John Clarke: The Art of Fighting and the Pursuit of Excellence | Lex Fridman Podcast #143
the following is a conversation with john clark he's a friend a brazilian jiu jitsu black belt former mma fighter and at least in my opinion one of the great ufc cornerman coaches to listen to and also he's my current jiu jitsu coach at broadway jiu-jitsu in south boston he was once for a time a philosophy major in college and is now i would say a kind of practicing philosopher opinionated brilliant and someone i always enjoy talking to even when especially when we disagree which we do often he's definitely someone i can see talking to many times in this podcast in fact he hosts a new podcast of his own called please allow me quick mention of each sponsor followed by some thoughts related to the episode thank you to theragun the device i use for post-workout muscle recovery magic spoon carb keto friendly cereal that i think is delicious eight sleep a mattress that cools itself and gives me yet another reason to enjoy sleep and cash app the app i use to send money to friends please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast as a side note let me say that martial arts especially jiu jitsu and judo have been a big part of my growth as a human being so i think i will talk to a few martial artists on occasion on this podcast i hope that is of interest to you i won't talk to people who are simply great fighters or great athletes but people who have a philosophy that i find to be interesting and worth exploring even if i disagree with parts or most of it i like alternating between historians and computer scientists fighters and biologists and between totally different worldviews and personalities like elon musk and michael malus this world to me is fascinating because of the diversity of weirdness that is human civilization i love the weird and the brilliant and hope you join me on the journey of exploring both if you don't like an episode skip it for an ocd person like myself sometimes not listening to a podcast episode is an act of courage it's like not finishing a book even though you're 80 done try it sometimes listen to ones you like and don't listen to the ones you don't like i know it's profound advice if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it with five stars and apple podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter and lex friedman and now here's my conversation with john clark you ready for this i've been ready for this my whole life all right i was thinking of doing a kerouac style road trip across the united states you know after this whole covet thing lifts you ever take a trip like that i've done a handful of long distance driving trips um up and down the east coast but also from the west coast back to the east coast and then returning to california so i've definitely done my fair share of driving in this country do you have the longing for the great american road trip i think there are so many things that i've been lucky enough to see in the world that i now at this point in my life realize there are tons of things that i need to see here in this country and a road trip could potentially be the best way to see them i think to do it effectively you need an amount of time where you can be as leisurely as possible there's no deadline and there's no i've got to make it from chicago to st louis by sundown to get to this place at this time i think you really need to be able to take your time and uh and kind of like let the road take you where you need to go it feels like you need a mission though ultimately like there's a reason you need to be in san francisco that's like the kerouac thing you have to meet somebody somewhere kind of loosely in a few weeks and then it's the as you struggle on towards that mission you meet weird characters that get in your way but ultimately sort of create an experience i think having a loose deadline is good but that's a beginning and an end point and what i mean is i don't want to have to be all right we're leaving say boston on sunday night let's get to new york by monday morning and then from new york we're going to go to philly and we've got to be in philly at 4. a vague beginning and end is fine but i think having very strict guidelines in between will rob you of certain experiences along the way if you have a time frame to get from philly to indianapolis and some awesome shit starts to happen in philly do you really want to have to cut it short because you got to be in indianapolis by sunup why do you have to be anywhere by any time for any reason really plans change plans change all the time exactly but if we're talking about um having a mission or the type of road trip i just think it would be best to have it as loose and uh flexible as possible i don't know you gotta make hard deadlines and then break them totally change the plans disappoint people break promises that's the way of life somebody's waiting for you in st louis and all of a sudden you you fell in love with a biker in new york i don't know i don't know what you're up to i can appreciate that um but on a trip like that i feel like a trip with deadlines is for a different point in your life and at this point in my life i don't want any of the deadlines because it's not about meeting someone and disappointing them in st louis it's about me not disappointing myself you want to have you want to have enough time in what you're doing to make sure that you get the full breadth of every experience that you encounter how would you fully experience a place how would you you know i i don't think i've actually fully experienced boston like how if you were showing up to to a city for a week on this road trip what would you do so i'm gonna answer that in two parts a few years ago i had an opportunity to move out of boston and the thing that kept me here no question about it was the fact that i felt like i had a um a contract with my students and i did not i felt like a great many of them took a leap of faith uh by joining my gym and like you know asking me to teach them what i know and when i had an opportunity to leave boston i thought of those people and i thought i want to fulfill my obligation to them so because i made a decision to stay here i then that summer made a decision to endear myself to the city of boston and i tried to find lots and lots of different things to do i can tell you that the coolest thing that i found to do in this city is um the mfa where they have like on friday nights they'll have like different exhibits and stuff and they'll have like little beer carts and food tents and you can go do a painting class off in the on the side very cool night of things to do but in general whenever i'm in a new city i try not to pay attention to google and i try not to do anything that i find on a travel site the best thing to do is to walk out of your hotel or wherever it is you're staying and find the most normal looking bar have a drink and talk to a bartender so people the people the people and then you can experience that town the way that they experience it even in a city where there are tons of tourist attractions locals probably visit the same tourist attractions when they have visitors come from out of town but you want to see how they view those places and how they visit them and you want to go to eat where they're going to eat like you know you're going to for the most part the north end is not a place where i would take someone and say hey this is boston's the pinnacle of boston dining because it's very touristy there are a handful of really good restaurants there but i want to know where the where the i want to go to bogey's place i want to know like the the down low spots where the hell is bogey's place it's like a little steakhouse in the back of jm curly's exactly like a shitty bar yeah it's just a bar with like bar food but i think they're like um boston it is in boston yeah it's like south boston no it's in um it's in the downtown area like um i don't know what the neighborhoods are called here honestly because they call they have an area called downtown boston and i don't even know what the hell that means i think he's near the financial district where's southie because i've heard about the southie southeast south boston but is there is there difference between south boston and southie no it's the same thing no but like you know the mythical south i think the mythical southie is uh something that's long gone now and the term now actually is sobo oh no yeah it's it's changed what who who took over what what's the you know the goodwill hunting personality that's southie isn't it strong accent those badass dudes i came here right at the end of like what was south boston so when i got and my gym is in south boston the neighborhood was just starting to change so i think as gentrification happened and they started building more luxury condominiums they were buying all these old businesses out all the mom and pop businesses and i think that kind of changed the the makeup of the community and it wasn't only because there was an influx of new young people with disposable income it's because there's an exodus of the the older people who kind of grew up and raised their families there because they were being offered humongous sums of money for their homes that they had bought like in the late 70s and early 80s so that they could develop those areas so you have a combination of the influx of new people in the exodus of the old and now you just got this totally new neighborhood in its place what do you love about boston is there a love still for boston you certainly have the love of the thing that's gone as well yeah i think i don't want to pinpoint pin this on boston because it's happening in all great cities as these areas become gentrified what's happening is the personality and the character of the neighborhood is just being run out and i have nothing against people coming in and making money and things like that but when you do it at the expense of the culture the character and the personality of the neighborhood i mean you're kind of standing on the shoulders of giants these are the people that came here and built these areas up uh it happens here in in boston it happens in all over new york uh happens on the west coast so what i love about boston is not nearly as romantic as what it might have been 15 years ago and what i used to love about new york what i love about boston is that um it's walkable um the food scene is on is on the rise here um but i think you're you're hard-pressed to find the charm that people think of when they think of old boston and old new england city see i see it differently people sometimes criticize like mit like for the thing that it is now but i think it is always like that i tend to prefer to carry the flame of the his of the greatness the greatest moments of his history and like sort of enjoy that the echoes of that in the halls of mit in the same way in boston you think about the history and that history lives on in the few individuals like you can't just look around where boston is now and be like what has boston become i think it was always carried by a minority of individuals i i think we kind of look back in history and think like times were greater in a certain kind of dimension back then but that's because we remember uh this is a ridiculous non-data-driven assertion of mine is we remember just the the the brightest stars of that history and so we romanticize it but i think if you look around now those special people are still living in boston for which boston will be remembered as a great city in like 50 years i think you're probably right but isn't there some sort of theory about the point that there's like a certain age in your life where things resonate differently to you like i think they've done studies where most people stop searching for new music after age 19. most dads you see like wearing super old clothes like the that's the style of the time period of the last great part of their life so like there's an evolution in in people and it could also be the memories of where they live and when i was 17 of course my neighborhood was the best then because i was having the most fun and we always kind of look at things through uh that that tint i think and you're right and i don't think there's anything wrong with the way cities are evolving now it's just not um i i i prefer the time of like a mom and pop store not a fabricated like uh gastropub that could just be like on a four-lane super highway on your on your way out of epcot center and it's actually owned by like some conglomerate but there's still the special places like i this takes us back to the road trip is um maybe i tend to romanticize the experiences of like the diners in the middle of nowhere what would you say makes for like it feels like life is made up of these experiences that are that maybe on paper seem mundane but are actually somehow give you a chance to pause and reflect on life with like a certain kind of people whether like really close friends or complete strangers maybe alcohol is involved in the middle of nowhere it seems like road trip facilitates that if you allow it to like what do you think makes for those kind of experience have you had any i think in the context of a road trip i think it's like hyper localization and i think it is um those those experiences along the way with people and the people that you're with will color the experiences differently depending on the person the road trip you took was uh with somebody else or along so i've driven up and down the east coast several times when i drove from la to new york my friend was on the run from the cops yeah so we were trying to get traffic tickets yeah yeah we were trying to get out of la because um he was going to have to go away for a little while yeah so we drove from la and we just you know we're young kids we had no idea what we were doing and we drove east and then you know we had an unbelievable trip mostly because we didn't really have a destination we didn't really have a time frame thank goodness uh because he got arrested again in pennsylvania so we got kind of stuck there and then um you know and then we we drove back to la when he got out in pennsylvania um but all the stops along the way were kind of like weird things like you have no money right so you're finding that like a little diamond in the rough place to eat the diner you talk about like that place i i once was in where was i i think i was in buenos aires and the guy that i was with he said i know this quaint little spot around the corner and i was young i was like 25 and i thought the coolest thing in the world would be to be such a citizen of the world that you know these quaint little spots around the corner in like all these great cities like i know where to get this great chicken sandwich in argentina i know where to get this great meal in costa rica i know where to get this super local like um egg in another country i always thought that that was really cool the ability to do that anywhere in the world you get closer with that guy went out through the trip i found that like so i took i took a trip across the united states with a with a guy friend of mine we had different goals i was searching for a meeting in life and he was searching for um what's the politically correct way of phrasing it but just uh basically trying to sleep with every kind of woman that this world has to offer what's the difference between those two things well i guess the different kinds of meanings i i mean i just i i still think that you can't find meaning between a woman's legs i suppose uh that maybe they tried all of them but there was a tension there we grew closer with those experiences but we've gotten in fights you know there was a lot of like literal almost fights and then we were close and there was like silences but then we were like brothers and this whole weird journey of friendship that we went on i think anytime you spend that much time in uh like a small space with another person you're gonna have the the different parts of the relationship will manifest themselves you'll have the periods of closeness you'll have the periods of vulnerability where it's like maybe you're driving through denver and it's three in the morning and you talk about something you might not have otherwise talked about you'll have the periods where you don't want to see that motherfucker ever again right he didn't and depending could be because of anything yeah um but the guy that i drove twice with we are still we're still in contact we're still buddies we we have very different goals also um but at that point in our lives we were not we never even contemplated the meaning of life we were about probably more to the point of the friend that you drove with we were more about racking up experiences whatever they were right i want to be able to retell this hmm stories yeah i want to be able to retell this and it's got to sound cool like i don't want to retell a story about yeah and then we drove through alabama and they've got a lovely library and i checked out this book and you know i'm not interested in retelling that do you remember any um well this is a kids show do you remember any stories that the kids would enjoy from those times they were profound in some kind of way there were some impactful moments on the beginning of our road trip where we had no money and as a couple of kids who knew nothing we literally had to we stopped in vegas and we went to circus circus at the time they had three dollar blackjack and we had like 12 bucks and my buddy was a kind of a degenerate gambler so he knew what was up i was just like kind of stuffing chips in my pockets making sure we could pay for the gas um and just being at a point which is like a starting line and like we drove from la to vegas which is only about four hours and being at the starting line and realizing like we may not even like get off the starting line here and if we don't what are we doing we're going to be two guys stuck in vegas with no money we can't go west because you're going to get pinched we have no money to go east what the hell are we going to do we're going to wind up in vegas so you know that that was kind of a profound thing where you just it's a turning it potentially could have been a turning point in our lives had we not made enough money to to continue going east that's the beautiful thing about road trips when you're broke it's like in retrospect everything turned out fine but you're facing the complete darkness the uncertainty of the possibilities laid before you and like i don't know if you were confident at that time but like i was really full of self-doubt like just like all i could see is all the trajectories where you just screw up your life like what am i doing with my life i'm a failure like all these dreams i've had i've never realized i'm a complete piece of shit all those kinds of i had no concept of consequence i i like i was i probably had toxoplasmosis i had literally no concept of consequence immediate gratification was all i cared about oh so existentialist yeah it did not it did not even enter my mind at in my like early 20s that anything that i was doing at that point could reverberate for the rest of my life i think part of me didn't even think i'd make it this far and so i was not interested in like the long play i remember thinking like why should i be acting now in a way that might impact a point in my life i never reach and yet now you are a man who searches for meaning in life at least i would say to put another way you have um you think deeply about this world and in a philosophical context while also appreciating the violence of hurting other uh friends of yours right on a regular basis so what why do you think i mean maybe there's a broader question there but also a personal question it seems that people who fight for prolonged periods of time like jiu jitsu people mixed martial arts people even military folks become overtime philosophers what what is that is that is there a parallel between fighting and violence and the philosophical depth with which you now have a from the starting point of being the full existentialist of like just living in the moment to like being uh introspective uh human now i would say to that being a a soldier or a warrior uh hundreds of years ago is probably what started the marriage between martial arts and philosophy if you're constantly under someone else's charge and you're told to go out and walk in a line and you know overtake some germanic tribe somewhere and that happens all the time um your job is being a soldier there's on any given day you might not come home so i think that you have to start your day by thinking deeply about how you've lived to that point and the people that are living in and around you and how you've treated them and i think that probably is what started the marriage of being kind of like a philosophical martial artist you've got to really like on a daily basis take stock of of what's going on around you and inside you because we all suffer with this kind of uh idea if today's my last day did i do it right and we don't really do it so much nowadays because we're so comfortable but if we're being marched out to war every day i think you'd see people live a little bit differently uh you know and you that you treat the people around you a little bit differently do you think there's echoes of that in just even the sport of uh like grappling and jiu jitsu where you're facing your own mortality we don't really think of it that way but to be honest i think that a lot of people that train in a martial art in contemporary society i don't consider them all martial artists i think just because you train a martial art does not mean you're a martial artist there are so many people that use martial arts as a form of exercise and like this little piece of um self-concept they use martial arts as a tagline in their instagram bio and it's really a form of exercise it's something they do it's not something they are and i think there's a big difference there there's a bunch of stuff mixed up in there because the instagram thing is something you do for it's also it could be something you are for display versus who you are in the private moments of searching and thinking and struggling and all that kind of stuff instagram is a surface layer that much of modern society uh operates in which is really problematic because there's that gap between the person you show to the world and the person you are in private life and if you make majority of your project of the human project of your sort of few years on this earth the optimization of the public instagram profile then you never develop this private person but it does seem that if you do jujitsu long enough it's very difficult not to fall into like this has become a personal journey an intellectual journey because like if you get your ass kicked thousands of times there's a certain point to where that maybe it's like a defense mechanism but that turns into some kind of deeply profound introspective experience versus like exercise yeah so let me let me go back first and address the instagram point which i think there's a difference between people who whose instagram is intrinsically tied to their profession and they have to put a specific profile out there and i think in general people who truthfully are their businesses tied to their instagram profile i want to exclude them i think that most people instagram is how they want to be seen and it's not always congruent with who you are but i think there is a level of dishonesty there yeah like this is how i want people to see me i'm gonna put all this stuff in my instagram bio but that's really not me and when you do that um i think it's it's a little disingenuous and you're right there's not you're never really going to marry those two things together and it gets tough let me uh sorry to interrupt let me push back on something that's a good time to address uh the the many flaws of the great and powerful john clark okay uh le le let's let's go there because it's interesting you strive so hard for excellence in your life and for extreme confidence that you are visibly and physically off put by people who are who have not achieved competence do you think we should be nicer to the people who are those early like you mentioned a person who first picks up an art picks up is becomes vegan starts throwing crossfit start doing jiu jitsu for the first time and create that as their you know they're they're struggling through this like who am i and they're really overly proud and it's kind of ridiculous and you and your wise chair i've seen seen many battles yeah that you see the ridiculousness of that i tend to i'm learning to give those folks not to mock them and and to sort of give them a chance to do their ridiculousness because i think i was that too let me first clarify i want to be clear about what you mean when you say a level of competence now i i've never won a world championship i've never you know there are plenty of things in my life where i've not achieved what um most people would consider to be the penultimate level of success now that's accomplishments it's accomplishments it's ribbons it's things like that and it's not that those things don't mean anything to me and the fact that i haven't in some arenas is uh is something that i want to change which is we can talk about that in a second but i think that there's a difference between the very eager noob of whatever it is they're doing who does the thing so that they can signal they do the thing that's the person i have less respect for so we know each other primarily through jiu jitsu look at a jiu jitsu tournament there's this there's this idea that people espouse online i respect anyone with the guts to get on the mat and put it on the line and sign up for a tournament that is the biggest load of shit i have ever heard this is great do you know do you know how easy it is for you to put your name on something and pay the registration fee and walk in there that's not the hard part that's the easiest part i don't care if you lose your first match but i respect the person who signs up for the tournament registers for the tournament goes on a diet loses weight the right way trains their ass off and does the things properly and then goes on the mat the person who simply signs their name on the registration form and jumps on the mat if they haven't done these other things they actually have nothing to lose because what they've done is they've stepped onto the mat in the ring in the cage with a bucket full of excuses yeah sure you signed up but when you but you you're not really vulnerable because you didn't run you didn't do this you didn't do all the things you're supposed to do the person who eliminates every possible excuse and then steps on the mat and gets their ass kicked in the first round i have so much more respect for that person than the person who does nothing and maybe unnatural ability wins a couple of matches and then you know writes on facebook on how i lost to the eventual champion that's worth zero that's worth zero and in that process what did you learn about yourself you learned about yourself that you've got a natural level of aptitude for whatever this activity is that you're doing but you didn't actually learn how to maximize it through training and through dedication and through all these other things uh i'm i'm an incredibly interested novice musician i love i like to play bass but i don't put that on anything and you know i stink at it i would really love to be sick at it i'm currently not but like i'm not running around you know talking about entering you know any of those other things like i i do it it's for myself and i want to i want to reach a level of competence in that so the person that you have respect for the person who takes it fully seriously takes takes the effort fully seriously so for base that would be that you agree with yourself that you're going to perform live and just in your own private moments your private thoughts you're not going to give yourself an excuse out like i'm just going to have fun it's just a nice experience you're going to you're going to think i'm going to try to be the best possible bass player given given everything that's going on in my life but i'm going to do my like actually and put it all on the line and if i fail that it that's not because i didn't try it's because i'm a failure exactly and then and then sit in that sick feeling of like i'm a failure but isn't that an important thing to know absolutely but there there's a there's a that's like the best thing it could be but sometimes it's fun to lose yourself in the in the in the bragging in the yeah in the lesser ways of life and i think i'm careful not to uh because too many people in my life when i brought them with like a little candle of a fire of a dream they would just go like you know they would just blow that fire out uh that they would dismiss me because they see like you know i would say i said i've said a lot of ridiculous stuff but the one you know i've always dreamed about uh like putting like i always dreamed of having this world full of robots and you know every time i would uh bring these ideas up they'll be shut down by the different people by my parents but you know uh you know then you need to first get to get an education you need to succeed in these dimensions in notice you do all these things you have to get good grades you have to like there's all this stuff that it's indirect or direct ways of blowing out that little ridiculous dream that you present and it's like you know i remember sort of bringing up i don't know um things like becoming a state champion and wrestling right it's a it's a weird dance because of course the coaches will tell they'll kind of dismiss that it's like okay okay uh but at the same time it feels like in those early days you have to preserve that little little fire that's like johnny i don't know if you know who that is as a designer at apple he was a chief designer he's behind most iphone all that stuff and he he always talked about that he wouldn't bring his ideas to steve jobs until they were matured because he would always shit on them uh he would he wanted them to like little as little babies like live for a little bit before they get completely shut down and i always think about that when i see a beginner sort of bragging on instagram you have to be careful let them play with that little dream you know are you playing with a little dream that you're nurturing and you're trying to take that little flame and you're trying to create a a roaring blaze with it or are you playing with the idea of it and behind behind that there's no substance it's hard to know the difference that's what i struggle with is it i don't think it necessarily is certainly you're wrong and when i say instagram i don't want to impugn a bunch of strangers but i have a gym with a lot of members and and i can tell you that the number of years i've been in the gym when someone comes to me and says this is my goal i don't i don't tell them yes or no in general but i know i can tell by the way they say it to me i can thin slice it i've seen the look on people's faces and when people start to like say they want to do x y and z i know right off the bat this person is either going to put an effort in or they're not going to put an effort in so to me it's about the effort behind that if you're busting your ass and you're a newt at something and you're brand new but you're working really hard and you have a series of like moderate successes in that like that's the guy i want to champion because that persistence and that grit over time those successes will no longer be moderate they'll be huge but the person who's having moderate success by doing nothing chances are they'll never learn to put that work in and the successes will never grow you have an admiration for mike tyson i love him i'm just gonna let that sit for a brief moment um why i think there's a combination of factors one is like the timeliness of his career and like the age i was when he like came to prominence um the raw brutal violence and the raw brutal honesty when he speaks i think it's easy for people to hear him or see his life and cast him aside as some simeonesque uh like just cretin scourge on society but when you hear him speak like this is not a guy who's unintelligent this is a guy who knows himself better than probably most of us know ourselves it's disarming and uh you know that's a humongous part of my admiration for him who is mike tyson because you there's it feels like there's similarities between him and you there's a it feels like there's a violent person in there but also really kind person and they're all like living together in a little house and you're the same there's a thoughtful person but there's also a scary violent person and they're like having a picnic they're having a picnic i think there are dialectical tensions in everyone these like opposing forces yeah that are constantly pulling at you and at different points in your life like it's sliding scale and i think that uh certainly when i was a younger person there was a lot more manifestation of the violence and a lot less of the kindness um people who were not as close to me probably saw more of the violent side only the very close people to me saw like what would pass for the kind side and now that's sliding in the other direction uh and i i worry actually sometimes that there could be a situation where i need that old version of me and he's getting further and further away and i can't call him up if i need him and that that concerns me to it to a certain degree the sad aging warrior seeing his greater self paid away like but you still compete is that that person return it seems like for mike tyson that person returned at the prospect of competition it returns but i've learned i've learned better how to manifest it in competition in terms of like the effects that that type of emotion has on you physically in the middle of a competition so i've better learn how to utilize that energy but i think another side effect of this is like having a gym where you're a bigger guy and you're the head instructor you can't be as mean and violent as you once were because you're also now trying to run a business and you spend so long so many so many years trying not to be mean and to you know soften your your technique a little bit that that all of a sudden just becomes who you are and and i don't necessarily like that so i've been trying to reclaim that a little bit uh on the mat but i think in competition there's there has to be an athlete really wants to score the points a fighter really wants to incapacitate you and put you in a position where they can do their own bidding and the result in a jiu jitsu match might just still be two points but the motivations are very very different what do you make of tyson and joe rogan saying that he was aroused by violence do you think that's insane do you think that's deeply honest for him and do you think that rings true for many of us others who practices in different degrees i don't i can't speak for a lot of people and i think that it's was a brutally honest statement by him and i think it's something that even if a lot of people feel it they're not that comfortable admitting it or saying it yeah but i think like there's there is great joy in like landing a flush right hand on someone's jaw and then watching them crumble you don't even feel it you ever play baseball as a kid you can hit a bass hit off the end of the bat and it will sting your hands because of the way that you hit it you can hit a home run and you won't feel anything and it'll just feel so good in your hands and that's i think that like one of the the joys of uh physical contact when you do it the right way and that goes for all physical contact when you do it the right way the physical pleasure you can derive from it and the mental pleasure it's uh it's unparalleled but that's different let me draw a distinction i'm not i've had the fortune of being a wrestler and i would draw a distinction between a very well executed and competition double leg single leg takedown or a pin there's some as an ocd person there's something so comforting about a well-executed pin because it's like two seconds and it's just like everything is flush and nice and it like it's all clean and i mean okay this ocd person who likes to align so it's just beautiful okay that's good technique wrestling also provides you maybe more than other sports the feeling of dominating another human yes of breaking no not just of them being very cocky and very powerful you feel this power of another human being and then you breaking them and like i'm not as honest as mike tyson but that's that uh uh i don't think i've ever sort of looked in the mirror and said like that that was in i enjoyed that aspect of it but it certainly seems like you chased that so when i was a wrestler in high school um i lost so many matches because of over aggressiveness um like you know i would pick the top position and let you stand just so that i could do a matt return and i wasn't trying to return you to the mat i was actually trying to like drive you through the mat and through the ground like i took like i it gave me joy to do that yeah like it wasn't like i was trying to you know just return you to the mat so that it could pin you that what you just talked about like the the dominating another person i used to look at that as you've got someone who in theory is equally trained and equally skilled as you are and you're you're absolutely out there totally dominating them there's joy in that you could get in an mma fight and you could take someone down and you can mount them and all that feels great but when you start raining down the punches on their face from mount and like dropping elbows and stuff like there's another level of satisfaction there and it's it's tough to describe and i don't think that it's everyone uh is made for it when i was a i think when i was a senior in high school my wrestling coach said look you've got to stop with all this crazy aggressive wrestling like they try to turn me into a technician and and it and it did work to a degree and it was a humongous shift for me in terms of success but it wasn't the same level of enjoyment out of it um like i mean i got disqualified from new england because my coach said crossface and i cross-faced and he said harder and i basically wound up and blasted a kid in the face and his nose got you know busted everywhere but i didn't think not to do it because that felt good it felt good to cross-face him like that i was that was a lot of like that's a weird american warrior ethos that i've picked up but i also have them either the russian the setia brothers that don't see it don't see it as that they they don't get draw they think that there is a tension between the art of the martial art and the violence of the martial arts i agree it's a poetic way i could put it but they're not so fascinated with this dan gable dominating another human they think of the effortless the effortlessness of the technique and your mastery of the art is exhibited in its effortlessness how much you lose yourself in the moment and the timing that just the beauty of a timing like there's much more like one example in judo but also in wrestling you can look at the foot sweep wrestlers in america and even judo players in america much of the world don't admire the beauty of the foot sweep but a well-timed foot sweep which is a way to sort of off balance to find the right timing to just effortlessly uh change the tape turn the tables of uh dominate your opponent is is seen as the highest form of mastery in in russian wrestling and in case of judos and in japanese judo it's interesting i'm not sure i'm not sure what what that tension is about i think it actually takes me back to i don't know if you listen to uh dan carl in hardcore history and genghis khan if you've ever i've read a great great book on jenga's god yeah i'm so i'm still trying to adjust most of my life said genghis khan but the right pronunciation is uh actually changus khan there's a tension there we kind of think i don't know we i kind of thought as genghis khan as a ultra violent a leader of ultra violent men but another view another way to see them is the people who warriors that valued extreme competence and mastery of the art of uh fighting with weapons with bows with the horse riding all that kind of stuff and i'm not sure exactly where to place them on my sort of thinking about violence in in our human history i think in the context of like combat sports i think there's a difference between an athlete winning a contest under a certain set of rules and a fighter winning a fight under those exact same rules there's a different approach to it and i don't think one is any better than the other um like in mma i think a great example would be george st pierre george st pierre is a tremendous it's a tremendous athlete and he considers himself to be a martial artist first he's trying to win an athletic competition like nick diaz is trying to bust your ass yeah right there's a different approach to it and yes they've had different results at the highest level of competition but it's difficult to attribute the difference in results just to their approach to the sport because they're different human beings with different abilities and different different uh physical attributes um the saito brothers have that luxury of being able to talk about the beauty of a perfectly timed slide by right there are other wrestlers that will never be able to pull that off and therefore they have to pursue other ways to defeat someone and maybe it is the dan gable breaking a man's spirit by outworking him type thing which is beautiful in its own way uh but we we we tend to self-select the ways in which we're able to be successful and then kind of take a deep dive into that what do you think is more beautiful brute force or effortless execution of uh technique that dominates another human i think it's a subjective thing based on what skills you perceive yourself to have i'm never i've never been a slick uh super athletic dexterous competitor in anything and i've always been more of an i've got to outwork you i've got to outgrind you i gotta help mean you and so because i've lived that i tend to see the beauty in that more because i have a perceptual awareness that i don't have for the people who have the luxury of being very slick and athletic and and using beautiful technique now that said there's a phenomenal little video the other day i sent to a friend of a compilation of foot sweeps by leota machida in mma and they're so beautiful and they're so awesome and it's not that i don't have an appreciation for those but i can't emulate those because i lack the physical ability to do that whereas i i at least have a chance to emulate some of the people who do it through grit and throughout working people but i would love to return to genghis khan and get your thoughts about like i have so many mixed feelings about whether he is evil or not whether the violence that he brought to the world had ultimately the fact that he had maybe kind of uh like dan carlin describes cleansed the landscape it's like a reset for the world through violence had ultimately a progressive effect on human civilization even though in the short term it led to massive you could say suffering i don't know what to make of that man what uh what are your thoughts on jenkins gone um i think it's always difficult to look at a historical figure and their actions of their time through a modern day lens because it's very it's easy for us to um kind of you know impugn their achievements and the things that they did and say oh well you know what he did was wrong well of course that can be true but a lot of times we don't actually have any real good context or concept of the the times they were living in and what really was deemed wrong and what really wasn't we're looking at it through a very cushy modern lens that being said from what i've read about genghis khan uh yeah he was a violent dude but also he gave you an option he when he when he got to a village he said look i'm gonna we're gonna you have a choice you can come with us or you can run and you know he gave them an option to join uh his legion of fighters who he took very good care of you know he was the the first military leader uh to pay his soldiers families when they died and he did that based on the the booty that they got when they raided a village he took that money he took his share and they divided that up amongst the soldiers and then the soldiers families i think he also is credited with uh first like horseback male roots or something like that right isn't he the godfather of the modern postal system or something something like that yeah he's the bernie sanders of the uh uh the mongol empire i do think the the offering of surrender is an interesting one because um it's interesting like as a thought experiment whether you would sacrifice your way of like the pride of nations or the nationalism pride of your country whether you're willing to give that up uh for uh you know to survive it depends on who depends on you if you have a if you have a family and like young kids and stuff like that i think your your obligation is primarily to them and therefore surrender has to be something that you consider in that in that moment in time so that you can uh take care of those people if you're a man alone and you've got like all these principles and all this other stuff and you just don't you're not down with what genghis khan is doing and what he's selling yeah try and escape do your thing and just know that you know what wait's on the other side of that for you potentially but i think if there's someone else out there that depends on you your obligation should be to them it feels like historically people valued principles more than life in this weight of like what do i value more the principles i hold versus survival it seems that now we don't value principles as much your principles could be also religion it could be your values whatever we're okay sort of sacrificing those for to preserve our survival and that applies in all forms like actual survival or like on social media like preserving your reputation all those kinds of things it seems like we especially in america value individual life that death is somehow a really bad thing as opposed to saying sacrificing your principles is a very bad thing and everybody dies and it's okay to die as what's horrible is to sacrifice your principles of who you are just to live another day i think a big problem is people don't really even know what their principles are anymore people you know um social media and just the way that we live nowadays where we're separated from the human contact like this like we're not you're not contacting people in a community anymore you're not whether you're religious or not like you're not you're not congregating at a church you're not part of a parish like you would be like in you know down south you're not part of that community anymore and so it's difficult to figure out what your principles and values are because you're constantly jumping from one bucket to the next uh online and you don't get a lot of like direct like reasonable feedback from people you just get dipshit feedback like oh you don't believe this well you're a jerk i think the hard thing currently is having the integrity and character to stick by principles one under i don't want to equate murder of in the genghis khan times to uh social media cancer culture but it certainly doesn't feel good when people are attacking on social media and it does take a lot of integrity to uh without anger without emotion without without being without mocking others or attacking others unfairly standing by the ideas you hold or in another way standing by your friends standing by this little group like loyalty of the people that you know are good people i find that uh in in cancer culture one of the sad things is whenever somebody gets quote unquote cancelled everybody just gets all their friends become really quiet and don't defend them or worse i mean quiet is at least understandable they kind of signal that they throw them under the bus i guess uh is one way to put it and that that's something i think about a lot because from coming for me it's like i i hold an ethic i don't know if others hold this ethic maybe it's this like russian mobster ethic of like you should help your friends bury the body you shouldn't criticize your friends for committing the murder like there are certain levels of like you know yeah you have that discussion after you bury the body that like maybe you shouldn't have done that murder thing right uh i don't know you know i understand that that's a problematic um what's the terminology that's a problematic ethical framework within which to operate but at the same time it feels like what else do we have in this world except the brotherhood the sisterhood the love we have for a very small community but perhaps that's the wrong way of thinking perhaps the 21st century would be defined uh by the dissipation of this community of this loyalty concept no we're all just individuals i think you're right and i think you have to have some sort of core framework of principles and beliefs that you operate on and i think when i was what i was referencing is a little bit different and but to speak to your point you you need a framework um of core principles on which you can then base a lot of your other decisions like i believe these three things to be true whatever they are and that will help inform other decisions you make in your life as far as how you treat your friends i've got i've got probably three friends that if they called me right now and said let's bury the body sorry lex i gotta go there are other people in my life that if they said uh hey we've got to go bury the body i would say who is this you know yeah so i think it it depends on the relationship i want that's a good it's a really good measure i would love to have i would love that to be in your profile people put like pronouns i would love to put like uh honestly like objectively not self-report but objective how many people in your life if they committed murder you would not ask any questions and you would help them hide the body right like i would love to know that number for people yeah and and i think it's a weird thing too because you think right away like okay it must be the group of people that are the closest to you that's who you're first thinking of right but obviously for like my best friend i would do it no question about it but i've got other people that are close to me that are close to me in other ways and i probably wouldn't do that only because i don't think they do it for me yeah and and that is a consideration um so i guess is the principle there then that you do for your friends what you think they would do for you is that the underlying principle or do you just have a blind loyalty to you know people in your life for different reasons i got people that are not on my inner circle that i probably wouldn't help change a tire at two in the morning if they were on the highway but if they called me and said hey we got to bury the body i might show up for that it's just these weird different connections yeah it's fascinating yeah i have uh close friends that like i probably exactly the tire is a good example would be like can't you find somebody else to do this i think part of that is just this leap of faith into like giving yourself to the other person that uh creates a deep connection that makes life fulfilling like meaningful that doesn't exist if you don't take that leap i mean it's not about the murder we're sort of focusing i think that's a i think you have to uh what does it cross that bridge when you get there i'm not exactly sure this is just a thought experiment but it's it's i think about that a lot especially these covet times and as like people become more and more isolated and separated from each other like how important is it to have those deep deep connections to other humans i think especially like what you're talking about there have you ever seen the movie the town there's a great line in the movie where one of the main characters walks into his friend's house and he says i need your help we're going to go hurt some people and you can never ask me about it again and the friend looks up and he says whose car we taking that that is the type of person you need in your life and the people like there are people that will walk through that door and say that to you and you drop everything you're doing and then there's the people that walk through your door and you're like you know what i got a hot pocket in the microwave i'm a little bit i'm a little bit tied up right now but i'd love to help you out but you know i don't want to do that and you don't have that that deep connection with those people you mentioned uh some principles that you've uh changed your mind on is there do you want to go there is there some interesting principles and the process of changing that uh is useful to talk about i can't really cite a specific thing except that understanding that the principles that you have at different points in your life can change and it's okay to change them without being a total pussy and being bullied by other people into thinking what you thought was wrong if you come to these conclusions of your own volition and you decide to change them that's great and it can be really it can be really liberating it's really liberating to have an idea that you hold so true to your your core belief system and then to actually have someone change your mind for you and be okay with it as opposed to being like no i gotta die with this i gotta die with this it's really liberating there are definitely our ideas you wanna die on that hill and no one's ever gonna change your mind but it's really liberating to be confident enough to say change my mind i'm lucky enough to have some smart motherfuckers around me who can tell me listen you're being a total dipshit like let's let's rethink this or like i have one friend who does the five wise all the time and he loves backing me into a corner and what's the five wise you just like when someone makes a statement about something to really get to the core issue they say if you ask why five times make a statement well why is that and you answer that well why and you phrase the y's differently obviously but then you get to the core they say five times you can get to the core of the issue and uh that's a challenging thing but i find later in life it's so liberating for me to be confident enough to be like man was i fucking way off the mark on this and have my mind changed and be able to say that to others that i was wrong totally that ability and i never used to have that and it's it feels real good and there's a hunger for that too um yeah if you're you're so right actually on a personal level it feels very good exactly as you said it's liberating because you're free to then think as opposed to defend yeah without thinking yeah you get so sick of defending the same thing over and over and over and you start to think about it and it's like well i i would really like to evolve my thought process here and when you're constantly defending you know one point it's difficult to let other ideas in you you you discount the possibility that you can have your mind change when you're constantly on the defense like you have to have a crack in in the front line in order to let a new idea come in and possibly flourish and maybe the new idea doesn't even prove your current belief system to be wrong but maybe it's like the the water to a seed and it grows and now it's something even bigger and better yeah and you can you can start to work with that instead and it's a it's a tough thing because i'm a stubborn fuck and it's very difficult for me it was historically to say i was wrong about this one or i messed this one up or yeah i wish i could have that one back there's a public figure for me thing too which there is there's a difference between changing your mind with a small circle of friends and changing your mind publicly about something but it has equal it one echoes the other it is equally liberating but people um people will not make that change easy uh but it doesn't matter that's that's the point it doesn't i think it's ultimately liberating as a human being public figure or not to uh to think deeply about this world and uh to keep changing which is like i i think there's a deep hunger for that in like political discourse that people are so tribal currently about politics that they want to see somebody who says you know what i changed my mind on this right and and then keep changing their mind and keep asking questions keep showing that they're open-minded all that kind of stuff but you want someone in a position of political power to change their mind because they realize that there might be a better way not because they realize that by changing their mind they're going to get a new demographic to vote for them that's transparent as shit nobody wants to see that right like that's right that's a person who can't separate their their their position from their people they're supposed to be helping yeah and you can usually smell that that's uh we're just talking uh offline about uh there's something about hillary clinton where she talked about changing her mind on gay marriage yeah that it felt like this is a political calculation versus like really deeply thinking about like what you know what things do we do in this world that violate basic human rights like really thinking about deeply and you know of course politicians are calculating there's but you can see it you this is the thing that's why i like um as on the human level there's like political policies but there's also humans and i've always liked bernie sanders for example i don't know not the later perhaps bernie sanders but i used to listen to him back in the day and never it felt that people might disagree with me but it it felt like there was a real human struggling with ideas whatever agree with him or not it felt like he wasn't doing political calculation he was just a human he couldn't be further away from my political ideals but also like there's an obvious authenticity to his passion for what he's saying that is not present in other candidates and you could see it all these people that have been in politics forever like from all the way back when hillary was a lawyer in the 70s there's a couple of shots of her in the courtroom in the 70s though she's looking all right she's got those big glasses on yeah kind of a little bit of a nerdy babe back in the day [Laughter] wow john clark says hillary clinton was a baby back in the day 73 hinton clinton yeah that's an interesting question about authenticity and politicians do you think like uh hillary clinton just the clintons in general are a good example that why do you think they become over time so inauthentic is it the system that changes them is it their own hunger for power is it uh what is it or they or were they always inauthentic well first i'd like to say that i don't know if you know this but i come from a bit of a political dynasty myself uh i was on the student government several times in high school and my dad won um the runoff in a special election in bradenton beach florida i think there's like 700 people there so so your dad got you the job yeah we're basically a lot of people compare us to the kennedys my guess with the politicians is that and you can you can see it now as we're becoming more like cognizant as people to the political process i think the process corrupts people and i think that i don't know the ins and outs of it i've listened to people who are far more educated on it than me and i i'm unprepared to cite any of their points i think you can see it a little bit in dan crenshaw can i say this yeah so i like him i i really liked dan especially like a year year and a half ago he seemed very level-headed it's clear to me now that as he panders more and more to the right it's because he's setting himself up for a presidential run it's clear that that's happening and he just doesn't seem like the same authentic ideals oriented guy that he did a year and a half ago now i could be wrong on that it could be way off but i think that you can take someone as honest as you want to when you start them on that path to the presidency you become so unbelievably beholden to so many people and entities along the way that by the time you get to the the final destination the oval office all you're doing is paying back the favors that got you there and you never get to serve the people you're supposed to serve your your primary focus is on your office and not on the people that you're supposed to be helping i think that that's a humongous problem and like we could talk all about campaign finance reform in the two-party system but at the end of the day the people who are running for political posts they're working to keep a job they're not working to improve the lives of the constituents which is different a long long time ago like a lot of politicians like those were like part-time jobs you know and they were they held other posts and you know out west they were ranchers by day and sheriff by night whatever the case might be but now you have such a cushy path for the rest of your life that the goal is to just be a politician yeah not do the things that you think a politician is supposed to do and that's a problem by the way i'll talk to dan on this box it's funny i i like the version of him from a year ago and i haven't been really paying attention so i'll be i'll actually pay more attention now and ask him that exact question like how do you prevent yourself from changing becoming what the the clintons became i tend to believe like there's conspiratorial stuff about clinton's and all these politicians that tend to believe that they were actually good thoughtful people back in the day at some point and the system changes them on the it's not even the system there's something about just the process of campaigning i just think it wears you down to where if you look at the percentage of time you spend on the kinds of conversations you have it's like one you do these speeches which you repeat the same thing over and over and over it beats the uh the process of thinking you just exhaust your brain to where you're not thinking anymore you're just repeating it's very right it's exceptionally difficult to keep making speech after speech after speech saying the same thing over and over and over again and at the same time thinking deeply and changing your mind and learning and then also the pandering to financial like having phone calls like fundraising all those kinds of things that's what they do now they spend most of their time fundraising they're not worried about anything sorry to interrupt you but i was going to say that you can see there's a fuel like the the more attention and the higher regard you're held in in your community and the more sycophants like continue to blow smoke up your ass the more it changes the way you present yourself and you can see it in in every walk of life i mean jiu-jitsu is a tiny tiny little section of the world but you see it in the jiu jitsu community when someone all of a sudden starts a social media page or whatever and they get a bunch of people like basically like you know cyber fellating them on their instagram page they they changed a lady is that a word i think so so giving fellatio yeah it's afflating yeah jamie look it up i think but in those people they it changes their character yeah it changes who they are because they become emboldened and you know now they've got this like mythical cyber mob behind them there's a sign at the entrance to your gym that reads for every moment of triumph it's a quote by hunter s thompson it reads for every moment of triumph for every instance of beauty many souls must be trampled what does this quote me do that quote to me is about mostly about sacrifice and it's about to achieve anything great or anything beautiful or to triumph you have to have sacrificed so many things to get there unless you're the most unbelievably genetically gifted person in the world and greatness is just you know falls upon you it's just raining from the sky i think on your path to greatness on your path to success and triumph you leave a lot of carnage in your wake personal relationships other goals things that you didn't pursue um you know other unfulfilled dreams and you kind of have to sell a lot of that out in order to be really the at the the peak of your field or or what you want to be um i know that that's happened in my life i mean there's tons and tons of relationships that you know couldn't survive the way that i was living my life because when i was trying to be a big time fighter or like when i was just training all the time tons of relationships uh dissolved themselves naturally some not so naturally some people get it some people don't get it some people hate you um you miss tons of other opportunities and i think that's kind of what that quote means to me it's about sacrifice it's about you're giving up what you want now for what you want more and it's the the trampling of souls it's messy too because it's not clear what what the right path is like that sacrifice is not obvious that um that's those are the right sacrifices to make you might be you might be ruining your own life but the the fact that you're willing to take that risk and uh sort of go all in on the whether it's stupid or not to go all in on something that the possib the possibility of creating something beautiful is there who says it's stupid if you're going all in on it you don't think it's stupid someone else might think it's stupid but i mean who really cares well i'm of many minds on many things so i feel like there's certain minds certain moods of the day where you think it's stupid like relationships is a beautiful one which is you've seen the movie whiplash by any chance yes it seems like in a man's life or it could be a woman's but i'm i don't identify as a woman so i know the man them the lyrics it's 20 20 bro but my lived experience for now is that of a man we'll see about tomorrow and there is in the pursuit of excellence there's often a choice of um some of the souls that must be trampled are personal relationships with humans in your life that you might deeply care about it could be family it could be friends it could be loved ones of all different forms it could be the people that your colleagues that uh depended on you people who will lose jobs because of the decisions you make all this kind of stuff it seems that that moment happens and i'm not sure that sacrifice is always the correct one like to me the movie whiplash for people haven't seen a spoiler alert maybe i don't even know if that movie has any spoilers but there is a relationship with a female there's a student that's a drummer that's pursuing excellence of this particular art form of drumming and he has a brief fleeting relationship with a female and he also has an instructor that's pushing him to his limits in what appears to be awfully a lot like a toxic relationship and he chooses not chooses he naturally makes the decision to sacrifice the romantic relationship with the woman in in further pursuit of this chaos of this chaotic pursuit of excellence and it feel that doesn't feel like a deliberate decision it feels like a giant mess of like an emotional mess where you're just like kind of like a fish swimming against stream just like fuck it you let go of all the things that convention says you should appreciate you you throw away the possibility of a stable life of a comfortable life of uh what society says is a meaningful life and just pursue this crazy thing full of toxic seeming toxicity with crazy people surrounding you i don't know so i don't know what the right decision is like part of my brain says you should stay with the girl uh fuck that instructor that's making you uh that's pushing you to to places where it's like that are destructive potentially destructive like could lead to suicide could lead you to uh completely uh fail or fail on your pursuit of excellence or destroy the possibility to destroy the dream the passion or pursuit of the thing that you've always dreamed for in that case is drumming i don't know i'm on many minds there like what is the right thing to do so my first two thoughts are number one fuck convention what is convention it's like a some laid out path some linear progression of the way your life is supposed to go like you know that someone can draw a picture of at the end that shit's that first of all it's just boring and whatever and it's it's i don't want to say that it's cowardly because it isn't cowardly but for someone who's not conventional to not be non-conventional is cowardly to get sucked into the convention that's first second of all i believe that scene in the diner in that movie where he tells her yeah you're in my way because i'm gonna want to be with you or you're going to want me to be going out to dinner with you and i know i should be practicing or i know i should be training and ultimately i'm going to make i'm either going to feel bad about not being with you by training or i'm going to skip the training to be with you and neither one is right the whole thing that they don't mention in that is that that's the wrong girl that's the wrong girl the right girl is a gangster the right girl says oh you you you've practiced tonight i'll leave you a sandwich and some milk so that you can you know uh outside the door uh let me know when you're done or you have some like free time like the right girl compliments that she's not an impediment in any way even if what you want to do is be with her so much that you're putting the drums down you're putting the bass down or you're picking up the pizza or you're not going to training like that girl without even telling you why she's making decisions is making decisions to help you achieve your goal now that might sound like some sort of like chauvinistic king of the castle type shit like where everyone should cater to you but the fact of the matter is uh that person is a compliment to your life and helping you do your thing and in your own way you're helping them to achieve whatever their goals are also it's uncommon that you have two people under the same roof striving to be unbelievably excellent in one small area it's not impossible but it's uncommon like relationships have to be like binary systems like two stars like the gravitational pull is what keeps you together and circling around one another right and and you know one is bigger than the other and they'll fluctuate and you know the stars will get bigger and they'll get smaller and they're contract based on positioning and you know composition that that's the way a relationship should be not an asteroid coming in to disrupt you know your the the surface of your planet yeah it's a binary system it's a compliment that girl was the wrong girl for him so you shouldn't uh like the big unconventional dreams should not be adjusted to fit into this world because i mean there is a part of me that's like full of salt out well maybe you're just a dick maybe maybe who cares lex so first of all who cares this is uh by the by the way somebody who's uh you have you have recently gotten well recently in the span of the history of the universe is recently you got into a relationship but you haven't always you have not felt the need to be in the relationship just because you're supposed to by society's kind of momentum if you i think that if you really want anything you've got to be prepared fully to be the exact opposite if you're a person who's looking for a relationship the only way you're going to get in an awesome relationship is by being comfortable being alone yeah because that's the risk if you're a person who's driven by money you've got to be comfortable being totally poor because that's the risk right and when you're when when you're when you're constantly hedging your bets you're never all in you're never all in on the thing you're trying to do um a relationship has to complement your life you can't say it's okay to want to be in a relationship but you can't want to be in a relationship so bad that you take someone in who fits the suit and it's like oh our schedules kind of work out you live near me and this and the other thing because the logistics of a relationship are not always perfect it's what matters is when the two people are together that's the perfect part of it and it's great to want to meet people and say if we meet and some sort of a relationship develops i'm willing to run with it but i'm not meeting you hoping a relationship develops i think you kind of put the cart before the horse in a lot of those situations it's like when guys meet like no guy goes out and is like i'm looking for a bro right nobody does that you go to the gym and you run into a bunch of dudes and the next thing you know someone's cool and they want to talk about fighting and you're fucking shotgun and beers and all of a sudden you got a bro yeah and that's how it works it works the same same way with what's the shotgun and beers um i'll show you after this you poke a hole in the bottom and you open the top yeah this is the problem with america drink vodka like a man okay now don't poke holes in beers this is the problem with the frat culture they don't really know how to drink they think they know how to drink they don't know how to drink what do you think makes a successful relationship if we can linger on that a little longer like let me ask john clark about love i didn't ask a question but let me just say love about love uh are you one of those people who never says i love you no no i'm an extreme person and uh like my emotions are also extreme and one of the things uh i concern myself with maybe this is philosophical and martial arts warrior soldier type related stuff is like i don't want anyone if i die tonight on the drive home hopefully that doesn't happen i hope that no one is left questioning how i felt about them and people i don't like probably are not questioning that and so the the thing that i've had to learn how to do later in life is to tell the people that you care about that you care about them and um each thing can be equally off-putting to the receiver of the message each thing can be equally upgraded when you're letting someone know how much you dislike them that can be off-putting to the person receiving that message and when you tell someone how much you care about them it can also be off-putting to the person depending on how they view their relationship with you but it's still important to get it out there like you shouldn't you shouldn't hold those things in because you're worried about how they'll be received or if they'll come back at you so you're okay going all in yeah on these yeah you're not afraid of commitment no i'm not afraid of commitment anyone who says they're afraid of commitment is full of shit you know what they're afraid of they're afraid of commitment with that person that's what they're afraid of like you no one when someone knocks your your knocks you on your ass and they come into your life and you're flush with all these emotions you're not worried about oh i don't really like commitment no because they've knocked you on your ass you want to be with them you want those things the the two most alive points in your life i think people feel is the euphoria of a new relationship and the law and then the loss when that love is gone you know you'll never feel more i don't think than in those those moments in in your life see the nice thing about the loss is it lasts longer yeah that's a lose ck point that he makes which is like uh that like uh he in his show i think has a conversation with an older gentleman that says like that's his favorite part of the relationship is that period between the loss of the relationship and the real death which is forgetting the person but that period lasts the longest and that's the like the most fulfilling like missing the other person is as fulfilling as the actual like love the the early infatuation which is interesting i also think of the bukowski i returned to that there's a little clip of him in an interview saying that love is a fog that dissipates with the first light of reality or something like that so basically emphasizing that it's this very very very fleeting thing that it's a it's a moment's thing and then it just fades and everything else is uh is something else so love is only a temporary thing which is interesting i think some people say that's cynical i don't know i don't know what to think of it i think it's important to understand that everything is fleeting when you don't put effort into it almost everything will be fleeting if you don't put effort into it most people will get fat and lazy if you don't put effort into something you're going to not be good at uh playing guitar or playing bass you've got to put effort into it the same thing goes for a relationship that the the awesome part of it that like love part that dies soon and early on in a relationship because it's so good that we think we don't have to work at it but you do you have to like keep doing the things you got to keep things new and crisp and fresh and you know when you when you different people probably feel differently about this but like i don't know you walk around your girl and you start like farting and stuff like that's when it all dies yeah that's when it dies you know we're all human beings we all you know have you know we're all here and our bodies working the same way but like you start to chip away at this like beautiful thing when you when you stop when you buck conventional courtesy and and things like that well take it for granted basically take it for granted yeah i mean that's the same thing with life it's like it's the same i'm a big fan of meditating on death that you could die today in the same way you should meditate on like this relationship could end today this connection with another human could be this is the last time you could uh you could be interacting yeah and your your chances of that increase when you take it for granted and you shit on people but when you work at it the chances of that decrease it's not it's never going to be zero but it decreases and and when you do that when you're the person and you're you're trying to maintain and you're trying to you know work at the relationship you got to make sure that both people are working at it otherwise you're just a fucking chump okay let's uh return back to uh mixed martial arts let me ask the ridiculous question of uh who do you think are the top three maybe top five greatest fighters of all time it's so hard to compare fighters across generations and maybe on one way to say it is which metrics would you put on the table as to measure what a great fighter is there was a guy named dioccipus [Laughter] in the fourth century yeah and he was such a badass that in the olympics in 336 bc no one even showed up to fight him in the pancreatic event nobody even showed up because he's fucking everybody up years later he was retired and uh this crazy macedonian dude came there at some dinner for you know alexander the great everyone's chilling drinking you know whatever they were drinking out of their chalices and this macedonian dude threatened him and challenged him so dioccipus said yeah man we'll throw down and you know they set the time in the place macedonian dude comes out like body armor spear shield all this other shit the octopus came out absolutely naked with a wooden club and took on this much younger guy beat the living crap out of him and then put his foot on his throat uh and then didn't even kill him in the show of ultimate power for the time so i think there's something about the guy being naked too it's just extra demeaning extra demeaning yeah okay can we rephrase the question then because those are clearly going to be some probably forgotten warriors in history let's take it to like modern day mixed martial arts in the ufc perhaps well just mixed martial arts there who do you think are the top fighters of all time what metrics would you consider in in trying to answer this perhaps unanswerable question i think one of the things you want to think about is a strength of opponent at the time you fought them so for example fighting bj penn in his prime and beating him is far different than beating bj penn last year right so to say you have a victory over bj penn it's not the same given the time frame of when it happened not to take anything away from anyone was being b.j penn just use that as an example of someone whose career went into a different direction yes i would say the guy who i think is probably the best that people are the least familiar with would be marilla bustamante and i think he was a guy who was one of the guys with the first really good physical build for mma which i think is narrow from the chest to the back and long shoulder to shoulder and kind of sinewy made out of steel cable that was a guy who could box that was a guy who could wrestle and that was a guy who had great jiu-jitsu i wasn't a great kick but at the time he didn't need it fought everybody and gave everybody a run uh i think he's probably one of those guys who's got to be considered yeah there's a few killers that never because like why is he not in the discussion is it because like i think greatness requires both the the skill and the opportunity to meet each other and when you talk about a fighter the other thing that really a good fighter needs to become great is a foil yeah and so many fighters don't have a foil that's one of the biggest attractions i think of early mike tyson's career he didn't have a foil he had no one driving him and by the time he did by the time he had a foil in holyfield his career was in a different place but he he's one of the greats of all time he never really had a foil so his greatness was in the un unparalleled destruction of like nobody right well not you know uh of lesser opponents right and so when people uh debate the you know the level of greatness of mike tyson that's one of the things they say like he didn't fight a lot of killers in their prime i think you've obviously got to say in that conversation i have a really difficult time keeping george st pierre out of the conversation uh only because he was able to beat you with anything he could he could out jab you he could out wrestle you and he could he could submit you the problem i have with fedor is his career also took a drastic turn towards the end and when he was fighting in pride he was doing a lot more grappling and then he just started casting that overhand right at people and his game kind of changed at that point uh he can't take anything away from his greatness but at that time the great heavyweights were not really uh in fighting in pride and they didn't really exist yet and by the time he fought a really good one fabrizio over doom he did get submitted there does does his later performance color our your and our perception of his greatness like in general about fighters not mine but i'm someone who's like intimately involved in the sport but it colors everyone else's same with anderson silva like i don't think anderson doesn't want to fight in like seven years or something or he's like one like that's a guy who in his prime was one of the best fighters is he in the top five for you i think he's probably in a top five yeah greater striker of all time or no in mma and in mixed martial arts and mixed martial arts that's a tough question the greatest mma striker of all time because like the timing the we were talking about foot sweeps right yeah who makes it look easier and uh anderson zilla i think in an incredibly short sample of his prime it's got to be anderson silva and i think you have to consider discussing leota machida for his unbelievable manipulation of distance yeah which is something that people don't really talk too much about in terms of fighting unless you're someone in the sport yeah the his his use of distance and the ability to like what we call pop out like and make you miss by one inch so that he could follow your fist back in as you retract it and hit you over the top that that's a thing of beauty anderson silva when he became a counter striker when he got to his prime in the ufc that was a thing of beauty that was the thing of beauty um so i think definitely those two guys and maril bustamanti's got to be the third guy they're just so many good guys now so where do you put in terms of metrics as you mentioned gsp and anderson silva i think they have a large number of defenses of a title is that important to you like this kind of consistent domination no because it's too much it's easily easily manipulated by the people making money off the fights so there's a great quote one time uh when ufc was coming to prominence and uh vince mcmahon from the wwe he said you know the difference between what we do and what uh ufc does is that when we have a superstar i can make sure he stays on top until he's no longer a superstar because we have predetermined results yeah the ufc can't do that because they're actually having fights well it's true and false you can't do that but you can give your superstars the most favorable match-ups to keep them on top for the longest so people always talk about title defenses as if the guy they're fighting the challenger is always the person most deserving of the shot and it's just not true so i don't put that much stock in it is it possible to put a guy in the in um in consideration of one of the greats if all they had is one or two amazing fights i'll tell you like and and amazing could be a lot of different definitions it could be just a war like they never really reached the highest of excellences of domination but they've like this we had this discussion about kyle bochniak right yep uh to me that's the perfect example he had this famous fight uh against the beat magametr sharapov where you on one side you have an anderson silva type of fighter and ends to be like just a very good striker like and then there's like the warrior on the on the kyle's side and just the fight they created something special together it was fight at night whatever but the you know that fight was special on that night because because the two dance partners you can have a great performance without being a great fighter not saying neither of those guys is a great fighter but to answer your first question uh i think that having one or two great performances does not necessarily mean that you're great when i need a larger sample size i have no idea what that is i don't have any idea what that is and also where how much weight does toughness have when you're thinking about the criteria when you define a great fighter that's that's that's a good question and i don't have the answer to it i admire the underdog that rises to the occasion through brute force they didn't have they didn't bring the skill set to the table that perhaps some of the greats have but they rose to the occasion i mean there's something about that there's something about that and so now we're more talking about like uh the internal attributes as opposed to the external physical attributes and those are the things i think that you cannot teach those things you you come in the door and you either have that or you don't i think and we talk about this all the time and this is one of the things where my mind changes regularly like i'm what makes a fighter is it is it born or is it bread and this week i'm of the opinion that uh it's in you and maybe it's in you and you suppress it and people can tease it out of you but i don't think you can make someone who doesn't have that seed in there i don't think you can turn them into that great warrior with that level of grit and mental toughness now when that that fight when kyle footes a beat it's a unique situation for both guys it was kind of a later later replacement fight for kyle it's a beats star was on the rise and kyle put the blueprint out there on how to beat the beat um which is which is uh pressure him and try and drag him into the late rounds you notice that later on when uh calvin kater fought him they wouldn't give him five rounds they wanted five rounds and it's a beats camp from what i understand would not agree to the five round fight well he didn't look right so with kylo was a three-round fight three-round fight and what did uh he went to decision it went to decision was a beat one a decision clearly did kyle have a shot of winning the third round i don't remember the exact score but kyle could have won the third round had he done a couple things differently but i do believe in the fourth round i think kyle would have won a fourth round and i think maybe even won the fight and if there would have been a fifth round and he was pressing forward uh like perhaps you know in a funny way that you could tell me i'm wrong but it felt like he wasn't emphasizing like head movement at that point he went full mike tyson there was a there was a point at which so it's funny that you say that which is a contradiction actually because mike tyson had a great headache i actually don't know exactly what i mean because he was in the pocket i think he was trying to do the movement he was just in the pocket and pressing forward and like the fuck you attitude it was just like yeah that was a little bit later once it beats backwards towards the cage but the we we get that fight and i said to kyle i was like look this kid has been training martial arts since he was three years old there's not an area where you're gonna out technique him and so we've gotta now channel some of that grit that we know you have this is an opportunity to showcase it and i don't know how long i did it for but um because kyle's much shorter than the beat so for a good long while while we're training for zabeet i didn't even say anything and i just had clips of mike tyson training on the tv in the gym and the head movement and i didn't even mention it and then we started to like get into it and talk about you know getting inside the length of the longer fighter and uh things like that and we we kind of which when some people train mma they say okay this guy's a really good wrestler let's think about avoiding the wrestling or being a better wrestler and i think that when the difference in skill is so great those are both the wrong answer if a guy who's a really good wrestler wants to take you down and you don't have a lot of wrestling experience he's probably going to get you down if he's got a good coach right so you have to deal with that to then say i'm gonna then learn in eight weeks how to wrestle better than a guy who's been wrestling since he was eight years old is also a bad idea so what we concentrated on for that camp and it worked beautifully was not getting caught in chain wrestling these are the takedowns you're going to get caught with this is how to not get caught with the next step while you're defending take down one because it's the chain of techniques that are going to get you fucked right so we talked we did a ton of work on get ups and breaking the hands from the various takedowns like it was a while ago now so i don't remember exactly the techniques we worked on but we concentrated on defend the first takedown and stay out of the chain don't get chained into a bunch of wrestling techniques because you will be out wrestled um and that was really successful and then in the third round uh beat was tired and uh he was tired he's a beat got tired he cuts a tremendous amount of weight yeah like i i can't see him staying at 145 forever when they start giving him five round fights i don't even know if he's had a five-round fight yet he may have but um i i can't see him staying down there he's the guy's like six one yeah guys he's he's a giant of a guy so kyle pressed forward there and he said uh he felt that there was no power left in zabeet's hands and so he felt fine and i think part of it was he fed off the crowd as he moved forward and um you know saw that he wasn't taking a lot of damage like the punches weren't standing him he started walking right through him it goes to your question of what makes a fighter was the him walking forward like that something that you're born with or is that something you were training is that is that the mike tyson on tv born with that kyle is born with that and the crowd i i've been in boston no he's in new york he's in brooklyn i've been in a lot of arenas for a lot of different sporting events that's one of the loudest things i've ever heard when he did that and i was going crazy and um you ask about that being like taught or not kyle is so much like that that i have to try and tease some of that out of him and pull it back because he's also so very technical when he wants to be that the emotion and the fun of it gets in the way of his technique and and probably has cost them a couple of a couple of wins and so that's one of the things we work on with him right now is like staying within yourself being a professional taking your time to download the information in round one and then starting your fight in round two but the tension between those two things what makes uh what on that day created one of the in my opinion one of the greatest fights i've ever seen joe rogan agrees yeah it's one of the greatest fights i've certainly ever seen so like i you it's funny that you as a coach i can see the frustration of like like throwing away some of the strategy kind of thing like you seeing like being not happy that there could be things that he could have done to win the fight it's in retrospect i think that at that time we were playing with incredible house money kyle was a gigantic underdog in that fight his beat was unstoppable i think people were probably picking him to finish the fight in round one i think at that point no one had ever gone the distance with the beat yeah and no one certainly had you know put that kind of performance together and i think kyle uh kyle put the blueprint out there and in retrospect when i look at the last round yeah there were things that could have been done differently but we're playing with house money at that point like i mean let it fly you you get to a point where you've got it you're down three rounds and there's 20 seconds left you got to move all your chips to the center of the table and you know see what happens do you remember what joe rogan said about it i i remember like he got one over i think i have trouble remembering because offline we talked about that fight and he's exceptionally impressed by i mean joe's from boston so it's like yeah i mean there there's a story there okay it sucks not you naturally want to romanticize like there's a rocky versus like uh there's a rocky four dragon i mean um similar i suppose kind of chemistry kyle's style represents the american ideal right the spirit yeah i mean he's from gloucester it's like you could have you could have dragged him off the docks like three hours before the fight and said hey you want to go fight and he would have said yes yeah oh man that was a special fight but that's as per discussion of like greatest fighters of all time i tend to believe that that fight is more special than the the the champion the championship belt defense is by george san pierre like you know there's something to that it's like rocky um rocky one is uh is more special than like rocky iii right so like yeah it's though that yeah the the underdog or it's whatever like the dance partners like going to war and like that moment i mean it's bigger it's bigger than any individual fighter they create that and that i know it's not perhaps good for a career it's not good for like in terms of money in terms of longevity in terms of all those kinds of things but that's a special moment in the history of fighting that you both created i can remember like right after like there was so much excitement in the air during the third round and i remember being in the corner and like i i was so excited at the end of it that i had forgotten what happened in the other two rounds i didn't even know and and i looked to to sean one of the other cornermen and i think i said to him did we win when we re-watched the fight clearly we didn't win the fight i mean we lost the other rounds but i got so caught up in that moment and then i just remember like i was so in awe of his performance that like i forgot what was going on and i i and it's so hard to not be a fan at that moment and to stay within yourself and try and like coach but then what the fuck you even coaching at that point it's like we're rumbling we got 30 seconds we're trying to win here and i remember like the performance itself i'm not a fan of moral victories but if ever there was going to be one that was one and when the fight was over and i grabbed kyle they hadn't even been to the center of the cage yet and i just hugged him and i said you're my fucking hero and i remember being very emotional about that that i was able to be a part of that it feels wrong to say but i was i kind of avoided saying it but if i'm being honest with my feelings this is a safe space for feelings yeah is i think it was the greatest mixed martial arts fight i've ever seen and i don't think i'm being biased i was honestly thinking like am i being biased i honestly don't think so i think that was the greatest fight like if you want to rank fights i've ever seen i think to me that was the greatest fight i've ever seen it certainly was a uh one of the greatest displays of like just dogged effort from an underdog who was out experienced and and probably outsized but i mean like you just kyle's one of those kids you're never gonna tell him he's out of a fight he has something you can't teach and i've seen tons of people with more physical attributes and they're just mental midgets and they got a million dollar body and a 50 cent heart and and and kyle is not that yeah and you can't teach it no matter what you do but that was i would say like my career in combat sports which spans you know if you want to go all the way back to like wrestling like that was one of probably the greatest experiences i've i've been a part of a bittersweet sport she's a fickle mistress yeah i mean the the tragic aspect of that is um like i guess kyle lost right right so like if you look at the record and all the kind of things perhaps uh like you look at the career maybe like as a financial from a financial perspective that perhaps is not uh the the greatest thing for carl's career or that or in in the history of the ufc perhaps it's not it's not um you know like maybe many people didn't even watch that fight but it was a special moment that stands in the history there's not many of these in uh in the history of fighting so but at the end of the day when you look at someone's career in the ufc like financially there's a you know a handful of people that make real money everybody else makes nothing there's a handful of people that make real money so did that loss cost him in the in the near term sure but when you look back on your life you're not going to look back on that loss as something that derailed my life financially and i never recovered from it that's not going to happen like the sad thing is unless you were a champion and you know most most people are going to be forgotten right after they're gone most people will be forgotten and if you're not forgotten certainly your your accolades are going to be misrepresented either they're going to be inflated or diminished one way or the other so looking back on it it's just so hard to to quantify that but it's an experience and like when you're in that moment and you're one of the people like intimately involved in it like the value of that experience supersedes any financial gain where would you put khabib in the discussion of the greatest of all time so you recently we worked together we watched the fight um of him and um justin gaichy and and khabib retired would you put him up there as some of the as one of the greatest or did he never truly find his foil that like the great warrior that challenged him and um and maybe do you wanna do you think he's fully retired now to answer the question about being fully retired i don't have any idea i can't for a second pretend to um think that i understand the way that people from that part of the world think and respect their family and things like that to an american who says oh i promised my mom i wouldn't do it i mean i promised my mom i wouldn't do a lot of things i went right out fucking back door and did them yeah but i think that that means something different to people in different parts of the world so i have no idea what kind of weight that carries so i can't answer that i can say a lot of times when people think about great fighters they think about the aspects that make up mma like they think of mma as a pie and they're all these different pieces that make up for make up the pie and how good is this piece and how good is this piece and how good is this piece when the fact of the matter is is you only need one really really really good piece and the other pieces are complementary pieces to get you to where you're the strongest and if you want to tell me that khabib's not the greatest mma fighter because he doesn't have really slick striking you can make that argument but what i can tell you is khabib has good enough striking to get him to his grappling where he is clearly the best guy at 155 they've ever seen yeah so does that make him the greatest fighter at that division or not to your point about the foil they wanted conor to be his foil and he just manhandled them i mean they wanted that to happen did not happen so well there there's a kind of argument to be made which would kind of not you get haters in this argument and and you're going to be one of the haters okay because i know you're uh uh put a lack of uh admiration for conor mcgregor uh but you know uh what is it football's the game of inches yeah there's there's a sense where you know that conor there's an argument to be made that conor wasn't exactly dominated that he ended up being dominant meaning let me phrase it differently is there's a lot of points in the fight that it could have uh a different trajectory right could have happened so he wasn't so far from having a chance at winning that fight it's just the end you can focus those are the most important moments at the end you've lost the most important moments right but the road less taken it could have been if he didn't lose those very important moments he had a chance so i'm saying out of all the people that could be fought it's arguable that conor was up there of the people that had a chance let me say this first i love you get so much heat for this i do love khabib i'm a huge khabib fan because i'm a grappler first and foremost me too because i'm also russian i love khabib calm down okay but when when when connor came on the scene i loved conor because i'm an irish american and you know i want to support him and things like that and he was he was good fun he he got to be for my personal taste he got to be too much of all the people khabib has fought i would never fight conor again if i were him and here's why and i said this about the diaz fight nate diaz who's one of my favorite fighters has fought the exact same fight for 12 years conor will switch something up to give himself an edge and i believe that conor would figure something out in fight number two i think but i also thought that gage would give could be problems where it wouldn't be a matter of i'm gonna out wrestle khabib or become better at defending his wrestling takedowns conor would have figured out a way to not get wrestled i feel like he's constantly changing he's constantly evolving and whether or not people realize it or not i think conor's one of the better overall athletes in mma just from looking at his body and his movement and the way he's shaped he's got a very tiny waist he's got really pronounced glutes and shoulders and i think he's a real athlete whereas a lot of guys in mma are not for real athletes they're just good at one of the things that makes up mma i understand what you're saying about if this happened if that happened but i mean you could say that about every single combat sports event ever if spinx's hook land landed on tyson maybe that fight didn't end the way that it did but you know what it didn't you're absolutely right but if we could talk about just conor mcgregor for a second i can't wait to get your fan mail or hate mail um speak to the innovation of conor i don't hear very many people making this argument but is it possible to make an argument that conor mcgregor is one of the greatest fighters of all time it's an interesting argument and the problem the only problem with the argument is there's so much emotion on either side yeah i had a conversation sorry to interrupt with uh jaron brook who's a a philosopher objectivist and which is the philosophy of iron rand and the amount of emotion around that particular human is fascinating to me it's similar to the amount of emotion around donald trump you can think of different personalities maybe elon musk those are the people that aren't willing to have their mind changed they're too emotionally attached to the argument yeah but it's weird that why do we why why some people inspire so much emotion and others don't but conor mcgregor i feel like nobody's able to have a calm like uh fight analysis of the guy like look to me as just a fan of martial arts like i study judo i love watching just hours of olympic judo and uh appreciating the art form like i forget the humans involved uh teddy renair who's a heavy heavyweight the most probably the most dominant heavyweight in the history of judo just studying his gripping just the art of it and who cares if there's shit talking like to me um i i put all of that aside and just look at the art and like what i really appreciate about conor mcgregor is his innovation like of movement of maybe it's romanticized maybe you can correct me i'm just uh a cheeto eating fan of mixed martial arts but like i i seem to detect more innovation than almost any other fighter uh that i've pa pay attention to in conor mcgregor i think first to i'll answer in two parts i think well i'm not going to answer the first part it's just a comment because you didn't ask the question what was the question i don't even remember it's about the the how conor mcgregor fans are very emotional and conor mcgregor detractors are very emotional i think fans become very emotional they become cheerleaders of someone like conor mcgregor or donald trump because they see that person exhibiting the qualities that they themselves lack and so they become cheerleaders for that right and i think that for the most part people who are detractors of conor mcgregor's they're not really conor mcgregor detractors they're detractors of connor's supporters there's a beef that they have with the people in that bucket right like it's not really a problem and that applies probably in our current political climate right with donald trump with the left and the right there it's more about like they uh they actually don't like on the other the caricatured the most extreme versions of what they see in this quarters of the other side yeah that's a good point but i think the more interesting thing is the fighter himself so let's put the supporters aside i would i would say that you know what some people know and some people don't know is that conor's base is in karate and the karate style of conor mcgregor stephen thompson um of lyoto machida that type of distance management a lot of times we think as martial artists we think that the sport version of the art we've chosen to pursue somehow taints the authenticity in the in the effectiveness of it but point karate is what led to that in and out distance management style of connor of leota and of stephen thompson they all kind of use it a little bit differently but they use it very effectively all three of them and that comes from a world of trying to kind of like uh step in land contact on you from my point and then get back out before you can counter-strike me right and that's where that comes from conor is blessed to have longer arms than someone his height probably normally has and his movement is just so fluid he's so athletic with uh the hinges of his body the knees and the hips and the swivel of his body which is also the hips and the shoulders his movement his distance and the way he sets people up for the straight left hand while you're circling away from it and he can still land it which is what he did to chad mendes hit him with a straight left while he was circling away from it that is something that is uh very beautiful to watch and sometimes people see the kicks and they see all the flashy snap kicks and the sidekicks all that stuff is doing is setting people up for the left hand it's all it's doing it's you're corralling people you're funneling people or you're leading the dance and you're bringing them to a spot where you know you can land that left hand and his ability to do that is masterful people constantly shit on his ability to grapple and you know because a couple of his losses have been uh to jiu jitsu guys or grapplers but they've been to really good guys like anyone who's gonna sit here and tell me conor mcgregor is not a good grappler go grapple him yeah let me see you grapple him to that point i'll also say a lot of people will use conor mcgregor's x-guard sweep on nate diaz as evidence to his high-level grappling in that fight to which i would also counter nate diaz didn't fight that off because he knew he was so much better at jiu-jitsu off the bottom that he didn't even care if he got swept so is conor mcgregor innovative absolutely um is he one of the best fighters ever it's tough to say because he's such a cash cow that he was fed people i firmly believe no one who who put that conor mcgregor khabib fight together thought khabib would win wow i i remember so at that time it was not completely clear there was a myth of the great khabib right it wasn't completely clear how good is he really so that's interesting and it was unclear how good is conor also right like what uh because because i think to me maybe part of my admiration of conor mcgregor is rooted in the fact that i thought there's no way he beats jose aldo and i thought there's no definitely no way he beats eddie alvarez and so like when he did uh i was like i had to like my i had to my brain was like like there's something broken it was like shut down like on windows like froze we have to rethink this like this is a special human now people who argue he's not even in the running of like top 20 is you know if you look at the number of defenses for example of his belt he had very very little but like to me i'm one of those people is back to our discussion of like do moments make great fighters that i think just being able to beat jose aldon is i would argue in his prime some people might disagree in this uh in in a way where he like figures out the puzzle gets in his head the entirety of the picture and then to be i mean eddie alvarez would he be considered a really good strong wrestler like like or uh not not strong wrestling strong striker and wrestler that could the whole combination of it and also uh what's the other wrestler he fought chad mendes chairman so let me comment on all those if i may so i was at the chad mendez fight live yeah and um there was a jiu jitsu tournament we're out in vegas and so me my best friend came out and we got some tickets that night was supposed to be the first aldo fight aldo got hurt like right after i bought the tickets they pulled chad mendes in he was a little bit out of shape whatever you still got to fight the fight but i don't i don't want to use that fight as evidence to conor's greatness because you know they pulled chad mendez and all he was like hunting and drinking beers in the woods and was a little out of shape yeah but if you want to talk about greatness like that surpasses your in-ring accomplishments i was in the stands that night and the people that came from ireland to see connor fight that night single-handedly set the market for hotel room prices and airline tickets to vegas that weekend these motherfuckers were all dressed like connor in the stands they had wool suits on and big beards and the whole thing i mean probably wearing pocket watches like i never saw more people trying to be someone else never saw more people try to be someone else i mean there's a level of is is there a level of greatness in that i mean i don't know how to like parse all that out you're somebody who doesn't admire that i love that in the sense the following sense i think that people don't seem to hold this belief at all but to me fighting is not just this isn't like a quiet street fight that nobody watches this is also spectacle this is also a story right there's like there's a professional wrestling element to this this is not like you you think it's it's just about fighting if it was just about fighting you wouldn't i mean there's a story to it i guess you're trying to get to it and like greatness has to incorporate that like people that criticize again i might be wrong on this but i i honestly think that uh conor mcgregor not nearly as much as khabib but he he's a true martial artist i think he respects his opponents despite the talk i if maybe i'm misreading it but it feels like he is a storyteller like uh jail son and type of like he's constructed this image to tell to uh to play the story like just the way he acts after the fight the honor he shows his opponents yeah there's a real martial art in there and to dismiss the fact that uh the the the story of the fight is part of it because he doesn't just shit talk this is what people don't seem to understand he's good at shit talking very good and i and i'm with you on on basically everything you said i think that there's greatness to that and i think that he understands how to sell a fight and i think what he did to jose aldo by getting in his head helped him win that fight he insulted jose aldo and his country so much that he knew aldo was going to come forward right into that left hook was that fighting in brazil by the way do you remember i don't recall because i know he insulted all of brazil yeah i'm not sure yes in brazil but when he tried to do that to khabib you could tell that he just was not going to get in khabib's head khabib was unflappable but there is there is definitely something great about how he moves people you know the irish are are like i mean conor's walkout music like for people from ireland and of irish descent like that shit is like very deep yeah you know that it's very emotional song i was to be honest a little bit upset with khabib that he didn't rise i admire that entire culture but there's an aspect to where he could have risen to the occasion of there's the same kind of depth of love of country that russia has and uh is there in dagestan dagestan is a little weird in terms of like but he could have especially with putin's support where for a bit the full russian hat right of like this is the great nation like rise above the uh the culture of dagestan which is a small town boy with the small town values of family and all those kinds of things there's a moment where you inspire entire nations like the step up and be the foil to the to to the great conor mcgregor where also could be becomes the fall to like like both both of them at the fall to each other and become like that fight was already a great fight right but it could have been something historic ali versus freight i mean it could have been really historic and i would argue i guess the biggest disappointment i have and i understand it and i also honor as a martial artist but to i'm disappointed that khabib doesn't seem to even consider the possibility of doing in moscow fight number two so and because that could be narrative wise if they do it right that's one of the could be one of the greatest fights in history yeah i think in terms of khabib and inspiring a country is it possible that by staying true to the values that he had his entire career and getting to the zenith of of his art form and still doing it in that humble way isn't it possible that that inspires yeah 100 so i should i should clarify that i think they're just hearing from people from my my fellow comrades no uh it's they love that they love they love that but they uh there's also a brash beer chugging shit talking thing that people really like about connor and i i do love that but the beautiful narrative would have been the clash the real clash of those cultures so khabib chooses to live the culture by walking away there's also like a clash of them sort of walking not walking away from the fire by walking into the fire of this of this brashness it's the sort of um the cool collected like calmness of the dagestan people it's like you were talking about the saita brothers so they just view it totally differently and you know there are stereotypes about the irish where they're maybe potentially a louder more boisterous culture and i haven't heard of that yet yeah and i mean i thought they each played their part perfectly and all those things that you're describing could have happened maybe khabib steps up and he carries the proverbial flag so to speak for a nation of people and they go to battle but the fight if it plays out the same way is still the fight yeah and it was a it was an okay fight it wasn't a great fight it was you know the fight was okay yeah and i think that again i don't have any idea what khabib's obligations to his family are i don't i don't think either those guys you know is want for more money to do another fight is just a legacy thing it's just about uh you know fulfilling some some part of a legacy and i i just um i admire the possibility of a great legacy of that that is bigger than either of the fighters i think with khabib he kind of um he's not as concerned about legacy i think right there's uh you're a promoter's dream because you want the rematch and the only thing that makes more money than the rematch is the trilogy you got to split the trip split the the the rematch you hope conor wins and then you have the trilogy fight and you now you're all in yeah yeah i can't get into khabib's head but i know putin just the game the entirety of it especially at the time especially if it was trump as president uh if he was as president at the time and and putin and in russia and just knowing how masterful connor is at like because kano would would be a different connor i think he would be a calmer connor like there would be a different uh like because you don't want to be over the top connor with the russian people right no it's it's like uh dangerous that was the episode in the hotel in brooklyn yeah when um some of the russian guys confronted uh artem and then conor came over it's not but the danger of that i mean there is the the element of just like real danger and the real it was almost of war it's uh i don't know it's it was like when when uh when chael sonnen was talking so much smack it maybe it was against vanderlei silva i don't know it was one of those fights where they they just didn't think he was going to make it out of brazil yeah yeah americans don't get it yeah like people take some of that shit in different parts of the world very very seriously yeah but that's what makes it beautiful that's uh that's what makes a great story and i think fighting is very much about the stories not just about the the the particular outcomes of a fight or the skill set matching or like the chess of the of the fight it's also about the story of the greater like context of societies of warring we're like warring cultures we're still we're still go we're we're no longer can have great big hot wars between nations because of nuclear weapons this is our wars that we can have and uh you know in some sense i feel robbed of the great war that could have happened it doesn't mean there aren't lots of wars going on but yeah the big one is not gonna happen there's too much of a balance of power with you know nuclear weapons and technology and stuff but it's not the end of war no do you think there's always gonna be war i think there'll always be war especially in underdeveloped parts of the world um isn't there always underdeveloped relatively parts of the world yeah i mean at some point though you'd think i mean the way that you know uh technology is expanding and we're bringing technology to weird parts of the world that you wouldn't uh think of as technologically advanced the way that uh the chinese are inhabiting certain areas for mining purposes and things like that i think underdeveloped parts of the world will get developed quickly i just wonder like what the nature of that war might be it could be cyber it could be all those kinds of things i think in developed nations it's going to be cyber i think that's probably the next phase of war but i mean i think you talk about parts of the world like the middle east and it's just still going to be warring tribal factions we can't even begin to understand what those people are fighting about over there yet yet everyone sitting in america on their couch has an opinion like you can't even begin to understand it i i sure can't yeah it's back to the principles discussion when um when when what's violated is much deeper than just kind of um anything we can even in a middle class existence can't even comprehend a lot of times american soldiers will go to war because that's what they're told to do and they maybe they disagree with the orders and maybe they agree with the orders but i get a sense that people in the middle east fighting all believe in what they're fighting for it's not it's not a thing where they're told to go do it i believe they're they really believe that what they're doing is the right thing and they're defending some sort of principle are you generally optimistic about the future speaking of war of human civilization do you think we'll uh like you know people talk about the fermi paradox and asking you know why haven't aliens visited us if you believe they haven't visited us you know one of the thoughts is that there's a kind of a great filter that intelligent civilization reach a point where it destroys itself naturally so that's why we haven't seen them they don't last very long there does seem to be a kind of we seem to be advancing faster and faster and faster we keep developing more and more powerful ways of destroying ourselves in all kinds of ways not even you know just even to say nuclear weapons alone but there's all kinds of new ways engineer pandemics nanotechnology agi all those kinds of things it's it seems to be that uh the argument that we are going to destroy ourselves in some kind of creative way very shortly is uh not too crazy of an argument to make are you more optimistic or pessimistic about the prospects of human civilization in maybe the 22nd century like is it possible that your generation is the last generation to be alive on earth no but i wouldn't say that five generations from now that won't be that that could be true i guess i think of it really selfishly i'm a big believer that when your time here on earth is over the overwhelmingly vast majority of people will be forgotten within 12 calendar months people with no family will be forgotten sooner and so i don't give a lot of thought to what will happen to earth or mankind when i'm gone i'm i give more thought to maximizing my time here now and i want to do it in a way where uh i don't um i'm not overtly hindering the future of civilization or humankind but i'm definitely taking a me first approach to how i live on earth do you have a philosophy behind why you have or don't have kids on this topic because for many people when they have kids there's a sense it's almost like a genetic sense or something like that where all of a sudden you do start caring about what happens five generations from now i mean i think i'm just too selfish i mean i'm that's i think that's the easy answer like i i know that your whole life has to change you know your your your focus everything shifts and just don't want to do and also like i think that there's a level of i i guess if i have to like really unpack it there's probably a level of um lack of hope in the future like i don't think it's i don't think the world and humanity is going in the right direction what does the right direction look like i think the right direction looks like people coming back together in in a more uh impactful human way in person touching feeling um talking face to face so all the things you're describing is what we had as you mentioned before when you were like a teenager yeah so the state of the world but that's because your mind was formed then it very well could be it very well could be it's very possible that the virtual reality worlds that we'll create will be actually a much higher level of existence in fact like now we're getting we're moving slowly away from tribalism perhaps you could argue the ideas of nations and we're going we're moving into the realm of ideas and it could be a higher form of existence where we're sort of uh moving past the constraints of our meat vehicles into the space of our minds it depends what you value because when you sit here and you talk about it you know and you're talking about these things in these humongous levels on these macro levels yeah and i don't think a lot of people view it that way i think a lot of people view it as like what am i what kind of pizza am i getting tonight yeah like it's a it's a much different outlook and sure the the virtual world that's on the horizon i'm sure it's got benefits in what and will help people but is it going to help the things that you find valuable like was it going to help commerce okay sure is that the thing you find the most valuable is it going to help communication well it'll help disseminating information is it going to help explain the information you're disseminating probably not is it going to hinder interpersonal communication absolutely and those are things i find valuable interpersonal communication talking to people like the like it saddens me when i go into a restaurant and there's five-year-old kids who like you know slamming away on an ipad and can't make eye contact with anybody or teenagers who don't say please and thank you when they order from the waitress like that to me is wrong that shit's wrong and i don't know this for a fact but i do attribute that to you know using technology as a crutch when we're raising raising kids yeah you know i think those are those are things that i find valuable i tried to empathize i mean i agree with you as a person who grew up in a certain age but like uh prior to the internet i suppose uh but or at least solidified the early philosophies of the way i see the world prior to the injury during the time of aol let's put it this way uh what was your aim screen name i never had one okay dude i i was the last person i knew to get a cell phone i was so anti all that stuff because i just felt like i didn't want to be a part of it i did not want to be a part of it i i joined the underground forum about mma in 2000 or 2001 when i first started training i think right at the tail end i got a myspace but i didn't have any of that stuff and i didn't want any of it i don't know why i just was i was not into it i i felt like like what are the good things that are going to come out of it oh my i'm going to get my package in two days instead of four days does that make my life better i try to uh i try to deeply empathize with a lot of experiences of other people and like one of the things i love like the smell of paper books and books in general and early on this is like five years ago i just gave away all my books and i said you know i'm really going to try to fall in love with the books in the same way i did before but now with a kindle or not a kindle like paper white whatever the ee reader e-reader and uh i'm still not there but i've been kind of trying to fall in love with that experience and the same way i try to think like teenagers are really into tick tock now like making these short videos i try to consider the possibility that their existence will be a much happier one than i've had because of this kind of interaction it's from my sort of skeptical perspective it's like the attention span is so short they don't really deeply think or deeply experience things they construct a social layer that they present to the world and they work on creating this social layer like the presentation to the world much more than really sitting alone with their thoughts and the sadnesses and their hopes and dreams and fears and like working on the project that is their their own like actual person that exists in this physical world as opposed to working on the project of a particular social platform but they show but like perhaps that project like who cares who you are in the physical space maybe what you are is what your instagram shows that's the more important project to work on well what's reality is reality perception is reality right so how other people perceive this constructed thing that's their reality of you but is it your reality like that i mean like we said earlier it's what what you want how you want people to see you is very rarely in line with how you really are or how you see yourself and i mean i can remember being like a 13 year old kid and like when you go through a bunch of you know weird 13 year old kid shit like sitting in my room like turning a red light on and listening to like a sad record and like you know trying to figure out what's going on inside sometimes you like it sometimes you don't like it but i feel like those experiences are lost on kids constantly connected to a phone and like you know i don't know what the remedy for those situations is nowadays like i don't know do they make a tick tock video do they do they blog about it did they you know make a video or nobody blogs anymore bro whatever man or oh a video a story about oh this is what happened to me and blah blah blah blah does that actually help them work it out or does it just create more noise and more static on how to get to the root of the problem and learn about themselves i don't know what future social networks are exactly i do know on a shallow level it does feel good when somebody clicks like on something i think that is more of a drug than an actual deep long-lasting fulfilling happiness but perhaps there is a way to make a social network that does lead to long-lasting happiness that's somehow detached from the physical meat space i don't know but it feels like you want to give that a chance do you think when people are liking things on social media do you think there's just a group of people an overwhelming majority of people that are going to like whatever you put out there they're clicking like and then there's another section of people that just constantly scroll and like scroll and like and scroll and like like do you think when you get a like on content you put out that that like perhaps came from someone who normally doesn't like your content but like you've just changed their mind on something or you you've turned them around on it i tend to think that when i get likes on social media those are just the people that like all my shit no matter what i say like they probably don't even read it like i could you know put the most preposterous thing up there and you're still gonna get a handful of the same exact likes that's interesting but i i tend to the way i see likes you're kind of you said multiple things i think in one sense you see social media as like a battleground of ideas and like is it kind of indicate like the best possible like is an indicator of like of the of you winning over somebody on an idea and they really appreciate the idea that's the best possible like to me a like is just two strangers smiling at each other like like a moment of like like i got you bro yeah i got you bro yeah yeah like fist bump like yeah we're in this fucking thing together this whole thing doesn't make any sense but we're in this together and i yeah it's possible for likes to be that i i don't think the actual clicking of a like i think social media at his best might be that where it's like i got you bro and it's a large scale as opposed to kind of uh this weird uh like crazy pool of dopamine where everyone's just obsessed with this likes and likes and and then the division drives like more of this like weird anxious engagement i think that's just the dark version of it in the early days of social media i think you called it uh a battleground of ideas but i think social media is nothing but a battleground of fragile egos well but humans are fragile egos i mean maybe but i think the people i think particularly on social media they're the most fragile like would you be doing all the things you're doing what would you be doing if you weren't um if you weren't podcasting and posting the things you do on social media what would you be doing you'd probably be much the same guy right but i think that on social media the fragile ego people what you see on social media is not what they'd be doing without social media does that make any sense like you're you're probably your mission is probably somewhat congruent in your path you're just utilizing social media but i think a lot of people social media has changed their path and and now they're doing something totally foreign to them and they're only able to do it maybe because of social media i think you're focusing on a particular moment in time of people in their less great moments like in their less great version of themselves i think you're just focusing on the masses struggling to uh to become the best version of themselves and then you yeah sure for stretches of time whether it's days weeks or months you could be a shitty person on the internet i think you're focusing on that and unfortunately social media platforms emphasize they love it when you're like that when you're not doing great in your own in your own life because it increases anxiety increases engagement makes you more susceptible to an argument and then really get pulled into like conspiracy theories all that kind of stuff but the other side works too i think there's also the people who are on social media like fronting like they're these positive figures and like you know going to the gym like whatever it is the positivity that they spew out but in real life they're the most negative fucks you've ever met in your life and they're just so full of crap and it's just you people playing to an audience it's like you like you said like they it's like a politician sometimes like a politician wakes up one day and they decide who's the group i can pander to the best to get the most likes equals votes yeah and it's the same thing on social media people wake up and whether it's conscious or not what's the group i can pander to the best to get the most likes is it the positivity motivated crowd is it the woe was me crowd like what is it who's going to give me the most likes that's what i'll do i i don't know how to argue against that i guess it's it's uh it rings true what you're saying but i just kind of refuse to believe it i guess i'm pandering to the optimistic crowd like i met with my marketing team and i just feel that uh uh love has the uh the best uh what do you call it no i don't know there's a lot of people that accuse me of being like exactly that which is like why are you always being positive it's like well because i i'd like to be that yeah but i don't i wouldn't consider you someone who panders no but you know it i guess what i'm saying is like uh it's easy to say that everyone is pandering but like maybe they're just trying i i do believe that social media platforms could encourage people when they're trying to be the best version of themselves whatever that is it could be like conor mcgregor talking shit it could be just being positive it could be actually creating cool things in this world um putting out instructional videos for jiu jitsu or like inspiring students to competition all i don't know all those kinds of things educational content i i think that people are trying like i i tend to believe that people want to be good like like they want to be successful whatever that definition of success is and they're kind of struggling to do that and they're just awkward at it at first and like it's easy to focus on the awkwardness and the the stumbling around us people have that and they start shitting on each other like it's easy to kind of focus in on that but i think that's just like people you know white belts there's more white belts in the world than there are black belts but you gotta give them a chance to kind of grow i think on social media if you put your stuff out there whatever your stuff is your content your views or whatever you let the chips fall where they may like that's a different thing than being like i'm gonna i'm gonna tweak what i normally might say and put it up this way because i want these people to like it and in terms i also think i have a different viewpoint than you do on people wanting to be successful i actually don't think that many people want to be successful i think people want to have the appearance of wanting to be successful but to be successful takes a shitload of work and most people don't want to put that work in so they craft this persona of a person who's trying really hard but just can't catch the break or you know these motherfuckers with getting back on my grind you've never been on a grind you've been on the couch i so disagree with you i get it i get it you you that's your foil you enjoyed that guy in the couch with the cheetos that's you that's that's your motivation but just own it be like don't be like back on the ground be back on the couch yeah well you you you're like david goggins who's like talking shit to the one guy with the eating cheetos and in in so doing inspires millions to like to actually pursue their success i get it but i just think that most people really do want to be successful and are like are trying to work hard and they keep failing uh so i mean but why is it why is it continue i'm sorry to interrupt you but like let's take a person who's overweight yeah do you not think that person wants to be skinny of course they want to be skinny they just don't want it enough to put the pizza or the pie down and go to the gym they want it but they want it to be easy of course they want to be skinny well of course he wants it to be easy right and of course people people want to be successful but do they want it enough to do the work i don't think they do i think the easy thing to do is to to create a uh an outward facing persona of the person who really wants it and you get the same reward from a lot of people as the person who actually is successful very few people differentiate from the person who's found success and and the person who's showing you how they're trying to get success on social media people see that as the same i see i see you're going after the marketing dollar that represents the the people that want to work hard yeah i like it uh you uh started a podcast recently oh yeah called which people probably from this conversation can i guess we didn't really talk about politics much or the fact that you're a business owner the fact that you're a red-blooded american and love this country uh uh america we wouldn't really talk about that but from the name of the podcast they can probably infer it and the name is please allow me good name uh what have you learned from doing this podcast what's your hope of doing this podcast for people should definitely listen to you have a few episodes out you're damn good at it which is very interesting i'm sure you'll evolve and change but so this is like the early days i'm curious to see where it goes but what like what's your thinking around it as a as an intellectual putting your thoughts out into the world i think that one of the things that covey did um when we were all kind of in lockdown was as a business owner it made me take stock of what's the future of brick and mortar businesses and i've always been reluctant to be an online presence in any way just because it's not my thing because i believe that i'm a force of nature and people need to experience me right and uh the the few characters that twitter has or faces not enough to experience not enough the force of nature there's john clark oh yeah right i want you to feel physically uncomfortable around me i've just been three hours of me being physically uncomfortable i'm scared for my life uh and so i thought that that would be one of the ways in which i could increase like i i came to the conclusion that with the the lockdown and potential future lockdowns you know uh in order to pay my mortgage and you know my bar tab and my grubhub's out of control that i would need to find ancillary ways to doordash slash lex uh you don't want to use grub pop grubhub sucks they actually do doordash no i'm just kidding just walk to your local uh food or 7-eleven yeah and get and get the food you can order 7-eleven from door dash or from post code lex okay i'm sorry um but anyway i thought it was like oh i should probably increase a little bit my online presence and what would be a way to do that that would be fun for me and entertaining and i thought well a lot of people yourself included that i know have done some podcasts and i find uh that inspiring and i'm fortunate enough to know a bunch of cool motherfuckers that you know i can talk to about a lot of a wide range of topics then they're starting to drop and there's an aspect to which podcasting does capture the force of nature better in in the digital form podcasting captures the force and nature of a human being better than other mediums perhaps yeah definitely there's that i i just felt like you know you know when it's midnight and you're in the bar and you get the sense that you know the bar's gonna close in 90 minutes and you think you know not enough people have seen me yet and maybe we should go to another bar so more people can see me yeah i feel like podcasting is like is like that for me not enough people have heard my thoughts and i feel like my mom raised me to be a giver she didn't want me to be selfish and i have these thoughts that i think that i think could be a waste if you didn't give it to the world people seem to really enjoy them yeah i enjoy well while i've probably been on my best behavior today on on this episode of the podcast so if you want the uh the uncensored unfiltered uh the full spectrum that the force of nature is john clark you go to do you go you go to the podcast you funny enough i think you're drinking throughout most of the podcast yeah yeah tequila so they only last like an hour because you seem to like i'm guessing that you just lose it one hour like it's like cinderella turns into a frog or whatever one of the things i'm learning is um sometimes you have great conversations when you're drunk and sometimes you don't like i was i went into it with the right drunk edit sober mentality yes hemingway hemingway yes but turns out that uh sometimes you don't have that much to edit when you're super shit-faced and so uh i've been scaling that back a little bit and what do you mean exactly by that like where does it go wrong when you're drunk i'm curious about that because uh it gets you especially when you have a personal relationship with the person that you're talking to rather than trying to put some ideas on display for other people to hear and maybe talk about you wind up just having like a conversation with your bro about inside jokes and things like that and it's like it's not that interesting no one wants to like watch you know go to a bar and watch two people at the sitting there getting drunk and talking to each other is different than listening to uh like strong discourse yes one interesting thing as a fan of joe rogan i'm a fan i've been a fan of joe rogan for a long time and he has his friends over a lot right and there there's a aspect to those three four or five hour conversations that i really enjoy there's a magic to those i think he taught the world that those kinds of long-form conversations can work the what you forget is joe rogan is a comedian his friends are also celebrities like they know what it's like to be on the mic they know there is a challenge to actually having your friends on the microphone like they're they've never this is the first time they've been on a microphone yeah and that's actually what you've been doing which is a very interesting experiment and uh you find that some are more awkward than others like they're trying to find like what do i do with this kind of thing why why do you not talk to strangers why did you go with people that you're actually no so the simple answer is the people that i selected are both interesting and i thought would be good at talking but then i noticed the thing you just mentioned my buddy paul did the first one and paul's a wild man and if you went out with paul he can talk about a bazillion topics to a certain to to a significant uh level of depth right he's got a good understanding and he's got a unique perspective on a lot of things um and i think he was the first guy invited on my podcast and it was almost like he was on a little bit less than natural about it and then by the time he loosened up with some drinks he was it just we were all shit-faced there's there's a phase shift though totally yeah totally and so he's gonna come back on and he'll be more comfortable with it and uh and it'll probably be awesome because he's a great person to talk to um i had my friend dave on who's a restaurant and a musician that that one will be released pretty soon but yesterday i had a guy on who you might really enjoy listening to who's a friend of mine his name is mark clem he's an endurance athlete and he's been compared he's been called the white dave goggins and um he talks about like those comparisons and what he hates about it and the various events and stuff and he's just a guy who's just always kind of like natural and like i knew he'd be great to get on the podcast and um so i started with friends who i thought could handle it and who also are just really interesting people and uh and i i did it so that i could also establish a level of comfort because it was a new thing for me and they i knew that they wouldn't really give a shit what i was doing and be like hey this is cool i'm going over jc's house we're gonna drink some tequila and talk shit there's just gonna be a microphone there this time i mean it's amazing what you're doing the freedom of it i mean you're not currently doing advertisements or any of that kind of stuff you're just exploring your voices one of the mediums that you're just trying it out my 11 subscribers know what i'm about you're 11 subscribers it's in the double digits yeah uh for both you and i do you have advice for me as a podcaster and for yourself as a podcast like if you if you were to think like you're gonna do say i mean who knows but say you do a thousand more episodes right like imagine a world where that that your life continues in that direction that this is like a little parallel to like for me this thing is like a little side hobby but it's also one that's deeply fulfilling um so not just from a business perspective which is not the way i think about it i just think from a life human perspective it's i probably wouldn't have this kind of conversation with you off mike like this long this deep this attentive there's something really fulfilling about these conversations so what advice would you have for me what advice do you have for yourself or have you not introspected this that deeply oh i have a lot i have advice i think the first advice i would give to you is i think you should uh have me on more often yes yeah that's first first and second is go on your podcast and uh well i would say i would say you come on my podcast when you're ready yeah when you feel like the product that i'm putting out uh would benefit from your presence and vice versa not not as a not as a favor to a bro but at the right time i i do sense actually it's an interesting there's a dance to it which is uh like joe i recently did like joe rogan had a conversation with me on this podcast there's a very specific kind of thing where you you're helping each other out yeah but the timing on that has to be right right you know like uh right if that makes any sense you're like supporting each other it doesn't make sense it doesn't it doesn't make a difference you would think right because it's it's just people talking it doesn't matter what microphones but it changes things it does and there's an order to the guests that i've had on and the next guest that i'll have on will be a a friend we have in common and we'll be talking about teaching how to teach different styles of teaching and what you're teaching all these other things do you mind saying who oh sean fisher and um i think there's an order to it's not scientific but it's based on my gut is it uh astrologically based uh what do you mean it's not scientific you're you're god so you have a sense uh like joe rogan for example tries to do left right he tries to alternate like this this gut feeling of like these bins of people and he tries to alternate world views that's interesting like he kind of so he doesn't feel like it that like it shake it constantly shakes him it's it's more about him like constantly pulls him in multiple directions about like how he sees the world and that keeps him balanced that keeps the conversation kind of exciting that's interesting i i did it in a way where i knew paul was going to be wild and we might get a little out of control and like have some technical hiccups along the way and then my friend jake who's a ceo of a pharmaceutical company that was very timely because uh you know he was able to speak to vaccines and that was kind of scientific flavored yeah and what i learned listening back on that is like i learned for myself about uh i wasn't asking the next level questions to really draw out great answers and part of it is uh i you're simultaneously hanging out with a bro but also i was trying to learn something and i didn't learn what i wanted to learn and that's my fault because i didn't ask the questions he's an expert in that field he doesn't know that i'm an absolute dipshit when it comes to that stuff and so i didn't do a good job and if i don't know it that means the thing i was trying to tease out of him no one who is going to listen is going to learn that either yeah so i learned that um and then i had the one with soap on which i thought was was pretty good um there's a wrestler there's also a farmer right and he's a social worker and kind of humble and and thoughtful yeah thoughtful thoughtful guy like slower not a wild man that kind of thing not a wild man in the sense that i'm wild but he does preach this this philosophy of being more wild like being in touch with nature nature that that that kind of work right right right and then my buddy dave he came on um you know because i love music and i wanted to talk a lot about music and he's one of the most knowledgeable people about music that i know and he's got a restaurant coming up and i thought my buddy mark clem being an endurance athlete like when you hear some of the i didn't even know these things existed that this fucking kid did he's out of his mind and you know i think shawn and i will have probably the most intellectual conversation that i'll have had on my podcast to date and so there's a little bit of alternating there but um you know i did it that way uh so that there's a guy there's a gut feeling behind oh so that what is there where are you going do you know where you're going uh i'm i don't have a destination but i want to i want to see it to its end whether that's uh it gets somewhere of its own volition or it takes on a new life at some point and then i know how to drive it where it needs to go i think the advice i have for both of us is um i think i need to no i don't think so i think for you i see an inner turmoil i see a storm that bruises you because i feel like there's a concern for what you're saying and is it gonna get is it gonna is it gonna lead to uh negative feelings towards you or the thing that you're doing and i feel like we're different people and i have such an easier time saying fuck off to everybody and that's a liberating thing but it also can can keep me from achieving the thing that i want to achieve because i'm so flippant with opinions that i don't listen to them and let them direct me when they should there's a balance let me push back on that please i think you you believe that about yourself and nevertheless your social media presence indicates otherwise if i were to be very harsh you're like one of those you know mentally strongest character wise people i know and yet on social media you don't put your face to the world no one of the reasons you sense the fear in me which exists i of course want to let go of it is because i put my face on like my my name on things and so when i say something stupid it it hurts when people did say like look that guy said something stupid and so there's a fear of saying something stupid in all of his different forms uh like of being my lesser so it's the same feeling i have in competition of like of losing not just losing losing doesn't matter it's embarrassing myself i like losing uh being the lesser version of myself and when you put yourself out there in a full way i think you would i i would venture to say you're also because you like said you you don't you wouldn't give yourself that advice i feel like you're also afraid of standing behind some of the ideas because right now you're doing guerrilla warfare you're you're free to to uh to be uh to say things to speak your mind from the sidelines but the moment you're standing and like when people can throw shit at you i feel like uh you haven't faced that far yet you've been like avoiding that fire i'm not sure maybe i'm projecting no to a degree you're right i think like a big thing for me was putting like ads on for like our our jiu jitsu online uh like um curriculum that was a big thing uh for me because for several reasons like in the climate of everyone under the sun having a you know a jiu jitsu tutorial online and social media not social media necessarily but forums specifically that uh critique and shit the bed one thing i have not done that i've thought about doing and probably you're right in your analysis of it is i've not gone the way that i do see you on things like reddit and say hey reddit i'm doing this like i could easily go to red and say hey reddit uh i got this website up here here's a sample video whatever the fuck people do on there but yeah you're right i haven't done that and part of it might be because i i i know also if i get suckered in for one second into the negativity i'm going to become an online warrior and i don't want to be that person so yeah you're probably self-aware about that i mean one of the things i've early on decided is like i'm just gonna be i've always really enjoyed being positive so i'm going to make sure i stay that way and when there's negativity it's like i'm not just ignoring it i'm literally just returning it with positivity i like no i probably am the same way as you most people are with with egos you get you want to become the warrior against the negativity and uh like like many wars there's no winning right there's no winning that was posted online especially on the internet and uh so in that sense that's that's been a journey to try to to face the fire of the negativity and it's not actually that bad it sounds like very dramatic there's not many people that are negative but it's like when you put advertisements so you put your face on an instructional or something like that right it just there's an aspect to it which you're being a salesman you're being a gimmicky thing right it just feels wrong and people will point out look that guy is a fraud like it's fake look he's trying but those people are going to be out there and if you're like trying to do your best trying to be authentic and not trying to like be a a snake oil salesman and being like the shady kind of salesman um i think they keep you honest they keep you being the most authentic self and podcasting is like the best medium because you're being real those one hour plus that you put out there that's like real john that's not a like people people fall in love with that and that that's that the beautiful aspect of podcasting is there's no long form doesn't give any possibility for you not to be authentic right and that's why it's a magical medium the the tough thing is you're not you know popularity takes time right now popularity and so like you should shouldn't be doing it for that reason and i don't it's not the thing that really uh drives me yeah is there three books technical fiction philosophical that had an impact on you like is there books that you kind of return to that you enjoy and never had you know you find profound in some way i would say like probably the thing i read is in one of emerson's essays that i read at a you know point in my life where i needed that type of thing and i read self-reliance and you know he's got a ton of good essays but i thought self-reliance was probably the most impactful to me um you know i've read later in life like a handful of you know existential authors and they're all great but at the time a lot of it has to do with timing and when i read self-reliance and it was about the individual uh that was really good and made it was uh impactful there's also a book called uh jonathan livingston seagull by richard uh richard bach i think and um it's kind of along the same lines it's about this seagull who you know wants to break conformity and learn to fly and do all these other great things and so it's a very short read so if people are interested in that that's good uh the book which i was lucky enough to read before the movie ever even came out which is just a a pleasure of mine was a american psycho just from a writing standpoint yeah i found that the writing was was awesome uh brett easton ellis who's the author of that and several other books who have like intertwining characters uh he's a new england prep school guy and so a lot of like the stories and a lot of the the visuals uh rang true for me and anyone who can write four pages of prose on like a huey lewis album i mean kudos to you and i also would say no one will do this but i would at some point read as much of one of the big three religious texts as possible it really gives you perspective there's so many overlapping stories in the in in of religious texts and then the way that they're written gives you a unique perspective on different people uh throughout the world and you know if you're a roman catholic maybe don't read the bible read one of the other texts and that would be an interesting take but i'm embarrassed to say that first of all i've never read the bible which is embarrassing to say it's like i read a bunch of stuff about the bible not the bible itself and the same not equating them but i haven't read marx directly i haven't read mineconf by hitler directly and it feels like sometimes because you think like it's better to read stuff about the books but ultimately you want because like the analysis will be better in the texts that uh followed it but there's value to actually reading like the actual words uh yeah there's this power in the words that uh there's a reason why like the bible is one of the most impactful books ever you know and it's it's in it's in those words and it's uh of value to return to those words the communist manifesto is truly frightening if you read it in in like modern context it's worth reading yeah we're three years so is mineconf not obviously well uh it's not obvious but it is not very well written uh but all the ideas that led to the evil that is hitler are all in there which is uh fascinating to think about because probably some of the world leaders at the time should have probably read the books he he outlined everything he's going to do you've mentioned offline you mentioned an emerson quote i really like so let's try to end on this powerful quote it's easy in the world to live after the world's opinion it's easy and solitude to live after your own the great man is who in the midst of the world keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude what does this quote mean to you uh it's kind of uh reinforces the idea that you're here to live your life and that even when people are trying to influence you or comment on the decisions that you make for your life you should have the strength to stick by living your life the way you want to live it that there's one immutable truth for you and it doesn't apply to everyone and so people who um people who frown upon or judge the way that you live because it's not air quotes conventional uh their opinion should not be something that impacts the choices that you make you're in a relationship now yes is that deeply meaningful or is it are you ultimately still alone is this are you still just a man in the cold of the of the life that is suffering no i'm a man who's warm nestled in a bosom i don't think there's a better way to end uh john uh you're a friend you're my coach i'm sure we'll talk many more times in the future thanks for wasting all your time with me today thanks brother thanks alex i had an awesome time hope to be back soon thanks for listening to this conversation with john clark and thank you to our sponsors theragun the device i use for post-workout muscle recovery magic spoon low-carb keto friendly cereal that i think is delicious eight sleep a mattress that cools itself and gives me yet another reason to enjoy sleep and finally cash app the app i use to send money to friends please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it with five stars and apple podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman and now let me leave you with some words from miyamoto musashi think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you