John Danaher: The Path to Mastery in Jiu Jitsu, Grappling, Judo, and MMA | Lex Fridman Podcast #182
the following is a conversation with john donahue widely acknowledged as one of the greatest coaches and minds in the martial arts world having coached many champions in jiu jitsu submission grappling and mma including gordon ryan gary tonin nick rodriguez craig jones nikki ryan chris weidman and george saint-pierre quick mention of our sponsors onnet simply safe indeed and lynnode check them out in the description to support this podcast as a side note let me say that john is a scholar of not just jiu jitsu but judo wrestling muay thai boxing mma and outside of that topics of history psychology philosophy and even artificial intelligence as you'll hear in this conversation after this chat i started to entertain the possibility of returning back to competition as a black belt maybe even training with john and his team for a few weeks leading up to the competition for a recreational practitioner such as myself the value of training and competing in jiu jitsu is that it is one of the best ways to get humbled to me keeping the ego in check is essential for a productive and happy life this is the lex friedman podcast and here is my conversation with john donahue are you afraid of death let's start with an easy question there's no warm-up that's it they're jumping jacks let's uh let's break that down into two questions um i'm a human being and like any human being i'm biologically programmed to be terrified of death every physical element in our bodies is designed to keep us away from death i'm no different from anyone else in that regard if you throw me from the top of the entire state building i'm gonna scream all the way down to the concrete um if you wave a loaded firearm in my face i'm gonna flinch away in horror the same way anyone else would um so in that first sense of are you afraid of death uh my my body is terrified of injury leading to death the same way in any other human being would so when death is imminent there's a terror that goes through the same adrenaline dumps that you would go through um uh but on the other hand you're also asking a much deeper question which is presumably are you afraid of non-existence what comes after your physical death and that's the more interesting question um no uh i should start right uh by by by scene from from the start i i'm a materialist i don't believe that we have an immortal soul i don't believe there's a life after our physical death um in this sense from someone who starts from that point of view you have to understand that everyone has two deaths we always talk about our death as though there was only one but we all have two deaths there was a time before you were born when you were dead you weren't afraid of that period of non-existence you don't even think about it so why would you be afraid of your second period of non-existence you came from non-existence you're going to go back into it you weren't afraid of the first why are you somehow afraid of the second so it doesn't really make sense to me as to why people would be afraid of non-existence you dealt with it fine the first time um deal with it the second time but your mind didn't exist for the first death and it won't exist after you die either but it does exist now enough to comprehend that there's this thing that you know nothing about that's coming which is non-existent actually you do know about it because you know what it was like before you were born there was just nothing every every every time you go to sleep at night you get a sneak preview of death it's just this kind of nothing happens you wake up in the morning you're alive again but it's not about the sleeping it's about the falling asleep and every night when you fall asleep you assume you're going to wake up here you know you're not waking up and the knowledge is a whole step from that to the idea of fearing it i'm fully aware that there's going to be a time i don't wake up but are you going to be afraid of it is there some mortal terror you have of this no you didn't have it before you don't have it when you sleep um going from the fact that you know you won't wake up to terror is two different things that's an extra step and at that point you're making a choice at that at that point what about what some people in our in this context we might call like the third death which is when um everybody forgets the entirety of consciousness in the universe forgets that you've ever existed that john donahue ever existed so it's almost like a cosmic death it's like everything goes yeah not not just i would say it's like knowledge the history books forget about who you are because the history books this is inevitable by the way we're all very very small players in a very big game and inevitably we're all going to go at some point yeah but doesn't so you're it's it's disappointing of course like it's um but but it's not even it would be arrogance to say um i'm disappointed in the idea that i will disappear but there's this far greater things than me that will disappear i mean it it's crushing to think that there's going to come a time when no one will ever hear beethoven's symphonies again that the mysteries of the pharaohs will be lost and no one will even comprehend they once existed like humanity has come up with so many amazing things over its existence and to think that one day this is just all happening on a tiny speck in a distant corner of a very small galaxy and among millions of galaxies that this is all for nothing okay i can understand there's a kind of dread that comes with this um uh but there's also a sense in which the moment you're born and the moment you can think about these things you know this is your inevitable fate is it so inevitable so if we look at we're in austin and there's a guy named elon musk and he's hoping in fact that is the drive behind many of his passions is the human beings becoming multi-planetary species and expanding out exploring and colonizing the solar system the galaxy and maybe the rest of the universe is that something that fills you with excitement uh it's as a project it's very exciting i um the whole i mean we all grew up with science fiction the idea of exploration the same way uh human beings in earlier centuries were thrilled with the idea of discovering a new world you know america or some other part of the world that they sailed to and come back but now instead of sailing oceans you're sailing solar systems and ultimately even further um so of course that's exciting but as far as relieving us from non-existence it's just plain a delaying game because ultimately even the universe itself if the laws of thermodynamics are correct will ultimately die of course we might not understand most of the physics and how the universe functions you said laws of thermodynamics but maybe that's just a tiny little fraction of what the universe actually is maybe there's multiple dimensions maybe maybe there's multiple universes maybe the entirety of this experience you know there's guys like donald hoffman i think that all of this is just an illusion that we don't like human cognition and perception constructs a whole it's like a video game it would construct that's very distant from the actual reality and maybe one day we'll understand that reality maybe it'll be like the matrix kind of thing so there's a lot of different possibilities here and there's also philosopher named ernest becker i don't know if you know that is he wrote denial of death and his idea he disagrees with you but he's dead now is is that he thinks that the terror of death the terror of the knowledge that we're going to die is within all of us and is in fact the driver behind most of the creativity that we do exploring out into the universe but also you becoming one of the great scholars of the martial arts the philosophers of fighting is because you're actually terrified of death and you want you want to somehow permeate like your knowledge your ideas your essence to permeate human civilization so that even when your body dies you live on i would agree with him and so far as uh death is the single greatest motivator for action but going beyond that and saying it's somehow terrifying that's that's an extra step on his part um and not everyone's going to follow him on that step i do believe that death is the single most important element in life that gives value to our days if you think for example of a situation where a god came to you and gave you immortality life would be very very different for you uh you're a talented research scientist you work to a schedule why because ultimately you know your life is finite and actually very finite and could be even more so if fate plays its hand and you die an early death or what have you we never know what's going to happen tomorrow as such we get work done as soon as we can the moment you gain immortality you can always put every project off you can always say i don't need to do this today because i can do it four centuries from now and as you extend artificially a human life the motivation to get things done here and now and work industriously and and excel fades away because you can always come back to the idea that you can do this in the future and so what gives value to our days is ultimately death and value it's not the only form of the reason behind value but a huge part of what we consider value is scarcity and death gives us scarcity of days and is probably the single greatest motivator for almost every action we partake in it's kind of tragic and beautiful that what what makes things amazing is that they end yeah i think it would actually be a terrible burden to be immortal you would um life would be in many ways very hollow and meaningless i think people talk about death taking away the meaning of life but i think immortality would have a very similar effect in a different direction so given this short life we could think about jiu jitsu we can think about any kind of pursuit what do you think makes a great life is it the highest peak of achievement you know you think about like an olympic gold medal the highest level of performance or is it the longevity of performance of doing many amazing things and doing it for a long time i think the latter is kind of what we talk about in at least american society you know we want people to be healthy balanced perform well for a long time and then there's maybe like the gladiator ethic which is the highest peak is what defines you asked an initial question which what makes a great life but then pointed towards two options one of longevity versus are there a degree of difficulty there's got to be a lot more than that shortly i mean think about um first of all we have to understand from the start there's never going to be an agreed-upon set of criteria for this is a great life from all perspective uh if you look from the perspective of say machiavelli then stalin lived a great life he was highly successful at what he did he started from nothing so the degree of difficulty and what he did was extraordinarily high he had massive impact upon world history he oversaw the defeat of almost all of his major enemies he lived to old age and died of natural causes so from machiavelli's point of view he had a great life if you ask the ukrainian farmer in the 1930s whether he lived a great life you get a very different answer so everything's going to come from what perspective you you begin with this you're going to look out at the world with a given point of view and you're going to make your judgments was this a great life or was this a terrible life um going back to your point you were actually i think focusing the question on on more in terms of uh great single performances versus longevity performances yes presumably this isn't really a question about uh what makes a great life then because there's so much more than that to a great life i don't know i'm going to push back on that so i think their parallels are very much closer than you're making them seem i think let's compare stalin stalin is an example of somebody who held power considered by many to be one of the most powerful men ever he held power for 30 years so that's what i'm referring to longevity and then there's a few people i have to i wish my knowledge of history was better but people who fought a few great battles and they did not maintain power but that's this contrast here for example alexander the great yes who died at 33 um from probably unnatural causes um uh had around four to five truly defining battles in his life which uh responsible for the for the lion's share of of his achievements and burned very bright but didn't burn long um stalin on the other hand started from nothing and quietly methodically worked his way through the revolutionary phase and uh gained increasing amounts of power and as he said um went all the way to the end of her uh of his career um yeah there's there's definitely something to be said for for longevity um but as to which one is greater than the other you can't give a a definition or um a set of criteria which will definitively say this is better than that but when you look ultimately we look at alexander as great but in a different way and we look at stalin i didn't think many people would say sam was a great person but from the machiavellian point of view he would say he was great also but when you think about beautiful creations done by human beings in the space of say martial arts in the space of sport what inspires you the peak of performance i i see where you're coming from like it's a great question um for me it always comes down to degree of difficulty but things are difficult in different ways okay um a single flawless performance in youth is still that wins a gold medal let's say for example um uh nadia komenichi won the olympic gold medal in gymnastics the first person ever to get a perfect score um if she had disappeared after that we would still remember that as an incredible moment and the degree of difficulty to to get a perfect score in olympic gymnastics is just off the charts um and contrast that with someone who went to four olympics and got four silver medals i mean they're both incredible achievements they're just different the the attributes that lead to longevity um typically tend to conflict with the attributes that bring a powerful single performance one is all about focus on on a particular event the other is uh on spreading your resources over time both that present tremendous difficulties there's no need to say one is better than the other there's also just for me personally the stories of the of somebody who truly struggled are are the most powerful i know a bunch of people don't necessarily agree because you said perfection perfection is kind of the antithesis of struggle but i look at somebody okay my own life somebody i i'm a fan oh i'm a fan of everybody i'm a huge fan of yours i'm trying not to be nervous here but uh somebody i'm a fan of in the judo world is travis stevens he's a remarkable fella by the way a remarkable human being insane in the best kinds of ways i think i started judo i i really started martial arts i have wrestled if you consider those martial arts that's my that's been in my blood i'm russian so but beyond that you know the the whole pajama thing we wear the ghee i started by watching travis in 2008 olympics was that accidental did you know travis prior to watching no no i just tuned in now that's an unusual choice it was just random you just tuned in and you saw travis stevens i tuned into the olympics and i was wondering what judo is and then s i started watch we're we're all proud of our countries and so on so i started watching he was i think the only american in the olympics for judo uh maybe the so this kayla harrison was 2012. and ronda was there too so i watched rhonda and travis but obviously sort of i was i was focused on somebody who also weighed the same as i did so there was a kind of i think 81 kilograms so there's a connection but also there's an intensity to him like he would get like angry at his own failures and he would just refuse to quit it's that kind of dan gable mentality i just that was inspiring to me that he's the underdog and the way people talk about him the commentators that it was an unlikely person to do well right and i they the fu attitude behind that saying no i'm gonna still win gold obviously he didn't do well in 2008 but that was the that was somehow inspiring and i just remember he pulled me in but then i started to see this sport i guess you can call it of effortlessly dominating your opponent and like throwing because i in to me wrestling was like a grind you kind of control you slowly just break your opponent the idea that you could with like a foot sweep was fascinating to me that just because of timing you can take these like monsters giant people like incredible athletes and just smash them with it it just doesn't there was no struggle to it it was always like a look of surprise judo dominance in judo has a look like the other person is like what what just happened yes this is very different from wrestling it's built into the rule structure too the whole idea of an epon of a match being over in an instant and um that creates a a thrilling spectator sport because you can as you say with usherwise or the footsweeps you can take someone out who's heavily favored and if you're not judo is the most unforgiving of all the grappling sports you can if you have a lapse of concentration for half a second it's done it's over um if those guys get a grip on each other any one of them can throw the other the the idea you know uh when you see someone like um nomura who won three olympic gold medals to to win across three olympics and that's an incredible achievement given how many ways there are to lose in the standing position in judo and how unforgiving it is as a sport it shows an incredible level of dominance i think when i was i was also introduced at that time to the idea jessica judo i think in jiu-jitsu is the same a lot of sports is probably the same is there's ways to win that include kind of um if i were to use a bad term stalling which is like use strategy to slow down to destroy all the weapons your opponent has and just to wait it out to sort of break your opponent by yeah shutting down all their weapons but not using any of your own yes and now travis was always going for he's off of course really good at gripping and con to that whole game but he was going for the big throws and he was almost getting frustrated uh by a lot of the opponents i remember uh ola bishop i think yes uh from germany from germany very talented very incredible i know he's very good at doing big throws and he's incredible judoka but he was also incredible at just frustrating his opponents with like gripping and strategy and so on and i just remember feeling the pain of this person like travis who went through just he broke like every part of his body he went through so many injuries just this person who dedicated his entire life to this moment in 2008 and then 2012 and in 2016 just ever gave everything you could see it on his face that you know his weapons are being shut down and he's still pushing forward he's still with that both the frustration and the power i mean the the the kind of throw he does is the his his main one i think is the standing was called tsunagi keep on saying i can hit pause that was that was the other thing is like the techniques he used was the these big throws that there's something to me about the synagogue i fell in love with that throw uh that's my become my main throw standing sanagi that is like why do why do you favor the standing variation because of the amplitude you get a more powerful yeah power it's like are you a fan of koga yes that's so that's why travis so koga and travis opened up my uh travis uses the same gripping patterns for saying i guess all the same and the way he uses his hips and turns and i remember like going to my judo club and other judo clubs and ask and they're all saying this is the wrong way to do it the way travis does is the wrong way to do it and i remember like i've always been amazed by this by the way i don't mean to cut you off but i i could literally fill 20 hours of reproductions of people who will tell me that either my students or other great world champions um are doing things wrong yeah and i'm i'm looking at them and i'm like who would i rather trust here in in their judgment koga who was one of the greatest throwers of all time or you [Laughter] a recreational guy who couldn't throw my grandmother yes um uh i'm supposed to take your word over his well say don't listen to what people say i'm going to give you a piece of advice here watch what the best people do okay that's how you get superior athletic performance i'm going to say that again don't listen to what people say watch what they do particularly under the stress of high level competition because that's when you see their real game what they really do under pressure okay and if you can emulate that you're going to be very successful i guess what i was frustrated with to your point is that the argument against koga is what he has a very specific body type and he figured out something that worked for him thus the statement is that might not be applicable to you or to the general public of of uh judo players that want to succeed that by the way at the shallow level might be true might be true the point is there might be a body of knowledge that's yet to be discovered and explored that koga opened up that i wanted to understand why his technique worked it made no sense to me that with a single foot like the way you turn the hip the single foot that steps in why does that work because it was actually very difficult to make work uh for me as a white belt in the very beginning it doesn't make sense like people just they don't they don't get loaded up onto your hip anyway for people don't watch koga highlights watch travis stevens highlights but the the the details of the technique don't make sense but when mastered that it feels like there's something fundamental there that hasn't been explored yet it's like koga and travis made me think that we don't know most of the body mechanics involved in dominance in judo like we just kind of found a few pockets that work really well the ichimoda there's these different throws also i wonder if there's like totally cool new things that we haven't discovered and that's saying i gave a little peek because there's very few people that i'm aware of that do it the way travis and koga did may i ask you a question yes um the choice of standing sanagi um i i should uh say this for you for your listeners they're probably thinking what the hell are these two guys talking about um uh sanagi is one of the more high percentage throws in the olympic sport of judah um probably uh uchimata is probably number one and variations of sanagi would be in the top five for sure um the basic choice you have in modern competition is the more difficult standing where you literally are up on your feet and you perform a shoulder throw that takes your opponent over from a full standing position the most popular form of synagi and modern competition by a landslide is not the standing version it's a drop saying argue where you go down to your knees um this means you have a much easier time getting underneath your opponent's center of gravity the defining feature of any synagogue is getting underneath your opponent's center of gravity and lifting them that ceo literally means to to lift and carry why did you choose the more difficult version what was your motivation you know you're a smart kid you know right from the start that for every standing sanagi there's 20 drops and argues in modern competition one is obviously more high percentage one obviously works for a wider variety of body types uh the number of people who are successful with standing sanagi is dramatically lower and it appears to be a move which is completely absent in the heavyweight divisions and rarely seen in the lightweight divisions why what was the motivation why did you willingly adopt the less high percentage over the this would be very interesting percentage i i i i would love you to break it apart because um i apply the same kind of thinking to basically everything i mentioned you offline there's these boston dynamics spot robots when i first met spot i found love i don't understand what exactly but there's magic there and i just got excited by it and that met that fire burns i want to work these robots i want to work with robots i want to i felt like there's something special there that i could build something interesting with create something interesting with and the same with with the same standing sanagi from koga and travis i just fell in love with that technique just even watching i didn't even know what the hell to do with it was it aesthetic it's the standing scene i guess more beautiful in execution there's no engine in in my own let's we're talking about love here right in my own definition of aesthetic yes it's not just beauty because you could argue there's more elegance sort of ichimata is very beautiful and effortless i love i love something about the dominance of it i love the idea in sport of two people that are the best in the world and one of them dominating the other and uh to me the standing say nagi you're lifted off your feet and especially when it's done perfectly and with really strong resistance from the other person it results in a big slam and that was like beautiful to me that's the uh alexander carell and like big pickups i love that it's interesting though it's you're correct and so far as you you're not just going with aesthetic and the sense of beauty but also but you are making uh as it were value judgments yes about the throw and that's fascinating to me um because there's two elements to any grappling sport i've always i'm always um insistent upon the idea that jujitsu is both an art and a science okay it has scientific elements insofar as it works according to the laws of physics and lever and fulcrum et cetera et cetera um but it also has an aesthetic element and so far as you're making choices with technique you're expressing who you are as a person you have 10 000 different variations of moves you could use but you're specifically choosing these that's an element of choice and self-expression on your part and insofar as that is true combat sports are not just a size but they're also an art so most combat sports have this sense which they have the features of both an art and a science and um it's not just about high percentage in in your case i mean me personally i'm obsessed with percentages what what are the ways to make signs yeah but that's also choices involved yeah but um but there is an undeniably aesthetic element to martial arts where you as it were express who you are as a person in terms of the techniques you're ultimately going to choose does that get in the way do you allow yourself to enjoy the aesthetic beauty of a technique of course yeah when i when martial arts have done well it's the most beautiful sport in the world okay when it's done poorly it's the ugliest but but a beautifully applied submission holder perfect throw a a superbly set up takedown are among the most difficult techniques to execute in all of sports and when they're done well they're magic to observe but do you uh prefer certain techniques over others because of their like for example i'll tell you for me chokes of all sorts with the ghee without the ghee probably with the geese the most beautiful to me personally i i value them above all others um people mostly associate myself and my students with leg locking they're usually rather surprised to learn that i actually value strangleholds far above leg logs um but not for aesthetic reasons for effectiveness we can talk about that later a few wish well let's step back sorry we drifted awfully far off topic man this is with i think this is beautiful uh we're drifting along the river of uh life and martial arts can you explain the fundamentals of jiu jitsu yes if i couldn't i wouldn't be much of a coach um jiu-jitsu is an art and science which looks to use a combination of tactical and mechanical advantage to focus a very high percentage of my strength against a very low percentage of my opponent's strength at a critical point on their body such that if i were to exert my strength upon that critical point they could no longer continue to fight well that's about weapons and defenses but then is there something more to be said about the set of tools that are that we're talking about that's where the art comes in because ultimately you have a set of choices and those choices that you make will be an act of self-expression on your part some will prefer this some will prefer that that's where you come in as an individual that's an overall definition of jiu jitsu of being a set of choices that where you're using the things you're powerful in versus the things your opponent is weak in no i was only talking about percentages of body strength if i have for example let's say um we have two athletes athlete a and athlete b athlete a has 100 units of strength however we define that overall athlete b has 50. okay so ostensibly athlete a is twice as strong as athlete b but athlete b can maneuver his body into a set of positions focused around a critical point of his opponent's body where he can apply 40 units of strength out of his total of 50. his opponent can only defend with 20 units of strength out of his total of 100 you have now completely reversed the strength discrepancy originally athlete a was twice as strong as b now on that one localized point the knee the elbow the neck b is now twice as strong as a under those circumstances b should win i guess what i'm trying to get at by the way that's really beautifully said is what you just said could be applied to other games other battles it could be applied to the game of chess uh it could be applied to war most obviously in war i think about for example um the american strategic bombing campaign in world war ii the eighth army air force was tasked with the idea of destroying german industry did they attack all of german industry of course not that would be stupid they attacked the ball bearing industry why because almost all of modern machines require ball bearings in order to operate in order for the mechanical interfaces of machines to operate you have to reduce friction it's done through ball bearings if you knocked out one tiny component of german industry the ball bearing industry the rest of it couldn't operate so too with the human body i didn't have to fight your whole body i just have to fight your left knee if i can break your left knee the rest of your body is irrelevant to me but then isn't the art of jiu jitsu discovering the the left knee the discovering the weak points you know a huge part of jiu-jitsu is understanding the weak strengths and weaknesses of the human body there's parts of the human body that are shockingly robust and there are other parts that are shockingly vulnerable the major joints and of course the most vulnerable of all the unprotected neck so if we take the something i'm not familiar with but i was incredibly impressed by is the body lock that i saw um nick rodriguez nick rodriguez used last time a few weeks ago but then i also got to hang out with craig jones who also has a very good body loan so that that was uh i don't know if this body lock applies to all positions but i was seeing it from when craig is uh on top of your opponent and trying to pass the go or passing the guard use the body lock as a controlling position the the principle behind it is that it shuts down as you've spoken about it shuts down the weapons of a very strong opponent that's absolutely correct in the case of um guard possession what makes god position dangerous what makes someone a powerful guard player is the movement of their hips forward and backward and side to side body locking is designed to shut down that movement and does a very fine job of it you'll see all of my students accelerate gordon ryan is probably the single best body dog guard passer i've ever seen nikki ryan is outstanding with it nick rodriguez is very good craig jones is outstanding all of my students use this for a very simple reason understand what is the central problem of shutting down a dangerous guard player it's his hips that's what makes him a dangerous leg locker you go up against a dangerous leg lock him body lock guard pass single best way to shut down most of his entries um we're all strong in leglogs so in our gym you gotta control the hips as soon as possible these can otherwise can be a very difficult thing to avoid leg entanglements as you go to parts and across the board my students excel in in uh in body lock guard passing they understand what's the most dangerous feature their opponent has the lateral movement of their hips what's the single best way to stop that body lock and then work from there so if this asymmetry of power is fundamental to jiu jitsu how do you discover that how do you how did you discover the body life that as a as one of many methodologies of achieving this asymmetry um it would be an overstatement to say we discovered the body line right body law passing has been around longer than we've been around um but what i would say is that in a room full of dangerous leg lockers you've got to have a way to shut down the hips and so once we started using body locks we saw that was one excellent way to get around that problem as with all development it comes from trial and error you will often see people teach the technique to a certain level and you see the teaching you know there's a lot of inadequacies there and that doesn't cover a lot of the problems that we're encountering and so trial and error is the single most important part of the development trial and error in um in the training room amongst ourselves in in hard training or no it never begins with hard training or everything techniques are born the same way we're born weak and in need of nutrition uh you have to like this build them up organically like children and you start with minimal resistance and you make progress over time when you first go to the gym do you put 500 pounds on the bench press and try to bench press it no you'll be killed you start off with the bar you build over time and then one day five years from now perhaps you really are lifting 500 pounds but only a four would attempt that on their first attempt and they're born like children in your mind first like uh there's a spark of another one it's like scientific development on a subject matter which is intrinsically simpler okay there's a sense in which naive and overly simplistic assessments of scientific method may not work well at advanced levels of science but they work damn well in the training room with jiu-jitsu whether the subject matter is inherently simpler than it is in research science and as a result there'll be a spark you'll see something right and there's possibilities there okay let's let's puzzle this out let's work with this and uh you run into a lot of failures this you know you've suddenly been oh man if i put my hip this way this works really well then suddenly you try and spare and you get caught in a simple alma plata and you know okay that didn't work as well as i thought and then you look to rectify things if things go on promising research directions you keep them if not you discard them well it's funny you say science it feels like more like art there's somebody i really admire that talks about this kind of ideas johnny i from apple he's the lead designer he recently left but he was the designer behind most of the products we know and loved from apple and when you say designer be more precise what exactly was he was he working on in apple the iphone which which parts of the iphone did he would like the entirety of it was he a leader of a research team or was he the person personally responsible for their development he's kind of i would say very similar to your position he wasn't necessarily the last the person executing the fine the manufacturer right yeah of course but there's the uh he's somebody that's very hands-on and it's it's like okay so he worked obviously extremely close to steve jobs steve jobs has this idea we should have a computer that's as thin as a sheet of paper and then you start to play with ideas of like what does that actually look like the reason i bring it up is because he talked about he had these ideas that he would not tell steve because he he talked about in the same exact language as you're saying is there's like like a little baby that it's very fragile it it needs time to grow absolutely and then steve jobs would often roll in was too ruthless you're too ruthless this is he would destroy ideas because uh johnny ive and the team didn't have actually good responses to the criticism at first because when they're babies you can't defend the baby uh but you needed time to develop you need to sleep on it you need to rethink it to do dream things and all those kinds of things it's fascinating you say this lex because this is actually the entire history of scientific development is literally the story of the juxtaposition between the need to protect and nurture new theories versus the need to rigorously test them with with harsh testing that either verifies them or falsifies them and learning to find a satisfactory compromise between those two is a very very difficult thing when you look at the history of science you will see that there's some pretty damn chaotic moments anytime there's major theory change where all kinds of apparently um uh undesirable tricks they use to protect certain theories with ad hoc hypotheses etc etc and uh and ultimately only time and success over time will justify a theory there's usually a period where when one theory goes in to replace another there's something of a battle between competing uh groups of scientists some of whom advocate theory a some who advocate theory b they often use seemingly unscrupulous methods to protect or attack another person's theory they dig for proofs and usually some period of time has to go by sometimes in some cases it simply involved older scientists protecting an initial theory dying off and new scientists just replacing them with numbers and this is a common common theme and the same applies in jujitsu you know so many times especially when i first started working with leglocks i would show things i had worked on to even world champion black belts they would try it once or twice and fail be like it doesn't work and we're like you tried it once on it on another guy who's also a world champion who has a strong ability to resist it and that's it no more it doesn't work and then uh five years later they would see my students finishing world champions with it and in some cases finishing the very people who said that the technique would never work i mean if there was ever a refutation of a statement that that's a pretty clear example um and there has to be a sense in which you you can't be too forgiving you have to test hypotheses but on the other hand you can't be too ruthless either you have to look for uh promise and and uh my advice is start slow like again the analogy of lifting weights you don't lift the heaviest weights on your first day you build up you work progressively over time um now you also have to have some common sense here you can't be too forgiving to a technique if it's repeatedly failing then and good people have tried it and multiple good people have tried and it's just not working out then okay it's time to dismiss it but don't be too quick you know is this where your idea of uh training with lower belts yeah quite a bit comes from yeah i've actually just as a side comment and maybe you can elaborate i the the place the gym uh balance studios with the phil and rick mcglarees where i got my black belt where i grew up as a jiu jitsu person in philadelphia they have a huge number of black belts but they have a huge number of all other ranks and the way they picked sparring partners people you train with is very ad hoc it's very loose it's very one of those places one of those gyms where you can just kind of you can train for like three four hours and it's great you could take a break or you could jump back in very informal yeah and you can go to war with black belts but then you can also play around with the purple and the blue belts and so on excellent and that was really beneficial for growth and you know you can pick which because everybody has a style you can pick which style you really want to work on right and then i came to um uh boston broadway jiu jitsu with john clark who i love he's a good friend but you know the it's a little bit more formal and i found myself it's a very interesting journey if i would be training with black belts the whole time and uh it was a very different experience i found myself exploring much less i found myself learning much less i mean part of that is on my on me but part of it was also realizing that uh wow there's a value to training with people that are much worse than you yes is there is there a philosophy you could speak to on that yeah um you probably know it already um you know from your studies and artificial intelligence that all human beings are naturally risk-averse this is a bias which is deeply seated in in all of us i'm sure you're you're well read on people like duversky and etc who talk about this all the time for your viewers uh there are numerous psychological experiments that have shown that most people to the point of irrationality fear loss more than they are excited at the prospect of an equivalent gain so for example if you have a hundred dollars in your wallet you're more worried about the idea of losing the hundred dollars that you have now then you would be excited by the prospect of gaining a hundred dollars that i could potentially offer you um this comes out whenever you get black belt versus black belt confrontations or any kind of similar um skill level whenever you get similar skill levels the chances of defeat get very very high interestingly if you're a white belt and you're going against a black belt you'll take risks why because there's no shame in losing to a black belt when you're a white ball so you'll you'll play more light-heartedly and you'll you'll have a more fun role but when you have very similar skill levels you're going to come back to what the techniques that are most likely to get you a win that number of techniques is usually pretty small and if you're always battling with the same tough opponents every day where if you make even a single error it will cost you that match in sparring and you don't like losing you're going to stay with a very small set of moves you might get slightly better at their execution over time but you as an individual will not grow growth as it does in organic life forms comes from small beginnings and builds over time you can't take an untested untried move and get it on a world champion black belt it's going to get crushed so it's not ready for that it's like a a lion cub being thrown out into the serengeti plains the lion cub is just too small and too ineffective it's a lion but it's a cub and it's not until it grows into maturity that it can be a line that can dominate the serengeti plains why i always encourage my students to play with a variety of belt types um and spend the majority of their time with lesser belts for development purposes when you're getting closer to a competition you obviously want to change that you want to be getting more a competitive sense of of hard work but you must learn to divide up your training cycles into non-competition cycles where you're presumably working with people who are slightly lower in leveling yourself and in some cases quite a bit lower than yourself and then competition cycles where you're working with people much closer to your own skill level is there something to be said about the the flip side of that which is um when you're training with people at the same skill level being okay losing to them yes you have to see training for what it is training is about skill development not about winning or losing you've got to you've got to understand that you don't need to win every battle you only need to win the battles that count and the the battles that count are in the world championship finals okay that's the one that counts think about that win okay that's the one you're going to be remembered for you're not going to be remembered for the battle you lost on tuesday afternoon at 3 p.m and some nameless gym with some guys that no one cares about no one's going to remember that you're going to be remembered for your peak performances not your everyday performances focus your everyday performances on skill development so that your peak performances you can focus on winning you know i just this is not a therapy session but if i could just speak every session is a therapy session there is still an ape thing in there of course you think i don't feel it you think everyone in the room doesn't feel it because for example you haven't never seen me roll uh you know when there's people you know i've seen the look in people's eyes when they see me train and they i could see maybe it's me projecting but they think i thought you were supposed to be good i thought you're supposed to be a black belt like that look they're like i'm gonna give you some therapy okay do you know how many people have come up to me over the years who have visited the training halls that i work in and they come up to me and go man i rolled with gary tonan i did really well with him like like really well really wrong i'm like oh that's very very good very impressive and then i see them talking to their friends like man i tapped out gary toner and i'm i'm sitting there going yeah and you can see that they're just like wow dude i'm i'm way better than i thought i was gary tonin all of my students um i pushed him in the direction of of giving up bad positions so that they practice working getting out of critical situations is a huge part of our training program but gary tonan takes that to a level that just no one else even gets close it's it's just amazing like he will put himself in impossible situations where it's a fully locked strangle a hundred percent on with both his arms behind his back and he'll try to work out from there yeah and seven times out of ten he does but three times out of ten he gets caught he i'm a huge advocate of handicapped training where you handicap yourself to work on skills he's took that to heart to a level that few people i believe can match i just wonder what his psychology is like because it goes back to what we talked about four legs you have to understand its skill development don't take it personally um i understand i hear where you're coming from we've all got what you call the ape reflex where we want to be dominant okay we all do like because there's thousands of white belts out there that have tabbed gary tonin yeah and they're walking around and they're people saying online dude i tap gary tonan like gary tonan's like one of the best in the world so i'm one of the best in the world and um uh does gary get upset about this no of course not because gary knows that when it counts on stage he's going to be going 100 with a set of skills that very few people can match um he can go into an ebi overtime at the 205 pound weight division against an adcc champion starting in a full arm lock position and effortlessly get out with no problems in seconds because he's been in that situation 25 000 times with varying degrees of skill opponents and there's just no panic no fear he's just doing what he's done so many thousands of times and that's a fine fine example of a guy who didn't give a damn what happened in the training room but when it counted on the stage in front of the cameras it it kicked in yeah he's he's an incredible inspiration actually uh this he's a practitioner something you've recently talked quite a bit about which is uh the power of escaping sort of bad positions uh i think you've talked about it which is really interesting framing is uh escaping bad positions is one of the best ways if not the best way to demonstrate dominance psychologically over your opponent that anything they throw at you like their weapons are useless against you um there's a little bit of legs friedman kicking through on this question your obsession with dominance is um uh it's a therapy session it's a therapy session i'm coming from a wrestling perspective i think it's not just lex friedman i think it's dan gable i think it's dominant the gary tonan ethic it just goes against everything wrestling is about you never put yourself in a bad position and the fact this it's uh philosophically i don't know what to do with it it's a total reframing of showing dominance by escaping any bad position yeah let's talk about the idea of what what what is the value of escapes why do i put this in as as the first skill that every jdc student must master um believe it or not uh when i talked about how it pertains to dominance that's its smallest value its greatest value has nothing to do with dominance it has to do with confidence you can train someone and teach them technique until you're blue in the face but at some point the athlete in question has to go out there on the stage and pull the trigger when the time is right what's going to give you that ability to go from the physical skills that you've learned to execution under pressure is confidence i always talk about skill development and yes skill development is the absolute bedrock of my training programs but you can't finish at that level there has to be something more than that and you have to go from the physical element of skill into the psychological element of confidence i can teach you an armbar all day you can get to a point where you can flawlessly execute armbars and drilling and even in a certain level of competition but if you believe that in attempting an armbar on a dangerous opponent with good guard passing skills say the armbar is being performed from guard position that if the armbar fails and your opponent uses that failure to set up a strong pass and get into a side pin possibly into the mount and you don't have the ability to get out of that side panel mount you won't pull the trigger on the armbar and so even though you had all the requisite physical skills to perform the technique when push came to shove and the critical moment came you back down you didn't pull the trigger building that confidence is the key to championship performance and the single best way to do it is to take away the innate fear that we all have of bad outcomes that makes us naturally risk averse when you don't believe you can be pinned when you don't believe your god can be passed you'll take risks because there's no downside to your actions an unpinnable person and an unpassable person doesn't have much to fear in a jujitsu match you can come out and fire with all guns blazing because then you know at the end of the day no one's going to hold you down no one's going to pass your guard that's your first two goals in jujitsu they're the most boring goals they're not exciting to learn no one wants to come in and they first met told okay you're going to practice escapes for the next year of your life i can't still go you're kidding me but that's what you gotta have that's your first skill and that's what i push upon all of my students you'll see almost all of them are very very strong and escape skills they know that if things go wrong they can always get out they can always live to fight another day and that is what gives them the ability to attack without fear i think that is so profound and so rare it's so rare to hear this i think it's because it's the most painful thing to do always ask yourself when you enter a jujitsu match you already know ahead of time if you're going to lose how you're going to lose okay there's only a certain number of realistic submissions that work in the sport of judas who the number is very small so ahead of time you already know the most likely methods of submission loss and jujitsu are going to be things like heel hook armbar renegade strangle guillotine etc just work backwards from that knowledge so start off learning how to defend all of those things you know what the major losing positions are in jiu-jitsu someone gets mounted on you rear mount side control neon valley those are positions you can only lose from so work backwards from there getting out of those positions and that's how i always start i always say with my students i teach beginners from the ground up and i teach experts backwards what does that mean when a young student comes to me with no skills they learn from the ground up they start on their backs defending pins then they start on their backs working from half guard bottom then on their backs working from variations of guard they don't even get to see top position until they're strong off their backs then they go on to their knees and they start passing start standing and passing and then they work their pins and transitions and then ultimately they stand up to their feet and they work standing position on their feet so they work from ground back on the floor to ground knees on the floor ground standing and then both athletes standing is a gradual progression over time where they work from the bottom to the top with regards experts i teach them in game first they must become very very strong and what finishes the match which is submission holds okay in chess we always talk about end game i do the same thing in judetsum i start experts just looking at the mechanics of breaking people and all the sufficient holds that i teach you should know that i teach only a very small number of submission holds around six um it's interesting my students have by far and away the highest submission rate in contemporary jiu-jitsu but they only learn around six to seven submission holds i start them with mechanics where they learn the end game how to break someone once they develop in their mind the belief that if the conditional if they can get to one of those six positions there's a very high likelihood they'll win if they truly believe then when it's competition time they'll fucking find a way to get to those positions that's confidence but if you don't believe let's say you believe man if i get to a finishing position an armbar or a strangle there's only like a 20 chance i'll finish with it how hard are you going to fight to get to that position you're not why why would you but if you believe there's a 98 chance if you get to that position you'll finish you'll find a way to get down that is so powerful there are certain things maybe going back to judo a little bit as the there's a clock choke for people who are listening it's with the ghee when a purple or when a person is in a turtle position in a crouching position and this is something that's done in judo quite a bit but i have doesn't matter what the technique is i have a belief in my head that there's not a person in the world that i can't choke with that clock joke and i've done that and that it was a it built on itself the belief made the technique better and better and better now you're on to something that's exactly the mindset that i'm trying to coach but that's step one you have to believe that but you got to stop somewhere and then it's step one but then you have to create a system but it's a damn important step yeah so you coach the end game first and then you fill in the details afterwards yeah that's a huge confidence builder but i just i have to say to admit and it makes me sad but i think i'm not alone i think a majority of jiu jitsu people are like this that uh i didn't do the the beginner step that you talk about which is the focusing and escapes i think i learned the wrong lessons from being from losing i remember in a blue belt competition long ago one i was uh i think it was yeah it was the finals of atlanta ibjf tournament and there's a person that passed my guard uh and he took him out and he stayed a mount for a long time and i couldn't breathe and it was like one of those things where i was truly dominated i don't think i've been dominated just a match quite like that before and or after and the lesson i learned from that is i'm not gonna let like as opposed to working on escapes i'm not gonna let anyone pass my guard what you learned is don't take risks don't take risks which is ultimately what kills you ultimately you become the best you can you got to take risks as they say nothing risk nothing gained failure usually makes us even more risk-averse than we started we're already mentally biased being human beings in that direction and failure tends to reinforce that um i work hard in my training programs to try and correct that fold is it still possible for a person who's a black ball to to then just go back to that beginning journey i guess of course let me tell you something i'm probably going to catch a lot of flack for saying this i have a belief i won't say something i won't call it knowledge because it's not known but i have a fervent belief that human beings in most skill activities not all skill activities but i will say combat sports for sure can reinvent themselves in five year periods now you might be saying five years what's magical about five years mike tyson was 13 years old when he was taken in by customarto by the age of 18 he was beating world-class boxers in the gym and had already made a a strong name for himself in international boxing it was already a known figure it was five years yasiro yamashita the judo player began judo at 13. he placed silver and the old japans at 17. i could go on all day with examples of athletes who within a five-year time frame of starting a sport were competing at world championship level i'm going to give you a rough and ready definition of sport mastery okay i believe that if you can play a competitive match against someone ranked in the top 25 in your sport and it's a serious international sport i would call you someone who's mastered that sport okay you're damn good if you can go with the number 25 wrestler in the world and give them a hard competitive match in the gym you may not win it but you know they had a good workout you have shown mastery of wrestling or indeed any other combat sport you care to name there are numerous examples of people doing far better than that in five years winning medals at world championships and even olympic games in that five-year period this is not an unrealistic goal there is a lot of empirical evidence to show that people have done this in the past a lot of it so if you fully immerse yourself in a sport with a well worked out well-planned training program there is a mountain of evidence to show that in a five-year period you can go from a complete beginner to a very very impressive skill level to the point where you're competitive with some of the best people on the planet you can reinvent yourself in these five-year periods what happens with most people is they get to a certain level and they get complacent they get lazy and they just keep doing the same old thing they've been doing but if you're diligent and you're purposeful five years you can accomplish an awful lot and as i said there's a mountain of evidence to show it by the way as a small aside somebody who's mentioned taversky and yamashita in the same conversation you're one of the most impressive people i've ever spoken to but it's that's a small side uh so if if there's this complete beginner this is really interesting there is empirical evidence that you can achieve incredible things in a short amount of time there's a complete beginner standing before you and that beginner has fire in their eyes and they want to achieve mastery where do you place most of the credit for it for a journey that does achieve mastery is it the set of ideas they have in their mind is it the the set of drills or the way they practice is it genetics and luck those are all good in science all of those factors you've mentioned play a definite role let's start with luck okay we are all subject to fortune and fortune can be good and fortune can be bad uh life is in many ways beautiful but life is also tragic and i've had students who showed enormous promise and just tragic events occurred in their lives the vicitudes of fortune can be a wonderful thing in your life and they can be a a terrible tragedy um i've had students who who died uh for various reasons who could have gone on to become world champions i've had students who uh on a much lighter note just fell in love and just wanted to have kids and move away and that's that's a that's a wonderful thing but different direction um you just never know so luck does play some role um even things like where you're born uh the location of your physical location in the world or even the socio-economic location can can play a role which could be detrimental or favorable so yeah luck does play some role thankfully it's one of the smaller elements and i do believe that a truly resourceful mind can overcome the majority of what fortune throws at us and and get two goals provided you're sufficiently mentally robust other things you mentioned genetics [Music] i do believe in certain sports genetics really do play a powerful powerful role for example in any sport where power output and reaction speed ability to take physical damage then there are genetic elements which will help okay for example i couldn't imagine a world in which even if i i have a crippled leg so even if i uh grew up in a world where my leg was was normal and i had normal legs and everything was fine with my body i don't believe that i could win the olympic gold medal in 100 meter sprinting for example okay i just don't have enough fast twitch muscle fibers but the more a sport involves skill and tactics the less you will see genetics playing a role if you look at the middle podiums in jiu-jitsu for example you will see that no one body type is definitively superior to another you will see every variation of body type and the metal platforms and jujitsu as skill and tactics become more and more important and things like just power output over time become less and less important then you will see that um genetics play less and less of a role i'm i'm happy to say that the sport of jiu-jitsu the evidence seems pretty clear that there's no one dominant body type in a sport of judas who rather there's just advantages for one type and there's advantages for another you just have to learn to tailor your game to your body with regards to training program yes i believe with all my heart and all my soul that your training program does make a difference i've dedicated my life to that obviously i'm biased in this regard um i do believe that all of the students that i taught who became world champions would have been great athletes whether or not they had met me or not i believe that but i do also believe it would have taken them a lot longer and they may not have gotten to the level that they did they i'm sure they would have been impressive but i do believe that the nature of a training program plays an enormous difference i don't mean to say this in an arrogant way i believe that there's again a mountain of evidence to suggest this is true because you see it in many different sports let's talk for example about your country russia and its wrestling program russia is an enormous country but the location where russia's wrestling program comes from is actually very small and the population is actually very small i can't verify this but i was told once i can't verify this but the number of people who wrestle in russia is actually significantly smaller than the number of people who wrestle in the united states it's also not part of the school uh uh athletics and it is in the united states yes that's a different point we'll come back to right to that because that's also an important point but if you look at the actual numbers of people there they're actually pretty small so ostensibly if it comes down to a numbers game america should dominate at the olympics if we have more wrestlers now this the story gets more complicated because america has a different style of wrestling the collegiate style than the international freestyle that is a complicating factor but nonetheless uh what you see there is that numbers on everything rather the manner in which people are trained clearly has an impact and we know very little about the this very little reliable information about the training program for wrestling in uh in the russian states but one thing is incontestable is the amount of success that they've had in international world championship and olympic competition they are disproportionately successful despite their relatively small numbers there's nothing genetically special about them um you can talk about performance-enhancing drugs but those are a worldwide phenomenon they don't have any access to technology that the rest of the world doesn't have at some point you've got to start asking what are they doing differently in the training room and there are many other examples of similar situations my country new zealand um has an insanely successful rugby program the sport of rugby which they have dominated for literally generations despite the fact that our population is very very small compared with the rest of the country and we don't excel in many other sports it's new zealand does fairly well and sports overall but nothing like they do in rugby and you've got to ask yourself is there a culture there which which built this up and the world is full of examples of seemingly small and unpromising areas or locations putting out disproportionately high numbers of successful athletes and that points to the idea that different training programs have different success rates and so i truly believe with all my heart and all my soul that how you train does make a significant difference i would even go further and say it makes the most difference is it the only thing absolutely not we've already talked about fortune we've talked about genetics if you want to get nasty you can even talk about things like performance enhancing drugs that obviously plays a role in modern sports um uh but i do believe that the majority of uh of what creates success is the interaction between the athlete and the training program now the training program is one thing i do believe that's the single most important but right behind it is the athlete themselves okay um in my own experience uh people talk about athletes that i've trained successfully but they never talk about athletes that i've trained unsuccessfully um always remember that for every champion a coach producers there's a hundred people that they coach that no one ever heard of and this is completely normal a coach can never take the lion's share of the credit a coach creates possibilities but it's the athlete who actualizes the possibilities and so building that rapport and finding the right people to excel in your training program is also a big part of it what makes the difference between the successful your successes and your failures as a coach a range of reasons the single most important is persistence people will point to all kinds of virtues amongst athletes this guy's the most courageous the sky's the strongest these are all virtues but the one indispensable virtue is persistence the ability just to stay in the game long enough to get the results you seek but what does persistence really look like if we can just break that apart a little bit it's actually this is a great question you're asking because most people see it as a kind of simplistic doggedness where you just show up every day that's not it the most important form of persistence is persistence of thinking which looks to push you in increasingly efficient more and more efficient methods of training famously people talk about the idea that the hardest work of all is hard thinking and they're absolutely right okay coming into the gym and just doing the same thing for a decade isn't going to make you better what's going to make you better is progressive training over time where you identify clear goals marked out in time increments three months six months 12 months five years and build those short-term goals into a program of long-term goals [Music] making sure that the training program changes over time so that as your skill level rises the challenges you face in the gym become higher and higher don't kill them at the start with challenges that are too hard for them to deal with they get discouraged and leave build them slowly over time but make sure they don't just get left in a swamp where they're just doing the same thing that we're doing three years ago and they get bored and there's two ways you can leave in a gym you can leave from adversity it was too tough or you can leave from boredom everyone talks about the first no one talks about the second most people when they get to black belt they get bored they know what their game is they know what they're good at they know what they're not good at when they compete they stick with what they're good at and they avoid what they're not good at yeah and they get bored they reach a plateau and that's it my whole thing is to make sure it's not so tough at the start that they leave because of adversity and then for the rest of their career to make sure it's not boring so they leave because of boredom travis stevens actually said something that changed the way i see training he said it as a side comment but he said that at the end of a training at the end of a good training session your mind should be exhausted not your body and um i've for most of my life saw good training sessions where my body was exhausted yes i believe that's the case with most people yeah you should come out of the training session with your mind buzzing with ideas like possibilities for tomorrow and by the way on that note i would go further and say that the training session doesn't finish when your body stops moving it finishes when your mind stops moving and your mind shouldn't stop moving after that session there should be analysis what did i do well what did i do badly how could i do better with the things that i did well i can ask about something that i truly enjoy and i think is really powerful but most people don't seem to believe in that but it's drilling i don't know maybe people are different but i love the idea maybe even outside of jiu jitsu of doing the same thing over and over it's like jiro dreams of sushi i love doing the thing uh that nobody wants to do and doing it 10 times 100 times thousand times more than what nobody wants to do so i'm a huge fan of drilling obviously i'm not a professional athlete but i feel like if i actually gave myself if i wanted to be really good at jiu jitsu like reach the level of being in the top 25 when i was much younger like really strive i think i could achieve it by drilling hmm that's i had this belief untested can you challenge this idea or or first off fascinating however we're going to have to disagree no no okay um we're just going to have to start to understand what are we talking about when we talk about drilling it's a very vague term okay if you're at this moment many of your listeners are probably seen having the same thought process which is a drilling yeah i know what that is we go into the gym and we pick a move and we practice it for a certain number of repetitions and if i do that i'm gonna get better at the technique okay um they're wrong we've got to have a much more in-depth understanding of what the hell we're talking about when we talk about drilling ultimately any movement in the gym that doesn't improve the skills you already have or build new skills is a waste of time a waste of resources everything you do should be done with the aim and the understanding that this is going to make me better at the sport i practice if it's not it shouldn't be there the majority of what passes for drilling in most training halls will not make you better including some of the most cherished forms of drilling which is repetition for numbers the moment you say to someone i want you to do this a hundred times what are they really thinking about volume they're saying okay i'm at repetition 78 i'm at 80 20 more to go all they talk their primary thought process is on numbers that's not the point of drilling the point is skill acquisition when people drill don't get them focused on numbers get them focused on mechanics that's what they have to worry about i never have my students drill for for numbers ever just one two three get the fuck out of here are you kidding me like how are you gonna get better with that okay get them working on the sense of gaining knowledge that's my job i have to give them knowledge i have to explain to them what they're trying to do that starts them on the right track but knowledge is one thing skill is another if jiu jitsu was just about knowledge then all the 60 and 70 year old red belts would be the world champions they're not isn't one by knowledge it's one by skill knowledge is the first step in building skill so my job as a coach is to transmit knowledge then i have to create training programs with a path from knowledge to polished skill is carried out that's the interface between me and my students and so i give them drills where the whole emphasis is upon getting a sense where they understand what are the problems they're trying to solve and working towards practical solutions they never work with numbers they work with mechanics and feel then you have to bring in the idea of progression when you drill there's zero resistance when you fight in competition there's a hundred percent resistance you can't go from zero to a hundred there has to be progress over time where i have them work in drills with slightly increasing increments of resistance and just as we talked about earlier with the weightlifter who doesn't start with 500 pounds but who begins with the bar and then over time builds the skills that one day out there in the future he will lift 500 pounds so too that judy gatami that you're working on today is feeble and pathetic but five years from now you'll win a world championship with it you can't have this naive idea of drilling it's something you just come out you randomly pick a move and you work for numbers until you satisfy a certain set of numbers that your coach threw at you and then think you're going to get better there's even dangers with drilling there is no performance increase that comes once you get to a certain level and you just keep doing the same damn thing let's say for example you come out and you hit a hundred repetitions of the arm by judy tommy from guard position and you're all proud of yourself because you hit 100 repetitions and your body's tired and you're telling yourself man i got a good workout and you come in tomorrow you do exactly the same thing you come in the day after that and a week goes by and you've done the same thing then a year later you do the same thing ask yourself has your judy katami really gotten better no you've performed literally thousands and thousands of repetitions you have spent an enormous amount of training time and energy that could have gone in different directions on something which didn't make you any better drills have diminishing returns once you get to a certain skill level if you just keep hammering on the same thing in the same fashion for the same amount of time you stop getting better can i partially for fun partially for dallas advocate but partially because i actually believe this to push back on some points is it possible so everything you said i think is beautiful and correct but the asking yourself the question am i getting better is a really important one and you could do that in training is there a set of techniques maybe a small subset of all the techniques that are in jiu jitsu where you can have significant skill acquisition if you put in the numbers or the time whatever on a technique against an opponent who's not resisting here's let me elaborate what i've in my maybe i'm different you'll probably have to finish an example yes let me first make a general statement and i can give examples the general statement is i found that through repetitions and this is high repetitions combined with training but high repetitions against a non-resisting opponent i've gotten to understand the way my body moves the way i apply pressure on a human because it's not actually zero resistance the opponent's still laying there they're still keeping their legs up they're still doing they might not be resisting but they're still creating a structure yes they're presenting a target yes it's not dynamic so you can't master the timing of things but you can master the not master but i felt like i could gain an understanding of how to apply pressure to the human body over thousands of repetitions now for example i just just to give you an example to to know what we're talking about uh there's a guy named uh like sal hibero and sean jihabero that have this i guess the uh i already forgot but the headquarters position or something like that but putting pressure as you pass guard uh like medium passing distance kind of pressure i've did thousands of repetitions of that to understand what what putting pressure with my hips feels like to truly understand that movement i felt like i was getting much better it's it's like it's hard to put into words but that skill acquisition is it's so subtle just the way you turn your little like hips but you're already talking about a better form of drawing now you're going beyond the basic numbers and you're getting the sense of feel and mechanics which is what we want in drilling but the reason i say numbers and maybe you can speak to this but the this might be an ocd thing but it it allows you to take a journey that doesn't just last a week or two weeks but a journey where you stay with the technique for two three years and there's a dedication to it where it's a long-term commitment to where you're forcing yourself perhaps there's other mechanisms but you're forcing yourself to stay with a technique longer than most people around you are staying with whatever they're working on and you're taking that long journey and the numbers somehow enforce that persistence and that dedication um first thing that journey is a wonderful thing and if that technique is a a crucial part of what you do then it's time well invested but always understand that it comes at an opportunity cost that by spending that amount of time on that one technique you've sacrificed other things that you could have learned that could have won your matches so understand that every focus upon one element of the game comes at the opportunity cost of other elements um now as long as you're playing a part of the game where okay this is central to what i do yes okay that's fine but um just be aware of the danger of opportunity cost that's something no one talks about in the training room but it becomes very important secondly the other question you have to start asking yourself is okay that training clearly had benefits for you early on but when the point of diminishing returns starts coming and if you feel you're just doing the same thing then it's time to switch now if you feel you're still getting benefit from it by all means continue that will be a call on your part you're you've been playing this game a long time now so i would trust your call on that but my job as a coach is to look out and say okay this kid's been working across hashigorami for six months and i feel he's gotten to a good skill level if he stays any further on it the opportunity cost becomes greater than the expected benefits of continuing it and that's my job as a coach is to direct things in that fashion if i can do a good job with that then i can take them to the next level of drilling and start amping it up and that's how i keep progress over time my biggest fear is to have students run past the point of diminishing returns staying stagnant where opportunity cost comes in and they're not making the progress they could in the time that they've been working i mean that was it was almost a philosophical question for me that's what i was always in a search on because i know my mind is uh likes drilling i don't like relying on other people for improvement and drilling allows me to do something that that that is percent most interesting legs but you say you don't like relying on other people on drilling but in drilling you really do rely a lot on your partner one of the first things i do when i coach people is i teach them how to drill like that's a skill in itself and um drilling is in a sense the opposite of sparring drilling is a cooperative venture where you work as dance partners complementing each other's movement if i drill with gordon ryan and i want him to work armbars i will move my body in ways which make it an interesting exercise for gordon um i'm not just sitting there and he does a repetition and i'm okay he does 10. um i can't wait for this to be over so i can do my ten and i can't wait for all the spares so we can just spar and get over with all this bullshit um that's the sad truth of most drilling and jujitsu um there's a sense in which when good people drill it's like watching good people dance they move in unison and complement each other's movement and make each other look better sparring on the other hand is the exact opposite of that that's resistance where you're trying to make the other person look as bad as possible and once you understand the different directions in which drilling and sparring go that's when things start getting interesting you start getting fast progress yeah just uh you're absolutely right i i think i was not very eloquent describing what i mean i found myself not able to find and jiu-jitsu too many people that are willing to dedicate a huge amount of time to a particular technique i concur with you on netflix now answer the interesting question why why can't you get people to drill with you by the way if i could just shout out the people that did draw with me is usually blue belt women because they're smaller they don't like training because they get their ass kicked because they're much smaller so they're willing to improve it invest significant amount of effort into uh um into training that's that's good but their motivation for doing so is not good well yes but your motivation for drilling is because you don't want to get your ass kicked no good black belt ever i could never find a black belt that i could draw with like this this the uh now let's go back to that question why i don't i mean this i i am somebody who likes to say nice things about people so let me let me answer for you yeah two reasons because they find it boring yes and secondly perhaps more importantly they don't believe it works yeah those are good answers and now let's go further and ask the truly interesting question why do they believe that if i were to answer it in the context of russian wrestling where drilling is much bigger part is i think culturally that was knowledge that everybody tells each other in jiu jitsu that uh drilling doesn't work because they're never taught how to drill no one ever sits you down one day and says okay this is how you drill and so the exercise feels futile they don't feel the skill level is going up they don't associate drilling with increased skill level they associate sparring with increased skill level but not drilling which is a tragedy because it is a fantastic way to introduce and expand the repertoire of a developing student it's an essential part of every workout i teach i always say that game of judity begins with knowledge and builds up to skill who wins is the one who has greater skill and nine times out of ten um so to me it's a tragedy that what you're saying breaks my heart to hear that you couldn't get a black belt to drill with you that's that's shameful and i but i understand i i i sympathize with those black belts too because the way in which most people are told to drill does feel ineffective and it is damn boring they'd rather just spar they feel like they get more out of the workout and that's that's if anything an indictment upon most of the training programs around the nation would you say that drilling if you were to build a black belt world champion would drilling be what percent of their training in the entirety of their career would be drilling good great question um let's first put a proviso on it that i don't do the same thing for all athletes everyone's got a different personality and like nikki rod i can only hold his attention for two minutes at a time and uh gary tonen um five minutes uh gordon ryan five hours like uh george saint pierre five hours travis stevens five hours they are just laser focused so everyone's different let's put that down as our first proviso um uh you probably knew those answers already yeah um that's hilarious but uh as a general rule uh if i run a two and a half hour class uh you can expect an hour and a half of it to be i'm going to use the word drilling but i'm also going to say that this is too complex of a story to give now with words i would need to demonstrate it but the way in which we drill is not your standard method of drilling and then it's into sparring but if you give me a choice between a bad drilling partner and sparring i could make the same choice that most black belts make without go with sparring because you can create drilling with it like good drilling is a wonderful thing bad drilling is just a worthless waste of time okay before i have a million questions for you but i have to ask can you we've described the fundamentals of jiu jitsu can we describe the principles the fundamentals of one of the interesting systems you've developed which is the leglock system yeah anything in particular or just like a general understand what are some of the major principles of it well it's like me coming to uh miyamoto musashi and asking can you describe the principles of sword fighting you're too generous um let's start off with some context um when i began the sport of jiu-jitsu i was taught a fairly classical approach to uh jiu-jitsu which leglocks were a part of it but not an emphasized part of it um the overall culture of the times is the mid-1990s the overall culture of the time saw leg locks as uh largely ineffective it was we were told that against good opposition they just didn't work very well they were low percentage techniques we were also told that they were tactically unsound because if you ever attempted them and you lost control of the leg lock your opponent would end up on top of you or in some kind of good position and you'd be in terrible trouble um and we're also told that they were unsafe that uh if they were applied in the gym there'd be far too many injuries and people would be badly hurt and that was the received wisdom of that time and so i i didn't even would work with them at all and uh they would be shown occasionally in the gym and you'd learn them you drilled them and but inspiring i showed no interest um you probably know that change when i met the the great american grandpa dean lester who uh early in his career was using achilles logs with considerable success i met him in the gym wonderful fellow and um i give these locks as like a straightforward yes that's correct yes and um uh he went on to become a heel hooker and win 280 cc's later on in his career but we never met again after after that and uh that opened some doors of inquiry and uh well he asked this first principles question is why would you only use half the body in a game which makes a human body perfect sense so that opened doors to to inquiry and if you looked around the judiciary world at that time um the number of specialized leg lockers was very small and most of them were from outside of conventional jiu-jitsu for example you could look around and see people like romina sato had sharp leg locks for that time period in the 1990s um so they were out there they existed and uh you'd see people like ken shamrock would would use uh here hawks in competition and he had some some good success with them when i began experimenting with the in the gym fairly soon certain truths started to become evident and the most important of these can be understood very quickly and they were relatively easy to discover the first was that most people when they went to understand and study leg locking and when i talk about leg locking i'm going to talk about one specific type which is the most high percentage type this is leg locks which are performed with entanglements of your opponent's legs with your legs there are other forms of leg log but these are relatively low percentage and don't figure heavily in competition so i'll i'll ignore them most people made no distinction between the mechanism of control versus the mechanism of breaking the heel hook is what ultimately breaks the the angle but the mechanism of control is the entanglement of your legs to your opponent's legs the japanese term ashigorami literally just means like leg entanglement it's a generic term it could apply to any form of entanglement there are many options my idea was let's focus on the entanglement first and worry about the breaking mechanism second this was analogous to the idea of position before submission only you couldn't talk about it in terms of conventional positions because ashigorami doesn't really fit into the traditional hierarchies positional hierarchies of jiu-jitsu so the the the conversation was switched from position to submission to control to submission now wrapping two of your legs around one of your opponent's legs gives you many different options you can do it with your feet on the outside so-called 50-50 variations you can do with your feet on the inside and um form what we call inside foot position um there's pros and cons to both there's also methods of harmonizing the two so you have one foot on the inside and one foot on the outside you can do it with a straight uh leg where you heel hook from the outside or you can bring the leg across your center line and he'll hook from the inside you will start to notice as you work through these different variations that some present advantages over others all of them come at a price to some degree regardless of which ashigorami option you use there will be some degree of foot exposure on my part to my opponent and some degree of back exposure on my part relative to my opponent so that's the downside of it variations within those different ashigorami enable you to lessen danger in some respects and at the price of gaining dangers in others so you get this wider array of choices there's not this kind of simplistic hierarchy that you see in the basic positions of you but there are hierarchies i do for example generally favor inside heel hooks over outside heel hooks if i feel my opponent is very good at exposing my back while i'm in ashigara i generally prefer 50 50 situations if i believe my opponent is very good at counter leg locks i generally prefer my feet on the inside working with variations of uh insights and cargo etcetera etcetera so there are broad heuristic rules that we can give to to work in these situations once you start to understand there's a variety of entanglements you can use then you start getting to the really interesting ideas that as you perform one given attack one given here hook you can flow through different forms of ashigorami where you can create new dangers and avoid possible uh pitfalls in a very short time frame as you switch from one ashy grammy to another over time so that as your opponent's lines of resistance to an initial attack change you can accommodate those by switching to another form of ashigorami so that your mechanism of control is always pointing in opposite directions of his escape and if you focus on this idea of control through the legs you can completely change the nature of leg locking and take it away from what it was in the 1990s an opportunistic method of attack based upon surprise speed and power into one based on control if you can do this you can undermine many of the basic criticisms of leg locking which were prevalent when i began the sport of jujitsu for example if i can completely control and immobilize you i can perform the lock very very safely if my only way of breaking your leg is to be faster and more powerful than you nine times out of term when i apply it i'm gonna hurt your leg as much by accident as anything but if i can completely immobilize you and as every attempt you make to escape i can follow you and immobilize you in new directions then i can apply the the lock with as much force or as little force as possible and so you'll see in our training room despite over considerably more than um two decades sorry a decade and a half now of hillhawking using these methods the number of people severely injured by hill hawks is is tiny like um i would say i've seen more people injured by far by kimuras in the time i've been training that i have by heal hawks despite them having a similar twisting dynamic to them if you build a culture where people focus on control rather than speed of execution then the injury rate goes down appreciably the whole idea of positional loss everyone was critically critical of leg loss now if you go for leg locks and they don't work well now you're in trouble the guy's going to be on top of you they never make that criticism with arm bars okay you can be in the mounted position go for a number end up on bottom lose the armbar and lose position but i've never heard anyone criticize armbars on that account more importantly i believed from early on that the best place to attack leg locks is not top position it's bottom position you'll see that over 90 of my athletes attack leg locks from underneath people not on top of people so there is no position or loss you're already underneath them and so that criticism was null and void and by focusing on this idea of breaking down and distinguishing between the mechanism of control and the mechanism of breaking that created something new and something interesting there was also another advantage that i had in terms of creating influence with leg locking when you look at the great leg lockers of the past they they were basically iconoclasts they were people who came out of nowhere who just had this remarkable success with leglocks [Music] but they were just seen as unique individuals they had their game and they were good at it what was unique about the squad is you had not just one person but a team of people who came out and did pretty much the same thing these people had very different body types and very different personalities so it wasn't that one kind of body type was good at it you had tall people like gordon ryan you had uh short people like nikki ryan you had someone in the middle like gary tonin you had fast people like gary tony you had slow people like gordon um there were there was every kind of body type involved and it was like people could see this was different because it it worked for an entire team as opposed to a unique individual who had unique attributes and that started to foster the belief that if it can work for a team it can work for anyone which means it can work for me and i think that had a big effect that's why i owe a lot to those early students um gordon ryan gary tone and eddie cummings and uh nikki ryan there it was those four kids came from nowhere um uh gary had some success in grappling like low-level success and grappling before uh before becoming a full-time member of the squad but the others were just nobodies who no one had known and yet within a five-year time frame they were all going up against world championship competition and doing exceedingly well and which gives further credence the idea of the five-year program and [Music] i think by operating as a team those young men did an incredible job of convincing the grappling world that this wasn't just about well they're just different or their it works for their body type or or them as individuals it was like no if a team can do it anyone can do it and i think that's what really convinced people that this was something worth studying this is something that could be a big part of their lives but also convince you and convince convince each other in those early days when you're developing the science essentially what was missing is an entire science and system of leglocks because it's not like you knew for sure that there's a lot here to be discovered in terms of control you perhaps hadn't just like you said an initial intuition but you know you have to have enough um there's perseverance required to uh take is the johnny eye thing to take from the initial idea to the entire system is there is there a sense you have about how complicated and how big this world of control uh in the in leg locks is how complicated is it you've achieved a lot of success you have a lot of powerful ideas in terms of inside outside what's high percentage what's not what's high reward what's low risk all those kinds of things and then you also mentioned kind of transitions not transitions but how you move with your opponent to uh resist their escape through control this is how much do you understand about this world this is a fascinating question um as a general rule the most the most powerful developments are always at the onset of a project okay um let's give an example um the jet engine was uh i believe first conceived in the late 1930s just around the time of world war ii it was developed with great pace because of world war ii that obviously military research was a huge thing back then and first fielded i believe by the germans uh in around 1943. um jet aircraft didn't play a big role in world war ii they were there at the end and they did play a significant role but in terms of numbers they just weren't there so by around 1945 you had the onset of the jet age and the jet engine began to replace the piston engine in most aircraft it was it was the new way of of doing things if you look at the pace of development of jet engine aircraft technology from 1945 to 1960 it is unbelievable there was a solid decade where they were gaining almost 100 miles an hour per year for a decade that's a form of growth that i mean in the world of engineering that's that's the only time you see growth like that is on things like bitcoin and that's about it okay um uh let's put things in perspective okay um in world war ii the standard us aircraft bomber was the b-17 which was a mid-sized bomber with a fairly limited load capacity and i think top speed well below 300 miles an hour just 10 years later you had the b-52 which could fly across continents and deliver nuclear weapons and carry bomb loads of up to 70 000 pounds uh in a decade that happened i if you took a b-17 pilot in 1943 and put them inside a b-52 a decade later he would literally think he was on a ufo a ship from another planet that was the speed of development now contrast that with the speed of modern development if i took you in a time machine and i put you in a civil airliner in 1972 let's say a boeing 737 it's not that different from what you fly in today that's right flies at the same speed has the same range flies at the same altitude it's not that different the amount of progress between 1973 and 2020 isn't very impressive but the amount of progress from 1945 to 1955 or even better 1960 was staggering and so the initial progress tends to be meteoric but after that it tends to be incremental that's that with lake longs there's a guy named elon musk there's been almost no development in terms of uh space rocket propulsion and rocket launches and going out into orbit or going out into deep space and one guy comes along one john donahue type character and says it doesn't make sense why we don't use reusable rockets why we don't make it much cheaper why we don't launch every week as opposed to every few years it doesn't make any sense why we don't go to the moon again over and over and over it doesn't make any sense why we don't go to mars and colonize mars it feels like it's not just a single jump to a b-52 it's a series of these kinds of jumps so the question is is there another leap within the leg locking system time will tell um i do believe that we're in a phase now where the really big jumps have already been made and we're we're in the incremental phase at this point um what i do believe is that you will start to see new directions start to emerge where you start to see the interface between leg locking and wrestling for example the interface between leg locking and back attacks and that will provide new avenues of direction which will provide create new spurs of growth but in terms of uh breaking people's legs this the simple act of breaking legs i i believe we're in the incremental phase now rather than the meteoric phase let me ask you a ridiculous question how hard is it to actually break a leg this is something you think about i remember because i'm a big fan of the straight foot lock not again we're talking about to the standing sanagi maybe it's my uh russian roots with samba or something like that maybe it's the dean lister uh achilles lock but i i love maybe it's my body something like that i just love the squeeze of it the control and the power of a straight foot lock and i remember trying to there's a few people in competition that didn't want to attack absolutely and i remember in particular there was one one person it was a again a finals match purple belt i remember it was a straight foot lock is perfect everything's just perfect and i remember going all in and there was a pop pop pop and i couldn't do anything more it wasn't breaking it was it was just bending and bending and bending and there's damage to it of some kind but i wanted to like you know i wanted to see first of all it's very difficult psychologically because it's like can i be violent here that wasn't a whole nother thing with adrenaline you can't really think that fast but i also thought like where where else is there to go like is it the shin going to break what is supposed to break so i wonder yeah in the case of the achilles log it's going to be the anterior tibialis tendon and what's that uh let's see it runs down there's two of them uh it'll be the minor one that runs on the outside of the front of the ankle um it's not going to be the achilles tendon a lot of people promulgate this uh this absurdity the achilles tendon can rupture but not from pressure it's rather tender not the bone it's going to break the bone won't break i have seen on one occasion a shin bone break from an achilles log but there was a enormous size and strength disparity and there may have been other complicating factors too um but in the vast majority of cases the achilles lock doesn't really do tremendous damage it can do significant damage you'll definitely feel it the next day but it's of all the major logs it's the one where it is most likely a psychologically strong opponent will be able to absorb damage and go on to win a match um and answer to your first question how difficult is it to break a leg um not very difficult it will come down to what is the skill level of my opponent's resistance if your boner is not resisting and you have an inside heel hook it is absurdly easy to break a man's leg not a challenge at all um you can be a 105 pound woman could easily snap um the the relevant knee ligaments uh in a 240 pound man's leg if he doesn't know how to defend himself that's an easy thing very easy to accomplish so the basic answer is yes it's very easy if your opponent does know how to defend and they can position their foot play tricks of lever and fulcrum it becomes significantly more difficult it becomes still more difficult under match conditions where they're actively looking to position their body and work their way out of the lock then it can become very difficult indeed always bear in mind that there have been some cases in our history as a team where people have literally just let their knees snap and continue fighting always remember that submission is a choice when it comes to the joint locks and uh we've had some people who just made the choice and i i'm willing to let my knee break so that i can can continue in this match that's a tough decision to make and i admire their bravery um is there something about that just to speak to that that you you admire yes yeah it's mental toughness i would i agree with it would i advocate it no um but that doesn't mean i can't admire aspects of it who is the greatest grappler ever you were very astute in the way you asked that question you didn't say the greatest jujitsu player of all time you specified grappler what's the bigger category jiu-jitsu is the bigger category jujitsu has four faces there is ghee competition there is no ghee competition there is mixed martial arts competition and there is self-defense so jiu-jitsu has four aspects grappling typically refers only to the nogi aspect of jiu-jitsu so it's one out of four possibilities so who's the greatest jiu jitsu practitioner ever and then who is the greatest grappler ever i believe that the greatest jujitsu player certainly that i ever met and i believe of all time i i i don't want to sound arrogant on that because really you can only go with your own experiences and there are some great athletes that other people mentioned that i i just never met so but in my estimation the greatest jiu jitsu player is hodger gracie my reasoning for that is out of the four faces of jiu-jitsu he excelled in three and in two of them in particular he was the best of his generation by a landslide um in ghee grappling nogi grappling hodger dominated his generation to a degree that is truly impressive what do you attribute that dominance to by the way is there something if you were to analyze them fascinating question i'll come back to it in mixed martial arts he was at his peak i believe ranked in the top ten in the uh in the world of mixed martial arts uh he wasn't the best in mixed martial arts the way he was in grappling but he was damn good and he beat some significant people so he showed tremendous versatility ghee nogi mixed martial arts he's not really known in the world of self-defense but there's no real criteria by which you would become dominant in self-defense so that's kind of a you can't really judge people by that i'm believing i'm if i thought you got into a fight in the street i'm sure he would do just fine so i i had no concerns about that um uh so i would say that if you look at jujitsu for what i believe it is a sport with four faces i believe it's uh you you have to go with roger gracie as uh the one who went out and empirically proved his ability to to go across those those elements and do extraordinarily well in all of them he even made the um the extraordinary step of coming out of retirement and beating the best of the generation that came after him and that's sure yes that's a truly difficult sounds incredible yeah and a sport which progresses very very rapidly that's a truly impressive accomplishment um if you ask the question who is the greatest grappler that i've ever seen uh i would say i've never seen anyone better than gordon ryan um now people are going to jump when i give these two names they're going to say well daniel you're close friends with hodger and you're close friends with gordon so you're biased um i i can't answer them to that it's true i'm good friends with both of them um i'm also a notoriously cold and unemotional person and i'm saying this based upon things that i've observed if i honestly believed that i'd seen other people who were better i would have said it um that's i will that convince the people who uh criticize me of bias probably not but those are the two names that i will mention i think it's uncontroversial statement to say that uh gordon ryan is one of the the greatest grappler ever yeah gordon's obviously a very polarizing figure and people tend to react to gordon on an emotional level rather than a statistical level and that colors a lot of people's minds but i also have the benefit that i've seen both of these guys extensively in the gym and that all adds a whole new perspective like if you think those guys are dominant on the stage wait till you see them in the gym it's even a different level of domination uh above and beyond what they did in competition have they trained against each other no they never trained together they've been in the same gym i think only on one occasion when haju was stopped by new york he came back and came by to say hello and uh gordon was here at the time they they shake hands they know each other and they're both wonderful people in their own way so i'd like to talk to you about gordon hodger and george gsb let's first talk about what do you think is this very different from my perspective maybe you can correct me a very different artists yes masters of their uh pursuits so what makes hajir so good hoja was probably the living embodiment of someone who played a classical jujitsu game based around the the fundamental four steps of jiu-jitsu and and um uh like if if you took someone who had taken introduction lessons in jiu-jitsu for three months they would recognize the outlines of hodges game with many of the techniques they learned in those first three months hodger was the best example of the dichotomy between the fundamentals of jiu-jitsu but also a kind of hidden sophistication underneath those fundamentals people always say oh you know hodges game was so basic no the outlines of hodges game were basic but the degree of sophistication and the application was extraordinary and his ability to refine existing technology was truly impressive i never saw anyone in his generation that even came close to his uh his ability both in competition and uh uh in the gym so for people who don't know how to gracie basically use just like you said a very simple techniques on the surface from the outsider's perspective that uh most people learn when they start jiu jitsu like a passing guard in a very simple way taking mount and choking from mount also when he's on his back this closed guard and all the basic submissions from coast guard armbar and triangle and just that's it and being able to dominate shut down and submit so control and submit the best people in the world for many many years just like you said including coming out of retirement and beating the best perhaps by far the best of the next generation so that's that just kind of lays out the story is there some lessons about his systems that you uh learn in developing your own system excellent question the the thing which always impressed me the most about uh hodgeo was his relentless pursuit of uh of position to submission everything was done with the belief that no victory was worthwhile if it didn't involve submitting his opponent that's a mindset that i try very very hard to imbue in my students the easiest part to victory in jiu-jitsu is the one which takes the least risk so for example you will see many modern athletes focus on scoring the first point or the fourth first advantage and then doing the minimum amount of work to each out a victory once they've done that they get a small tactical advantage they realize they're ahead take no more risks and just do the minimum amount of work to get the victory hodges mindset was always to take the riskier gambit of submission which entails a lot more work and in many cases a lot more skill what i always liked about hodger is he never tried to play tactics it was always just go out there and try to win by submission and that more than anything that mindset of looking for the most perfect victory rather than the victory that takes the least skill and the least effort is probably the the thing i took from his career the most and tried to work upon in my students i always wonder what are the little details he's doing under there when he's in mount the little adjustments you know but perhaps that's like almost indescribable the the details of that control what makes gordon ryan the greatest grappler of all time so good with gordon he's also very strong on fundamentals all of my students are but he's also obviously a member of a new generation of nogi grapplers that also bring in technologies that uh weren't really emphasized in previous generations specifically the prolific use of lower body attacks especially from bottom position um this means that he can play a game between upper body and lower body which was not really a part of hodge's game nonetheless you will also see significant similarities he's got a very strong and crushing passing game to mount and a very strong and crushing passing game to the back um you will see that the major differences between the two are from bottom position hodges bottom game is essentially based around his close guard gordon ryan's game is based around his butterfly guard so one is based on outside control and one is based on inside control one focuses almost entirely on the classical notion of getting past the legs to the upper body and the other one works between the two as alternatives and sees them as competing alternatives where the stronger you become at one the more your opponent has to overreact and become vulnerable to the second so they have strong similarities in top position but are very different in bottom he has uh from an outsider's perspective a calm to him in the uh in the heat of battle that's like uh that's inspiring and confusing is there something to speak to the psychological aspect of gordon ryan yes people will talk all day about sports psychology and um they will often have heated arguments as to what's the right side psychological state to be and when you go out to compete i've never seen any one school of thought which gave noticeably better sports performance than another i've never seen any psychological mindset prove to be reliably more efficient or effective than another i've seen fighters that were scared out of their minds when they went out every time to fight and yet they were very successful i've seen fighters go out who were relaxed and calm and they too can be successful i've seen both mindsets win i've seen both mindsets lose i've seen every extreme between them what i generally recommend with regards your mind and preparation going in find what works for you everyone's different don't try to give a one-size-fits-all in something as vague and confusing as the human mind um having said that my preference i don't force it on people because everyone's different but my preference is to try and advocate for a mindset of unexceptionalism most people see competition as something exceptional it's not your everyday grappling session you know you train 300 times for every time you compete and so they see competition is something exceptional different scarier more nerve-wracking there's a crowd watching these cameras my reputation is on the line i'm going to be observed and judged and so they see it as this exceptional event my general preference is to see it as an unexceptional event to see everything else the noise the cameras the crowd as illusions the only reality is a stage an opponent on the other side of it and a referee adjudicating you and to make it as unexceptional as possible gordon does an extraordinarily good job of of doing that gordon looks more tense in most of his training sessions than he does in his competitions because he knows his training partners are typically better than the people he's actually going out to compete against and you see it in its demeanor it's one of just complete calm it also goes back to what we talked about earlier about the power of escapes gordon ryan is almost impossible to control for extended periods of time in most of the inferior positions in the sport and most of the submissions so he goes out in the full knowledge that the worst case scenario isn't that bad for him and so nothing could really go that badly wrong he can always recover from any given mistake and go on to victory when you believe those things you can have a calm demeanor then if you look at somebody who is quite a bit different than that george st pierre who at least in the way he describes it he's basically exceptionally anxious yes and terrified approaching a fight ago and he loves training and hates fighting and hates fighting so and just like you said he made it work for him but you he's somebody he speaks very highly of you he's worked with you quite a bit in training and you've studied him you've worked with him you've coached him interestingly i've actually coached george for twice the lengths of any of the squad members so my knowledge of homelessness is far greater than it is for really a contemporary squad so can you speak to what makes george st pierre who i think even though i'm russian and a little bit partial towards fedor and the the russians but i think he is in the four categories you mentioned the greatest mixed martial artist of all time what makes him so good his approach his techniques his mind his approach is certainly part of it george started mixed martial arts at a time when the sport was in a pretty wild phase um uh it was illegal to show on most american tv networks and there was talk about it being banned as a sport uh in his native canada it was banned you could only fight on indian reservations and in canada i believe his first fight may have been on an indian reservation um so the sport at that stage was very much in its infancy and it's probably fair to say that most of the athletes involved in the sport came from a training program that would probably be described as unprofessional and in um in the contemporary scene um george is one of a handful of people who started approaching the sport in a truly professional fashion it was like okay here's what great athletes in other sports do i'm gonna try to emulate that and uh his ability to invest in himself in my own experience for example uh george when i first met him was a garbage man and he would jump on a bus from montreal to new york now that's a that's a long bus ride he would come down on a friday afternoon when he finished work as a garbage man stay for the weekend and then late on sunday night he would jump on a bus all the way back to montreal and work as a garbage man um that's an extraordinary commitment for a young man to make that's and george was a blue belt at the time and so he would come down and you know we had a very talented room so uh he didn't do well in the room when he first came in he was inexperienced in jiu-jitsu and uh the people who went against were considerably better than him at jiu-jitsu so imagine investing 25 of your weekly income maybe even more new york's an expensive town 50 percent to come down and just get your ass kicked months by month yeah that says a lot let's talk about the whole idea of delayed gratification here i mean um that's that's a guy who's saying like this is highly unpleasant but i have a vision of myself in the future and i have to go through this extreme case of delayed gratification to get to that distant goal which may never happen and uh that's a that's the level of commitment and self-belief which is just extraordinary um i always laugh when people say you know george was afraid so he was mentally weak like no that's that's a very very shallow understanding of mental strength and weakness um george felt anxiety but let's understand from the start there's different kinds of mental strength and the most important kind isn't whether you feel fear or don't feel fear before you step into fight the most important form of mental strength is discipline and training that's where most people break i know dozens of people who are fearless to fight but you couldn't get them to come into the gym for three months in a row and work on skills yeah so they're mentally strong one way they don't feel fear but they're mentally weak in another which is to instill them the discipline which keeps you on a road to progress over time that's much tougher than not feeling fear before you are defined understand also that when george talks about fear he's not afraid of his opponent he's afraid of failure he's got high standards someone who's got high standards can change the world his standards were very very high that's what he was afraid of wasn't afraid of his opponent and yet that's always been the misinterpretation he wasn't mentally weak he was mentally strong as an ox okay to stay in his training regimen year after year after year and do so while he became one of the first stars in mixed martial arts to actually make money and it gets tough to stay in the training gym with people who are young and hungry and want to punch you in the face you're coming out of a luxury room living in finery towards the end of his career and still training as hard as ever that's an impressive thing and always he valued perfection and you're right that was the fear was not achieving the perfection is there something you've uh observed about the way he approaches training that uh stands out to you or is it simply the dedication no it's never just about dedication there's lots of dedicated people in the world but most of them are unsuccessful if you want to be the best in the world at anything you have to do out of the many skills of whatever industry you're in you have to take at least one of those skills and be the best in the world at it there's many skills in mixed martial arts but george identified one skill which is the skill of striking to take downs he calls it shoot boxing shoot boxing was barely even a category of skill when george began it was just the idea that wrestlers grabbed people and took them down the same way they did in wrestling and and you threw some punches before you did it okay george largely pioneered this science of creating an interface between striking and takedowns he did it at a time where no one else before him had made it into a system or a science he did it largely on his own and i've always said george is the only athlete that i ever coached who taught me more than i taught him and almost single-handedly he created this strong sense of shoot boxing as a science which enabled him throughout his career to determine where the fight would take place would it be standing or would it be on the ground and that more than anything else was the defining characteristic of his success um i will always be immensely impressed by his accomplishment in that regard he was an innovator he did things differently this is such an important point you can't go out there in combat sports and do the same things that everybody else is doing and expect to get different results life doesn't work that way if you want to be dominant you got to find one important part of the sport and preferably more than one and be the best in the world at it you can't be weak at anything but you can't be strong at everything either life's not long enough for us to develop a truly complete skill set so you've got to be good at everything and you've got to be the best at at least one thing and george was the best at two in his era he was the best at striking to take downs and he was the best at integrating striking and grappling on the floor let me ask you a completely ridiculous question but it's a fascinating one for me from an engineering and a scientific perspective when i look at a sport really any problem one way to ask how difficult is this problem is to see how can i build a machine that competes with a human being at that problem you can look at chess you could look at soccer robocup and then you could look at grappling there's something about when you start to think how would i build an ai system a robot that defeats somebody like gordon ryan where it forces you to really think about formalizing this art as a as an engineering discipline in the same way you do but you you you still have some art injected in there there's no space for art when you actually have to build the system that's not a ridiculous question that's a damned interesting question let's put aside the like like i mentioned with the boston dynamics spot robots what people don't realize is the amount of power they can deliver is huge so let's take that weapon aside just the amount of force you're able to deliver yeah yeah i'm glad you're specifying that um uh so essentially your question is okay can can a talented group of engineers create a robot which could defeat gordon ryan on the face of it um as you just pointed out that's the easiest project in the world just create a robot that carries a nine millimeter automatic and shoot them five times in the chest okay that's that gordon ryan's done um so that's not the interesting question the interesting question and i if i understand you correctly is if we had the ability to create a robot whose physical powers were identical to gordon ryan not inferior and not superior what would it take to create a mind inside that robot that would be gordon ryan in the majority of matches yeah and there's two ways to build ai systems this is true for autonomous driving for example which has been quite contested recently so one is you basically one way to describe is you have a giant set of rules it's like this tree of rules where you apply a different condition when there's a pattern you see you apply a rule and they're hard coded in you basically get like a john donner type of character who tries to encode hard code into the system all the moves you should do in every single case of course you can't actually do that fully so you're going to be taking shortcuts uh what are called heuristics just basic basic kind of generalizations and apply your own expertise as an expert of in this case grappling to see how that can be encoded as a rule now the other approach elon musk and tesla taking this approach which is called machine learning which is create a basic framework of the kind of things you should be observing and what are the measures metrics of success and then just observe and see which things lead to success more success and which lead to less success and there's a delta you like when you when you see a thing first of all the way machine learning works is you predict you see a position or you see a situation and then you predict how good that is and then you watch how it actually turns out and if it's uh worse or better you adjust your expectations yes through that process you can learn quite a lot the the challenges and this might be a very true challenge in grappling is uh in like in driving you can't crash so there's a physical world in chess for example where this approach has been exceptionally successful you can work in simulation so you can have a ai system that for example with as in the case with alpha zero by deepmind google's demand it can play itself in simulation millions of times billions of times it's difficult to know if it's possible to do that in stimulation for for for anything that involves human movement like grappling so that's my sense is if we first look at the hard encoding if you were to try to describe gordon ryan to a machine how many rules are in there do you think yeah um first off let me tell you that's one of the most fascinating questions i've ever been asked and uh i'm tremendously happy to answer this um how about what we do is this is a this is a massive question you've asked there's a huge amount of ways this could get very interesting and very confusing let's set some ground rules for the discussion um uh lex alluded to the idea of man versus machine and chess okay and i think that's a really good place for us to start the the discussion um i'm going to uh just tell people about a little bit the history of man versus chess to give you guys some uh some background on this in 1968 there was a a party in which a highly ranked not not a world champion but a highly ranked chess player and his name was levy and he met a a computer engineer at a party and they had a a a light-hearted bet that in a 10-year time frame a human chess player would be defeated by a computer now you gotta remember 1968 computing power was very very low the computers that got america to the moon were were actually pretty damn primitive your iphone would kick all of their asses so computational power was very very low in those days so interestingly the chess player fully believed that no computer could beat them in the 10-year time frame and the the computer engineer was very optimistic that he was wrong and in fact 10 years uh the computer would win 10 years later they had a competition and the human won uh decisively in fact so computational power simply hadn't risen to that level yet through the 1980s computational power increased but not sufficient to to to get to championship level there were computer programs in the 1980s which were competitive with good solid chess players but not world beaters understand right from the start that there's a fundamental problem here the number of options that the two players in a chess board can run through is astronomically high there are 64 squares on a chess chessboard the number of possible options that can could work or could play out on a chessboard and this is a truly shocking thing for you to think about the number of possible options is higher than the number of atoms in the known universe think about that for a second in terms of complexity okay the number of atoms on this table is massive okay that is an unbelievably large number then we're talking about a situation where if a computer had to go through all the options at the onset of a match they would have to run numbers greater than the number of atoms in the known universe the number of galaxies and the number of in our universe is vast okay it's measured in the billions like the number of atoms that's just a number so mind blown it's impossible okay so no computer is ever going to be able to work with those kinds of numbers okay you that i don't even know if future generations of quantum computers could could work it with those kind of numbers so that's the fundamental problem okay the number of options in a in a chess match is just so astronomically large that no computer could ever figure out all the the available options and make decisions in a given time frame so that's the fundamental problem so as lex correctly pointed out the way you get around this is by the use of heuristics these are rules of thumb which give general guidelines to action so for example in jiu-jitsu i could give you a general rule of thumb uh don't turn your back on your opponent okay that's a solid piece of advice there are obviously some exceptions to that rule but it's a good solid piece of advice to give a beginner the moment you give that heuristic rule you rule out a lot of options okay you've already told someone don't turn your back don't turn your back on someone so a lot of possibilities have just been turned away right there so you've cut the number of options in half right there just by giving one heuristic rule okay if you were decent at j it's not great but decent and you knew enough to give say 10 heuristic rules you could chop that initially vast number of options down by a vast amount and now you're starting to get to a point where if the computer had sufficient computational power it could start getting through the number of options in that acceptable time frame so that's the general pattern of the development now things started getting very interesting in the mid 1990s with ibm's computer deep blue there was a great chess champion of the late 1980s and early 19 through the 1990s called gary kasparov who had been more or less undefeated for a decade in 1996 he took on ibm's computer deep blue just to correct the record he was undefeated i apologize russian got it gotta make sure they get very nationalistic about their chairs be careful of these guys deep blue lost the first confrontation i believe in 1996 it was competitive but lost then in 1997 uh deep blue won and it wasn't a complete walkover kasparov i believe won one of the matches but uh they did unequiv er deeply unequivocally won the confrontation and it was seen as like this watershed moment where a computer beat the best human chess player on the planet and that was it there was there's no coming back from that i think it would be remembered as one of the biggest moments in computing history is is really when the first time a machine beat a human at a thing that humans really care about in the in the domain of intellectual pursuits yeah it was it was a it was a powerful powerful moment now not only was that a powerful moment but things started getting truly interesting from that moment forward because then you started having different areas of development the general way in which the progress is made from those early starts in 1968 all the way through to deep blues victory was of the use of heuristic rules that brought down the number of potential options to a manageable level as computer power increased then it could make faster and faster and wiser and wiser decisions and make them at a rate which no human even the best human could keep up with so that was the general way in which the the debate went um but things got more interesting after this with the advent of computers that as you pointed out make use of so-called machine learning there were a company put out uh a program alpha zero which can look at the basic rule structures of chess and then ultimately play itself in trial games and make trial and error assessment of what are good and bad strategies so that with no human intervention a computer could start doing remarkable things not only did uh this company create alpha zero and there were some other ones too that they fought not only in chess but in the much more complex asian game of go which has far more potential options than chester by a very significant margin yes these machine learning programs not only easily defeat any human in chess but in go as well and what's truly remarkable is they weren't just beating them when alpha zero took on a rival chess program which by itself was already superior to any human it only required four hours starting from learning the rules of chess to figuring out how to beat the second most powerful chess program in the world that's insane that's literally like taking a human telling the rules of chess they play some games with themselves for four hours and they go out and beat gary kasparov this is like to me this is a truly exciting development far beyond even what deep blue did i like how you said exciting not terrifying yeah because i agree with you on the exciting now things also get exciting in a different direction there is another possibility which few people foresaw after the deep blue episode this is where a new form of chess started to emerge sometimes called cyborg chess or centaur chess we're humans of moderate chess level playing ability not world champions just decent but not great i guess you might say like purple belts and juditson allied themselves with computers so the humans and computers worked as a cyborg team the humans supplied the heuristic insight the computers supplied the computational power and fascinatingly they proved to be superior to both the best humans and the best chess programs the united force of human insight with heuristics with computers ability to go through uh numbers in far more rapid form than any human could ever hope to do proved to be one of the strongest combinations and enabled that pairing of human and computer to overwhelm both the best single human and the best single computer that adds a whole new level of fascination to this topic so to wind things up here we've got this fascinating initial question from lex the idea of could there be a computer inside a robot which doesn't have any special physical properties this is mind versus mind because the bodies negate each other the robot is the same body as gordon ryan this is a thought experiment what would it take to create a mind that would defeat the mind of gordon ryan based on the chess example it would appear that this is entirely feasible at some point in the future and in fact i would go further and say it's actually quite likely based on what we've seen from the example of chess the rate of progress in a.i in the last 20 years or has dwarfed anything from the previous 50 years and the rate continues to increase we're talking now at a level with machine learning defeating world champions in chess and go and four hours like just from starting from the rules of the sport um this is this is going to be difficult for humans to keep up with now in humans favor could we take gordon ryan and put a chip inside his brain that created the same cyborg effect as we saw in centaur chess and cyborg chairs and then take gordon ryan to a new level where suddenly his computational powers were massively increased he still has his heuristic insight but he has vastly augmented computational powers that's the interesting battle i uh you asked a great question lex let me give you my initial push or for an answer would be that if it's just gordon ryan versus your your uh your robot technology in 10 years i would say with machine learning i say you guys win every time but if it is cyborg gordon ryan where he's part part gordon ryan with heuristics and part machine then and now that's where i throw the question back at you young man what do you think well it's fascinating to hear your answer that's very interesting because because there's a there's a lot of different ways you can build a cyborg gordon ryan so one is there's the neural link way which is basically say doing what you're suggesting which is expanding the computational capabilities of gordon ryan's brain like directly being able to communicate between a computer and the brain so most of you preserve uh most of what there is in the human body including the nervous system and the the computing system we currently have that's biological and expanding it with the computer there's also on the cyborg chest front the like magnus carlson the current world champion in chess he studies alpha zero games like that it's not a regular thing for high-level grand masters from what i understand almost every uh chess master now studies computer games for for inspiration like that just as um great chess players from the past used to go back into old leather-bound books of previous grand masters and study games and books nowadays most people when they want to study the most perfect games they actually study programs like alpha zero yeah and it's not just for inspiration it's education it's i mean it's literally part of their training right yeah this isn't like a fun side thing it's just the main way to get better so um so there's a certain element there where even our human brains can be trained by observing the partial explorations of an ai systems in the space of grappling that could be actually in simulation it doesn't have to be in the physical world it could be uh in if we construct sufficiently good biomechanical models of human beings machines can learn how they grapple there's there's quite a bit of that already open ai has the system of uh there's like sumo wrestlers with some basic goals of pushing each other off of a platform and you know nothing from the you don't even know so you have a basic model of a bipedal system it doesn't even know in the beginning how to stand up it just falls right so it has to learn how to get up and they do that through self play they they learn how to get up they learn how to move enough to achieve the final goal which is to push your opponent off of the thing fascinating so they've learned that now open ai is not those folks are currently not that interested in the grappling world so they kind of stop there but it's very possible in stimulation to then develop ideas in fact this is something i should probably do because it's pretty natural to do and easy is ideas of control and submission and all all the you know you add the ability to [Music] i don't know how to put it nicely but to uh to choke your opponent uh and uh to break their body parts off which is what is add that in and what kind of ideas they'll come up with is very fascinating i actually don't know until this conversation i don't know why i never even thought about that i've been very obsessed with just like walking and and running and all those kinds of things like evolving different strategies for when you have a bunch of so one difficult thing for robots is when you have uneven terrain and there's uncertainty about the terrain it's how to keep walking or when when there's a bunch of things being thrown at you all that kind of stuff and you learn uh through self-play how to be able to navigate those uncertain environments when there's a lot of weird objects and all those kinds of things there's no reason why you can't just do that with uh with submissions and so on in simulation that'll be actually fascinating but once we might be surprised by the kind of strategies in simulation these ai systems will develop and that might make a much better gordon ryan and much better john donohar in wait it in asking the dean lister question of like why are we only using why are we not doing x but on the actual sort of grappling event in the physical space i've been very surprised and a little bit disappointed by how difficult it's to build a system that's able to have the body of gordon ryan or a human being actually which means it's not just the the biomechanics which is very difficult to do but also all of the senses that are involved be able to perceive the world as richly to be able to there's something called soft robotics which is is incredibly difficult to do through touch understand the hardness of things we don't understand as human beings just how much we're able to touch to experience the world and to manipulate the world like the the the process of picking up a cup is very similar to the process of grappling all the feeling that you do all the leverage that you're applying there is so many degrees of freedom in both the in the interactive sense in the sensing and the applying sensing and applying you're doing that through so much of your body that's just going to be very difficult to build a system that's able to experience the world and act onto the world as richly as we humans can yeah if um if picking up a cup is a seemingly insurmountable challenge then then taking someone down controlling them getting past their legs that's going to be one hell of a project exactly i mean there could be shortcuts but i mean currently that's um that's that's the field called uh robotic manipulation which is picking up objects usually they have like a ball and a triangular object and your whole task is to like pick it up and move it around generalizing that to the human body is harder but perhaps not so so not as hard as we might think the question is how do you construct experiments where you can do that safely and chase that's very easy but here it's very very problematic um i guess you could just have robot versus robot teamed up with each other and then they learn and they're about to take on a human opponent yes exactly so you have two physical robots that interact with each other everything you've said so far suggests that many of the problems these tactical elements they're easy tasks for humans so which becomes more powerful more quickly robots that are taught to think like humans or humans that are given the computational power of uh of of computers and robots themselves which wins first a cyborg gordon ryan or an artificial robot gordon ryan really really strong question and i think i think by far the cyborg gordon ryan yeah that's what i'm thinking here the problems you're talking about uh with regards to the robots those are those are deep problems like if if picking up a cup is problematic it's gonna be damn difficult to but to a human let's say you know that two-year-old can do that you're highlighting a very important differences human beings have something called common sense that we don't know how to build into computers currently that's what picking up the cup is is some basic rules about the way this world works we're able to this is when we're children and we'll crawl around we pick up what humans don't have that machines have is incredible computational power and access to infinite knowledge computers can do that so if if you have a gordon rhine with the infinite knowledge and compute power that's just going to because we know how to do that that that's going to blow out of the water update on the um uh the phenomenon of cyborg or centaur chess there was some debate as to whether or not um cyborg chess teams could stay competitive with the uh the latest machine learning has there been any update on that yeah i believe at this point machines dominate over the machine human pairs with the human pairs when they first came out they were good chess players but not great chess players does it make any difference if you have say gary kasparov and uh and a a computer work in unison buses yeah joe blow from no no it does make a huge difference but yeah both are destroyed by machines that are interesting and it's not even competitive no no it's not competitive but they also lost interest in this kind of uh idea so i think there's still competitions between human machine pairs versus human machine pairs almost like uh to see how the two work together but in terms of machine versus human machine pair machines still dominate interesting so and and now we've retrieved back as human beings caring mostly about human versus human competition which is probably what the future will look like it's very interesting to think but like that that in chess happened really quickly it won't happen and it wasn't so painful in chess because we care about chess but it's not so fundamental to human society in uh when you started talking about cyborg gordon ryan's which really beyond grappling is referring to robots operating physical space or human robot hybrids operating physical space you're talking about our society is now full of cyborgs yes and that that might that transition might be very painful or transformative in a way we can't even predict and that very much has applications as both china and us now have legalized is autonomous weapon systems so use of these kinds of systems and military applications so it used to be there'd been a big call in the ai community to ban autonomous weapons so the use of artificial intelligence in in war just like bio weapons are banned uh internationally so you're not allowed to use bioweapons in war and actually most people even terrorists have kind of agreed on this ban it's not like a there's been a quiet agreement like we're not going to be doing this because everybody's going to get really pissed off with autonomous weapon systems that's not been the case with china has said that they're going to be using ai in their military and uh the us in 2021 just released a report saying that they're going to um they're they're going to add increasing amounts of artificial intelligence into our military systems into drones into just everything that's doing any kind of both strategic and actual like bombing and uh defense systems i presume uh a drone army would easily defeat a human army in the in the near future like um i mean think about just off the top of my head just think about the implication of kamikaze drones versus a naval fleet i mean kamikazes was humans and world war ii did terrible damage to our navy imagine swarms of of uh mechanical kamikazes which have no fear no remorse i mean but it's very uh inefficient kamikaze is very inefficient you want to be very like war is it's the same discussion to jiu jitsu right you want to be uh you want to create an asymmetry of power and you want to be efficient as in the way you deliver that power it's actually goes back to the picking up a cup currently a lot of things we do in war like so most of the drones that you hear about they're not autonomous not most all they're usually piloted by they're piloted remotely by humans and humans are really good at this kind of what's necessary to deliver the most damage targeted damage effective as part of the largest strategy have about bombing the area or all that kind of stuff i don't know how difficult that is to automate i think the biggest concern i actually have a sense that's very difficult to automate the biggest concern is almost like an incompetent application of this and uh consequences that are not anticipated so you have a drone army where you say we want to target you give it power to target a particular terrorist and then there's some bug in the system that has like for example has a large uncertainty about the location of that terrorist and so decides to bomb an entire city you know almost like as a bug a software bug i'm much more concerned about like bad programming and software engineering that i am about like malevolent ai systems that uh destroy the world so the more we rely on automation this is the lesson of human history the more we give to ai to software to robotic systems the more we forget how to supervise and oversee some of the edge cases all the weird ways that things go wrong and then the more stupid software bugs can lead to huge damage like you know even like nuclear explosions those kinds of things if we add ai into the launch systems for nuclear weapons for example i think human history teaches us that software bugs is what will leave lead to world war three not malevolent ai or human beings interesting by the way i deeply appreciate how knowledgeable you are about the history of artificial intelligence that was awesome oh no it's fascinating stuff you know i remember reading when i was a child about you know turing tests and things like this and visionaries from the 1950s had ideas but to see it come this far is just fascinating to me um okay so so what can we as jujitsu players take away from this we saw that when it comes to computers versus humans in chess tournaments humans had something truly valuable to give to the computers that was heuristic rules in every coaching program that i run i make an endless quest to search out and find effective heuristic rules that's the basis of a good training program heuristic rules and principles give vast informational content which can rapidly increase your performance on the mat just as they rapidly increase the performance of chess computers to overcome the human adversaries the great human weakness is computational power most people vastly overestimate their ability to reason and problem solve under stress in fact numerous psychological studies have shown that humans can balance a relatively small number of uh of competing options in in in stressful decision making but what we do have what is it the great and unique human gift is this idea to come up and arrive at heuristic rules and principles which turn out to be very effective guides to behavior for both human behavior and artificially intelligent behavior make that your focus in study don't try to remember ten thousand different details on a move okay that's that's human weakness not human strength our strength is heuristics make that your focus not endless computations over 25 details here merge with 27 details here that's not that's not what humans are good at the uniquely human strength is arriving at these heuristic rules and principles which guide our behavior which provides simplifications which enable us to take vast amounts of information and parry it down to a few simple rules that effectively guide our behavior take that core insight from the discussion that lex and i just had it was a complex discussion we both apologize for going a little bit overwatch that was awesome then dragging you into some details there but take that away from it love it it'll make you better at jiu-jitsu sorry legs that was uh that was a really exciting discussion and uh the depths of knowledge in the dimensions of knowledge you have and interests you have is just fascinating is there advice you have for complete beginners for white belts that are starting jiu jitsu that are listening to this they haven't done jiu jitsu i know there's a lot of people who are super curious to start is there advice you would give them on their journey uh yeah i'm just going to talk about just getting better on the mat okay because there's a thousand other things you can talk about in terms of like morale and persistence and um how often they should train is a thousand things you get break up with your girlfriend or boyfriend that's one let's put that aside um that's probably the best advice we give um it goes back to what we said earlier uh i always advocate start your training from the ground up okay your first sessions in jiu-jitsu you're going to find to your horror that everyone gets on top of you and you can't get out and it's a dispiriting crushing kind of feeling that you just have no skills and you have no prospects in the sport so your first skill is the skill of being able to free yourself from positional pins most of the escapes in jiu-jitsu go to guard position and so once you get someone in your guard they're going to be looking to pass your guard and get back into those positional pins that you just escaped from and that's just as crushing as getting pinned you feel like every time you try to hold someone a guard they just efficiently pass you by so your first two skills you gotta better get out of any pin and you gotta better hold someone in your guard so pin escapes and guard retention are your first two skills i generally advocate the idea of learning to fight from your back first and then learning to fight from on top second why because the brute fact is when you first start off you just don't have enough skills to hold top position or gain top position through a takedown so inevitably you're going to end up underneath people for most of your training time your training should reflect that in the early days as a white belt start with the first two skills you need they're not the most exciting they're not sexy skills that are going to make you look stuck in the training room but they're going to keep your life long enough to learn those sexy skills in the future that'll make you look like a stud start with pen escapes go to guard retention and focus heavily on those two when you start to get into offense start with bottom position so there's a clear continuity between your pin escapes your guard retention and then your guard itself okay you've got different options with guard some of you're going to like closed guard some of you are going to like variations of open guard some of you going to like to be seated some of you like to be supine some of you are going to like half guard as a general rule this is a heavy generalization but i'm going to give it to you in my experience most people benefit the most by starting with half guard first i know that traditionally jujitsu has been taught closed guard first and then all the other guards come after that i'm a big believer in the idea of start with pen escapes then go to guard retention and then start with half guard bottom that way you get a nice continuity between your first three skills and you make good progress over those first critical six months in jiu-jitsu what does it take to get a black belt in jiu jitsu very little [Laughter] to show up pay your fees don't set your goals low okay don't even ask yourself that question no one cares if you've got a black belt okay the only thing that counts is the skills you have i know plenty of black belts that suck okay there's a lot of them out there um don't lower your standards by saying i want to get a black belt ask yourself something much more important how good do i want to be you want to be damn good right you want to do something invest time and you want to be the best you can wearing a belt around your waist doesn't guarantee that build skills focus on that let me ask you about the fourth thing in facet face of jiu jitsu which is self defense let's say the bigger things i don't know if you you know i don't know why it's called self-defense it's called street fighting let's call it fighting okay maybe maybe you can contest us that terminology how about non-sport fighting non-sports funny like street fighting what happens if you go out on a playground you're fighting on grass they're no longer street fighting it's like tennis you have like wimbledon like grass courts and it's a whole other thing uh no is there um what do you think is the best martial art for street fighting what is the best set of uh we talked about advice for white belts to advance in in uh in grappling in jiu jitsu what is the set of techniques maybe martial art that is best for street fighting okay um again you're asking some truly fascinating questions here um the way this gets framed as a question is often condemns you to bad answers from the start this is uh as a questioner i'm i'm trying to achieve asymmetry of power and i'm winning um put you in a bad position don't worry so much about people always gonna say you know is this martial art better or is this martial arts better the truth is uh there's only one way to say this combat sports are your best option for self-defense there are many martial arts and there is a rough divide between the two those that fall into combat sports and those that fall into non-sporting martial arts where there's no uh competitive live sparring element where most of the knowledge is limited to theoretical knowledge reinforced by passive drilling if you have a choice between a combat sport versus a non-sporting art based around theoretical knowledge and passive drilling go with a combat sport nothing will prepare you for the intensity of a genuine altercation better than combat sports many people as i say these words are probably horrified to hear me say this and uh immediately going to rebut and say no combat sports is exactly the wrong thing for you to do because they have safety rules etc etc which uh would easily be exploited in a real fight and if i fought a world championship boxer i would just poke them in the eye or kick them in the groin etc you heard these arguments a thousand times um yes there is some validity to these things but as a general rule if you ask me to bet in any form of street fight call it what you want between a combat sport adherent versus someone who simply trains drills and talks in terms of theories of what they would do in a fight i'm gonna go with the combat sport guy every single time now having said that combat sports need to be modified for the use of self-defense street fighter we haven't agreed on it to him yet we'll figure it out later um what does this modification consist of well some of it is technical okay for example a boxer in a street fight now has to punch without wrapped or gloved hands and that's problematic okay your hands are not really designed for heavy extended use of clubbing hot objects there's a very high likelihood of breaking your hands mike tyson was one of the finest punches that ever lived but in one of his more famous street fights against mitch green in the late 1980s he broke his hand with one punch that he threw his opponent hit the wrong part of the head and broke his hand and he was one of the most gifted punches of all time if he can do it you'll certainly have trouble protecting your hands and when you go to throw blows um nonetheless this is easily modified and so a boxer can throw with with uh open hands or with elbows and so just a small modification and technique can overcome that problem so what you'll find is that the general physical mental conditioning and skill development that comes from combat sports allied with technical modifications and then the most important of all tactical modifications will provide your best hope in altercations outside of sports in the street or wherever you find yourself the least effective approaches to self-defense that i have observed in my life have been those where as i said people talk to theory drilled on passive opponents and generally had no engagement in live competition or sparring in their training programs the most effective by a landslide with those that put a heavy emphasis on live sparring and sporting competition modified both technically and tactically for the circumstances in which they found themselves people talk for example about how you know um and with some validity that weapons will change everything in a in a street fight there's absolute truth to that but this extends into weapons as well okay the most effective forms of of knife fighting that you'll see will be those who come from a background in fencing because it has sparring and a competitive sport aspect to it but would pure fencing be the appropriate thing of course not you'd have to modify it but the reflexes endurance physical mobility that you gained from the sport of fencing could easily be modified to play craft in a in a fight situation what you want to look for with regards street and self-defense is not okay which style should i choose should i choose taekwondo should i choose karate should i choose this variation of kung fu no focus on the most important thing does it have a sport aspect to it then once you've made sufficient progress in the sport aspect of that martial art start asking yourself what are the requisite modifications and technique and tactics that i have to to use or to input to make it effective for street situations that's always the advice that i give so let me zoom in on a very particular aspect of street fighting where uh with all due respect i disagree with mr joe rogan and george st pieron which is uh the suit and tie situation now to criticize gsp yeah yeah he's very accomplished and everything but to criticize him for a bit he made claims about how dangerous the tie is in a street fighting situation without ever having used them in a fighting situation so he made sort of broad proclamations without understanding the fundamentals so i thought i would go to somebody who uh thinks in systems what do you think is it um is it dangerous to wear a tie or not in a grappling situation versus all the other way we were talking about in a street fight here because there was nothing strange to wear a tie in a grappling competition he would be it would be uh yes in a street fight situation okay joe rogan thinks it is like the most dangerous it's like it becomes your weakest point if you wear a tie because it's very easy to choke george saint pierre seemed to have agreed with that also george added that you can grab the tie and pull the person down to a knee yeah this is this is the go to joe rogan will go for the choke george st pierre will go for the tie to the knee which i was saying is ridiculous so what do you think okay um first off i actually can speak with experience on this because they worked as a balancer for over a decade and most of the clubs i worked at did not require a suit and time but occasionally they did okay let's first differentiate between the kinds of threats when you wear a tie yes if you wear a tie if there is going to be a threat by far the more important threat is not strangulation okay being strangled by your tie is possible but it is a poor choice there are many other ways to strangle people that are far more efficient if i strangle with you you're by your tie i'm literally in front of you um that means as i go to apply the stranglehold i can easily be eye gouged at sarah sarah if you're going to strangle people on the street do it from behind and there's just much better ways to do it than that hear that joe rogan with regards to the snap down question that's that is more of a problem i always recommend if you are going to work as a bouncer with a tie wear a clip-on tie so it just comes off immediately if you don't like clip-ons then you can use a bow tie i used to work for years with uh in hip-hop clubs with uh members of the nation of islam security team that were known they had various factions but the one i worked with with the x-men and they would always wear bow ties which of course can't be grabbed now um the bow tie was that was a recognizable part of their brand a security guard so everyone knew that that's what they were if if i wore a bow tie and a security situation people would probably think that i was some kind of nancy boy and um uh and want to fight with me so i couldn't wear one so i would always wear a tie which you should become familiar with mr freeman that's the texas bolo tie which is a kind of shoestring tie which is very very thin almost like shoestring and rather short and just has a simple pendant in the middle um this is perfect if you need to wear a tie in a situation where you believe there's a high likelihood of you being grabbed because it can't be grabbed yeah there's nothing to grab it's literally like string like if if you pulled it it would just slip through your hand um that tie that you're wearing now that would give me tremendous control of your head and i could easily turn into a hockey fight situation where your head was being pulled down out of balance and you would have a hard time recovering so strangulation not really a problem getting pulled down possible problem solutions clip-on tie bow tie or if you don't want to look like a nancy boy wear a bolo tie beautiful so you disagree with joe rogan and agree with george st pierre i love it i feel like with i feel like this is an instruction we put together here on uh on street fighting it and the tie speaking of joe rogan let me ask um the following question he's uh currently doing a podcast with gordon ryan and probably going to try to convince him and you as he's already been doing to move to austin what are the chances of the donahue death squad coming in to austin and opening a school in austin and making austin home so i can attend the classes there i would definitely have to think about that um i do know that i personally love new york yes but every single person in the squad despised new york and wanted to leave for a long time so um uh what was the nature of your love for new york by the way uh it was truly an international city like i'm a big believer in the idea of of breadth of experience and if you want breadth of experience usually requires extensive travel but training people means you have to be in a fixed location working according to a schedule and that pushed those two push in different directions new york was the compromise where everyone from around the world came there so you had breadth of experience of world culture but at the same time you had a fixed location so you could run a training program that produced world champions so it was the ideal compromise um it was a fascinating thing to teach classes of over 120 people where literally the entire world was represented on the map and go outside and see the same thing it was truly uh the world's leading international city it was um it was like the world's unofficial capital a fascinating place to live so um i loved it but the squad hated it for them it was like an expensive um things they never actually lived in manhattan they always lived in new jersey or long island had to commute in so all they ever saw was the bridges and the tunnels the expensive daily parking fee so they only saw the worst of new york and um despite my pleas for them to move into manhattan they never did and so they they hated it they because when all you see of new york is the bridges and the tunnels and yeah the the parking garage that's not a pleasant thing so um i understand where they're coming from so uh then when covert broke out um uh they wanted to to move to puerto rico and uh and and work there now puerto rico is a beautiful alternative to new york it's in many ways has many advantages over new york it's physically beautiful the the uh the people are wonderful and um uh it's it's a it's a just a wonderful place to spend time um freedom low taxes all those kinds of things that's puerto rico stands for yeah it's uh texas on the other hand i know everyone in the compromise right texas is a compromise between those two actually i must say that everyone on the squad myself included loves texas i that there's no question about that i know um gordon loves it uh gary uh craig nikki that everyone who comes here just loves texas this that is incontestable um of course in texas there's uh many great cities austin has uh uh always been one of my favorites i've i love dallas i love austin um and uh it has the advantages of better infrastructure as a place to train it has a much higher population density so that you could get a larger number of prospective students and form a larger squad um it would uh it would definitely be a fantastic place to to open up a gym um i couldn't give an answer off the top of my head it would be a big move if we did make that move uh but the the basic idea would be very agreeable to everyone on the team i will say that well i'll just have to call my russian connections to threaten the right kind of people and uh i definitely would love the way you approach training the way you approach the martial arts is uh is something that's uh that i deeply admire as a scholar of these arts so it would be amazing if you do come here but either way it'd be amazing to train together let me ask a big ridiculous question what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing we talked about at the beginning of the conversation about death and the fear of it the other big question we ask about life is its meaning do you think there's a meaning to our existence here on this little spinning ball that's uh you you've thrown some some powerful questions that's the most powerful um for most of human existence the meaning of life was very very simple survival the only thing that humans cared about was just surviving because it was so damn difficult for the early years of human existence on this earth if you look at ourselves as biological agents everything about our body is set up for one mission and that is survival every reflex we have every element of our uh structure is just built up on the battle to survive and then humans did something remarkable they elevated themselves through the use of technology and social structure to the top of the food chain so that they went from extraordinary extremely vulnerable if you take a a naked human being alone and put them in the serengeti plains in africa they're in some deep shit okay if you look at a human being as a survival organism just by itself naked they are among the most feeble at that task in the entire animal kingdom you compare us with predatory animals we are weak and soft and easily killed but if you take that same human and put them in a group and you give him basic technology steel a spear a knife he goes from the bottom of the food chain to pretty much at the top and so humanity found itself in a crisis that emerged out of its own success for most of its history their only interest was the battle to survive and they they did it i don't know how they did it but they did it they got through ice ages droughts famines disease everything and they found a way to get to the top of the food chain and that's where it all got interesting because an organism whose only interest was in survival yeah had for the first time in their history a more or less guaranteed survival and so the big question now is now what we survived there's no more danger the average human being finds himself in a world now where there's almost zero danger from predatory animals where getting a meal is the easiest thing ever where getting to and from work is not problematic at all where the majority of infectious diseases medical complaints can be resolved in a hospital fairly easily and so they start casting their mind around okay what do i do now and so the minute mankind's existence became more or less guaranteed the problems shift from survival to meaning and we found ourselves grappling with a whole new issue that had never occurred to our ancient forefathers but which now becomes one of the centerpieces of our modern lives i mean when you look at your own life when you look back you think i did a hell of a good job you know uh hunter thompson has this line that i often think about that life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body but rather to skid in roadside in a cloud of smoke thoroughly used up totally worn out and loudly proclaiming wow what a ride that's which is the complete opposite of survival well not complete opposite of survival but basically embracing danger embracing risk going big just living life to the fullest so within that context what would make you proud of a life well lived when you look back you john donahue looking back at your life first i will address that question but let's first look at why hunter thompson could say that because his life was more or less guaranteed and safe if you look at animals in the animal kingdom the pattern of their life is very simple they take the least risk possible to secure their existence lions are powerful creatures but when they go hunting they typically go for the weakest animals they can kill in order to eat because they don't want to take the risk of injuring themselves knowing that if they do they die so the brute reality is the only people who can talk about having casual danger in their lives are those whose lives are guaranteed and a fascinating small tangent hunters thompson took his own life so that's that seems like a deeply human thing to suicide yes um that's a fascinating question in itself if you look at the the number of suicides per year it's a shocking shocking statistic that gets almost no recognition and yes uniquely human you don't very very few animals you see killing themselves because their whole thing is just survival and that humans paradoxically when survival is more or less guaranteed are killing themselves in vast numbers it's usually linked back to the idea of meaning because it's so hard it's it was hard to win the battle for survival but it's ten times harder to win the battle for meaning um when i think about it first off i'll say right from the back there's never going to be an agreed upon sense of meaning there's as i said there was one thing that our our physical bodies agreed upon and which is hardwired biologically into us and that's survival but once we got to a more or less guaranteed survival then all bets were off at that point you just have to start listing your own criteria and what one person will describe as a meaningful life another person will decry as is meaningless or wasted um there's something terrible about the idea that we're sitting around you know waiting for meaning to show up on our doorstep but what i find the best people do is they take charge of it and they look at their lives and in a form of authorship where they see their life as a tale to be written and they do their best to write that tale and put as much control over the the direction of this story as they can in the end we all have to just try and write our own story we all have our own interests i try to bring in the sense that even though i'm an atheist i don't believe that we go on to to live after this i'm i i believe that there's a possibility of a god and afterlife i don't say it's impossible but in order for me to believe that they exist i'd have to see better evidence than i see currently nonetheless i do believe that there is a great value in the idea of living for something bigger than yourself the moment you see yourself as the be all and end all of your existence you're in for a meaningless life and nothing will ever satisfy you you can have all the money in the world you can have all the power in the world you'll be empty inside i do believe that humans have a deep and abiding need to follow the interests of a group bigger than themselves as an individual is it ideal no is it an answer to the meaning of life nope because eventually that group will itself die out so there's a sense in which it that just plays a kind of delaying game but i do believe that in order to live a happy life meaning as a central part of that and the deepest sense of meaning not a fully complete answer but a better answer than most people give us to to find something which hopefully does very little harm to the people around you and mostly benefits them which enables you to become part of a community and to live as i said for something larger than than you as an individual if there is such a thing as the perfect conversation it would be a conversation on death meaning and robots with the great john donna john i've been a fan it's a huge honor that you would waste all your time today thank you so much for talking today my pleasure thank you thanks thanks for listening to this conversation with john donahue and thank you to onyet simplisafe indeed and linode check them out in the description to support this podcast and now let me leave you some words from john donahue himself in fighting and competition the objective is victory in training the objective is skill development do not confuse them as such one of the best ways to train is to identify the strengths of your various partners and regularly expose yourself to those strengths thank you for listening and hope to see you next time