Josh Barnett: Philosophy of Violence, Power, and the Martial Arts | Lex Fridman #165
the following is a conversation with josh barnett one of the greatest fighters and submission wrestlers in history with an epic 25-year career that includes being the ufc heavyweight champion and countless other accolades he also happens to be one of the most intelligent and brutally honest human beings in all of martial arts and especially so about his appreciation of and fascination with violence quick mention of our sponsors which feels ridiculous to say after that introduction monk pack low carb snacks element electrolyte drinks eight sleep self-cooling mattress and rev transcription and captioning service click the sponsor links to get a discount to support this podcast as a side note let me say that i've been a fan of josh barnett for a long time this conversation was indeed a long time coming and i'm sure we'll talk many times again for what it's worth i'm a student of combat sports admire when they're done at the highest level either through masterful execution of skill or relentless dominance of pure guts for context i'm a black belt in jiu-jitsu and have competed in wrestling submission grappling jiu-jitsu judo and even catch wrestling which is a variant of submission grappling that josh is one of the great practitioners scholars and teachers of i could probably talk for hours about what i've learned from my time on the mat but if i were to say one thing it is that the mat is honest you can't run away from yourself when you step on the mat it reveals your fears the lies you might tell yourself all the delusions you might have or at least i had that there's anything in this world that can be achieved except through blood sweat and tears that honesty taken to the highest levels as is the case with josh creates the most special of human beings and definitely someone who is fascinating to talk to if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it on apple podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman and now here's my conversation with josh barnett who were the philosophers and philosophical ideas that influenced you the most are we just jumping right in that's we're right and we're not interested no foreplay on camera all right i had an interesting philosophical journey at least i think it's interesting and that was i think as far as organized philosophy or maybe uh i think authentic's not the right word but like uh yeah we'll stay organized um i would say that nietzsche is probably one of the people with the most influence on on me uh but i also feel like to a degree your personality and will oftentimes dictate what philosophers that you can you can vibe with yeah so what what what ideas from nietzsche was it the the ubermaj definitely the ubermensches is huge to me because i see it as an extension of basically the religious concepts of god and higher ideals but just put into a different a secular context and the idea also that the ubermensch is a striving and overcoming you know something that you're always working towards that very few will ever it's not like the the concept that you can just make them it doesn't happen that way and it's not based simply upon if you were say put through a genetic program and and and turned into a super soldier like i wouldn't that wouldn't make it you know that's like the the very surface level and incorrect understanding what ubermensch is the ubermensch is the idea of this this kind of uh human that that transcends all the the weaker lower aspects of humans which we're full of but i also think that there's an element in nietzsche's writing that suggests that it's not something you can't even be in all the time like it's even a temporary state because it's not something that we're capable of maintaining it's something to strive for like a morality uh an image ideal a set of principles that we can connect to that doesn't rely on otherworldly kind of uh outdoor things with nietzsche i feel like the concept of the ubermensch is something built on authenticity as well as heidegger was like dozen right so when you are authentic and heidegger being a follower of nietzsche's and highly influenced by him uh with i think that the ubermensch is an example of authenticity in that it isn't about trying to be anything that you cannot be or to go against who you are but to actually understand that accept that and then work with what you can work with and and and create from your lump of clay that is you because i can't become certain there's certain things that are just not going to happen for me because it's not in my proclivity i mean i'm never going gonna be you know five foot tall and 120 pounds i mean that again i guess but uh um but i know but as you get more in tune with who you are as you start learning more about what unique things or at least what that that combination that makes you that gestalt part of yourself what those things are and how you can use them then you know you can work towards being that taking what that is and seeing if you can get to that point now the likelihood is no maybe probably never i mean but we can never achieve godhood yet you know religion is is a constant you know striving and a look at a higher ideal concept even if it's multiple gods or one god it's still essentially all built around this concept like i i like the idea of catholics original sin if you think of sin not as evil but as you know missing the mark the archer's term where it derives or even like in spanish you know without so as being if you accept that you are imperfect if you accept that you you need to constantly strive even against yourself because you you will figure out the best ways at which to submarine your own capabilities submarine your own dreams and wishes and whatever you will ruin them more than anything else and you will tell yourself that you ruined them on purpose for a good reason or you'll say that you'll figure out a way to put it on everything else but yourself and so the idea of thinking of well as i'm starting off on this whole thing i got a lot of work to do and that's just the way it is and i got to figure out what areas those are going to be and so you know i thought oh yeah if i think of original sin actually can be that can be kind of a clever idea but it's also just accepting that we're all uniquely strange and unequal in our own ways but we have to figure out how that fits in the word authenticity kind of connects to all of that so striving to be your authentic self means figuring out exactly the shape of the flaws the the character of your like little demons you get to play with and around them finding a path to whatever the hell uh ideal versions of yourself you can carve and pretending like that's such a thing is even possible the other idea about nietzsche is on his idea of morality he presents the argument that uh morality is a human illusion and that uh you know there's not such a thing as good and evil and these are all kind of constructs do you think there's such a thing as a good and evil that's connected to some objective reality i think that there are some i actually do believe that there are some universals i'm not kantian in any way but i do think that there are some universals and the thing that actually brought me to even the concept of that was jung so you know jung's concept of the collective unconsciousness and then taking that thought and then applying it to looking through his history and uh the most varied history you can find so i would say probably religion is your earliest one that you can get for for written history or uh written examples of human behavior and psychology at its at the the furthest that we can look into it uh with you know from man's hand to whatever the medium is cuneiform or whatever but as you do that and then let's say going from mesopotamia to india to you know up to and just going from all these places as disparate as they may seem as many different cultures and ethnicities and religions and how the religions will will vary quite a bit from monotheists to uh polytheists and so on and so forth but then just seeing how there's all the through lines and of course campbell he did this uh much earlier than me thinking about it but uh i think that by looking at things that way and starting to find the threads instead of always just looking at everything as being its own compartmentalized concept as if it only applies to this time this people like getting overly pomo about it is just a really idiotic post-modern so you think that there is uh just like joseph campbell there's a thread that connects all of these stories narratives that we constructed for ourselves as we evolve and that thread is grounded in some kind of absolute ideas of maybe on the morality side which is the trickiest one of good and evil somewhat yeah i think that a lot of this stuff is just derived from a biological perspective i feel like these things are innate within us do you think our innately humans are good like we no i don't i feel like i also feel like there's an issue of scale too like um like nasim taleb likes to talk about how he views his the way he interacts with with groups in terms of scale you know what is this thing about like at a at the familia level i'm a i'm a communist and then at the civic level i'm a i'm a republican or something at this other level then it goes on at the widest level he's a libertarian or something of that nature you know like fundamentally human interaction changes on scale on scale and scale and also uh from uh you know subjective to the environment around them so and i don't even mean environment just in the sake of physical environment uh nature right like nature's constantly trying to murder you well it's not really trying it's just nature's being nature the universe is the universe and uh at times it takes you out it's just not with any particular uh compunction or prejudice it's just oops you know sorry there's no more dodos my bad but don't you think the particular flavor of the complexity that is the human mind was created like let me make an argument for that all people are fundamentally good okay is uh there's an evolutionary advantage to being to striving to uh cooperate to add more love to the world of like compassion empathy all that kind of stuff and that the very thing that created the human mind was this evolutionary advantage whatever the forces behind this evolutionary advantage and scale yes so when we're dealing with a small tribe sure yeah when you meet another tribe maybe there are other factors that are going into that let's say you scale up and so your 150 has exceeded their 150 and like you start to get to a certain point where um you can't really be close enough to someone down the line of some of of that next like that 150s 150 150 and they just now all of a sudden become some some guy whatever and when it comes to some guy at once it starts hitting scale i don't know that it's capable people can be as as magnanimous to a stranger as to the known if they orient themselves to be secure enough because it does come to security insecurity in one way or the other either brought on by the unknown brought on by an actual threat brought on by even their own as we would use the word insecurity in that their own insecurity within their own capabilities their own belief in themselves all these things can change things from being compassionate and what have you to at least at the very least maybe not evil but self-interest driven to the point of negative results for those that aren't you know what i mean right but another way to frame that is uh maybe it's less about scale and more about the amount of resources available so if we're overflowing with resources in terms of security and safety all the things you've mentioned if we have more than enough resources then the way we treat a stranger the way we position ourselves towards that stranger might be in a way that uh allows us to be our real human selves as opposed to sort of our animal self and therefore it's mostly about how clever can we descendants of abes be in coming up with all cool kinds of technologies and ways to uh efficiently use the resources we have such that we're not constrained and my hope is that we can that human innovation will outpace the growth of our the number of people that are starving for resources yes uh i think that there's a lot of uh rationality behind uh this argument and you know in in some ways i agree and and in a lot of ways i see it as missing the point of of how this experiment has been playing out across time when you look at uh what for one it's like define resources you know what is a what is a resource of of as humans uh would would define it right or wealth even and so you can say well you know an iphone's a resource the internet's a resource water obviously is a resource but if we weigh them what is more important to human beings water internet or iphones it's water right so if we look at resources if we start with what do human beings need to live i mean actually live not live here in this bullshit fantasy creation extension of our own ingenuity and you know a prison of our own creation and also a paradise of our own creation but this is not how human beings normally live this is all built upon stuff on on built on concept on idea and some and and some of it's built on just well this is the paradigm so this is what you do human beings need food they need water to survive they need shelter from the elements and they need certain skills to perpetuate these things and be able to pass them down so that they can so these things don't become uh you don't end up in this this gap where you have to relearn things because if it's lost then that time before you can get it back again is going to be a dark ages of sorts you know or it's going to be highly detrimental to to your group because not knowing how to fish not knowing how to hunt not knowing how to even clean and cook the game once you have it could be lethal that's fascinating to think of that as a basic resource the knowledge to attain the very low level things of water right and we'll figure it out we did it once before and we've done it over and over and over and over again it's just costly yes it has costs for sure um but when you think of how you look at the well we'll just deal with the first world of the west you look at the the the pathline the pathway of of western civilization and its growth and then you look at how technology injected into it over time you know how it magnifies uh things or how pushes things at uh orders of magnitude faster and then the internet comes along and even faster you know so you're watching industrial evolution to what is it the uh the capacitor and then so on it goes further and further and as the internet and technology especially on the electronic side of things start increasing in capability it massively outpaces even our necessity for it at times it becomes you know plan obsolescence happens quicker and over and over and over again and wealth increasing increases increase increases in terms of the things that we're able to acquire right i mean i've seen homeless people with with smartphones you know so we're living in the most wealth-laden luxury laden age of all of humanity yet what happens when we see calamity or people go on hard time what are they the things that they value you know what what is what do people go to an argument about the cost of things that are luxury items generally and not necessity items you know we get into fights about um you know things that are at the end of the day not necessities to us you know people are so concerned about netflix and the internet and personally i'm very concerned about the internet because i look at it as my own little personal library of alexandria in my pocket that's what i love about it and the ability to have a tool as effective as it is even though i'm in a constant battle to not let that tool become a vice or to become something that that actually brings me to a lower state but we will the question is over the are we willing to murder each other over netflix versus murder each other over water we're willing to murder each other over water that's a given right but that's our animalistic cells of death well it's also a necessity for it's animalistic but it's also either you do it or you don't right like unless somebody's willing to share that water or if that water is of such a limited uh uh capability or such a limited amount then you will have to murder to have that one netflix the argument is the higher we get up to this hierarchy of what we consider in los angeles resources yes we were less willing to be to commit violence we are less willing to commit violence the oh i would say over netflix but we are willing to commit violence over netflix over everything associated with netflix over televisions over sneakers over over um you know i mean when we look at a good i mean the majority of the stuff that came with the riots i mean it was use car dealerships uh targets i mean and then you look it's like whoa okay what are people what do they got what are they so hell bent to get out of this whole thing i'm even talking about the ideological elements or anything like that just like okay something's going on boom looting whatever yeah we you know what what are you going to loot yeah you know you'll have aoc say oh people needing bread like i didn't see a single loaf of bread you know i saw television poetry you know but to me it is poetry in a sense because you get to see who we how we actually are operating you know what are where what is becoming first principles to most people but wait but you could also argue though those rides were more like the madness of crowds which is oh it's definitely a lot more than just that i'm just saying that given a chance it's like okay boom the the lights are off the grid is down we've we've hacked into the whole system turned into an 80s movie and you have the ability to go get a hold of whatever it is that you think is most important and what do we do and i say we as in you know including all of us we grab a tv we we attack it we we break into a sneaker store on melrose we do it's just like uh we still giant cause statues or the value of that is completely market driven like it's just a piece of polypropylene or whatever butyl and you know it's cool you know i'm a big fan of art uh but uh it's like you know i can't eat that and at the end of the day man you're sitting there with your with your like what'd you do today honey what'd you get you know man we were able to you know oh i got this i got this designer art statue are you gonna go well you can't really sell it on the on like the art markets where people are really gonna pay for it so are you gonna become an underground art dealer with your one piece of cause art one interesting thing you just said before i forget it you mentioned the library of alexandria and your phone well your phone but also just thinking of your little world that you're creating for yourself on the internet that's a really powerful way to actually phrase it one of the things that uh you've been on joe rogan several times although everybody always comes to me oh that was so great i didn't know you you're on you've on joe rogan i go this is like my fifth time dude i've been a fan of yours for a long time from uh from other avenues this is a long time coming actually everybody you have no idea like how many times through uh messaging and missing each other over the years this is ridiculous this is a long time coming you don't realize how special this is for us this is a well i'm also star struck we'll talk about this but you symbolize something very important to me through my journey through wrestling through jiu jitsu through judo through to street fighting through just combat there's uh you're the in some sense the devil on my shoulder of like of violence in a good in the in in uh the devil gets a bad rap does he does get a bad rap i i realize you know sitting encased in in ice down at that low-ass level you know yeah but you know the angel side is more like the athletic the sport the science the tech the the technical the chess side of things so uh but on the library alexander let me ask uh because you're on joe rogan it does make me really sad and i realize that i'm just probably being romantic that his most of his library of interviews that were on youtube have not been taken down because he went to spotify and that was the first i'm probably an idiot but it was the first time i realized that this knowledge that we've been building up on the internet doesn't necessarily last forever no it doesn't unless you preserve it i mean it's like all things if if you do not preserve them if you do not make uh efforts um you know so many of my it just really brings the minor off the top of my head all my so many friends of of mine that are jewish uh you know they're they're basically secular but yet through even the secular aspect of just keeping the traditions alive it's like well you could always pick a book and read out about read about it clearly it's called the torah but um if you don't put these things into action if you don't make them a part of your consciousness maybe even on the subconsciousness just by through through repetition they will die they will become simply something that exists somewhere until you find it again and carl gotch used to say something um he would say that i don't invent moves i just rediscover them but yet gotch and billy robinson also would understand that you if someone's not carrying the torch it'll go out now that doesn't mean fire can't be rekindled it just means that it that torch no longer is lighting the way on on this knowledge and so it's it's important to be an individual even on on an individual level to be a repository for for aspects of knowledge you mentioned gotch you uh consider yourself a catch uh wrestler so i've mentioned to you offline that i competed in a couple of catch wrestling tournaments uh can we go wikipedia level at the very basic you're the exactly right person to ask what is catch wrestling and what are its defining principles i would say the easiest way for us to talk about and give uh an overview of what catch is in the simplest terms is think of collegiate wrestling with submissions that is essentially what catch is and it's not surprising because collegiate wrestling is actually derived from catch's catch can it's just that over time certain aspects were were removed from the competition structure so that they became null elements things that were discarded but it's funny that you can take high level amateur collegiate types and you can show them a move and then add a little bit to it and go oh well hey that was just like what we already do here but except oh i didn't know you could take it all the way to this point or you know things of that nature especially when it comes to professional wrestling like uh teaching people like no that that i know you're just using this for in a show but this is actually a real move and here's how it really feels and so collegiate wrestling and wrestling in general for people who are not aware is basically two people started on their feet and that's a score that they're trying to take each other down and they have to um they score points along the way you can end matches by pinning them for example on their back i think one way to describe wrestling is uh it's very much about figuring out ways to establish control and leverage in these kind of uh tie ups or there's different styles where you can do more from a distance to where it's more about the timing and all that kind of stuff ultimately it's an art of like both upper body and lower body and you could choose the different puzzles that you solved there you could be attacking the head the arms you could be attacking the legs there's also part of collegiate wrestling that's on the ground that has more uh what's called like a referee's position right the referee's position where you're on uh your hands and knees basically and so uh do you do you understand what that's supposed to simulate why is that one of the standard positions it's one of the standard positions because one it's one of the easiest ways to actually get up um but two it's because you cannot be on your back if you're on your back you're getting pinned and the back exposure or being pinned is pretty much the universal wrestling thing one taking the guy from their feet to the floor and two pinning them as you go from like was it uh cornish wrestling turkish oil wrestling mongolian sumo uh indian um well they'll call it pelhani it's also called kushti um jujitsu judo so many of them is like there's a usambo even if it doesn't end the match it's still like one of the most important aspects of the competition itself across oh so every style and this is where submission like catch wrestling or uh submission wrestling or jiu jitsu feels different which it seems like for most wrestling for a lot of wrestling the dominance is the is the goal as opposed to submission which i guess those are two are related but dominating the position so that's what pinning is it's almost like breaking your opponent like breaking uh through all of their defenses to where they're completely defenseless and you could do anything with them that you want maybe that's a wikipedia definition of dominance i don't know and then yeah i mean it sounds very much like a chain to a radiator yeah yeah yeah this uh there's a threat that connects all right but submission feels different i mean it is actually different when you think about it across the landscape i don't think radically different but distill slightly different and that um if you think of wrestling as being derived from from from combat right so well it is combat sports but more more lethal combat getting somebody off their feet and onto their back is about as lethal a place for the person on bottom to be in general i mean i i don't don't come at me with your talks about your fucking worm guards and blah blah blah and whatever spider bear okay get out of here with that this is we're not talking about you in this highly uh regimented sporting environment we're talking about general you know all the body hair none of the waxing human beings so um getting someone on their back okay they're how you as you're trying to get up you're getting hit with a rock or stabbed or what have you set on fire who knows generally these conflicts are not just isolated to one on one you it's if it's four on two your your your your buddy that was with you back to back now he's on his back what do you think now it's going to be one-on-one well three go on one so and then you go you elevate this to to armored combat right and it's boom put them on the ground oh crap it's hard to get up well while you're struggling to get up stab you know that's where jiu jitsu's uh concepts come from with all their leveraging and off balancing is oh man if i end up in this situation in tight close quarters combat yes we could fight it out with swords and knives and what have you but it's way easier if the first thing i can do is foot sweep you on your back and then pull my knife and just go and stick is there a thread that connects all of these different arts from not just arts but from the very base violence of war just like you said that there's no rules to the very regimented uh ibajf i do jiu jitsu tournaments and just you kind of laid out some of it but can you go all the way to the so when you you start off with absolute skills in the sense of absolute offense and defense in the taking or preserving of life right full-on at its at its purest form of self defense and self-preservation okay and then you extrapolate part of that in that all animals train in violence all play usually degenerates into some sort of soft violence so be it cats when they're kittens and puppies and all that everything learns how to kill how to fight um not that you know just that that dumb alpha meme stuff where the idea is that oh by being alpha that means you run around like basically just being a bully in a shithead no actually alpha wolves spend very little time fighting because if you were actually alpha you don't get into fights there's no need to um and if you are probably getting into any large amount of fights it's probably because you're being shitty at being an alpha and now people are tired of you being in charge um and yet in the animal world and it would be the same for human beings at that that that base beginning level of violence there's a big risk so i know that we live in this place with health care and where or you might be in a place with nationalized health whatever right there's there's there's band-aids there's there's uh uh uh penicillin there's all that kind of stuff but that's not the normal way of things you know yeah there's a channel that just hurts me every time i i used to follow and i had to unfollow it because it was too painful for me as a human being called nature is metal oh yes on instagram it was uh sobering and then it was like this is too sober that's very sobering so in there the risk is at its highest level there the damage you take the winner walks away hurt getting lame when you need every aspect of your physical and athletic faculties to survive because it isn't going to be the the this isn't the first and it's definitely not going to be the last especially if you're the slowest one you know it's a is it was it uh is a lyric from a clutch song uh don't go for the fat ones just go for the slow ones [Laughter] oh man but that the universal truth of the way nature works it's not cruel it's just the way it is yeah i mean watch uh animals get into fights on on any of these sort of documentary stuff you'll see an intense short and then dispersal like you'll see as soon as one feels like uh things have switched just enough boom the bear or whatever it is takes off it's like i'm not i'm done with this because if you can get out of there with just some scars and what have you okay you lose an eye no it's not as good uh you really get hurt bad and get infected you're done yeah you know so it there's a serious risk to be um that can come with these sort of things yet i believe that we are inherently born for at least aspects of and use of violence and so at the end of the day we need these things not just to not just survive each other but they're they're a part of being able to hunt and other things but uh so violence is a part of human nature violence is a is like it's an absolute it is in every person it is a part of every interaction it isn't part of every every law everything and i'm not by the way i'm not an ancap so don't even don't don't hit your wagon to me on that one and cap is an arcade captain capitalist yes not a not an end cap they have nice book book shops yeah they do i mean i'm not i'm not gonna you know sit here and and shit talk and caps uh although i also used to get into the conversations with uh with uh an ancom uh anarcho communist uh a good friend of mine and he would he would bring up this stuff and i'm like yeah cool man i'm down with anarchy you ain't gonna like it what do you mean i go because i'm gonna take on i'm gonna gather all kinds of people think i'm gonna make this i'm gonna get the strongest together going to take your shit okay okay on that topic i have um a friend of mine now uh a fellow russian uh ukrainian uh michael malus oh yeah i'm familiar with michael melons i watched a little bit of your guys's uh conversation so this is really good to ask you because uh i like how he's in the white suit and and you're in the white and black but he he lives in new york city he is uh espouses ideas of monarchism and his idea and this is different than um sort of the iron rand set of ideas that there's a line between sort of capitalism that's backed by the state and just pure anarchism and his idea that violence won't take over in an anarchism is one that feels to me not grounded in reality i may be agree i may be wrong so is there some so uh the idea with pure capitalism is that you mean laissez-faire completely deregulated yeah yeah well what it will agree it'll end up in one it'll end up in if if you're anti-globalist it's gonna be that it's gonna be globalist 100 because it has no con pure capitalism has no consideration for uh has no consideration for your your native users or of any sort like it does it doesn't matter and but the idea of governments is that the land little piece of land geographically you're born on means you're going to stick to whatever founding documents created that little land so anarchism is against that and the argument is you should be able to choose which ideas you live with and the concern there is nobody uh this geographical land the governments that organize on that land will not do not need to protect you from the violence and my sense is there does need to be an army there does need to be police that help what however the form that police takes but there needs to be a more centralized not completely centralized but more centralized safety net of to protect you from the violence scale again right so if you want to have your anarchist utopia well we'll call it utah your anarchist creation here at certain scale i'm sure it's doable you know um but as it scales as the scale increases it's completely untenable and a state will emerge a state will always you because even people always think of states as as like people rubbing their hands and smoking cigars and back rooms and just out of nowhere coming around just like oh we're going to create this big centralized thing and just so we can tell everybody what to do and we can be in charge i mean i know that there are people like that that exist that they would like to do things of that nature and that they see the use of power as something to be used more for their their personal gains over first which again self-interest in human beings but um uh but eventually a state people want us they want something to go like okay who's taking care of this and who's taking care of that and who and how do we create some sort of uh some sort of uh protocol for this like okay well when it's not bob when is it susie when is it whatever i mean like how do we you know it's got to get done if we want this thing to become bigger if we want our all of our plumbing to work right if we want it's just i'm sorry a state's going to happen a state is also when you think about it it's supposed to have consideration to tribe right so if people think that we're not tribes well you're not you're not really thinking very deeply we're all tribes of a sort and uh everybody likes to use the word tribalism in this idea of of this uh antagonistic concept but and while sure tribalism can be antagonistic tribalism can also be uh a positive thing or i could just say it just seems to be a natural thing people you know they create their their groups of one sort or another and so when you have well when you think about where when nation states really started to become a thing uh and i don't mean even the more modern looking variants that we could think back of and say the 19th century or something like that right even older than that i mean you think the assyrians didn't have a state of some sort of course they did um they how do you increase your your your your empire if you don't actually have a place to start from a ruler so you're saying like naturally when you start talking thinking about scale of humans naturally states emerge and so can we try to make an argument for anarchism which is okay okay so uh anarchy in a sense is in opposition to the unhelpful unproductive inefficient bureaucracies that eventually the states lead to yes and that's what we can see i mean i would say less anarchy let more study james burnham you know uh or well any anybody that wants to talk about the the managerial problem and the matter so you you have a sense i hope maybe let's think like what is the path forward with the inefficient state is it revolution or is it to work within the system to constantly improve it man i don't know that one i mean my general sense uh and maybe this is the nietzschean part of me is that yeah it'll it would take maybe not even just maybe not even defining uh it specifically as revolution maybe it would just take just total calamity to to get people to stop being shitty to not stop being a lesser version of themselves to stop thinking more about uh things from you know the paradigm that we exist in now where we're giving so much value to stuff that isn't really all that valuable you know where we're so concerned about likes and i don't just mean like whether we get them or not but that oh man maybe we should take this off of our platform because this is too destabilizing to people and it's like because once you exceed dunbar's number i think it's actually without having the right faculties which would need to be developed because this is dealing with this is dealing with tech that brings things ways of approaching being that we are not naturally programmed to be able uh to handle appropriately so and i think it's even even even more it's even more detrimental to women than men because i think uh women have a more natural proclivity towards um uh group association and and and more group oriented thinking and patterning and now and with also coupled with seemingly more sensitivity towards towards human uh states so i feel like women like the classic idea is like oh you know women are psychic you know i have a sixth sense and what have you and i think that's just a uh a way of uh simplifying what i think is that women may be more in tune with picking up on the unsaid like they might be better at seeing physical cues uh inflection and tone like different like they may be far more sensitive to these things which to me would make sense because dealing with children that can't uh communicate uh so so generally more understanding and all the full form right now okay now whether it be a woman or a man but especially with even the social uh push on this concept of empathy which of course it gets to the point where it loses any meaning anymore like people use the word empathy absolutely incorrectly all the time and they don't even understand what you're really asking of people but let's just take it as as we're using empathy in the correct sense and you're taking on the emotional content of the thing itself now you open that up to thousands of people maybe hundreds of thousands of people all across the world that you will never meet that you will never know that you're not even getting an actual true representation most of the time of who these people are you're you're meeting persona and some of these personas are even deliberately created to elicit a response inauthentically are you referring to bots or uh could be bots or actual people bots are one thing but i mean there are literal people out there that will create something create uh gofundmes for for tragedies that never didn't really or events that didn't happen or any number of things okay i mean burn their own house down and then say you know we were attacked and then it comes down you did it to yourself because you wanted money and empathy and this that and you wanted all this this emotional wealth let's say this emotional uh coin as well as actual if possible you wanted to leverage it in some way that's not the majority of people but i would say a good amount of folks are thinking well if i post this photo um and i put this little blurb in there i bet i can get this much cachet out of it in this sense and i'm not even and this isn't just a reference to like butt picks and stuff like that because clearly obviously people understand that that uh our inborn uh sexual nature is easy to manipulate i mean that's pretty pretty obvious but you're you're saying this kind of new medium of communication on social media is uh is is unnatural and it preys on us and so as you you want this you know you look at you look at an anarchist kind of mindset right and so you're just like there's no there there is no overarching state to to create any kind of uh structure right and so if you have that unfettered capitalism aspect with it and before i say anything particularly damning about unfettered capitalism uh i'm a massive capitalist because i view capitalism essentially as what it boils down to i get these arguments people too they they start giving me all these extra definitions about capitalism like no no this is obviously some sort of theory you're taking from other shit but that doesn't describe capitalism capitalism is the ability for us to create whatever we want you know create our thoughts ideas physical things and trade them freely amongst each other uh in ways that we find um acceptable right you know i'm not even using the word fair because i might think it's fair to me you might think huh well i mean that was actually i think he what he thought was unfair to him and it's more fair to me and someone a third observer goes oh man you should you should not have paid that for that you should have paid this and it's like well you know what it works for me without sufficiently acceptable you you both agreed to the transaction correct and uh you know but but also at the at the root of that is freedom right and as far as i can tell i've been banging this around in my head it's like for every one unit of freedom you need two units of accountability and if you don't have that what you end up with is human self-interest we're not even going to get into evil human self-interest sabotaging other things even not in a sense to be malicious okay so in terms of uh let's let's put this as mathematically speaking i love this so anarchism is more like two units of freedom and one unit of accountability or maybe zero units of accountability possibly i mean the anarchists tend to think like no everyone will be accountable fuck they will when have you seen this happen in real life you know i mean people aren't even accountable in their revolutions after that time so uh you aren't looking at the way people really are it's like marx is like yeah the people are like this they're like that look at how capitalism does it i mean he of course assigns a lot of really ridiculous economic principles and practice uh but and also assumes that everybody you know who makes any profit from anything is somehow stealing it and you know really assigns a negative moral aspect to them and then it's like oh yeah but then eventually communism will happen ever no one will act that way anymore and you're like whoa hold on you just said that people are all are you saying it's all due to capitalism or it's is it innate it's just it's a fundamental misunderstanding of and it's like hey look at you you're like a notorious like anti-semitic angry like uh just absolute curmudgeon of a human being who seems to be really not all that fun to be around marx yeah and then it's just like so you have to think like if if there was one billion marxists in the world how would they behave it would be absolute they would hate each other so bad and you know this isn't for me to even poison the well on marx is like oh his personality sucks like there's lots of people whose personality sucks that doesn't mean they can't make i don't know that his name what you know what somebody argues he's just a he's a loner i mean i don't know his personality sucked at all let me walk that back and that he was human saying his personality sucked he was sometimes contradictory irrational sometimes he was uh quite sexist despite the emails i've gotten that uh that that's that told me that uh that there's this people was written to me that uh nietzsche has been unfairly labeled as sexist in his discussion about women i'm pretty sure there's a bunch of documents where he's just like he's just a bitter guy i i will agree with you and marx is as bitter as they come to but um you know what bitterness in and of itself doesn't make like wha why i hate marxism comes from you know the the whole the entirety of the thing and but the dismissal of humanity but i'm not going to say that marxism or practical man you can find any forbidden book and it could have something good in it it's colonel's a good idea yeah and like at the end of the day you know marx is a human being he's got a nice beard he does he had a hell of a beard yeah a decent portrait i mean he looks like the kind of guy like i wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley but thankfully i don't think he was much of a fighter but in any case i mean not the anarchists are are they're more hot for like uh max sterner people like to think that uh nietzsche borrowed a lot from sterner and my argument is one you don't have any real evidence for that and two bullshit you know i mean anybody could i i the fact that they have some overlapping thoughts doesn't make it uh lifted not to mention go read a lot more philosophy and see how there's so many different things oh this guy said it in uh 1722 well and then this guy says that again in 1922. does that mean he read the other guy's stuff not necessarily i mean he's working from the same type of human physiological construct as anybody else like of course it's possible this guy could think the same thing we we think a lot of the same things to be perfectly honest i mean reading the hagakure going back to philosophy books this was really impactful on me as a younger adult because here's a book written in the 19th century about someone who lived through the 19th and 18th century at times as a samurai now a monk and his objections to society at the time the same objections one was having to society as i was reading it like the same human behaviors the same uh impetus for action that he found a problem like well that's the same that's the same shit now like we're not and this is the thing and then i'm reading more religion i go oh we're no different than anyone who wrote the torah or older we are the same thing with the same problems with the same uh psychological issues the same human behaviors like these things are not different yeah and we haven't changed growing set of tools though to to kill each other with or to communicate together and all that kind of stuff but underlying it there's a human nature well we're also trying to understand that human nature i think we've just like you said learning how to fish acquired more and more knowledge about that human nature uh but it's been a very slow journey it's slower than people realize yes in terms of understanding uh human nature let me ask in terms of egoism to be curious uh to get your sons about ayn rand and um her whole idea of virtue of like selfishness sure and her because you mentioned that everybody has a kernel of truth there there's potential for a colonel truth to be discovered in anything for example i've been recently reading mineconf you know what that's the thing even there's something in there's probably things in mineconf that are not the surface level read if you get all hung up on on all probably all his crap about uh you know his anger anger at jews and this and that all this crap it's like okay yeah that that's right on the surface try to get below that try to see you know how is he how is he creating the jews as a cope somehow like how is he using why why are they his his scapegoat and i mean scapegoat in the so randy gerard's uh concept of the scapegoat i mean in that sense whereas uh you know hitler uses it wants to make the the jews the scapegoat for world war one yeah i mean for me the starting point similar with ann rand is uh like mineconf is not a good place to search not just because hitler's evil but it's just not full of ideas no it is not it has its significance due to a lot of historically speaking but the starting point for me with hitler is like to acknowledge that he's human and to at least consider the possibility that any one of us could have been hitler so like that not that peterson kind of concept also um jonathan height has a thing about uh the difference between hate and disgust mechanisms and things like that and so he used he goes into the looking at uh hitler and his through his his diary entries and journals and stuff like that to look uh and see it more as the the discuss mechanism then also try and see like if there's any evolutionary biological uh attachment to this whatever i mean you're right he is a human being any of us are we're all human beings it's not that probably jarring for people to think but we're we're all i guess supposed potentially capable of just being in and all these evil people in the world think they're doing it for the sake of good yeah which makes them the most dangerous and there's some there's differences in levels of insane i think hitler was way more insane than stalin i think stalin legitimately thought he was being doing good i would say that's probably true stalin it was just outright brutal like yeah he had he had his five-year plan he had all those other things uh he's just had a much lower value for human life yes and so he was willing to take make decisions about what he actually as a as a good executive of which he was of managing different uh bureaucracies and so on he was willing to make decisions that resulted in mass human suffering where hitler was it seems like to me what much moodier so allowed emotions and moves to make his decisions we also have to consider the different trajectories and how where and when they were making their decisions and i mean not by time specifically but you know hitler engaged into this this conflict across multiple continents and then that everything that comes with basically fighting the whole world stalin had his conflict and then he really mostly compartmentalized the rest of it so he was dealing with his own internal instead of dealing with the internal and the external so if stalin was put under a world war scenario i don't know maybe he would have eventually lost his marbles too yeah i'm not sure that you that's you're right the hunger for power was more internalized for stalin he wanted to control the land that already existed as opposed to wanting to colonize other lands he was as nationalistic as hitler but uh and was as capable and willing for violent conflict as hitler for than the aims of the state but he he he centered and internalized prior to then externalizing and moving outwards whereas even maybe prior to him there was an interest to continually push communism in an aggressive sense following on the momentum from the the 1918 revolution and that the halting of that uh through various aspects i guess in germany part of that was the the national socialist like they they came up and then they were the other ones to fight the communists and so you had the two totalitarians going after it but then in the rest of the world that was not dealing with um totalitarian aspects it was just it wasn't going to stick especially in the west and other places but stalin see just you know casually thinking it seemed like stalin decided to go all right well we're not gonna go just start launching right into more conflicts here we're gonna these dudes are going down so that's cool for us because they hate us and we hate them um but now we're gonna we're gonna focus internally and then we're gonna work on growing at a slower rate and picking our battles a bit more specifically and of course there's you know you can get to the even this is after stalin but yeah you got the besmanov type stuff talking about subversion in in cultural aspects yeah i mean there's this fascinating dynamics to propaganda throughout that that's that's a whole nother colonel yeah do you think hitler could have been stopped one of the things that's kind of fascinating to look at is how many nations both journalists and nations wanted almost crave to take hitler's word that he wanted peace until it was too late they almost wanted to be deluded themselves i mean the same is true with this stalin uh people wanted to take stalin at his word for they'll delude themselves yeah that way we will do we we will delude ourselves over any number of things and until even after the fact where the history just says hey fuck face you know you you cannot supplement your pseudo-reality onto actual reality here anymore but yet we deal with people in pseudo-realities constantly it i mean it we will always find a way to to change reality to suit our needs well the nature of truth now there's now multiple actual truths it's kind of fascinating there's multiple versions of history that people are telling you know the the version the version of the the the great patriotic war in russia the world war ii and russia is very different today under putin than the version that we're learning on uh in the united states and then different than the version in europe in the united states uh the the hero of the war is the united states in europe there's a much more sad and solemn story of suffering and so on sure and in russia it's the great patriotic war yes it was a unifier of a sense and it i mean yeah i mean you can't argue that war and conflict that and or are just even um reducing that to stressors agitation suffering doesn't um create human motivation you know we started this off you brought up frankel and i'm like yeah frankel's dope answers for meaning uh maslow's great and and i talked to you about how i started to think like man do the ability for human beings to to to live and or potentially flourish in the worst environments you can think of is pretty incredible in and of itself and that it's a crazy thought to think that without frankel and maslow ending up in concentration camps do they write some of the most important books on philosophy in the 20th century and that's insane on a lot of different levels but suffering is a creative force i mean i don't do you think we'll always have war yes we will always have war in some form or another we we need quote unquote air quotes for those just listening uh war to survive we need war to flourish we need at least can you explain the quote of the air quotes well because uh take take take take wars as violence no violence so like so we're talking quotes because uh well you know what us getting on the mat or just getting on these hardwood floors and wrestling around yeah is not literal war it's war of a sort you know work you know it is it is a deluded form of war american football is a diluted form of war all this these are diluted forms of war tennis is a deluded form of war um and i think the one of the best explanations i ever got from this and another person very uh impactful on my life and outlook and thinking about things cormac mccarthy and so in blood meridian there's this fantastic speech about war given by the judge which there's a ton of fantastic speeches on things given by the judge yeah all that existing creation without my knowledge does so without my consent okay that's pretty heavy that's that's hard dory can you break that up can you say it again uh all things that exist and creation all things that exist without my knowledge do so without my consent what does that mean well i think from the judge's perspective it's like well i didn't consent to to that bird or that dog or this building or all this like all of this you know i didn't create it so it's done so without my consent and if it's up to my consent well i'll design it how i want to there's a another similar uh look into how the judge is in that book is he would study everything everywhere he went and so he's collected this group of nerdy wells from all over to go on these hunts uh against uh certain tribes in in the southwest and getting paid by the us government the mexican government so he's on these indian hunts and yet they're going to all these different places and they would stay the night in a cave somewhere and he would find cave paintings he would write them all down or he would find old pieces there's an example of him the narrator uh explaining how watching the judge and how he drawing everything he's got his notebook just full of things drawings and writings and how he found like a piece of armor from a conquistador or something way back in the day of spanish armor and he draws it into his his book and then crushes it so that so the reason we'll always have war in this society is because there's this struggle of amongst people that want to be the designers there's there's that but it's i'm just saying that uh he's got this whole quote on war like war is about is is play war is a game and the difference is is that what's at stake so all things are a game of some sort and some you're putting up for it or what you're willing to put up for it determines whether or not you're going to participate or not and you know all aspects of any game is war and it's just what is at stake you know if it's your life it's a different story if it's just a coin it's another thing a nice way to put it is uh humans play a game in this kind of pursuit of uh creating whatever the hell the reason is that we keep creating cooler and cooler things that that it seems to be the result of a game that would naturally play it would naturally crave i don't know i mean that's been the struggle of philosophy it's to understand what is the underlying force of all that is it the will to power is it i think will to power is a really great way of of describing it do you want to be the winner of the game no not just nah i don't look at wilt powers being the winner of the game well i mean if we're going to get philosophical yes you want to be the winner of the game what does winning the game define how you win everybody's going to define that win differently you know you could define the win in the most base level like oh i got all the things well if you got all those things without the the needing component of fulfillment then you're going to be a very unhappy person with a whole lot of things there's a self-referential aspect to where to me the winner of the game is defined by the people playing the game so if i'm playing a game i want to win in the sense that most of the other people who are playing the game will say yeah that guy won by their by our collective definition if i just come up listen i'm sort of if i come out that's a lot of that's a lot of weight on the external on you right but that's that's how games seem to work somewhat so i'm already a winner in my life by defining my own different success i'm i'm basically the best person in the world at doing uh uh me at being lex yeah so like and now i'm really happy with that that's that's the source of uh well i mean think about it games are also iterated right so you you start off with your game yeah and then your game with your immediates and then the game further than that the game further than that and then the game today and the game tomorrow and the game next week and so it never ends and if you try to keep thinking about it that way no wonder people go crazy but we we don't want to think about things that way we don't want to think about uh being towards death we don't want to think about um whether or not i'm going anywhere after this other than in the ground or what have you like you know all of these games are sense some distraction this is where we kind of but i mean it's violence is that um we need to let this out and so it is of our kids need a wrestle and play just like animals need to wrestle and play we need to have forms of competition we need to have ways to to test ourselves to create uh when uh what is it uh when at peace a man of war makes war with himself and so we need to be able to competently go at war with ourselves and go at war with our neighbor and go at war with our neighbor's neighbor in a way that is repeatable at the very least so one one way of saying that there will always be war i mean that's my hopeful view is that most of the work conducted in the future will be like you said the man must go to war with himself that would be great that that's that's what to me love is is like focusing on yourself and your own improvement and your own creativity and towards others feeling uh sort of emphasizing cooperative behavior and compassion and would be great empathy it would be great but i mean you can have well i'll put it to you this way if you have uh a whole community of randians and a whole community of ancoms and they could all like uh i don't know uh toast of london on netflix and they love netflix and they love the internet and they love uh picking apart moncomp with you they love like they like all these things even the esoteric that they can they can they can get on with but at the at the fundamental route they cannot help but go to war because they are literally oil and water no the perceived but they would the various labels they assigned to themselves would need to dissipate well this is really well then you would have to stop being whatever it is that you took on as your ideological or religious point right yeah i mean i there's some days i'm uh and calm some days i'm an end caps and uh whatever the uh an arctic uh naked capital i mean there's it depends on the the hour the minute of the day you're constantly changing moods and embracing that flow the change of opinions of ideas as there's some days like i'm actually cognizant of the fact because i've been not getting my sleep and after i get some sleep i see i'm so much more optimistic about the world the less and less sleep i get the more sad cynical i guess you can see that up and down i don't even let my well okay i try not to let and most days it's never a problem any sort of like uh what are the kids call it now black-pilled way of thinking be my my my over my the umbrella which i hang under so we actually uh to drag us back can we talk about carl gotch and cat tressley uh is he the greatest catch wrestler i don't know if he was the greatest catch wrestler ever i don't i don't i mean he's one of them for a myriad of carl gotch uh billy robinson uh gotcha robinson's trainer billy riley um so who are these figures and what do they mean he's one of the greatest catch wrestlers ever because he's responsible for brazilian jiu jitsu right along with gustav gracie okay there's a bunch of things i'd like to say here but one of the things that catch wrestling seem to espouse as a principle is that of violence i i just the the termites i competed at uh the unfortunate thing and we'll probably hopefully talk about a little bit they were disorganized and the level of competition was pretty low people really sucked pretty typical is that typical okay well it's it's i mean think about um you know local run-of-the-mill yes uh jiu-jitsu tournament versus ibjf created you know a vast difference so so i you know but there is a to me as a human being that like intellectually philosophically it was more interesting to go to catch wrestling tournament it seemed more real and honest because of the way they communicate about violence i love aggression it is it is often uh more honest i think that who is that from does that originate from gosh and then well i mean it originates from all wrestling in that uh even wait wait chalice not a [Music] not a classically considered catch wrestler yet the reason why he has the world record for most amount of world champions pinned or the record for pins in the ncaa is because well of course the idea is to put you on your back and opinion but you're there's no way you're gonna let me do that uh so how do i make it so that you want me to pin you well it's by you put them in excruciating pain yeah so at the end of the day you're both there you both want to win neither one wants to allow anything to the other yeah so how do i how do i get you to lose to me i make it so unbearable for you that you decide losing is better than staying so those are two those two are so fascinating because so coming from russia i don't know if that's where i got it or if it's just my own predisposition is i always love the there's two ways to get you to want to pin yourself one is to making it so painful not to pin yourself that you pin yourself or whatever and the other is it's sort of like uh bruce lee water flows make it so easy to pin yourself so it's technique it's like the elegance the ease of movement this is the uh satia brothers uh like the just [Music] russians are quite truthful about things uh especially when it comes to something like combat they just this is how it is yeah and this is how it's going to be it's honest yes and honesty is what i really like about uh catch wrestling because i find that we given any opportunity for us to be dishonest for any number of reasons we're gonna especially if it's a dishonesty towards a positive right like oh well you know it's all technique and it's all this and it's the gentle art and blah bro i have rolled with 80cc world champions you know some of the best you have ever heard of varying a lot of gentleness when it comes to like oh yeah they wanted to sweep you and you said no and then you did said no again yeah and then you said no and attacked their leg yeah it ceases to be all that gentle because at the end of the day these dudes are strong as hell they're flexible they're all i mean they're the difference between the athleticism and and the the ability to actually win is a pretty wide gap the athleticism shows up but then there's all that other extra and part of that is meanness and and pain and uh getting what you need out of it but see there is a philosophical difference in the way it's thought because i think some of it is just they just in denial like oh people will they like to people like to espouse a lot of things as theory and then it's like okay let me watch when they're oh you're not doing anything about what you said right now in fact you're doing the opposite you're you're literally hurting that guy because you your shit ain't working in the way that you'd like it to so you're having to use strength you're having one of my favorites like oh you're using too much strength and it's like well hold on do we want people not to use strength at this point to understand more of mechanics or are you trying to tell people if they use strength at all uh that they're somehow bad at what they do because you know it's not my fault you're not stronger than me i'm speaking to something else that's uh that's i tend to think what it comes down to is like strength is fine until you beat me with it then it sucks okay so strength is another thing i'm speaking i'm thinking about more like anger oh sure okay so like a lot of angry guys in jiu jitsu i know that really okay okay but let's talk about let's talk about they're only human the highest level of competition there's a book called wrestling tough yeah this is a really good book there's i've encountered in my life a few uh especially in wrestling people who really tried to find a way to use anger to get really angry at their opponent not like stupid anger but just like intense pointed uh anger uh distilled into something uh that you can use yeah fuel and like i remember the story i don't know where i read it might be wrestling tough where a person was imagining that their opponent just raped their mother raped their uh girlfriend or something like that to to create this like method acting thing in their head to be like to to snap them out of this polite interaction of the usual like athletic convention and like you know really design of necessity so my anecdote for this was i was sitting with uh backstage before a fight not my fight and i'm i'm working with this guy and this dude is this is a this is the world champion guy uh and he competed at the highest levels uh and he he looks at me and he goes you know you ever get nervous before fights i looked at him and i went no i don't and he just looks at me he's like fuck man i'm sorry you know how do you do it man well you know i wish i could be like you and i said you know what that doesn't mean that what i'm doing is better it's just what is necessary for me it's the way i am and i told him so this anecdote goes into another anecdote this is a family guy episode i guess where some uh another famous high-level guy told me about this experience with a world champion boxer in japan and this guy would get insanely nervous and worked up and anxious before his matches and he hated it and hated it and hated it and so he wanted to get rid of that feeling so he went to a hypnotist for a bunch of sessions and managed to and he goes in and the next fight he cools a cucumber and doesn't perform and loses and so what i said going back to anecdote one was uh you know whatever is necessary for you to get yourself in the best state of being right now to compete whatever that may be it could be absolute stress and fear it could be anger it could be calmness it could be whatever but there is a so brilliant but there is a a there's a state at which you need to be in to do your best and use the individual you have to find that can you comment on uh uh tyson mike tyson oh yeah that thing so first so he uh there's two things i wanna so he's a in terms of fear there's a clip there i think from a documentary where he talks about he is like fully afraid as he walks up to the ring and as he gets closer and closer and closer he gets more confident until he gets in and then he's a god or something like that that coupled with his statement on joe rogan that he gets aroused uh at the possibility of true like of hurting somebody in the ring so like he gets aroused at the violence yeah uh i like it because it's coupled to your basically statement that we need to own to find our own unique way of existing at our top level of performance and that perhaps is mike tyson but do you think there's something more deeply universal to the mike tyson speaking to the fact that he's aroused that the possibility of that i do actually uh although i don't think that it always equates to arousal for people in fact i would say in general it doesn't yes uh i can say i've never had a boner in the ring in fact of anything you know old combat cock is like we're not hanging around we're leaving we're going up yeah we're taking off yeah we don't want anything to do with this yes you have fun come back to us when you have something warmer softer smells better yeah but the power the feeling of aliveness yeah i could see it it being you know back to the even the concept of the ubermensch i feel like the states the highest states of being i've ever been in were in the midst of conflict i felt like that was the times those are the those are the moments in my life where i felt like i was at the highest level of being as a human in existence but yet even being in that state was not it was not something that you could interact with people that weren't in that state with you like they wouldn't get it you would almost seem and to be that way all the time either a might drive you mad or b is you're not you're something that's untenable to the rest of society like you can't function with everybody else it will not work it's just like you said with the ubermensch it's like it's perhaps that ideal is not something you can hold for long that's the the very nature of it yeah well there was an example in the spoke zarathustra about a snake being down the person's throat and biting it and then having this maniacal laughter erupting and you know to me it was at least i read it as yeah okay there's this insane moment that isn't forever but that it is life and death and it is and and the overcoming it is the thing that all of a sudden gives you that tapping into the your your highest state right this is you know man is uh a chasm a tightrope between uh man and ubermensch well i i don't want to leave your thought about uh we'll just we'll call those things flourishes to to the aspect of uh tyson's uh interpretation or or his his his expression of his feelings in combat and so i gave this antidote to the guy and i just you know at my first anecdote to that athlete i was working with and i said you know this isn't there isn't a superior way in this sense there is the way that works for you that may be something you can implement to other people if you find that person because we all have different personalities and and to me that's a that is that's an absolute i don't want to no don't come at me with all your other fucking the social sciences crap no we have distinct personalities that that personality that that who you really are and this you know again heidegger dozen like being authentic if you're if you're authentic with who you are goods and bads you will know how to create what that is and for me violence and fighting and conflict was something that always felt normal to me and i don't mean normal and like i grew up in a war zone or a abusive household or something like that i just meant that i was a kid who was very joyful and inquisitive and spent a lot of time around older people of all things uh and also while i don't think i have much capability towards engineering my mom said that one of the first things as like a little baby when she put me in my sister's old crib instead of my sister who just milled about and was fine with it all the first thing i did was i completely deconstructed it i didn't break it i figured out how to pull it apart curiosity about the world and yet that wasn't in conflict with the idea of violence no not at all and so being a very joyful and nice kid but you know kids are kids and and if if kids can find that you respond maybe more easily to agitation they will agitate you and if you should stand out in some way by being taller or bigger or something or caring especially they will agitate you they don't really fully understand it either and so i don't i don't hold anything against like any of the kids used to pick on me or whatever especially at the youngest stage just like man they don't know shit either so um but once that line was pushed for me it was oh well i was i was being cool now you're being uncool yeah well then that gives me license for everything and so boom we would just go at it or kids that would try to initiate a fight okay and being in that moment of just going going to town with someone else it just felt like this is this is i belong here yeah it was it was never a problem for me like the in fact if anything the over what i had to understand was well not only did i learn the hard way that it doesn't matter at the end of the day it doesn't really matter what anybody else does if your response and violence even to their violence if you're the winner is often going to be penalized severely you know society state apparatus they don't want any of that they want to be the only arbiter of violence in the world always but i learned a very difficult lesson with that and it was really impactful in a negative way on me but also i had to learn on an individual sense to you need to manage violence too because hey if someone attacks you or starts a fight with you and you go at it okay beating him up is one thing you know um you know trying to grab a handful of broken glass from the street and throw it in their face maybe that's a bit much at seven so you need to learn what what level is necessary and you need to learn what comes with with all what's the responsibility of when you enact violence i mean you take on something when you you have a responsibility for that this is a extension of your actions um so uh but as i got older and especially as i found sports and then combat sports now this was a place for me to flourish and to the point where i was more myself in that space than i was outside of it until time enough where i could learn to to get this back together again and i never say that i that i'll merge the two or anything like that no all what happened my my uh um my journey uh from adolescence on to uh to manhood a huge portion of it besides the normal finding yourself whatever whatever actually what it was was re getting back to who i always was getting that curious kid the kind kid getting back to the guy that i should have been allowed to become instead of what happened under the pressures of other things yeah and uh the attempt for society and and certain people within you know managerial positions to to compress what that was into something that they found more suitable yeah but those pressures allow you to discover this little world forbidden world in many ways of violence then you could explore through sport you can explore it and uh it's more socially acceptable to explore at this sport for sure and even but even then there's like uh at times it's socially unacceptable so i beat sam schilt i'm he cut my right eyebrow i cut him and busted his nose and he's bleeding all over me as i have an arm bar on top i'm getting you know it's raining quote some slayer from a lacerated some shield bleeding in his horror creating my structures now i shall reign in blood but uh i win the fight armbar nasty one i get on my feet and the first thing i do is i wipe all the blood off onto my hands and i lick it and i do my thing and all the mma journalists freaked out dana white's like man i don't know about that you know you know we don't want him doing everybody had this huge problem and then some folks would even contend oh you know look you're trying to do like no no this isn't planned this isn't i don't think of these things this isn't this is how i really feel this is who i really am and you know it was even kind of comical after the fact you know and bj penn was on the very card with me watching him at some point in his career all of a sudden win fights and then and do this licking the glove thing and everyone thinks it's the coolest thing ever and i'm like hey fuck faces i did this in 2002 or 1 2001 and bj penn actually back then was like dude you're a badass you're a killer you know where did that come from because that seems like a deeply human moment i could say i could just be you know goofy about it call it orgy stick to the line back to mike tyson yeah but tyson but uh no no it isn't it's beyond that uh is it pretty good there's pretty decent orgasms in my life at this point i'm 43. so but no none have ever compared to that like i said it is a feeling of highest being to me and i see ubermensch moment this is this is where i feel like the restrictions of general existence in society are gone and i get to fully live uh in a state that feels more meaningful of the most meaning you know i think of it as life and death and i it's just it is the way i'm built and i don't have i've never had any problem applying violence like it doesn't i i don't know where it comes from or how you would define it or whatever if you want to stick me under in a psychologist's chair but like i don't there's a part of me that can just like i know if i'm gonna apply i can apply violence to any level and be okay with it and it doesn't i don't lose sleep it doesn't bother me it's not a problem it's it was me learning how to fully understand violence humans and and the broader perspective that allowed me to think about things and like well what am i what what do i really want to accomplish with my actions in the world just on a whole you know not compartmentalizing uh my sporting career even when i get in the ring i i don't have any mercy generally and if i do it's because i make a a really deliberate attempt to be in a state where i can have mercy if i just go in there to fight with everything i got there is zero natural state there's nothing there's nothing that will hold me back other than the referee and that's that you know i i know i agreed to to be allowed to do and not to do but but within that no and i expect it to be done to me but in terms of values in terms of seeing what to me violence is uh is just yet another canvas that humans can uh paint beautifully on clearly i mean uh we have venerated the violent uh there are communists that venerate the violent on their behalf there are national socialists that venerate the violent there and then if you remove it from an ideological perspective we venerate the violent uh when they're a hero we venerate the violent in our religion well i mean i guess some people venerate the violence of of yahweh and sodom and gomorrah right so or do we say jehovah i don't know is there you've already mentioned one but is there a fight where you've achieved the highest of heights for your own personal being just when you look within yourself that you're the proudest of or maybe was your most beautiful creation is this something that stands out there there are a few actually uh fighting semi shield and a rematch uh well the first one was pretty good too uh but the rematch was i i was suffering i had suffered early prior the week prior to uh food poisoning and so while my abs are looking all right i in the ring didn't have the power that i expected to and i was struggling in ways in some of the grappling for the submission stuff that i hadn't accounted for just exhaustion or mental exhaustion no i mean like just physical this i wasn't back up to a hundred percent in terms of just power output and semi was well he's always seven foot tall but this time he was the first time i fought him he was too or 257 or 260 something something like that this time he was like 290. and so he was a significantly bigger cat and he he was he's a big dude and i just remember being in up against the ropes with him changing levels trying to take him down and he's fighting he's hipping and i just thought in my head there's no fucking way i'm going to lose this fight there's no way you are not going to beat me is not going to happen and i arm barred him the other arm even the fact he's like i really want to get you for that i want to get that match back and then you fucking got my other arm dick i'm like dude i still love you though yeah you know and that's but the whole time you're like so this has to do the the dichotomy of your feeling your worst and having to overcome you're like literally mentally telling yourself there's no way there's no fucking way i'm gonna lose this fight and then there's even my last bare knuckle match and getting in the ring and fighting bare knuckle uh boxing for the first time um and just thinking just being in a great state and just just looking so forward to seeing i mean i called someone and i was talking to them the night before and i said yeah well i i want you know i video called you because this face might not look like this when i see you next and they're just like uh oh okay that's not just like empty trash talk that's no that's like a clarity of mind and the seriousness about it i i know i might die i'm most pretty high chance of of being deformed some way so but fuck it i don't really are you do you think about are you accepting your own death yes 100 yeah i in fact and that's in a strange way that's partially what makes it so elevated in terms of my my sense of feeling by being able to have death at my side it feels good and to be there and to think that this could be the one like why not you know i'm not a religious person at all even though i very much have to seem seems to bang on the drama about the usefulness or the understanding the usefulness of religion for people um but you know if if if i got to do something then yeah put me in valhalla man i don't want to be anywhere else nothing else seems like a good place for me to be i want to i want to fight all day long and feast all night you know it sounds great i saw you uh throw your hat into the ring of vader emiliano yes he got cloved i guess i hope he i hope he overcomes it and comes out just as good if not better epic would that did i understand correctly that might be his last fight yes that's my understanding and it would be epic as hell and it would be epic as hell because the the person that i want to give my most to is a person that i respect especially at this this long uh this long this this this long career of mine and getting at this this this twilight years like and that's the thing about even this going in there with the aspect of being with death and all that is that when that person is in there they are my brother with me in this and that so when you give me your best even if i even if i win dominant fashion but if you show up and you're as authentic and being here as i am then then i love you and i'm glad for you to be here and we're in this together and and at this point you know your loss or my or whatever is no less deserving of veneration than the wind like we're here in this and so to be in the ring with fiora and to venerate him in win or defeat to be in there with with someone like that is to me it's so rare so it's incredible how the ultimate violence is coupled with like love or respect and it's like it's it's weird how this is uh how the competition in this violent form is also a uh veneration of just the human connection it's also the removal i feel like it's the purest purest ways purest on most honest places of person can exist uh that line and fight club you don't know really who you are until you've been in a fight i mean believe that and i i've seen so many examples of people trying to portray themselves as one thing and then in the ring you see who they really are or even when they're trying to persuade themselves as one thing and they're winning the crowd at times will see who they really are and still hate them you know it's like but i said all the good things yeah bro don't work that way yeah but speaking of fedor if we take you out of the picture who are the greatest mixed martial arts fighters of all time uh i i feel you out of the picture as a cop-out to some degree i feel like we need a little bit more time you know so to to see how how this unfolds because you've got to compare a lot of things and i ah did i did i i think i'm like sanctuary i did an interview i don't know about centuries but that would help if we can keep accurate records and not allow uh too much uh bias to to fall into too much profit right yeah but um i made an argument uh i was in a i get a it was it was a interview with an mma outlet of some sort and i can't recall who it was but oh it was an argument about will the winner of cain velasquez versus stephen yochik be the greatest mma heavyweight of all time and i said fucking no way oh no it was cormier and miocic that's what it was i said absolutely not not even close and i said these guys need a bit more time to see how things go and also how things go for some of their opponents and like there's more factors than just this one fight it really is and i go and when you want to weigh these people even if let's say we'll bring aleister or uh yeah aleister over him into the end of the equation okay you judge him on what you know now what he's done for you lately okay right which is a very myopic way of doing it what has he done over his career k1 champion uh he was a champion in uh uh dream um he strike force blah blah blah his overall record the entirety of all the different opponents he's fought and i just sit back and i go i okay he's not the ufc champ but his accolades his merits in some ways actually stand up higher than cormier's and mjojk is so what about the moments do you give much value to the special moments like the highest heights you rise to not in terms of records or the strikes landed but just creating a magical moment in in a in a fight it doesn't have to be even a championship fight but just you know conor mcgregor is an example of somebody who creates a narrative who gets a story he creates a drama and the special magic happens even if it's like not myth is greater than reality and that is always the case but do you and so i understand that so very much and it takes an asshole like me to to poo poo on your myth they at least get you at the end of the day you're not going to abandon your myth but um perhaps temper it with the facts and logic but uh so you're not a fan of myth no i'm an absolute massive fan of myth but you prefer facts and logic it's like when i i know i mean i like saying facts and logic because people i also i am not a materialist in that sense i don't think that materialism can solve for everything it's not enough it's not it's not robust enough i'm sorry if facts and logic and or uh reason as the enlightenment scholars all thought including marx was enough for people then we would never we wouldn't have any religions yeah we wouldn't have like there would be no we wouldn't have narratives and myths and all this kind of stuff it would not it just i'm sorry there is no there's nothing about history that supports the idea that rationality will over will overcome all there's something about ben shapiro's facts don't care about your feelings that feels to be mis fields be missing something fundamental about human nature it's not clear to me exactly what is missing to give all oh oh ben uh a fair shake yeah and uh you know i don't know ben shapiro i don't really listen to ben shapiro not against ben shapiro um i don't i'm not here to say anything particularly bad about him um although i will say at one time tom arnold was seemingly trying to pick an actionable fight with ben shapiro in the ring or somewhere yeah and i just and i actually responded like and i tried to get him to clarify i said hey are you saying that you want to fight ben shapiro that you're looking to actually because i was waiting for him to say something and then i'd be like okay well it's one thing to want to get into a fight with someone it's another thing to go pick on a little tiny you know guy like ben who's much smaller than you and doesn't train or whatever but you know if it's not me i can find someone your size and you can go fight him you know don't be a basically don't be a bully piece of shit yeah you know which by the way tom arnold you are a mental midget you are never going to be able to compete even with ben shapiro in an argument on any level about anything oh intellectual argument yeah an intellectual argument you could scr maybe you can scream louder than him but whatever but but nevertheless in the discussion of greatness in fighting i think you you need to all right numbers you need the numbers the numbers and there's the magic there is some context also in that where did aleister overing fight oh we found pride where you could soccer kick people and stomp their heads and this and that and so the the the the game environment is actually different too so more uncertainty there's more chaos and pride there's more go back a little further and go like what about the guys that used to like dan severn fought bare knuckle head butts the whole nine beat down seven right i did beat dan severan that was that was killing an idol so to speak although i didn't really kill him because i still love him you know he's still in i mean he's still responsible for inspiration along this whole pathway you know it's it's meaning meeting your god and then putting a knife in it i guess [Laughter] uh realizing they're human and then bringing them down to your level exactly but also there's a there's a huge misconception there and that is that i could bring maybe i could bring dan severan down to my level but i couldn't bring his mustache down to my level oh it is it is of mythic proportions and uh greater than yours your facial hair is greater than yours my facial hair is is is is creating its own legacy but it is not dan severn mustache level or no don fry mustache so don fry mustache dance ever mustache you know now you have like shia versus sunni like you think there will be a karl marx uh like painting of josh barnett one day with the beard and is that is that basically i hope so i'll i will actually comb my hair unlike marks but uh um chaos is uh has a charm to it it does it does i mean uh we all thought doc brown in back to the future was was quite charming so yeah you have to throw that into the calculation where they fought yes this is and the rules that they fought under you know some guy like eager of changing won a 32-man tournament or something like that i go okay uh stipa and daniel cormier are awesome and they may they will they will for sure be uh revered as when they're as for their careers 100 percent can you say that they're particularly even better overall than eager of changing maybe one of them could have beat them maybe maybe one of them wouldn't have you know maybe maybe here would have fucking got him with the knuckles right away well maybe if they fought him in pride they wouldn't have won maybe if they fought him bare knuckle they wouldn't won i don't know and there's something about the cat like do you put boys gracie in the top ten you know there's some top ten of all time in terms of competitors is capable um i don't know i'd have to think about that maybe not but i because tracy as like pyramid level like wow dude what a what an amazing man oh yeah he's so important absolutely incredibly important but there's something about stepping into uh like fighting another human being under all the uncertainty that the early ufc's had i mean you don't know yup what is going to happen and couple that with not much money yep all of it yes so that the purity of it too there's something about money i mean that i guess shit for that yes world but that ruins the purity of the violence yeah people given the opportunity for yeah yeah well the bigger things get the more i love the fact that that fighting has opened up to such a degree that the career business side of it because i i absolutely distinctly separate the two the business side of it has opened up to give me far more possibilities open way more doors for me than i ever intended it to uh whereas the p the athlete side of things has if anything just gotten substantially worse i would say and uh some of this can be some of this is due to all the the nature of all games will be learned will be gamed uh without even the rules being broken and once that's figured out you need to make an adjustment no adjustments have been made so the game just appears to be the same game over and over and over and over and over again on espn plus on whatever on whatever on whatever it doesn't really matter which night you watch it's the same game constantly and that's not because the the the athletes are worse or better it's because they have had that game uh structure long enough that they figured out what do you do to be to be the most successful at it what is the highest percentage way of approaching it essentially even if you're not thinking of percentages what would the if we take a step back it's really fascinating to think about the early ufc's did you fight dan severan in the ufc i found him in super brawl so that was the early early days you're undefeated uh what were those early days let's say of mixed martial arts like give let me tell you the day of high adventure yeah it is it was so much fun and it made you feel absolutely like you were a part of uh a novel a comic book i mean i i would love to transcribe my experiences as what i consider a second generation mma athlete except i'm way too sensitive uh to anybody's personal any things that are not not even to you know i'm not a gossipy person i really do believe that like small people talk about others big people talk about ideas so um but there's some stories that just can't you can't tell without telling the whole story and there are so many amazing stories that could be told people being at their best people being at their worst yeah the whole the whole gospel is there something you could speak to the chaos of the time oh 100 like okay so we at amc got uh connected to somebody that was throwing an event in nampa idaho and we all piled into this and matt humes uh subaru wagon and we jammed out and we left kirkland and we headed over to idaho only to find out that there was nothing really put in place it was absolute disrepair and chaos there they didn't have a ring they didn't have this i it was such a bullshit adventure but we were like well you know there's hardly anywhere to fight it's tough to find these opportunities so okay well how about this whoever is here to fight and is willing all right well since there's no venue there's no this whatever we all got gloves we got mouthpieces we'll just go to the park still get paid yeah and so folks were kind of like i don't know about that the guy i was gonna fight was he finally figured that they finally he finally gets information on who i actually am and i was undefeated at the time and i think i had fought superbrawl 13 already won that tournament and so he's like yeah i had no clue i'm so glad we didn't fight you would have murdered me this is you know what a setup and eventually matt had to had to strong-arm the guy and get our money that we were supposed to all get and drive back and because he his whole position was well there ain't no fucking way we drove all the way out here for free this is on you you fucked this up not my problem but what is my problem is the lack of cash in my account so fix it you know or me fighting my first uh organized fight against an amc guy on 11 days notice uh through a connection to an old wrestling coach i had and i just gathered up with what all my old martial art my old martial arts instructor that i had worked with and we grappled in his apartment we did tie pads in the park i ran a couple miles every day and then all right boom show it up one my fight by front joke in two minutes and then matt goes okay well hey you did really great we'd like you to come back and fight again in the summer what do you think okay go back off to university and then i think hmm well that fight didn't go exactly as how i wanted it to so i gotta find a way to get more experience i would literally fight people in uh the university like rec center on the old wrestling mats as they didn't know i had a wrestling team i would find anyone doing martial arts anyone talking about getting into street fights anyone whatever and just basically go oh ever watch ufc yeah yeah that stuff's cool what do you what do you think oh man i'm super into it man that's badass rad so would you would you want to fight i mean it was way easier picking fights and then it was you know getting a girlfriend yeah i just you know path least resistance i think it might be useful for us to uh get some advice from you yeah all right because you've accomplished for the journey of a martial artist first if you've accomplished some of the greatest accolades there is in the sport if somebody who's starting out now or like early on in their journey what advice would you give on how to become a martial artist a catch wrestler a fighter uh well i mean really what it comes down to is do it because you love it do it for that reason and that reason alone uh most people that get into this and attempt to make any sort of professional inroads with it you are not going to be the world champion uh you probably will never even fight for a belt and you're probably not going to net make money at this so don't do it for those reasons do it for the reason of the passion do it for the reason to be the absolute best that you can be whatever that ends up being you might at best only be mediocre but you won't even be mediocre if you don't do it like you really mean it so compassion look where's the kernel of the passion would you say is it in the learning process itself the improvement i think it really depends on the person right i mean there's some people that really love the the the fact of they feel like they're growing right so well to power you know you're growing growing stronger growing better you know the idea of of eliminating weakness so uh twitch i'll quickly define weaknesses as like things that weaken you not like being physically weak sure you could call that weakness but maybe you're not meant to be a super strong guy but choosing to be weak is really a different story other than just like we're all uh deficient in some way or another so that's neither here nor there it's a matter of what you decide to do with it and that's an infinite strength and weakness at least the way i look at it like strength is choosing regardless of the difficulty to make improvements to strength is even choosing to acknowledge that you you do lack and accept it and then make a decision what to do with it um yeah but there's also there's a bunch of stuff that just like you said it's what you're drawn to there's an honesty to just grappling that it seems more real than anything else you can do sure well that's the that's where the passion of love can come yeah i mean it's being in an environment hopefully that is as true as possible uh would be would be a starter so it's hard to be uh a bullshit person when you're literally trying to tear each other's arms off yeah you know you really sort of see who somebody is uh i also feel like you really really get to see somebody who there are a couple instances where you really see who people are on the mats and in the bedroom so even the aspect of self betterment growth along a path i mean hell that's part of the the the device of capture for martial arts as a business give you a belt put a stripe on your belt each each of these iterations cost 20 bucks so but there's a benefit to that too i i really enjoyed the progression of belts sure is it um you know a bit of his ocd or whatever but you're enjoying the recognition of your growth when you feel when you're made to feel when i think genuinely you do earn it yeah i agree i process it i agree i actually it makes complete sense to me it just it's anything that is is has a goodness in its purity can also have a detriment in its perversion so and there's a value to competition i've gotten some shit in the past for saying this i've gotten the most value in giving everything uh i have to try to win and and lose so like i've gotten i remember most of the matches i've lost and i think that's what i've gotten the most from the sport is losing think about it i mean if you really think about it um what what makes you want to actually in detail go over what happened oh it's the time when you didn't get what you wanted yeah it's a time when you gave it everything you had and you came up short or failed miserably okay so unless you feel embarrassed in some way right and so that's usually the only time people again calamity is the impetus for them to actually turn around and go who the fuck am i what am i doing and why am i doing it yeah instead of naturally going hmm okay well i won why what was it the cause and so i think part of my success is that when i win i'm brutal when i lose i'm brutal and there is no in-between so i remember losing uh the rematch against noguera and i still feel like it was a bullshit call like i feel like i won that fight but my my opinion is that and this even came up so one of the coaches in the back was like oh you did great you know don't feel bad you know blah blah blah blah and i go no fuck that i didn't finish him i allowed the referees to make a judge a decision that i think is incorrect and bad but that came because i didn't take him out you know fuck that no no he won he's going to get more money he's going to get more recognition blah blah blah blah blah i accept all this and i don't and it's not okay and i need to if i when i get a chance to fight him again i got to figure out a way to like take this guy out i want to say forever i'm not trying to put him six feet underground well when i fight yes i am but yeah but but the point being i need to find a way to like this is definitive you don't get to say shit about it because i'm the only one who can stand right now that's the way it's got to be anything less than that is not good enough and even if i achieve that then i gotta figure out okay it's not a given how did i get to this point how did i make that happen was it simply been uh because of his own mistakes or was it because of my my my successful action so it's always self-critical always constantly you uh love movies i read this somewhere yeah you mentioned blade runner as a favorite number one of all time the final cut that's my go-to so you would say uh blade runner is the greatest movie of all time it's one of the greatest movies of all time what's in the top nice top five uh blade runner final cut this is the original blade runner and i used to own on tape the original vhs cut yeah and uh and i had the director's cut on dvd why blade runner by the way as a kid i just thought it was so cool there was something about really spoke to me the whole cyberpunk landscapes and uh you know this guy chasing down rogue uh androids replicants and is it just the entire cyberpunk universe it's just robots as well no it's it's i mean the cyberpunk universe is part of it uh on the on the surface i have a i've always tended towards dark subject matter uh like things that are of the dark so to speak are things that i've always been gravitated towards i think maybe part of it is that the things that are darker are more accepting and more upfront with death and perhaps i think that maybe that is what was uh yeah somehow more honest perhaps and there's also the aspect of uh rebelliousness usually like there was uh i was never one to want to just do what somebody told me to do you know um i'm not sitting around trying to always be such a radical individual that i can't take orders no in fact i'm more than willing to take orders from somebody that i feel is competent and has merit and reason behind what they're doing and makes like okay yeah yeah i'm 100 for not only what can i take orders i will help you achieve whatever it is if i think it's worthwhile um even at my own expense but uh to get to that point is a rarity like it's not not a given and so you can even imagine like being a grade school teacher and this kid doesn't respect you and he doesn't really think you're that smart they don't really appreciate that but um so cyberpunk is number one what else cyberpunk is kind of number one it's an environment i love but at the same time conan the barbarian by john millions is one of my favorite films of all time uh and you know that's such a pure film in a way like the motivations are pure they're very easy to follow but not lacking in depth you know it's not it's not just explosions and and teal and orange it's uh it's it's more on the human condition and i love it and it's shot incredibly well it's got an incredible soundtrack yeah i fucking love it but with blade runner also in a deeper sense you know again the human condition you know you start seeing like what what is what is being what is being human you know how does this relate to well if you can make it and you can tell it what to do at what point is it like you should or you shouldn't you know why do you get to determine what's alive and what's not what's a life that should be allowed to live and what isn't and what would be the strain of being roy batty and seeing all these incredible moments that with his passing will no longer exist especially if he hasn't had a chance to put that flame into another torch so to speak if he hasn't written them down if he hasn't passed them down to somebody else gone like tears in the rain like tears in the rain that scene is incredible uh yeah i mean but it's funny because those two universes are very different than the barbarian and cyberpunk because they're that makes me curious about what else might be in the list uh well let me think it's a pretty do you like that no no i mean i'm sure the god i've never actually even watched the whole godfather no but also like uh was it a casino good fellas good phil is a good movie but no that's not in my top it's a good flick uh but it doesn't really do it for me uh i if people really want to get into this a little more i did make a hundred a list of a hundred hundred of my favorite movies on my facebook fan page nice uh but uh do you remember like oh yeah like blazing saddles is on there right to the lost ark um valhalla rising by nicholas from winding refin uh maniac by uh william lustig it's a 1980 gnarly video nasty horror movie about a serial killer uh who murders women and scalps them uh and it's gnarly as hell and very brutal and very bleak and very uh i mean it's the kind of thing that like a lot of people would have a real hard time watching but uh one again i like things that are dark but two i thought the performances were fantastic in this film and they really got out the i think what the underlying thing was and it was you know it was a guy who was basically just like run amok by the overbearing mother uh union archetype and it she was she imparted her insanity into him and he but yet there is this aspect you could see of him of him wanting to try and actually be able to be in the world and have love and have a feminine companionship to go with with his masculine aspect but he had no way of understanding how to really make that happen and he had a complete negative connotation to the feminine so his struggle with and there's a little part in the in the movie where he somehow comes across this model or something and they actually he starts to feel like maybe he might be able to actually have a relationship with somebody and it goes somewhere but uh yeah even the elijah wood remake i felt was really well done and captured most of the essence of what the movie was about but i still feel like the original by william lustig uh is the best what's the greatest uh love movie of all time i just love movie of all time it's like something more loves i mean i suppose love underlies most of these movies especially i mean hell takashi mikey's films are all about family of all things as bonkers as those movies are they the general theme is family almost entirely in all of his films uh yeah there's there's very i mean even you can argue later on yeah there's this every love film of all time uh that's intro i mean is excalibur a film about love uh what's this called about king arthur his caliber is about uh arthur becoming king of the britons and his love of his his country and his love of guinevere but eventually yeah it becomes more of about the the necessity for the king to love to to hold hold excalibur to stay to realize that while if you're the king you can love your wife and you can love your best friend and they may fuck each other behind your back and as they fall in love too but at the end of the day you're responsible your your love has to be to the to the country and everyone else first and not your own personal uh wants which you know well it made a much more interesting story when you have uh carmen berenina and and what is that one it's it's a german opera but uh you know into horses and slo-mo and sword fights and an epic death scene between uh arthur and his his son okay now i definitely have to watch it i haven't watched it embarrassing it's uh it is john borman's second film in hollywood his first one being uh point blank with lee marvin which is also on top one of the upper echelon movies on my list derived from a book by called the outfit by ah what is his name uh i forget but darwin cook the comics illustrator he did donald westlake wrote so darwin cooked is does an amazing comic book send up of darwin cook's novels and they are fucking incredible so anyways but uh the point blank with lee marvin uh you know it's a man driven by purpose revenge but also by like really pure motivations he wants his money he was he was betrayed he and he wants his his cash because this is what he agreed to do the thing for and this is which also is part of the reason why i like no country for old men so much which i felt was a great great great movie even better book but uh i remember talking to my friend and i go you know anton chigger is the most pure human being in that whole book well that guy's the villain i go is he evil he's the one he lies to no one he does everything he says he will do he always follows his word and on the rare occasion he he allows fate to make a decision as he figures like well whatever all led us to hear will will will lead us one way or the other and if we're at this crossroads what how is there any better or worse way than to do it over a coin flip and so that whole scene where the guy is going well what am i putting up and he goes everything you've been putting it up every day of your life and that's true everything we do is a as a decision as a calling as a choice and it toward and then it bumped me out they they reduced the last interaction between chigger and uh what's his face's wife and he finally finds her and she's like you don't have to do this i mean she's he's like yes yes i do this is the way it is you can think that your life could have turned out any sort of ways you could have done this you could have done that but the reality is this is the way your life is that's the way it was always going to be you know the fact that i'm here is the end of it and that's that yeah it's funny if you're honest this is what dark movies reveal that the villains are the the purest of humans and uh can teach us the most like profound lessons and that's the certain example of it what do you think the big ridiculous last philosophical question what do you think is the the meaning of this whole thing we got going on of life and existence on earth from your individual perspective but the entirety of the human species life uh the universe and everything yeah don't [Laughter] we could just leave it at that i knew exactly where i was going i love it josh i love you very much you've been a huge inspiration i have uh a friend who she said do you know lex friedman have you gone on lexi's con i go yes i know i know lex friedman is i've sadly been way too long in contact without making it happen for too long and uh and yes i will 100 uh i even cut a shirt at the beginning of the pandemic to make my own little mask at one point due to the the lex process yeah and uh uh i love it i can't really hear you like but i'm demonstrating just let's see it through but uh now this has been a blast and next time i'm back next time let's drink some of the the warbringer whiskey i will bring some warmaster uh i wasn't sure if you were uh if you imbibed at all in spirits 100 percent it felt a little weird to do it early on in the morning especially because i'm flying though does it i mean i've had some wonderful morning whiskey at times it it uh now that you've mentioned it it doesn't at all so next time let's make sure what joe oregon calls the uh adult beverages let's uh make sure we indulge i have zero reservations for doing such a thing i'm into it josh thanks for talking today my pleasure thanks for listening to this conversation with josh barnett and thank you to our sponsors monk pack low carb snacks element electrolyte drink eight sleep self-cooling mattress and rev transcription and captioning service click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from sun tzu in the art of war the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you