Ryan Hall: Martial Arts and the Philosophy of Violence, Power, and Grace | Lex Fridman Podcast #125
the following is a conversation with ryan hall one of the most insightful minds and systems thinkers in the martial arts world he's a black belt in jiu jitsu accomplished competitor an mma fighter undefeated in the ufc and truly a philosopher who seeks to understand the underlying principles of the martial arts jiu jitsu is such an important part of who i am and i was hoping to share that with folks who might know me only as a researcher i think there's no better person to do that with than ryan who somehow remarkably i can say is a friend and also a modern day warrior philosopher of the miyamoto masashi line of especially dangerous and brilliant humans also his amazing wife jen hall was there as well so if you hear a kind of voice of wisdom coming from above you know who it is quick summary of the sponsors power dot babel and cash app please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast as a side note let me say that renaming this podcast to just my name gave me intellectual freedom that i really didn't anticipate was so empowering especially for someone who's trying to find their voice i hope you'll allow me the chance to really try and do that to step outside of ai and even science engineering history and so on and on occasion talk to athletes musicians writers and maybe even comedians who inspire me especially up and coming comedians and musicians like eric weinstein who yes we'll do a third conversation with soon i think if i allow myself to expand the range of these conversations on occasion when i do return to science and engineering i'll bring a new perspective and also a little bit more fun and a few extra listeners that may not otherwise realize how fascinating artificial intelligence robotics mathematics and engineering truly is all that said please skip the episodes that don't interest you you don't have to listen to all of them trust me as someone who is a bit or a lot ocd that idea is quite unpleasant but life 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used it he was an inspiration to me as someone who practices first principles thinking especially in a discipline where conventional thinking is everywhere he created a martial art called jeet kune do that is in many ways at least philosophically in his hybrid approach a precursor to modern day mixed martial arts there's a special kind of deep philosophical thinking that combat athletes or jiu jitsu practitioners do that is unlike any other i think it's grounded in the humbling process of getting your ass kicked a lot that removes any illusion of intellectual superiority i think the journey towards wisdom starts when you humbly admit to yourself that you know very little or almost nothing anyway go to powerdot.com lex and use codelex at checkout to get 20 off on top of the 30-day free trial this show is also sponsored by babel an app and website that gets you speaking in a new language within weeks go to babble.com and use code lex to get three months free they offer 14 languages including spanish french italian german and yes russian let me read a few lines from a russian song by vladimir vasotsky called anabolaf parisia that you'll start to understand if you sign up to babel annabella this song always made me smile because it resonates with my own life it translates loosely to she's been to paris paris for russian i suppose symbolizing a fancy life and that the guy could never quite fit into that kind of life expensive things nice restaurants cars all that i was thinking about what song's equivalent in english maybe uptown girl by billy joe is similar in spirit but very different in style i just watched the video on youtube for uptown girl and it's basically billy joel dressed up as a mechanic but dancing in a way that i'm pretty sure no mechanic has ever danced turning the old cringe factor up to 11. anyway i always felt like i didn't really fit in with the fancy people and that's what this song represents but back to uh babel get started by 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there right now sitting in a hot tub with some wine watching me say this i salute you sir or madam i may be opening up some floodgates i deeply regret later so please make sure you're wearing clothes and whatever you sent me there will be no naked people in the hot tub as part of this podcast i have integrity and standards let me know in the comments what ideas for contests you might have again if you get cash out from the app store google play and use the code lex podcast you get ten dollars and cash app will also donate ten dollars to first an organization that is helping to advance robotics and stem education for young people around the world and now here's my conversation with ryan hall who in your view is the greatest warrior in history ancient or modern that's a tough question and again i'm no historian by any measure so i'll probably do the worst like what are your best bands ever i'm like metallica and you know so i'll pick the material could just come out with a new album by the way entire orchestra that's that's kind of cool yeah them metallica will will always be one of the greatest yeah i agree with that example if they were a well-known yet awesome band let me say it's like a nickelback or something like that but i feel that feels cheap because everyone makes fun of nickelback yeah i don't know i guess it depends on how you want to define warrior something to think about when it comes to trying to evaluate various people or situations or things that i've read about or heard about are with the circumstances that they were involved in because i think a lot of times it's easy to look at the outcomes and obviously outcome we live in an outcome-driven world and you know outcomes do matter but at the same time like uh you know you look at let's say what cuba's been able to pull off you know from a combat sports perspective it's it's staggering you know like the amount of successful olympic level competitors they have in wrestling boxing judo um i mean they're a tiny little island with no money and no people it's that's shocking you know when you come you think about the olympics in the united states doing well of course we should do well i mean russia should do well china should do well india should do better than they do honestly obviously it means like they're not into it as much or at least certain sports because they have the resources people-wise um so talent's not going to be an issue so there's something to like where the starting point is like that's the argument with like uh what people say maradona i don't know if you're into it oh yeah big soccer okay they say mardon is better than messi because he basically carried the team and and won the world cup with the team that wouldn't otherwise win the world cup and then messi was only successful in barcelona because uh he has like superstars he's playing with other superstars right yeah that's fair to say i mean like like united there's a lot of factors that go into let's say winning a winning a soccer game and you know obviously barcelona you know particularly for various points in time had a ridiculous all-star squad of world-class players but um and i you know let's say for instance maybe they didn't have the creative players in argentina they needed to get the ball up to messi you know they didn't have like the nes the and you know the you know the again the backing there in the midfield but um because obviously argentina's always had ridiculous attacking players like even alongside messi but they're like the three killers up front and then a little less behind so it's interesting you say that it depends how you define warrior because you can probably take like some of the civil rights leaders you can go into that direction like leaders in general but if we just look at like the greatest martial artist in history in that direction do you have somebody in mind i would say at least three three that pop into my head and um would be uh hannibal um alexander the great and then maybe miyamoto musashi um you know the two commanders and then one you know guy but uh so it's it's interesting and then again you mentioned warriors being able to make a lot out of a little uh you know musashi's famous for winning duels you know that were oftentimes one there were one-on-one you know the alexander and hannibal were you know military commanders and one of them faced rome and that was an interesting thing oftentimes you know coming up with novel tactics different strategies sometimes under resourced doing having to do novel and crazy things there's skin in the game that's an interesting thing too i think a lot of times you know it's uh if you're playing a video game i don't think you can be a warrior because there's there's no skin in the game you get hurt you lose and it's a bummer it stings a little bit maybe it makes you feel slightly disappointed but uh you know musashi loses he loses um hannibal loses he loses alexander loses he loses and they lose i guess the people around them lose so that's almost like uh you could use even from a combat sports perspective a muhammad ali i mean you consider also their quality of opposition musashi was fighting high quality opposition obviously hannibal and al alexander particularly hannibal were fighting unbelievable opposition muhammad ali fought phenomenal opposition but he had skin in the game both in the ring and out and that actually meshes with as you mentioned like a civil rights you know type of situation where you are under resourced you're pushing the stone uphill and that was a neat thing i think about muhammad ali was how much you know personal conviction the man had to have in order to pull off what he was able to pull off both in in and outside of the ring and that reminds me of of again some of the other great leaders or great fighters throughout history so what do you make of the kind of very difficult idea that some of these conquerors like alexander the great and somebody that uh if you listen to hardcore history oh dan carlin uh who apparently elon musk is also a big fan of is the genghis khan episode you know a large percent of the world is uh is uh we can call genghis khan an ancestor so the difficult truth is about some of these conquerors is that there's a lot of murder and rape and pillage and stealing of resources and all that kind of stuff and yet they're often remembered as quite honorable i mean in the case of genghis khan there's a lot of people who argue if you look at the historically the way it's described in full context is he was ultimately like a given the time he was a liberator he was uh he was a progressive i should say uh you know like in terms of the the violence and the atrocities he committed he at least in the stories has always provided the option of not to do that it's only if you resist do you basically have the option do you want to join us or do you want to die and die horribly and so that's the progressive sort of uh that's the bernie sanders of the era nice so uh what do you make of that that there's just so much of these great conquerors there's so much murder that to us now would just seem insane it's funny you mentioned it i think that maybe it's a human nature thing that we want to uh or you know maybe or maybe a misunderstanding thing that we want to cast all of our characters and ourselves maybe as entirely good or as entirely negative when you know i guess i was the phrase or the saying you know one man's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist um is accurate and a lot of times i think you can understand as long as you're able to look from various people's perspective like if you look at the tv show the wire um which was obviously you know widely everybody loves the wire um i thought that they were everyone i mean i'm not saying anything that's that's not been said before compelling characters from all angles whether you like the character dislike the character you were able to understand the motivations of people doing various things even if they did wrongly they did rightly you know we want to cast all of the the demons throughout history as as completely inhuman when i think that makes it difficult for us to understand them and we want to look back at at the people that we think of as great um and entirely great and i think that we're you know we're experiencing the problems with this you know even right now socially and politically as we're trying to look back and decide the people we thought were good or not good or people we thought were bad and now good rather than going hey there's there's good and bad to all things and there are as you mentioned the genghis khan thing you don't have to fight back you do i respect you for it but then we're gonna have a conflict and then we'll see what happens and if you lose you're going to be sorry that you did because i have to make it that way if i want to continue utilizing this this kind of mo because i need to discourage the next guy from doing what you're doing right now and ultimately though i guess that's an interesting thing imagine you put every single person on planet earth in a cage crime drops you know uh all sorts there are certain positives to that and i it's just things are as they are it's difficult but that is ultimately more the law of the jungle and i think that we're able to supersede some of that now in modern times and i think we're fortunate but as you mentioned we look back and say oh this is horrible say no that that just is what it is that's how life is at a base level and you know again if you're a lion and i'm a gazelle i don't i don't really like it very much but we don't call the lion the bad guy we don't sanctify the gazelle or the other way around so it's just it's interesting when you pull back some of the controls that we put on our behavior and you know in modern life which i think are generally speaking positive you know we get down to how things often are and at the same time we could modern life was built by people like genghis khan so then you get down to the ends just to find the means it's a tough question these aren't things with easy answers at least if they are i certainly don't have the the smarts to figure out the answers to them but uh it's it's difficult i would just say people in the world are complicated and layered and depending upon which side of the line you're standing on at various times you know um you may like or dislike someone but i can't remember uh it's i can't remember who's whose idea was this is killing me but it's the veil of ignorance i guess um the philosophical you know um you know idea of the veil of ignorance where i go is is sticking everyone in the cage the right thing to do when i say or everyone but me and i say well no why well it would make my life easier if i just went over and took all of your stuff as long as you couldn't stop me i mean of course that's a great idea that's what everyone does in every video game but uh in skyrim you steal stuff when people aren't around but um ultimately you go well this isn't the right thing to do because if i were on the other side of it i would i would not appreciate it it's it's inherently not a good thing to do i'm only doing it because i think i'm going to win and that's a fine way to be but you don't have the white hat on i guess i would say so i think without those philosophical underpinnings to reign us in you know i guess morally speaking it's very difficult to say what's right or wrong and you'd say certain actions have a reaction almost like a physics sense if you kill everyone in your way for as long as you're able to your life will be easier i mean you're setting the table for someone doing the same to you when you're no longer the tough guy but it is what it is yeah if you look at like the instagram channel nature's metal it hurts my heart to watch to remind me a comfortable descendant of ape how vicious nature is just unapologetically uh just i mean there's a there's a process to it where the bad guy always wins the the violence is the solution to most problems or the flip side of that running away from violence is the solution depending on your skill set and it's funny to think of us humans with our extra little piece of brain that we're somehow trying to figure out like you said in the philosophical way how to supersede that how to like move past the viciousness the cruelty the just the cold exchange of nature but perhaps it's not so maybe that is nature maybe that's the way of life maybe we're trying too hard to uh we're being too egotistical and thinking we're somehow separate from nature we're somehow distant from that very thing i couldn't agree with him more in fact i think actually orson scott card you know who's the writer of a great book called anders game um was this was a statement that the main character you know ender uh made in the book his brother was brilliant um his brother was like kind of sociopathic brilliant kid that was ended up kicked out of the school that they were all into for battle commander dealing with his brother taught him that ultimately strength courage the ability to do violence for all the good and the bad of that is one of the fundamental most important things to be able to do in life because if you can't cause destruction if you can't cause pain you will be forever subject to those who can and i think that you mentioned egotism i think that that's a disease that could obviously strike any of us but it's something that we're looking at now we're you know i think we should be unbelievably thankful as people that live in the world that we do um that we can walk down the street without having to worry that i'm like well don't worry that that six foot six 270 pound person over there is just gonna leave me alone and i have a rolex on but whatever i'll be fine because that person's deciding to leave me alone because we've all agreed to live in this relatively you know sane and or you know constrained society because it benefits all of us and we're doing it because of a philosophical underpinning not because nature dictates it be that way because nature dictates it go in a very very different direction and the only person the only thing stopping that person from doing something to me is either me that person or someone else that will stand in between us and if i can't do it and there's no one there to stand in between us then the only thing stopping that person is that person and i have to hope that they're either disinterested or disinclined to do that sort of thing and i think that uh you know it's keeping in mind that that that is the fundamental nature of the world whether we like it or not um is important and i think the the quest to fundamentally alter human nature is going to be ultimately fruitless and then also it's it is a little bit egotistical the lion does what a lion does you know we we can try to box it in and we can try to you know guide this direction that direction but you know nature is as it is and as it always will be unless we want to start to constrain it significantly but now i'm starting to get into individual rights who put me in charge who says that i should be the one to make the choice is constraining because many of the most awful things that have happened throughout history one group or one person has decided to constrain others and we don't like genghis khan doing that well i'll do that on a little level are there going to be beneficial benefits and beneficiaries absolutely but there'll be losers in that too so i guess it's a it's a dangerous game it's almost like putting on the one ring you know we remember when frodo offered the one ring to gandalf and gandalf said no no i would take it away i would put it on i would use it out of the desire to do good but through me it would wheel the power so terrible you can't imagine i think that's that's the big question for anyone that decides that's able to have reach and able to have power i mean obviously i can't speak to that but imagine you did have national level global level power how would you use it would you try to change the world would you be glad that you did down the line i don't know yeah there's uh i mean that's the thing we're struggling now as a society maybe it'd be nice to get your quick comment on that which is um the people who have traditionally been powerless are now you know seeking a fairer society a more equal society and in in attaining more power justly there's also a realization at least from my perspective that power corrupts everyone even if you're even if the flag you wave is that of of justice right and so you know not to overuse the term but it'd be nice if you have thoughts about the whole idea of cancer culture and the internet and and twitter and so on where there's on nuance difficult discussions of uh of race of gender of fairness equality justice all these kinds of things there's a shouting down oftentimes of nuanced discussion of kind of trying to reason through these very difficult issues through our history through what our future looks like do you have thoughts about the internet discourse that's going on now is there something positive yeah i mean we can pull out of this it's an interesting thing to see i guess as you mentioned anytime you're wielding power whomever you are doing so carefully is is important and it's very very easy to look at the people that have power and that are using it poorly or have used it poorly and go hey you're the bad guy and then go well of course if i had power i'll use it properly and i may intend to use it properly and maybe i will but at the same time we see a lot of times people are people are people i think that a lot of the i think if you if you believe that that human beings are all one which i do you know no matter whether you're here you're there you're you're you got two arms two legs a heart a brain if we all live a similar experience you know and obviously with variations on a theme but uh you know you're no less a human being if you're a person i've never met from china than than some person in virginia it's we're all we're all people and i guess ultimately if i believe that human beings are corruptable and that power corrupts and that we're all fallible and we say and do things that either intentionally or unintentionally um that we wish we'd not um i think that i have to allow for a space i guess with the word it's almost a religious term but i guess i would just say grace and that's something that i see disappearing from discourse in the public or maybe it wasn't there i'm not sure but it's interesting you know watching this occur on the internet because also now no longer are you and i just having a talk sitting on a on a bus stop it's now in writing everything's in writing the old the old saying like don't put that in writing you're like don't put anything in writing that's how you get in trouble and basically uh you know with with the degree to which everything is recorded but recorded in tiny little bytes it's very very easy for me to wave every less little foolish ignorant incorrect or correct thing that someone has ever said or done in their face to support whatever argument that i'm trying to make about them or a situation and i think that you mentioned cancel culture or you know as it seems to exist obviously this is poisonous on its face this is poisonous um it's it's the sort of thing that doesn't incentivize proper behavior i mean you look at let's say one of the great monsters of history adolf hitler obviously who's done awful awful things but also for anyone that's even a minor student of history did some positive things as well we don't have to i don't have to embroider this person's crimes i don't have to act as if there was nothing good a monster has ever done and nothing bad that that a great person throughout history has ever done but imagine the ghost of adolf hitler were to pop up and go oh my gosh guys i'm so sorry i i know what i've done but i'd like to apologize and start to make it right well i mean you'd hope that you you know if he popped up over here you go well i don't really like what you've done and i don't like you but at the same time i'm glad to hear that you're attempting to make this right and push in a positive direction even if you can't make it right because otherwise what am i doing i'm disincentivizing change for the better i'm i'm looking to wield whatever power i have in a punitive fashion um which does not encourage people to do anything other than double down on on the wrongs that they've made knowing that at least they're going to have some support from the people that support that and i guess i want to you you hopefully look at the use of the internet as a tool that can educate and i guess i don't like the word empower but empower people to do various things extend their reach but uh but educate and learn rather than to further solidify little tribal things that exist which i think everyone in humanity and human history is is vulnerable to me look at the course of human history it's deeply tribal and the tribes or the groups that have been on top at various points in time have done a lot of times bad things to the ones that have not and you'd hope that we could learn lessons from the past and rather than you know committing the crimes that were you know that were committed against us recommitting them when we slide into the top position um say you know i could do this now but i'll not you know i understand the urge to to seek vengeance is strong of anyone that says differently i don't i wouldn't trust you know but at the same time we go i've we we have enough experience in history enough experience in life enough hopefully wisdom you know time in to go this isn't the right answer this is only going to replay the things the the worst parts of our history not the best and i want to encourage positive behavior and if i just again further lash out at people although understandably done done understandably i'm simply just going to just perpetuate the cycle that's gone on to this point so you hope that even though we're seeing a lot of a lot of turmoil societally at the moment and globally at the moment that uh i guess our better angels can prevail at a certain point but it's going to take a great deal of leadership and i think that we're we're sorely missing like a martin luther king style character at the moment or a great leader and i just i'm hoping that one will show up for sure and by the way a word i don't hear often and i think it's a beautiful one which is grace that's a really interesting word i'm gonna have to think about that it is there is a religious component to it but it's exactly right it um you have to somehow walk the line between you know you mentioned hitler i've been reading uh the rise and fall of the third reich i'm really thinking about the 1930s and what it's like to have economic my concern is the economic pain that people are feeling now quietly is really a suffering that's not being heard and there's echoes of that in the in the 20s and the 30s with the great depression and there's a hunger for a charismatic leader like you said there's a leader that could walk with grace could inspire could uh could bring people together with uh with sort of uh dreams of a better future that's positive but hitler did exactly everything that i just said except for the word positive which is he did give a dream to the german people who were great people who are great people of um of a better future it's just that a certain point that quickly turned into the better future requires literally expansion of more land it started with well if we want to build a great germany we need a little bit more land and so we need to kind of get austria then we need to kind of get france mostly because france doesn't understand that more land is really useful so we need to get rid of them and look what they did to us in versailles anyway but so the jew the jewish uh the holocaust is a separate thing i don't know well i don't know i don't know what to think about because uh so me being jewish and having a lot of the echoes of the suffering is in my family or the people that are lost i don't know because hitler wrote all about it in mineconf so i don't know if the evil he committed was there all along i mean and that that's where the question of forgiveness i mean hitler's such a difficult person to talk about but it's the question of on cancer culture who is deserving of forgiveness and who's not like the holocaust survivors that i've read about that i've heard the interviews with they've often spoken about the fact that the way for them to let go to overcome the atrocities that they've experienced is to forgive like forgiveness is the way out for them it's interesting to think about i don't know i don't know if i don't know if we're even a society ready to even contemplate an idea of forgiveness for hitler it's it's an interesting idea though it was it's a good thought exercise at the very least to think about like all these people that are being canceled for doing bad things of different degrees think of like louis ck or somebody like that for being not a good person but like what is the path for forgiveness so what's a good person what is the good part if that's a sliding scale that we could all find ourselves looking at the uncomfortable end of a gun on you know particularly down the line i mean you hope for the best but these definitions i guess like you said are important and who's doing the canceling who's being canceled i'm not necessarily as you said saying that that's entirely unjustified or certainly not it's certainly understandable and particularly you mentioned like a monster like an adolf hitler but it's also interesting i couldn't help but notice like you mentioned as a society us being able to apply forgiveness to someone who's done so much horror but people who are personal i'm of course many so many people in person affected but directly personally affected someone a survivor of the holocaust being able to let go on that i'm nowhere near big enough a person for that sort of thing but i guess that's that's an interesting thing you know being the person who was physically there potentially able to able to let go i don't know that's that's unbelievably powerful it's interesting i guess you have to wonder sometimes and this isn't obviously in regards to that to the holocaust but why why i'm holding on to various things am i what is it doing for me and what is it doing to me is it facilitative is it not and i guess that's something else that i i really enjoy when i was on ultimate fighter they uh they don't let you have any music or any books other than religious text so i brought a bible and i brought a quran and i started to read them side by side and it was it was really interesting reading the bible's a little drier quran's the crown is more interesting at least written but um i i think something that that was consistently brought up uh was the way the most merciful people want i don't think any of us want justice we think we want justice but i don't think we want justice justice is a dangerous dangerous dangerous game because maybe this person's wronged me deeply and i i want justice i want to balance it out because what is justice is not a balancing of the scales and sometimes you can understand it on a societal level i think it's fine i mean there's crime and punishment we can go for the benefits and the drawbacks of that but i think what any of us want is mercy within reason you know grace as you mentioned because justice is a very very very dangerous thing and it's a valuable and important thing but who gets to decide what's just what justice is actually meted out maybe i get to meet out justice but it's not i don't get my comeuppance well that sounds great but what happens when it's pointed back at me and uh i guess that comes back to the veil of ignorance you know the idea that that one day i will have to live in the world in which i've envisioned the world in which i've created i i think that a lot of times people love the idea of uh they're a judge for your crimes and a lawyer for theirs and i heard that the other day i thought it was great and uh i think that's it that's a dangerous thing and hopefully it gives us all pause before rightly or wrongly but always understandably you know wielding wielding serious power yeah justice is a kind of drug so if you look at history also been reading a lot about stalin i mean all those folks really i don't know i don't know what was inside hitler's head actually that he's a tricky one because i think he was legitimately insane stalin was not and stalin was like he literally thought he's doing a good thing he literally thought for the entirety of the time that communism is going to bring like that's the utopia and he's going to create a happy world and in his in his mind were ideas of justice of fairness of happiness of of uh yeah human flourishing and that's that's a drug and it somehow sadly pollutes the mind when you start thinking like that what's good for society and believing that you have a good sense of what's good for society that's intoxicating especially when others around you are feeling the same way and then you start like building up this movement and you forget that you are just like a you're you're like barely recently evolved from an ape like you don't know what the hell you're doing and then you start like killing witches or whatever like you start you start doing they did math let's be honest though i mean sometimes you got a witch has to go yeah we can all agree there which which has to go if if it floats or sinks which one i forget which which whichever one we need at the time honestly it's floating it should have sunk uh yeah but yeah we can definitely agree that we just have to go because you brought it up i uh tweeted recently but also just i'm one of the things i'm really ashamed of in my life is i haven't really read almost any of the sci-fi classics really yeah so like i my whole journey through reading was through like the literary philosophers that would say like camus jesse dostoevsky kafka like that place like that's a kind of sci-fi world in itself but it's it just it creates a world in which the the deepest questions about human nature can be explored i didn't realize this but the sci-fi world is the same it just puts it in a it like removes it from any kind of historical context where you can explore those same ideas in like space somewhere elsewhere in a different time a different place it allows you almost like more freedom to like construct these artificial things where you can just do crazy uh crazy kind of human experiments so i'm now working through it uh the books on my list are the foundation series by isaac asimov dune snow crash by neil stephenson and ender's game like you mentioned that's just kind of and then so i posted that and then of course like elon musk john uh carmack i don't know if you know him creator of doom and quake oh cool so see they all pitched in these nerds these ultra nerds just started like going like did these uh do you need to read this that and and the other so i've like started working out okay but it seems like the list i've mentioned holds up somewhat is there a book is there sci-fi books or series or authors that that you find are just amazing maybe another way to ask that is like what's the greatest sci-fi book of all time well i'd like to start by sharing something that i i'm embarrassed about is that i haven't read anything other than uh you know orson scott card j.r tolkien uh frank herbert tolkien yeah dude yep yeah yeah i'm aware through wikipedia and uh through through surface reading of things that like a book called the republic was written once um yeah there were some other motherboards you're uh a prolific reader of wikipedia articles well or occasionally uh whatever else it is that i waste my time on but but yeah so i also i should say i posted on reddit questions for uh ryan hall and there's like a million questions but like uh half of them have to do with dune no not really but like people bring up doom i don't understand why i did you mentioned doom before well i actually actually have a showy roll actually made us a ghee a dune themed ghee one time which i thought was kind of cool i'll send you i'll give you one we got extras but uh actually to your to your point actually this is a orson scott card quote actually the writer of bender's game um fiction because it's not about somebody who actually lived in the real world always has the possibility of being about oneself and i think that's a neat thing because i i have heard you know other very people whom i respect and very sharp people actually every now and then dig their heels and go i don't like fiction i only like non-fiction it's more it's more instructive and i would go i completely disagree with that i think we have a hard enough time figuring out what happened at 7 11 three hours ago that let me tell you what happened 600 years bc i'm like hey i'm interested but don't tell me this isn't a story too yeah there's a there's there's actu there's factual components i have no doubt but we struggle sometimes to like i guess what i like about fiction is that you can tell me a story it's all about people i mean every night there's more and less believable things um and i think dune would be an unbelievably well written in my opinion for to run you know what do i know but i really like doing i'll say that uh well-written example of you know human beings interacting with one another the political component to that the emotional the intellectual the relationship components all of that and uh i i think that dune is neat because it's a sci-fi novel but only in the only in the loosest sense it's it's really a story about religion about group dynamics about human potential about um belief learning politics governance ecology it's uh the best stories remind me of history the same way history hopefully is not just a a list of facts that i try to be able to recall or factoids that i try to recall but a story that i can understand and and see how how the threads of time kind of came together and created certain things and a lot of times like we say i'm like uh how the heck is what's going on right now or a hundred years from now or a hundred years in the past happened and you can look back far enough if we had accurate knowledge if we had that like that hypothetical perfect pool shot you know at the beginning of time we would see an unbroken chain of events that led us to where we are and and where we are will potentially lead us to where we're going which is again why hindsight's helpful but i think it's neat like i guess i really enjoy for instance a book like dune and they're actually making a movie out of it which i'm i'm skeptical of to be honest because it's it's going to be difficult to bring that to the screen for a variety of reasons but there's at least 100 questions ask ryan what do you think's about the new dune movie i am not enough of an authority to have any sort of decent opinion but i guess what i would say is so much of it goes on in the character's mind like how much of any of our day is any lived experience as it were is internal the majority how many times are people walking around and you know they can you could like hey what do you see right now i'm like oh well i see this picture i see a wall hey there's lex but really what what i was paying attention to was what was going on inside of my head for a moment and almost the rest of the world tuned out and kind of dimmed and uh yeah i guess um that i think that's going to be a struggle to to any time you want to bring that type of a written story to to a visual medium i think it's going to be more difficult but it'll it'll be interesting it's definitely my one of my favorite stories and it's been it's honestly helped me become better at life in my opinion better the martial arts and i think the the writer i think frank herbert was absolutely brilliant whether those were all his ideas which in reality none of us or all of our good ideas aren't ours we're a combination maybe came up with something you're a curator of other good ideas and some things you borrowed from somewhere without even realizing it but uh i think the the way the messages and the themes and the ideas that were conveyed particularly in the original novel or just absolutely brilliant is that the is that to you one of the greats and and the flip side of that like or another way to ask that is like if somebody's new to sci-fi is that something you would recommend that that is an entry point i'm not well read enough in this sci-fi world i haven't written a lot of like isaac asimov or anything like that but i just i'll recommend dune i'll be an obnoxious like evangelist for dune to anyone who'll listen okay so i yeah i would strongly recommend it so the other thing you mentioned now i should probably be talking to you about much more important things but the other thing you mentioned is skyrim uh do you play video games what's your favorite game what's what would you say is the greatest video game of all time because i'm a huge fan of elder scrolls oh yeah i mean i play a little bit um at this point you know a little little less uh finally moved into a new house so you're like an adult no no no no i'm like a better funded 12 year old yeah that's yeah that's entirely that's entirely accurate better funded 12 year old but um somewhat better funded 12-year-old not as well-funded as i wish but historically did you play video games oh yeah i played as a kid i was you know again i've always liked playing sports and and liked reading and i always enjoy video games but my favorite video game i think i've ever played was uh nicely the old republic um it was a star wars game a huge star wars fan until it became less so so recently disney um you don't like the i haven't watched it yet oh my my delorean oh dog oh i actually like mandalorian that was that was actually pretty good yeah waving this off yeah yeah i will if i could cancel one thing i would cancel disney store i'm gonna edit that part out okay let's go to the next but uh this is where if people are wondering if you're watching this on youtube and like the dislike amount is like 80 percent it's because of that comment so good job good job for making the internet hey nothing now what about uh baby yoda yeah i guess like he's little he's got ears and he uses the force sometimes and he passes out again no qualms with baby yoda yeah you don't have a heart okay i the let's go to jiu jitsu if it's okay uh so the audience of this podcast may not know much about jiu jitsu or they do because it's really part of the culture now but they don't really know much they see that so many people have fallen in love with it have been transformed through it but they don't know much about like what is this thing is there a way you could sort of try to explain the what is jiu jitsu what is the essence of this martial art that's captured the minds and hearts of so many people in the world i think that jiu jitsu is is a philosophy that's expressed physically and that it's the kind of development of the in mental capacity and physical capacity working in unison to uh move efficiently and almost flowingly unresistantly um with with a given situation with a with or physically resisting opponent um learning how to generate force on your own and how to steal force from the floor how to steal force from the other person and move in concert with it as opposed to clash against which if you watch two untrained people fight it's almost entirely a clash it's a runaway and clash or run away and clash um if you watch jiu jitsu done well it's it looks like water moving around a solid structure and and i think that that is expressed physically and i think that all of the things that anyone have really been able to do very very well in jiu jitsu end up kind of exemplifying that but i think that's true of martial arts in general i think that a lot of times like the clashing that we see going on um and working well is just the fact that you know you get very very physically powerful people every now and then they're able to get away with this but i don't think that that's and that's that's fantastic because ultimately it's a results-driven thing but i think that the essence of the martial arts is learning how to make more out of less and how to move with and be yielding almost like real life aikido and uh so you think of martial arts uh jiu jitsu as uh like water or flowing so aikido so moving around the the force as opposed to sort of maybe the wrestling mindset is finding a leverage where you can apply an exceptional amount of force so like it's like maximizing the application of force i guess maybe that's a better way to i'd like to marry the two ideas you know because i think you flow until the point at which you are the greater force at which point in time you can apply but uh if you look at the best wrestlers and when i say best i don't necessarily mean most successful although of course most successful are always very very good um throughout the course of history in boxing in wrestling in judo they're magical they they disappear and reappear it's like fighting a ghost that that is like incorporeal when you want to find it but then when you don't want to find it when you don't want to find it it finds you and i i think that we see that in the like the bouvie source citatives of wrestling um and you know i guess you could look at uh floyd mayweather or willie pep or you know pernell whitaker in boxing um as brilliant examples of disappearing and reappearing and when you're strong it's almost like gorilla warfare when you're strong i'm nowhere to be found when you're weak you can't get rid of me and i think that's what we're looking for yeah the tear brothers are incredible at that they just they they look like uh skinny starbucks baristas and uh they just manhandle everybody like effort effortlessly they look like they just kind of woke up rolled out of bed go fighting for like the the gold medal at the olympics and just effortlessly throw uh like there's a match against you i guess yo romero yeah so like you you know if you look at like who is the guy who's like intimidating in this case uh and the terrifying looking it's uh it's joe romero just like a physical specimen and obviously like a super accomplished wrestler i think this is for the gold medal yeah in 2008 2000 yeah sydney and then there this is the year you all took silver and what you like just to just show you like there's a inside trip effortless gucci and he does it again you know it's a really creative kind of wrestling where it's organic yeah you're throwing all these kinds of things this is a mix of judo a mix of like weird kind of moves it's not like as funky as uh ben askren it's it's just like legitimate basic well it's not funky for funky's sake and i'm not poking right then asking to imply that that's what he's doing but it's like it's it's funny it's like a lot of times it's almost like a musashi talked a lot about that you know that the only goal of combat is to win is the the outcome is it's outcome driven versus like flourishing you know cool looking movements it's like unless that had a utilitarian purpose like what are you wasting your time with that both in the fight and also you know in practice but but as you mentioned it's almost like it looks like judo it looks like wrestling it looks like jiu jitsu it's almost like i guess reminds me all of the martial arts is again deeply tribal as well i i want to learn lex friedman martial arts and then i want to learn another you know i guess transcendent person's martial arts and it just happened to be the set of movements that you tended to do most of the time thanks to your body type and your opposition and whatnot but then i try to codify that and force those to work as opposed to going i want to understand how the body works in concert and in in congress with something else and other forces and move appropriately and that's why it's like it always struck me that the psyche brothers are great examples of just moving like water but they to use bruce lee which is a little trite but again it's brilliant it's like water can flow or what it can crash and they would crash when they needed to crash and they would flow when they needed to flow but they would flow for the purpose of dissipating and then crash when they would win and at the right moment then go back to flowing the second that the other person found them and it's just it's beautiful to watch it's artistic and i think that great expression of anything physical is ultimately studied as a science but expressed as an art and i think that that's something that gets lost in jiu jitsu a lot of times when it gets a little bit a little nerdy like do this hand to your hand here like it's like the more details i have the better when in reality that's just not not in my experience how it's done might be a fun exercise of saying like what are the main positions and submissions in the art of jiu jitsu you don't have to be complete that's a ridiculously i apologize for putting you on the spot like this but it might be a nice exercise to think through it sure i mean i would just say that they're they're you have your arms bend in various ways you have key lock americana straight arm locks kimura omoplata omoplata is a chemorecognizable plot that's just executed emissions like submissions breaking off your arm in all kinds of ways but ultimately the question is let's say you were a terminator like a robot that i which of course you are going on it's like all right so we're being completely literal but uh and i and i couldn't harm you with any of these things would i still use these positions the answer is yes they they create leverage they create control they create shapes that i can affect and that can affect me and they can be affected through other forces and other objects or structures like the ground or the wall i really enjoy mixed martial arts because there's another component rather than just me and you and the floor there's me you the floor and the wall and it's another player in the game that doesn't exist uh in a grappling context with an uh in a non-enclosed you know i guess area of combat but um you can strangle me or choke me um what do you call it uh without my arms being involved or you can use one of my shoulders to pin one side of my one carotid artery off and you can enclose the other you can turn my knee in the exact same ways that you can turn my arm straight this way and that way you can add a rotation to that or it can be directly linear against the joint so i guess what i would say is the more that i've been able to understand jiu jitsu the more that i've been it's given me a look into how we learn language where rather than learning five bazillion adjectives i go i understand what an adjective is and of course we are all read into some degree of vocabulary i understand what an adverb does and i understand what an adverb is i know what a noun is i know what the component parts of a sentence are i know what you know i guess a clause a contraction any of these things and it allows you to be um interesting and artistic with your language to the extent that you can but i can't like i can speak a degree of spanish but i'm not even slightly artistic in spanish i would be something i speak like like a child with a head injury and anyway um your basic understanding of the english language allows you to then be a student of spanish 100 but i'm limited by my experience i'm limited by my understanding of techniques and i'm limited unders by my understanding almost like let's say techniques are like these are like vocabulary um so even if i kind of sort of grasp the sentence structure and the thought process and the thought patterns of of spanish which it's interesting because just even though the orientation and the organization of a language and i've thought about this a great deal um you know the way that i perceive the world is affected deeply by the language that i learned you know the again if i learned i have no idea the chinese language structures but i can only imagine that it would be that it would affect it's like a different lens we're looking at the same thing but i have i have a different set of sunglasses on than you do um and uh that's that's very very interesting i'll use the quran as an example you know apparently it's unbelievably poetic in in arabic still neat and was interesting reading in english but i'm told by people that i trust that it just one doesn't bear resemblance to the other and i think that's a very interesting thing that you may be able to say the same thing but in in a more in i guess in a different way in a more artistic way that that may not translate on a one-for-one kind of fidelity but um the more that we're able to understand about how the body works the more examples of the body working this way the body working that way the body working that way the more that i'm able to eventually become an artist but it has to be studied as a science first and it does start with technique collection vocabulary collection the same way we learn in school you remember how to say quickly 17 different ways and let's say i speak spanish i'm only i only know three so you might use quickly you might use an adjective like quickly in spanish but use one of the many many options to describe that that i don't understand now i sit there and go like wait what i can't be artistic i can't be as organic with the language as i'd like so i believe that jiu jitsu a lot of times starts with the acquisition of a lot of hey do this this this drill this technique here's an american americana to an arm lock arm locked to a triangle um but the problem with that is oftentimes we get stuck in that phase and i people eventually become move collectors or sequence collectors and i notice this when i'm trying to do dvds or i guess like an instructional series now or even teaching in class i don't believe in that form of learning anymore um not that it's not valuable but i don't believe i don't understand jujitsu on that level anymore so what i'm trying to do is get across the basic ideas to people and say hey you need to fill in the gaps with going to class all the time you need to go hey learn this move learn that technique learn that technique because otherwise i'm basically just throwing at you like 75 different words that you could use but that hasn't really taught you how to how to speak a language whereas if you give me the language structure you can fill in these pieces on your own and then eventually speak organically in lex form which will be ultimately unique to you because otherwise you just end up being a weird facsimile of whatever it is that i'm doing for mostly the worst i'd say but uh yeah that's what people i mean people comment like is this especially people haven't listened to me before uh is this guy drunk or high does he does mit really allow slow people to uh to be like like what's what's wrong with him is he getting sleep are you okay and does he need help so that that's similar with my jiu jitsu it's like this is this guy is this guy really whatever rank i was throughout i remember just like is this guy really this rank i just have a very kind of certain way of sitting and being slow and lazy looking that that was ultimately the language that i had to discover and it was uh it was yeah it was a very liberating moment i think of probably a few years of getting my ass kicked especially with open guard and butterfly to where you really allow yourself to take in the entirety of the language and realize that um that i'm not i'm different i'm a unique i'm i'm unique and like i have a very uh i have a language i have a set of techniques a way i move my body that needs that i'm the one to discover like it's you can only you can learn specific techniques and so on but you really have to understand your own body that's the beautiful thing about jiu jitsu like you said is like the the connection about your philosophy your view of the world with the physical and like connecting those two things how you perceive the world how you interpret ideas of the world about exhaustion about force about effortlessness like what it really means to relax all these kinds of loose concepts and then actually teach your body to like do those things and like you know and be able to apply force and spurts to be able to relax in sports and like figure all that stuff out for my for your my individual body but it's as you mentioned that's i couldn't agree with you more it's a discovery process and no one can cheat that process which is at the same time it's almost like imagine i want to start writing books in second grade unless maybe i'm like staggeringly brilliant i wish i could only conceptualize someone being able to do that but maybe a mozart of the english language where you're out there doing it but for most of us we don't have enough knowledge enough information enough experience to be able to be to express ourselves so we have to basically input repeat um which is important but it's the process as you say of going through that of getting your ass kicked just like well that didn't work well that didn't work that felt right but i don't know nobody else does that i guess i don't believe in that versus eventually going i don't know i'll just try going my own way and see what happens and now i'll get yelled at and people won't like me and if it works they'll say i got lucky and if it doesn't work they'll say i was dumb but uh which maybe all is right but basically uh you know going through that iterative process that allows you to eventually find your self-expression and find your voice so that you you fight the same way that you speak the same way that you write the same way that you think in a way that that is uniquely you that will also ultimately allow you to understand other people being uniquely them because even if you can only conceptualize and i think about this a lot for society stuff where i go well this is how i feel about this but am i objectively right maybe about a couple things but that's a small box that i have to be very very careful about what i think is objective and versus what's not and i have to be open to the possibility that all the things that i think are objectively correct may or may not be and that should allow me to have some degree of compassion or consideration for other people both in their martial arts journey and in their in their journey you know as people as human beings because i understand that they're on a it's a we're all on a path right it's all a again an iterative process of eventual self-expression but i think that's one of the things that we see having trouble when we see tribalism which i mean raises an expression of that political affiliation expression of that all of these things that can go in really uncomfortable directions people are looking for hey where do i plant my feet over here where's where's the thing that i know is right and that we can all agree on the following and i think that we see that in martial arts we're like oh i do this style why do that style i do that stuff which is like hey man we're all just pushing forward in a certain direction you're trying to do our best and i understand why you feel the way you do i may have felt like that at one point too but uh you know what i'm just trying to learn and understand versus i've already acquired enough knowledge let me cross my arms and start to to look who's fucking up around here yeah and and i think that uh that that's an it's an interesting trap that i think is very human trapped to fall into but it definitely happens early on it's something it's a joke in the jiu jitsu world right like how the blue belt that knows everything well initially it's like what i know nothing and i at least think i know nothing then i'd learn a little bit and i think it's a lot bit and then you know the more you learn the more you go like i don't even know what i'm doing yeah that's exactly right we kind of talked about it a little bit but uh once again a lot of people that listen to this have never been on the mat have never tried jiu jitsu but are really curious about it everybody at all positions like i think elon musk's kids are not doing jiu jitsu andrew yang is like they're all you know the world is curious it's a it's a nice it seems to be a nice methodology by which to humble your ego which to grow intellectually and physically so people are curious about it so the natural question is if they're curious about it how would you recommend they get started maybe like what do you recommend the first day week month year first couple years look like like how do you ease into it and make sure that it's a positive experience and you progress in the most optimal and positive way the first thing you can do is simply ask yourself why why you want to be involved you know i remember the first day that i walked into ronan athletics in new york city to train under um godfather my son now christian montes and i didn't know what i was getting myself into i played baseball through high school and i wanted i was at manhattan college in the bronx and i wanted to go and learn martial arts because it was always something that was interesting to me but it was never something that that was i that i knew was accessible and it definitely wasn't really around in northern virginia where i grew up whereas then you stick yourself in in manhattan and there's stuff everywhere so anyway i guess i didn't know what to expect um i didn't know if i was going to get beat up if people were going to be nice if people were not going to be nice um but what i began with was i think expectation management and i think that that's something that uh i would that'll be the first thing that i would start is almost imagining what is it that i'm getting myself into because i love the martial arts with with the martial arts has given me everything in life and i'm so thankful i wouldn't be sitting here um without without that that experience that journey of the people that i've met the place that i got i could never ever have ever imagined um and i'm just unbelievably thankful for that but i think that the thing that um that helped me most of all was starting with you know my mom said something to me one time and she said you know there's two types of people in various situations there's why and there's why not and you know it's understandable to have questions concerns things like that um but maybe sometimes a little bit easier when you're when you're younger to just trust people or just say oh well you know um but uh we go hey you want to climb that rock i'm like yeah why not let's go hey you want to jump in that river yeah why not sure versus if i have to reason my way into everything i have to be talked into everything a lot of times i'll talk myself out of it and i think that a lot of times this is the thinker's disease you want to figure out what's going to happen and what you should expect to have happen before you get involved versus going using the old bruce lee saying again it's like no amount of thinking or training on the on the side of the river will teach you how to swim you have to jump in and there are risks associated with that and so uh i guess uh psychological are usually the biggest ones that's the biggest hurdle and physical but the biggest thing that i guess i would suggest to anyone to say why do you want to do this you're like well i want to challenge myself i want to learn i would like to learn to fight i wanted to learn to fight so that i could protect myself and if and if anything else other people if only within arms reach um i perceived that if i had some small degree of power um i generally wouldn't use it which is why i was like i'll give it a try i'll try to be reasonable and hopefully if i make a mistake i'll apologize to people but basically uh i said yeah i'd like to have that and i wanna i know this is gonna be challenging and we'll see what happens and that means that getting beat up and i didn't get like hurt but getting roughed up and getting my arm bent this way or that way getting choked i was like well this is all supposed to happen that's no big deal it would be like going and joining the army during peace time and then going oh i'm just doing this for a college education you're like okay that's cool man and then all of a sudden war breaks out and they want to send me somewhere and i'm like whoa whoa whoa whoa i didn't sign up for that gig actu actually you did whether you realized it or not you may not have thought that you did but you did so getting your mind right and and just going what are my expectations this activity what is it that i'm looking to do and of course you know you're you're going into a gym you're going into a place that you don't know people you probably don't know people and you don't know the coach and even if you do want to hey how you doing shake your hand type of level you know 95 percent of my students don't know me not really you know i'll try to be polite and not annoy them too much but they don't know me and i don't know them um i understand if they don't trust me i wouldn't trust trust me either if i were them but at the same time someone has to take that leap and one of the things that i've noticed um as a martial arts instructor that's the biggest struggle uh with dealing with adults which is why a lot of people like to teach kids is because kids don't ask don't argue now that also means there's there's all sorts of pitfalls with that sort of thing and that can be an issue but you know i guess a lot of times people get to a point in their life you know in their 20s early 30s where now i'm i'm a manager now i know what i'm doing no one talks to me like that yeah versus like hey man you go join boot camp i don't care if you are elon musk they're gonna tell you to shut up and do push-ups yeah and that's what's great about it yeah um so you are taking a leap of faith into a world that you're gonna be a tiny fish and you gotta hope that the people um who are who are guiding you in that in that journey are gonna have i can't say even say your best interests at heart because they don't even know you but they'll they'll try to do no harm and they'll try to help you in the way that they would understand and i guess that's for instance that's what i would try to do with anyone that that comes into my gym i would try to help them in the way that i understand they need as best i can in as safe and reasonable a way as possible but sometimes in a way that's going to make them uncomfortable particularly if physical combat and and it's not something they've done before if a lot of people go in without even having played you know contact sports and so that can be a big jump and you have to understand if if that's where you're starting from no worries but you're going to have to kind of work your way to it and it's going to be uncomfortable and and that's okay it's part of the process and you're gonna have some bumps and bruises and you're not gonna want to roll with that guy in the corner because that that person's rough and they beat you up and they're like okay but is this a big hurt or is it a little hurt if it's a big hurt okay if it's a little hurt you need to use you just drop a little bit yeah it's such an interesting balance because to find i think one of the most important things as in anything i think in life is the selection of the people or that you put around you i mean that's true with the like getting married that's true with uh like if you go to if people ask me like graduate students like your phd advisor can um can be the difference it's everything it's like you spend five years with somebody they're going to basically define the more impact on you than anybody you marry anybody you hang out with it's a huge impact and the same with the the coach selection which is like the school selection is it's going to be really important about in terms of like who you select will uh define how happy like the trajectory of your growth and how happy you are with the entirety of the experience and yet like the the flip side of that is especially if you have an ego especially if you are the manager then you need to let go of some stuff you're gonna feel like shit with the good with the best kind of coach that's that's what you need right but there's a nice there's a weird balance there to find like i i mean like and everybody needs a different thing like i'm much more uh i enjoy being sort of like it sounds weird but like i am you know from the wrestling background i enjoy feeling like crap in the sense like the coach like getting beat up i don't actually enjoy it it's not like some masochistic thing or whatever it's the growth like i like the anxiety i like uh feeling uh like like shit when i go home like emotionally physically it's like it's growth it's a sign of growth right like if you're not having to feel those things you're probably in your comfort zone which is fine but that's not your growth zone right and everybody has a different threshold for that and you i mean the the beautiful thing about jiu jitsu is like it's also has like a yoga feel to it like you're learning about your body so depending on the gym and depending on in fact the coaches the people around you within the gym you can select little groups too kind of like the people with who you roll like if you're a smaller person it doesn't mean you have to go against big people you can go against the people who like smoke a lot of weed and they're chill or you can go against like that crazy ripped blue belt competitor who's like out to destroy everybody and depending on like what your mindset is you can kind of select that it's just such a fascinating journey uh of like basically self-discovery i couldn't agree with you more it's i mean what you need may change over time right maybe what you needed what you need today could change six months from now or a year from now and that's something that i experience i'll use my uh first coach christian again as a great example of someone who i really look up to and respect and someone who helped me a lot like at a time when i really needed some guidance and i needed to learn martial arts but get into i the hens of gracie's gym was right down the street from where christian was teaching and christian was a blue belt at the time it was uh he was teaching at a place called fight house which was this awesome like you know like 90s early 2000s you know warehouse area uh down on fashion avenue in uh in manhattan off of like between seventh and eighth and uh it was like like two basketball courts wide but like there was the sambo guys over here there was the kali guys over there there was a wing chun over there with jits in the corner and hens was one of the most famous academies in the world at that time still is and i just didn't know what enzo gracie was and i mean it's a great gym and it's a fantastic place for people to train but i think what was right for me at the time was to i stumbled into a you know like a two-person elevator up and found a place where six people trained at that time and i had someone that that i could that could give me some like in addition to martial arts advice like personal guidance and that made it that made a big difference and then one initially we would have like competitions or like intra intra you know gym competitions with the sambo guys we would comp we would roll with them and like again it was great because they were just a bunch of like like russian dudes from like brighton beach and they would come down and then we would all fight and then everyone would train and we'd all drink tea and then go home and uh anyway uh what was uh it was super super tough and they were like again just a tough group of people it was great and then i remember when i decided after like four or five months i'm like man i really want to try to take this seriously and i told christian about that and he's like well hey i think you need to do the following and it was you know like hey here's there was a guy named jeff ruth who was uh about at the time which was a much bigger deal than it is now but it was 10-0 as an mma fighter a lot of amateur body spirits super tough dude and jeff was was the best person at that time that i'd ever trained with and i just got squashed christians beat me up too but like jeff would just absolutely kick the crap out of me and i was like this is awesome and this was back when i was at home i went home for the summer for that and chris is like hey i think you should stay because i told him that's what i was thinking and this was a coach that you know when it's like when initially was exactly what i needed and then he's like well hey that's not what i'm doing here maybe they're going to be able to help you on to a path that's that's kind of commensurate with what your goals are at the moment and then you know that was a niche that was an interesting thing and i really got i feel that i was fortunate to start um at a place where my coach was able to transition roles and and and do so comfortably and i think that that also was probably a factor of the fact that you know where he'd done some of his training prior like there have been issues with with the coach there we're like not supporting not having the support you know feeling like hey like i'm gonna hold on to my students i'm gonna hold on to my best guy or my best girl even if i can't take them where they need to go um so that was an interesting thing and just recognizing also though that the people like the same way you're an individual going into a gym and you don't know what you're getting into your coach is a person too and he or she you know they may have been doing this activity longer than you but they're not they're not some weird little you know all-knowing god they don't know anything but they're gonna they may say something that pisses you off they may they may yell at you they may help you they may inadvertently cause you some sort of you know some sort of issue and just being able to recognize that even though i say this to people and i've said this to people in my gym i'm like you know we're in the service industry man but i'm not at your service like don't get it twisted like i will absolutely do my best to help people i'm there to do my best as a martial arts coach but i'm here to do my best as a martial arts coach and i'll do my best and periodically i make mistakes and i own an apology or two and i'll try to give them out when i can but uh we're not mcdonald's it's not oh you gave me 100 bucks so you do whatever you want in here this is my house this is my gym this is my dojo this is this is the martial arts this is not a basketball team yeah there's something beautiful about martial arts like exactly as you said as the coach like in wrestling and at least collegiate like high level wrestling it's like there's a dictatorship aspect to a coach that is very important to have like this this ridiculous sometimes nature of like master and so on and bowing all these traditions there's something it seems ridiculous from the outside perhaps but there's something really powerful to that because that process of you said why not of letting go of the leap of faith requires you to believe that the coach has your best interest in mind and just give yourself over to their ideas of how how you should grow and that's an interesting thing i mean i've never been able to really see coaches i've had as human they're always you always it's like a father figure or like this you always put them in this position of power and i think that's i think at least for me it's been a very it's been a very useful way to see the coach because it allows you to not think and let go and really allow yourself to grow and emotionally deal with all the beatings they'll push you where past oftentimes where you would have stopped yourself right which is great and hopefully they know they if they're paying attention and they're they're still a person they can make mistakes but they'll push you further than you would have gone but not so far that it's not facilitative right right that's something that i can say like ferraza hobby um the head coach at tristar my head coach for mma kenny florian one of the head coaches for mma have both been phenomenal influences paul schreiner who's the uh one of the assistants at marcelo garcia's academy um coached me in jiu jitsu for a long time brilliant instructor they've all been able to do that and i think what's interesting about all of those guys they're very sharp but they they're very intuitive as well and i think that for us actually uh you know told me about something that john wooden said john wooden the legendary ucla basketball coach just a simple philosophical idea just he said some people's life is a bowl of shit it needs some whipped cream in it some people's life is a bowl of whipped cream needs a little bit of shit in it just to balance it out and it's an interesting thing coaching everyone the same way doesn't work you know that's i think the difference between a coach and an instructor and a lot of times people think they want to coach but they really want an instructor i'm like hey lex tell me what to do not how to do it and then other times people think they want you know an instructor and they really want to coach i'm like man this guy's just giving me information a coach is so much more than an instructor and that's a huge leap and that's something that i think that people need to understand when they're going into martial arts and i understand i can totally grasp why they don't because how how would they know but uh i think about this a lot like me giving you 150 dollars for a month which is not nothing that's for sure that does not that pays for instructor really coach is a relationship that gets developed because can you imagine like just the amount of emotional investment and and time thinking away from from like oh alex isn't here anymore what can i do to help him what does he need like that's that's serious and that's the difference between that's that's oftentimes the difference that at getting getting over the hump in various situations so it's a it's an interesting you know bargain that's being made like commitment by the by the instructor who becomes a coach commitment by the student you know like there's a financial transaction there's a lot of things going on there but i feel very fortunate to have had not just instructors in my time but coaches and that means sometimes we butted heads and sometimes i look back and i think i was right and other times looked back on my own no they were definitely right but there was always the trust um with the exception of one time that i feel that trust was greatly betrayed um that rightly or wrongly whether mistakes mistakes will be made but everyone is attempting to do do the right thing under no circumstances would i intentionally do anything malicious you know versus hey i might have done i'm going to burn your house down but you can be darn sure it wasn't on purpose and i think that as long as there's that mutual understanding and mutual belief of goodwill which again doesn't just magic up out of nowhere i understand i think that that's when then great things can happen and i look at all the athletes that i know you know the guys and girls that i've watched become fantastic in various places almost invariably it never happened alone yeah yeah i'm really torn about that like um maybe you can help have you seen the movie whiplash so it's uh i would say from an outsider's perspective people should watch it's a i guess jazz band it's a movie about a drummer and the instructor and he it's a basically i would say from the outsider's perspective it's a toxic relationship but he's really the coach whatever we call him pushes the the musician the drama to his limits like to where he just feels like shit um emotionally it's a it looks like a toxic relationship but it's one that ultimately is very productive for the improvement of the musician i have the same like in my own experience i had um i got a chance to train a couple places regularly and so one of my coaches uh who is a great human being a lot of people love him but when i was a blue belt he was pushing me a lot for competition and every time i stepped on the mat i was uh anxious and almost afraid of training because of like the places i'm gonna have to go and then the i can't i don't know what's good or bad because i think i've become a better person because of that experience like i needed that and on the flip side like the place i got my black belt from balance studios is i remember also blue belt uh the coach sitting down and i was going to competition and he saw something in me where he said um you know like good luck but win or lose we always love you like i i re i remember that because i really needed that at that time like i was putting so much pressure on myself like i'm not an actual professional competitor you know i just competed like i'm a pg student like but like it was clearly having a psychological effect on me and that's what a great coach does it's like you know it's like life is more important than jiu-jitsu sense that's right it's bigger so they find you use jiu-jitsu when you need it to grow as a person and when it overwhelms you you you have to pull that person out like look at the bigger picture always look at the bigger picture it's fascinating and i don't know what to make of it i don't think i would have it any other way is both the anxiety and the and the love yeah i think that i couldn't that's a really interesting thing that you're describing that i i guess it kind of brings me back to a lot of the other things we've been discussing is just almost like the the reciprocal nature of everything where no pressure that's great everyone's happy all the time it's either i mean let's uh use an example of sci-fi movies let's say the matrix which of course the first one was amazing and then each subsequent movie made the series worse but um but basically i'm working on a new one by the way yeah i've heard we'll see i was hoping for the best but um but basically uh you know it's like hey we started our first initial world agent smith says to neo he's like our first world was a utopia where everyone was happy and nothing ever went wrong it's like your primitive cerebrum rejected it and i think that there's obviously i mean what do i think but i guess well i'm here so i might as well say what i think um i guess uh you know great things are fantastic a kind gentle place is fantastic and this is again why i love dune because i think doon does such a great job of expressing frank herbert does such a great job of expressing again the reciprocal nature of these ideas you know look at uh look at sparta for instance or at least what i understand sparta from the reading and also watching 300. um you know and reading wikipedia and reading the wikipedia article about the movie not the place um but uh it's um that's a hard brutal place and that was their benefit to that like absolutely was there drawback to that absolutely is it sustainable i should i would think probably not um i mean granted it hasn't sustained but i mean that type of a of a thing it burns too hot almost and it uh it destroys the host at a certain point and you know i guess that that type of unforgiving nature but entirely entirely permissive has its own issues and i guess coming back to your what your description of like describing a toxic relationship is a very dangerous and tricky thing because it's almost like uh it's like bird's-eye view me it's what you know you see let's say a husband and a wife arguing and you're like all right well sort of somebody hitting somebody i need to keep myself out of this because i have no idea what i'm seeing something but i don't know what's going on or why specifically and again short of it going to a place that's that just out out of bounds i don't know who's right here i don't know who's wrong and i don't know what phase of this things they're in so i guess long term what's good for yeah both people right it's dangerous for so if i want to put my finger on the scale i can understand the desire to do i'm like hey guys let's break it up yeah but and that may be the right thing at the time but at the same time i'm not sure so i think back to all of the times that you know that like you mentioned your coach pushing you when very very hard and then other times going like hey let's put in perspective here i think that's an interesting thing for high performance and i think that we're seeing that again societally you know now or at least maybe that's it just pops up on my internet feed periodically um but coaches shouldn't be allowed to do this or yell at this person to yell at that person like well have you ever been go to a boxing gym it's not a commercial entity not really a real boxing not la boxing not a ufc gym like a real place you're going to see what things are like when it's entirely performance-based go to wrestling room at a high level you know again there's there's left and right limits and there are such things obviously as abuse of course but and that should never be tolerated um but it's not a commercial entity i don't need to be sweet to you if you're if you're screwing up if you're dropping the ball and in fact recognizing that i'm not doing you a favor or the team a favor by by being permissive of that type of behavior i think is important everything in its context and at its time is important and i guess i can think again at the times that i've been put put or had put on me like a great deal of pressure to do x y as a year to succeed um or to push for success and i can't look back fondly enough on those times they were tough at the time but without that i'm not sitting here without that i don't go from growing up in a very nice family in the suburbs to fighting at the highest level in jiu jitsu nogi and now in mixed martial arts starting a career at age 27. you know i don't it just doesn't happen because people generally speaking from that background don't get pushed hard enough physically to be able to make that transition and that has benefits and it has drawbacks you know when you stare into the abyss it stares back and i think that that's an important thing to understand you know you stare long enough you you can become something that you don't that you would be sorry that you did you don't look enough and you don't have perspective either you know and i i think that that's an interesting thing i can speak to someone who's relative to being someone who's relatively articulate and reasonably i try to be reasonable but you know i'll say inspiring if people get crazy with me they get a warning and then i'm gonna crack them and what did they expect oh they hear the guy on an interview but who did they think they were meeting because there's also the guy in the ring and there's layers there too i remember training with you it's kind of funny there's like there's well you didn't know who i was i mean you still like i have a really good strength a lot by the way that so i don't remember what rank i was but it might have been purple or something like that and i did some like i you had this look on your face which i've often seen in black belts it's like here he goes again like here here's him trying this thing and then when i kind of annoyed you a little bit with it now i get that it was a good like i you know i did something somewhat effective like some like maybe a little bit off balance yeah there's i just peeled off a little layer of ryan hall to where i was like okay let me let me like there there's like layers underneath the covers are like somewhere in there like so it was like okay this like new guy rolls in here he thinks he can do this stupid thing and then and then you start to beat the hell out of me but the the point is there's layers here from the guy who was being interviewed now to like genghis khan but it's but it's all in the same body right but it's like all of us are like that right in various different directions and recognizing that's okay it's just there are consequences to all every choice that we make as a consequence sometimes there's like objectively wrong or objectively right but at least in my mind that's a pretty small box everything else is just there's a consequence of that do you like that consequence do you not and who do i want to become what do i want to try to hone myself or anyone else into and also like but this is something i've screwed up as a coach plenty of times you know like if someone says if you're if like i come to like lex i really really want to take you know research very seriously like okay i believe you now i haven't shown you that but i believe you're like okay and now me not showing up to research or to study or not being up until three in the morning thinking about this is no longer acceptable there was a time like five seconds before me making that statement that if i went to bed without reading the book that i needed to read no worries but the second that i made that statement your your expectations for me change and maybe it's something that's something that i've screwed up a whole bunch of times in my um as a teacher because it's an interesting thing obviously you know being a like running a martial arts school as you're principally an athlete um is sometimes i don't pay enough attention to what people are doing i just go oh okay you say xyz i'm like roger that i believe you're cool i will now put you in category x and whether rightly or wrongly like maybe this person didn't understand what they were asking for or i didn't express this or the other and it just it caused cross wires and then most times you hash it out you have a discussion you figure out get to the bottom of what people are trying to do or what they want but uh if i was paying more attention i think i could have been a lot more effective or if i had more experience and sometimes maybe i'm not sharp enough or i don't person i'm not perceptive enough to be able to to see what's going on and maybe with years more down the line i'll be able to have a sharper perception but uh i think that's another one of those interesting things that some that sometimes i would caution or not caution but just to inform a prospective martial arts student depending upon where you're going um you know this you both you and also your coach or other people in the room they wear many hats and sometimes there's a i had the wrong hat on you were talking to me as lex the guy i didn't realize you were talking to me i thought she would tell me his elects the guy i didn't realize she talked me as lex the martial artist i'm like oh crap i was talking to the wrong person so it's almost like if you had a like i run my gym with my wife she's a black belt so she's my wife she's my peers as a martial artist uh on in jiu jitsu he's here by the way in judging so exactly all right well all right so but a fellow black belt and i guess like another he doesn't have a microphone so you can't hear all the trash he's talking exactly but it can be tough and that's something we've had to work through a lot and it's like looking back and it's like now being where i'm at now and it's easy me to say that because she's in the room and i don't want to stab me just continue to slowly poison me over time yeah um which frankly i understand um you know it's it's the sort of thing that is now way more effective than anything else i could really reasonably expect to have um but there were times when when both of us you know were justifiably annoyed at the other because of crossed wires and sometimes you know you just have to scream in anywhere mr standing anyway but again like i've i coached some of my friends i've coached i've coached my friend who i've known since i was four years old you know sometimes i don't go hey buddy how you doing someone's like what the fuck are you doing put your hand over there how many times we talked about this and then you walk away and you can see him look at you crooked and you're like oh crap oh yeah he thought i was talking to his friend yeah well all right we need to talk this one out hashing out and not he's wrong how could he possibly think that way like oh no i totally understand that but if i was 22 like doesn't he know i'm a purple belt some nonsense like that and it's and it doesn't come from a bad place but it's just i guess that comes back to society to anything people only have the perspective that they have and the awareness that we have and so again going back and going hey guys grace like i don't expect it's not fair for me to go i for ufc why doesn't this guy who came in as an attorney understand how hardcore this needs to be and like how could he yeah and at the same time though if if i'm using the language of someone that is interested in at least performance from a martial arts perspective i understand how that could be off-putting let's say for instance someone that's comple like all of that would be out of bounds in their normal workplace but if they think of the gym as my office then whether they agree or disagree with what's going on they go okay i hear why i see why that might have happened let's talk about this and we can again all push forward in a positive direction that benefits i guess everyone's journey throughout the activity and now on top of all that there's moods okay i mean especially lately uh i think two days ago maybe yesterday no two days ago i've never been that cranky in my life i think i i don't know what it was but i wanted to tell everybody how much they annoyed me it was like i i was just very conscious of this feeling of like why why is this happening right now so i consciously decided as i usually do in those cases to not say anything to anybody how do you do that uh well i you know it's uh it's yeah meditating because it's not i i tend to i tend to then visualize what's gonna happen in the next like how is this gonna make my life better like if i say something that mean to somebody else i have uh just started a conflict that will just escalate will continue will add more conflict to my life it will make things i just don't like the feeling you will create and so you live a lot enough life to know that like uh it's just like with like street fighting you know i i i would get into a lot of fights when i was younger just on the street but then you realize like it's not like a jiu jitsu match or something like that it's not it'll escalate it'll it'll might come back at you it'll like that person might find you again but more importantly the anxiety of it of having created little enemies in this world distorts the way you see the world so i've noticed that like if i'm shitty to people on the internet which i haven't been i think in a long time is like it it somehow brings the shittiness to you more and more it escalates like the more love you put out there the more like the people who put love out like surround you well you mentioned forgiveness as well like you said like i guess back to the original you know the holocaust survivor scenario we're like oh my god like you think of the ultimate in in like i've never experienced one one billionth of that level of of pain and horror and it's like and i can't let this little thing go you know i guess that's an interesting thing i think you're just making the point in your personal life i guess the same way right yeah there yeah and on the internet it's hard i've somehow gotten i mean you've you've had a level of celebrity for a while i've recently gotten some level of like celebrity and like these people who are just shitty for no reason come out from all from all places like calling me a fraud or anything else i'm using a jain silent bob strike back they find out a movie's gonna be made about them and people are talking shit on the internet and they're like what's the internet and then someone shows them and they're like what and they go to a message board and they go to hollywood to try to stop it from being made and they eventually get money for their likeness and they use the money to buy plane tickets and fly around and beat the shit out of all the people that talk bad about them yeah it's tough i mean it's uh i'm i'm having trouble with it because there's people like yeah there's you know there's posts and forums and like heated discussions about is lex vaping a fraud i don't know what has he really done and there's like and then there's people like well i think he's an alright guy but i'm not sure like like there's like literal discussions and i'm like like nobody like if you increase the level of celebrity there's going to be like one of the things that hurts my heart a little bit is like some level of toxicity around joe rogan for example there's like communities of people that now like talk about him selling out for example all that kind of stuff and i don't you know and joe i've talked to him about it is amazing that he uh he says don't read the comments he legitimately doesn't read the comments his heart and his soul doesn't give a damn about the comments all he gives a damn about is his friends like one of the things that's really inspiring to me and that's i've had a conversation with them offline about spotify and uh the removed episodes people are curious um it's uh it's a thing on the internet where uh i think you can play taylor swift's songs on i'll write that down but you can also now play joe rogan podcast oh cool and they gave him 100 million dollars so that that's uh you know that's awesome it's yeah uh but the thing i've had a discussion with him and i made a video about it that i took down because the toxicity is like it's hard to put into words but he will give away the 100 million in a second if he ever has to compromise who he is like he doesn't i mean he already said as he talked about he's made quote unquote fuck you money a long time ago he doesn't need any more money he doesn't care it's nice to have money whatever but like he'll give it away so the it's nice to see when people like him at a level of celebrity level success and financial success don't change at all they're just the same thing that makes you happy is talking in his case talking shit with his friends in case of most of us really just just hanging out with friends doing the things you love in his case doing the things he loves without any like you know the texas way the uh freedom like without any corporate bureaucracy bullshit that rolls in and says well maybe you shouldn't say fuck you know like more than 20 times a podcast or something like that like those kinds like rules like people like he says in a suit and tie they show up and say stuff um oddly enough people that could never to have done what he does yeah exactly and it's kind of inspiring to see that and i i hope people i hope people realize how special of a human he is he's inspired uh like people like me like i'm just i'm a scientist right so he inspired somebody like me from a very different walk of life to be like kind to others to be open-minded i don't know that uh it's a special dude so like people need to support that and treasure that as opposed to uh as opposed to be toxic about it if i mean what uh i just people really for a long time have told me that it would be awesome if ryan hall's on goes on joe rogan i definitely think that'll be an awesome thing have you listened to joe has he been a part of your life in some kind of way um you know well joe's always i've i remember watching joe on fear factor when i was a little kid which is cool so i've actually gotten a like from a from a bird's eye view watch you know his his kind of just path through life yeah but one of the things that that i always appreciate and again i barely know joe are then to shake his hand he interviewed me after the uh briefing in the ring after the bj penn fight but um one of the things that i've always admired about joe is that i think he had fucking money from the start i think that zero dollars is fuck you money for joe i think and that's something i respect about him a great deal um because as you say it's interesting to watch it's like you you hope that uh george saint pierre is like this it's really neat now i'm not super close to george but we're teammates at tristar and he's never been anything but a gentleman is one of those people that if you didn't know george was famous when you walked in the gym you'd have no idea he's not holding court not doing it he's just you know training and he'll help out an amateur doing this if you have a question for him he'll help me like i'm nobody man he he would give me advice and train me it was super cool and he didn't kill me which i really appreciated he's a gentleman but uh you know it's like you you meet someone and you go man i'm so it's so cool that this is the guy who's the best that this is the guy who who's been successful and then you go why are they successful like i said true to what they're doing they haven't changed they're the same as they've been and i remember i got to try start in 2012 and george was already already george st pierre but i remember watching and talking to people and they're like oh man george is the same as he's always been in this neat i see him in the gym training now and again giving advice now and it seems like joe has always been consistent and it's neat to watch someone not compromise on their values and not change who they are and not you know periodically like you know again we all make mistakes like you have a bad day or this or that an apology needs to be issued or even my bad or this or that and you're like yeah they just move on they're not afraid to be themselves and they're not afraid to be wrong they're not afraid to make a mistake as you as you mentioned open-minded and so i'm like so what are the correct beliefs to have about this that i know going in everyone's going to be okay with what i'm saying which is usually the beginning of a conversation that's going to go nowhere right and uh it's it's neat to see um the things i guess that he's created on his own as a result of the authenticity that's there and it reminds me of like dave chappelle and again i don't know i've never met dave but it's neat to see someone that's clearly again authentic in their own way doing their own thing and they're because of that they're above the corporate nonsense but what's funny i think the message behind all of it is hey guys we all are i can't promise you that i'm gonna have money joe couldn't promise you that he's gonna have money now it ended up working out but he was above that nonsense from the jump and he just continued to be above it by never giving it any mind and just going like yeah i'm gonna be a reasonable person i'm gonna try to learn i'm gonna try to grow and uh if i say something annoying you can come and talk to me about it we get to the bottom of it and i'm like if i need to say my bed thanks appreciate it you know i will and if i don't need to i'm like hey i still appreciate the talk thanks man i'll shake your hand and we carry on and we go our separate ways and hopefully i'll treat you respect you treats me with respect and and that's about it and i guess i think it's a lesson that it can work out no matter what you don't have to kowtow to like these weird powers that be and whether you're at this level or at this level but you can live your life the way that you want and as you mentioned talk shit with your friends hang out be happy and it just so happens that that resonates with people it actually reminds me of like speaking to mit and being in boston is like good will hunting you know like again that's what he really want to do he could have gone this way could have gone that way and it was an interesting story but it's like this person wants to hang out with his buddies and wants to do other things and again happens to be brilliant and happens to be able to do all these other things but there was it i guess it's like at least in my mind a story of authenticity as well and it was both the same thing in the robin williams character and i i just think that that's a message because watch watching things occur on the internet as they do now things so many things playing out in the public eye i feel like so many private or otherwise formerly private discussions and disputes and and you know interactions now become they all have a a well what is this going to say when it goes public so how can i couch what i'm saying or how can i word this in a way that's going to get people on my side to use the right buzzwords and not use the wrong buzzwords and it's just neat to see people you know in their own way flip the bird to that because i just think that that's that's just not how a human being is meant to think or interact i'm curious what you think about the thing that recently has you know me like hosting this podcast i sometimes think about like who should i talk to and not in terms of like it's the the old hitler question now hitler i would definitely talk to because post world war ii because everyone knows he's evil the question whether you talk to hitler in 1937 like when people who are really students of what's going on understand that this is a very dangerous human being but a large number of part of the world they're like well he's a leader who cares for germany so the question i have it's interesting to me it involves a particular person named who also lives in austin texas named alex jones i don't know if you're familiar with the guy i am familiar with mr jones uh i've actually recently just listened to infowars like one episode of his uh show i guess that he does every day and it kind of reminds me of a time in college when i drank too much tequila there's no turning back like no it's like like the the mistakes you make that like it it it's i mean you don't know where you're gonna wake up you don't know who you're gonna kill or not kill or steal or rob it it's it's unclear so that that it felt like i was getting pulled into a dark place where pretty much everybody is a pedophile that's trying to control the world so bill gates definitely is a pedophile everybody in power anybody in power there's a kind of a deep skepticism about power and a conspiratorial way to see the world where everything is like dark forces in all corners it's like the way you feel when you're a kid that there's a monster hiding in the closet which is also why you leap over the bed from like four feet away there's a strategy yes so but he says that you're just being weak you need to look under the bed under the bed there's monsters and we need to be aware of them because they're growing they're multiplying you should be and they're touching children they're touching children exactly so it all connects but the the i when i listened to him and i thought about like do i want to talk to him on this podcast for example when i listened to his conversation with joe rogan the two times he talked on there to me it was somehow entertaining like it was fun to listen to it's fun to listen to a madman go on for four hours because it's almost like theater um like this is what i talked to joe about when people try to censor alex jones joe says that the people who try to censor him don't give enough credit to the intelligence of human beings to like understand like that like what a person says on a large platform does not necessarily is not the truth you can be a madman and say crazy things and people are intelligent enough to hear uh certain things be when they're said like the earth is flat they can they can be intelligent enough not to all of a sudden start believing that the earth is flat like they they're intelligent enough to sort of select different ideas and be able to enjoy the theater of a particular ridiculous over-the-top conversation without being sort of influenced where they start believing like toxic set of beliefs now there's a lot of sort of other kinds of people especially now with cancer culture that say well you don't want to give platform to crazy people that that ultimately whose beliefs might lead to dangerous consequences like and i see it very often now with conspiracy theories that go that go like way too far like for example would i i'm not i haven't looked into it so i'm sorry i will look into it but uh it hurts my heart to see that on bill gates in my opinion the person who has saved and improved more lives than probably any human in history literally because of the money he's invested in helping like just just the work he's done on like malaria in africa the number of people he's helped is huge and yet every interview anything you see now on bill gates everyone is calling him i believe haven't looked into it but i believe everyone's calling him a pedophile i don't know the full structure of it but it's it's just a very it feels like an army of like it feels like it's hundreds of thousands of people that's what it feels like it might be a much smaller percentage but it feels like a huge number of people are calling them a pedophile so that's the that's the flip side if you allow if you give platform to conspiracy theories like that then you start to have bigger and bigger percent of the population believe in these crazy things i just i wanted to put it out there because i don't know what to think of that if you put yourself in joe rogan's shoes if you put yourself in my shoes if you put yourself just in your own shoes i'm in my shoes right now great if you're staying your shoes just stay in your shoes can i have your work would you talk would you give platform to people like alex jones would would you talk to somebody like alex jones or or not uh i yes i would and i feel very strongly about this honestly um well i think that it's it's an interesting thing and i i would just say a lot of times i can understand you know very very clearly why people would take issue with the idea of i guess what they perceive to be amplifying this man's voice this man's reach um you know as as a demonstrable negative but i think um you know when you take a step back further uh the the cure is more damaging than the disease and significantly so um i guess i think that i'm very very wary of i think being where you mentioned alex jones being wary of power and people with it that's a lot of times there's a lot of truth and validity to crazy things that people say it's the conspiracy theories that stick are the ones that sound credible at least quasi-credible in some aspect and it's almost like it seems to me like an anchor in people's mind and it is also funny to me obviously the the bill gates it's so funny to tar people with things like pedophile racist rapist like these are things that we're basically trying to pick words that no one can ever support someone who does these things yeah and that's you know and that changes year by year currently pedophile is totally in as a thing to call somebody just just as a it used to be communist or marxist cleveland browns fan you know like come on you know who actually nobody likes the bronze so yeah i'll agree i felt that that was that's why i picked one that's the trick is you find a group of people that nobody likes we're good here all right that's the move but uh yeah that's a creepy thing though because that is that is the creepy thing it's like people are always looking for groups of people are always looking for and i find this really deeply disturbing um like hey so who's the guy that we can all get away with you know just treating like dirt who's the guy that i can be a dick to i can just walk up and punch in the face and no one's gonna say anything yeah and it's even if i you know people do that with whether it's literal nazis or someone that i called nazi you know i guess what's the bigger issue this person's ridiculous beliefs or what i'm doing and you mentioned hitler before and obviously mein kampf being a you know like the outline for some of the things he did later and when the evil was it always there did it did it take root later on or to flourish later on but was was adolf hitler a problem because he had crazy ideas or because he did things i think it's because it's not i think i know it's because he did things now if i'm going to start punishing thought crime i i'm going to have to start punishing thought crime and that's a terrifying concept even if i'm right about the certain about the objectively correct about the things that i decide to call out of bounds who put me in charge and made me arbiter of good taste and how long until i decide that something else is is out of bounds it's always a sliding scale or it's always just a sliding standard and i i find that that you know to be more of a concern than people doing crazy things because i guess if you mention alex jones you know putting out ridiculous ridiculous ideas ridiculous theories i think that most people don't look at alex jones as a credible person no i'm not going to pretend to be deeply read into all of his beliefs or the things that he's trying to peddle um but there's plenty of things that are quasi mainstream that i think on with this side or that side that maybe not comparably ridiculous but are yeah you know particularly in hindsight or you know are we're not or silly and i guess uh the idea of of getting a group of people together to decide what we're not going to tolerate is a very very tricky thing and i think that you know it reminds me of law or you know even you know religion when it gets to like what are the things that we don't like how do we feel about rape it's like no under no circumstances is that an acceptable behavior murder no that's not acceptable behavior killing i don't know kind of depends on the situation are you at war were you justified were you acting in self-defense okay so it's not now murder is a specific type of killing the same way you know other things should be a specific type of something else but i guess we we draw a line of murder we say if you want to exist in our society you can't do this this cannot be done and then we go theft if someone said hey i murdered that guy can you understand where i'm coming from i might say yeah i'll hear you out doesn't mean that i think you're right but i'm like have you ever been wronged so deeply that you could imagine that you could kill someone i'm like no i haven't but i could conceptualize someone doing that and i'm like yeah okay and you still need to go you still need to face you know criminal justice as we have it in our system at least that's how we've decided yeah there's it's interesting you have to be able to like there's if you look at the history of discourse in this country i think it's still true but i'm not sure it's changed since 9 11. is uh it used to be impossible to criticize um a soldier it was easier to criticize war it was harder to criticize soldiers for allowing themselves to be the tools of war i tend to be maybe it's the russian upbringing it's the it's the combat thing i tend to romanticize war and soldiers i see soldiers as heroes but i've also heard people that not only say that soldiers are the war is bad they say soldiers are bad what's their argument it's it's the kind of a libertarian view that they're basically slaves to evil right war is evil and they're they're giving they are suspending their moral and ethical like as like duties as a human being to become the tools of evil that's sort of the argument if you see war as evil i mean i think it's useful to hear that but there for a long part in history that was completely unacceptable same with abortion if you see abortion as murder i mean if i classify it in that if i put it in that in that basket it starts we're living in the midst of like a genocide from that perspective could you feel how people could be deeply upset by abortion you know of course looked at from a different perspective you say i don't believe it to be murder that's not how i see it then you go oh well if that's the genesis of your your thought process then you're like yeah okay now i see how we can come to a different thing but i guess we go well abortion is murder period therefore if you support it you support murder that's a convenient way for me to tar you right but i guess that's kind of coming back to the alec jones i'm i'm this nuance it's uh you have to have the nuance in these kinds of conversations and i have to be willing to have the conversation and i have to be willing to sit down if i can't sit down across from like the most violently racist angry hypothetical internet you know conceived person that none of us have ever actually met in real life but or hopefully not um you know and go like well of course i believe that this person's wrong but allow me to change do my best i'll hear him out and i'll go no i can go point by point and explain why this guy or this girl is wrong and hopefully bring them over to a more reasonable position where they will have better beliefs and they will like objectively better beliefs and beliefs that will will and they'll treat other people better why would i want to marginalize this person now i might not want to talk i might want to invite them to my barbecue if they're acting like a jerk all the time but how could i would it not make the world a better place if i'd hear them out and they go look if you're going to sit down and talk with me we're going to have to have a discussion i'll hear what you have to say and if i can't if i can explain to someone why their ridiculous belief is wrong then i might i must not be so confident in my position and i guess that's where i come back to the alex jones thing as you mentioned you know with uh with bill gates and and you're much more familiar with with the specifics of all the good that he's done but you know again he's been an unbelievable force for good you know in this world you can list a b c d things that the man has has done that his foundation has done and you know positive things and then the other people could speculate about ridiculous crazy levels of of evil but you can't produce any evidence for that sort of thing because if you could the man would find himself in trouble you know and anyway i guess what i would would say is that why you can't force me to accept the truth the same way you could write down two plus two equals four on a piece of paper and show me how it works and i could say nah but that doesn't make it not true and you've still given yourself an opportunity to present your case you've presented it to me and you've also for anyone listening and watching you know you've been able to critically assess what's gone on you know or critically address back and forth you know kind of the the discourse and i think that you almost you're making your case for the public so i guess like you know when it comes to just never not engaging with these people that seems to me to be cowardly and i think that that's a something that we're seeing in society right now i think i think we're seeing a crisis of courage in society all over the place and i think that's where we're seeing poor leadership i think we're seeing understandable things happening everywhere but we need stronger voices and stronger stronger beliefs that have a conviction and are willing to engage with others not just turning into a shouting contest and not i didn't win because there's more of me oh i voted i outvoted you that's nice too but that's a stand-in for bullets that's saying i won because there's more of me that doesn't mean that i'm right because plenty of horrible and unpopular now things have been very very deeply popular in the past and would have won a popular vote does that make them right i'd said clearly not so i guess uh you'd hope that we engage with these people and that you can do your best to bring them over to a more reasonable position if you believe that you have one and if you can't well at least you made the effort and i think that that's something where martial arts shows the value it's like or do you know if you're going to go win your next fight i'm like i have no idea i will proceed forward with with full effort and and you know i will fight with dignity i'll fight with honor and i'll fight with courage and i i'll use everything that i have and i will play within the bounds of the game and that's that and the result will be what it'll be but i'll walk into and out of that ring with my head held high because i will know that i did my part i did my job the outcome the specific outcome is not in my control it's just strongly in my influence and and i think that that's something that helped me that martial arts has taught me because other times even when i was successful or unsuccessful i would focus on if i won i'm i won therefore i'm good i lost therefore i'm bad this other guy won or lost therefore as opposed to evaluating their method and i think it's so easy when we're taking a bird's-eye view of things to not evaluate how someone's doing things you're not evaluating my process you're simply evaluating my outcome and i could have stumbled into something very very good or very very bad and we can look back and i think that's the value of history i mean i don't mean to get on my dang high horse but it's like that's the value of history we can see the unbroken chain or the chain of events that led us somewhere and then only with only with the eyes of history can we truly evaluate things unless we're in the room watching it happen and i guess that's again where we start to go most of the big bad scary things that have happened in history that are done particularly on an industrial scale which implies governmental power and things like that or these the equivalent involve groups of people getting together and going hey we're not going to deal with that guy giant groups of people so maybe we're right this time but maybe we're wrong next time and i guess i would be back to the gandalf putting on the one ring i would be very very hesitant even if we thought we were in the right to simply try to try to marginalize just on general principle even people like alex jones whom on their face are pretty ridiculous like you said you should sit down with adolf hitler and talk to the man i agree with you to play a little devil's advocate is alex jones might be a bad example but if we look at because he has a face he is a human he's a real person there's also trolls on the internet 4chan the worry i have with those folks is that and there might be parallels to martial arts is they practice guerrilla warfare meaning they don't necessarily want to arrive at the truth they just always want to cut at the ankles of the powerful like they want to always break down the powerful and even if they i mean it's they turn everything into a game so they let's see if we can make the world let's see if we can make a trend that bill gates is a pedophile right they make it into a game they get excited about this game they see the powerful let's see if we can convince that like who is the most positive person we can think of let's see if we can turn them into evil and they've tried that with like with like everybody and some and it seems to stick and they're good at it assam would argue whatever you think about our current president that he has some elements of that which is he's figured out whatever this music of social discourse that's going on he's figured out how to always troll the mainstream like flow of consciousness that's the the media he always kind of says stuff that annoys a very large number of people and he enjoys that because it's like taking the powerful taking the way things were before and he like shakes it up by saying the most inappropriate thing almost on purpose or instinctually and so on the problem i have with that is that doesn't the powerful thing there is it uh brings the power the those in power down a notch that's a great thing the negative thing is it doesn't push us closer to a nuanced careful rigorous discourse towards truth it's like showing up to a party and just like starting to yell it doesn't create a good conversation it just makes everything into a game where truth doesn't even seem like a thing we can even hope to achieve like that makes sense and i guess as you mentioned it'll come back to another movie because i don't do books and do movies some people just want to watch the world burn right and i guess there's that's a creepy creepy you know kind of urge that some people have and it also is some people you're like hey would you like to throw a brick through that glass window and you're like yeah sure like no i'm not going to do that because i think about what's going to what's going to what's going to occur like something's going to be hurt someone's property not going to do it versus hey you want to see what'll happen like yeah sure you know kids are always like i have my son he just grabbed spider-man and dropped small table spider-man fell my spider-man didn't fall shawn like he dropped him you knocked him off the table and he'll grin and basically uh you know it's it's an interesting thing like you said like playing that p these people are appealing to and you know and also almost like the little dog factor of like i people do want to watch the powerful get taken down a notch for all the good and the not good of that because plenty of people it seems to me that have found their way to incredibly high positions some some have just found themselves there and many many many many many people you know men and women of of all backgrounds are brilliant and have worked hard and yeah of course there's luck and there's there's luck into everything there you know lebron james in spite of being the best basketball player on god's green earth is fortunate that he didn't get hit by a car you know it's fortunate they didn't tear his knee you know but thankfully we get to see all these things you know but um i i guess uh it's if people don't have any skin in the game you never know what they're gonna do and i think that's the problem with the internet you know that people get to be nameless be faceless that's why guerrilla fighters are outside of the bounds of war like you don't have a uniform on you're like i don't know who you're from you don't get the same treatment that a soldier gets um for and people well that's crazy actually there's reasons for this because otherwise people are able to assail things and there's no there's no one responsible there's no way to go and say hey where's where did this come from what's the root of this what how can i address this and i think that's the problem of the internet's problem on twitter's problem places like 4chan i wouldn't mind seeing that type of stuff go away if i'm frank but that's not the same thing as people with a face people with people who are willing to stand there and say hi my name is so and so even if i have ridiculous beliefs hopefully you know people will hear me out and then if i'm wrong educate me but i i guess you hope that the real i guess in my mind antidote to all of this silliness is education and and i think that that's something that we're you know critical thinking is is not necessarily i went to school in america and you know i feel very fortunate but critical thinking is not something that's that's focused on i mean and it's it's tough it's almost like talking about jiu-jitsu it's tough to teach critical thinking when i don't know any words you have to teach me techniques you can't teach me to be an artist but recognize that the techniques are the beginning not the end ultimately it's the artistry that we're searching for not just the not just the science or the or the by rote memorization and i guess you know you'd hope that people's ability to think critically and recognize that majority rule or whoever's loudest does not mean that they're right by any stretch of the imagination and we don't appeal to that and we don't bow to that will help them to help inoculate them against the ridiculous things that come out of these places these dark places that that are objectively not great but the i guess all circling back if even if we swatted these you know these bad things out of existence right now we've got to be very very careful doing that because it's who's doing the swatting this political group that's in power right now the people that support our current president would maybe feel a certain way the people that support another option would feel differently as to what exactly defines toxic and i you know i guess that that's what gives me pause yeah and but also the grace thing i tend to believe that the the technology you said education but the the platforms we use like twitter and the reddit and all these platforms have a role to play to teach us grace meaning they ins they should help us incentivize the kind of behavior that is incentivized in real life like being a dick in real life is not incentivized like one-on-one interaction like there's cases where it is but usually being kind to each other is incentivized on the internet it's not like you get likes for being for mocking people in a funny in a humorous way and it can be dark kind of mocking depending on the community you can go you can go to the appearance if somebody's a little fat or a little too skinny you can comment on their appearance the hair the way their hair looks like the appearance stuff it could be on the people comment all the time on the uh level of eloquence of my speech go fuck yourself i like it it's creepy though watching watching previously like this used to be lowbrow though like people doing this type of stuff it's creepy watching like our political figures get into this type of game yes but again it's a little bit refreshing right it's a the my hope with donald trump was is that he would shake up the the people who wear suits usually the like if you're from dc i remember like showing up i actually didn't wear what i usually wear in dc because i was like everybody's wearing a suit and tie when i was like giving talks and stuff except for mudge who wears jeans and a t-shirt doesn't give a damn mudge is uh a forever renegade uh but i don't even remember what uh oh yeah so my hope with trump was that huge shake up that system just say like like uh to inject new ideas to inject new energy of course the way it turned out is different but like there's uh it turns out that you might want to have somebody who's like like an andrew yang type character who is full of ideas that are very different and inject the energy new energy into the system through youthful new ideas versus through the troll that like that's very good at sort of mocking and like playing outside the the rules of the game but trump did reveal powerfully i don't know what to think of it that um it's just a game and you don't have to play by the rules that's both inspiring and dark deeply depressing right yeah and i don't know what to do with it i don't i mean the same i'm not drawing parallels not drawing parallels between our president and adolf hitler but it certainly and there's a lot of in history a lot of positive and a lot of negative things happen when charismatic leaders realize they don't have to play by the rules you can just flip the table it's the that uh uh kevin spacey show no house cards house of cards where you just flip the table or whatever you don't have to play by the rules of the chess game you can flip the table one wonders if that's always been done in private you know i guess because that's i mean even look obviously the united states is a as a republic but we had we had bush then we had clinton and we had more bush than we had president obama then we were about to have another clinton that's fairly creepy yeah even on its own but now we added another i mean i'm sure we'll have a generation of trumps no gee we uh you know i'm russian so i think we humans like kings still and queens there's something we're attracted to the the thing we talked about coaches there's something in us that longs towards that authoritarian control one of the beautiful things about america the second amendment uh is uh we also like individual freedom that's one of the one of the unique aspects at the founding of this country and still and for me is the beacon of hope that uh somehow there's the fire freedom burns in there like that texas feel that i that gives me hope the fu energy that revolts against the power which as we discussed power corrupts and ultimately leads to sort of uh degradation of the whoever's ruling is the people it's interesting though like it seems to me maybe i'm just i don't know if i'm reading this properly when i when i see it but it's it seems to me that that like you said that that you know flip the bird i'm gonna do me within reason like as long as i'm not hurting you uh is idea that that very much at least in my mind defines the american ideal or at least part of the consciousness of the united states is is under attack to a certain extent you know um in if only like i can think to like you know maybe a generation behind us um it's it's becoming more collectivist yeah you know for all the good and also the not good of that and it's uh you know not in not in terms not in terms of policy at this point but just in terms of like uh the consciousness and i wonder if that's a an internet thing you know people are more in touch with one another than they've as far as i can tell they've ever been at least more than in my lifetime and uh you know the rest of the world seems much closer than it did you know living in virginia california seems very far away being on the internet it's just right there i can hear about it i can see it i can i can interact with people from there you know i remember uh you know being in tennessee at uh you know one time and then and reading about you know events taking place in you know the middle east and it just seemed like a mile away it seemed like a unbelievably far distance and then another time when you're in dc you just feel like oh you read about something happening in paris and it just feels like it's just right around the corner because dc is a seat of a seat of power where things are just occurring all the time and uh you know i guess you you wonder about that's where i come back to the group decisions to not listen to this person or to cancel this or to you know we all the moral majority shall do the following as opposed to as long as you're not hurting me and long as you're not hurting anyone else i have to let you do i have to let you be on general principle even if i don't like you i'm very free to not like you i'm free to speak out against you but i'm not it is not within my right or and not with it and it's not i i would not be right to attempt to attack you and that is an interesting thing though when we see words being redefined or words being defined whether it's toxicity whether it's violence if i think that what you're saying is is your speech is by itself you know a violence or a precursor to violence i'm justified in doing all sorts of things you know and and that creeps me out significantly because again even if it ends up being pointed in a good direction initially it's only a matter of time and actually that brings me to uh another dune oh yeah i got all day um how much are they paying you but wait about say the uh the frank herbert estate not enough frankly oh let's see and how many books are there in dune that's a gen question you're also a fan of i read the whole series but not a couple of the i read all the prequels as well it was the exception of a couple is there a book one for dune dune it would be book one and even the prequels it's still all better if you start like i read dune and then read the original what is it six and then i went back and started to read something like just like watching star wars you want to start at episode four or whatever yeah i think so that's the way that's the move and then stop at six call it a day watch the mandalorian and but well i thought you're not walking back here no i like the mandalorian yeah that is what i said yeah i was told that i was heartless for not liking baby yoda boy we don't talk about a couple of the movies not including the middle or in the middle and it's fine it's the more recent movies that we don't like to talk about yeah oh the what's his name the the goofy guy uh ryan no no no the creature the goofy creature with the jar jar yeah jar jar do you ever see the the the jar jar binks is actually like the dark lord of the sith theory that fixed the whole initial trilogy we're like he's he's like goofing around and like making it all the way through battles and when you're like wait a minute he oops his way he walks over to a pool does a triple backflip falls in you're like it's just bizarre this is the this is the alex jones theory of of star wars he's actually running one that actually was like hey we should vote in chancellor chancellor palpatine or senator palpatine like right before they put jar jar in charge first off what did they think was gonna happen and second off that was i just think that'd be great like oops oh man i guess he's the emperor now that would have been great but actually to the to the cancel and all the other stuff again it's just you'd hope that it gives pause and i think about this for fighting because a lot of times i'll use this example people and people like fight fans and you know like ufc they love people that run out and try to murder each other and it's entertaining and it's super entertaining but you know floyd mayweather doesn't resonate with people as much it's like people start i remember the time when floyd was not as popular now people think people love floyd because he's 50-0 floyd and oh man and finally he had so much success that we all can't help but recognize the man's genius and greatness but prior to that oh he's boring he's this he's that he fights you know with he's circumspect he's cautious he's he's pressing he's intelligent deeply intelligent and uh when you watch people go out and try to murder each other you can flip a coin 100 times and you know you can get you could be lucky enough to get 100 heads but it's still a coin flip and i think that that's what's going on all the time is you know people are getting an outcome that they want but it wasn't a well thought out situation and that's why you'll win by five in a row by knockout and then lose three in a row and then people will go well what happened to that guy he used to be so great no he's doing what he's always been doing it's just it was getting great outcomes on a coin flip prior and it's getting negative outcomes on a coin flip now but uh i guess what i would say is it watches it's interesting watching you know i guess societal beliefs become such a a thing that we're almost adopting on a religious level if we're not careful and if if when i say religious level i mean like like pan life like this is guiding all of my choices for all the good and the bad of that and this is the dune quote is when religion and politics travel on the same card the writers believe that nothing can stand in their way their movements become headlong faster and faster and faster they put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget that the precipice does not show itself to the man in the blind rush until it's too late and i think that that's again the the pause we go oh man thank goodness we have this guy that wants to rebuild germany he'll put us back where we need to be and you stop questioning any your own judgment your own just you start you stop thinking essentially right i'm not allowed to question this oh of course this is correct of course this girl of course i'm right i intended to do right so of course my actions are correct i mean how many times have any of us intend to do something helpful and ended up doing something less and you know plenty of people who intend to do harm could by accident do something decent and i guess it's like you know i'm not saying anything you know terribly terribly you know insightful but it's just one of those where it's hard it's hard to say in the moment and that's where you hopefully caution you would counsel some degree of caution and uh that that's what worries me with with people deciding that we're all so right about this or we're also right about that and attempting to rather than win the argument silence the counter-argument no matter how crazy it may seem because i just think that that idea even when it's pointed in a good direction initially it's only a matter of time you're amongst many things a jujitsu black belt one of the things that people are really curious about white belts and blue belts and jiu jitsu but also people haven't tried the art is what does it take to be a jiu jitsu black belt i think that you know everyone's journey is a little bit different but the one thing that the it was a calvin coolidge quote you know determination persistence is the only thing that that will win in the end it will always win in the end not brilliance not toughness not education it's it's persistence and i think that having the belief that no matter what happens to me i will proceed forward and i will i will figure out how to make this happen hell or high water i think is the one thing that ties together all of the people that i've ever met that made it through whatever it was that they were going through because you know sometimes you can get lucky and you can have an easy time or and that luck could be you had a good situation it could be i mean like in the obvious sense of like where you're living where you're training what's going on you had a good situation you're un unbelievably athletic oh you're you're going to be an astronaut you're brilliant and an olympic athlete you know like well that's a fantastic situation you know you won the genetic lottery and i've worked hard as well but you also won the genetic lottery it's a determination is the one thing though because that person could have a very easy go of it initially and then tear their knee and then they're no longer the the superhuman physical specimen that they were the only thing that will keep them going is persistence and i think that that um i would just say that persistence to say i'll just put one foot in front of the other and sometimes i can see the path ahead and sometimes it's beyond my vision but i will not stop i may even slow down but i won't stop and that's the only thing that i can say that i've seen tie everyone together because there's so many ways to the top of any mountain and there's so many different personalities and skills and backgrounds involved but everyone everyone carries on so at the core the foundational advice is just don't quit just keep going that's the lesson of martial arts i think you know we think it's like how to be strong or how to be how to win but in reality it's like how to persist how to endure because it's all of us have been beaten so many times and gotten beaten up so many times and thought about quitting have i ever thought about quitting absolutely have i ever quit never i will never ever quit ever i can say you might not be out i will be damned if i quit what's the darkest moment is it injury related like is that is it uh so like to me like two possibilities i've fortunately never been seriously injured but i think that's a dark place to be like having to be out for many months uh for um as jen was saying like with a head injury especially like the uncertainty that's one and then the other side is if you have big ambitions as a competitor realizing that you're not as good like those those doubts were like i kind of suck how am i supposed to be a world the greatest fighter of all time if i if if like several people in the gym are kicking my ass those are the two things that paralyzing i think that everyone's darkest moment is maybe different looking from the outside for ryan i wouldn't say that he's had injuries and he said bad ones i wouldn't say that was his darkest moment i think for me i would say some my head injury was my darkest moment absolutely and i have torn my acl twice i've torn my shoulders four times i've had lots of surgeries for me the orthopedic injuries were not the most difficult it was the brain injury for others that might be the case for them maybe they've never experienced an injury and maybe for them that's their darkest moment from the outside obviously orion can speak to this more but for ryan i think it was the um inability to to perform at certain points to the upper the missing of opportunities that for him from my perspective watching him go through and having seen various points of his growth from from early purple bought on i think the hardest time for him looking in obviously was when he would hit moments where he wasn't able to perform for various reasons he couldn't get fights he was having difficulties there i think that that was the hardest point for him did you did you think like with the head injury that you might not never be able to do jiu jitsu again yeah i mean i i mine was very um was really bad and it was just the one hit but i had a looping memories for seven months didn't know it because when your brain's messed up you're not even aware that you're looping and so i saw two different neurologists i find like it took a very long time um i didn't know if i was going to be able to have like linear thoughts or read a book i didn't know at certain points if i could listen to music again you know without it making my head hurt um and so uh it was almost two years before i woke up in the morning without a headache um just waking up before i even start my day and so that so that's even bigger than jujitsu that's just life that's just that's just hard and i think that you can experience so many things i've had all these injuries we lost the baby when i was 15 15 weeks and we've had all these experiences and what the hardest point for me not saying all those things weren't hard but it's kind of like as you go through these you just realize like life goes on and you have to keep working at it and you have to keep going and you asked me earlier offline did i feel depressed and not from my head injury i don't think that at least in the moment i had a any recognition of that it's kind of like but i think different people's personalities i have kind of the like buckle down and just keep going and sometimes it's not until lots of time later that you realize wow that was really hard because you're just struggling to live and and function and do the things that you need to do alone do you mind jumping on just like this part of the conversation just for a few minutes it's over do you mind you know just sitting together oh no no just for a little bit sorry be cool be cool so we put a face to it you know uh is it okay with you yeah it's fine with me if it's fine by the way what was the head injury if you don't mind sharing someone hit their head dropped their knee on the back of my head during training who's a lot bigger than me so one strike to the back of the head is too much for someone there's a reason that's outlawed in mma right someone 50 pounds everything you drop their running on the back your head once and it's that's the funny thing about getting hit right you never can really be sure what's going to happen i think that's actually one of the magical parts about jiu jitsu where like if you choke me if you we know what's going to occur you hit someone they might be completely unharmed like you might be punching tony ferguson in the face and like he you need to hit him with a sledgehammer to affect this man and then other people they could get really badly hurt which i guess it's back to your point about you know street fighting and things like that and the serious serious potential you know second third order consequences of any action that we take but yeah that's a that's a tricky thing about getting hit how does it make you feel that like the the really shitty thing about injuries to me was that like you start thinking like well if i did this one little thing different like this wouldn't have happened today like one one moment changes your entire life is that do you uh do you think that where is that totally counterproductive um you can't help but think that way when you've had the amount of injuries i've had now because i've had more than most people's fair share um as my orthopedic says you don't want to win that you don't want to with the contest of who's had the most but since you haven't actually built me a pool yeah um but i think you can't help but think that way sometimes but i definitely don't think it's i think it can be facilitated if you don't beat yourself up too much um because thinking about why have i been subject to so many injuries and and a lot of it comes to just um almost all of mine in particular are people a lot heavier than me so we're talk but if i've been training martial arts 15 years i'm obviously on the much smaller side i'm a woman i've done thousands and thousands of rounds with people 50 pounds plus heavier than me i mean years not training with anyone less than 50 which is 50 pounds is almost half my body weight and when you also add testosterone the natural physiological advantages of men not just are they heavier with more mass they're faster they're more explosive they're stronger if they're the same size and so i think that the willingness to be in that environment over and over and over again creates a lot of strength resiliency willingness to continue but it also like in order to do that you almost have to uh for me the way i was approaching was like pretend like i wasn't more vulnerable um and just be willing to step in and step in and stuff take it until you make it kind of until you make it kind of yeah like i'll just one day i'll be strong enough and you avoided injury for most for most of those rounds i would injure the problem as ryan points out is that like you could do thousands of rounds but if one person that size that strength that however reacts in a way that you don't expect it doesn't it's not like an oops it's like always major do you regret any of it like i think that most no one i know has experienced the degree of injuries that i've experienced and i started juice at a time when in 2005 is very different than now where you have the coaches have more control over what you're doing they're more aware in general about a lot of the injuries there's a lot more people who are uh hobbyists than when i started um they were hobbyists but it was different kind of hobbyist you know than now now our girls can train with other girls they don't have to do thousands of rounds with somebody significantly more powerful than them and for the drawbacks and the benefits of that you know as with anything um so i think i think that i don't think i would go back and change it there were times after one of my injuries where i said to ryan i said i quit i'm done i'm not doing this anymore i probably said it more than once but there was one time i was really serious in 2012. um i was really serious i tore my shoulder i had i was looking at missing a big competition again the world's for my second or third year in a row after injuries and i said i'd quit my job two years before and i'm like i'm done and run before that had always been you know keep me focused and then he kind of said okay if you want to be done be done just just have a good time no i'm really done i don't even want to train anymore okay okay and then you know i think he helped facilitate a moment for me to go um visit a friend some friends some girls that were doing a girls camp who are close to my size or some friends of mine to go train and i was like oh wait i do love this thing it's harder for me on a daily basis but that doesn't mean i don't love this thing and it really helped change my mind i started to connect with other people travel more myself because previously he had done that but i hadn't really done that i think there was a point where um when i started youtube it was just for fun i just wanted to sport after college i played sports as a kid i want to i just want to exercise i wasn't into the martial arts he usually gave me a hard time about it because he was always very how can you not care about martial i don't know i just want to play sports um and ryan was really big into kind of the philosophy side of the martial arts aspect um he used to give me a hard time and i think after that moment this moment where i looked at myself and i said do i want to keep doing this is when i started to appreciate jiu-jitsu take it took off some of the pressure i'd been feeling i think as ryan's girlfriend but i had a full-time job a long time it was never my goal to be a jiu jitsu world champion and i think after that moment where i like you know i really do like this i really do want to just i had this moment like any time where you're like i'm doing this for me i'm not doing this for him and i think that that's um i think that was really lucky for me because how often in our lives do we have a kind of a challenge where we have to stop and we have to say is this really what i want how often in a relationship do you do that how often in any type of lifestyle or job do you stop and you really ask yourself is something really difficult happen that you look and you go am i just doing this because it's convenient and easy or is this what i really want to do yeah i've had those moments like this this podcast is one of those things it's like you you stop and think like i actually love this and it's uh i had that with jiu-jitsu too i don't think i had set until like brown belt did i stop i mean yeah it's when you first face real challenges you think like why am i doing this it's i think most of my progression was why not i think that's the right the leap of faith and then a certain point you think like what why am i doing this and if you can answer honestly that because i love it it's kind of a liberating feeling it's a it's a yeah it's so it's so powerful thankful for the opportunity to be there right because you love it and yeah man great gratitude it's yeah so that's it's ultimately gratitude yeah let me ask you this so ryan said like what what did i took over your thing yeah this is no nobody cares about ryan i wouldn't i'll photoshop him out or whatever however you edit that'd be great put sean connery's head uh just like a dune ad exactly uh connor is that the sexiest man in sean connery in the dune universe that's my understanding okay i think in any universe yeah well mind gossiping given we actually named our son after sean connery oh yeah that's right yes he was in the rock those i love all those great lame nicholas cage oh yeah conairs face off greatest movie of all time dude his accent and conair was so awesome i don't know where it's from alabama i guess or something well they got like steve buscemi in there like we need steve buscemi in this thing and we got him dave chappelle yeah that's right yeah he's a prisoner eight ball yep greatest movie of all time should have won and dave chappelle also in blue streak with martin lawrence and then uh what do you call it uh robin who men and sites oh robin was one of my favorites as a kid half baked but rob yeah well that that's a good uh wow we just listed off some really bad 90s movies but you take that back we're telling our age yeah so what um like in your view i don't mean to from like a smaller person i guess that's an interesting thing while jiu jitsu is like that uh small i don't hopefully that's not a bad thing um yeah like with all these like uh bigger people you can still enjoy the art like what does it take to get a black belt to excel to quote unquote master the art gosh everyone has such a different path ryan's promoted six seven people something like that and i think about half of them have had um have kids have families have other careers um at the time some of them competed a lot some of them have never competed or rarely competed some have been commuted a long time some had started different places everyone's had different journeys even in our own little group of seven i think only maybe only two or three were high level competitors of that group at the higher belts very like brown black maybe um and so it's just different for every person and that's something that that you know we try to tell her since we have 400 students and um do we have us we don't really have anyone who's you know a stated other other than like the coaches like adam but we don't have anyone that's like a stated high-level competitor as a student at the moment we people look at our gym like oh it's lots of competitors there's not lots of competitors it's never been lots of competitors and we've had ones and twos here and there um but really everybody's in it for the long term if they're in it sometimes the the high level competitors are the ones that are more likely to drop off because they have a bit of success particularly at blue or purple and then they realize how hard it is at brown and black and then they they have a hard time continuing on that's that path and then they can't look at themselves as a non-competitive hard time continuing with jiu jitsu i think whereas sometimes it's the guy who comes in as the white belt and he trains you know twice a week every week and the next thing you know he's been there for two or three years like oh he's a blue bell he's a purple he's a brown bell and and he's just consistent um over over a long period of time and willing to take the path and no two people's path is exactly the same no two people's lives are exactly the same you have um we have students who started as a white belt as you know a young adult with no you know no responsibilities and they train all the time and then they have a job you know then they graduate college and they have a job then they have married then they have kids then they have different points in their careers and at different points in your life jiu jitsu will be there you know for whatever way that you're willing to accept it it's place i think well that's actually kind of what back to the initial question we discussed about you know what makes a warrior you know and and also like what makes something or someone you know particularly impressive in my mind is like uh what they make out of what they have um you know one of my favorite movies ever as far as gump and it's obviously it's it's just if you can't uh because i've heard people like force gum sucks i'm like i don't like you as a person and uh like you have no heart at all but basically uh it's the story of someone that tries hard and it's like yeah but it's it's funny movie but it's like um you know i guess you meet each person where they are you know and obviously you want everyone needs to be pushed we all need to be pushed we need friends and people around us that push us to be better versions of ourselves all the time and as you mentioned the people you spend all of your time around deeply impact you um and we have to be willing to be pushed it takes a leap of faith for me to trust for me to put some of my self in my my you know i guess my ability my control my personal agency as it were in the hands of someone else that i that i trust and and that i respect but if if i can do that well again maybe i never become you know high level black belt competitor but you know i had four of the things i was doing my life i also have a family i have this i have that you know what that person was able to accomplish in the martial arts relative to what they were able to put in this phenomenal you know other times someone could be a very successful black belt and it might might be a bum because they could have been a lot more and you know they could have done more they could have focused more and and there's no shame in deciding that you don't want to do that but whatever it is that you're you're invested in i remember the uh take it uneasy podcast and that i loved because you know i'll just chill out like resting it's like vacation oh who wants to go on vacation yeah go on vacation for a day or two you want to spend three weeks on vacation like i kill myself like get me out of here like this is horrible this is i'm a waste of life i'm not doing anything useful right now technically right now right well this is fun though it's like a one-day vacation yeah exactly but if you notice if you had i'm sure you're thinking about jumping off of the building right now but if you had to if you had to talk to me for you know like uh three days i'm sure you'd probably shove me off the building i don't blame you i would be dead but yeah five hours in but yeah but you know it is it's like you want to be pushing towards something um because otherwise what's the purpose of being here you know it's not just a college it's doing something useful building growing as a person helping others do the same if that's within your power at any given time but i think that's kind of the neat thing about martial arts is it can be many many different things to many different people you know i finally for instance i was able to get a college degree let this this year that which i mean it's not a big deal for most people but for me it was a big deal because i was going back and finish yeah and i never envisioned ever going back and that's a hard step to to go back and finish that's uh it just weighs heavy on you if you don't it's interesting yeah i was just i was more proud of that than most things i've ever done if i'm honest you know and it was neat and i really enjoyed it and it was the process of doing it but you know are my academic credentials impressive like not in the least but for me it's like it was a big deal for me personally to take that step and to to go back and do that and i was i was proud of the the direction and because it would have been easy like do i need to do it like no i'm you know i'm business i'll do okay i'll try i'll keep fighting but i i was happy to take the time in between fights when i was when i was unbooked for an opponent to do something productive rather than just i'll just hang out you know like i can still train every single day but i can also train and go to school people go to the olympics while going to school i can i can do martial arts and go to school one thing i gotta ask is uh you know a bunch of women listen to this podcast if they haven't done jiu jitsu i think it'd be kind of intimidating to uh stop on the mat with a bunch of bros uh that like enjoy somehow killing each other like how do you succeed in that environment to where you can learn this art learn how to beat all those people up um oh gosh is there any advice i mean another way to ask that is like if if uh any women listening to this are interested in starting jiu-jitsu like is there advice for that journey honestly i think it's just walking in the door and starting sometimes i don't know how to respond to that because i'm not i don't view myself as typically anxious particularly in interactions with other people or new people shy is not a word that has been used for me but if you ask my family and um they joke because our son talks a lot he's advanced verbally and they're always like oh well let's we know where he gets that from like because he just doesn't stop talking he narrates everything he does um and so they always tease because that's like i'm known for for kind of talking a lot um but so i haven't been typically i'm not i don't consider myself a shy person so for me going into um a new room a new group of people is you know there's there's always that you don't really know who they are how they're going to treat you but i typical but i i don't have a lot of anxiety with that so i don't if that's something that's going to put something up i don't really know how to to address that particular feeling um but in terms of all of the rooms i've been in i have popped in the jutsu jams before i knew ryan in florida like i traveled for my jobs in germany and florida and in california in places where where i don't know anyone they don't know me and i have never once had anyone be anything other than than kind and solicitous and helpful and long before when i was a white belt and a blue belt and didn't know anything and didn't know anyone and i just think that it's a community of people that it's so cool that no matter where you go in the world um i i walked into a gym in prague one time where only two people spoke english and and it was just yeah it's weird you know it's weird like part of a group and they're like oh let me tell you what it is being part of a cult right yeah yeah but it's like a positive cult like it for sure that's what we would say yeah that's true yeah that's true i mean we do need to murder every week of practice aikido i mean yeah that's this cult uh true deeply believes it no but there is a like if you look at different kinds of games like chess and so on like there's a skepticism i mean there's not a brotherhood sisterhood feeling with jiu jitsu it's like you can roll into most places even like with judo like i can see the contrast like because i've trained in judo places it uh it's more like tribal like you walk in and like who is this like there's that kind of feeling with jiu jitsu there's uh less so there is a little bit with like the competitors there's always like the competitors feeling each other out usually like the blue belts uh but like outside of that in terms of if you don't get the if you if you walk in with the vibes of just loving the art and just wanting to have a good time you're like welcome it's really cool it's really fascinating it's a really great um thing i think and as a woman i think you you think you're walking into these rooms of these you know big strong tough guys and um if anything i would i would say that they're almost like much more solicitous when a woman comes in there and not like they're just like hitting on you all the time you know it's just that you walk in and everyone is like oh cool you want to do this thing that i love let me make sure you have a good experience and take care of you and i think that's that's an experience that that i hope people have when they come into our gym and and i've i've always felt when i walked into other gyms and so you know we try our best to to make that comfortable and and it can be a little uncomfortable because there are when you walk into a male-dominated environment there's conversations and topics there's a different style of camaraderie and joking that a lot of men will do that um maybe some women are more uncomfortable with i grew up with four brothers so i kind of maybe was a little more desensitized to that um and i worked for the department of defense for for a while too so before i i i'd say you're with the government yeah so so i did that i'm already skeptical yeah i'm not going to ask you about ufos then because you're not going to tell me the truth [Laughter] uh yeah now you just freaked out a lot of people okay uh but yeah by the way where's where's your school because people always ask like where uh uh well we're outside of washington dc and northern virginia and falls church you always want to pick like what's the best school if i travel to this place or if i lo if i want to move to this place so that's well i mean obviously we're biased but yeah we're in the washington dc area the best okay we just took a little break now we're back let me ask you uh one thing that a bunch of people are curious about you're one of the innovators first of all you're one of the great innovators and philosophers and thinkers in jiu jitsu right but you're also one of the innovators in terms of leg locks and and the 50 50 position and just like the fact that legs have something to do in jiu jitsu uh the the under the other popularizer innovator in the space is john donahue and his whole group of guys do you have um thoughts about their whole system of leg locks and their ideas about jiu-jitsu and so on sure i i guess uh you know obviously you know john and and the students at henzo have been able to do fantastic things competitively in the past number of years and you know um you mentioned innovators in the in that kind of you know section of jiu jitsu i would be uh i'd love to bring up some guys like dean lister um of course uh mazukaze minari in fact a lot of what was going on in like 90s japan like combat submission wrestling there was some crazy gnarly stuff that it's just it's on grainy vhs tape but like stuff that if people were doing now they go oh my god that's brand new like there's um it's it's been i think these are things that have been around for a while um in various places i first learned the 50 50 position just like the leg entanglement of it from brandon vera actually at a seminar at lord urban's martial arts i think in 2005. he learned it from dean lister who used it to submit alexandria cocareco a really really tough nogi guy at adcc on the in the run that uh dean made to the to the gold medal in the absolute division which was a great performance at the time first american to do that um and uh you know and i actually saw a video i mean first of boss rutin actually broke i think guy mesger's foot with a 50 50 heel hook did he actually grabbed his heel and his and his toes and like and in pancreas it's back when they had like the man panties and the high uh yeah and uh dude that was gnarly boss rooting is underappreciated as like as like he double oh grab like oh yeah like you know his leverage is leveraged it's that's like a toehold that's you know that goes the other way and it's like it either doesn't work or breaks in half and uh well he's uh people don't often think of boss rooting as an innovator but he is in a way like he uh you know talk about like elon musk and first principles thinking in terms of physics he like just feels like he just gets the job he figures out like the simplest way to get the job done of breaking things and establishing control and hurting people remember that was back in the day if you listen to boss root and do any like commentary for any of the uh the big mma shows or any mma show way back when any time guys were clinching like the gosh role for an ebar he was saying that way back when and now people are doing it all the time with varying degrees of success it's it's funny it's like it's also tough to be uh i think like a breakaway thinker i mean you know groupthink is a real thing in group inertia and it's it's neat to see um you know particularly at a time when maybe that type of stuff was less accepted um you know someone going hey i'm gonna i'm gonna run off in this other direction i think you know whoever you know the inventor of electricity in my mind is a lot more impressive than whomever not to say that the person down the line isn't impressive that comes up with an interesting way to use it um both are cool but when you think about just can you imagine we're sitting here like yeah people i'm going to build an airplane you're like what are you talking about it's crazy people don't fly i'm like no i'm going to do it and of course it's not going to be as good as the airplane down the line the iterative things that happen later on but um just being able to go to dream something into existence that you haven't seen before and then make it happen like takes an unbelievable like strength of character almost like a force of will because you have you're you're blazing a trail that hasn't been walked before that's the bj pen factor in you know winning the jiu jitsu world championship first non-brazilian to do that was back in 2001 and then raphael lovato later on it's like he's you know both of those guys are so unbelievably impressive in my mind for the same reason you know because they were out there winning at a time when that wasn't a common thing not that it's easy to win now it's just there's not a psychological hurdle that needs to be left i remember you know when i was early in jiu jitsu like americans weren't winning the world championships at any belt i mean bj we all knew bj penn because bj penned it but it was really really uncommon now it happens you know on a semi-regular basis of course the brazilians are so strong europeans are still strong but uh and australians are coming on as well but uh it's it's definitely kind of an interesting thing so to come back to you know john danaher and the uh hensar team obviously they're doing fantastic things john's had some really really great innovation there and the the the systematization and the methodology that they're using is uh is great and it's neat to see that it's getting out there um i would just also what i would encourage people to make sure that they're you know catching up on their history because obviously you know john's a brilliant instructor and has done things you know for the sport that um that are fantastic that haven't been done before but you know none of us exist in a vacuum and i've learned things from everywhere else so you know john would say the same i'm sure and uh you know dean lister would say the same and it's just neat when you can kind of trace the history of all of this happening because we've had humanity's had two arms and two legs for some time at least as long as i've been alive but you mentioned like airplanes do you think there's something totally new to be invented in jiu jitsu still not totally new but like the you know flying isn't new right uh but airplanes nevertheless made that much more efficient is there like new ideas to be discovered in digital still i'd say the reason i'd say yes is the same reason i would say i believe in alchemy even though i don't i'm serious like i've got some backing for this okay um you know i guess i talk about this with a buddy of mine a lot like uh and facilitative versus not facilitated beliefs and if i don't believe something is possible and i do no investigation towards it i'll never find something even if it's there it's almost like it's no different than me walking up on a group of people and going like oh man look at these jerks this is going to suck versus me going i wonder what these guys are up to i'm about to have two very different conversations even though the players in the game are no different my internal constitution has changed because of of how i've decided to approach the situation so although i wouldn't personally want to spend all my time trying to turn lead into gold because i don't believe that it's likely to work only a person who's willing to spend his or her life in that pursuit will actually get to the bottom of that and also in the in the pursuit of that they're likely to find other things so i think a lot of times the idea is that humanity is pushed forward by you know again it's another orson scott carbon it's like you know human beings are in this slog it's paraphrasing just in this slog over time and then periodically the humanity gives birth to genius like someone that invents the wheel invents electricity pushes us forward you know comes up with with the idea of governance that doesn't you know just start and end with the point of a sword you know and uh you know these aren't common things these are unbelievable advancements that you know that just me sitting here i didn't come up with them but i just get the benefit of it so i guess what i would say is a lot of times these ideas are called crazy you know like as we discussed on kind of offline it's like you know einstein was brilliant in his 20s and it was brilliant before that i would suspect but basically uh you know gets recognized later on in life and of course we all thought those were great ideas the man was probably roundly mocked for giant chunks of his life and i i guess so it's neat i would say there's definitely in my mind things that even if it's just combinations and new to me new ways to see things new ways to understand different depth of understanding possibly new things new positions new ideas because even if that's not true the process of of going through and acting as if it is and believing like that and focusing and trying to investigate will make any of us will push us all forward we're sitting there you know obsessing over the cult of our current knowledge i think is the biggest the biggest danger um and the biggest cause of stagnation that exists anywhere yeah and it starts with believing the the impossible which is kind of interesting one of the things that's really inspiring to me is to see people out there which which sadly are rare who kind of have uh a combination of two things one is they have a world view that involves that includes a lot of ideas that are crazy and the second part is they're exceptionally focused and competent in bringing that whatever the ideas in that world view to reality so there's certainly a lot of people with crazy ideas you know there's a lot of conspiracy theorists they have way out their beliefs about things but they're not doing much to like make the like build stuff grounded and like they're not engineers or whatever they're just like espousing different crazy ideas but that's why you get like the elon musk type characters and the reason i bring him up a lot is because like there's not many others to bring up it's like there's not many examples of it through history the people i mean the guy's convinced that we're going to colonize mars and basically everybody on earth thinks that's insane everyone accept the guy that's going to do it right except that's going to do it and like you can imagine like a couple hundred years from now people will i mean first of all they won't certainly won't remember the haters they won't remember all the people if if they do remember them they'll remember them in a sense like people were silly to think that this isn't the obvious path forward like from a perspective that's what that's what elon talks about like it's obvious that we're going to expand throughout the universe like so from his perspective from his perspective like but to me it is also obvious because like either we destroy ourselves or will expand beyond earth like uh like there's not many you know we well it's not maybe it's not completely obvious i'm i guess i share that world view there's the other possibility that we humans find a sort of an inner peace where the forces of capitalism will calm down and we'll all just meditate and do yoga and jiu jitsu and like relax with this whole tech thing where we keep building new technologies but it's cool to have those kinds of people that just believe the big ambitious crazy dreams because that's where it starts if you want to build something special you have to first believe that when you also have to believe strongly enough that you're not vulnerable and i'm speculating but it's like i can only imagine how many people have told elon that what he's doing is crazy so not only did he dream it up he dreamed it up went with it and also went with it in the face of being told that it's not going to work and then time and then also stepped away from the bitterness because he's done a series of really crazy impressive things uh and that's only those little things i'm aware of but and also staying away from the bitterness of every single time you did something good initially i all i do is talk down about you and then eventually i act as of course of course i never apologize and yet you don't let that dampen your spirits for the next innovation which is pretty incredible to me to watch yeah it's kind of cool i mean uh it's contagious to spend time with the guy because he's not it's rogan has the same look to him which is interesting about these people is uh like there there's like a hater shield that he's like he doesn't even like sense them it feels like like it doesn't he does he thinks to uh to elon it's like it's obvious i mean he keeps calling it like first principles thinking like physics says it's true therefore it's true like he's convinced himself that like his beliefs are grounded in the fundamental fabric of the way the universe works therefore the haters don't matter right and i mean that's kind of like a system of thought he developed himself through all the difficulty through all the doubt he's able to take huge risks with basically putting everything he owes on the line multiple times throughout his life amidst all the drama amidst all the doubts amidst all like the he's still able to make just clear clear-headed decisions it's i don't know what to make of it but it's inspiring as hell well it's i think it's something that's funny i think like i can only imagine that you know history will look back on him as a brilliant person but that's not the only there's there's a lot of maybe not not statistically speaking but a lot numerically on a giant planet of you know billions people a lot of brilliant people well um you know time place luck fortune all that other stuff but at the same time that clearly isn't the only determining thing in making elon musk musk and obviously i don't know the guy from adam and but it's an interesting thing that it's not just his intellect his belief system his structure how he's viewing the world like that's did he reason his way to that did he not what other factors came in i'm really curious about that because i guess coming it's again i feel really strongly about people's belief structure and and this the how they view the world being more important than the engine behind it you know it makes someone resilient or not it makes someone positive or not because you could have ten thousand i think about this for competitive stuff you could have ten thousand things going properly and one thing going improperly if you focus on the improper you'll probably fix it at a certain point which is good facilitated for development in the long term but if you had to go and try to perform a task in the next five minutes and you're focusing on the negative your confidence and your your your belief in in the positive outcome of the future is likely to be damaged whereas you could have 25 things going wrong but you go man i sure am happy to be alive how fortunate i am this is great i can't this is i have problems to solve this is awesome versus i list the problems and i start bitching about them both of them are technically accurate but it's i guess different lenses and i think that's a really neat thing to see you know someone you know exemplifying that for us so maybe to look at the the fighting world there's a million questions i can ask here like one you mentioned bj penn you uh first of all you are undefeated in the ufc and one of the fights you've had is against bj penn which is a kind of an incredible fight you you won performance of the night what did it feel like to uh to face pj pen and to beat him definitively as he did like what's that whole experience like i'll be honest i didn't know if i was going to ever be able to fight again after beating gray maynard in 2016 um and i've had a couple of periods of those i i was about to join the army actually in uh when i was 30 before the uh for the ufc for jen sent me over to ultimate fighter i didn't want to go because i was like one they're never going to pick me too i'd be terrible for tv three i'll probably say something i'm gonna get you know burned to death in the streets you know i'm like this isn't a great idea and then uh she said well go out there see what happens do it anyway you'll be you'll regret it if you didn't and then i ended up doing ultimate fighter and then so i fought three times on the show and then i fought um for the for the finale so those four times in like five or six months which was great and then it took me a year to get another opponent um and that was gray maynard and then gray was obviously a very tough guy managed to get a good outcome there then it took two years to fight b.j penn and that was you know obviously i'm training all the time every single day and that never stops but that was i'll be honest like pretty deeply frustrating because you know as a human being as an athlete you know i think as an athlete you die twice like you have an athletic peak or area and then then you go on with the rest of your life but it is a microcosm for the rest of your life it's like you're seeing this the sand tick away in the hourglass or drop away and you're going man this is these are years between 31 32 33 like i'll be at my best at this time my absolute best physically now not technically i'm a lot better now than i was before and i planned but at a certain point you will unless you're bernard hopkins you will reach diminishing returns and i guess that's the long the long wait you can feel the clock ticking is this frustrating so why why did it take two years for bj i uh i i that's the question people ask a lot like why does nobody want to fight right now i don't know i probably they probably think they'll get infected by whatever this is but uh i don't i don't blame them but uh i mean you're a really tough opponent is the bottom line i'll say that i'm different maybe they perceive that the uh the the threat is greater than the reward i'm hoping that now that we're ranked number 12 you know in the ufc rankings that uh that that will change and i know that if we're one more win and then we're in the top 10 that you know now now you're there but uh what i've consistently found is that like randoms want to fight and i'm like go away you know i didn't come here for you you know because if i wanted to just fight anybody i could go down to a waffle house and yell until like dmx shows up and we can we can fight because he'll be at the waffle house too who am i kidding i really want to hang out with the mx but uh you know it's like you want to when i had the opportunity dmx oh my god that was i would never flick shows i would never fight dmx we'd be on the same team no but uh anyway um it's i i guess um i i accepted fights against uh i asked the guy to ask about llamas i said yes i got asked about dennis bermudez i said yes um you know like long periods of time and they at that time you know in between 2016 and 2018 um i was struggling to have have opponents who would sign up and uh us i haven't turned down fights i just said hey you know keep the i don't care about fighting the randoms and it's you have a successful school you're like you're running you're a martial artist broadly speaking so it doesn't make sense to to take fights that aren't like right that fit a certain kind of trajectory for your career and that's when when bj penn they said well bj's looking for an opponent i was like i'm your guy and uh and i think that you know bj accepted that fight because um another jiu-jitsu guy i don't think he perceived that i was much of a threat on the feet um and uh you know i was able to it was neat to get it to compete against someone uh you know who's one of my heroes one of the people i looked up to in mma for the longest time and you intimidated by that no no i love competing i i don't really get nervous or scared before fights i'm not afraid to get hurt and not afraid to win i'm not afraid to lose it's i i'm just excited for the i feel thankful for the opportunity to compete and the opportunity to to play when it matters you know i i just but that's the only time i'm interested in playing anymore is when it when it matters when the opposition is i know that you know it's funny because people pick on on a lot of some opponents particularly after after the fact like if you if you get a good outcome well then uh of course lex beat that guy that guy wasn't that good i'm like well i was that's after the fact i get to say that and also as the person in the ring you know bj penn has hurt a lot of people in in in mixed martial arts cage and i could actually absolutely have been on that list um so it was neat to get to compete against someone that i really respect someone that i looked up to for a long time someone who has a great skill set and also i went up and wait to fight him at his weight class he didn't have to come down to mine which is where he'd take lightly it was lightweight yeah um i generally have featherweight i walk around like 158 pounds so um what's the lightweight and featherweight uh lightweight is 155. with a day before weigh-in and featherweight is 145 with the day before weigh-in so i'm a little bit more properly sized for featherweight but um anyway uh you know i so i didn't feel like obviously he was giving up a couple years of age but i was giving up size and all this other stuff and it was you know i was just excited to have the opportunity to step in against someone like bj and uh you know we managed to to get out of there with a with a good outcome without getting too banged up but uh just it was cool because we tied up on the fence and just even uh the second you know is when you're rolling with somebody and you touch and you can feel what they're doing you go oh man this guy's really good um you can feel the calm you can feel the small minor adjustments that they're making the subtle things that they're doing and that was one of those things that was really neat and gratifying because you know you never know sometimes people that you've heard of are a little bit less technically proficient than you thought and other times you'll meet some guys training like who the hell is this guy how have i not heard of this person and uh bj was exactly as a jitsu guy what i would have thought and uh another thing that's another thing that bugged me about how people reacted after the fight is uh you know basically going oh bj screwed up this screwed up that i'm like all right yeah it's so interesting that's sad that was you know one of the uh to me i mean as a fan of both that was a beautiful moment as uh as a as a kind of passing of a torch in a sense of exceptional performance like another one that stands out to me maybe you can comment is i don't understand well maybe i do why conor mcgregor gets as much hate as he does uh he probably revels in it but i think he doesn't get enough credit for uh jose aldo for the for like for base you know knocking him out in the the in the in the first few uh seconds of uh of a fight i mean uh jose is like one of the greatest fighters ever that's true uh maybe some people could be even put in the top ten no question and the like i don't understand why it's doesn't get as much like conor mcgregor doesn't get as much credit uh as i think he deserves for that and for eddie alvarez and all the fights for some reason whenever uh conor mcgregor beat somebody well that they they were not that good then like it means like they were they were there something was off right that's convenient isn't it yeah it's it's it's quite strange to me but i mean what are your thoughts on the um on conor mcgregor maybe one way to ask that i'm russian some obviously also khabib fan but i'm also a conor fan it seems like there's not many of us who are like fans of both right um what are your thoughts the two of us which also is a good play uh uh stop dude yeah really really tough dude just like five line which is really interesting also the oh wow i didn't know that side of it there's a brain there well on the khabib versus conor what do you make of their first fight what do you do you agree with me that uh they should fight again because i think it would be awesome if they fought again in moscow and uh do you agree with me i'm just gonna put say things that piss people off but i believe is that conor actually has a chance to beat khabib one the conor absolutely has a chance to be conor has a chance to beat anyone that he steps into that ring with and not just like a mathematical chance you were like oh one of the billion but like you know like he absolutely it's funny because i i won't pretend to know conor really well but i first met conor in 2010 when i was teaching a seminar in uh at straight blast jim ireland in dublin um and that's actually where i first met all of the coaches that ended up being on conor's team um you know john kavanagh owen roddy uh gunnar nelson you know so for i actually i enjoyed being on ultimate fighter and being on a uriah favors team and getting to train with all the guys there but at the same time that the people that i was actually i knew better were actually the european side all the connors coaches um and uh that was a neat thing because i got to i met connor i didn't know who connor like connor wasn't conor at that point yeah that was before his ufc oh yeah well well before yeah i think i think he got in like 2014 maybe something like that yeah and uh anyway but he was doing well in cage warriors winning the titles there i think prior to that you know i remember going seeing him on the show and uh also then getting to see him train because i competed uh i was initially slated to fight david tamer for the ultimate fighter finale for getting put into fight artem for the title for the show so i went over to ireland to train for a couple days and basically it was neat to watch him watch him work i mean man is focused and trains a lot it's very very smart and very very hard working and i think a lot of times people get stuck in the uh in this um you know and they almost want to believe that this was lucky or this this person you know they're not working that hard they're just out there they got there with their mouth and that's that's just not the case and um you know i don't know what it's like you know obviously connor's very well off right now and i don't know how hard how serious he's training what he's doing i can't speak to any of that but uh there's no question that that he has skills to be dangerous and one of the funny things obviously the khabib fight one could be his weight could he was a great fighter and also has the chance to beat anyone in that ring at any given time but uh there's there wasn't conor you know it's uh one that he can he can put anybody away and as you mentioned i think that he doesn't get the credit for the eddie alvarez fight he doesn't get the credit for the jose aldo fight because it was almost so much of a letdown i remember that happened the same weekend that i did the ultimate fighter finale and you're like all right wait what yeah it almost doesn't feel like a fight happened but we mentioned miyamoto musashi i mean musashi was famous for the way he poked and prodded at people with what he was doing whether overtly or not it's like oh we're supposed to fight to the death and uh you know at 3 p.m tomorrow great 4pm rolls around i'm just not there five i mean you remember all the all the antics and nonsense that conor was pulling prior to that like speaking personally that's not it's not something i would feel comfortable doing but it's like everyone's different and the effect that it had on on jose was i mean beyond evidence when was the last time jose started the start of the fight with leaping left hand leaping right-hander like wait what and then he was obviously you know living rent-free in jose's head at that point and that was a combination of psychological you know ability and and and wherewithal and then physical and remind me of the way muhammad ali would would bother people and whatnot and the fact that he's a polarizing figure um i i think makes some people not give him his due and then at the same time sometimes certain fans may be go overboard but uh they remember the knee that ben asker and got knocked out with by mazdal i mean that was an amazing unbelievable thing but three inches to the right three inches to the left i guess whichever side his head wasn't could have been square but uh and that fight starts with ben askren on top of you in the first five seconds well connor ran and threw a knee just like that at khabib and could be got right around it that could have easily gone the other way can you imagine what would have happened if after the after coming back from boxing after coming back from from the mayweather fight connor connor in the first ten seconds it's over and you're like he would yeah it would have been intolerable but basically yeah like you know but see here's the thing let me actually push back slightly uh i mean to the fans correct me if i'm wrong but conor seems to because i've competed a lot and like there's a tension there's a negativity sometimes depending on the opponent and there's a respect afterwards that happens like when you understand that there's a deep like respect and almost like love for each other like i always seen that in conor like all the trash talk afterwards yes there's a it's it's a subtle thing you can't always see it but there's a respect like i agree and the like that i almost on the khabib side i almost feel like khabib really took it personally he did he didn't he lost the respect for connor i thought the whole time conor had the respect so i what i wanted to say is like if connor won that fight like rock khabib i could see like i wouldn't see trash talking i could see like trash i can stop right there i think so too but at the same time i'm sure you recall like connor come across in some pretty personal territory you know both religiously and also familiar with uh with khabib and it's you know i mean i think it's the sort of thing that i don't know it's an interesting that's one of those sentences like you have to know the difference so obviously i know the the the kibbe the dagestani people they don't play around like that they don't play wrong like that you know you know i mean they take offense to basically i mean you you don't do that so uh so like connor didn't maybe he did on purpose or maybe he wasn't even just aware of of uh it was cultural differences about the box he opened like you can talk to him if floyd mayweather you can you can go anywhere with him you can you could say the most defensive things but with uh yeah that could be hardline yeah hard lines but you uh i mean a lot of people ask i know you're a featherweight but if you were to uh face it feels like khabib is one of the hardest puzzles to solve in in all of mixed martial arts if you were to face khabib do you think how would you go about solving that puzzle like almost the question is almost from a jiu jitsu perspective too what do you do with a guy that's exceptionally good at controlling position especially on top very good at wrestling and taking down and controlling position like let's say so forget maybe striking on the ground how do you solve that guy like what do you do with your guard if you get taken down or do you create an entire system of not getting taken down or escaping it's like what what ideas do you have for that well i guess i would say in my mind fighting is a game of trading energy um kind of uh you know there's two there's two things there's damage and there's energy so like when i say energy and being like uh tired not tired how much how much gas you've got um and then damage counts obviously as well um you could be feeling i could be feeling great and then you get to keep me in the head hard really hard three times it doesn't matter that i could get up and run a mile i can't get up so anyway um you know i think what khabib does is so well is he makes the fight look like it could be the mega man fight um he does a great job of avoiding damage on the feet for the most part and really sucking the life out of people with how suffocating and oppressive is his control is his chain wrestling is as good as anyone we've ever seen in the ufc it's fantastic but that poses a really serious threat for people that need to maintain a certain amount of space and try to hurt them on the feed because unless they're able to inflict an adequate amount of damage they're gonna each time let's say for instance let's say him taking them down as a foregone conclusion at some point um if every single time khabib takes you down you get right back up it's not that big a deal um because it's actually more we've all experienced this let's say you and i are rolling he tapped me 15 times in one round who's more tired probably you are yeah you what my ass so badly that it's like you're the only one working but um so if you're comfortable with the up and down of it like being taken down if you're if you don't if you don't get hurt badly or tired on the bottom you have a chance but that doesn't involve just cracking him on the feet before he gets a hold of you that's a lot that's a lot to ask that's a lot to ask that's difficult to do it seemed actually like conor it seemed like it when he was being kind of taken down or the the takedown attempts against khabib he seemed to be somewhat relaxed the whole thing i thought he was doing well actually i think that particularly for the first round i thought he did a very good job it's just one of those things that i think like uh could be being the fights taking place in khabib's world in large part and i mean set aside that one giant uh what is it right hand that that khabib hit khanna with it by the way conor reacted like an absolute champion he got crushed by that overhand and then dropped and his eyes went right back on khabib it was immediate great response so even though that was i think that was a bit of a surprising thing conor reacted really really well but if you're going to be on bottom with khabib for four rounds that's going to be tough and also conor's a way better grappler than people like to give him credit for but he's not the type of grappler that can do that can that can that's too tall of an order but there are grapplers that could do that or at least would have a much much better shot at uh being able to weather that type of a storm do you see yourself being able to be relaxed through that kind of storm yes well i guess remember being being being savagely beaten is very relevant the time the timing of that answer was like okay that's a dumb question no that's ultimately the goal of jiu jitsu is to um be relaxed to the fire for sure and remember like every ufc fighter i win all hypothetical match ups yeah [Laughter] that's true since uh i'm one to ask ridiculous questions and we've been talking about sci-fi and all that kind of stuff let me ask the kind of big question that everybody disagrees about certainly with me is uh who are the top five greatest mma fighters of all time oh man and um why is fedor number one okay well first off fedor is number one oh really i agree right there with you really oh yeah talk about people that just get completely underappreciated even though he's never been like he's never succeeded in the ufc it's not his fault it came along after him at the time that at the time that fedor was at his height the ufc was not where it was at for heavyweight fighting i mean not that there weren't good heavyweights there but fedor fedor was unbelievable you know i mean you remember i mean minotauro nogueira i was a massive fan of him i still remember watching uh what is it pride 2004 when when noguera fought crow cop and got blasted with that left kick and dropped with like seconds left in the first round pride was great because at a 10-minute first round in that five-minute second which again materially also alters the fight big time and you know just the texture of the fight because it's totally it's borderline a different sport you know than than getting a five a pause and a five but anyway uh similar sports like one of those swimming things where they have nine gold medals for different types of swimming right but still swimming but anyway uh um well yeah that they would disagree yeah i don't know but it's so it's totally true ten ten minutes is different than five i'm sorry i think don't don't don't drown me swimmers i don't swim very well it's easy easy to downplay it but anyway um uh yeah and then no better than uh jon jones like the modern era well i mean i guess it's tough to compete to compare across eras it would be like going and saying like oh man how how would such and such great grappler from today fare against someone from 1995 i'm like well probably pretty well for them depending upon who they are what's going on you know there's some people that would their skill sets might transition across eras but a lot of times not but that's not fair we get they'll be like comparing spartans to modern day you know like army guys they're like well who's gonna win i'm like well did modern day army guys get modern day weapons well yeah but who's the toughest ruggedest group of people at the very least so i guess it's tough to say but at least in my mind the people that i think about for great fighters their their quality of opposition um their level of like lasting like success the level lasting innovation like the courage that they have to demonstrate because again it's like being a big fish in a small pond takes no courage doesn't mean that there's nothing there but it just requires something a little bit different so kazushi sakaraba is one of my guys too uh bj penn also i mean bj penn fought leota machida yeah that's insane you know it's there was a time it was a different sport it was a different time in the sport where you know they were some guys were bouncing around doing different things but let's so i guess the gracie family it's i mean they never had an in like obviously hoist was there um but they never and that was a definitely a different sport weight classes being open things like that but you have to say the hoist is up there oh no question one of the greatest ever i think so too and again i wouldn't be sitting here talking to you um if it weren't for him so the gracie family as a whole but i mean who's the better i mean i think the hoist would tell you himself probably that hixon would have handled business back then but they didn't put him in so again he's the greatest fighter the greatest fighter the greatest fighter that we saw do his business so hoist up there for sure what about so this is like nobody seems to agree with me on this but like this connects to soccer again and messi it seems that people value like how long you've been a champion how many like defenses of the championship that you've had successfully to me i highly value singular moments of genius so like like i i don't like if you look at conor mcgregor he hasn't i guess held i've been a champion very long very much he didn't defend either title right he didn't defend any other either of the titles but like if you try and same with messi if you look at uh leonel messi there's just moments of brilliance unlike any other in history for both conor and messi and people don't seem to give credit it's like well how many world cups have you won but to me like why is it about this arbitrary world cup thing or championship thing i think it's easier for people to wrap their head around right it's like the nfl combine when was i mean yeah numbers it's something well again if i go and if i pick tom brady in the first round you know and it works out they call me a genius if i pick tom brady in the first round after his combine and it doesn't work out i get fired and i'm never hired again i have to work work somewhere else but it's like i'm insulating myself from criticism i think almost if i go by the numbers well he had more bench presses it's like how how many times have the guys that are like the super studs in the uh in the nfl combine ever been on the greatest players in the nfl history in nfl history like zero or close to zero and even if even if there's some it's certainly not a one to one so it's so funny though i think it's just like how many how long how many days did he hold the title oh your title reign was x times longer that means nothing so if we wanted to find greatest fighter ever like you said i think individual moments of like you're like that was transcended that was different that was something else because people can win or lose for any number of different reasons and that that's an interesting thing again i don't blame argentina not winning the world cup on messi you know that's not fair you know how many times has you know i mean aggies the i remember when uh trent ilford was the quarterback for the uh the baltimore ravens and they had such a strong defense i'm not trying to pick on trent tilford but it's like they had such a strong defense that that they were like that was the ray lewis you know chris mcallister era you know and they they won they won the super bowl i don't think anyone is going to say that you know trent dilfer is a better quarterback than you know or put him in the same category as dan marino but he got the w he's got the he's got the super ring how many times uh let's use march madness or super bowl i love it like that that guy always makes the finals but he just never gets it done yeah so let me get this straight get into the finals nine times doesn't count because you didn't win the end game i'm not saying it wouldn't be better but that guy won the game once he got over the hump well how many other times was in the finals zero you're like all right yeah it's interesting well we yeah that we were obsessed with these numbers like um because we can't assess their method right well i think most of the time most of us can't assess the method of anything and it's like oh look at that guy do x y swimming i'm like how do i know michael phelps is great i don't know who's faster i can't look at his technique and say anything other than well that's way better than anything i know how to do but i can't say the difference between him and the next guy so i guess that's i wonder if it's like i need a concrete identifier and a lot of times people don't like saying i don't know and most people won't put like a ronda rousey in the top even 20 or 50 of but like she changed more than more than almost anybody else she changed the martial arts history i i don't know if that even i i don't think i'm over exaggerating that she she made it okay for women to be fighters yeah and that and like change the way we see like she's one of the great feminists of our time [Music] in her own way yeah in in a weird kind of way that like i don't know uh maybe i'm just a ronda rousey fan but the yeah but she's not in the conversation because then you start converting into numbers well how many did well was she is she among the greatest fighters or did she do the greatest things you know i mean i don't i think it's something i mean obviously ronda is a great judoka who was competing in mma at a time when a lot of the girls like where did you get your skills in the olympics where'd you get yours high school you're like yeah you're gonna olympic girl is gonna beat you up but uh i i guess that that doesn't diminish it just that accomplishment is what it is i don't have to i don't fedor is not diminished by the fact that he would like if he were to fight stephen milochus right now probably wouldn't go great or that jon jones exists i don't now have to like knock fedor's accomplishments down or say oh because bj penn or someone so let's say he has a mixed record at this point that somehow invalidates the things that they've done before yeah i guess it kind of brings us back to a lot of the other people we've talked about the fact that the the brilliant people throughout history that we love are some of the monsters throughout history that we rightly reviled in a lot of cases we're complicated people and their legacy is more than just one thing and someone doing something amazing doesn't involve doesn't mean they didn't do anything bad and someone doing terrible things doesn't doesn't mean that it doesn't invalidate the the positives that they did but i guess we fighting the urge to put people in one category and same with ourselves i think that's why people get depressed oh i'm good right now oh i'm bad right now versus hey we're all at work in progress and we're trying to do x number of things and legacy is a tough thing to figure out anyway and it's all speculative last time or no on reddit you said that last time too that you don't experience much fear uh before fights i'd like to ask you a couple mike tyson things if it's okay it's just interesting to me i'm just weird so there's a i don't know if you've seen this clip of tyson talking about how he feels leading up to a fight that uh he's kind of overtaken with fear as he gets closer and closer and closer to the ring his uh confidence grows um have you seen the clip i'm aware of it okay we've seen in a while here let me play it for you i think george st peter said something similar to me one time while i'm in the dressing room five minutes before i come out my gloves are laced up i'm breaking my gloves down i'm pushing the lever at the back of my break in the middle of the blood so my knuckle appears to the left feel my knuckle piercing against the tight leather gloves on that and the last box angle and i come out i have supreme confidence but i'm scared to death i'm totally afraid i'm afraid of everything i'm afraid of i'm afraid of being humiliated but i'm totally confident closer i get to the ring the more confidence i get the closer more confidence i get the closer more confidence i get all during my training i've been afraid of this man i thought this man might be capable of beating me i've dreamed of him beating me but i always stayed afraid of him but it was closer i get to remain more confident once i'm in the ring i'm a god no one could beat me i'm a god i mean first of all he's cognizant of both his demons and whatever the hell ideas he has about violence is so interesting is there something about the uh the tension that he's describing about being confident and scared that resonates with you or you're or do you hold to this idea that you've kind of spoken about before that you're really not afraid no i i can i can appreciate what he's saying you know i think that um you know i can speak to feeling like concerned about let's say for instance if you feel a certain way i think people are a lot more like computers than we than we like to admit and just because a lot of times i can't parse what's going on and why it doesn't mean that it's not it doesn't make sense and and i think that at least in the times of like if i'm concerned about a situation or about a person or about something happening prior to the fight or i'm like there's a reason there was a reason i don't have to push that down and bury it there's a reason like why what have i not thought about what have i not done what am i missing why am i feeling this way as you mentioned you know for yourself prior like you'd be like why am i feeling like this i don't do this very well in certain aspects of my life now that i mentioned it or not i think about it but when it comes to competing i think i do an all right job and i'm trying to learn to be better and it's uh and going like well why do i if i feel this way there's a reason okay am i thinking about this the wrong way have i not adequately prepared for something i have to i have to address it and then maybe i'll be up for four hours that night you know like extra hours thinking what if i not address watching sparring watching this watching that and then that when i when i am thinking about things more more accurately or when i've addressed what that concern was i feel any of that concern kind of dissipate and i guess if i honestly thought that you know i guess when it comes to i know i'm gonna die at a certain point obviously i'm gonna get hurt i mean you know pain happens but the pain of loss would be nothing compared to the or the pain of injury nothing compared to the pain of running away you know and yeah and so i guess if i think about where's my value what it's like i feel like i'm a winner every single time i step into that ring and fight with everything that i have i can't promise that i'll win my next fight i know that i have the skills and the tools to beat anyone in grappling or wearing mixed martial arts at this point it's just i i know that for certain i've trained enough people i compete with enough people i know i know where i stand but i also know that i'm not perfect and also the the better fighter even if i perceive that i was that thing um doesn't win on the night the the man who fights better wins on the night and if i give credence in my mind to only the person that's that's one has value versus going what's your process what's your path through this how are you going about this how are you thinking about this how are you behaving then if if i can focus on the process then then i will respect my opponent i will respect myself and i'll respect anyone that behaves with with a certain level of of consistency to that and they could win there's plenty of winners in history that that are shit bags and there's plenty of losers that are not but winning doesn't make you a bad or good person and losing doesn't make you good by default either or bad by default so and i think that that can be the truth socially that can be the truth you know athletically and you know academically so i guess is there a primal fear though like a primal fear of getting hurt the running away and not facing the the threat long term is the bigger pain than any pain you can experience in the fight that's pretty powerful but what about the violence of i mean you don't have that on your face but like the i don't know if you've also seen tyson talk about he was on rogan recently he was talking about was trying to psychoanalyze himself about why he enjoys violence so much i mean he called it orgasmic i don't know have you seen that clip i haven't okay we're playing we're playing it because i can i need to because trump also retweeted it which is hilarious i don't know how to contextualize yeah that's something that our president retweeted the clip of uh of tyson saying that's just maybe he's just doing like they're not it's like i'm gonna throw him a curveball no one's gonna have any idea what that is but yeah he did no explanation just here you go there you go well i think that's kind of like what you're describing it's like if i give you an answer it has to be a good one better to just let your imagination run exactly yeah he's yeah he's like the kubrick of our time you know what's really interesting that sometimes um period it's not real but sometimes i struggle with the fact of why it's a possibility i can really hurt somebody like you don't want to hurt them what do you mean when you struggle struggle with the possibility that you could hurt them that is sometimes it's orgasmic sometimes yeah like some fights like particularly like tyro biggs or someone that you had problems with someone that you joe's not getting you had animosity towards so when you finally get your hands on them hey um what does it mean um when fighting gets gets you erect what does that mean it's a good question means you're getting excited yeah so that that's going through your mind right now well that's how i get when i was a kid and i you know sometimes i get to twinkle the twinkle yeah well that's what i'm saying is like you reached a state as a human being as a champion as a ferocious fighter you reached a state of of ability and of accomplishment that very few humans will ever ever touch and feel that's why i'm asking you when you're running when you're hitting the bag when that heart's beating again and that you know who you are you're mike motherfucking tyson so when you're doing all this shit again you're still mike tyson those thoughts have got to be burning inside you again it's got to be pretty wild i don't know it's um it's wild but um i believe it's um it's rightfully so to be that way and i just know how to um i don't but think i i'm how to deal with it i don't let it overwhelm me i mean he goes on to try to they don't ever like joe doesn't bite well the interesting thing about that conversation is mike was trying to figure himself out yeah like he's trying on the spot like why do i feel this way uh to me it was like to me it's so real and honest to uh to feel like pleasure from hurting somebody like that you rarely hear that in this society it's like you rarely like talk about like you feel pleasure from winning you feel pleasure from like the relief of overcoming like all the stress you have to go through pleasure from just like the the specifics of the fight the techniques you use the maybe overcoming being down a couple rounds but like how often do you hear somebody say i just enjoyed he's not even saying because i hate the opponent he's saying like i enjoyed purely the violence of it that's crazy i mean i don't know it's honest it made me ask like i wonder how many of us are cognizant of that let's say mike is uncommonly seemingly uh honest i think athletes make a full-time job out of lying you know i think people make a full themselves perhaps too that's fair i mean in some you tell yourself or you tell others what you feel you need to or maybe whether you would even know what you feel you need to but why should he not i mean again did he did he run up and just hit somebody that's didn't sign up for this no they sign it to be there well that's the interesting thing about dyson is there's that weird uh like non-standard behavior i mean like your fighting style is not standard he's non-standard to another degree of like uh who else has that in jiu jitsu uh uh polaris uh uh has this kind of weirdness like what's what's in there like there's a fear that i think uh most opponents would have because it's like it's no longer about like it takes you out of the realm of its game it takes us back to the thing we're talking about like before is it strips away that like several layers of ryan hall the the podcast uh guest ryan hall the jiu jitsu instructor ryan hall just a competitor it keeps going down to a point where like ryan hall the murderer of all things that get in his way that lies underneath all of it seemingly like if we're like in this society we put all that aside but it makes you wonder like now society's being tested in many ways it makes you wonder like what's underneath there well do we want do we want the answer to that because i guess it's what is it uh you've seen paul fiction you know the best character in the movie and in the best scene in the movies i give my questions here if you're what he called him my answers scare you she's asking scary questions you know and i guess uh you wonder i mean all of us that's something that i think it's funny oh that's not okay i mean versus maybe not appropriate for situation x y or z but uh what should make any of us think i mean humanity is a different place now and i mean i'm not saying anything crazy out there but it came in a different place now than we were 5 000 years ago where all of us are descended from people who have killed things with their teeth and fingernails in order to be where we are and whether it was in whether it was an animal or it was in conflict with another person i mean think about that the chances of dying by violence now are so so slim at least in in most countries in most places like shockingly small thankfully but there was a period of time like the most period of time where dying by violence was mostly how it went down and i guess what would be facilitative what would allow you to win back to ender's game you know what allows you if you can't do that you are all you are forever subject to people who can and that's that's a real thing and you know we're fortunate to find ourselves in a situation where we don't where other things matter but that is a funny thing periodically where people you'll see people like kind of drawing at each other like in videos or out in the world that clearly neither of them expect this to get serious like i'm just going to yell at you you're going to yell at me and it's like this weird larping thing we're both going to go on our own separate way all it takes is one person to be like well i wasn't kidding yeah and it's like oh you'll go to jail like oh i know you're gonna go to the morgue and it's that's but that can happen like that like society i mean obviously anyway you could jump across the table and stab me in the eye i mean i appreciate hope if you don't and there will be consequences if you do but not from not from me from from the rest of society will potentially get you at a certain point but you can decide to not play by the rules anytime you want it's fascinating that yeah that's we've created rules based on which we all behave but underneath there you know there there's things that doesn't the there's motivations and forces that don't play by the rules they're still there nature's metal is under the surface seriously and again i pull out my phone and i'm basically saying like hey i'm gonna you're gonna get caught yeah but really i'm further antagonizing you yeah rightly wrongly you know what i mean like and that that's an interesting thing and i feel like just people need to remember any of us need to remember just for any reason just that's that's one step away at all at all times you ever i've had people say to me before like oh i don't feel safe i'm like you're not safe i'll kill you before you get out of this room nothing you do stop that nothing i mean but don't worry you could do the same to me which means i'm like oh thank goodness can you imagine like how many guns are there are in this country like i mean everywhere i mean seriously everywhere but that's a heartening thought not the other way because people usually freak out and go oh my god gun violence gun violence says gun violence is like really not a serious issue in the united states compared to what it could be because it means that i mean with the amount of guns and the amount of bullets that are out there that are in circulation can you imagine if like one in every thousand was used in anger each day i mean this would be a terrifying place to live you couldn't go anywhere so i mean although you could say hey this is more than we'd like or xyz it actually means that people are much more reasonable insane than we're saying than or then i then sometimes i might and i might argue so i guess what i mean is like oh man i walked to 7-11 and i didn't get stabbed i'm like oh well that's good because not because i protected myself with my karate it's basically no one decided to run over and stab me because i wasn't protecting myself it's i they they stopped so i guess we're all fortunate to live in a society that like you said nature being metal doesn't become that big of an issue all the time but it is funny when you get people in the ring and you go hey let's peel back from mr tyson many layers of that and say hey now it's okay and it's cool that i mean that's what society's doing so i've i lived in harvard square for a while and we add extra layers of what safe means like now there's a dis discourse about safe spaces about like ideas being violence or or like uh you know yeah but ideas or minor slights against your personality being violence but that's all like extra layers around the nature is metal thing that uh it's cool that's that's what progress is but we can't forget that like underneath it it's still it's still the the thing that will murder at the at the drop of uh in any at any moment if uh if aroused one thing that i find funny though or ironic maybe about the uh the you know words of violence you know offense is violence thing is that of course that if that the belief in that then justifies my violence like my and whether maybe maybe not physical violence but my response to my my aggressive response to things and i guess like which again regrets begets a further aggressive response and like a you know kind of a tit-for-tat sort of situation or or it goes to like well there's 10 of me and there's one of you so we'll get you and you can't do anything about it but that's not morality that's that's just saying that's might makes right so i guess again you can understand why people do it and there are certain there is a progress aspect to it but again i guess without proper examination i'm effectively with my 10 friends you know and and the force of the law mike tysoning people but not admitting to myself what i'm doing and at least mike tyson again is honest are you uh afraid of death i mean it's easy for me to say no as i sit here probably not about to die but is this like the ufc question can you defeat any opponent exactly yes the answer is of course yes and uh i don't have they're not around they're not here are they yeah exactly but i mean you uh do you ponder your own mortality maybe another context to that is you mentioned two deaths for martial artists i think that's actually why honestly even though at a relatively young age i think mortality is something that i'm aware of more maybe more than the average person i think probably most athletes can speak to this and anyone that's had trouble i've managed to to slide out of a couple near-death experiences personally you know mostly river related um because i'm an idiot but um i regret nothing but uh yeah yeah but uh thank god we're here but um yeah it is in our seeing seeing the end and seeing going well what's going to happen i guess i think it comes back to kind of what we're discussing about belief structure and belief system i think a lot of times if i recognize that no matter what i do it's all going to end one day and then you go well why were we here what would i do am i going to make it to 40. i have no idea i'd like to hope so that i had no idea that i was going to make it to to the age that i am now um am i going to make it to 80. how much of that is in my control much of it is not i mean it's so funny it's an interesting like back to the belief structure again like locus of internal and external locus of control you know what's facilitative versus what's true and you know i think accepting personal responsibility for more than is on my control is is probably a positive but at the same time recognizing that much of much is not in my control i was fortunate enough to be born in the united states fortunate enough to you know to not knock on wood have a serious disease that i'm not aware of right now um i didn't do any of that i just showed up that was really fortunate and i i guess that doesn't diminish the fact that i try to make decent choices but it works in concert with it and i i guess um when i when you go is death what i want right now no no i should think not and again it's easy for me to be relatively calm about as i'm not staring it in the face but what i would care a lot more about is is how you live that's what's in my control and i can't control if as i walk out of this building a helicopter falls on me worrying about that i can't control maybe i maybe i have cancer now and i don't know it i really hope not but um there's something about meditating on the fact that it could end today outside your control that can uh clarify your thinking about yeah the the fact that life is amazing like just kind of somebody yeah helping you enjoy this moment even if life was horrible let's say for instance it was it was you live at one of those times or places and this place still exists in this world today that life is brutal and metal and whatever all and short and painful would you still want it and again as i'm sitting here not not on fire physically it's easy to say yes but i would i'm confident i still i'll plant my feet and say yes any of life any life is amazing and beautiful and a gift an unbelievable gift that none of us have earned for the record i hate the word earned a lot of times earn yeah you earn but it's like there's a lot a lot of good fortune in earning and that's back to do i want justice or do i want grace and i guess we're all fortunate to be where we are no matter where we are and hopefully it should give us some sense of perspective some sense of compassion for other people but also like like you said a sense of peace if it all ended right now would i be happy with what i with a life to this point of course would you like to live a little longer yeah i would try to do more and try to live rightly to the best that i know how which over time will hopefully continue to evolve in a positive direction but if the answer to that is no i i guess uh that's that's always that's a sign that that what i'm doing is not what i'm meant to be doing and i mean you're familiar with the tecumseh before so there's a i've got one actually if you could give me 10 seconds i'll i'll read this one out this is a personal favorite basically and i think it sums up i mean again like it's one of those quotes on the internet like when abraham lincoln said don't believe everything you read online um but uh this is you know i it's again uh attributed but it's like so live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart trouble knowing about their religion respect others in their view and demand that they respect yours love your life perfect your life beautify all things in your life seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide always give a word or sign a salute when meeting or passing a friend even a stranger when when in a lonely place show respect to all people and grovel to none when you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living if you see no reason for giving thanks the fault lies only in yourself abuse no one and no thing for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision when it comes your time to die be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way sing your death song and die like a hero going home powerful words i don't think there's a better way to end it let me just say uh we've spoke maybe five six years ago i don't even remember when but i'm not exaggerating saying like you had a huge impact on my life because of the podcast you're the reason i was doing the podcast as long as i have you're the reason i'm doing this podcast and it's a little it's a stupid little meeting that you probably didn't know who i was i didn't really know who you are it was just like a magical moment it's a flap of a butterfly wing kind of situation and uh yeah i'm forever grateful you're one of the most inspiring people in my life so ryan it's a huge honor that you would come here uh jen and talk with me and waste all this time i really appreciate it was amazing thank you so much alex it's just been a pleasure i really appreciate you having us on thank you thanks brother thanks for listening to this conversation with ryan hall and thank you to our sponsors power dot babble and cash app please check out these 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 on 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 frank herbert in dune deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense but the real universe is always one step beyond logic thank you for listening and hope to see you next time