, oh, one of the billion,
but like, you know, he absolutely,
it's funny 'cause I won't pretend to know Conor really well,
but I first met Conor in 2010
when I was teaching a seminar
in at Straight Blast Gym Ireland in Dublin.
And that's actually where I first met
all of the coaches that ended up being on Conor's team.
You know, John Kavanaugh, Owen Roddy, Gunnar Nielsen,
you know, so for, I actually,
I enjoyed being on Ultimate Fighter
and being on Uriah Faber's team
and getting to train with all the guys there.
But at the same time, the people that I was actually,
I knew better were actually the European side,
all of Conor's coaches.
And that was a neat thing
because I got to, I met Conor.
I didn't know who Conor,
Conor wasn't Conor at that point.
- Yeah, that was before his UFC debut.
- Oh yeah, well before, yeah.
I think he got in like 2014, maybe something like that.
Yeah, and anyway, but he was doing well in Cage Warriors,
winning the titles there, I think prior to that.
You know, I remember going, seeing him on the show
and also then getting to see him train
'cause I competed, I was initially slated
to fight David Tamer for the Ultimate Fighter finale
before getting put in to fight Artem
for the title for the show.
So I went over to Ireland to train for a couple of days
and basically it was neat to watch him, watch him work.
I mean, man is focused and trains a lot
and is very, very smart and very, very hardworking.
And I think a lot of times people get stuck in this,
and they almost wanna believe that this was lucky
or that this person, you know,
they're not working that hard, they're just out there.
They got there with their mouth
and that's just not the case.
And, you know, I don't know what it's like.
You know, obviously Conor's very well off right now
and I don't know how hard, how serious he's training,
what he's doing, I can't speak to any of that.
But there's no question that he has skills to be dangerous.
And one of the funny things, obviously,
the Khabib fight went Khabib's way.
Khabib was a great fighter and also has the chance
to beat anyone in that ring at any given time.
But there was, Conor, you know, it's one,
he can put anybody away.
And as you mentioned, I think that he doesn't get the credit
for the Eddie Alvarez fight.
He doesn't get the credit for the Jose Aldo fight
'cause it was almost so much of a letdown.
I remember that happened the same weekend
at the Ultimate Fighter finale.
And you're like, oh, wait, what?
(laughing)
Yeah.
It almost doesn't feel like a fight happened.
But we mentioned Miyamoto Musashi.
I mean, Musashi was famous for the way he poked
and prodded at people with what he was doing,
whether overtly or not.
It's like, oh, we're supposed to fight to the death
and, you know, at 3 p.m. tomorrow, great.
(sighing)
4 p.m. rolls around, I'm just not there.
Five, I mean, you remember all the antics and nonsense
that Conor was pulling prior to that.
Like, speaking personally, that's not,
it's not something I would feel comfortable doing,
but it's like, everyone's different.
And the effect that it had on Jose was,
I mean, beyond evident.
When was the last time Jose started the fight
with leaping left hand, leaping right hand?
You're like, wait, what?
And then he was obviously, you know,
living rent-free in Jose's head at that point.
And that was a combination of psychological, you know,
ability and wherewithal and then physical.
And it reminded me of the way Muhammad Ali
would bother people and whatnot.
And the fact that he's a polarizing figure,
I think makes some people not give him his due.
And then at the same time,
sometimes certain fans maybe go overboard.
But they remember the knee that Ben Askren
got knocked out with by Masvidal.
I mean, that was an amazing, unbelievable thing,
but three inches to the right, three inches to the left,
I guess, whichever side his head wasn't.
Now, you know, could have been square,
but, and that fight starts with Ben Askren
on top of you in the first five seconds.
Well, Conor ran him through a knee just like that
at Khabib, and Khabib got right around it.
That could have easily gone the other way.
Can you imagine what would have happened
if after coming back from boxing,
after coming back from the Mayweather fight,
Conor rocks Khabib.
In the first 10 seconds it's over,
and you're like, he would, it would have been intolerable.
But basically, like, you know.
But see, here's the thing.
Let me actually push back slightly.
I mean, to the fans, correct me if I'm wrong,
but Conor seems to, 'cause I've competed a lot,
and like, there's a tension, there's a negativity sometimes
depending on the opponent,
and there's a respect afterwards that happens.
Like, when you understand that there's a deep, like,
respect and almost like a love for each other.
Like, I've always seen that in Conor.
Like, all the trash talk afterwards,
there's a, it's a subtle thing.
You can't always see it, but there's a respect.
- I agree.
- And like, I almost, on the Khabib side,
I almost feel like Khabib really took it personally.
He didn't, he lost the respect for Conor.
I thought the whole time Conor had the respect.
So, what I wanted to say is like,
if Conor won that fight, like rock Khabib,
I could see, like, I wouldn't see trash talking.
I could see, like, trash talking stop right there.
- I think so too, but at the same time,
I'm sure you recall, like, Conor crossed
in some pretty personal territory,
both religiously and also familiarly with Khabib.
And it's, you know, I mean, I think it's the sort of thing
that, I don't know, it's an interesting,
that's one of the reasons.
- It depends, like, you have to know the difference.
So, obviously, I know the Khabib, the Dagestani people,
they don't--
- Play around like that.
- They don't play around like that.
You know, I mean, they take offense to basically,
I mean, you don't do that.
So, like, Conor didn't, maybe he did it on purpose,
§26Transcript · 3:11:41–3:18:35
or maybe he wasn't even just aware of--
- Totally fair.
- Of--
- It was cultural differences, you know?
- Of the box he opened.
Like, you can talk to Floyd Mayweather,
you can go anywhere with him.
You can say the most offensive things,
but with Khabib--
- There's hard lines.
- Yeah, hard lines.
But you, I mean, a lot of people ask,
I know you're a featherweight,
but if you were to face,
it feels like Khabib was one of the hardest puzzles to solve
in all of mixed martial arts.
If you were to face Khabib,
do you think, how would you go about solving that puzzle?
Like, almost, the question is almost
from a jiu-jitsu perspective, too.
What do you do with a guy that's exceptionally good
at controlling position, especially on top,
very good at wrestling, taking down,
and controlling position?
Like, let's say, so forget maybe striking.
On the ground, how do you solve that guy?
Like, what do you do with your guard
if you get taken down?
Or do you create an entire system
of not getting taken down or escaping?
It's like, what ideas do you have for that?
- Well, I guess I would say, in my mind,
fighting is a game of trading energy.
Kind of, there's two things.
There's damage and there's energy.
So, like, when I say energy, I mean like tired, not tired,
how much gas you've got.
And then damage counts, obviously, as well.
You could be feeling, I could be feeling great,
and then you get to kick me in the head
hard, really hard, three times.
It doesn't matter that I could get up and run a mile.
I can't get up.
So, anyway, I think what Khabib does so well
is he makes the fight look like
a Khabib and a Magomedov fight.
He does a great job of avoiding damage
on the feet, for the most part,
and really sucking the life out of people
with how suffocating and oppressive his control is.
His chain wrestling is as good as anyone
we've ever seen in the UFC.
It's fantastic.
But that poses a really serious threat for people
that need to maintain a certain amount of space
and try to hurt him on the feet,
because unless they're able to inflict
an adequate amount of damage,
they're gonna, each time, let's say, for instance,
let's say him taking them down
as a foregone conclusion at some point.
If every single time Khabib takes you down,
you get right back up, it's not that big a deal,
because it's actually more, we've all experienced this.
Let's say you and I are rolling,
you tap me 15 times in one round.
Who's more tired?
Probably you are.
Yeah.
You whoop my ass so badly
that it's like you're the only one working.
But--
So, if you're comfortable with the up and down of it,
like being taken down.
If you don't get hurt badly or tired on the bottom,
you have a chance.
But that doesn't involve just cracking him on the feet
before he gets a hold of you.
That's a lot.
That's a lot to ask.
That's a lot to ask.
That's difficult to do.
It seemed actually like Conor,
it seemed like it when he was being kind of taken down
or the takedown attempts against Khabib.
He seemed to be somewhat relaxed through the whole thing.
I thought he was doing well, actually.
I think that, particularly for the first round,
I thought he did a very good job.
It's just one of those things that I think like Khabib being,
the fights taking place in Khabib's world in large part.
And I mean, set aside that one giant,
what is it, right hand that Khabib hit Conor with.
By the way, Conor reacted like an absolute champion.
He got crushed by that overhand and then dropped
and his eyes went right back on Khabib.
It was immediate positive, great response.
So even though that was, I think,
that was a bit of a surprising thing,
Conor reacted really, really well.
But if you're gonna be on bottom with Khabib
for four rounds, that's gonna be tough.
And also Conor's a way better grappler
than people like to give him credit for,
but he's not the type of grappler that can do,
that can, that's too tall of an order.
But there are grapplers that could do that,
or at least would have a much, much better shot
at being able to weather that type of a storm.
Do you see yourself being able to be relaxed
through that kind of storm?
Yes.
Well, I guess.
(laughing)
Remember, being savagely beaten is very relaxing.
The timing of that answer was like, okay.
That's a dumb question.
No.
That's ultimately the goal of jujitsu
is to be relaxed through the fire.
For sure, and remember, like every UFC fighter,
I win all hypothetical matchups.
Yeah, for sure.
(laughing)
That's true.
Since I'm one to ask ridiculous questions,
and we've been talking about sci-fi
and all that kind of stuff,
let me ask the kind of big question
that everybody disagrees about, certainly with me,
is who are the top five greatest MMA fighters of all time?
Oh, man.
And why is Fedor number one?
Okay, well, first off, Fedor is number one.
Oh, really?
Oh, yeah.
I agree right there with you.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
Talk about people that just get completely underappreciated.
Even though he's never been in the,
like he's never succeeded in the UFC?
It's not his fault it came along after him.
At the time that Fedor was at his height,
the UFC was not where it was at for heavyweight fighting.
I mean, not that there weren't good heavyweights there,
but Fedor was unbelievable.
You know, I mean, you remember,
I mean, Minotauro Noguera, I was a massive fan of him.
I still remember watching, what is it, Pride 2004,
when Noguera fought Crow Cop
and got blasted with that left kick
and dropped with like seconds left in the first round.
Pride was great 'cause it had a 10-minute first round
and that five-minute second,
which again, materially alters the fight big time.
And you know, just the texture of the fight,
'cause it's totally, it's borderline a different sport,
you know, than getting a five, a pause and a five.
But anyway, similar sports,
like one of those swimming things
where they have nine gold medals
for different types of swimming, right?
But still swimming, but anyway.
- Well, yeah, they would disagree.
- Yeah, I don't mean, I'm not trying to--
- They specialize in the, but it's totally true.
10 minutes is different than five minutes.
- Sorry, I'll take, don't drown me, swimmers.
I don't swim very well.
It's easy for me to downplay it.
But anyway, yeah, and then--
- So better than Jon Jones, like the modern era.
- Well, I mean, I guess it's tough to compare across eras.
It would be like going and saying like,
oh man, how would such and such great grappler from today
fare against someone from 1995?
I'm like, well, probably pretty well for them,
depending upon who they are, what's going on.
You know, there's some people that would,
their skill sets might transition across eras,
but a lot of times not, but that's not fair.
We get the, they'll be like comparing Spartans
to modern day, you know, like army guys.
You're like, well, who's gonna win?
I'm like, well, did modern day army guys
get modern day weapons?
Well, yeah, but who's the toughest,
ruggedest group of people at the very least?
So I guess it's tough to say, but at least in my mind,
the people that I think about for great fighters,
their quality of opposition, their level of like lasting,
like success, their level of lasting innovation,
like the courage that they have to demonstrate.
Because again, it's like being a big fish
in a small pond takes no courage.
Doesn't mean that there's nothing there,
but it just requires something a little bit different.
So Kazushi Sakuraba is one of my guys too.
BJ Penn also, I mean, BJ Penn fought Lyoto Machida.
§27Transcript · 3:18:39–3:25:22
That's insane.
You know, it's, that was a time, it was a different sport.
It was a different time in the sport where, you know,
they were, some guys were bouncing around
doing different things, but let's,
so I guess the Gracie family, it's, I mean,
they never had an, like obviously hoist was there,
but they never, and that was a definitely
a different sport, weight classes being open,
things like that.
Yeah, but you have to say that hoist is up there.
Oh, no question.
One of the greatest ever.
I think so too.
And again, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you,
if it weren't for him.
So the Gracie family as a whole, but I mean,
who's the better, I mean, I think hoist would tell you
himself probably that Hickson would have handled business
back then, but they didn't put him in.
So again, he's the greatest fighter, the greatest fighter,
the greatest fighter that we saw do his business.
So hoist up there for sure.
What about, so this is like,
nobody seems to agree with me on this,
but like this connects to soccer again and Messi.
It seems that people value like how long
you've been a champion, how many,
like defenses of the championship that you've had
successfully, to me, I highly value
singular moments of genius.
So like, I don't, like if you look at Conor McGregor,
he hasn't, I guess, held, been a champion
very long, very much.
Well, he didn't defend either title, right?
He didn't defend any other, either of the titles,
but like, if you took, and same with Messi,
if you look at Lionel Messi,
there's just moments of brilliance,
unlike any other in history for both Conor and Messi.
And people don't seem to give credits,
like, well, how many World Cups have you won?
But to me, like, why is it about this arbitrary
World Cup thing or championship thing?
- I think it's easier for people
to wrap their head around, right?
It's like the NFL combine.
When was, I mean, - Numbers.
- Yeah, numbers, it's something,
well, again, if I go and if I pick Tom Brady
in the first round, you know, and it works out,
they call me a genius.
If I pick Tom Brady in the first round
after his combine and it doesn't work out,
I get fired and I'm never hired again,
I have to work somewhere else.
But it's like, I'm insulating myself from criticism,
I think, almost, if I go by the numbers.
Well, he had more bench presses.
It's like, how many times have the guys
that are like the super studs in the NFL combine
ever been on the greatest players in the NFL history,
in NFL history?
Like, zero or close to zero?
And even if there's some,
it's certainly not a one-to-one correlation.
So it's so funny, though.
I think it's just like, how many,
how long, how many days did he hold the title?
Oh, your title reign was X times longer.
That means nothing.
So if we wanna define greatest fighter ever,
like you said, I think individual moments of like,
that was transcendent, that was different,
that was something else.
Because people can win or lose
for any number of different reasons.
And that's an interesting thing.
Again, I don't blame Argentina
not winning the World Cup on Messi.
You know, that's not fair.
You know, how many times has, I mean,
I remember when Trent Dilfer was the quarterback
for the Baltimore Ravens.
And they had such a strong defense.
I'm not trying to pick on Trent Dilfer,
but it's like, they had such a strong defense
that they were able to make it.
That was the Ray Lewis, you know,
Chris McAllister era, you know,
and they won the Super Bowl.
I don't think anyone is going to say that,
you know, Trent Dilfer's a better quarterback than,
you know, or put him in the same category as Dan Marino.
But he got the W, he's got the Super Ring.
How many times, let's use March Madness,
or Super Bowl, I love it.
Like, that guy always makes the finals,
but he just never gets it done.
So let me get this straight.
Getting to the finals nine times doesn't count
because you didn't win the end game.
I'm not saying it wouldn't be better,
but that guy won the game once.
He got over the hump.
Well, how many other times was he in the finals?
Zero?
You're like, all right.
- It's interesting what we, yeah,
that we were obsessed with these numbers.
- Well, 'cause we can't assess their method, right?
I think most of the time,
most of us can't assess the method of anything.
I mean, it's like, oh, look at that guy do X, Y swimming.
I'm like, how do I know Michael Phelps is great?
I don't know, he was faster?
I can't look at his technique and say anything
other than, well, that's way better than anything
I know how to do, but I can't say the difference
between him and the next guy.
So I guess that's, I wonder if it's like,
I need a concrete identifier.
And a lot of times people don't like saying, I don't know.
- And most people won't put like a Ronda Rousey
in the top even 20 or 50 of,
but like she changed more than almost anybody else.
She changed the martial arts history.
I don't know if that even,
I don't think I'm exaggerating that.
She made it okay for women to be fighters
and like changed the way we see,
like she's one of the great feminists of our time.
(laughing)
- In her own way, yeah.
- In a weird kind of way that like, I don't know,
maybe I'm just a Ronda Rousey fan, but yeah.
But she's not in the conversation
'cause then you start converting into numbers.
Well, how many did she actually win?
- Is she among the greatest fighters
or did she do the greatest things?
I mean, I don't, I think it's something that,
I mean, obviously Ronda is a great judoka
who was competing in MMA at a time
when a lot of the girls like,
where did you get your skills?
In the Olympics.
Oh, where'd you get yours?
High school.
You're like, yeah, you're gonna,
Olympic girls gonna beat you up.
But I guess that that doesn't diminish her.
Just that accomplishment is what it is.
I don't have to, I don't,
Fedor is not diminished by the fact that he would,
like if he were to fight Stephen Miochis right now,
it probably wouldn't go great or that Jon Jones exists.
I don't now have to like knock Fedor's accomplishments down
or say, oh, because BJ Penn or someone,
so let's say has a mixed record at this point
that somehow invalidates the things
that they've done before.
I guess it kind of brings us back
to a lot of the other people we've talked about.
The fact that the brilliant people
throughout history that we love
or some of the monsters throughout history
that we rightly revile in a lot of cases
were complicated people and their legacy
is more than just one thing.
And someone doing something amazing doesn't,
doesn't mean they didn't do anything bad.
And someone doing terrible things doesn't,
doesn't mean that, doesn't invalidate the positives
that they did.
But I guess we're fighting the urge
to put people in one category and same with ourselves.
I think that's why people get depressed.
Oh, I'm good right now.
Oh, I'm bad right now.
Versus hey, we're all a work in progress
and we're trying to do X number of things
and legacy is a tough thing to figure out anyway.
And it's all speculative.
- Last time or no, on Reddit, you said that,
last time too, that you don't experience much fear
before fights.
I'd like to ask you a couple of Mike Tyson things
if it's okay.
It's just interesting to me, maybe I'm just weird.
So there's a, I don't know if you've seen this clip
of Tyson talking about how he feels leading up to a fight,
that he's kind of overtaken with fear,
but as he gets closer and closer and closer to the ring,
his confidence grows.
Have you seen the clip?
- I'm aware of it, but I haven't seen it in a while.
- Here, let me play it for you.
George St. Pierre said something similar to me one time.
- While I'm in the dressing room,
§28Transcript · 3:25:24–3:32:48
five minutes before I come out, my gloves are laced up.
I'm breaking my gloves down.
I'm pushing the leather of the back of my leg
in the middle of the gloves,
so my knuckle could pierce through the leather,
feel my knuckle piercing against the tight leather gloves
on the Everlast boxing gloves.
When I come out, I have supreme confidence.
I'm scared to death.
I'm totally afraid.
I'm afraid of everything.
I'm afraid of losing.
I'm afraid of being humiliated,
but I'm just totally confident.
The closer I get to the ring, the more confidence I get.
The closer, the more confidence I get.
The closer, the more confidence I get.
All during my training, I've been afraid of this man.
I thought this man might be capable of beating me.
I've dreamed of him beating me,
but I always stayed afraid of him.
But the closer I get to the ring, I'm more confident.
Once I'm in the ring, I'm a god.
No one can beat me.
- I'm a god.
I mean, first of all, he's cognizant of both his demons
and whatever the hell ideas he has about violence.
That's so interesting.
Is there something about the tension that he's describing
about being confident and scared that resonates with you?
Or do you hold to this idea
that you've kind of spoken about before
that you're really not afraid?
- No, I can appreciate what he's saying.
I think that I can speak to feeling concerned about,
let's say, for instance, if you feel a certain way,
I think people are a lot more like computers
than we like to admit.
And just because a lot of times I can't parse
what's going on and why,
doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense.
- I see.
- And I think that at least in the times
of like if I'm concerned about a situation
or about a person or about something happening
prior to the fight, or I'm like, there's a reason.
There was a reason.
I don't have to push that down and bury it.
There's a reason.
Like why?
What have I not thought about?
What have I not done?
What am I missing?
Why am I feeling this way?
As you mentioned for yourself prior,
like you'd be like, why am I feeling like this?
I don't do this very well in certain aspects of my life
if I'm not that I mentioned it or now that I think about it.
But when it comes to competing,
I think I do an all right job
and I'm trying to learn to be better.
And it's going like, well, why do I,
if I feel this way, there's a reason.
Okay, am I thinking about this the wrong way?
Have I not adequately prepared for something?
I have to address it.
And then maybe I'll be up for four hours that night,
like extra hours thinking, what have I not addressed?
Watching sparring, watching this, watching that.
And then when I am thinking about things more accurately
or when I've addressed what that concern was,
I feel any of that concern kind of dissipate.
And I guess if I honestly thought that,
I guess when it comes to,
I know I'm gonna die at a certain point, obviously,
I'm gonna get hurt.
I'm gonna, pain happens,
but the pain of loss would be nothing compared to the,
or the pain of injury would be nothing compared
to the pain of running away.
And so I guess if I think about where's my value,
it's like, I feel like I'm a winner
every single time I step into that ring
and fight with everything that I have.
I can't promise that I'll win my next fight.
I know that I have the skills and the tools
to beat anyone in grappling
or in mixed martial arts at this point.
It's just, I know that for certain,
I've trained with enough people,
I've competed with enough people,
I know where I stand,
but I also know that I'm not perfect.
And also the better fighter,
even if I perceive that I was that thing,
doesn't win on the night.
The man who fights better wins on the night.
And if I give credence in my mind
to only the person that's one has value
versus going, what's your process?
What's your path through this?
How are you going about this?
How are you thinking about this?
How are you behaving?
Then if I can focus on the process,
then I will respect my opponent
and I will respect myself
and I'll respect anyone that behaves
with a certain level of consistency to that.
And they could win.
There's plenty of winners in history
that are shitbags
and there's plenty of losers that are not.
But winning doesn't make you a bad or good person
and losing doesn't make you good by default either
or bad by default.
So, and I think that that can be the truth socially,
that can be the truth athletically and academically.
So I guess-
- Is there a primal fear though,
like a primal fear of getting hurt?
The running away and not facing the threat
long-term is the bigger pain
than any pain you can experience in the fight.
That's pretty powerful.
But what about the violence of,
I mean, you don't have that on your face,
but like, I don't know if you've also seen Tyson talk about,
he was on "Rogan" recently
and he was talking about,
he was trying to psychoanalyze himself
about why he enjoys violence so much.
I mean, he called it orgasmic.
I don't know, have you seen that clip?
- I haven't.
- Okay, we're playing it 'cause I can,
I need to, 'cause Trump also retweeted it,
which is hilarious.
I don't know how to contextualize
that our president retweeted the clip of Tyson saying-
- Maybe he's just doing it like,
they're not gonna, it's like,
I'm gonna throw him a curve ball.
No one's gonna have any idea what that is.
- But yeah, he did no explanation, just, here you go.
- There you go.
Well, I think that's kind of like what you're describing.
It's like, if I give you an answer,
it has to be a good one.
Better to just let your imagination run.
- Exactly.
Yeah, he's like the Kubrick of our time.
(laughing)
- Know what's really interesting?
That sometimes,
period, this is not real,
but sometimes I struggle with the fact
of why is there a possibility I can really hurt somebody?
Like you don't wanna hurt them.
What do you mean, but you struggle with the possibility
that you could hurt them?
- That is sometimes, it's orgasmic sometimes.
Yeah.
- Like some fights, like particularly like Tyrell Biggs
or someone that you had problems with,
someone that you-
- Joe's not getting it.
- You had animosity towards,
so when you finally get your hands on them.
- Hey, what does it mean when fighting gets you erect?
What does that mean?
- It's a good question.
It means you're getting excited.
- Yeah.
- So that's going through your mind right now?
- Well, that's how I get when I was a kid.
And sometimes I get the twinkle.
- The twinkle?
- Yeah.
- Well, that's what I'm saying.
It's like you reached a state as a human being,
as a champion, as a ferocious fighter,
you reached a state of ability and of accomplishment
that very few humans will ever touch and feel.
That's why I'm asking you, when you're running,
when you're hitting the bag, when that heart's beating again
and you know who you are, you're Mike motherfucking Tyson.
So when you're doing all this shit again,
you're still Mike Tyson.
Those thoughts have got to be burning inside you again.
It's got to be pretty wild.
- I don't know.
It's wild, but I believe it's rightfully so to be that way.
And I just know how to, I don't say I'm mastered,
but I just know how to deal with it.
I don't let it overwhelm me.
- I mean, he goes on to try to, they don't ever,
like Joe doesn't bite.
Well, the interesting thing about that conversation
is Mike was trying to figure himself out.
§29Transcript · 3:32:51–3:40:52
- Yeah.
- Like he's trying on the spot.
Like, why do I feel this way?
To me it was like, to me it's so real and honest
to feel like pleasure from hurting somebody.
Like that, you rarely hear that.
In this society, it's like, you rarely like talk about like,
you feel pleasure from winning.
You feel pleasure from like the relief of overcoming
like all the stress you had to go through.
Pleasure from just like the specifics of the fight,
the techniques he used,
the maybe overcoming being down a couple of rounds.
But like, how often do you hear somebody say,
I just enjoyed, he's not even saying
because I hate the opponent.
He's saying like, I enjoyed purely the violence of it.
It's crazy.
I mean, I don't know, it's honest.
It made me ask like,
I wonder how many of us are cognizant of that.
- I'd say Mike is uncommonly, seemingly honest.
I think athletes make a full-time job out of lying.
You know, I think people make a full-time job out of lying.
- To themselves perhaps too.
- That's fair.
I mean, you tell yourself or you tell others
what you feel you need to,
or maybe whether you even know what you feel you need to,
but why should he not?
I mean, again, did he run up and just hit somebody
that didn't sign up for this?
No, they signed up to be there.
- Well, that's the interesting thing about Dyson
is there's that weird, like non-standard behavior.
I mean, like your fighting style is non-standard.
He's non-standard to another degree of like,
who else has that?
In jiu-jitsu, Paul Ares has this kind of weirdness,
like what's in there?
Like there's a fear that I think most opponents would have,
because it's like, it's no longer about like,
it takes you out of the realm of it's game.
It takes us back to the thing we were talking about
like before is it strips away that like several layers
of Ryan Hall, the podcast guest,
Ryan Hall, the jiu-jitsu instructor,
Ryan Hall, the jiu-jitsu competitor.
It keeps going down to a point where like Ryan Hall,
the murderer of all things that get in his way
that lies underneath all of it seemingly.
Like if we're, like in this society, we put all that aside,
but it makes you wonder,
like now society's being tested in many ways.
It makes you wonder like what's underneath there.
- Well, do we want the answer to that?
'Cause I guess it's, what is it?
You've seen "Pulp Fiction,"
the best character in the movie
and in the best scene in the movie.
It's like if my questions,
if you're, what do you call it?
If my answer is scary,
you should cease asking scary questions.
And I guess you wonder, I mean, all of us,
that's something that I think it's funny.
We go, oh, that's not okay.
I mean, versus maybe not appropriate for situation X, Y, or Z
but what should make any of us think?
I mean, humanity is a different place now.
And I mean, I'm not saying anything crazy out there,
but humanity is a different place now
than we were 5,000 years ago
where all of us are descended from people
who have killed things with their teeth and fingernails.
In order to be where we are.
And whether it was an animal
or it was in conflict with another person.
I mean, think about the chances of dying by violence now
are so, so slim, at least in most countries,
in most places, like shockingly small, thankfully.
But there was a period of time,
like the most period of time where dying by violence
was mostly how it went down.
And I guess what would be facilitative?
What would allow you to win back to end this game?
What allows you, if you can't do that,
you are forever subject to people who can.
And that's a real thing.
And we're fortunate to find ourselves in a situation
where we don't, where other things matter.
But that is a funny thing periodically where people,
you'll see people like kind of drawing at each other,
like in videos or out in the world
that clearly neither of them expect this to get serious.
Like, I'm just gonna yell at you,
you're gonna yell at me.
And it's like this weird LARPing thing
where we're both gonna go on our own separate way.
All it takes is one person to be like,
well, I wasn't kidding.
And it's like, oh, you'll go to jail.
I'm like, oh, I know.
You're gonna go to the morgue.
And it's, but that can happen like that.
Like society, I mean, obviously,
anyway, you could jump across the table,
stab me in the eye.
I mean, I'd hope if you don't,
and there will be consequences if you do,
but not from me, from the rest of society
will potentially get you at a certain point.
But you can decide to not play by the rules
anytime you want.
- It's fascinating that, yeah, that's,
we've created rules based on which we all behave,
but underneath there, you know,
there's things that doesn't,
there's motivations and forces
that don't play by the rules.
- Oh, for sure. - And it's still there.
Nature as metal is under the surface.
- Seriously, and again, I pull out my phone
and I'm basically saying like, hey,
I'm gonna, you're gonna get caught.
But really I'm further antagonizing you,
rightly or wrongly, you know what I mean?
Like, and that's an interesting thing.
And I feel like just people need to remember,
any of us need to remember,
just for any reason,
just that's one step away at all times.
Do you ever, I've had people say to me before,
like, oh, I don't feel safe.
I'm like, you're not safe.
I'll kill you before you get out of this room.
Nothing you can do to stop that, nothing.
I mean, but don't worry, you can do the same to me,
which means I'm like, oh, oh, thank goodness.
Can you imagine like how many guns
are there are in this country?
Like, I mean, everywhere.
I mean, seriously, everywhere.
But that's a heartening thought, not the other way,
'cause people usually freak out and go,
oh my God, gun violence, gun violence.
Gun violence is like really not a serious issue
in the United States compared to what it could be,
because it means that, I mean,
with the amount of guns and the amount of bullets
that are out there that are in circulation,
can you imagine if like one in every thousand
was used in anger each day?
I mean, this would be a terrifying place to live.
You couldn't go anywhere.
So I mean, although you could say,
hey, this is more than we'd like, or X, Y, Z,
it actually means that people are much more reasonable
and sane than we're saying,
than or than sometimes I might argue.
So I guess what I mean is like, oh man,
I walked to 7-Eleven and I didn't get stabbed.
I'm like, oh, well, that's good,
because not because I protected myself with my karate,
it's basically no one decided to run over and stab me
because I wasn't protecting myself.
It's, they stopped.
So I guess we're all fortunate to live in a society
that like you said, nature being metal,
doesn't become that big of an issue all the time.
But it is funny when you get people in the ring
and you go, hey, let's peel back from Mr. Tyson,
many layers of that and say, hey, now it's okay.
- And it's cool that, I mean, that's what society's doing.
So I've lived in Harvard Square for a while
and we add extra layers of what safe means.
Like now there's a discourse about safe spaces,
about like ideas being violence or like, yeah.
But ideas or minor slights
against your personality being violence.
But that's all like extra layers
around the nature is metal thing that it's cool.
That's what progress is,
but we can't forget that like underneath it,
it's still the thing that will murder
at the drop of in any, at any moment if aroused.
- One thing that I find funny though,
or ironic maybe about the words of violence,
offense is violence thing is that of course,
that if that the belief in that then justifies my violence.
Like my, and whether maybe not physical violence,
but my response to my aggressive response to things.
And I guess like, which again,
begets a further aggressive response
and like a kind of a tit for tat sort of situation
or it goes to like, well, there's 10 of me
and there's one of you, so we'll get you
and you can't do anything about it.
But that's not morality.
That's just saying that's might makes right.
§30Transcript · 3:40:55–3:48:07
So I guess, again, you can understand why people do it
and there are certain, there is a progress aspect to it.
But again, I guess without proper examination,
I'm effectively with my 10 friends,
and the force of the law, Mike Tyson-ing people.
But not admitting to myself what I'm doing.
And at least Mike Tyson, again, is honest.
- Are you afraid of death?
- I mean, it's easy for me to say no,
as I sit here probably not about to die, but.
- Is this like the UFC question,
can you defeat any opponent?
- Exactly, the answer is of course, yes.
And I don't have, they're not around,
they're not here, are they?
Yeah, exactly.
But- - I mean, are you,
do you ponder your own mortality?
Maybe another context to that is you mentioned
two deaths for martial artists.
- I think that's actually why, honestly,
even though at a relatively young age,
I think mortality is something that I'm aware of,
maybe more than the average person.
I think probably most athletes can speak to this,
anyone that's had, I've managed to slide out
of a couple near-death experiences personally,
mostly river-related, because I'm an idiot.
But I regret nothing.
But yeah, but thank God we're here.
But yeah, it is an interesting, seeing the end,
and seeing going, well, what's gonna happen.
I guess, I think it comes back to kind of
what we were discussing about belief structure
and belief system.
I think a lot of times, if I recognize that
no matter what I do, it's all gonna end one day,
then you go, well, why were we here?
What would I do?
Am I gonna make it to 40?
I have no idea.
I'd like to hope so.
I had no idea that I was gonna make it
to the age that I am now.
Am I gonna make it to 80?
How much of that is in my control?
Much of it is not.
I mean, it's so funny.
It's an interesting, back to the belief structure,
again, locus of internal and external locus of control,
what's facilitative versus what's true.
And I think accepting personal responsibility
for more than is in my control is probably a positive.
But at the same time, recognizing that
much is not in my control.
I was fortunate enough to be born in the United States,
fortunate enough to not knock on wood,
have a serious disease that I'm not aware of right now.
I didn't do any of that.
I just showed up.
That was really fortunate.
And I guess that doesn't diminish the fact
that I've tried to make decent choices,
but it works in concert with it.
And I guess when you go, is death what I want right now?
No, no, I should think not.
And again, it's easier for me to be relatively calm
about it as I'm not staring it in the face.
But what I would care a lot more about is how you live.
That's what's in my control.
And I can't control if as I walk out of this building,
a helicopter falls on me.
Worrying about that, I can't control.
Maybe I have cancer now and I don't know it.
And I really hope not.
But--
- There's something about meditating on the fact
that it could end today.
Outside of your control, they can clarify your thinking
about the fact that life is amazing.
Like just kind of--
- Some of it.
- Yeah, helping you enjoy this moment.
- Even if life was horrible, let's say for instance,
it was, you live at one of those times or places,
and those places still exist in this world today,
that life is brutal and metal and whatever all,
and short and painful, would you still want it?
And again, as I'm sitting here not on fire physically,
it's easy to say yes, but I would, I'm confident,
I still, I'll plant my feet and say yes.
Any life is amazing and beautiful and a gift,
an unbelievable gift.
But that none of us have earned, for the record.
I hate the word earned.
A lot of times earned, yeah, you earn,
but it's like, there's a lot of good fortune in earning.
And that's back to, do I want justice or do I want grace?
And I guess we're all fortunate to be where we are
no matter where we are.
And hopefully it should give us some sense of perspective,
some sense of compassion for other people,
but also, like you said, a sense of peace.
If it all ended right now, would I be happy
with life to this point?
I'm like, of course.
Would you like to live a little longer?
Yeah, I would try to do more and try to live rightly
to the best that I know how, which over time
will hopefully continue to evolve in a positive direction.
But if the answer to that is no, I guess that's always,
that's a sign that what I'm doing
is not what I'm meant to be doing.
And I mean, you're familiar with Tecumseh before.
So there's a, I've got one, actually,
if you could give me 10 seconds, I'll read this one out.
This is a personal favorite, basically.
And I think it sums up, I mean, again,
it's one of those quotes on the internet,
like when Abraham Lincoln said,
"Don't believe everything you read online."
But this is, it's again, attributed, but it's like,
"So live your life that the fear of death
"can never enter your heart.
"Trouble no one about their religion,
"respect others in their view,
"and demand that they respect yours.
"Love your life, perfect your life,
"beautify all things in your life.
"Seek to make your life long,
"and its purpose in the service of your people.
"Prepare a noble death song for the day
"when you go over the great divide.
"Always give a word or sign, a salute,
"when meeting or passing a friend,
"even a stranger, when in a lonely place.
"Show respect to all people, and grovel to none.
"When you arise in the morning,
"give thanks for the food, and for the joy of living.
"If you see no reason for giving thanks,
"the fault lies only in yourself.
"Abuse no one and no thing,
"for abuse turns the wise ones to fools,
"and robs the spirit of its vision.
"When it comes your time to die,
"be not like those whose hearts
"are filled with the fear of death,
"so that when their time comes,
"they weep and pray for a little more time
"to live their lives over again in a different way.
"Sing your death song and die like a hero going home."
- Powerful words.
I don't think there's a better way to end it.
Let me just say, we've spoke maybe five, six years ago.
I don't even remember when,
but I'm not exaggerating saying,
you had a huge impact on my life because of the podcast.
You're the reason I was doing the podcast,
as long as I have.
You're the reason I'm doing this podcast.
And it's a stupid little meeting
that you probably didn't know who I was.
I didn't really know who you are.
It was just like a magical moment.
It's a flap of a butterfly wing kind of situation.
And yeah, I'm forever grateful.
You're one of the most inspiring people in my life.
So Ryan, it's a huge honor that you would come here,
Jen, and talk with me, and waste all this time.
I really appreciate it.
It was amazing.
- Thank you so much, Alex.
It's just been a pleasure.
I really appreciate you having us on.
Thank you.
- Thanks, brother.
- Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ryan Hall.
And thank you to our sponsors,
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Please check out these sponsors in the description
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If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
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And now let me leave you with some words
from Frank Herbert in Dune.
"Deep in the human unconscious
"is a pervasive need for a logical universe
"that makes sense.
"But the real universe is always one step beyond logic."
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
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