Ryan Hall: Solving Martial Arts from First Principles | Lex Fridman Podcast #169
the following is a conversation with ryan hall his second time in the podcast he's one of the most innovative scholars of martial arts in the modern era quick mention of our sponsors indeed hiring website audible audiobooks expressvpn and element electrolyte drink click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast as a side note let me say that i've gotten a chance to train with ryan recently and to both discuss and try out on the mat his ideas about grappling and fighting what struck me is his unapologetic drive to solve martial arts it reminds me of the ambitious vision and effort of google's deep mind to solve intelligence in ryan's case this isn't some out there martial arts guru talk this is a style of thinking about the game of human chess of seeking to define the rules and to engineer ways from first principles of escaping the constraints of those rules this style of thinking is rare but is ultimately the one that leads to the discovery of new revolutionary ideas if you enjoy this podcast subscribe to it anywhere or connect with me lex friedman and now here's my conversation with ryan hall you're known as a systems thinker in martial arts but you also i think are willing to think outside the rules of the game outside of the system when you're thinking about strategies of how to you know solve the problem particular problem of an opponent whether that's jiu jitsu or in mixed martial arts what's your process for doing that for figuring out that puzzle i would say i don't know if i have a specific like a to b to c process for that sort of thing i try to do my best to uh appreciate that i think a lot of the thinking um or maybe not all the things but a lot of great thinking on conflict on battle on war on martial arts has been done already um not that we don't have to do any sort of uh background investigation or reassessing of these ideas or axioms that have come down through things like the book of five rings or the art of war or you know like von klosterwicz even anything like that really but is uh trying to understand the the lessons of the past that i think often times we we don't take with us um problem solving we pay lip service and like a uh you know a victorious fighter uh the great fighter uh you know he knows victory is there then he then he seeks battle everyone else is looking for victory in battle yeah moving on and that's why i'm going to double jab and throw my left hand and i think a lot of times our actions don't reflect our stated belief structure and i think that oftentimes you can tell what i believe really or what my fundamental operating system is based on my actions whether i'm aware i have an operating system internally whether i'm aware of it or not or certainly whether i'm fully aware of it so i guess uh when it comes to strategy i try to think about how things interact you mentioned systems thinking and i try to do my best to understand how systems exist but i think that systems have a fundamental strength and a fundamental weakness they work how they work and that's great but they're readable so if you are aware if i am operating on a system of which you're you're not really read into then i think oftentimes i can seem like shockingly effective particularly if my system preys on certain weaknesses uh that that maybe you are uh you're given to but what happens when you've read the same books that i have i think that a lot of times that makes me deeply predictable i think about systems in jiu jitsu you know and uh a lot of times people think that they're doing jiu jitsu when in reality they are doing an expression of it let's say i'll use there's the marcelo garcia system there is the uh henzo gracie current henzo race system there's the old gracie baja one there's a you know the gracie academy classic crazy jiu jitsu there's the art of jiu jitsu um you know kind of otto's approach and you know there's some crossover between a lot of these but uh oftentimes i think um you know when it comes to understanding how i'm making decisions and how my opponent is making decisions i have to appreciate whether or not i'm an end user of something and i'll use my my phone as an example i was thinking of this the other day and as an end user of my phone i can't i have no idea what it does you know like edward snowden comes up and goes hey guys you realize your phones are listening to you from like really what yeah all right i believe you and then of course that that comes out but uh to what extent i have no idea um what is my phone capable of i have no idea i can mess with the font though i really like blue screens not purple screens so like as an end user i can change some of the bells and whistles that have nothing to do with the underlying source code of it all or how it functions the same way my car i'm an end-user of my car if i do this with the steering wheel it goes if i push on the gas it goes um if i yeah i know how to fix it when it's out of gas i know how to fix it when it's out of oil and i know how to fix it you know when uh when a flat tire comes but short of that or actually beyond that i have nothing so i think that oftentimes um you know i've been around in jiu jitsu long enough to encounter like a new wave of like good grapplers and it's very very interesting sometimes how they're running systems they don't realize they're running like i'm like oh yeah i trained at marcelo garcia's academy for a long time you know and a big fan of marcellus was a student there uh encountered a lot of the the otto style jiu jitsu a number of years ago uh been you know a very very you know deep into foot locking and leg attacks and whatnot for a long long time i understand your system better than you do or i may and let's say you understand my system better than i do that would be a huge issue that was something that i encountered a long time ago trying to come up in jiu jitsu where i was trying to utilize systems that were created by let's say hoffman mendes or someone else and i'm basically trying to do what you're doing i'm just not doing as good of a version of it so not only am i not doing it well but i'm entirely predictable and i think that that can be a big issue so to come back i think of systems a lot of times now in terms of you know particularly like end user type of systems like uh an iphone is a really really fast way for me to be able to do all sorts of things if you were to take it from me i couldn't recreate any of that so you want to be more the nsa unless the end user exactly exactly that way that way i'm listening i'm going to be the idol of combat that's right we're watching you p but basically you know it's uh i guess what i would what i would come back and say is uh if you understand how things interact on a fundamental level and what type of games exist and what type of interactions is this then you can transcend a lot of the uh the systems it's almost like a cook versus if i can make certain things in the kitchen i can but i am not a chef you could give me a bunch of ingredients and i could probably cook not well but a couple of different things but a master chef you know would be aware of the implications of all of the things that they're doing you know extra time in the oven less time in the oven putting this you know flavoring or spice in you know what you're doing with various things and also they could make they could turn all of these ingredients into chinese food they could turn all these ingredients into italian food and they could turn all these italian food ingredients into chicken parmesan or it could turn into lasagna but they're not limited to a specific thing because they have knowledge of how food interacts how what it does to create taste what it does create texture so to come back let's take rock paper scissors rock paper scissors is built on the idea of a couple different things actually i'll tell you what can i you might have may ask you a question yeah what's your favorite dinosaur on the same on three we'll go one two three t-rex t-rex i'll meet soon man this is we're gonna be best friends so uh it's okay uh if so what's the first question when you say hey let's play rock paper scissors it's like is it rock paper scissors or rock paper scissors shoot and like rock paper scissors shoot you're like okay because if we go rock paper scissors shoot i'm like oh man i got lucky and i won imagine i won 100 times in a row yeah i'd be luck give me luck if i was honestly doing that but now let's say for instance i go on rock paper scissors and you go on shoot rock paper scissors shoot here comes the rock right if you lose whose fault is it it's yours this is built on a parody thing where i don't get to pick second if i get to pick second it's like being able to investigate your background before going to meet you and then i'm like oh hi oh i too love the new jersey you know the new jersey nets which is a statement that no one in their right mind would ever make when i was growing up so anyway you'd have to have personal knowledge of somebody so anyway to come back let's you're if if you understand how games are structured you can start to realize that there's huge gaps and huge holes in a lot of the the thinking behind all of it and if you can create the illusion of choice i'll play one more if you don't mind it's one of my favorite ones to do this in class all the time uh have you seen this before no okay um may ask you some questions please sure okay fantastic i'm scared oh there's everybody wins don't worry um all right so could you could you please i would uh could you please pick three fingers and tell me what they are uh your thumb okay your uh pinky okay and your middle finger okay so could you please pick uh two fingers your middle finger and your pinky okay could you please pick one finger uh i'll go with the middle finger okay could you please pick one finger oh pinky okay let's play again can you pick one finger please [Laughter] uh your middle finger okay can you pick one finger please your thumb yeah your pinky okay now pick uh two more fingers please your uh middle finger and your uh ring finger okay could you please pick one more finger damn it so i thought that enhanced the illusion of choice it's the illusion of choice if i'm asking the questions provided i ask the right questions there can be no correct answer it doesn't mean that ultimately if if that's what you wanted let's say like i thought i was guiding you to something i wanted it turns out that was the outcome you want to well let's now let's here's now i'm going to ask the wrong questions i might not get what i want so by the way sorry to interrupt uh for people that might be just listening to this that uh no matter what trajectory we took through that decision tree that ryan was presenting it was always ending up with the middle finger ironically enough i was surprised so and all of us were surprised and we're both winners yeah we all everyone i felt like a winner all right so now it now i'm gonna then i'll ask some different questions if you don't mind uh can you please pick two fingers to put down uh your middle finger and your pinky all right oh that's so awkward that's like the worst finger positions okay can you please wait a minute that's oh hold on yeah well what if you pick two other fingers to put down uh you throw me a pinky okay my thumb on my pinky can you please pick two fingers to put down well whatever two you like okay your uh middle finger and your pointy finger ah okay can you pick two fingers to put down what's the name is index finger index finger that i don't call it the point it's the point one that's the one we usually point it's weird to point with the ring finger uh uh sorry what dude put two more to put down please uh the middle finger and the ring finger ah man is it what if you pick my my ring finger and my index finger yeah yeah i win yeah so even though i'm asking the questions it's not impossible that i arrive at a good outcome for me but it's it's no longer guaranteed i went from a situation where i literally can't lose yeah it's pretty low probability right super low probability and the second you realize what i'm doing you would never let me win because the ball is truly in your court so i guess that that's kind of what i'm fundamentally trying to put into play almost all the time can i ask the right set of questions can i develop the ability um skills wise understanding wise and then discipline wise and then have the courage and the constitution and the and the discipline necessary the patience necessary to ask the proper questions and wait for the proper answers and if i can all assuming like the perfect world i win period oh yeah so does that make sense yes it totally makes sense so i don't know if you know sort of the more mathematical discipline of game theory there's something called mechanism design so game theory is this field where you model some kind of interaction between human beings you can model grappling that way you can uh model nuclear conflict between nations that way and you set up a set of rules and incentives and then use math to predict uh what is the likely outcome depending over time based on the interaction given those rules mechanism design is the design of games so like the design of systems that are likely to lead to a certain outcome and so what you're suggesting is you want to create you want to discover systems whose decision tree all the possible things that could happen feel like there's choice being made but ultimately one of the parties doesn't have any choice in what the actual final outcome is uh you're making them feel like they're playing a game too so it's not like you don't feel trapped it's kind of like well the best traps i don't you don't look very threatening so i'm like oh i'll walk over there i guess wouldn't that i guess that's kind of an interesting thing if a lion when is a lion roar it's an interesting thing when you watch like lions hunting don't roar when they hunt they want to when they want to move you back they do stuff like that when they actually want to come and get you they're pretty slinky it's like water covered it's like furry water yeah and and i guess like when you keep that in mind um it's funny how like a frosted hobby actually a brilliant guy like one of my mma coaches and head coach at tristar um he brought this up one time i thought it was a really salient point he said let's say we have a million person bracket impossibly huge like frank dukes went in the kumite level huge bracket he claimed to knock out like 250 consecutive people and you're like that is all of hong kong was in that thing and everyone kept their mouth shut but anyway that's pretty cool but uh it's a comeback a little improbable pretty cool um so let's say for instance like there's no cheating going on no cheating going on and we're flipping coins right someone is going to have an unbroken string of victory through that bracket which is pretty insane how many how many consecutive like toss-ups this person won and then at the end of it all imagine we like aliens show up and we go hey they want to flip a coin for they're not earth whether or not earth uh you know gets to gets to continue they're like oh i'll do it i'm good at this yeah that would be tempting as a person to to do you're like well i'm a lucky guy oh yeah are you sure maybe i mean maybe effectively you are we could argue they effectively are incredibly lucky but basically is that an actual ability it's like a perk in a video game or is that just this thing that happened so anyway uh how many times are someone you could go through an entire career you know particularly in a fights board well let's say you get 15 knockouts in 15 toss-up scenarios because you see that happening all the time in the fight game a toss-up scenario it's not like you're mounted on me and like and that's not a toss-up scenario many many many many many striking centers a lot of grappling with tons of striking scenarios are dead toss toss-ups and uh somebody wins by knockout they win five times in a row then they lose a couple times in a row and we go what happened you're like what do you mean what happened they were always flipping the coin and then they win five more they go ah back on track can you imagine that you're flipping a coin on like heads heads heads heads tails what tails those heads again oh man i'm back on it i'm flipping good now that's basically what's going on i think the vast majority of the time and then humanity's you know tendency to see a sign in almost anything you know it starts to present itself and then we build a narrative in our mind to imp to convince ourselves that we're in some sort of control when in reality i was in a marginal situation at best the whole time yeah without having much control without having a deep understanding of the system the same story is told the stock market with many of the human these distributed human systems we start telling narratives and start seeing patterns without understanding actually the system that's generating these patterns so if we can see the system that's incredibly valuable but then you go well what system is above all of the systems i guess maybe physics maybe it's not like game theory explains these things but like i guess what are the what aspects of the system can i can i put my hands on that i can touch and understand and what am i what am i missing what what's going on in the world all around me to continue to lean on on dune that i don't have uh that i don't you know you talk to a blind person about about the world about sight and talk to someone that doesn't have everyone who's got coronavirus now so no one can taste or smell like this is delicious like is it so anyway uh you know again what what senses am i missing or what understanding am i missing that's preventing me from seeing the dots connect in the world all around me and i think sometimes if we uh oftentimes at least personally i've screwed this up a lot i'm so nose-deep in the in the trench of trying to understand what i'm doing that i can't take a step back and realize you know that i'm in a forest not just head-butting a tree and i may be doing both maybe both two things should be true at once but uh so i would say when it comes to strategy trying to understand that but then also you go well okay well how can that sounds cool but how can you actually do that and then i'd say that's a really good question because if i imagine i say man i should fight like stephen thompson i should fight like wonder boy he's like good idea go do that i'm like i'm not thinking about the guy i would fight like could be even banging made of if i could you know it seems to work so anyway uh you go well what if i could develop what if i could take my time developing skills so that when these strategies become apparent that you are they are executable to you you actually have the ability to like enter to again to be the person in the arena to be the person required whereas there's plenty of great ideas like dunking a basketball is a fantastic idea alas for me unless there's a small trampoline nearby i'm not the guy but that doesn't make it any less good of an idea i just don't i haven't developed the ability or i lack the ability so anyway i think a lot of times at least when i watch people in fighting i'll use an example um we're so can we're so concerned with trying to win early on rather than develop skills that i'm going like well what's the best way to fight with my current set of skills and usually the the path forward is like the barbarian route like the you put on the one ring take the damage you need to take to hit that guy and that was something i realized very early on in my mma career was like i'm not that good at striking at that time i'm not a world-class striker now but i'm way better at striking than i'm giving any credit for because it helps people sleep at night i think but um i'm serious but uh um yeah yeah you're always introduced as like this message like master grappler i'm like that's nice of them to say that maybe i'm not that good at grappling we haven't even seen that and but the funny thing is i'm like just because if people almost go like well lex like see you're really good at this but you gotta understand like we're equal man like i'm good at this other thing maybe you're really good at what you do and i'm just mediocre that's also possible so there's plenty of people that define themselves as a striker that do that just because that's for lack of other options not because they're a really good striker like i'm a grappler i was a grappler as a blue belt not really so anyway i guess to come back uh if if i'm constantly going how can i win with what i've got right now i think often times i never take the time to develop the skills that i want to develop and i also never take the time to develop the strategies that i want to develop and that has actually been one big blessing of uh fighting someone frequently which has been really frustrating as a result of injury and time away and you know some of those people being hesitant to get in the game but uh it gives you so much time to to be out of the trenches and focus on developing your abilities so that now it's almost like developing money like you mentioned the stock market that you can now put in as you told me bitcoin was a great idea five years ago and i had eight bucks man if someone told me bitcoin was a great idea five years ago and i had you know 50k oh my god i'd be sleeping in my bed of money that i would then set on fire later today just to do it so all the due to all the injuries you've been mining bitcoin all this time and now you're a rich man well no actually someone told me i was trying to mine for bitcoin actually like in a cave and then i found out recently that it's actually mining is like a figure of speech not like a literal thing that you do but i mean in my defensive english language is difficult it is it really is next time russian is more uh is a ritual language you should learn you should learn russian i'll help you out i believe you thank you so can you do a whirlwind overview of uh your career in mma leading up to this point with the injuries and the undefeated record and then what's next since we're on the topic well i i did my first fight in a as a blue belt and i've been training for about a year and a half i did nine uh judicial tournaments in ten weekends or eight maybe eight tournaments in ten weekends prior to my first fight in uh april 2006 um i got punched in the face a whole bunch i didn't realize it was a professional fight and found that out like the day beforehand that was great thanks coach uh it was in atlantic city where another place no one ever goes on purpose so that wasn't great i got into three actually three car accidents in the preceding 36 hours before the fight i had my car totaled um i wasn't driving for any of them that was great uh it was 2006. it's 2006. yeah and then you're a blue boat uh yeah yeah i've been training for about a year and a half to blue belt you're getting i mean if you haven't lived if you haven't gotten punched in the face in atlantic city that's true i mean i so these are i would a lot would have loved to have it happen for different reasons yeah but uh yeah well what's funny is you know i i remember you know getting punched in the face a bunch trying to do inverted guard i won one round lost two rounds definitely lost the fight you went for inverted sorry to interrupt you went for inverted guard like can you tell the story of that fight yeah sure it was three three minute rounds which is not a professional fight length although i don't know if professional fight length would have been any better it's more time to get punched uh but uh i found out part way through is like i remember walking back to my corner in the first round i'm like this guy can't hurt me and he's like yeah my corner was my friend tom and then someone else and he's like yeah i would still encourage you to stop blocking so many punches with your face i'm like that's a good idea time i appreciate that i'm gonna try that um anyway uh i remember like i was not you're not allowed to upkick so i'm like great i was i had no martial arts skills it really at all but if i had anything at all it was jujitsu it was very very little jiu jitsu uh but definitely no wrestling definitely no striking like i was basically a magnet for punches so that was your time uh that was you know roughnecking out in atlantic city as we all do once in a while can we fast forward to when you're actually dominating as a black belt well actually because i took a little bit of money that they're like hey we're paying him like really okay stories with ryan hall well then i went to i went to the casino i went to whatever like the traffic canada that was right there the casino because that was a boardwalk call and i'm like you know what man this was this has been a not great not great evening i'm gonna this is i'm gonna win it back it's gonna be great 15 minutes later they had all the money that i had from the fight was gone yeah i remember like walking out of the casino super pissed and like i don't know what i was thinking like i'm not good at gambling why this was not going to make my night better i just thought that there was going to be some sort of cosmic balancing and maybe it was the cosmic balancing all at once for the things i've done in the longer term though yeah the the balancing we'll see i hope so but to come so we're all dead in the end though that is true time will get us all yeah well that was so that was the first one and that was when i realized i'm terrible at mma but i like it i should just stop this until i one day learn how to actually grapple much less learn how to fight but i remember this guy named dave kaplan who's the reason my ears are all messed up who was on the ultimate fighter and got punched in the face and knocked out by tom lawler who i'll always appreciate for doing that um but uh anyway uh david tom uh i appreciate tom i appreciate dave too david was great dave was just a huge bully and used to like really not completely unmercifully but relatively unmercifully beat the crap out of me and uh anyway uh the ears look good so i appreciate that i tell people it's a tumor that i got and i'm gonna if they want in on our class action lawsuit with atmc they should you know send me an email but uh anyway you're very financially savvy i'm very good no i just give the impression like dave basically said hey don't worry man you're never going to be good at mma and you're never going to be good at grappling either but even if you are good at grappling which in my opinion you will never be you will never be good at fighting and i said dave if i do nothing else in my life i'm going to keep training until i can make you pay for that and now that i can make him pay for that really easily he doesn't train anymore but i love dave dave's awesome he actually won the singing b what an interesting dude super interesting guy but anyway uh none of the virginia like speaks couple languages super interesting guys like shockingly good at jeopardy too um not that i'm any good but still shockingly good to jeopardy so anyway years later met for as a hobby actually john danaher i met john danaher and he put me in touch with for as a hobby i started training at tristar i you know immediately loved uh working with frost and learning under for us started training at tristar and i did my first real professional mma fight um as someone that actually does had practiced a little bit prior in i think august 2012 um and uh that was against a guy he was four and five at the time so you know had some experience um good kind of like first go for me honestly and i won that fight by tko and then it was a little bit of uh time off and then i did another fight against a tough guy named uh magic hammer um he was five and two at the time i think he was three and i was an amateur she had a good good little bit of fighting experience um won that one in the first round uh via rear naked choke and then uh started to experience difficulty getting getting fights at that point um you know what you continuously introduced as like the the master of grappling the submission at least that would that was my thing i don't know if i was that was the source of the fear for people i think so because i mean that definitely wasn't much at striking at that point you know i definitely am a lot i'd like to think i'm pretty hard to hurt although i try not to lean on that and i played baseball for like 16 years so i can hit things pretty hard i just wasn't able to uh i i recognized pretty early on that i had no idea how to actually hit things hard without becoming hittable myself so i think that's kind of the big thing is a lot of times like we almost were mentioning before if you try to go and get people too early you can hit them if they're not that good but you're going to get hit yourself so you're making you're basically making a wager you're making a trade of your own life for the ability to hit them when you watch guys like israel sonia floyd mayweather stephen thompson uh conor mcgregor when he's fighting really well it's not a trade they're not you're hitting them and they're hitting you it's they're hitting you but it takes years and years and years and years to be able to learn how to do that tom lee is another great example of that and you know my closest training partner one of my best friends and uh currently now uh one champion uh with one championship in uh in asia the champion of the uh featherweight or i guess lightweight featherweight um 155 uh over there now and he recently defeated uh martin nguyen in a really great fight and ton knocked him out long time champion and tan doesn't let you hit him he doesn't let you touch him i feel so fortunate to have met guys like stephen and ton to go early on in career and go holy moly i can't even it's not even like oh you'll let me walk over and find you it's like fighting a ghost that periodically shows up with a hammer and smokes you in the melon and then disappears into the ether again so the way to approach the fighting game is thinking how can i attack without being hit because every every strategy every idea you have about what you're going to do has to do with uh like that uh minimizing the the return abs absolutely i mean that's what all good fighting has done all poor fighting if you know throughout the course of history most generals whether they saw a read or you know they they did battles by attrition yeah you know it's like yeah man i've got 150 guys you've got 50 like yeah 60 of my guys die killing your 50 like that's great for me yeah but uh that's not so great for the 60 guys that died you know i hope it's worth it so when you realize that not only you're not just kobe bryant and you're phil jackson too you got to do everything you know if you've got to run across the beach in normandy so be it but that better be you should have we make sure we thought this through and there's like hey there's no way we can like you know walk around the side huh because oftentimes there there is and i think a lot of times there's a lot of incentives in professional fighting to for people who want to do that and we come up with all sorts of well i'm trying to be exciting are you is that really what you came here to do because i came here to win and i think that anyone that that's really successful came there to win and if it ends up being exciting well that's fantastic i hope that people enjoy watching something and that's great but that's a qualitative assessment anyway you know you want to also be able to you know live the rest of your life i think it's easy you know i'll use meldrick taylor i'm a big boxing fan alger taylor was an excellent fighter um came this close uh to a world title and was stopped with like he was in a fight that he was winning with seconds remaining literally seconds remaining and they probably could have just let it go and he would have been world champion and it was brutal if you ever watch legendary nights like hbo boxing show it's it's great but um it's heartbreaking it's absolutely heartbreaking and also like the beating that he absorbed in that fight changed him for the rest of his life and also you know don't think he'd ever been hit before but it was one of those where you go it's it's all fun and games until you can't remember your name at age 44 years old and i didn't come here what are they what did patton saying nobody nobody wins the war by dying for his country make the other poor bastard die for his and uh i think that that's kind of what we're shooting for and you know the lionization of absorbing damage and that not being a big deal like you hear that all the time so and so can take shots that would put a lesser fighter down what does that even mean yeah you know like let's let me get this straight your ability to absorb damage is a part of you i mean i guess that don't get me wrong that is an attribute that's nice to have if you if you need it but there's plenty of people that actually have really porous defense that are just very very difficult to hurt for whatever reason that's a fascinating fighter's perspective on the thing i mean the the the story that is inspiring and i know it goes against the artistry of fighting is when you have taken the damage to still rise up and be able to defeat the opponent so it's uh but that that's a flip side of a basically you failing to defend yourself properly right i agree but let's say for i think it's it's trying that's a triumph of of humanity that's triumph that's amazing it's to witness such a thing is unbelievable but you still go this is there is a cost here it's like i i i've been fortunate enough to spend some time working with with the military and i've been like around and read medal of honor citations they're unbelievable like you read the story music it it's it'll floor you but it's all a cost and you don't want to be paying that cost or the long term and most of the time with the cost was everything and then sometimes you go hey yeah the value here it's worth everything it's like i defend your family you defend your country under certain circumstances and if that point is extension of your family you're like hey this is worth it to casually throw your life away or throw a hufflepuff it's foolish there's nothing there's nothing great about that and and like you said it's still an amazing thing to see yeah but but it's also amazing to see you not take damages the floyd mayweather it's the artistry of like not being hit and i wonder if maybe that's why people don't resonate with floyd as much as obviously muhammad ali was such a time and place a great man for so many different reasons although it was funny to remember like there were times when he wasn't very popular we love him now because of time of context you know time to move away from some of the nonsense he had to deal with but uh we got to see him struggle and also he had unbelievable sacrifice both in and out of the ring you know that that we all got to witness we've never really seen floyd struggle like that and granted obviously floyd isn't like a civil rights figure like muhammad ali was it's different time different place and he's a different man but basically uh you know i wonder if part of the thing that made us made everyone think of muhammad ali as the greatest in addition to of course the unbelievable things that he did out in the world and the stands that he made we saw him struggle in the ring it's it's almost it's humanizing you know it's it's weird when people the person yeah people respect b but again it's we saw gsp lose and gsp came back stronger khabib is amazing but i wonder i wonder how people feel about him long term not like they won't think of him as amazing and great and he's been a respectable person and champion but uh the time he hasn't he hasn't had to fall yeah if that makes sense and also coupled with uh ali had uh a way of being poetic about sort of the way he was in the ring sort of being able to explain the artistry that he i mean there's like joking as being playful but really he was able to describe the the flow like a butterfly's thing that could be like he was able to actually talk about his strategy without talking without crossing that line into the floyd mayweather when you're just talking about money and and just talking shit that's true actually conor mcgregor when he's not talking shit is pretty good at like talking about the art of the marshall and like first time and uh i wish khabib did the same actually uh from uh like the satya brothers there's a few there's a culture of like being poetic about like being scholars and also uh bards or whatever poets of the game and khabib is more like just simple and he lets his actions speak which is is great too in his own way yeah it's great but it's nice when you can tell stories and uh you know that that that's probably why ali was the great catch me up to you went to three fights i think undefeated yep bj penn you we talked about last time you defeated bj penn that's a that's a i mean that's an incredible accomplishment but you fought a lot of really tough guys um when was your last fight and then catch me up with the injuries well a lot of people kept more and more and more were unwilling to fight you yeah that's been that's that was why i was out for two years following the grey maynard fight between uh the fighting gray um and bj and the great major fight was actually what i'm really proud of because um gray was very tough he's very big very strong very experienced i had only five fights at the time um and i didn't have a lot of skills i don't get to fight gray with what i have today i had to fight great with what i had in december 2016. and that i it really took a lot of discipline a lot of focus a lot of challenge you know to stay the course to do what i need to do in the fight and to win in in ultimately dominating fashion just not in the dominating obvious sense that you see when someone runs across and just does that to somebody but that wasn't on the list for me at that time you know so um that was a that was an interesting one but the time away again was very frustrating it was incredibly difficult before that fight uh after that fight that well because i uh i beat artem lobov in the final of the ultimate fighter in autumn is another guy that's tough a lot of experience and uh gets gets you know he he's a funny guy and he said some things on the internet so i think he gets a lot of heat for that but uh you know he just knocked out three of my teammates i'm like he put a couple people in a pretty rough shape at the end of that so he was doing well and that was a tough fight again if i got to go back and fight that fight now it would be not competitive at all i mean it wasn't competitive at that time but it very it was completely phased it wasn't close but it was competitive so you were improving and growing fast yeah and it was nice to have time away i wish i had more time in the ring but again i'd only been doing mma for three years at that time so the improvement from doing what the bitcoin mining was over uh overriding the ring rust i think so i don't really believe in ring rust if i'm honest you know i can understand why uh you know people could feel a certain way but if anything it's almost like you just kind of forget what competition's like and you realize like oh you feel butterflies or something like that you go oh my god this is different versus no that's your body getting ready to perform it's okay it's normal how do you not have ring rust i think i try to watch try to practice performing no matter what you know like whether it's sing karaoke i'm not very good but like anything you name it talking in front of people like you embrace the butterflies um yeah it's almost like i remember my last fight i'm just staring at the wall and i'm like huh i guess i guess i'm gonna fight in a couple minutes all right hey you give i mean of course we all heard the phrase like you can never walk in the same river twice because even if you're this even if the river's the same you're a different man that's uh i think it's a really important thing to understand because at various points in my martial arts career of thought oh man how should i feel i remember when i used to do well in competition i would feel i would think these thoughts listen to this song think think about this i would feel a certain way and then if you don't feel that way i would start to become stressed because uh i was self-inflicted versus going you'll feel how you feel your job is to show up with what you have on the day do your absolute best like i will never quit i can be sure of that i didn't say i can't be beat i can definitely be i could have lost every single fight that i've ever had but i control my effort and i control my attitude and that's i will i will do my very best to execute my game plan and the event's not working if i have to i'll put my hands up and walk dead forward if i need to at somebody you know we hope that that's not where it goes but you know like again that humanizing moment where you're shooting for like just the inner like the inner you sacrifice the outer and all you have left is will and you hope it doesn't happen but if it does you'll be there but i guess to come back like the extra periods of time um in between fights i think was uh valuable because it was it was deeply challenging it was incredibly it was it's heartbreaking sometimes i'm honest man it's like i didn't wanna it's just waiting oh my god dude is there politics involved does it some sometimes you know like i i i i you know it's every single time you step into the ring nothing's guaranteed um it's uh you could be hurt you could hurt somebody you could win you could lose you know throwing away just like i said throwing away your healthier life cheaply makes no sense for anyone um and you know having demonstrating some degree of of temperance is not cowardly either i mean but again you're if you wait too long you have nothing so i guess like uh i was trying and always being i'm always open to fighting the absolute best people possible i'm never turning down fights ever um you know some random jabroni decides that he wants to fight him to go away if i wanted to just fight randoms i would just start at stand to the you know on the table at denny's and start yelling and i'm sure would have you know some people who'd be willing to indulge me but uh you know you want to fight um you know meaningful opponents challenging opponents and i know who and where they are and so you did fight in atlantic city you know i did the denny but you put the denny's behind you i did and you know and i'll be honest if they were if i just stood up after that fight i don't know if i was in great shape to expect to win in the other fights that evening but i could i could have tried it i'm sure there was some takers in the crowd particularly after they watched me fight they're like yeah i'll fight that guy so okay so when was the last fight that was uh darren elkins that was six months or seven months after the bj fight which was great because that's you know i love maybe five really tough a very tough opponent very tough guy super tough dude and uh that was in uh july 2019 and then right when i was about to fight uh so you're ready to fight regularly after that yeah trying to fight and then you're trying to find a fight yeah incorrect we got ricardo llamas so no one else none of the i was ranked in the top 15 at that point and then uh people didn't want to fight we were struggling to find an opponent and ricardo llamas a great you know former title challenger you know mma you know really great history and mma recently retired but we were supposed to fight in uh i think may march march may of uh 2020 and then coronavirus happened and uh so that scrapped the whole show you know training we were just scrambling to try to keep the gym alive and take care you know i have five or six four five six i think five full-time employees that i you know they're my responsibility i have to their livelihood is in my hands and it's um to be irresponsible of me to to not take that seriously so anyway uh we were able to navigate through that time and then uh we were able to reschedule the llamas fight and that was in august of last year and i got a a medical like flag like oh hey like you you have a medical condition that we need to look into you when i got pulled from the fight and i immediately was concerned because of course any serious medical condition you want to go oh man well i guess i would like to look at that yeah it turns out it was a giant false positive and you know we find that out you know all of five weeks later and you go you gotta be kidding me that's frustrating and then we're still waiting for our fight waiting for a fight waiting for a fight waiting for a fight people won't sign up um asked for a number of different opponents basically said hey i'm willing to fight anybody that's that's tough and moving forward um finally got a you know a great opponent in dan ige um for uh i guess it would have been uh this uh this march yeah and then um i was training in january working on working on some stuff i was out training with raymond daniels in uh in california raymond's amazing um unbelievable you know kickboxing karate style kickboxer fantastic martial artist great teacher great training partner and good friend and uh you know just really bad luck uh you know kind of a fall in the middle of in the middle of training and i tore uh my hip flexor halfway off of my femur so yeah that wasn't great and you go like man right at the time where you're like oh man all right finally moving forward you know having the opportunity to fight dan's a really tough guy you know you have to fight well if you want to have a good chance to do well with him if you don't fight well it's going to be a rough night i'm like that's exactly what to sign up for that's what we want bj that's what we went with elkins that was gray and then the universe goes hey man i hear you but there's also this so anyway uh yeah unfortunately it's healing up and then hopefully uh which we think you yeah i think um may this year may of this year yeah so it's been it's been it's been about five weeks since the injury you'll be able to heal up you think yeah i think it'll be okay by then like i don't need a big camp at this point i've had years of camp um i'm not going to curtail my drinking or anything like that obviously you know come on man life is meant to be live and uh you know so it's uh you know i i'm in good shape i always i'm always training i'm trying to do my best to train around the injury to the extent that i can right now without you know hurting myself long term so is there a particular opponent's you're thinking about yeah anybody anybody forward you know i mean i tried to i asked uh i asked this second that i got hurt i sent a message to dan and i said hey man like i just wanted you to be the first person to know um i you know i just was pretty reasonably injured you just got an mri doctor says like hey man you're out and you need to take like three weeks off off don't do anything or you're gonna immediately you're gonna tear it the whole way and this is going to be surgery and then it's going to be an additional like eight weeks on top of that to start to rehab it through pt and anyway uh you know so i let him know hey if you can push this thing back i would love to keep on the car i would love to keep the fight you know it's like i respect you a lot as an opponent and also it's been brutal trying to get anybody to sign on so if you're into it i'm still there unfortunately he turned that down i understand he had other things going on he and his wife were expecting a child coming up so uh he needed to he needed to fight and anyway uh yeah i guess we'll see who's coming forward um is there somebody's like super tough in the featherweight division that you you seem to like enjoy the difficult puzzles is there somebody especially difficult that you would like to fight i would like to fight i know that i'll need to win at least one fight before this um and i look forward to coming back and giving my best effort to do that i want to fight to beat uh megaman sharapov i want to fight yeah rodriguez i want to fight um uh korean zombie and b is complicated man yeah that would be a guy i would love to see that fight that's a fascinating fight that would be fun um he would be very challenging all those guys are very challenging and uh so i look forward to just staying healthy to the extent that we can coming back and i'm gonna fight multiple times this year hell our hot water hell yes hey by the way uh i completely forgot because you were talking about systems and decision trees and the illusion of choice made me think of sam harris and i forgot to mention it so he talks about free will quite a bit huh and that there's an illusion of free will so it's like old claim cotton that the you know maybe the universe constructed that little game where it makes us feel like we have a bunch of choices but we really don't we're really always ending up with the middle finger that should be hilarious yeah that's it that's that's what you see before you die it's just a giant middle finger it's like oh fuck i knew it uh i knew it what do you think do you think there's a free will like we feel like we're making choices so you're thinking again we're talking about okay here's a system of martial arts that's uh hands of gracie there's different schools and whatever and then you're thinking okay how can i think outside these systems but then there's also a system that's our human society and we feel like there's a actual choice being made by us individuals do you think that choice is real or is it just an illusion well okay that's a really good question i'm not necessarily equipped to answer this but i'll do my best um okay i guess i would say to start with sure would be interesting if it wasn't real if the choice wasn't real yeah um would be pretty interesting if it is real uh first off i would start with facilitated beliefs versus not facilitative beliefs it's almost like uh i think the world's out to get me true not true what next probably not a facility to believe even if you if imagine you believe there's no free will okay now what does that justify every single impulse that you're going to give into or does the belief in free will just the belief in my ability to work hard to focus to be disciplined to improve my position prove my situation whether it's true or not although i think that at least many of us would argue that at least whether whether there's some sort of internal driver that allows for that yeah like we live in a material world your actions do affect the world i can choose to pick that water up or not and anyway uh i would say i believe strongly in the idea of picking facilitative beliefs um you know and going hey i will adjust whether this belief system is right or wrong on a cosmic level i'm nowhere near smart enough to understand but i can say me deciding that let's say for instance i'm going to walk over to have a conversation with someone in the hotel lobby and they've never met them and i go over and i start with oh this is going to be interesting and i just walk over there versus in my head i'm like what's this asshole want we're about to have two very different conversations i could be right that this person is not very polite or thinks negatively of me right from go but i think that that's probably not a facility to believe people talk about i'm how is that going to help me navigate the conversation to a positive conclusion and i think about that for uh um you know let's say fighting it's a good example like confidence plenty of people believe plenty of things that aren't real myself included i'm sure all the time and uh anyway believing that you can do something i'm like hey i think i can win doesn't guarantee you a positive outcome but i would say it most of us would probably most of us would argue that it helps and you think about depression what's depression if not a a negative unfacilitative belief that is not always that oftentimes is not reflected by reality but you project it on to reality and it's understandable if it makes you feel like oh man this isn't going to work out i don't think the prospects are going well and then if you feel like you can't get out of that loop that seems pretty rough and i see a lot of things out in society right now where you go whether whether you agree or disagree with various positions on things you go is that a facilitated belief even if that is true which is arguable anything so what next man so what where does this end one one is the positive what's the happy ending here and if they go well there is no happiness like okay so so now what so what do we do here and i guess uh so choose the facilitative belief and uh in your intuition believing that free will is real is uh is more productive for a successful life absolutely because otherwise how am i not how am i first of how can i how can society function if it's not real so how can i blame you or anyone else or hold anyone responsible for anything if free will isn't real well no that's exactly the point you but at the surface level what you're saying is true but perhaps if we truly internalize that free will as an illusion we'll start to figure out something that uh that transforms the way we see society for example we are very individual centric so uh believing that free will is real puts a lot of responsibility and blame on people when they do something bad maybe if we truly internalize that free will is an illusion we start to think about the system of humans together as um as like this mechanism for progress as opposed to where individual people are responsible for their actions uh good or bad so we like remove the value the weight we assigned to the accomplishments or the or the violence the negative stuff done by individuals and more look at the progress of society i don't know what that looks like but it's almost like as opposed to focusing on the individual ants of an ant colony looking at the entirety of the ant colony to that i think it makes perfect sense i would just say that that's a reasonable thing to suggest it's a seismic shift right and it's hard to say whether that would be you know better or worse but i guess i'll use this as a this is a convenient one for me um so i remember the last time we spoke i brought up you know one of the most reviled evil characters in certainly recent history probably human history period adolf hitler well i'm a big fan of making people live in the world that they want to believe in well if free will doesn't exist and it's just about how things move forward when are we going to be high-fiving this guy or what like this is you know because i remember what i said and you know that actually brings me to something else we discussed you know uh yeah for people who don't know ryan brought up or i brought up there's literally a giant book about hitler my so i've been obsessed with uh hitler world war ii and stalin recently uh for recently oh man this has become like a meme joe rogan with like dmt and me with it like i picked something more positive like cat in the head or something i don't know but we you brought up hitler as an example of something particular of the the some philosophical discussions we're having and uh the excellent eloquent and uh the the full of integrity mma journalists uh clipped out something you've said about uh about hitler and said that uh you know i i forget what the headlines are but there were the the most ridiculous possible implementation basically intentionally misrepresenting intentionally misunderstanding what i'm saying then it's like i get that they're stupid but i'm stupid too so i know what that's like so i don't have a lot of stupid yeah exactly it's it's yeah exactly i don't i can't give you pass on that but basically intentionally misunderstanding what's going on but what i find funny is that hey we got to be careful what we believe and again back to the cancel culture thing that we discussed last time as well where would i would i like to apologize i mean no actually something about cancer culture that we've been seeing things culturally like i will be damned if i apologize for anything that i don't need to apologize for because i was intentionally misunderstood in that instance now you could say that i don't know that i'm not a historical scholar which i would agree immediately and also that i'm that i oftentimes ineligibly phrase things which i'll agree that what again but uh ultimately you know going hey i want to make you believe live in the world that you will that you're suggesting ought to exist okay so if there's no free will is everything how far of a step back are we willing to take cosmically before we start going hey this is good because we're experiencing a social you know reckoning in our country at the moment you know for good and for other um probably i guess and basically uh but hey it all worked out right so that that's probably not something that would fly and and i think that's a fair thing that's interesting it might not fly from the individual perspective but if you zoom out and think of you know appreciate society as you know just like an ant colony as a beautifully complex system like we kind of from from the individual pro perspective we value progress especially progress of the individual but in whole progress of societies but if you accept that this is just a complex system that's not necessarily headed in you anywhere that this is almost like that river it's just flowing i think that removes the burden of always striving of always trying and always like the struggle and so on so it's possible that if we have no control you can like arrive at some kind of other zen state does that sound very human though that's that's that's that goes against i think uh our current uh human condition as we experience it but we've communicated that to each other like so we've taught like through these social forces taught each other that our lives matter and so on maybe if we convince ourselves that we're just sort of like little things in a stream and ultimately none of it matters there might be some kind of enjoyment to be discovered through that process i don't listen i'm a capitalist but i guess i think you bring up a really important point like i guess almost anything like capitalism i i only get to experience it as i as i sit here now and i get to live i was raised in the united states i've traveled around the world a little bit i've had the you know good fortune of meeting many people from many different places and um i'm an end user of capitalism i don't really know how it got here whether it was i wasn't there at the start of this idea i wasn't there for hey how do we come up with this idea how do we arrive and i'm nowhere near well read enough to understand any of that really uh even second hand and i guess recognizing that communism marxism socialism anarchism anything is uh these are all perspectives that all have i guess various strengths and weaknesses but i guess uh one thing i'm always i guess i would say the burden it seems to me that if you want to make a change uh the burden of proof is is on the person implying that there needs to be a change yeah and it doesn't mean that there's nothing there but it's like if you want to create a small shift a riffle that's fine but a seismic ripping shift in how we exist or how we experience the world as human beings and you mentioned fighting why watching someone undergo take abuse on a level in the ring that's just shocking and then triumph in spite of it is like it's you're like this is unbelievable this is part of the magic of combat sports now it's part of the the magic the other side of the match that doesn't get talked about sometimes is that the the trajectory of that individual's life later on is not always great um or there's a little phrase there's a cost for that but uh you know if if this if we remember you mentioned removing the struggle i don't personally the struggle is what makes life is what makes life life and also i guess you know something for us has brought up to me on a number of occasions is that as and it makes sense to me it's basically uh humans only understand things uh through relative comparison i only understand um you know heat because i've known cold i only unders it's i guess like it's like talking to someone that's uh never experienced any sort of hardship and then their their latte isn't right and then they they pitch a fit versus someone that's gone through a great deal of challenge struggle you know in their life they tend to have a little bit more of an even perspective and anyway and of course even as a relative thing and what i perceive to be even may not be even maybe i'm particularly soft or something the other direction without realizing because i can only understand what i can understand but the idea that that we want to fundamentally alter ourselves as a species and as people seems like a incredibly incredibly high bar to prove and also like an incredibly dangerous idea because it always comes back to who's going to be responsible for this who gets to do the choosing what's a good idea what's not a good idea and i guess that actually brings me kind of to a something i've been encountering recently in discussions with friends i feel like there's only two types of people that i that i encounter at this point um people with a more or less libertarian tilt to their thinking and people without it and when i say libertarian i don't mean that in the political party sense or even the belief system basically i'm like hey you do you buddy it's not my it's not what you're up to is not my concern versus what you're up to is my concern and i guess i've always watched you know various points in history people on this side are people on that side are more more or less you know i guess problematic i guess you could say i don't mean that in the internet sense you know more of it more of an issue but um the world is always full of people that want to tell you what you need to be doing as opposed to more or less do no harm and i guess that's one of the ones anytime i'm trying to tell other people what to do i better hope i'm right and it's bizarre to me how many people are so confident that their side or their position is the one that's not only right for them but right enough that they can enforce it on others and that just seems incredibly dangerous to me and i guess that comes back to even sam's point about oh we want to if under trying to spread the idea that free will doesn't exist i'm not saying it's damaging but it very well may be and plenty of other things could be as well i'm not you know it goes way over my head as to you know the implications of all of these and i guess all of us are an evangelist for something but uh i i guess it's weird that we've gotten this far as a species and now we want to take like sharp sharp turns well we've been taking a bunch of sharp turns throughout history yeah that's so that's what you know that's that's the way you know okay humans love power and one way to attain power is to say everything that you guys are doing is wrong and i have the right thing and i'm going to build up a giant cult of people and i'm going to overthrow and indirectly what that results in me is me gaining power and that's how you get all the big revolutions in human history saying i'm done with the thing that the powerful are currently doing so i'm going to overthrow that's that's where probably all the identity politics that's happening now is people that didn't have power before are looking to gain power and they're also you know that's where jordan peterson criticizes identity politics is people with the right with the good intentions i should say are in seeking power allow power to corrupt them as power always does and so they lose track of like the the the devils that they're fighting by becoming the same kind of devils the the the same kind of evil that they're fighting and so that that's just the progress of human history but hopefully as these power greedy people keep attaining power with the with the progressive mindset over time things get better and better as they can as they have generation each generation a lot of a lot of unfairness happens a lot of hypocrisy happens a lot of people are trampled along the way by those who mean well but over time like lessons are learned or like human like civilization accumulates lessons and in part learns the lessons of history and gets better and better over time even though in the short term there's people acting not their best selves and you know that seems to be the progress of human history the idea of internalizing with free will not being real i mean you you're actually making me realize that that ultimately leads to a kind of um doesn't that go in a nihilistic direction yeah it's both nihilistic or if you want to make it a political system then it's more like communist type of a system where like the the value of the individual is completely uh reduced removed or another perspective is like the freedom of an individual is not to be valued or protected and so from us our current perspective the systems that seem to have worked the united states works pretty damn well uh despite all the different criticisms it seems like freedom of the individual in all its forms seems to be fundamental to the success of the united states and so we should it's uh however the hell you put it is like doesn't matter whether free will is or isn't an illusion the belief that it's real protects the individual from the group which is fundamentally correct me if i'm wrong that always seems like the big issue of history hey there's more of me than there is of you deal with it you're like yikes yeah and you want to be yourself you want to be different you want to have a different religion you want to be a different skin color you want to do this all the bad tribal things happen when there's more of me than you recreating from wrong yeah yeah absolutely but then that's always the fundamental power imbalance though right well the interesting thing about the libertarian thinking i guess i i don't know those words are maybe they're all charged i know what you can yeah and they're all i may not scale up but i mean more like on a philosophical underpinning where you're like yeah basically hey you feel free to believe i'm i'm a fool and plenty of people do i'm sure but as long as you don't chase me down the hall and hit me in the back of the head with a textbook what's the big deal yeah so the libertarian viewpoint which i probably espouse like that's i'm very much like uh freedom of the individual is very valuable and like leave others the fuck alone unless they're trying to hurt you the thing is you also have to i believe put in the the work of empathy of understanding what others how what leaving people the fuck alone means to others but isn't that an interesting thing if i believe in freedom of the individual and i take that like all of these like you said you take them past just their first why question you ask why why why why or how how many times should that not extend to respect for you respect for your position respect for your individual lived experience which could be grossly different than mine yeah this is the problem with saying i'm an individual i'm not going to bother you you don't bother me that's just like that's not actionable because to be to make it actionable you have to think the why why why why you have to do the steps beyond right you think what does that actually mean that means understanding how even my very existence uh like hurts others because you have to understand that like i'm not you're not just sitting alone in a room you're uh you're using like public transit you're using the police force you're using fire fighters you're using the like you're using a lot of resources that are publicly shared and some of those resources are are unfairly distributed like we've agreed that we're going to pay taxes and those taxes are going to go towards building some kind of infrastructure so that's already towards social that's so you're not a real you're you're not a real sort of i talked to michael malus like anarchists right saying like basically full just leave me the fuck alone and i'm going to collaborate with whoever the hell i want we're not that's not the american society as it stands currently we've agreed that there's going to be certain social institutions that we pay into yes and uh some of the sort of discussions about race and all those kinds of things is about those institutions being uh institutionally unfair whether it's race or gender all those kinds of things listen i you know i have a bunch of criticisms of the way that conversation carries itself out but the thing is what's valuable is to actually listen and empathize and that's not over often talked about with the leaving the fucking little mindset because your um it doesn't have it doesn't have that little component which i think could be fundamental to the function of a society which is like social like it's the what is it the obama you didn't build it or you didn't build it alone or whatever what however that goes but basically we wouldn't be we wouldn't be able to accomplish anything as individuals without the help of others and to be able to then start to think okay so what is what is what is my duty what is my responsibility to other human beings to be respectful to be loving to to help them as part of this functioning society that starts that's actually a lot of work to start to think about that for sure because then i have to like think okay ryan what's his life like like as a business owner doing covid what's that like and then he has uh there's employees that run the gym what's that like what's that stress like right or about the fighting and the injury and so on what's that like that empathy takes a lot of like compute cycles and also a lot of energy right but i have to go through that computation if i want to be an individual that's like doesn't hurt you if if i may i guess like to to come back to muhammad ali one of the things he said is service others is the rent is the rent that you pay for your you know there's these is the price you pay for right here on earth yeah and now i one of the things that i think that i see as a result of the internet all the time is people talking about global giant problems social problems that are society-wide that are massive like truly massive and frankly beyond the beyond the power of any of us to solve yeah that's certainly on an individual level so i've you know i've discussed things with friends like my father's an environmental attorney like uh ian has been for a long time and has been an engineer for a long time and uh you know so i'm not i barely know anything but i'm reading a little bit of various things but uh climate change oh my god i'm so concerned about climate change what am i supposed to do about climate change i'll tell you what i can do is i can not litter i can try to conserve energy where i can i can do whatever i want what can i personally do about some giant social problem that is that i didn't start and i is out of my control i'm like well i can be decent to the people around me i can mention i can demonstrate empathy and i can demonstrate consideration for the people in my circle and to the extent that i can the people outside of my circle but yelling at the trees over things that over problems that are borderline cosmic um doesn't seem very productive it just makes me feel like i'm cool and important because i'm talking about something well hundreds of years from now the water will rise maybe it will maybe it won't i can't it's completely over my head i know nothing but focusing on the problems that we can actually solve it comes back to the same thing i want to win a fight i would love to win a fight uh i can't control that what i can do is i can control each individual step that i take around the ring and trying to make the next correct move i can't look no it it gets people's uh you know they get all excited you know i'm trying to keep my language in check but they get all excited thinking about uh you know problems that are like superman couldn't solve these problems like you could be that powerful and you can't make all of the bad things go away but you can absolutely change yourself and i think a lot of the lessons that you know like the good lessons from religion that happened the good lessons from the great men and women throughout history that we and that we're inspired by that talk about change starting with within and you know again treating the people around you decently and feeding the people around too decently doesn't even necessarily mean the golden rule do unto others as you would like them to do to you i go well maybe what i would like and what this person would like aren't the same thing well how am i going to get to the bottom of that because i could be attempting to be decent to this person and by my standard i am being decent but maybe i'm maybe i'm missing the mark by theirs well i can't possibly if i just interacted with you like it's like someone talking about some nonsense microaggression you're like so let me get this straight i've never met you before you've never met me before and you're interpreting some minor comment that that i've made in the least charitable way possible yeah i'm not saying that that you couldn't be annoyed but your expectation for that level of consideration is you're going to be you're going to be disappointed a lot now if you if we're someone that's in your life on a consistent basis and they're like hey i really don't appreciate what you're saying or what you're doing here do you realize that this is how i'm this is how i'm perceiving you go oh man i'm so sorry of course i would hear what you have to say but i guess trying to recognize that you know my i guess my job is to treat others with dignity in general but that level the level of specificity that that that requires increases as it gets closer to you and i have as a person i have a very finite amount of resources financially intellectually emotionally physically if i chuck you know point zero zero one percent of it in every single different direction what am i doing it's like when people go oh i care deeply about tibet like why aren't you over there go build a house man get on a plane go build a house oh you don't want to do that so really what you want to do is post on facebook and and accept high fives for how much of a good guy you are i got an idea go help somebody in your neighborhood go be go play with go play with some kids go be a friend to someone that doesn't have a friend read a book try to educate yourself and so i guess to come back it's all of these problems aren't solvable on a grand scale but it's almost like by attempting to address them in our personal lives we do better but rather than a giant airing of the grievances on a on a consistent basis not that that isn't you know sometimes necessarily even valuable but after you air your grievances you go hey how about we sort this out what's the next step and and i guess again when we're trying to address it on a giant social level just seems unmanageable to me even if you have the best of intentions yeah i mean but nevertheless there's that there's a lot you can do on social networks i mean i i enjoy uh tweeting and consuming twitter it's just i apply the exact same principle that you just said which is a free will and discussion which is like i approach it in a way that i don't get stuck in this loop that's counterproductive i try to do things that are productive and like it's just like you said that's like uh like what kind of things can i do in this world whether that's tweeting or building things those are low effort tweeting or actually building businesses or building ideas out as high effort what can i do that will actually solve problems and that's that's the way i approach it and i do wonder if it's possible to at scale encourage each other to approach like social media and communication with fellow humans in that way i don't know how do you think that would be done i guess like to improve the improve the quality of discourse maybe like even like you said the empathy or the the decency of discourse i think people should be you know incentivized encouraged to do that i think most of what's we see happening on twitter and facebook and so on has to do with very small but very powerful implementation details it goes down to like what is the source of the dopamine rush the like button uh the sharing mechanisms just even small tweaks and those can fix a lot really i i believe so so like a lot a lot of the stuff we see now is the result of just initial implementations of these systems that we didn't anticipate so the monetization comes from engagement and the the tools we have is clicking like and sharing it was not always obvious it was not obvious from the beginning it wasn't obvious while the twitter and facebook grew that there's a big dopamine rush from getting more followers and likes and shares so we've gotten addicted to this feeling like how many people are commenting how many people are saying like a clicking like and so on so that's that dopamine right so we want to say the thing that will get the most likes on and like on mass in society and then the other thing that was expected is the controversial the divisive will get the most likes so we it had to do with the initial mechanisms of likes and shares resulting in an outcome that was unpredicted which is huge amounts of division irrespective of like any of the basics of human connection that we've actually all come to understand society is valuable at the individual level like we're saying but on mass what results is like you throw all that out and it's all just divisive at scale uh discourse uh i think it could be fixed by incentivizing personal growth like incentivizing you to challenge yourself to grow as individual and most importantly to be happy at the end of the day so uh feed like incentivize you feeling good as in in a way that's long-lasting long-term i think what makes people actually feel good is being kind to others long-term in the short term what feels good is getting a lot of likes and i think those are just different incentives that if implemented correctly you could just build social networks that would do much better so do you think it comes from a structural perspective i guess at what point does you mention like you mentioned free will and also you mentioned you know feeling good like and again working hard you know you i know that you have the uh i guess the was it a race or um no it's oh the the the goggins thing yeah uh it's 4x40 4x4 by 48 challenge where you run four miles every four hours for two days that's awesome yeah it's it's a bunch of it's it's uh the the the challenge of it isn't just the running the running is very tough but it's mostly the sleep deprivation rises you're just training every four hours but it's a struggle right and that's but the struggle gives meaning and ultimately i guess so how can we because you mentioned like you said adjusting things on like a uh i guess like a programming level almost uh based programming levels so that the interface is different for the user but at what point does the user have a responsibility to you know as a as a man or a woman or a person to just behave more decently how can we i guess utilize what can we do it seems like you know like our society is so grossly missing like a martin luther king right now like the great inspiring characters throughout american history throughout world history where are the great leaders so leadership is part of it but i you know that's definitely word the great leaders is a very good question that's that's more of a question of our political systems why they're not pushing forward the great leaders but there's also just uh okay there's uh some just basic engineering shit which is when you and i when you ryan and i are in a room alone and we're talking even if we're strangers the incentives are for us to get along like just when we're together in person that's what i'm saying i'm not even saying some kind of but when you remove that when we remove that the the the implementation of of the of social networks as they stand right now in the digital space a very different set of incentives it's more fun to destroy others to be shitty to others and that and it becomes this loot endless loop uh like you were saying that's ultimately destructive and not productive and i think it has to do with just the interfaces of uh making it feel good to be nice to others because currently it doesn't feel nearly as good to be nice to others on the internet and if it doesn't feel nearly as bad as it does in real life to be shitty to others on the internet so the incentives are just wrong i i think there is a technology solution to this or at least the solution to improve this uh this communication mechanism it's not obvious how a bunch of sort of more detailed ideas but this is fascinating because uh i've gotten a chance to talk to jack dorsey quite a bit this is the ceo of twitter and he is legitimately has you know in this conversation he would agree with everything and he's a good human being and he has a lot of really good ideas how to improve things the question when you're a captain of a ship whether even it's a question whether ceo is even a captain how much can you actually steer that ship once it's gotten large enough there's so much momentum there's so many users there's so many people who are marketing in pr and lawyers it's very difficult to change things is it difficult because of the fallout or is it difficult because it's actually like literally out of his power uh so power is weird when you have a large organization this is why the great leaders well this is what great leaders do whether it's presidents or leaders of companies steve jobs i would argue musk is that way is to walk into a room full of people who don't want you to create drama it's weird man when people just kind of want to be nice the niceness creates momentum and nobody wants to it's the systems thing everybody just behaves in the way they were previously behaving in the way they're supposed to behave and nobody wants to raise a fuss it takes a great man or woman leader to step in and say what we've been doing is bullshit okay you're fired you're fight you're cool what is it that right i'm out yeah i i think you have to create constant revolutions within a company that's very very difficult to do structurally and psychologically it's very difficult to do to to be able to sort of yeah to constantly challenge the way things have been done in the past and which is why another way it's often done is a startup like a small company basically a small company becomes really successful and then no longer can turn the ship so a new startup comes along right a new competitor that then challenges the big ship and then that starts out the winner that's like google came to be saw twitter came to be in facebook and so on and uh apple has you know that that was the dream of steve jobs as it would succeed for for many decades for like centuries that was the idea that you would keep keep creating revolutions and the under steve jobs apple successfully pivoted a bunch of times right just like reinvented themselves which is funny very difficult to do because i mean i've heard at least i don't know if this is accurate because i wouldn't know anything but i've heard plenty of people complain about steve jobs yeah but in reality the reason that all of these amazing things were done was because this person was willing to obviously brilliant and also willing to to rattle the you know rattle everyone's cage periodically and say hey what's going on is not what we need to be doing that's a really interesting thing so he would rattle the cage but he would also i don't know if those are intricately connected or always have to be connected but he would just be a dick so maybe by my maybe by his standard i am lazy and worthless well this is he being a dick though if by his standard i mean like again it's like everyone's stupid compared to somebody you know i guess uh but at the point so you you apparently are able to take that kind of thing it's uh sometimes you just you cross there's there's ways to cross the line and i mean this is okay the the fascinating thing about being a leader especially leader of companies is it's a people problem so each individual in a room so as a leader you're only really interacting with a small number of people because there are leaders of other smaller groups and so on but each of those individuals in the room have their own different psychology some like to be pushed to the limits some some like like to be screamed at some have are very soft soft-spoken and almost afraid to speak and they have to be uh you have to you have to hear them out like there's a and those those could be all superstars we're not we're not talking about like the c students we're not talking about the students well it's funny that yeah but the thing to me the skill to manage all of those people is completely separate from the skill to innovate something i mean not that they're not connected but it's funny how it's it's almost like uh you know why do we have shitty why do we have shitty representatives yeah well i mean the thing that you do to get elected has nothing to do with governance yes yeah also well that's exactly it but the the great leaders have to have both skills so like you have to have the boldness of maybe if you look at the great presidents through history usually in a time of crisis is when they step up but they basically say okay stop this old way that congress works of this bickering of this like compromise bullshit here's a huge plan that cost billions of dollars in today's age trillions of dollars no extra pork no extra additions just like here's a clear plan we're going to build the best road network the the world has ever seen or we're going to build some huge infrastructure project we're going to revolutionize internet or we're going to for coronavirus we're going to build the largest like testing facility the world has ever seen in terms of the we're going to get everybody tested uh several times a day all those kinds of things huge projects and say uh fuck all this uh the details that everybody's bickering about we're gonna give everybody uh two thousand dollars and give everybody three thousand dollars like huge projects and at the same time so that's the boldness and the leadership and saying throw out all the bullshit of the past and at the same time be able to get in the room with the leaders of both parties over the powerful individuals and smooth talk the shit out of them in the way they need to be smooth talk to so like both of those skills it seems to when they're combined in one person that's that creates great leaders musk appears to have that elon i don't know if steve jobs it's interesting so the criticism of steve and a little bit on elon is he misses some of the human part um but maybe it's impossible to have a really uh you have like signia nadal who's the ceo of microsoft you have um who's really good on the human side really really good on the human side like everybody loves them the ceo of uh google and alphabet is also the same way so like i don't know if it's possible to have both uh you only get so many stat points yeah yo in this in this rpg of life yeah you got very good at jiu jitsu very fast so you want i mean you told the story blue belt and so on but you you went to black belt really quickly uh and not just in terms of ranks but in terms of just skill level i mean uh you didn't go to black belt nearly as fast as your skill set developed you were like doing extremely well at high level competition so you're a good person to ask how does one get good at jiu jitsu we talked about solving problems at the elite level but when you're a beginner at the at the martial arts how do you get good how much training should you do the very basic stuff like how much training how much drilling okay and then the mental stuff like where should your mind be how should you approach it from a mental perspective too i'll just tell you my perspective on this one i guess i would say uh i feel step one i feel lucky to have found uh you know a good training situation particularly for the time um you know in uh in where in where i was at and uh i drilled a ton um i drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and um one one thing that's really important to understand though is that it i was able to in a relatively brief period of years you'll go from zero to reasonably good but um i think i probably crammed more hours in those small years than most people did training let's say in two or three times the length so it may not it may masquerade as something else other than it is i i could say you have to put it in the hours yeah there's no way around that i i think so what did you put in those out so when you said drilling can you break that apart a little bit like what what does really look like is there any recommendations absolutely step one i would say your choices matter like uh there's a i think that one of the really important things that i think we should consider about jiu jitsu is that there's a lot of junk in the system right now it's like jujitsu has exploded in terms of uh the number of positions techniques strategies this that rule sets that's really cool on the one hand on the other hand there's probably a just metric shit ton of sub-optimal things that are out there that are being taught um myself included i've taught things that are looking back five years three years two years one year or i'm like oh i would not do it like that anymore straight up sometimes i wouldn't do it like that other times i would literally never do even that particular movement um i don't think the shrimp is a real move uh it's like it's a giant spell it's easier to show in person but long sword of is there's a lot of things that are we think of as fundamental that i think that are uh really pretty negative and also you know um that's heresy and jiu-jitsu isn't it the shrimp exactly is like the holy we all worship the shrimp we love the shrimp we love the shrimp now for people who don't do jiu jitsu and you should the shrimp is uh you scoot your butt away from your opponent yeah in a room it's like a really athletic looking position where you look like like someone that's trying to stick their butt out on instagram and then you push your hands away and you expose your face and then uh you lay on your side because someone told you to do that and you look like uh yeah i guess you look like a shrimp yeah it's like that time that uh you know someone really credible told me to drink unleaded gasoline and i did it for a while and then uh you know it got to the point in my life where you know the next best the thing that i needed to do to really improve my life was stop drinking unleaded gasoline yes and uh i would say that there's like a lot of stuff that's that's in there that step one is like uh it's junk it's actual junk and it's it's not only will it waste your time it's it will straight up it will it will be like an albatross hanging on you because it affects how you think about things going forward so although um i it was it's funny like the operating assumptions that we we work under um have a huge huge huge influence you mentioned like growing up in the united states or this being a capitalist society like whoo all right now of course i think that i don't really know any different otherwise and i think that a lot of times people go oh communism is better i'm like i haven't seen it i haven't read any books about it were being better but uh it's possible i mean i haven't experienced it much myself either so i can't dismiss it out right but i guess i would say it's a fundamentally different differing operating system underpinning and all of my choices all of if i honestly believed in that thing many of my choices on a moment by moment on a day by day and certainly on a lifetime basis would be very different so i would say that uh it's tough when you're when you're young in the martial arts and i mean all of us are always trying to do our best to learn but when you're young in the martial arts you always go if you're a reasonable guy what are they what they call it like dunning kruger amnesia i can't even if this is the right one but basically you go like oh i know what i'm doing here so i can say that's not right but then i read a new story about baseball only about baseball sounds incredible um and it's it's bullshit yeah but i can't call bullshit if you're a reasonable person you can't call bullshit on things that you don't understand even if you suspect it's not right you're like well i've got to reserve judgment you never ever ever set aside your your need and also obligation to understand why you were doing what you're doing and don't ask why once ask why over and over and over and over about the same thing oh well i want to shrimp why to make space why do i want to make space to get away from the guy well why do you want to get away from him well because he's dangerous why is he dangerous and you can oftentimes get down to wait a minute i didn't even need to move three quarters of the time you're actually acting in the other person's self-interest and i guess a lot of times i can't this kind of goes beyond what we can you know demonstrate here but i would just say uh trying to understand what my base operating assumptions are and consistently reevaluate them which can be freaking exhausting frankly and also consonants confidence destroying but you mentioned uh that that i did pretty well relatively quickly i was at um i started in 2004 and i was at abu dhabi adcc for the first time as an alternate in 2007 i won a match there against the blackpool world champion um and the fact frankly the fact that i was able to beat someone like that was neat but at the same time says a little bit more about what jiu jitsu is and some of the issues with it than it does about how cool i am was because that shouldn't really happen when you think about it you're like okay you're a champion at ostensibly a very high level of the sport you enjoy a three inch four inch height advantage and a 35 pound weight advantage and you just got beat like that should not exist i'm serious i'm dead serious that should not exist if that happens you're doing it wrong is it that i'm doing it right or is it that you're doing it wrong and there's enough variance in the way that you're doing it that you're allowing me to win and now i did happen to win that with a 50 50 heel hook which was 50 50. but um but basically which was one of the early examples of like hey guys by the way people can try to hurt your legs and that was something like we mentioned john danaher mentioned like you know myself dean lister a lot of the guys from the enzo gracie team that have had amazing success they've gone and done great things um craig jones in the competitive grappling world basically taking advantage of being very very good in what they're doing but also a glaring glaring glaring issue with the operating system of jiu jitsu which was you know a huge vulnerability in the lower body and not only not attacking it but having no idea how one does attack it which means you can't understand how someone will assail you so anyway um i guess to come back is if in the in the absence of knowing what to do i try to polish what i've got so if i've got a knife and i'm like i don't know how to use them okay i'm just going to sharpen the edge and polish it make sure that when i need to use this to anything i'll be able to do it because trying to put together a system when you don't have an idea of what's going on a lot of times you end up making you know sub-optimal choices but as long as you're consistently re-evaluating what you're doing and that's something i've tried to do over time over and over and over again and try to seek out the uh the most um the best and also most uh um articulate or insightful instructors or people of various love it doesn't matter if they're well known or not that could say hey ryan i think you should do this i think you should do that and i i think all i've ever done in martial arts is try to treat people with respect honestly try to demonstrate appreciation for the many many people who have helped me over time and be the type of person that they want to train with not the type of because we've all trained with people that make us think about beating the ever loving crap i never wanted to be that guy and i was basically saying like if i train with a black belt when i'm a blue belt and and this person enjoys training with me that's in my interest selfishly not only do i not want them to beat me up but selfishly i should you mentioned being decent to other people you want to incentivize being decent to other people right with the structure of what you're doing selfishly i'm incentivized to be a nice guy even if i'm internally a scumbag which i like to think that i'm not but basically uh going like hey this guy's way more likely to help me or this person's way more likely to help me if i shake their hand say thank you i really appreciate you helping me out and uh but that thing that they tapped me with four or five times i'm gonna ask them about it and then they don't have to tell me they're under no obligation but i'll say and will they tell me you don't thank you so much for your time i really appreciate it and uh that that's it you know okay so to summarize those so what you brilliantly described i just want to make sure we're keeping track i went all over the place just no you didn't you're you're pretty on point but uh so the first thing is basically which is difficult i wonder if we can break it apart a little bit is don't trust authority essentially keep asking why be respectful without trusting authority right right which is and then the second thing is be the kind of person that others like training with or like being around sort of uh being a good friend so so many people just enjoy being around so one is complete which is yeah you're right it's attention which is like completely disrespect the the way that things are done so asking why constantly one of it is your own flaws and not understanding the fundamentals of what's being described and then once you get good enough not understanding um like going against the fact that the instructor doesn't understand and my inability to understand what you're saying though doesn't invalidate it and that's something like you mentioned like mentioning keeping in mind our own flaws and then also again the flaws that any of us have is the instructor to your point and i guess i can speak to being kind of weird i don't you know i like to sit in the corner but um so everyone's a little bit different some people you know i wasn't terribly popular in high school i you know like uh i don't like high school very much but anyway yeah i would not gonna be rude to people though i was never gonna bully anybody if you said hello to me i'd say hello back i would hold the door for you if you walk by you know and i would just say like simple things like that go a long long long way and that actually takes us back to our uh um to our social discussion where i'm like oh man how do i become great at jiu jitsu it's like well i'll start by not pissing off this person who can beat the crap out of me and not disrespecting the person who is probably the clearest the closest thing to a font of knowledge at that time for me so and then recognizing that i should do that for its own virtue because it's the right thing to do and i should try to treat people decently but beyond that even selfishly it's in my interest to do that but see the thing is this this is interesting is there's a culture in martial arts a culture that i like where the instructor legitimately so carries a aura of authority and it's not comfortable to really ask why i'm not it's it's a skill to be able to have a discussion as a white belt with the black belt instructor of like why is it done this way like and saying why again like with i mean it's a skill to show that you're actually legitimately a curious and passionate and compassionate student versus like somebody who's just being an annoying dick who saw some stuff on youtube there's a line between to walk there i i just wonder because like it's the drilling thing and you know i um for example like in my and when i was coming up there was so much emphasis placed on like closed guard for example and you might you might actually teach me now i i don't know but to me it was like why do i need to master the close like why is the closed guard on top or the bottom but the bottom really this is the fundamental basics of jiu jitsu who decided that my body is not my body says this is wrong i'm like this like i have short legs but it doesn't even matter the length of legs there's something about me that just i don't understand how leverage here works for my particular body like so it's just it's a feel thing too like it feels like in my basic understanding of leverage and movement and timing and so on it feels like these certain like butterfly guard or even like half basically every guard except close guard i i can play i can dance closed guard feels like you're shutting down uh like the play that is that wrong or is that make sure that's what you want because that's almost like an innate characteristic of this guard position but it's not sold that way right it's like hey this is a good guard it's like hey man here's a bow and arrow versus and you know how to use this thing right like make sure you're you're far away and like up on a hill or something because you could take that bone hour run up on something and try to use it but if nobody told you not to do that and they told you it's foundational it's very foundational it's very important to everything else too right that's back to the shrimping thing how many things are we taught that even if it's not let's say itself is not a garbage thing it might be effectively garbage you could give me a ferrari but if i try to make it fly it's not going to work if you're like here's a plane here's another plane here's another plane here's another plane here's a ferrari i'm like oh it must be a different type of plane like you could be forgiven for leap if we're going there you know like oh maybe the wings come out or you just go fast enough it's like a bullet like you can make these crazy leaps in your mind and people are doing that all the time so if you don't provide the context for me or worse yet you provide improper context like how how much of a problem is that going to be well i think the skill of the white belt should be just be nice but so in the complicated human space of when your intention at least on the in the big picture view is good there's the question is it's not always when your intention is good the actual implementation of it is good so you might be just almost and that's much it's not the case for you it's much more the case for white belts they don't even know their intention might be good but they don't know all the lines they're crossing all the right so they're not actually able to and like interpret all the ways in which they're being totally insensitive to the requests of others right explicit requests of others so your job as a beginner is to be a really good listener of those social cues it's like a visit in a foreign country right yeah like you're a representative of people that look like you people that talk like you people that have your passport and you're like man i'm gonna go over here oh i've got my foot up on my knee well if i was in certain conscious world that's rude i'm like oh i'm so sorry but can you imagine if someone says hey i really appreciate if you take your foot off that's pretty rude and then i want to tell them well not where i'm from man i'm in your house i better again i may go that direction but let's say i could get away with that now i'm a bully and if i can't get away with that well i'm about to maybe be on the wrong side of something but i i guess uh like you said if we have positive intention that's fine but i also have to recognize who i am and i think that that's one thing that i tried to do and continue to try to do over time like we're oh man uh hi i'm i'm the one that's asking for a favor here if i spawn with raymond daniels raymond daniel's doing me a favor i ain't doing him a favor let's not get it twisted so thank you so much for tom i really appreciate these are not and this is not like some affected nonsense this is serious i'm like thank you if i spawn with stephen thompson i'm i'm the one being done a favor george st pierre takes his time to spar with me which he has in the past and and not even kill me which is really i appreciate that because that's why i can sit here george is not a prop for me to to to get my rocks off or see what's going on and also i'm going to do that and then expect him to just take it and i've seen he's a gentleman i've seen people get nuts with george and and have him just like he has a he's a patient of a saint i don't have that level of patience but i would just say to come back what figuring out like hey so what what role am i here and that comes back to like at least what i see people on the internet yeah man i have a beef with joe rogan you're like no you don't ryan you're some goof yeah i'm like i'm some random dude joe like people wanna they almost wanna like elevate so that we can somehow be level we're peers here if i go into ferocious hobbies gym i'm not a peer of frazza hobby i'm a student of tristar i'm a guest in the academy and if for us asked me for something short of him like you know telling me to try to do a triple backflip so i break my neck the answer is yes sir i can do it free for us no man the noise and it's and hopefully it should come with i guess a level of graciousness but i guess that's kind of one of the things that i see nowadays with uh how accessible people are because i grew up you know being a big huge sports fan of all kinds i couldn't send derek jeter a message and and much less have a possibility of reply and if i do it's like you know i have people send me messages it's very nice that people say some people again and everyone not everyone is coming from the same place but i've had plenty of things they're like yo dude i need you to do this for me i'm like well i'll tell you what's never going to happen that i have no idea who you are and that was how i was addressed and i don't need oh man you're the greatest one because that's weird and two because i'm not but just hey ryan uh how are you doing um hey if you think you could do the following if you get a second like if i get a second you're dang right i can't why not it's easy ask but it started with some level of politeness and i guess like that's maybe being semi-southern like i grew up in virginia yes sir yes ma'am like yeah well and there's all different kinds of implementations of politics i mean all most of the successful people i've met it's been surprising to me how much of you you mentioned piers like the like i could think of joe rogan you mentioned joe rogan but elon musk they don't like they almost treat me like i'm the superior you know what i mean like it's not even it's it's that's the politeness like you know that's the approach the feeling of it is like i'm the student i'm the beginner i'm like approaching a situation like it's it's uh it's almost like uh method acting of like you're better than me that and that's how i approach a lot of interactions like i have something to learn from this even if it's like a young do you think that they're ungenuine they're totally genuine but it's not a funny thing like in spite of who they are they're incredibly genuine because they respect correct me from wrong they respect you obviously for what you bring the table but also they approach it everybody but that's right that was they were done but i'm sure they're respectful which means well beyond that though they're treating with dignity as a human being as a human being which is right people when they could probably get away with treating most people without a whole heck of a lot of dignity and i guess what does that always say that like you know again like you can always tell someone of of you know of quality because they treat the king and the and the janitor the same way but that's what we're seeing a lot like like that's i guess i don't mean to like to nitpick but that's where would take issue i guess a little bit or disagree with are you going to criticize the internet again i know people on the internet oh man yells it yells at clouds but uh but um anyway but i guess uh what what i mean is just like the way that people address each other because it's so casual now yes you know and it's like it's great on the one hand it's nice on the other hand you go hey i just why can't do am i somehow demand am i worried about diminishing myself it's like the way that i'm sure that people talk to like talk to women sometimes and words yo what's up girl oh man she's bitch you know versus like how am i that was supposed to get a good response what about that was going to elicit a a favorable response you know versus being anything anything other than than just yo man what's going on and i guess that does that make any sense it makes total sense and that southern thing that you're referring to i i feel like that's an important uh that's an important part of human communication let me ask you this sure your new back attacks instructional first of all awesome yeah uh second of all you drop you drop a lot of fascinating insights in there but you quote uh galileo out of all people and saying that you can't teach a man anything you can only help him find it within himself so we talked about how to start in jiu jitsu what about if we zoom out even more and how do you learn how to learn how do you optimize the learning process i i don't know the answer to that but i can tell you what i like to do and i would say like i can't step one i don't i'm not maybe this is a little bit easier for me because you know i've i've never had a ton of friends honestly i've you know i've got my close friends and people that i know but i never had tons and tons of people so i spent a lot of time you know thinking and anyway uh yeah i can't i can't control you i can't control anybody else i you know i uh um all i can i want to take my i'll get some marcus aurelius thing it's like you know i guess the trick to life is figuring out what's in our control and what's not and focusing on things that are in our control i guess and uh so step one is figuring out both internally and then also out in in the world as it pertains to jitsu what is actually in my control and what is not like passing someone's guard is not in your control people think it is it ain't if i can't just do an activity and be unchecked then it ain't in my control entirely i can always breathe i can always um you know be calm i can always no matter whether i'm concerned or not concerned whatever you want to call it nerves you know i can step forward across the line and say i will i will face the challenge ahead that is all entirely no one can stop me from doing that that's entirely my control and that's why i know that every single time that i walk into the ring i'll walk in and out of there with my head of high because there's i will fight with everything that i have i can't promise that i'll win i would say i take that same first principles you mentioned the last time we talked you know with elon and the importance of that and going what are the first principles and i guess to come back a lot of times in my opinion the things that people think are the basics are not the basics you can't learn if you think you're reasoning for first principles but you're actually like level six you're actually like layers up you're making so many there's so many baked in assumptions to what's going on that you're going to struggle to understand why anything is actually happening internally externally you name it so i guess what i would start when it comes to learning is first principles and trying to understand what's going on but then also simple things first i can control my posture i can control my breathing no one can stop me from doing that i can control where i place my frames i can control where i place my limbs i can move my feet i can develop the ability to do these things better of course and i do that through practice through drilling through watching people i've been incredibly fortunate in my time in martial arts to train with many of my heroes to train with many of the people that i looked at and i was like that guy is amazing i want to train with this person like stephen thompson kenny florian george st pierre raymond daniels ferraza hobby you know i mean like bruno farzada marcelo garcia you know all of these guys that are just unbelievable and i go well they're moving in a way that's different well how do i do that well sometimes you can ask them and they can tell you directly other times people part of the genius of what they do is that it's intuitive and maybe they don't think and understand and see the world the same way that i do that was something that i experienced with marcelo he's amazing but in in a different way then his it just we see things fundamentally different we experience the world differently it seems to me that we do um and again that that taught me a really important lesson because i was wanting when i trained there to have someone go hey ryan do this this this and this and that's how it works and i'm like all right because that's how i understood martial arts at the time um i wasn't ready to have someone tell me like hey um it feels a little bit like this and i just kind of do it which is kind of what marcelo would do at the time he was less experienced as a teacher but that is what he was doing i was completely i couldn't separate in my mind performance and understanding i thought that if i understand i could do it and i would also want to i would also struggle sometimes to wonder why i couldn't execute things that i thought i understood and why guys like marcelo were just so elemental i mean in like the like lightning wind like that type of thing like it's just so in touch with what they wanted with with their capabilities they could summon their powers at will i couldn't always do that and i guess so recognizing that there was more than one way to the top of the mountain and also i had a lot of science but i didn't have a lot of art or i had some science i should say but i didn't have a lot of art meeting people like marcelo taught me and then josh waitskin actually brilliant guy uh chess champion um former owner maybe owner of martial's academy really great friend i think he has a book on learning he does yeah the art of learning actually but uh yeah he knows a thing or two about it but a great guy and anyway he sat me down one time was like look man you're you're doing this wrong you're missing what the missing the genius the brilliance that's right in front of you and it took me once i mean that i was frustrated with uh with my inability to grasp certain things and and sometimes uh the teaching style being different i'm wrong just it was it it was it was tough for me at the time you were trying to replicate what marcelo was saying as opposed to understanding the the the the fundamentals from which it was coming right i couldn't see i couldn't see where it was coming from and also sometimes i'm like well why can't you explain it in the way that i would want you to explain it and he's like well why can't i meet him where he's coming from yeah so anyway it was a really important time unless i'm very very frustrating if i'm honest but it's not um i'm so thankful for that time and anyway uh you know i i just always first principles trying to understand the basics first starting at the place where you can't control things the the very basic elements of what you can work with and then when there's other mentors and teachers to to uh meet them where they're coming from meet them to the extent that i can rather i'm not like again it's like why are you not talking to me the way i want you to talk to me as opposed to hey where are you coming from back to your point yeah but uh and i know that's not entirely specific but you know like if you can focus on that and back to the whole you can't teach a man anything marcelo didn't teach me anything but he taught me in so doing like and other and other people like that to uh you know to find it within and it's like yeah i guess something else that i've heard before is that all learning is self-discovery but all performance is self-expression and i always thought that marcelo was a brilliant master of letting what's inside out he would he was so consistent in his performances and a lot of times i felt like there was a block there personally particularly at the end of jujitsu when i was very very results oriented and i wasn't i think i think my focus was was not a deal it was definitely not not in the place that i would like it to be and whether i would have won more loss more hard to say but i know that i would perform better if i'd have adjusted that and anyway uh that recognizing that again jiu jitsu i think i've said it before just to study as a science but expressed as an art it doesn't matter if you can articulate what you know how to do what matters is if you can do what you want to do it only matters if you're you know i guess if you're teaching in a verbal fashions whether or not you can articulate it but uh recognizing the difference between learning on an intellectual level or a conceptual level and being able to to translate that into the physical and i guess like that's been the thing that i feel like fortunate over time in my own academy to be able to kind of fiddle around and learn on my own and practice my students and you know sometimes i struggle to have great training partners like when i say great training i mean other world-class people to spar to roll with but i've gotten a lot more honestly than i ever would have thought out of being able to practice and learn and fail and try and succeed on my own without like my own little sandbox um figuring out how i can take an idea and then come up with drills and and drills to practice it so that i can actually practice putting it into play because again knowing an idea and then not drilling what's the point i'll never have it it will never it'll never see the light of day so in that dvd in that instruction dvd sorry it's an online instructional dvd i keep saying dvd though nobody has dvds anymore do they like vhs i don't know who has dvd with like blu-ray i possess some dvds i mean like i've never watched them what do you use them for like uh like a couple like a cup like a thing you put a drink on who i mean weren't in a pinch yeah uh what's that even called uh yeah my uh matrix coaster the matrix goes to zeros and ones okay uh so in that instruction that people should should get i've been watching i'm really enjoying um it's i don't even know when it come out recently right like december or something like that yeah it's uh it's it's part one you're actually like ended up being like 18 hours long and i was like oh my god we gotta chop it in half and it it when it comes together the whole thing i think i hope people will like it yeah well it's uh even part one is really good it's actually yeah yeah people on reddit were really excited for part two as well really and you also have a back oh the old one the old one that i that was really helpful to me to understand some very basic aspects of control really back yeah that was uh you know that clicked with me there's very few instructionals there's very few things i've watched that ever clicked with me and that was definitely it uh he taught me one thing i don't know it's uh you drop a lot of sort of bombs you drop a lot of really interesting details and it's funny that there's only specific things that really click like a lot of it rings true and you kind of take it in it's like oh that's interesting okay yeah but there's certain things that really click and i remember when that first uh instruction will click with me is like the importance i i don't i don't remember anymore like how you communicated it because i'm now integrated it's not mine you know what i mean uh but it was more about you just describing upper body control and the importance of the upper body control from the back and just like the there's certain grip like the the you describe different details on the grips and so on and as i started trying it i realized how important upper body control is versus like me maybe as a blue belt or something it was i thought like you have achieved victory when you got the two hooks in and then i realized like at least for me that the hooks were not even for my body type for my style for the way i approached things they were not even important at all they're supplemental for the most part yeah so they were there for the points but i can establish a huge amount of control uh in fact the hooks were you you were talking about like illusion of choice it's it's uh it almost made people panic a lot more when you were like fighting for or establishing that kind of control they were a lot less panicked when the hooks weren't involved even though they should be a lot more panicked anyway i realized a lot of those kinds of things especially that had to do with judo because so much of judo on the ground is centered around aggressive efficient very fast choking like different kinds of clock chokes and all that kind of stuff what a brilliant thing that is only going to start to make its way into jiu jitsu coming up but like the judo style approach to like clock choking triangling from the top of the turtle and stuff it's so powerful yeah and the the there's something about judo that emphasizes obviously due to the rules the urgency so there you only do techniques that go fast and then the other thing is which i guess uh jiu-jitsu emphasizes too but judo really does which is um the transition so like while the person's flying in the air is the easiest time i mean this is like ryan hall type of shit which is like why not put in your submissions or positional control while they're in the air and if well if you could why would you not right and say oh well i don't throw well we'll learn how to throw and then do it and so you should think i mean in a transition when they're flying is the easiest time to put in stuff and that's when you think about jokes as you're throwing you should be thinking about the choke and then everything becomes a lot easier you ever see flavio canto uh man brazilian judoka yeah it's so cool like with stuff like that yeah yeah exactly but but that has to do with the first starting principle of like stop thinking this as a two-phase game of uh standing and then ground start thinking about like the the standing and the the standing comes before the ground comes after but everything happens in the transition well unless you're attacking what is the art of war like every we all like everyone's like oh yeah the art of war oh yes he says and then they immediately throw it away and then fight like a freaking barbarian but uh yeah i mean like i'm serious but uh you know how many people quote stuff and then like you know it's like what is it the family guy joke or they're like you know quoting jesus then jesus walks in he's like you're not sure about work what are you talking about and anyway uh basically um you know like what like the art of war you know one of the things that's like the only thing that you can be sure of being successful in attacking is something that's undefended yeah well like yeah yeah but you know in a fight though they're defended well are they there's moments all the time where i'm borderline defenseless and if you were to attack at that moment if you could see it and then seize the moment if you were capable of both you should not only expect to be successful you should be damn sure you're gonna be successful and more more important than that you'll be successful and even if you're somehow not you won't be countered and i guess like uh that's the trick of almost all all like conflict right it's like showing up when the other person's you know taking a nap and then it's so funny like we take like a protracted war it's like oh it takes five years and there's you know lulls and there's a battle this month but then there's a couple weeks in another battle it's like well if you just shrink that down it's the microcosm macrocosm idea that same thing that whole war is taking place in five minutes or 10 minutes or 15 minutes and there's moments of laws of person effectively going for a snack you know being like you know in a horror movie like hey guys i'm gonna go get a beer from the uh from around the way like i'm dead for sure so anyway um is there in this particular instructional if you can convert into words uh you talk about finishing submission is there some interesting insights that you find beautiful or profound about finishing the rear neck choke or just finishing the submissions from the back control is there some like you know you talk about the squeeze and the crush and all these kinds of principles is there something about control about the process of finishing that uh you find especially profound about this position absolutely the opposite of one profound truth can be another profound truth so like uh it's i i i do uh did jesus say that no i don't i actually was a guy on tumblr um but uh yeah it was really really cool there's like a like a tree in the background but anyway uh uh but so let's say like i'll use i'll use examples like first off um i i saw someone finishing a 50 50 heel hook in the ufc one promo that it was like some chubby dude in a karate key like inside heel hook and another dude and you go huh well i didn't know they were doing that back then at least and whether they were doing it how many times did someone do something and then that works and then we go okay cool versus hey maybe we should do that all the time so anyway how long do we all talk to the seat belt the way we all do the seat belt in jiu jitsu like a long time why works in fact it works so well and it was so it was then the people who used it were so prolific that we went well solved that one good to go all right no more thinking and then you go imagine you were to like the merkel and merkel flip all those positions that we're showing in the uh in the dvd which is pretty much or the whatever the heck it is i don't know the digital vd um no not vd i don't want that digital digital video something but basically uh recognizing that doing it on the wrong side is at least as effective doesn't mean that the other side wasn't good there could be something that's the literal borderline opposite of that and you go huh why is that something like imagine like i would say almost all of these things all the tactics and all the strategies so i guess that was something that we came to like training in the gym like a year ago maybe i've been playing with since and it's just it's huge i'm like oh wait so let me get this straight first if i can use my strong side seat belt my right arm over the shoulder any all the time well that's that's really helpful because that's a lot better than my left i can do both sides of my left but if i had to bet my life on on being able to finish it i would want my right arm over huh everything that's a tactic or a strategy evolved from an idea like capitalism is an idea you know anarchy is an idea and then it becomes what does that all mean what are they what are the consequences what's the fallout of all this right so what if we start with jiu jitsu the idea of the guard right and we go well i mean wendy why do you use the guard nor the martial art really has developed the guard in the same way the jiu jitsu has well what is the guard a guards are not a defensive idea where you're kind of on your back to some extent or another and you're using your legs as a wall between you and the other person and the other guy represents danger and you're like yeah that's a great idea is it i mean it clearly works at least to a certain extent but what where do i want to put my legs when i want to get up not on the other dude i'm trying to put them on things on the floor if i want to generate a ton of power what's the first thing i do with my feet i anchor them to the floor drive for a punch you name it move away jump dart yeah you name it so does it mean that that's a terrible idea to be on your back no clearly it works and clearly it limit face has function but what if the function that we're giving it and we're and the how much how much focus we're assigning to it is disproportionate to its effectiveness yeah maybe what if it's not a good idea i'm not saying it's not a good idea but what if it wasn't that's a foundational idea of jiu-jitsu and then how much because no one questions that foundation how much innovation is built on top of the idea well of course i want to be my being on my back is an okay position so now they're innovating but they're innovating within a closed system that they don't they think they're innovating in like in this open space of oh my god it could be anything when in reality it could be anything within this little set yeah but you don't realize that you're in a set you don't realize that you're in a box there would be answers that would become so immediately apparent to you if you were willing to look outside of that but you'll literally never even look over to your left because you don't even realize the left exists do you think there's a lot of places in jiu jitsu whether it's back control or generally guards and all the different positions where there's a lot of space like a lot a lot to be discovered by questioning the basic assumptions maybe if you can give examples of like back control like is there something you've discovered this like merkel versus seatbelt what's miracle seatbelt is uh right arm over the shoulder left arm under the arm on i'm on the i'm on the same side as my choking arm merkel is just i do the same thing i don't even adjust my hands i walk myself over to the left side i'm on the opposite side it's actually a more powerful position yeah for people listening or for people who might not know jiu jitsu is uh seatbelt is a control we're talking about when one person is on the back of another person which is a really dominant position jiu jitsu sea belt is a i guess widely accepted way of holding best practices almost best practices yeah and it's worked so well so it's a one arm over one arm under and there's a certain side you're supposed to be on when you're on the back you know everyone teaches there's a choking arm that's the arm that's over and your body is supposed to be in a certain side relative to that and then ryan is describing questioning these like basic assumptions about which side you're supposed to be on and let's say that's even just like a mid-level assumption it's not even a first principles assumption but it's pretty supposed to it's getting there but but let's just say for sake of argument it goes a lot deeper maybe um i think most of the innovation that i see is not innovation it's like basically changing the color of a car or polishing like the window a little bit we're like hey you made it you made it a little bit different you made it a little bit better it's like oh man what if i did the same guard and then grab the lapel i'm not saying it's bad but you're not fundamentally changing anything i think most of the big seismic shifts that we see in almost anything come from hey that thing we thought was right was wrong rather than not only is it right it's even writer and you're like that's not wrong it's not bad but that's you're in it's like oh man let's say for instance i didn't make the triangle better but let's say i made the triangle a little bit better than it was or then it was taught um yeah i mean you call it innovation i don't know man it's not like the person that said hey have you guys ever heard of a triangle before and came up with that we're like that is i feel like that's that's on the list you can do this thing to people are you kidding me can you imagine you invented the straight right hand you'd be like one punch man you can walk around and just just lay low every single person you got into a fight with because it didn't even occur to them to hit you with their backhand in a world full of jabbers you throw your back hand you're gonna kill people so basically but by the way i mean just to pause on that that first of all somebody did invent the triangle probably right sure it's not a trivial thing once it's like no it's how many of these giant things that we all go like oh yeah we all use that now can you imagine you have triangles and heel hooks and rear naked chokes and i don't have those you're on b you're borderline i mean like that's that's why that's we all experience every single one of this particularly those of us i mean when did you first start training likes uh 12 13 years well let's not count wrestling but 13 years ago with jiu-jitsu right on so let's say let's say about that time where particularly was still like kind of kind of underground-y you know and you're like hey we all experienced being like a relative like a mid-level wipeout and being able to easily beat up all our friends because everyone wrestled all their buddies and it was one of those ones where like they don't have weapons to end the fight you have weapons to end the fight that's so cool that's such a crazy you know asymmetric advantage that if you lose it's on you now man like you get like you had the next time it's like i've got this rifle and you have nothing and i decide to put it on my back and then run over and try to karate chop you're like okay next time just make sure you use the rifle bud i'm like oh yeah i should do that so yeah it's kind of fascinating to i mean everything you're describing is a there's a fascinating tension between like whenever i show people for the first time what a triangle is just like regular people uh it's like they're discovering he's like oh okay that's interesting i mean mma has changed that but people have haven't watched mma that's an interesting move it doesn't make sense why that would be a choke and they kind of quickly accepted that's a thing and they accept the basics without questioning wait a minute what's actually being choked how is it that a shoulder of a person can do the choking like i'm not sure i fully question the fundamentals of all of that like i claim i have either what exactly is the blood supply that's being cut off like what what is the anatomy and the physiology of all of that why does this work and if you understood all that what else could we do here yeah what else can we do here that's the really important thing but if we know if i'm an end user which almost everyone is of almost anything i'm serious where i'm like i think about stuff in my life the only things i really think about are like martial arts and martial arts strategy and like i don't know some other couple couple other things but not much and anything else in my life is is borderline unexamined and i like to think that if i put a lot of effort into something i'd like to think that i could figure at least some things out about it but i figured out almost nothing about anything in my life because i haven't even looked and you know if you're an end user what are you capable of versus you can literally alter the source code you are neo in the freaking matrix if you can alter the code and i can't and it's like we think about haha but imagine you are a world class anything or even not even world class forget it like a purple belt compared to a white belt or compared to a no belt might as well be jon jones or marcelo garcia you're going to beat them up comparably bed so it's uh that's that actually is a common thing where people can't tell the difference between levels they're like oh man i'm training with my black belt instructor how much better could so and so be like so much better you're gonna have a hard time wrapping your head around it i remember when i first trained with marcelo garcia in 2007 i was a decent purple belt and of course he molly walked me very gently and then uh training him again in 2008 i was definitely better i won the gui and nogi worlds that year at purple belt so definitely for the record i'm definitely not a jujitsu world champion i wanted a purple belt but like that's not the same at winning a black belt um and uh tough accomplishment but not in the same thing at all but anyway um i was definitely better he beat me up just the same way okay 2009. i was a lot better got a medal at adcc that time won the trials crushed everybody like no just submitted everybody like bob train marcelo garcia it was worse and uh 2010 training marcelo garcia same same so the idea was uh i wouldn't be able to tell you the difference and that the outcome difference was the same in all of these rounds i was significantly more experienced and more more adept each time each time that this occurred but it was like how many number of times did this person submit you were past your guard in the round i'm like i don't know probably like let's say five each one because it's a brief period of time and let's say it was three on one six on another or whatever it's comparable it's six one half dozen would i be able to easily tell the difference no i would just say i know in concept that he's way better so much better but there's plenty of other people that could have beaten me just as bad as marcelo did when i was a purple belt or when i was a brown belt then maybe i would watch marcelo walk through like their borderline not there so it's neat like if you that's back to kind of what i was talking about about certain people beginning to really like peel back some of what's really special about the martial arts or any activity i presume um is they get to a level of understanding and depth that they're playing with like the almost the reality of that thing and i'm i'm playing by rules that are not rules i'm not i'm not even wanted to use a matrix analogy i'm not even an agent which is the best version of something playing by the rules yes i'm like one of the regular people or one of the regular people in that got out of the matrix so i'm like oh i'm cool but when i fight an agent i lose because we're both in the rules but they just play them to the play them to the bone and i'm just here well and then the agent encounters neo and they can do nothing you're like why because operating outside of what the rules are but not really what the rules are what they perceive to be the rules are clearly so anyway i guess that's kind of my point about marcelo or certain other people that are doing things where you go that doesn't even seem real it doesn't seem real to me because i don't understand what's going on and i guess if we can get down to base assumptions but like if we can constantly strip away strip away strip away let's say we always thought that turning left was right it was correct and it turns out that turning right was correct it changed your life yeah it's uh what is the soccer you said the unexamined life is not worth living so you just basically have to rigorously just constantly examine every assumption over and over and over but doesn't that give your life meaning to come back to the struggle to come back to free will to come back to what if we could strip all that away all right cool all right let me just stick the needle in my in my arm and that's that yeah no i mean that that constant striving for understanding yet another lower layer of the simulation we're living in is is is something that's actually deeply fulfilling that i don't know if it's genetically built in but there's something about that striving to understand that seems to be uh deeply human but it's funny what makes us human we don't talk about the soul anymore man i went to catholic school as a kid and whether you buy into all that stuff or not you're like what what about the soul of a person the spirit of a people the spirit of a nation anywhere the spirit of humanity we don't we talk about everything like it's this quantifiable thing when maybe certain things are maybe everything is but then what happens if there's things that just aren't quantifiable that nothing in our understanding can or will ever explain it that doesn't mean that that should be our assumptions through our assumption that we can explain everything and let's get to the dang bottom appeal but what if there is actually something that like that you that we need challenge for yeah and we could be looking in the wrong place by going oh wait is it in the genes maybe it is again i'm not saying we're looking wrong places like i wouldn't know anything i do karate but basically uh not even well um but uh yeah do karate mediocre just asked grandma daniels or stephen thompson but uh uh i guess the to come back though you just are you yell about you or are you man i actually have you ever seen the seinfeld episode where kramer fights the kids yeah i did that at raymond daniels school under the kids kids wanting class as in addition to the uh the alleyway oh yeah yeah exactly when i was on my last legs but uh but yeah i would just maybe it's funny i feel like there's something deeply missing from you know from public understanding anymore that it's almost like the idea that we can figure everything out which i deeply believe in but also the possibility that there's some things that we'll never really see and some things you'll never understand and there's something like you said uniquely human about the human experience that even if i had the power to change i don't want to fuck with it man i don't want to change that thing oh yeah well wouldn't it be great if we just immediately knew the outcome of everything and you just press this button you're like oh that's kind of what's the point of living life then even if you could do it it's it's the end you've seen drastically i'll leave you be sorry i know i'm talking about ian malcolm jurassic park jeff goldblum right life life uh finds a way but we were so concerned with whether or not we could we didn't stop to think whether or not we should maybe i i think there's an ex i mean it's a deeply human thing but it's also a really useful thing to always kind of assume that there's this giant thing that you don't understand so you can forever be striving to understand because that process gives you meaning but also keeps making you better like thinking that actually even just thinking that you can't understand everything will lead you to stop too early so like uh i i think there's something to whether it's the soul or whether it's like religious stuff like assuming that there's this thing that you cannot possibly understand is a really good assumption under which to operate and underwish to do this first principles kind of thinking because you can just keep digging and keep digging keep digging even when it seems like you're at the bottom because you don't fucking know if you're at the bottom or not and back to your original back to one of our i guess our other kind of tangents was that comes back to everyone's a human being the smartest human being in the history of humanity is so hilariously weak like short-lived and not intelligent for yourself bro i understand i didn't say no i'm not saying comparison to me in comparison to me everyone is awesome but that's that's why i don't do the goat thing but basically uh you know we're it's just on a cosmic level can you imagine if you were vampire you're like 900 years old like how much you would seem you would seem like a lowercase g god to people yeah you'd be like how can you how could you know so much how can you have such a long view perspective it would be insane so i mean that it seems like we're talking about ai now right we're creating things that are infinitely smarter than us effectively and live all this time and it's probably going to do what we tell it to do right no it's probably well i hope it keeps us around do you by the way think about ai and the existential threats like speaking of gods iu is this whole technological world we talked about social networks and this increasing power of technology around us we ourselves are becoming less human because we keep becoming we we keep relying on technology more and more so we're becoming kinds of cyborgs but also there's a future that's quite possible where the technology becomes smarter and more powerful than us humans and you know starts having a life of its own in ways that perhaps we don't imagine as human beings i don't just mean like two-legged robots walking around and being humans but smarter i mean like an intelligent life that's that's beyond and fundamentally different than our human life is it's infinite it's uh also creating new species yeah yeah a new a new kind of species not even just a new species you talk about systems but like it it lives in the space of information it lives uh in a different time scale and a different scale of also a spatial scale it uh operate like we speak we spoke about individuals it doesn't operate in the sense of a single individual like embodied it's not embodied so it's not like a thing that walks around and it like it looks at stuff it consumes the world it's able to do much larger scale sensing of the environment around it all that kind of stuff i can't barely even try to i can barely conceive of what that would be like are you scared are you excited i don't define like scared or excited i feel like i try and tend to define them like the same way or i'm like i guess i i'm kind of like before karaoke it's the same well that's actually kind of my happy place it's not so much everyone else's you know it's uh everyone else is probably you know heading for the door at that point but you know it's uh while you're doing it or leading or leading up to the karaoke well it depends whether or not uh whether or not they know it's me if they know it's me that's before i start if they if they're like who's that guy then they're like halfway through the song they're already you know what's throwing their beer what category is a song or a particular song are we talking about in terms of like your happy place oh man are you kidding me i mean obviously we came in rhapsody i mean there's no question because oh yeah because i don't have to sing it here it's that it's like you remember can you can i be oh yeah of course is he here no yeah then yeah yeah all right if you i like this here no that i can't i've a torn i've uh i've torn feelings about bohemian rhapsody because i like the beginning part the sadness i like like the solo the heartbreak but the second part i understand it is so much just like it gets ridiculous it's so ridiculous it ruins it for me but it's more about flexing on people i think if you can actually hit hit that hit that you know the falsetto yeah so it's it's not okay so you appreciate enough for the musical uh beauty and complexity of the song you just like to flex on board because like for all yeah like what's the purpose of anything except for just to let everyone know that you think you're cool and there's no better way of doing that than karaoke so i'm not sure why bro captive audience yeah exactly oh fear and excitement of artificial intelligence i mean like you know me i don't know anything about i just i basically i don't i don't understand the implications of of any of this i would just say that like radically altering what it means to be human in such an unbelievably short period of time just seems like such a crazy thing and also it's not like we're i can't remember who said this to me recently might even be like i can't remember so this is definitely not my idea but uh we're we're not even going hey would you like to opt in everyone everyone is being opted in you know and particularly when you want to talk about like large-scale robotics a large-scale ai like the world is changing people in senegal are opting in right now without realizing it it's not even like and again i don't mean to pick on senegal it's just whatever country comes up to mind but it's in the developing world but basically uh you know recognizing that this huge shift is coming we have no idea this is a decent idea and also something else i've always been considered is uh you know you think about most of the really awful awful awful things that have done in history large-scale slavery hall you name it it didn't people say that it came from this motivation or that motivation maybe it did maybe it didn't fundamentally the issue at least in my mind i'm not a historian power differential if you if you and i can't contest we don't contend it's not like you we fight and you might win or we fight even you'll win comfortably it's you are so unbelievably powerful compared to me that there's nothing i can do to stop you that seems like a recipe for something really really not great happening because if you think about like uh you know european countries encountering each other and i'm just speculating i don't know anything about history but let's say countries that can contend with one another versus countries that can't let's say an alien species alien race shows up you know right now we don't want that i think stephen hawking said that that makes for it makes perfect sense to me we don't want that if you can come here we better hope you're nice because what are we going to do what are we going to hope that you invade the water planet like they did in uh you know one of the uh side lord of the year where the world so i guess what i'm trying to get across is like shocking levels of power differential between groups makes that makes the world ripe for horrific abuse in the event that someone decides to do it it's like like you imagine an adult hitting a child like hating hitting a child no one in their right mind would ever go like that's a great idea because it's such an it's so grossly imbalanced you're like this is wrong but but it's also on the table only because of the gross imbalance so i guess to come back it's like whether we create ai and it's on some crazy level of its own or it's i'm in charge of it or so i just it seems like we're we're creating you mentioned like game theory and nuclear war what prevented nuclear war i mean i presumably mutually assure destruction i mean hopefully also humanity and the humanity and the the reasonable you know cooler heads prevailing and going hey i can i can understand the veil of ignorance and i uh i don't go oh yeah let me kill those guys because i can i go this is wrong period and in concept this is not an action i should take but it's also nice and easy to keep me honest if i know that i can't get you without being got myself yeah but what happens when i can get anyone anything and i'm more or less untouchable like that seems to me to be like like various times in colonial history you know what i mean and what happened we know what happened but so the possibility of really bad things are plentiful the possibilities but are the possibilities of really positive things applying for like what though i'm not saying wrong i don't know so i can give a million examples one is just the examples of the parent and the child uh you said uh there's a power differential there and we don't like a parent hitting their child about not just hitting like beating like really yeah great beating their child how often percentage-wise do you see that happening even though that that that uh power differential first of all other people's kids let's just put this on the table i love kids but other people's kids can be annoying sometimes sometimes you got to deal out some justice i get it but we don't practice we don't take advantage of that power differential so like there is ethics there's moralities that emerge that allow the power differential to be used for good versus for bad so like you're one of the assumptions with stephen hawking or with uh if russia became much more powerful than america or america much more powerful than russia in the cold war your assumption that immediately that power differential not your assumption but it would express itself right would express itself in the in the same way that it was trying to express itself when there was a more uh level competition but it's also possible when the power differential grows the incentive the joy whatever the mechanisms that uh made sense when it was at the same level that the incentives become very different it's not as fun to destroy the ant colony you start becoming more the kind of a conservationist like one hopes it's an evolved perspective though yeah well i don't know if it's evolved or not but it's definitely a possibility it's unclear to me that something that's many orders of magnitude more powerful than us will want to destroy us well i mean what did we what did i mean how did how did mass slavery occur how did you know like just big dogs playing with not i think i think slavery and a lot of the atrocities in history happened when the power differential was not as great as as we're talking about with ai potentially is that not somehow worse than it's not obvious to me it's not obvious that things that are way more powerful that's fair okay so i think i i think you're i guess how do you restrain it though uh there there's a lot of different discussions of how to uh i just even restrain each other because let's say i go and decide to strike someone's child which i'd like to think i wouldn't do yes i will be promptly i will find myself in front of a judge and so i feel like there's a lot can you imagine how many people used to get murdered just in the woods yeah i mean i would just presume it's a lot you know and i don't think most people are lunatics like that but i would just say that's the point if you're given though if you're given to that your ability to get away with it was was greater in the past because a chance of detection was less so does it i don't know this is what that's called an artificial intelligence ai safety research called value alignment of ensuring as you build the the systems that become smarter and smarter and more powerful and powerful make sure that their values are aligned with the entities over which they're becoming powerful with with humans so if you were to talk to an ai that's becoming smarter first it's dumber than unit but it's becoming smarter and smarter you have to create mechanisms where you both value the same things i guess one thing i wonder so i guess i'm probably not like sharp enough to grasp this if i'm honest but i guess like i wonder like uh i used the chess programs um you know was deep blue stock fish and then like alpha zero and alpha zero teaching itself to beat stock stockfish without any help in four hours yeah yeah like it becomes orders of magnitude more intelligence than us in effectively an instantaneous period i guess what i always wondered like uh if you were that much smarter than me i feel like your ability to manipulate me would be pretty significant or at least potentially you know but manipulation implies that the incentive is to overpower everything around you like there's implied incentives if your value is to actually like uh it depends what you want in life okay what you want in your system like it's it's not clear that the goal of an ai system that's all-powerful is to destroy all humans no i don't think that i don't think that it is either i guess we're going to even enslave all humans that's fair i guess what i'm trying to suggest is that something adequately powerful these these actions are on the table yes they're on the table and that's scary and that's why a lot of people are really concerned about it and are working on it i'm just trying to make the case for agi because if they're watching this he's the one to kill uh no actually i was thinking i was uh yeah i i watched toilets like really well no i mean that that's the main concern for all the people in the aic to research people talk about agis it's uh it's kind of disturbing how little people are working on trying to create mechanisms that keep ai's values aligned with ours that's completely unshocking yeah we we humans seem to do only good when like you know you even look at like coronavirus it's like when like the water has to be leaking from the ceiling you have to be there fine fine blood everywhere fire just destruction we do we just seem to ignore completely and all over the wall riding all over the wall this is fun nothing to see here we'll be okay but we do all right especially in the united states you figure out even when this becomes a really serious problem taking actions last minute there's something about the innovative spirit that results in a solution last minute right before the deadline it works out well i mean how i don't know how you did school probably a lot better than me but that was how i did school i couldn't be mo i was no motivation up until like the last you feel like we have 22 hours to do the entire semesters of work like let's do this yeah and you get like 19 freaking mountain dews and then uh yeah well that's that's why you and i are failures in life because i just talked to i mentioned cal newport uh with his book uh deep work and so on he is of the variety of these creatures that basically does everything ahead of time that's shocking because he this dislikes the he thinks it's unproductive uh to experience the stress and anxiety of the deadline because you're just you're not going to be your best performance wise and you're not going to do the best work so it doesn't make any it's completely irrational to uh to a function based on the deadline you should have a system a process that gets stuff a little bit of stuff done every day so like you should be and constantly be systematically honest with yourself if you say i'm going to get this stuff done today and this week at the end of the day at the end of the week you have to then reflect on what you did who you planned and improve that plan update it constantly update every day every week every quarter whatever those durations are uh as i'm listening to this and reading his stuff it's like oh yeah i agree with everything i'm like yes i'm clapping but like the reality is and then i'd go back and just eat cheetos and like don't do shit until like blasphemy and cheesy but actually like again not that it'll ever matter not that it's ever going to matter because he's so shockingly productive and well thought out that whatever i've decided to think about trying to monkey wrench in there is uh is definitely going to be able to deal with but it's funny that again because you're a human being not a god all of your strengths are you have a corresponding weakness the less you practice working under the gun the less comfortable you are working under the gun the more practice you have working under the gun the better you get it the downside is you're always working on the gun so you're less productive or it's like your work quality maybe drops so it's an interesting thing it's like it's almost like hey i wonder if this i wonder if khabib nurmagomedov has a lot of heart and i'd say the answer is almost certainly yes but you go well he hasn't struggled a bunch maybe he doesn't struggle well and it just so happens that he can also work under the gun really well he just doesn't like to do it yeah but uh yeah but it's an interesting thing it's like i guess what is it the aristotle we are what we repeatedly do we are all we're all practicing something all the time so i guess it's it's funny i guess that's a question that i have though i would love to ask him really neat is uh in certain jobs i mean obviously you want to have preparation always always but certain things have like a degree of like entropy in the system and you go i need to practice working under the gun and i'm not saying that's what i need to do because fighting it should be for the most part it's a really sterile environment the grand scheme of things like fighting in a cage is very sterile compared to most other things in life right but dangerous but sterile and uh unless of course like you know like the other guy the ref decides to hit you should be hilarious but um anyway i guess just going like okay so at what value do you get out of adding a degree of let's say you could even be planned by someone else but junk in the system and you just have to work under the gun to make it happen let's say for instance for like police or something like that the situation turns left hard at some random point in time that could happen to any number of people so i guess it's interesting things that allow for perfect planning or quasi-perfect planning versus things that are inherently unstable and then what are the what's the psychological fallout of comfort with that because i think a lot of people that are really comfortable under the gun let it happen a lot for all the good and the bad of that does that make sense no that totally makes sense it was i mean his answer would be that you have to be honest with yourself if it's valuable for the your success to practice being under the gun and then you should schedule that john then he's smart you should plan that you should systematically and then as opposed to doing it half-assedly because it's as opposed to letting the environment choose the randomness like control the randomness to where like you optimize it i was just it's so efficient it's shocking just to hear about it yeah no he's he's i mean the same way you are he's annoying in the same way which is like he he drops truth bombs it's like yeah yeah that's so true yeah we're probably comparably you know doing that you know but he's so he his profession requires that so he's not just like a motivational speaker or whatever he uh he's a a computer science theoretical computer scientist and he needs the long hours in the day of doing like serious math so it's mostly math proofs and for that you have to sit and think really deeply it's like really hard work compared to like uh what most people do like even when i i mean what i do like programming is way easier than rigorous math proofs because you have to basically have this machine and you have to uh your brain to churn out logic in a focused way while visualizing a bunch of things and holding that in your brain and holding that for 10 minutes 20 minutes hopefully several hours and you're not just like doing homework you're doing totally novel stuff so like stuff that nobody's ever done before so you keep running up against the wall of like fuck this is a dead end oh no wait is this a dead end and like that whole frustration that's serious mental work that's like incredibly difficult mental work so he knows what he's talking about that's something that's amazing but like you said he's like this seems like the standard for the quality of work that he needs is so high so almost anything less than this level of systematization and organization would preclude it right so he can't afford the kind of bullshit that i don't know about you but that certainly i do which is like last deadline kind of stuff because you can't do that kind of work uh uh last minute on kind of stuff so my question for him in general is like and for you and i is like well here's these negative patterns that we do of like doing shit last minute and so on is this just who we are now or are there some i don't think i'm really big into a free will you know i was thinking that it's mostly predestination at least in this regard it's the same with like communism like as long as it fits my uh whatever is the lazy thing to do i'll i'll just not believe in freedom yeah i'm not a congressman opportunist or uh yeah that's when that was i'm an opportunistic communist and capitalist i just do whatever whatever is cool at the time exactly uh let me ask you um to examine some fundamental principles of a particular thing that joe rogan brought up to me several times online and offline okay which is that he thinks that the tie that i wear okay is something that makes me uh vulnerable to attack that you sh should be the reason he doesn't wear a tie is because he can get choked very easily with a tie it's a big concern okay my contention and by the way he wore a suit last time too uh he didn't wear it on the podcast he wore it for dinner later yeah i wore a suit the other day and i i had uh no socks on i didn't realize yeah you're supposed to wear socks yeah that's that's my understanding why'd you wear a suit did you go to court no no and i didn't know no yeah i don't know i just wanted to play i wanted to pretend i was an adult for a day okay cool yeah so uh so my contention is like the jacket everything is more dangerous than a tie that's kind of where i was going with that that's kind of where it was my first thought too like if once the tie becomes an issue like yeah like everything else is already it's already an issue yeah because the tie to me now without like messing with it now is is to me has some of the similar problems that a belt does so like for example i don't know about you maybe you can correct me but i'm not sure you can use the belt as tied you know i know there's some kind of guards you can probably utilize the belt with but the belt sorry when it's tight around the waist and we're talking about a belt belt or a keyboard it's a g belt okay sorry but importantly it's it's not that great of a thing to use in most cases i would say because it slides it doesn't you can probably invent a few interesting ways to use it as leverage as control and so on but there's just so many more things around that are better built better better yeah and so for me the time when people don't realize i suppose are we trying to sell a dvd here and have some some widgets and bells and whistles because in that case the belt is really important part of what we do and i would really encourage you guys to look into it yeah uh if we're trying to actually like learn something and say like you said we're surrounded by better options well that's the thing i mean it's not obvious to me that the belt maybe there's actually undiscovered things about using the belt you know i think people have used like like putting a foot inside the belt somehow inside inside the keyboard there's some this is a no punches ski grappling situation yes okay yeah i guess so it's already fairly contrived right but with punches too like is there okay let's let's talk about a street fight with a belt that's like a jeans belt like a belt clothing belt okay so i get to take it off and whip them in the face of the buckle how serious is this street fight are we talking about like they're nice no beat up or are we talking like no like death like one of you has to die oh yikes whoa okay oh you you ever like i i'm in this situation all the time and there's a reason i'm still here i had something i saw we tried to fight with the starbucks we were talking about power differentials yeah hey beat up kids all the time just pick the easy w you got to get the ecws you want the hardware i'm undefeated come around the playground watch what happens no like to the to the death what is their clothing that's useful you know they're from my perspective for your use or their use uh both am i used to their use no like i like how you want to take the belt off and use the buckle to hit them with but first of all how you're gonna take off the like the belt well there's a lot of effort involved in unclothing well what i was figuring was when they started to see me take my pants off in the fight they were like what they're going to pause and rethink the situation for a second yes and i'm making dead eye contact obviously yeah exactly nodding and then you know by the time they realized you took a belt off until you could whip them with it yeah you actually you're already one possibly two steps ahead okay so fine let's not talk about your own clothing let's talk about their clothes okay i'll take off their belt and hit them with it no but that's that's much harder no question but if you can do it oh i'm maintaining i got no i just shit how did it come to this there's alt but the point is there's alternatives that are perhaps more effective yeah in my perspective this might be clueless there's almost no clothing that's more effective than almost assuming the situation is no gee grappling like i feel like clothing particularly when you start to add hitting like every single time i start grabbing your clothes if you start you start hitting it's not like nothing could work but most of the time you're like why am i not using my arms for something better than what i'm doing them right now right yeah it's very difficult for me to i don't know in terms of just distance i can't imagine a case of different distances even like situations where let's not talk about like like a situation where you haven't both yet agreed that a fight is happening solid clothing's nice if they have it on then i mean solid clothing oh yeah like something like a good jacket because you can snatch somebody on their face yeah you know it's like if you if you took my like you know like he snapped down in judo like how easy it is to snap down a beginner yeah it's like so i agree with you actually a tie in that sense might be a really effective way to snap down so the snapdown is really powerful to change the like disorient the situation and give you a lot of different opportunities for you know taking their back taking them down doing hilarious stuff like snapping them down with their tie into your knee and then when they come back up doing this and you're already so yeah in that sense i agree but not as a choking mechanism because the effect of joe had is a choke i think you would probably choke me with your tie more easily than i could choke you with your tongue probably i'm serious because like if you get you can get like you get my back and you can put it around somebody's neck you know like uh like like you ever see a die hard yeah yeah you remember when the super uh swedish looking blonde dude or whatever was was trying to choke bruce willis with the uh with the chain and then he ended up getting choked himself with the chain if i recall this properly but anyway yeah like like that but uh yeah i don't feel like i feel like if i start grabbing your tie you have too many other great options i mean i do like the snap down that you actually made me realize no i think you're good there what's that i think you're on the right path with it with a snapdragon yeah particularly if you start with like one of these like you know like like you like you poke your finger in my chest and then snap down real quick oh yeah because it it also socially speaking it's not a threatening thing to just you know to to reach for the tide it's not particularly like a business setting you know i mean they'll never see it coming yeah because i was thinking choke but it's not it's a really good leverage point because like grabbing a jacket the jacket will slide if you try to snap down you really have to get a whole like a really good hold well that's a good point because around the back and the neck what if it's a clip on how much of a jackass would you look like you feel like and then they just yeah they stick you one would you ever see the uh japanese politician or i think it was japan yeah it was that guy is so he was so calm and cool had like it was ever it was beautiful technique the level of uh of actually the throw was even gentle yeah but uh yeah it was perfect it's amazing well executed yeah more of our politicians you just toss the shit out of it yeah we need more teddy roosevelt exactly i like our politicians like talking about fighting when it's clear that none of them even it would ever have been in a fight ever yeah somebody was saying teddy roosevelt is interesting i didn't realize this as he's one of the greatest presidents this country's had and he was one of the greatest presidents even though he faced no crisis whatsoever he literally willed himself like nothing happened during his presidency he's just a bad motherfucker who made really great speeches yeah so you like you know uh this made me realize i was just talking to a historian that like most of the people who we think are great need also a good crisis that they've that reveal their greatness but muhammad ali right this muhammad ali i mean in sports but but you know what i mean like the circumstances what is greatness you know i mean it's like you have to it's not just your capacity it's what you what you face right it's a quality of opposition circumstance what you overcome so i guess what you're saying is joe rogan is wrong about the thai thing you know i don't want to go so far as saying is wrong you know the man is not here to defend himself maybe he has some things that i'm not understanding i'm willing he has not deeply thought that this is my main criticism of joe he's not deeply thought to this and the mma journalist would be like ryan hall says joe rogan is wrong and hates ties and has ties they'll integrate hitler back in there somehow nice what's uh you talking about greatness and greatness requiring a difficult moment in time can you like reflect back and think what are some of the hardest if not the hardest thing you've ever had to do in your life well you know i think i've had a bunch of things you know i've had a lot of things not going my way um you know i've been incredibly fortunate i've had a lot of things go my way also um but uh leaving leaving teamwork urban in 2008 which i firmly believe was the right thing to do um is one of the uh that was very difficult at the time not like not a difficult choice but it was uh because of why i was leaving but um psychologically first of all lost in general leaving yeah team a family of all kinds doesn't matter what the circumstances i didn't lose any friends but i lost a lot of people i thought were my friends and i uh i lost training i lost i had also had like a really serious my wrist only does that so like uh at a really serious uh wrist surgery like that i didn't know if i was gonna be able to compete anymore after that i just got my brown belt that was uh it was a tough time like uh psychologically physically everything but i was very very motivated to do my best and to push through it and to uh just to carry on in a positive direction no matter what in a different direction and uh we lonely this is the thing about family even if it's an abusive family leaving it's tough people are complicated and even people that i that i don't think very well of that i think on the whole i don't think very well of it's it's unfair to paint them with one brush um you know obviously there's greater and lesser examples of that like the person we discussed last time who's an infinitely you know beyond almost anyone that we could ever imagine meeting in our own personal lives yeah yeah bloody elbow yeah in terms of forgiveness and hate i mean do you do you have hate in your heart for for people in your past i don't know for that process no i mean there were definitely times where i've been negatively motivated to prove people wrong or to accomplish things in spite and i think that some of that is valuable if i'd be lying if i felt differently i think particularly uh i do really well in conflict um i'm useless without the usual deadline thing i'm used to yeah i'm using chaos i'm using i do i'm used to that an antagonist i like fighting i like competition i like being pushed i like feeling like if i don't play well i'm going to get hurt i mean i have no choice but to play well i'd play with everything i got at the very least and i guess i would say though is uh you know as i've gotten uh you know more time and you know lived a little bit longer you see you know various situations for uh you know you know with increased uh increased color i guess i would say increased clarity and uh you know there are a lot of lessons to be learned even from from times in history or bad experience that we have and the question is can we take those lessons and move forward and that's again what i think we're seeing and sometimes socially right now we're forgetting important lessons of the past and that's not good not saying hey i don't get why we why we could be going in this direction or that i understand entirely but hey let's not forget the lesson so we don't have to learn them again because that doesn't really serve anybody and anyway i guess i would say i'm thankful for all of the experiences difficult and otherwise mostly difficult honestly most of the times i remember i'm thankful for every loss i've ever had particularly the tough ones i'm thankful for uh you know for all the relationships many people have taught me many things and continue to teach them anything some of them are still some of my closest friends some of whom are people i really don't get along with at all and some of whom are people i think really poorly of oh there's not many of that last group what i guess i would say is uh there's there's been a lot of things and opportunities to learn and uh you know throughout that and also it's not as if i've never done made any mistakes myself now again they're magnitude differences i like to think and i can definitely say that none of the mistakes that i've ever made have been mistakes of intention you know i've screwed up a lot of things in my life but i can confidently and and easily say that i've never had ill intent towards people as i've done it so you sit there like man this is the right thing it's the right thing and sometimes i've been wrong but uh you know you never sit out with malicious intent and i think that when i find that i think people do things differently when i do think that there's malicious intent i have a difficult time forgiving that how does love win over hate ryan hall in this world we talk about social media we talk about forgiveness of uh some of the more complicated people in your past uh if we scale that to the entire world before the ai destroys us and although the human race is lost to history how do you think love wins over hate well i'd like to preface this by saying i tried to make pancakes the other day yes it didn't work but i'm happy to comment on this so uh basically uh wow i i think like i think most of the times that that i can think of that i've struggled you know it's uh and can and the times that i've read about is being unable to see the humanity in other people and also even in sometimes our enemies and the people that have done awful things and you go what would allow people to do this that or the other and that doesn't forgive what they've done depending upon you know some things are forgivable some things are less so but you want to understand why it's like to our knowledge demons don't populate our world neither do like literal angels walking around being actually perfect a lot of times the things that it's i find it deeply amusing watching you know people hoisted by their own batard on twitter even though it's gross and it's really unproductive it's actually like equal parts amusing and like awful because you're not you're not happy that someone's being raked over the coals particularly unjustifiably but it is funny when it's the exact same thing they were raking others over the coals for not like a week or two prior and that's happened repeatedly and will continue to happen and i guess i would say as you mentioned you know a uh prior you know like a recognition of the humanity of others of that all of us make mistakes that it's difficult to understand intention i've had arguments with close friends of mine over text message where both of us ended up super pissed because we were completely misreading what the tone the intention of what the other person was doing and even if i was reading it correctly which i wasn't it's so easy to uh ascribe the most negative possible you know the least charitable assessment of what they're doing and i think that that's such a dangerous way to live your life and it's also just a fruitless way to live your life you know it's one thing to go hey why did you do that i was pissed did you what did you do you just you did that to make yourself feel better like you damn right i did and have i done that plenty of times my life yeah i would lie if i said that i didn't you know uh why did why did you punch that guy in the face he was going crazy at me and hit me and i asked him to stop and then i gave a warning and i'd put him on his ass i'm like no i'm not sorry but then looking back now with years to sit on him like do i understand why i did what i did absolutely would i like to respond differently now yeah i would you know it and it doesn't mean that i think plenty of things that people do are understandable doesn't mean understandable doesn't mean correct understandable doesn't mean that you go oh yeah that's great you go i could i could see someone doing such a thing but i guess just wrecking trying to understand and see the humanity in others because if i can't see the humanity in others how can i see it in myself and also you know how am i meant to interact with everyone as you said whether you know even if we're a society of individuals for at least for the time being hopefully you know in perpetuity we still come together as a whole and watching it's weird like you said it's if i only ask why once i start with stay out of my way and i'll stay out of yours leave me the fuck alone you're like okay that's fine ryan but that's easy for you to say living in a society that doesn't actually function like that so it's a little bit cheap but if i recognize that that's step one is i don't hurt you and you don't hurt me but then we go well but how can i help you that's step two and then it goes way beyond that and a lot further than i've thought about it but i guess what i would just say is again recognition of the humanity and others and that we all have different strengths we all have different weaknesses and it's you can never really be sure where the other person is coming from but if we approach things charitably as charitably as we would hope others would approach us i think we'll do a lot better and i guess one thing that i read that i liked that i thought was accurate and unfortunately disappointing was everyone is a great uh you know jury or their i'm sorry a great lawyer for themselves and a judge for others and i think that's a terrible way to live life even if it's an understandable one yeah i don't know what's happening and then probably flipping that is the right way to live being uh being constantly judgmental of yourself and a defender of others and that results ultimately in interaction that de-escalates versus escalates right yeah and you can you can we can all live in a world like that and sometimes you're like hey man people that deserve punishment won't get it like okay hey what do they say better to have you know 10 guilty people go free then one innocent person you know burn and ultimately that is i think that is a better world than the other way around and if all else fails uh join the team that builds the ai that kills all humans yeah obviously i mean if you have to be on a team pick the winning team what that's been the uh that's that's my hiring pitch actually it's a good hiring pitch you're still taking resumes you want to be on the team that doesn't die during the great apocalypse not immediately you want to be on the one that that's uh you know eventually long suffering and stepped on right yeah life is suffering ryan hall this was an amazing conversation i really enjoyed talking i could probably talk to you for many more hours i hope i do as well ryan i love you buddy this is a great conversation thanks for talking today thank you so much for having me i really appreciate it thanks for listening to this conversation with ryan hall and thank you to our sponsors indeed hiring website audible audiobooks expressvpn and element electrolyte drink click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from frank herbert in dune i must not fear fear is the mind killer fear is the little death that brings total obliteration i will face my fear i will permit it to pass over me and through me and when it has gone past i will turn the inner eye to see its path where the fear has gone there will be nothing only i will remain thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you