The following is a conversation with John Clark.
He's a friend, a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt, former MMA fighter, and at least in my
opinion, one of the great UFC cornermen coaches to listen to.
And also he's my current Jiu-Jitsu coach at Broadway Jiu-Jitsu in South Boston.
He was once for a time a philosophy major in college and is now, I would say, a kind
of practicing philosopher, opinionated, brilliant, and someone I always enjoy talking
to, even when, especially when we disagree, which we do often.
He's definitely someone I can see talking to many times on this podcast.
In fact, he hosts a new podcast of his own called Please Allow Me.
Quick mention of each sponsor followed by some thoughts related to the episode.
Thank you to TheraGun, the device I use for post workout muscle recovery, magic
spoon, low carb, keto friendly cereal that I think is delicious, AteSleep, a mattress
that cools itself and gives me yet another reason to enjoy sleep, and Cash App, the app
I use to send money to friends.
Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support
this podcast.
As a side note, let me say that martial arts, especially Jiu-Jitsu and Judo have been a big
part of my growth as a human being.
So I think I will talk to a few martial artists on occasion on this podcast.
I hope that is of interest to you.
I won't talk to people who are simply great fighters or great athletes, but people
who have a philosophy that I find to be interesting and worth exploring, even if I
disagree with parts or most of it.
I like alternating between historians and computer scientists, fighters and
biologists, and between totally different world views and personalities like Elon
Musk and Michael Malus.
This world, to me, is fascinating because of the diversity of weirdness that is human
civilization.
I love the weird and the brilliant and hope you join me on the journey of exploring
both.
If you don't like an episode, skip it.
For an OCD person like myself, sometimes not listening to a podcast episode is an
act of courage.
It's like not finishing a book even though you're 80% done.
Try it sometimes.
Listen to ones you like and don't listen to the ones you don't like.
I know it's profound advice.
If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with Five Starz and
Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on
Twitter at Lex Freedman.
And now, here's my conversation with John Clark.
You ready for this?
I've been ready for this my whole life.
All right.
All right, I was thinking of doing a Kerouac style road trip across the United
States, you know, after this whole COVID thing lifts.
You ever take a trip like that?
I've done a handful of long distance driving trips up and down the East Coast,
but also from the West Coast back to the East Coast and then returning to
California.
So I've definitely done my fair share of driving in this country.
Do you have the longing for the great American road trip?
I think there are so many things that I've been lucky enough to see in the
world that I now, at this point in my life, realize there are tons of things
that I need to see here in this country.
And a road trip could potentially be the best way to see them.
I think to do it effectively, you need an amount of time where you can be as
leisurely as possible.
There's no deadline and there's no, I've got to make it from Chicago to
St. Louis by sundown to get to this place at this time.
I think you really need to be able to take your time and kind of like let the
road take you where you need to go.
It feels like you need a mission though, ultimately.
Like there's a reason you need to be in San Francisco.
That's like the Kerouac thing.
You have to meet somebody somewhere kind of loosely in a few weeks and then it's
the, as you struggle on towards that mission, you meet weird characters that
get in your way, but ultimately sort of create an experience.
I think having a loose deadline is good, but that's a beginning and an end point.
And what I mean is, I don't want to have to be, all right, we're leaving, say,
Boston on Sunday night, let's get to New York by Monday morning.
And then from New York, we're going to go to Philly, and we've got to be in Philly at four.
A vague beginning and end is fine, but I think having very strict guidelines in
between will rob you of certain experiences along the way.
If you have a timeframe to get from Philly to Indianapolis, and some awesome shit starts
to happen in Philly, do you really want to have to cut it short because you've got to
be in Indianapolis by sunup?
Why do you have to be anywhere by any time for any reason, really?
Plans change.
Plans change all the time, exactly.
But if we're talking about having a mission or the type of road trip, I just think it
would be best to have it as loose and flexible as possible.
I don't know, you've got to make hard deadlines and then break them, totally change the plans,
disappoint people, break promises, that's the way of life.
Somebody's waiting for you in St. Louis, and all of a sudden you fell in love with a
biker in New York, I don't know, I don't know what you're up to.
I can appreciate that, but on a trip like that, I feel like a trip with deadlines is for a
different point in your life, and at this point in my life, I don't want any of the deadlines,
because it's not about meeting someone and disappointing them in St. Louis, it's about
me not disappointing myself.
You want to have enough time in what you're doing to make sure that you get the full breadth
of every experience that you encounter.
How would you fully experience a place?
I don't think I've actually fully experienced Boston, if you were showing up to a city
for a week on this road trip, what would you do?
I'm going to answer that in two parts.
A few years ago, I had an opportunity to move out of Boston, and the thing that kept me here,
no question about it, was the fact that I felt like I had a contract with my students,
and I did not, I felt like a great many of them took a leap of faith by joining my gym,
and asking me to teach them what I know, and when I had an opportunity to leave Boston,
I thought of those people, and I thought I want to fulfill my obligation to them.
So because I made a decision to stay here, I then that summer made a decision to endear
myself to the city of Boston, and I tried to find lots and lots of different things to do.
I can tell you that the coolest thing that I found to do in this city is the MFA, where
they have on Friday nights, they'll have different exhibits and stuff, and they'll have
like little beer carts and food tents, and you can go do a painting class, all that.
Do a painting class off on the side. Very cool night of things to do. But in general,
whenever I'm in a new city, I try not to pay attention to Google, and I try not to do anything
that I find on a travel site. The best thing to do is to walk out of your hotel or wherever it is
you're staying, and find the most normal looking bar, have a drink, and talk to a bartender.
So the people. The people.
The people. And then you can experience that town the way that they experience it.
But even in a city where there are tons of tourist attractions, locals probably
visit the same tourist attractions when they have visitors come from out of town.
But you want to see how they view those places and how they visit them,
and you want to go to eat where they're going to eat. Like, you know, you're gonna,
for the most part, the North End is not a place where I would take someone and say,
hey, this is Boston's, the pinnacle of Boston dining, because it's very touristy.
There are a handful of really good restaurants there. But I want to know where the,
I want to go to Bogie's place. I want to know like the down low spots where
the hell's Bogie's place?
It's like a little steakhouse in the back of Jam Curly's, exactly.
It's like a shitty bar Jam Curly's?
It's just a bar with like bar food. But I think they're like,
South Boston?
It is in Boston. Yeah, it's like South Boston.
No, it's in, it's in the downtown area. Like, I don't know what the neighborhoods are called
here, honestly, because they call, they, they have an area called downtown Boston, and I don't
even know what the hell that means. I think it's near the financial district.
Where's Southie? Because I've heard about this, Southie.
Southie is South Boston.
But is there, is there a difference in South Boston, Southie?
No, it's the same thing.
No, but like, you know, the mythical Southie.
I think the mythical Southie is something that's long gone now. And the term now actually is Sobo.
Oh, no. Yeah, it's, it's changed. What, who, who took over? What, what's the, you know,
the Goodwill Hunting personality? That's Southie, isn't it?
Strong accent, those badass dudes.
I came here right at the end of like, what was South Boston? So when I got,
and my gym is in South Boston, the neighborhood was just starting to change. So I think
as gentrification happened, and they started building more luxury condominiums,
they were buying all these old businesses out, all the mom and pop businesses.
And I think that kind of changed the, the makeup of the community.
And it wasn't only because there was an influx of new young people with disposable income,
is because there's an exodus of the older people who kind of grew up and raised their families
there because they were being offered humongous sums of money for their homes that they had bought
like in the late 70s and early 80s, so that they could develop those areas.
So you have a combination of the influx of new people and the exodus of the old.
And now you just got this totally new neighborhood in its place.
What do you love about Boston? Is there a love still for Boston?
You certainly have the love of the thing that's gone as well.
Yeah, I think I don't want to pinpoint, pin this on Boston because it's happening in all great cities.
As these areas become gentrified, what's happening is the personality and the character of the
neighborhood is just being run out. And I have nothing against people coming in and making
money and things like that. But when you do it at the expense of the culture, the character,
and the personality of the neighborhood, I mean, you're kind of standing on the shoulders of giants.
These are the people that came here and built these areas up. It happens here in Boston.
It happens all over New York. It happens on the West Coast. So what I love about Boston is not
nearly as romantic as what it might have been 15 years ago and what I used to love about New York.
What I love about Boston is that it's walkable. The food scene is on the rise here.
But I think you're hard pressed to find the charm that people think of when they think of
old Boston and old New England city.
See, I see it differently. People sometimes criticize like MIT for the thing that it is now.
But I think it is always like that. I tend to prefer to carry the flame of the greatest moments
of its history and enjoy the echoes of that in the halls of MIT in the same way in Boston.
You think about the history and that history lives on in the few individuals. You can't just look
around what Boston is now and be like, what has Boston become? I think it was always carried by
a minority of individuals. I think we kind of look back in history and think times were
greater in a certain kind of dimension back then. But that's because we remember this is a ridiculous
non-data driven assertion of mine. We remember just the brightest stars of that history.
And so we romanticize it. But I think if you look around now, those special people are still
living in Boston for which Boston will be remembered as a great city in like 50 years.
I think you're probably right. But isn't there some sort of theory about
the point that there's like a certain age in your life where things resonate differently to you?
Like I think they've done studies where most people stop searching for new music after age 19.
Most dads you see like wearing super old clothes, like that's the style of the time period of the
last great part of their life. So like there's an evolution in people and it could also be
the memories of where they live. And when I was 17, of course, my neighborhood was the best then
because I was having the most fun. And we always kind of look at things through that tint, I think.
And you're right. And I don't think there's anything wrong with the way cities are evolving now.
I prefer to time of like a mom and pop store, not a fabricated like
gastropub that could just be like on a four lane super highway on your way out of Epcot Center.
And it's actually owned by like some conglomerate.
But there's still the special places like I this takes us back to the road trip is maybe I tend to
romanticize the experiences of like the diners in the middle of nowhere. What would you say makes
for like, it feels like life is made up of these experiences that are that maybe on paper seem
mundane, but are actually somehow give you a chance to pause and reflect on life with like a
certain kind of people, whether like really close friends or complete strangers, maybe alcohol is
involved in the middle of nowhere. It seems like road trip facilitates that if you allow it to.
Like what do you think makes for those kinds of experience? Have you had any?
I think in the context of a road trip, I think it's like hyper localization. And I think it is
those experiences along the way with people and the people that you're with will color
the experiences differently depending on the person. The road trip you took was with somebody
else or alone. So I've driven up and down the East Coast several times when I drove from LA to New
York, my friend was on the run from the cops. Yeah. So we were trying to get traffic tickets.
We were trying to get out of LA because he was going to have to go away for a little while.
So we drove from LA and we just, you know, we're young kids, we had no idea what we were doing.
And we drove East. And then, you know, we had an unbelievable trip, mostly because we didn't
really have a destination. We didn't really have a timeframe. Thank goodness. Because he got arrested
again in Pennsylvania. So we got kind of stuck there. And then, you know, and then we drove back
to LA when he got out in Pennsylvania. But all the stops along the way were kind of like
weird things. Like you have no money, right? So you're finding that like the little diamond in
the rough place to eat the diner you talk about, like that place. I once was in, where was I?
I think I was in Buenos Aires. And the guy that I was with, he said, I know this quaint little
spot around the corner. And I was young, I was like 25. And I thought the coolest thing in the
world would be to be such a citizen of the world that you know these quaint little spots around
the corner in like all these great cities. Like I know where to get this great chicken sandwich
in Argentina. I know where to get this great meal in Costa Rica. I know where to get this super
local like egg in another country. I just thought that that was really cool. The ability to do that
anywhere in the world. You get closer with that guy when through the trip? I found that like,
so I took a trip across the United States with a guy friend of mine. We had different goals.
I was searching for a meaning in life and he was searching for, what's the politically
correct way of phrasing it, but just basically trying to sleep with every kind of woman that
this world has to offer. What's the difference between those two things? Well, I guess he was
searching for the different kinds of meanings. I mean, I just, I still think that you can't find
meaning between a woman's legs, I suppose. Have you tried all of them? But there was a tension
there. We grew closer with those experiences, but we've gotten in fights. You know, there was a lot
of like literal almost fights and then we were close and there was like silences, but then we
were like brothers and this whole weird journey of friendship that we went on. I think anytime you
spend that much time in like a small space with another person, you're going to have the different
parts of the relationship will manifest themselves. You'll have the periods of closeness,
you'll have the periods of vulnerability where it's like maybe you're driving through Denver and
it's three in the morning and you talk about something you might not have otherwise talked
about. You'll have the periods where you don't want to see that motherfucker ever again, right?
He didn't, and depending could be because of anything. But the guy that I drove twice with,
we're still in contact, we're still buddies, we have very different goals also. But at that point
in our lives, we never even contemplated the meaning of life. We were about probably more
to the point of the friend that you drove with, we were more about racking up experiences, whatever
they were. I want to be able to retell this. Stories. Yeah, I want to be able to retell this
and it's got to sound cool. I don't want to retell the story about, yeah, and then we drove
through Alabama and they've got a lovely library and I checked out this book and I'm not interested
in retelling that. Do you remember any, this is a kids show, do you remember any stories
that the kids would enjoy from those times that were profound in some kind of way?
There were some impactful moments on the beginning of our road trip where we had no money and as a
couple of kids who knew nothing, we literally had to, we stopped in Vegas and we went to circus,
at the time they had $3 blackjack and we had like 12 bucks and my buddy was kind of a degenerate
gambler so he knew what was up. I was just like kind of stuffing chips in my pockets,
making sure we could pay for the gas. And just being at the point which is like a starting line
and like we drove from LA to Vegas, which is only about four hours, and being at the starting
line and realizing like we may not even like get off the starting line here. And if we don't, what
are we doing? We're going to be two guys stuck in Vegas with no money. We can't go west because
you're going to get pinched. We have no money to go east. What the hell are we going to do?
Are we going to wind up in Vegas? So, you know, that was kind of a profound thing where you just,
it's a turning, it potentially could have been a turning point in our lives had we not made
enough money to continue going east. That's the beautiful thing about road trips when you're broke
is like, in retrospect, everything turned out fine. But you're facing the complete darkness,
the uncertainty of the possibilities laid before you. And like, I don't know if you were confident
at that time, but like I was really full of self-doubt. Like just like all I could see is all
the trajectories where you just screw up your life. Like what am I doing with my life? I'm
a failure. Like all these dreams I've had, I've never realized I'm a complete piece of shit.
All those kinds of things. I had no concept of consequence. I like, I was, I probably had
toxoplasmosis. I had literally no concept of consequence. Immediate gratification was all
I cared about. Oh, so existentialist. Yeah, it did not, it did not even enter my mind at,
in my like early twenties, that anything that I was doing at that point could reverberate for
the rest of my life. I think part of me didn't even think I'd make it this far. And so I was
not interested in like the long play. I remember thinking like, why should I be acting now in a
way that might impact a point in my life I never reach? And yet now you are a man who searches
for meaning in life at least. I would say to put another way, you have, you think deeply about
this world and in a philosophical context while also appreciating the violence of hurting other
friends of yours, right, on a regular basis. So what, why do you think, I mean, maybe there's a
broader question there, but also a personal question. It seems that people who fight for
prolonged periods of time, like Jujitsu people, mixed martial arts people, even military folks
become over time philosophers. What is that? Is that, is there a parallel between fighting and
violence and the philosophical depth with which you now have a right from the starting point of
being the full existentialist of like just living in the moment to like being introspective,
human now? I would say to that being a soldier or a warrior hundreds of years ago is probably
what started the marriage between martial arts and philosophy. If you're constantly under someone
else's charge and you're told to go out and walk in a line and, you know, overtake some
Germanic tribe somewhere and that happens all the time, your job is being a soldier.
On any given day, you might not come home. So I think that you have to start your day by thinking
deeply about how you've lived to that point and the people that are living in and around you
and how you've treated them. And I think that probably is what started the marriage of being
kind of like a philosophical martial artist. You've got to really like, on a daily basis,
take stock of what's going on around you and inside you because we all suffer with this kind
of idea, if today's my last day, did I do it right? And we don't really do it so much nowadays
because we're so comfortable. But if we're being marched out to war every day, I think you'd see
people live a little bit differently, you know, and you treat the people around you a little
bit differently. Do you think there's echoes of that in just even the sport of like grappling
and jujitsu where you're facing your own mortality? We don't really think of it that way. But
to be honest, I think that a lot of people that train in a martial art
in contemporary society, I don't consider them all martial artists. I think just because you
train a martial art does not mean you're a martial artist. There are so many people that
use martial arts as a form of exercise and like this little piece of self-concept. They use martial
arts as a tagline in their Instagram bio. And it's really a form of exercise. It's something
they do. It's not something they are. And I think there's a big difference there. There's a bunch
of stuff mixed up in there because the Instagram thing is something you do for, it's also, it could
be something you are for display versus who you are in the private moments of searching and
thinking and struggling and all that kind of stuff. Instagram is a surface layer that much of
modern society operates in, which is really problematic because there's that gap between
the person you show to the world and the person you are in private life. And if you make
majority of your project, of the human project of your sort of few years on this earth, the
optimization of the public Instagram profile, then you never develop this private person.
But it does seem that if you do jiu-jitsu long enough, it's very difficult not to fall into like
this has become a personal journey, an intellectual journey. Because like if you get your ass kicked
thousands of times, there's a certain point to where that maybe it's like a defense mechanism,
but that turns into some kind of deeply profound introspective experience versus like exercise.
That's not yoga. Yeah. So let me let me go back first and address the Instagram point, which
I think there's a difference between people who whose Instagram is intrinsically tied to their
profession and they have to put a specific profile out there. And I think in general, people who
truthfully are their businesses tied to their Instagram profile, I want to exclude them.
I think that most people Instagram is how they want to be seen. And that's not always congruent
with who you are. But I think there is a level of dishonesty there. Yeah. Like this is how I want
people to see me. I'm going to put all this stuff in my Instagram bio, but that's really not me.
And when you do that, I think it's a little disingenuous and you're right. You're never
really going to marry those two things together and it gets tough. Let me sorry to interrupt,
let me push back on something. This is a good time to address the many flaws of the great and
powerful John Clark. Okay. Let's go there because it's interesting. You strive so hard for excellence
in your life and for extreme competence that you are visibly and physically
off put by people who have not achieved competence. Do you think we should be nicer to the people
who are those early? Like you mentioned, a person who first picks up an art, picks up,
becomes vegan, starts through and cross fists are doing jiu jitsu for the first time and create
that as their, you know, they're, they're struggling through this, like, who am I and they're really
overly proud and it's kind of ridiculous. And you and your wise chair have seen many battles.
Yeah. That you see the ridiculousness of that. I tend to, I'm learning to give those folks,
not to mock them and to sort of give them a chance to do their ridiculousness because I
think I was that too. Let me first clarify. I want to be clear about what you mean when you
say a level of competence. Now, I, I've never won a world championship. I've never, you know,
there are plenty of things in my life where I've not achieved what most people would consider to be
the penultimate level of success. Now. That's accomplishments.
It's accomplishments. It's ribbons. It's things like that. And it's not that those things don't
mean anything to me. And the fact that I have it in some arenas is, is something that I want to
change, which is, we can talk about that in a second. But I think that there's a difference
between the very eager noob of whatever it is they're doing, who does the thing
so that they can signal they do the thing. That's a person I have less respect for.
So we know each other primarily through Jiu Jitsu. Look at a Jiu Jitsu tournament.
There's this, there's this idea that people espouse online. I respect anyone with the guts
to get on the mat and put it on the line and sign up for a tournament. That is the biggest load
of shit I have ever heard. This is great. Do you know, do you know how easy it is for you to put
your name on something and pay the registration fee and walk in there? That's not the hard part.
That's the easiest part. I don't care if you lose your first match, but I respect the person
who signs up for the tournament, registers for the tournament, goes on a diet, loses weight the
right way, trains their ass off and does the things properly and then goes on the mat. The person
who simply signs their name on the registration form and jumps on the mat, if they haven't done
these other things, they actually have nothing to lose because what they've done is they've stepped
on to the mat in the ring in the cage with a bucket full of excuses. Sure you signed up,
but when you, but you're not really vulnerable because you didn't run, you didn't do this,
you didn't do all the things you were supposed to do. The person who eliminates every possible
excuse and then steps on the mat and gets their ass kicked in the first round, I have so much
more respect for that person than the person who does nothing and maybe on natural ability wins
a couple of matches and then writes on Facebook on how I lost to the eventual champion. That's
worth zero. That's worth zero. And in that process, what did you learn about yourself?
You learned about yourself that you've got a natural level of aptitude for whatever this
activity is that you're doing, but you didn't actually learn how to maximize it through training
and through dedication and through all these other things. I'm an incredibly interested novice
musician. I love, I like to play bass, but I don't put that on anything and, you know,
I stink at it. I would really love to be sick at it. I'm currently not, but like I'm not running
around, you know, talking about entering, you know, any of those other things. Like I do it,
it's for myself and I want to reach a level of competence in that.
So the person that you have respect for is a person who takes it fully seriously, takes
the effort fully seriously. So for bass, that would be that you agree with yourself that you're
going to perform live and just in your own private moments, your private thoughts,
you're not going to give yourself an excuse out. Like, I'm just going to have fun. This is a nice
experience. You're going to, you're going to think I'm going to try to be the best possible
bass player given, given everything that's going on in my life, but I'm going to do my, like,
actually and put it all on the line. And if I fail, that's not because I didn't try. It's because
I'm a failure. Exactly. And then sit in that sick feeling of like I'm a failure. But isn't
that an important thing to know? Absolutely. But there's a, there's a, that's like the best
thing we could be, but sometimes it's fun to lose yourself in the bragging, in the lesser
ways of life. And I think I'm careful not to, because too many people in my life,
when I brought them with like a little candle of a fire of a dream, they would just go like,
you know, they would just blow that fire out that they would dismiss me because they see like,
you know, I would say, I've said, I've said a lot of ridiculous stuff, but the one, you know,
I've always dreamed about like putting a, I always dreamed of having this world full of robots. And,
you know, every time I would bring these ideas up, they'll be shut down by the different people,
but my parents by, you know, you know, then you need to first get to get an education, you need to
succeed in these dimensions. And in order to do all these things, you have to get good grades,
you have to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like there's all this stuff that it's indirect or direct
ways of blowing out that little ridiculous dream that you present. And it's like, you know, I
remember sort of bringing up, I don't know, things like becoming a state champion and wrestling,
right? It's a, it's a weird dance because of course the coaches will tell, they'll kind of
dismiss that. It's like, okay, okay. But at the same time, it feels like in those early days,
you have to preserve that little, little fire. That's like Johnny Yive, I don't know if you
know who that is, is a designer at Apple. He was a chief designer. He's behind most iPhone,
all that stuff. And he always, he always talked about that he wouldn't bring his ideas to Steve
Jobs until they were matured because he would always shit on them. He would, he wanted them to
like little, as little babies, like live for a little bit before they get completely shut down.
And I always think about that when I see a beginner sort of bragging on Instagram,
you have to be careful. Let, let them play with that little dream, you know?
Are you playing with a little dream that you're nurturing and you're trying to take that little
flame and you're trying to create a roaring blaze with it? Or are you playing with the idea of it
and behind, behind that there's no substance? It's hard to know the difference. That's what I
struggle with. Is it? I don't think it necessarily is. Certainly you're wrong. And when I say Instagram,
I don't want to impugn a bunch of strangers, but I have a gym with a lot of members. And,
and I can tell you that the number of years I've been in the gym, when someone comes to me and
says, this is my goal, I don't, I don't tell them yes or no in general. But I know, I can tell
by the way they say it to me, I can thin slice it. I've seen the look on people's faces. And when
people start to like say they want to do X, Y and Z, I know right off the bat, this person's
either going to put an effort in or they're not going to put an effort in. So to me, it's about
the effort behind that. If you're busting your ass and you're a new at something and you're brand
new, but you're working really hard and you have a series of like moderate successes in that, like
that's the guy I want to champion because that persistence and that grit over time, those successes
will no longer be moderate. They'll be huge. But the person who's having moderate success
by doing nothing, chances are they'll never learn to put that work in and the successes will never
grow. You have an admiration for Mike Tyson. I love him. I'm just going to let that sit for
a brief moment. Why? I think there's a combination of factors. One is like the timeliness of his
career and like the age I was when he came to prominence, the raw, brutal violence and the raw,
brutal honesty when he speaks. I think it's easy for people to hear him or see his life and cast
him aside as some simian-esque like just cretin scourge on society. But when you hear him speak,
like this is not a guy who's unintelligent. This is a guy who knows himself better than probably
most of us know ourselves. It's disarming and that's a humongous part of my admiration for him.
Who is Mike Tyson? Because it feels like there's similarity between him and you. It feels like
there's a violent person in there, but also a really kind person and they're all like living
together in a little house and you're the same. There's a thoughtful person, but there's also
a scary violent person and they're like having a picnic. They're having a picnic. I think
there are dialectical tensions in everyone. These like opposing forces that are constantly pulling
at you and at different points in your life, like it's sliding scale. I think that certainly
when I was a younger person, there was a lot more manifestation of the violence and a lot less of the
kindness. People who were not as close to me probably saw more of the violent side and only
the very close people to me saw like what would pass for the kind side and now that's sliding in
the other direction. I worry actually sometimes that there could be a situation where I need that
old version of me and he's getting further and further away and I can't call him up if I need him
and that concerns me to a certain degree. The sad aging warrior seeing his great self fade away,
but you still compete. Does that person return? It seems like for Mike Tyson that person returned
at the prospect of competition. It returns, but I've learned better how to manifest it in
competition in terms of the effects that that type of emotion has on you physically in the middle
of a competition. I've better learned how to utilize that energy, but I think another side
effect of this is having a gym where you're a bigger guy and you're the head instructor,
you can't be as mean and violent as you once were because you're also now trying to run a business
and you spend so many years trying not to be mean and to soften your technique a little bit
that that all of a sudden just becomes who you are and I don't necessarily like that,
so I've been trying to reclaim that a little bit on the mat, but I think in competition
there has to be an athlete really wants to score the points. A fighter really wants to
incapacitate you and put you in a position where they can do their own bidding and the result in
a jiu-jitsu match might just still be two points, but the motivations are very, very different.
What do you make of Tyson and Joe Rogan saying that he was aroused by violence? Do you think
that's insane? Do you think that's deeply honest for him? Do you think that rings true for many of
us others who practices in different degrees? I can't speak for a lot of people and I think that
it was a brutally honest statement by him and I think it's something that even if a lot of people
feel it, they're not that comfortable admitting it or saying it, but I think there's great joy
in landing a flush right hand on someone's jaw and then watching them crumble. You don't even
feel it. You ever play baseball as a kid? You can hit a base hit off the end of the bat and it will
sting your hands because of the way that you hit it. You can hit a home run and you won't feel
anything and it'll just feel so good in your hands and that's, I think, one of the joys of
physical contact. When you do it the right way, and that goes for all physical contact,
when you do it the right way, the physical pleasure you can derive from it and the mental
pleasure, it's unparalleled. But that's different. Let me draw a distinction. I've had the fortune
of being a wrestler and I would draw a distinction between a very well executed and competition
double leg single leg takedown or a pin. There's some, as an OCD person, there's something so
comforting about a well executed pin because it's like two seconds and it's just like
everything is flush and nice and like it's all clean. I mean, okay, is this OCD person who likes
to align show show is just beautiful. Okay, that's good technique. Wrestling also provides you,
maybe more than other sports, the feeling of dominating another human. Yes. Of breaking, no,
not just of them being very cocky and very powerful. You feel this power of another human being
and then you breaking them. I'm not as honest as Mike Tyson, but I don't think I've ever
sort of looked in the mirror and said I enjoyed that aspect of it, but it certainly seems like
you chased that. So when I was a wrestler in high school, I lost so many matches because of
over aggressiveness. I would pick the top position and let you stand just so that I could do a mat
return and I wasn't trying to return you to the mat. I was actually trying to drive you through
the mat and through the ground. It gave me joy to do that. It wasn't like I was trying to
just return you to the mat so that I could pin you. What you just talked about, the dominating
another person, I used to look at that as you've got someone who in theory is equally trained and
equally skilled as you are and you're absolutely out there totally dominating them. There's joy
in that. You could get in an MMA fight and you could take someone down and you could mount them
and all that feels great, but when you start raining down the punches on their face from
mount and dropping elbows and stuff, there's another level of satisfaction there and it's
tough to describe and I don't think that everyone is made for it. I think when I was a senior in
high school, my wrestling coach said, look, you've got to stop with all this crazy aggressive
wrestling. They try to turn me into a technician and it did work to a degree and it was a humongous
shift for me in terms of success, but it wasn't the same level of enjoyment out of it. I got
disqualified from New England because my coach said cross-face and I cross-faced and he said harder
and I basically wound up and blasted a kid in the face and his nose got busted everywhere,
but I didn't think not to do it because that felt good. It felt good to cross-face him like that.
That was a lot of like… That's a weird American warrior ethos that I've picked up,
but I also have in me the Russian, the Satya brothers that don't see it as that. They don't
get drawn. They think that there is a tension between the art of the martial art and the violence
of the martial art. I agree with that. It's a poetic way. I could put it, but they're not
so fascinated with this Dan Gable dominating another human. They think the effortlessness
of the technique and your mastery of the art is exhibited in its effortlessness,
how much you lose yourself in the moment and the timing that just the beauty of a timing.
There's much more… One example in judo, but also in wrestling, you can look at the foot sweep.
Wrestlers in America and even judo players in America and much of the world don't admire the
beauty of the foot sweep, but a well-timed foot sweep, which is a way to sort of off balance
to find the right timing to just effortlessly turn the tables and dominate your opponent
is seen as the highest form of mastery in Russian wrestling. In the case of judo,
it's in Japanese judo. It's interesting. I'm not sure what that tension is about.
I think it actually takes me back to… I don't know if you listened to Dan Carlin,
Hardcore History and Genghis Khan, if you've ever… I've read a great book.
On Genghis Khan? I'm still trying to adjust. Most of my life said Genghis Khan,
but the right pronunciation is actually Genghis Khan. There's a tension there. We kind of think,
I don't know, we… I kind of thought as Genghis Khan is a leader of ultra-violent men, but another
view, another way to see them is the people who warriors that valued extreme competence and mastery
of the art of fighting with weapons, with bows, with horse riding, all that kind of stuff.
And I'm not sure exactly where to place them on my sort of thinking about violence in our human
history. I think in a context of like combat sports, I think there's a difference between an
athlete winning a contest under a certain set of rules and a fighter winning a fight
under those exact same rules. There's a different approach to it. And I don't think one is any
better than the other. In MMA, I think a great example would be George St. Pierre. George St.
Pierre is a tremendous athlete, and he considers himself to be a martial artist first. He's trying
to win an athletic competition. Nick Diaz is trying to bust your ass. There's a different
approach to it. And yes, they've had different results at the highest level of competition,
but it's difficult to attribute the difference in results just to their approach to the sport,
because they're different human beings with different abilities and different physical
attributes. The SITF brothers have that luxury of being able to talk about the beauty of a
perfectly timed slide by, right? There are other wrestlers that will never be able to pull that off,
and therefore they have to pursue other ways to defeat someone. And maybe it is the Dan Gable
breaking a man's spirit by outworking him type thing, which is beautiful in its own way.
But we tend to self-select the ways in which we're able to be successful,
and then kind of take a deep dive into that. What do you think is more beautiful,
brute force or effortless execution of a technique that dominates another human?
I think it's a subjective thing based on what skills you perceive yourself to have.
I've never been a slick, super athletic, dexterous competitor in anything,
and I've always been more about, I've got to outwork you, I've got to outgrind you,
I've got to out mean you. And so because I've lived that, I tend to see the beauty in that more
because I have a perceptual awareness that I don't have for the people who have the luxury
of being very slick and athletic and using beautiful technique. Now, that said,
there's a phenomenal little video the other day I sent to a friend of a compilation of
Foot Sweeps by Leota Machida in MMA. And they're so beautiful and they're so awesome.
And it's not that I don't have an appreciation for those, but I can't emulate those because I lack the
physical ability to do that. Whereas I at least have a chance to emulate some of the people who
do it through grit and through outworking people.
But I would love to return to Genghis Khan and get your thoughts about,
like, I have so many mixed feelings about whether he is evil or not, whether
whether the violence that he brought to the world had ultimately, the fact that he had maybe
kind of like Dan Carlin describes, cleanse the landscape. It's like a reset for the world
through violence had ultimately a progressive effect on human civilization, even though in
the short term it led to massive, you could say suffering. I don't know what to make of that,
man. What are your thoughts on Genghis Khan? I think it's always difficult to look at a
historical figure and their actions of their time through a modern day lens because it's
easy for us to kind of impugn their achievements and the things that they did
and say, oh, well, you know, what he did was wrong. Well, of course that can be true, but a
lot of times we don't actually have any real good context or concept of the times they were living
in and what really was deemed wrong and what really wasn't. We're looking at it through a very
cushy modern lens. That being said, from what I've read about Genghis Khan, yeah, he was a
violent dude, but also he gave you an option. When he got to a village, he said, look,
we're going to, you have a choice. You can come with us or you can run. He gave them an option
to join his legion of fighters who he took very good care of. He was the first military leader
to pay his soldiers' families when they died and he did that based on the booty that they got when
they raided a village. He took that money, he took his share and they divided that up amongst
the soldiers and then the soldiers' families. I think he also is credited with first horseback
mail routes or something like that, right? Is he the godfather of the modern postal system
or something like that? Yeah, he's the Bernie Sanders of the
of the Mongol Empire. I do think the offering of surrender is an interesting one because
it's interesting as a thought experiment, whether you would sacrifice your way of the
pride of nations or the nationalism, pride of your country, whether you're willing to give that up
for to survive. It depends on who depends on you. If you have a family and young kids and
stuff like that, I think your obligation is primarily to them and therefore surrender has
to be something that you consider in that moment in time so that you can take care of those people.
If you're a man alone and you've got all these principles and all this other stuff and you're
not down with what Jengaskhan is doing and what he's selling, yeah, try and escape. Do your thing
and just know what waits on the other side of that for you potentially. But I think if there's
someone else out there that depends on you, your obligation should be to them. It feels like historically
people value principles more than life. In this weight of like, what do I value more? The principles
I hold versus survival, it seems that now we don't value principles as much. Your principles could
be also religion. It could be your values, whatever. We're okay sort of sacrificing those
for to preserve our survival. And that applies in all forms like actual survival or on social
media, preserving your reputation, all those kinds of things. It seems like we, especially in America,
value individual life, that death is somehow a really bad thing as opposed to saying sacrificing
your principles is a very bad thing and everybody dies and it's okay to die. What's horrible is to
sacrifice your principles of who you are just to live another day. I think a big problem is people
don't really even know what their principles are anymore. People, social media and just the way
that we live nowadays where we're separated from the human contact like this. You're not contacting
people in a community anymore. You're not, whether you're religious or not, you're not
congregating at a church. You're not part of a parish like you would be down south. You're not
part of that community anymore. And so it's difficult to figure out what your principles and
values are because you're constantly jumping from one bucket to the next online. And you don't get
a lot of direct reasonable feedback from people. You just get dipshit feedback like, oh, you don't
believe this? Well, you're a jerk. I think the hard thing currently is having the integrity
and character to stick by principles one under. I don't want to equate murder in the Jengus
Kantimes to social media cancel culture, but it certainly doesn't feel good when people are attacking
on social media. And it does take a lot of integrity to, without anger, without emotion,
without, without being, without mocking others or attacking others unfairly, standing by the
ideas you hold, or in another way, standing by your friends, standing by this little group
like loyalty of the people that, you know, are good people. I find that in, in cancel culture,
one of the sad things is whenever somebody gets quote unquote canceled, everybody just gets all
their friends become really quiet and don't defend them. Or worse, I mean, quiet is at least
understandable. They kind of signal that they throw them out of the bus, I guess, is one way to put
it. And that, that's something I think about a lot because from coming for me, it's like,
I, I hold an ethic, I don't know if others hold this ethic, maybe it's this like Russian
mobster ethic of like, you should help your friends bury the body. You shouldn't criticize
your friends for committing the murder. Like there's certain levels of like, you know, yeah,
you have that discussion after you bury the body that like maybe you shouldn't have done that murder
thing. Right. I don't know, you know, I understand that that's a problematic with, with the terminology
that's a problematic ethical framework within which to operate. But at the same time, it feels
like what else do we have in this world except the brotherhood, the sisterhood, the love we have
for a very small community. But perhaps that's the wrong way of thinking. Perhaps the 21st century
would be defined by the dissipation of this community, of this loyalty concept that we're all
just individuals. I think you're right. And I think you have to have some sort of core framework of
principles and beliefs that you operate on. And I think what I was, what I was referencing is a
little bit different. And but to speak to your point, you need a framework of core principles
on which you can then base a lot of your other decisions. Like I believe these three things
to be true, whatever they are, and that will help inform other decisions you make in your life.
As far as how you treat your friends, I've got, I've got probably three friends that,
if they called me right now and said, let's bury the body. Sorry, Lex, I gotta go.
There are other people in my life that if they said, hey, we've got to go bury the body, I would
say, who is this? You know, so I think it depends on the relationship. I wonder, that's a good,
it's a really good measure. I would love to have, I would love that to be in your profile. People
put like pronouns. I would love to put like, honestly, like objectively, not self-report,
but objective, how many people in your life, if they committed murder, you would not ask any
questions and you would help them hide the body. Like I would love to know that number for people.
Yeah. And I think it's a weird thing too, because you think right away, like, okay,
it must be the group of people that are the closest to you. That's who you're first thinking of,
right? But obviously, for like my best friend, I would do it, no question about it. But I've got
other people that are close to me that are close to me in other ways. And I probably wouldn't do
that only because I don't think they do it for me. And that is a consideration. So I guess
is the principle there then that you do for your friends what you think they would do for you? Is
that the underlying principle? Or do you just have a blind loyalty to, you know, people in your
life for different reasons? I got people that are not on my inner circle that I probably wouldn't
help change a tire at two in the morning if they were on the highway. But if they called me and
said, hey, we got to bury the body, I might show up for that. It's just these weird different
connections. Yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah, I have close friends that like, I probably be,
exactly, the tire is a good example, be like, can't you find somebody else to do this?
I think part of that is just this leap of faith into like giving yourself to the other person
that creates a deep connection that makes life fulfilling, like meaningful, that doesn't exist
if you don't take that leap. I mean, it's not about the murder we started focusing. I think that's a,
I think you have to, what does it cross that bridge when you get there? I'm not exactly sure.
This is just the thought experiment. But it's, I think about that a lot, especially these COVID
times. And as like people become more and more isolated and separated from each other, like how
important is it to have those deep, deep connections to other humans? I think especially
like what you're talking about there, have you ever seen the movie The Town? There's a great line
in the movie where one of the main characters walks into his friend's house and he says,
I need your help. We're going to go hurt some people and you can never ask me about it again.
And the friend looks up and he says, who's car we taking? Like that, that is the type of person
you need in your life. And the people, like there are people that will walk through that door and
say that to you and you drop everything you're doing. And then there's a people that walk through
you doing, you're like, you know what, I got a hot pocket and a microwave. I'm a little bit,
I'm a little bit tied up right now, but I'd love to help you out. But you know,
I don't want to do that. And you don't have that deep connection with those people.
You mentioned some principles that you've changed your mind on. Is there, do you want to go there?
Is there some interesting principles and the process of changing that is useful to talk about?
I can't really cite a specific thing, except that understanding that the principles that you have
at different points in your life can change and it's okay to change them without being a
total pussy and being bullied by other people into thinking what you thought was wrong. If you come
to these conclusions of your own volition and you decide to change them, that's great. And it can
be really liberating. It's really liberating to have an idea that you hold so true to your
core belief system. And then to actually have someone change your mind for you and be okay with
it. As opposed to being like, no, I got to die with this. I got to die with this. It's really
liberating. There are definitely our ideas. You want to die on that hill and no one's ever
going to change your mind. But it's really liberating to be confident enough to say,
change my mind. I'm lucky enough to have some smart motherfuckers around me who can tell me,
listen, you're being a total dipshit. Like let's, let's rethink this or like I have one friend who
does the five Ys all the time and he loves back in me into a corner and what's the five Ys?
You just like, when someone makes a statement about something to really get to the core issue,
they say, if you ask why five times, make a statement, well, why is that? And you answer that,
well, why? And you phrase the Ys differently, obviously, but then you get to the core. They
say five times, you can get to the core of the issue. And that's a challenging thing. But I
find later in life, it's so liberating for me to be confident enough to be like, man,
was I fucking way off the mark on this and have my mind changed.
And be able to say that to others that I was wrong.
Totally. That ability. And I never used to have that. And it's, it feels real good.
And there's a hunger for that too. Yeah, you're so right. Actually, on a personal level, it feels
very good. Exactly. As you said, it's liberating because you're free to then think as opposed to
defend. Yeah. Without thinking. Yeah. You get so sick of defending the same thing over and over
and over. And you start to think about it. And it's like, well, I would really like to evolve
my thought process here. And when you're constantly defending, you know, one point,
it's difficult to let other ideas in. You discount the possibility that you can have your mind
change when you're constantly on the defense. You have to have a crack in the front line in
order to let a new idea come in and possibly flourish. And maybe the new idea doesn't even
prove your current belief system to be wrong. But maybe it's like the water to a seed and it grows.
And now it's something even bigger and better. And you can start to work with that instead.
And it's a tough thing because I'm a stubborn fuck. And it's very difficult for me. It was,
historically, to say I was wrong about this one or I messed this one up or I wish I could have that
one back. There's a public figure for me thing too, which there is, there's a difference between
changing your mind with the small circle of friends and changing your mind publicly about
something. But it has equal, one echoes the other. It is equally liberating, but people will not make
that change easy. But it doesn't matter. That's the point. I think it's ultimately
liberating as a human being, public figure or not, to think deeply about this world
and to keep changing, which is like, I think there's a deep hunger for that in political discourse
that people are so tribal currently about politics that they want to see somebody who says,
you know what, I changed my mind on this. And then keep changing their mind and keep asking
questions, keep showing that they're open-minded, all that kind of stuff.
But you want someone in a position of political power to change their mind because they realize
that there might be a better way, not because they realize that by changing their mind,
they're going to get a new demographic to vote for them. That's transparent as shit. Nobody
wants to see that. That's a person who can't separate their position from their people,
they're supposed to be helped. Yeah. And you can usually smell that. We're just talking
offline about, there's something about Hillary Clinton, where she talked about
changing her mind on gay marriage, that it felt like this is a political calculation versus
like really deeply thinking about what things do we do in this world that violate basic human
rights, like really thinking about deeply. And of course politicians are calculating this,
but you can see it. That's the thing. That's why on the human level, there's like political
policies, but there's also humans. And I've always liked Bernie Sanders, for example. I don't know,
not the later, perhaps Bernie Sanders, but I used to listen to him back in the day,
and it felt like people might disagree with me, but it felt like there was a real human
struggling with ideas. Whatever, agree with him or not, it felt like he wasn't doing political
calculation. He was just a human. He couldn't be further away from my political ideals,
but also like there's an obvious authenticity to his passion for what he's saying that is not
present in other candidates. And you can see it, all these people that have been in politics forever,
like from all the way back when Hillary was a lawyer in the 70s. There's a couple of shots
of her in the courtroom in the 70s though. She's looking all right. She's got those big glasses on.
Kind of a little bit of a nerdy babe back in the day. Yeah. Wow. John Clark says Hillary Clinton
was a babe back in the day. 73 hinting Clinton. Yeah. That's an interesting question about
authenticity in politicians. Do you think like Hillary Clinton, just the Clintons are in general,
are a good example of that? Why do you think they become over time so inauthentic? Is it the system
that changes them? Is it their own hunger for power? What is it? Or are they always inauthentic?
Well, first I'd like to say that, I don't know if you know this, but I come from a bit of a
political dynasty myself. I was on the student government several times in high school and my
dad won the runoff in a special election in Bradenton Beach, Florida. I think there's like
700 people there. So your dad got you the job? Yeah. We're basically, a lot of people come
Paris to the Kennedys. My guess with the politicians is that, and you can see it now as we're becoming
more like cognizant as people to the political process. I think the process corrupts people.
And I think that, I don't know the ins and outs of it. I've listened to people who are far more
educated on it than me and I'm unprepared to cite any of their points. I think you can see it a
little bit in Dan Crenshaw. Can I say this? Yeah. So I really liked Dan, especially like a year,
year and a half ago. He seemed very level headed. It's clear to me now that as he panders more and
more to the right, it's because he's setting himself for a presidential run. It's clear that
that's happening. And he just doesn't seem like the same authentic ideals oriented guy that he did
a year and a half ago. Now, I could be wrong on that. It could be way off. But I think that
you can take someone as honest as you want to. When you start them on that path to the presidency,
you become so unbelievably beholden to so many people and entities along the way
that by the time you get to the final destination, the Oval Office,
all you're doing is paying back the favors that got you there and you never get to serve the people
you're supposed to serve. Your primary focus is on your office and not on the people that you're
supposed to be helping. I think that that's a humongous problem. And we could talk all about
campaign finance reform in the two-party system. But at the end of the day,
the people who are running for political posts, they're working to keep a job. They're not working
to improve the lives of the constituents, which is different. A long, long time ago, a lot of
politicians, those were like part-time jobs, and they held other posts out west. They were ranchers
by day and sheriff by night, whatever the case might be. But now, such a cushy path for the
rest of your life that the goal is to just be a politician, not do the things that you think
a politician is supposed to do. And that's a problem. By the way, I'll talk to Dan on this
spot because it's funny. I like the version of him from a year ago, and I haven't been really
paying attention. So I'll actually pay more attention now and ask him that exact question.
Like, how do you prevent yourself from changing, becoming what the Clintons became? I tend to
believe there's conspiratorial stuff about Clintons and all these politicians. I tend to believe
that they were actually good, thoughtful people back in the day. And the system changes them.
It's not even the system. There's something about just the process of campaigning. I just think it
wears you down to where if you look at the percentage of time you spend on the kinds of
conversations you have, it's like, one, you do these speeches, which you repeat the same thing
over and over and over. It beats the process of thinking. You just exhaust your brain to where
you're not thinking anymore. You're just repeating. It's exceptionally difficult to keep making speech
after speech after speech, saying the same thing over and over and over again. And at the same time,
thinking deeply and changing your mind and learning. And then also the pandering to financial,
like having phone calls, like fundraising, all those kinds of things.
That's what they do now. They spend most of their time fundraising. They're not worried about anything.
Sorry to interrupt you, but I was going to say that you can see there's a fuel. The more
attention and the higher regard you're held in in your community and the more sycophants
like continue to blow smoke up your ass, the more it changes the way you present yourself.
And you can see it in every walk of life. I mean, Jiu Jitsu is a tiny, tiny little section
of the world, but you see it in the Jiu Jitsu community. When someone all of a sudden starts
a social media page or whatever, and they get a bunch of people like basically cyber-filating
them on their Instagram page, they change.
Filating, is that a word? I think so. So giving filatio. So filating. Jamie, look it up.
I think, but in those people, it changes their character. It changes who they are,
because they become emboldened. And now they've got this like mythical cyber mob behind them.
There's a sign at the entrance to your gym that reads, for every moment of triumph,
it's a quote by Hunter S. Thompson. It reads, for every moment of triumph, for every instance
of beauty, many souls must be trampled. What does this quote mean to you?
That quote to me is about, mostly about sacrifice. And it's about to achieve anything great or
anything beautiful or to triumph. You have to have sacrificed so many things to get there,
unless you're the most unbelievably genetically gifted person in the world,
and greatness is just falls upon you, it's just raining from the sky. I think on your path to
greatness, on your path to success and triumph, you leave a lot of carnage in your wake,
personal relationships, other goals, things that you didn't pursue, other unfulfilled
dreams. And you kind of have to sell a lot of that out in order to be really at the peak of
your field or what you want to be. I know that that's happened in my life. I mean, there's
tons and tons of relationships that couldn't survive the way that I was living my life,
because when I was trying to be a big time fighter or like when I was just training all the time,
and tons of relationships dissolve themselves naturally, some not so naturally,
some people get it, some people don't get it, some people hate you. You miss tons of other
opportunities. And I think that's kind of what that quote means to me. It's about sacrifice,
it's about you're giving up what you want now for what you want more.
And it's the the trampling of souls, it's messy too, because it's not clear what
what the right path is. Like that sacrifice is not obvious that those are the right sacrifices
to make. You might be you might be ruining your own life, but the fact that you're willing to take
that risk and sort of go all in on the whether it's stupid or not to go all in on something
that the possibility of creating something beautiful is there.
Who says it's stupid? If you're going all in on it, you don't think it's stupid. Someone else
might think it's stupid. But I mean, who really cares?
Well, I'm of many minds on many things. So I feel like there's certain minds,
certain moves of the day where you think it's stupid, like relationships is a beautiful one,
which is you've seen the movie whiplash, brain chance. Yes.
It seems like in a man's life, or it could be a woman's, but I'm, I don't identify as a woman.
So I know the man, the lift. It's 2020, bro. But my lived experience for now is that of a man
we'll see about tomorrow. And there is in the pursuit of excellence, there's often a choice of
some of the souls that must be trampled are personal relationships
with humans in your life that you might deeply care about. It could be family. It could be friends.
It could be loved ones of all different forms. It could be the people that your colleagues that
depend on you, people who will lose jobs because of the decisions you make, all this kind of stuff.
It seems that that moment happens. And I'm not sure that sacrifice is always the correct one.
Like to me, the movie whiplash, where people haven't seen the spoiler alert, maybe I don't
even know if that movie has any spoilers. But there is a relationship with a female,
there's a student, there's a drummer that's pursuing excellence of this particular art form
of drumming. And he has a brief, fleeting relationship with a female. And he also has
an instructor that's pushing him to his limits in what appears to be awfully a lot like a toxic
relationship. And he chooses, not chooses, he naturally makes the decision to sacrifice the
romantic relationship with the woman in further pursuit of this chaos, of this chaotic pursuit
of excellence. And it feels, that doesn't feel like a deliberate decision. It feels like a giant
mess of like an emotional mess where you're just like kind of like a fish swimming against stream,
just like, fuck it. You let go of all the things that convention says you should appreciate.
You throw away the possibility of a stable life, of a comfortable life, of what society says is a
meaningful life, and just pursue this crazy thing full of seeming toxicity with crazy people
surrounding you. I don't know. So I don't know what the right decision is. Part of my brain says
you should stay with the girl, fuck that instructor that's making you, that's pushing you to places
to places where it's like, that are destructive, potentially destructive, like could lead to
suicide, could lead you to completely fail, or fail on your pursuit of excellence, or destroy
the possibility, destroy the dream, the passionate pursuit of the thing that you've always dreamed
for in that case is drumming. I don't know. I'm on many minds there, like what is the right thing
to do? So my first two thoughts are number one, fuck convention. What is convention? It's like
some laid out paths, some linear progression of the way your life is supposed to go,
like, you know, that someone can draw a picture of at the end. That first of all, it's just boring
and whatever. And it's, I don't want to say that it's cowardly because it isn't cowardly,
but for someone who's not conventional to not be non-conventional is cowardly, to get
sucked into the convention. That's first. Second of all, I believe that scene in the diner in that
movie where he tells her, you're in my way because I'm going to want to be with you, or you're going
to want me to be going out to dinner with you. And I know I should be practicing, or I know I
should be training. And ultimately, I'm going to make, I'm either going to feel bad about not being
with you by training, or I'm going to skip the training to be with you. And neither one is right.
The whole thing that they don't mention in that is that that's the wrong girl.
That's the wrong girl. The right girl is a gangster. The right girl says, oh, you have,
you have practice tonight. I'll leave you a sandwich and some milk so that you can,
you know, outside the door. Let me know when you're done or you have some like free time.
Like the right girl complements that. She's not an impediment in any way. Even if what you want
to do is be with her so much that you're putting the drums down or you're putting the bass down,
or you're picking up the pizza, or you're not going to training. Like that girl,
without even telling you why she's making decisions, is making decisions to help you
achieve your goal. Now that might sound like some sort of like chauvinistic king of the
castle type shit, like where everyone should cater to you. But the fact of the matter is
that person is a compliment to your life in helping you do your thing. And in your own way,
you're helping them to achieve whatever their goals are also. It's uncommon that you have two
people under the same roof striving to be unbelievably excellent in one small area. It's
not impossible, but it's uncommon. Like relationships have to be like binary systems,
like two stars. Like the gravitational pull is what keeps you together and circling around
one another. And one is bigger than the other and they'll fluctuate and the stars will get
bigger and they'll get smaller and they're contract based on positioning and composition.
That's the way a relationship should be. Not an asteroid coming in to disrupt the surface
of your planet. It's a binary system. It's a compliment. That girl was the wrong girl for him.
So you shouldn't, like the big unconventional dreams should not be adjusted to fit into this
world. Because I mean, there is a part of me that's like full of self-doubt. Well,
maybe you're just a dick. Maybe, maybe. Who chairs? Lex, so first of all, who chairs?
This is, by the way, somebody who's, you have recently gotten, well recently, in the span of
the history of the universe is recently you've gotten to a relationship, but you haven't always,
you have not felt the need to be in the relationship just because you're supposed to by
society's kind of momentum. Correct. I think that if you really want anything,
you've got to be prepared fully to be the exact opposite. If you're a person who's looking for
a relationship, the only way you're going to get in an awesome relationship is by being comfortable
being alone because that's the risk. If you're a person who's driven by money, you've got to be
comfortable being totally poor because that's the risk. When you're constantly hedging your bets,
you're never all in. You're never all in on the thing you're trying to do.
A relationship has to compliment your life. You can't say it's okay to want to be in a
relationship, but you can't want to be in a relationship so bad that you take someone in
who fits the suit and it's like, oh, our schedule's kind of work out. You live near me and this
and that and the other thing because the logistics of a relationship are not always perfect.
What matters is when the two people are together. That's the perfect part of it.
It's great to want to meet people and say, if we meet and some sort of a relationship develops,
I'm willing to run with it, but I'm not meeting you hoping a relationship develops.
I think you kind of put the cart before the horse in a lot of those situations. It's like
when guys meet. No guy goes out and is like, I'm looking for a bro, right? Nobody does that. You
go to the gym and you run into a bunch of dudes and the next thing you know, someone's cool and
they want to talk about fighting and you're fucking shotgun and beers and all of a sudden,
you got a bro and that's how it works. It works the same way with them.
What's the shotgun and beers?
I'll show you after this. We poke a hole in the bottom and you open the top.
Yeah. This is the problem with America. Drink vodka like a man. Okay. Now don't poke holes
in beers. This is the problem with the frat culture. They don't really know how to drink.
They think they know how to drink. They don't know how to drink. What do you think
makes a successful relationship? If we can linger on that a little longer?
Or like, let me ask John Clark about love.
I didn't ask a question, but let me just say love.
About love.
Are you one of those people who never says, I love you?
No. No. I'm an extreme person and like my emotions are also extreme. And one of the things I
concern myself with, maybe this is philosophical and martial arts warrior, soldier type related
stuff is like, I don't want anyone, if I die tonight on the drive home, hopefully that doesn't
happen. I hope that no one has left questioning how I felt about them. And people I don't like
probably are not questioning that. And so the thing that I've had to learn how to do later in
life is to tell the people that you care about, that you care about them. And each thing can be
equally off-putting to the receiver of the message. Each thing can be equally off-putting.
When you're letting someone know how much you dislike them, that can be off-putting to the
person receiving that message. And when you tell someone how much you care about them,
they can also be off-putting to the person, depending on how they view their relationship
with you. But it's still important to get it out there. You shouldn't hold those things in
because you're worried about how they'll be received or if they'll come back at you.
So you're okay going all in on these not afraid of commitment?
No, I'm not afraid of commitment. Anyone who says they're afraid of commitment is full of
shit. You know what they're afraid of? They're afraid of commitment with that person.
That's what they're afraid of. When someone knocks you on your ass and they come into your life
and you're flushed with all these emotions, you're not worried about,
oh, I don't really like commitment. No, because they've knocked you on your ass. You want to
be with them. You want those things. The two most alive points in your life I think people feel
is the euphoria of a new relationship and then the loss when that love is gone.
You'll never feel more, I don't think, than in those moments in your life.
See, the nice thing about the loss is it lasts longer.
Yeah. That's a Lucy K point that he makes, which is in his show, I think,
is a conversation with an older gentleman that says that's his favorite part of the relationship
is that period between the loss of the relationship and the real death,
which is forgetting the person, but that period lasts the longest and that's the most fulfilling.
Missing the other person is as fulfilling as the actual love, the early infatuation,
which is interesting. I also think of the Bukowski. I return to that.
There's a little clip of him in an interview saying that love is a fog that dissipates
with the first light of reality or something like that. Basically emphasizing that it's this very,
very, very fleeting thing, that it's a moment's thing and then it just fades and everything
else is something else. Love is only a temporary thing, which is interesting. I think some people
say that's cynical. I don't know. I don't know what to think of it. I think it's important to
understand that everything is fleeting when you don't put effort into it. Almost everything
will be fleeting. If you don't put effort into it, most people will get fat and lazy. If you don't
put effort into something, you're going to not be good at playing guitar or playing bass. You've
got to put effort into it. The same thing goes for a relationship. The awesome part of it,
that love part, that dies soon and early on in a relationship because it's so good
that we think we don't have to work at it. But you do. You have to keep doing the things and
you've got to keep things new and crisp and fresh. Different people probably feel differently
about this. I don't know. You walk around your girl and you start farting and stuff. That's
when it all dies. That's when it dies. We're all human beings. We're all here and our bodies
work in the same way, but you start to chip away at this beautiful thing when you buck
conventional courtesy and things like that. Well, take it for granted, basically.
You take it for granted. That's the same thing with life. I'm a big fan of meditating on death
that you could die today. In the same way, you should meditate on this relationship could end
today. This connection with another human could be. This is the last time you could be interacting.
Your chances of that increase when you take it for granted and you should on people,
but when you work at it, the chances of that decrease. It's never going to be zero,
but it decreases. When you do that, when you're the person you're trying to maintain and you're
trying to work at the relationship, you got to make sure that both people are working at it.
Otherwise, you're just a fucking chump. Okay. Let's return back to mixed martial arts.
Let me ask the ridiculous question of who do you think are the top three,
maybe top five greatest fighters of all time? It's so hard to compare fighters across generations.
Maybe on one way to say it is, which metrics would you put on the table as to measure what a great
fighter is? There was a guy named Dioxopus in the fourth century and he was such a badass
that in the Olympics in 336 BC, no one even showed up to fight him in the pancreation event.
Nobody even showed up because he was fucking everybody up. Years later, he was retired and
this crazy Macedonian dude came there at some dinner for Alexander the Great. Everyone's chilling,
drinking whatever they were drinking out of their chalices. This Macedonian dude
threatened him and challenged him. Dioxopus said, yeah, man, we'll throw it out. They set
the time and the place. Macedonian dude comes out like body armor, spear, shield, all this other
shit. Dioxopus came out absolutely naked with a wooden club and took on this much younger guy,
beat the living crap out of him and then put his foot on his throat and then didn't even kill him
in the show of ultimate power for the time. There's something about the guy being naked
too is just extra demeaning. Extra demeaning. Yeah. Okay. Can we rephrase the question then?
Because those are clearly going to be some probably forgotten warriors in history.
Well, let's take it to modern day mixed martial arts in the UFC perhaps. Well,
just mixed martial arts there. Who do you think are the top fighters of all time?
What metrics would you consider in trying to answer this perhaps unanswerable question?
I think one of the things you want to think about is a strength of opponent at the time you
fought them. For example, fighting BJ Penn in his prime and beating him is far different than
beating BJ Penn last year. To say you have a victory over BJ Penn is not the same given the
time frame of when it happened. Not to take anything away from anyone who's beaten BJ Penn.
Just use that as an example of someone whose career went into a different direction.
Yes. I would say
the guy who I think is probably the best that people are the least familiar with would be
Marillo Bustamante. I think he was a guy who was one of the guys with the first really good
physical build for MMA, which I think is narrow from the chest to the back and long shoulder to
shoulder and sinewy made out of steel cable. That was a guy who could box. That was a guy
who could wrestle and that was a guy who had great jujitsu. It wasn't great kickboxer,
but at the time he didn't need it. Fought everybody and gave everybody a run. I think he's
probably one of those guys who's got to be considered. There's a few killers that never
... Why is he not in the discussion? I think greatness requires both the skill and the
opportunity to meet each other. When you talk about a fighter, the other thing that really
a good fighter needs to become great is a foil. So many fighters don't have a foil.
That's one of the biggest attractions I think of early Mike Tyson's career. He didn't have a
foil. He had no one driving him. And by the time he did, by the time he had a foil in Holyfield,
his career was in a different place. But he's one of the greats all the time. He never really
had a foil. So his greatness was in the unparalleled destruction of nobody's... Well,
not of lesser opponents. Right. And so when people debate the level of greatness of Mike Tyson,
that's one of the things they say. Like he didn't fight a lot of killers in their prime.
I think you've obviously got to say in that conversation, I have a really difficult time
keeping George St. Pierre out of the conversation. Only because he was able to beat you with anything.
He could outjab you. He could out wrestle you and he could submit you. The problem I have with
Fedor is his career also took a drastic turn towards the end. When he was fighting in pride,
he was doing a lot more grappling. And then he just started casting that overhand right at people.
And his game kind of changed at that point. You can't take anything away from his greatness, but
at that time, the great heavyweights were not really fighting in pride and they didn't really
exist yet. And by the time he fought a really good one, Fabricio Verdun, he did get submitted there.
Does his later performance color your and our perception of his greatness in general about
fighters? Not mine, but I'm someone who's intimately involved in the sport, but it colors
everyone else's. Same with Anderson Silva. I don't think Anderson Silva doesn't want to fight in
like seven years or something. That's a guy who in his prime was one of the best fighters.
Is he in the top five for you? I think he's probably in the top five, yeah.
Greater striker of all time or no? In MMA? In mixed martial arts.
In mixed martial arts? That's a tough question. The greatest MMA striker of all time.
Because like the timing, we're talking about foot sweeps, right? Who makes it look easier
than Anderson Silva? I think in an incredibly short sample of his prime,
it's got to be Anderson Silva. And I think you have to consider discussing Lyota Machida
for his unbelievable manipulation of distance, which is something that people don't really
talk too much about in terms of fighting unless you're someone in the sport. His use of distance
and the ability to like what we call pop out, like make you miss by one inch so that he could
follow your fist back in as you retract it and it hit you over the top. That's a thing of beauty.
Anderson Silva, when he became a counter striker, when he got to his prime in the UFC,
that was a thing of beauty. That was a thing of beauty. So I think definitely those two guys and
Marilla Bustamante has got to be the third guy. They're just so many good guys now.
So where do you put in terms of metrics? You mentioned GSB and Anderson Silva,
I think they have a large number of defenses of a title. Is that important to you,
like this kind of consistent domination? No, because it's easily manipulated
by the people making money off the fights. So there was a great quote one time when the UFC
was coming to prominence and Vince McMahon from the WWE, he said, you know, the difference between
what we do and what the UFC does is that when we have a superstar, I can make sure he stays
on top until he's no longer a superstar because we have predetermined results. The UFC can't do
that because they're actually having fights. Well, it's true and false. You can't do that,
but you can give your superstars the most favorable matchups to keep them on top for the longest.
So people always talk about title defenses as if the guy they're fighting, the challenger,
is always the person most deserving of the shot. And it's just not true. So I don't put
that much stock in it. Is it possible to put a guy in consideration as one of the greats
if all they had is one or two amazing fights? I'll tell you like, and amazing could be a
lot of different definitions. It could be just a war. Like they never really reached the highest
of excellences of domination, but they've like this, where does discussion about Kyle Bakniak,
right? Yeah. To me, that's a perfect example. He had this famous fight against the beat
Magomed Sharapov, where you on one side you have an Anderson Silva type of fighter
and ends to be like just a very good striker. And then there's like the warrior on the Kyle side.
And just the fight, they created something special together. It was fight and night,
whatever. But that fight was special on that night because the two dance partners.
You can have a great performance without being a great fighter. Not saying neither of those guys
is a great fighter. But to answer your first question, I think that having one or two great
performances does not necessarily mean that you are great. I need a larger sample size.
I have no idea what that is. I don't have an idea what that is. And also,
where, how much weight does toughness have when you're thinking about the criteria when you define
a great fighter? That's a good question. And I don't have the answer to it.
I admire the underdog that rises to the occasion through brute force.
They didn't have, they didn't bring the skill set to the table that perhaps some of the greats have,
but they rose to the occasion. I mean, there's something about that.
There's something about that. And so now we're more talking about like the internal attributes
as opposed to the external physical attributes. And those are the things I think that you cannot
teach. Those things, you come in the door and you either have that or you don't. I think,
and we talk about this all the time, and this is one of the things where my mind changes regularly.
Like I'm, what makes a fighter? Is it, is it born or is it bred? And this week, I'm of the opinion
that it's in you. And maybe it's in you and you suppress it and people can tease it out of you.
But I don't think you can make someone who doesn't have that seed in there. I don't think you can
turn them into that great warrior with that level of grit and mental toughness. Now, when that, that
fight, when Kyle farts a beat, it's a unique situation for both guys. It was kind of a later,
later replacement fight for Kyle. So beat star was on the rise and Kyle put the blueprint out
there on how to beat the beat. Which is, which is pressure him and try and drag him into the
late rounds. You notice that later on when Calvin Cater fought him, they wouldn't give him five rounds.
They wanted five rounds and it's a beats camp from what I understand would not agree to the
five round fight. Well, he didn't look right. So with Kyle, it was a three round fight.
Three round fight. And what did it want to decision? It went to decision. It beat one
to decision clearly. Did Kyle have a shot of winning the third round? I don't remember the
exact score, but Kyle could have won the third round. Eddie done a couple things differently,
but I do believe in the fourth round, I think Kyle wouldn't want a fourth round. And I think
maybe even won the fight. And if there would have been a fifth round, and he was pressing forward,
like perhaps, you know, in a funny way that you could tell me I'm wrong, but it felt like he
wasn't emphasizing like head movement at that point. He went full Mike Tyson. There was a point
at which, so it's funny that you say that, which is a contradiction actually, because Mike Tyson
had a great head movement. I actually don't know exactly what I mean, because he was in the pocket.
I think he was trying to do the movement. He was just in the pocket and pressing forward.
And like the, the fuck you attitude of just like, that was a little bit later when it beats back
was towards the cage. But so the, we get that fight. And I said to Kyle, I was like, look,
this kid has been training martial arts since he was three years old. There's not an area where
you're going to out-technique him. And so we've got to now channel some of that grit that we know
you have. This is an opportunity to showcase it. And I don't know how long I did it for, but because
Kyle's much shorter than the beat. So for a good long while, while we were training for the beat,
I didn't even say anything. And I just had clips of Mike Tyson training on the TV and the gym
and the head movement. And I didn't even mention it. And then we started to like get into it and
talk about, you know, getting inside the length of the longer fighter and things like that.
And we, we kind of, which when some people train MMA, they say, okay, this guy's a really good
wrestler. Let's think about avoiding the wrestling or being a better wrestler. And I think that
when the difference in skill is so great, those are both the wrong answer.
If a guy who's a really good wrestler wants to take you down and you don't have a lot of wrestling
experience, he's probably going to get you down if he's got a good coach, right? So you have to
deal with that. To then say, I'm going to then learn in eight weeks how to wrestle better than
a guy who's been wrestling since he was eight years old. There's also a bad idea. So what we
concentrated on for that camp and it worked beautifully was not getting caught in chain
wrestling. These are the takedowns you're going to get caught with. This is how to not get caught
with the next step while you're defending takedown one, because it's the chain of techniques that
are going to get you fucked, right? So we talked, we did a ton of work on getups and breaking the
hands from the various takedowns. It was a while ago now, so I don't remember exactly the techniques
we worked on, but we concentrated on defend the first takedown and stay out of the chain.
Don't get chained into a bunch of wrestling techniques because you will be outwrestled.
And that was really successful. And then in the third round, Sabit was tired and
He was tired.
He's a beat got tired. He cuts a tremendous amount of weight. I can't see him staying at
145 forever when they start giving him five round fights. I don't even know if he's out
of five round fight. Yeah, he may have, but I can't see him staying down there. He's
guys like six one. Yeah. Guys, he's a giant of a guy. So Kyle pressed forward there and
he said he felt that there was no power left in Sabit's hands. And so he felt fine.
And I think part of it was he fed off the crowd as he moved forward and, you know, saw that
he wasn't taking a lot of damage. Like the punches weren't staying him.
He started walking right through them.
It goes to your question of what makes a fighter. Was the him walking forward
like that? Something that you're born with? Or is that something you were training? Is that
is that the Mike Tyson on TV? He's born with that. Kyle is born with that. And the crowd.
I've been in Boston. No, he's in New York. He's in Brooklyn. I've been in a lot of arenas for a
lot of different sporting events. That's one of the loudest things I've ever heard
when he did that. I was going crazy. And you ask about that being like taught or not?
Kyle is so much like that that I have to try and tease some of that out of him.
Because he's also so very technical when he wants to be that the emotion and the fun of it
gets in the way of his technique and probably has cost them a couple of wins. And so that's
one of the things we work on with him right now is like staying within yourself, being a professional,
you taking your time to download the information in round one and then starting your fight in round
two. But the tension between those two things, what makes what on that day created one of the,
in my opinion, one of the greatest fights I've ever seen. Joe Rogan agrees. Yeah,
it's one of the greatest fights I've certainly ever seen. So like, it's funny that you as a coach,
I can see the frustration of like, like throwing away some of the strategy kind of thing. Like,
you seeing like, being not happy that there could be things that he could have done to win the fight?
It's in retrospect. I think that at that time, we were playing with incredible house money.
Kyle was a gigantic underdog in that fight. The beat was unstoppable. I think people were
probably picking him to finish the fight in round one. I think at that point, no one had
ever gone the distance with the beat. And no one certainly had, you know, put that kind of performance
together. And I think Kyle, Kyle put the blueprint out there. And in retrospect, when I look at the
last round, yeah, there were things that could have been done differently, but we're playing with
house money at that point. Like, I mean, let it fly. You get to a point where you've got it. You're
down three rounds and there's 20 seconds left. You got to move all your chips to the center of
the table and, you know, see what happens. Do you remember what Joe Rogan said about it? I remember
like he got one over. I think I have trouble remembering because offline, we talked about
that fight and he's exceptionally impressed by, I mean, Joe's from Boston. So it's like,
yeah, I mean, there's a story there. Okay. It sucks not, you naturally want to romanticize
like there's a Rocky versus like, there's a Rocky IV, I mean, similar, I suppose,
kind of chemistry. Kyle's style represents the American ideal, right? The spirit.
Yeah. I mean, he's from Gloucester. It's like, you could have, you could have dragged him off the
docks like three hours before the fight and said, Hey, you want to go fight? And he would have said,
yes. Yeah. Oh man, that was a special fight. But that's, as per discussion of like greatest
fighters of all time, I tend to believe that that fight is more special than the championship
belt defenses by George St. Pierre. Like, you know, there's something to that. It's like Rocky,
Rocky I is more special than like Rocky III, right? So it's the underdog or it's whatever,
like the dance partners, like going to war and like that moment, I mean, it's bigger,
it's bigger than any individual fighter. They create that and that, I know it's not perhaps
good for a career. It's not good for like, in terms of money, in terms of longevity, in terms of
all those kinds of things. But that's a special moment in the history of fighting that you both
created. I can remember, like right after, like, there was so much excitement in the air during
the third round. And I remember being in the corner and like, I was so excited at the end of it that
I had forgotten what happened in the other two rounds. I didn't even know. And I looked to
Sean, one of the other corner men, and I think I said to him, did we win? When you rewatched the
fight, clearly we didn't win the fight. I mean, we lost the other rounds, but I got so caught up
in that moment. And then I just remember, like, I was so in awe of his performance that, like,
I forgot what was going on. And it's so hard to not be a fan at that moment and to stay within
yourself and try and like coach. But then what the fuck are you even coaching at that point?
It's like, we're rumbling, we got 30 seconds, we're trying to win here. And I remember, like,
the performance itself, I'm not a fan of moral victories, but if ever there was going to be one,
that was one. And when the fight was over and I grabbed Kyle, like, they hadn't even been to
the center of the cage yet. And I just hugged him and I said, you're my fucking hero. And I
remember being very emotional about that, that I was able to be a part of that.
It feels wrong to say, but I was, I kind of avoided saying it, but I think if I'm being honest
with my feelings, this is a safe space for feeling. Yeah. Is I think it was the greatest
mixed martial arts fight I've ever seen. And I don't think I'm being biased. I was honestly
thinking like, am I being biased? I honestly don't think so. I think that was the greatest fight.
Like if you want to rank fights I've ever seen, I think to me that was the greatest fight I've
ever seen. It certainly was one of the greatest displays of like just dog effort from an underdog
who was out experienced and probably outsized. But I mean, like you just, Kyle's one of those
kids, you're never going to tell him he's out of a fight. He has something you can't teach. And
I've seen tons of people with more physical attributes and they're just mental midgets.
And they got a million dollar body and a 50 cent heart. And Kyle is not that. And you
can't teach it no matter what you do. But that was, I would say like my career in combat sports,
which spans, you know, if you want to go all the way back to like wrestling, like
that was one of probably the greatest experiences I've been a part of.
It's a bittersweet sport. She's a fickle mistress.
Yeah. I mean, the tragic aspect of that is like, I guess Kyle lost, right?
So like if you look at the record and all the kind of things, perhaps like you look at the career,
maybe like as a financial, from a financial perspective, that perhaps is not
the greatest thing for Kyle's career or that, or in the history of the UFC, perhaps it's not,
it's not, you know, like maybe many people didn't even watch that fight, but it was a special moment
that stands in the history. There's not many of these in the history of fighting. So.
But at the end of the day, when you look at someone's career in the UFC, like
financially, there's a, you know, a handful of people that make real money. Everybody else
makes nothing. There's a handful of people that make real money. So did that loss cost him in the
near term? Sure. But when you look back on your life, you're not going to look back on that loss
as something that derailed my life financially. And I never recovered from it. That's not going
to happen. Like the sad thing is, unless you were a champion and, you know, most people are going
to be forgotten right after they're gone. Most people will be forgotten. And if you're not forgotten,
certainly your, your accolades are going to be misrepresented. Either they're going to be inflated
or diminished one way or the other. So looking back on it, it's just so hard to, to quantify that,
but it's an experience. And like when you're in that moment and you're one of the people like
intimately involved in it, like the value of that experience supersedes any financial gain.
Where would you put Khabib in the discussion of the greatest of all time? So he recently,
we worked together, we watched the fight of him and Justin Gagey and Khabib retired.
Would you put him up there as some of the, as one of the greatest or did he never truly find
his foil that like the great warrior that challenged him? And maybe do you want to,
do you think he's fully retired now? To answer the question about being fully retired,
I don't have any idea. I can't for a second pretend to think that I understand the way
that people from that part of the world think and respect their family and things like that
to an American who says, oh, I promised my mom I wouldn't do it. I mean, I promised my mom I wouldn't
do a lot of things. I went right out and fucking back door and did them. But I think that that
means something different to people in different parts of the world. So I've no idea what kind
of weight that carries. So I can't answer that. I can say a lot of times when people think about
great fighters, they think about the aspects that make up MMA. Like they think of MMA as a
pie and they're all these different pieces that make up for make up the pie. And how good is
this piece and how good is this piece and how good is this piece? When the fact of the matter is,
you only need one really, really, really good piece. And the other pieces are complimentary
pieces to get you to where you're the strongest. And if you want to tell me that Khabib is not
the greatest MMA fighter, because he doesn't have really slick striking, you can make that argument.
But what I can tell you is Khabib has good enough striking to get him to his grappling,
where he is clearly the best guy at 155 they've ever seen. So does that make him the greatest
fighter in that division or not? To your point about the foil, they wanted Conor to be his foil
and he just manhandled them. I mean, they wanted that to happen, did not happen. So.
Well, there's a kind of argument to be made, which we kind of, you get haters in this argument.
And you're going to be one of the haters because I know you're, Hasha, I put a lack of admiration
for Conor McGregor. But what is it? Football is the game of inches. There's a sense where
that Conor, there's an argument to be made that Conor wasn't exactly dominated,
that he ended up being dominant. Meaning, let me phrase it differently, is there's a lot of points
in the fight that it could have, a different trajectory could have happened. So he wasn't
so far from having a chance at winning that fight. It's just the end, you can focus.
Those are the most important moments at the end. You've lost the most important moments.
Right. But the road less taken, it could have been, if he didn't lose those very important
moments, he had a chance. So I'm saying, out of all the people that could be fought,
it's arguable that Conor was up there of the people that had a chance.
Let me say this first.
I love, I do love Khabib. I'm a huge Khabib fan because I'm a grappler, first and foremost.
Me too, because I'm also Russian. I love Khabib, calm down. Okay.
But when, when, when Conor came on the scene, I loved Conor because I'm an Irish American and,
you know, I want to support him and things like that. And he was, he was good fun. He, he got to
be, for my personal taste, he got to be too much of all the people Khabib has fought.
I would never fight Conor again if I were him. And here's why. And I said this about the Diaz fight.
Nate Diaz, who was one of my favorite fighters has fought the exact same fight for 12 years.
Conor will switch something up to give himself an edge.
And I believe that Conor would figure something out in fight number two, I think,
but I also thought that Gagey would give Khabib problems where it wouldn't be a matter of,
I'm going to out wrestle Khabib or become better at defending his wrestling takedowns.
Conor would have figured out a way to not get wrestled. I feel like he's constantly changing.
He's constantly evolving. And whether or not people realize it or not,
I think Conor is one of the better overall athletes in MMA, just from looking at his
body and his movement and the way he's shaped. He's got a very tiny waist.
He's got really pronounced glutes and shoulders. And I think he's for real athlete,
whereas a lot of guys in MMA are not for real athletes. They're just good at one of the things
that makes up MMA. I understand what you're saying about if this happened, if that happened.
But I mean, you could say that about every single combat sports event ever.
If Spinks's hook landed on Tyson, maybe that fight didn't end the way that it did.
But you know what? It didn't.
You're absolutely right. But if we could talk about just Conor McGregor for a second,
I can't wait to get your fan mail or hate mail. Speak to the innovation of Conor.
I don't hear very many people making this argument,
but is it possible to make an argument that Conor McGregor is one of the greatest fighters of all
time? It's an interesting argument. And the problem, the only problem with the argument
is there's so much emotion on either side. Yeah. I had a conversation, sorry to interrupt,
with Yaron Brooke, who is a philosopher, objectivist, which is the philosophy of Iron Rand.
And the amount of emotion around that particular human is fascinating to me. It's similar to
the amount of emotion around Donald Trump. You can think of different personalities, maybe Elon Musk.
Those are the people that aren't willing to have their mind changed. They're too emotionally
attached to the argument. Yeah, but it's weird that why do we, why some people
inspire so much emotion and others don't? Conor McGregor, I feel like nobody's able to have a calm
fight analysis of the guy. To me, as just a fan of martial arts, I study Judo. I love watching
just hours of Olympic Judo and appreciating the art form. I forget the humans involved.
Teddy Reneire, who's heavyweight, probably the most dominant heavyweight in the history of Judo,
just studying his gripping, just the art of it. And who cares if there's shit talking? To me,
I put all of that aside and just look at the art. What I really appreciate about Conor McGregor
is his innovation of movement, of maybe it's romanticized. Maybe you can correct me. I'm just
a Cheeto-eating fan of mixed martial arts, but I seem to detect more innovation than almost any
other fighter that I pay attention to in Conor McGregor. I'll answer in two parts. I think,
well, I'm not going to answer the first part. It's just a comment because you didn't ask the
question. What was the question? I don't even remember. It's about how Conor McGregor fans are
very emotional and Conor McGregor detractors are very emotional. I think fans become very emotional.
They become cheerleaders of someone like Conor McGregor or Donald Trump because they see that
person exhibiting the qualities that they themselves lack. And so they become cheerleaders
for that. And I think that for the most part, people who are detractors of Conor McGregor,
they're not really Conor McGregor detractors. They're detractors of Conor supporters. There's a
beef that they have with the people in that bucket. There's not really a problem. And that applies
probably in our current political climate. Donald Trump with the left and the right,
it's more about like they actually don't like on the others, the caricature, the most extreme
versions of what they see in the supporters of the other side. Yeah, that's a good point. But I
think the more interesting thing is the fighter himself. So let's put the supporters aside.
I would say that, you know, what some people know and some people don't know is that Conor's base
is in karate. And the karate style of Conor McGregor, Stephen Thompson of Lyoto Machita,
that type of distance management, a lot of times we think as martial artists, we think that
the sport version of the art we've chosen to pursue somehow taints the authenticity in the
and the effectiveness of it. But point karate is what led to that in and out distance management
style of Conor of Lyoto and of Stephen Thompson. They all kind of use it a little bit differently,
but they use it very effectively, all three of them. And that comes from a world of trying to
kind of like step in, land contact on you from my point and then get back out before you can
counter strike me, right? And that's where that comes from. Conor is blessed to have longer arms
than someone his height probably normally has. And his movement is just so fluid. He's so athletic
with the hinges of his body, the knees and the hips and the swivel of his body, which is also
the hips and the shoulders, his movement, his distance and the way he sets people up for the
straight left hand while you're circling away from it and he can still land it, which is what he did
to Chad Mendes hit him with a straight left while he was circling away from it. That is something
that is very beautiful to watch. And sometimes people see the kicks and they see all the flashy
snap kicks and the side kicks. All that stuff is doing is setting people up for the left hand.
It's all it's doing. It's you're corralling people, you're funneling people or you're leading the dance
and you're bringing them to a spot where you know you can land that left hand. And his ability to do
that is masterful. People constantly shit on his ability to grapple and because a couple of his
losses have been to Jujutsu guys or grapplers, but they've been to really good guys. Anyone who's
going to sit here and tell me Conor McGregor is not a good grappler, go grapple him. Let me see you
grapple him. To that point, I'll also say a lot of people will use Conor McGregor's X guard sweep
on Nate Diaz as evidence to his high level grappling in that fight, to which I would also
counter Nate Diaz didn't fight that off because he knew he was so much better at Jujutsu off the
bottom that he didn't even care if he got swept. So is Conor McGregor innovative? Absolutely.
Is he one of the best fighters ever? It's tough to say because he's such a cash cow that he was
fed people. I firmly believe no one who put that Conor McGregor Khabib fight together thought Khabib
would win. Wow. I remember so at that time it was not completely clear there was a myth of the
great Khabib. It wasn't completely clear how good is he really. So that's interesting and it was
unclear how good is Conor also. Right. Because I think to me maybe part of my admiration for Conor
McGregor is rooted in the fact that I thought there's no way he beats Jose Aldo and I thought
there's no, definitely no way he beats Eddie Alvarez. And so like when he did, I was like,
I had to like my brain was like there's something broken. It was like shut down like on windows
like froze. You have to rethink this. Like this is a special human. Now people who argue he's not
even in the running of like top 20 is, you know, if you look at the number of defenses, for example,
of his belt that he had very, very little. But like to me, one of those people is back to our
discussion of like, do moments make great fighters that I think just being able to beat Jose Aldo
and his, I would argue in his prime, some people might disagree in this, in a way where he like
figures out the puzzle gets in his head the entirety of the picture. And then to be, I mean,
Eddie Alvarez, would he be considered a really strong wrestler? Like, like, or not not strong
wrestler, strong striker and wrestler, the whole combination of it. And also, what's the other
wrestler he fought? Chad Mendes. Chad Mendes. So let me comment on all those, if I may. So I was at
the Chad Mendes fight live. And there was a Jiu Jitsu tournament, we're out in Vegas. And so me,
my best friend came out and we got some tickets. That night was supposed to be the first Aldo
fight. Aldo got hurt, like right after I bought the tickets. They pulled Chad Mendes in, he was
a little bit out of shape, whatever, you still got to fight the fight. But I don't, I don't want to
use that fight as evidence to Conor's greatness, because, you know, they pulled Chad Mendes in,
he was like hunting and drinking beers in the woods and was a little out of shape.
Chad Mendes. But if you want to talk about greatness, like that surpasses your in-ring
accomplishments, I was in the stands that night. And the people that came from Ireland to see
Conor fight that night, single-handedly set the market for hotel room prices and airline tickets
to Vegas that weekend. These motherfuckers were all dressed like Conor in the stands. They had
wool suits on and big beards and the whole thing. I mean, I'm probably wearing pocket watches. Like,
I never saw more people trying to be someone else. Never saw more people try to be someone else.
I mean, there's a level of, is there a level of greatness in that? I mean, I don't know how to
like parcel all that out. You're somebody who doesn't admire that. I love that in the sense,
the following sense, I think that people don't seem to hold this belief at all. But to me, fighting
is not just, this isn't like a quiet street fight that nobody watches. This is also a spectacle.
This is also a story. There's like, there's a professional wrestling element to this. This is
not, like you think it's just about fighting. If it was just about fighting, you wouldn't,
I mean, there's a story to it, I guess. Trying to get to it. And like greatness has to
incorporate that. Like people that criticize, again, I might be wrong on this, but I honestly
think that Conor McGregor, not nearly as much as Khabib, but he, he's a true martial artist.
I think he respects his opponents despite the talk. I, if maybe I'm misreading it,
but it feels like he is a storyteller, like a jail son and type of like, he's constructed this
image to tell, to, to play the story. Like just the way he acts after the fight, the honor he
shows to his opponents. There's a real martial artist in there. And to dismiss the fact that
the, the, the story of the fight is part of it because he doesn't just shit talk. This is what
people don't seem to understand. He's good at shit talking. Very good. And I, and I'm with
you on, on basically everything you said. I think that there's greatness to that. And I think that
he understands how to sell a fight. And I think what he did to Jose Aldo by getting in his head
helped him win that fight. He insulted Jose Aldo and his country so much that he knew Aldo was
going to come forward right into that left hook. Was that fighting Brazil, by the way? Do you
remember? I don't recall. Cause I know he insulted all of Brazil, but I'm not sure if it wasn't
Brazil. But when he tried to do that to Khabib, you could tell that he just was not going to get
in Khabib's head. Khabib was unflappable, but there is, there is definitely something great
about how he moves people. You know, the Irish are, are like, I mean, Conor's walkout music,
like for people from Ireland of Irish descent, like that shit is like very deep, you know,
that it's very emotional song. I was, to be honest, a little bit upset with Khabib
that he didn't rise, I admire all that entire culture, but there's an aspect to where he
could have risen to the occasion of, there's the same kind of depth of love of country that Russia
has. Is there in Dagestan? Dagestan is a little weird in terms of like, but he could have, especially
with Putin's support, wear for a bit the full Russian hat of like, this is the great nation,
like rise above the, the culture of Dagestan, which is a small town boy with the small town
values of family and all those kinds of things. There's a moment where you inspire entire nations,
like the step up and be the foil to the, to the great Conor McGregor work, where also Khabib
becomes the foil to, like, like both of them are the foil to each other and become like,
that fight was already a great fight, right? But it could have been something historic,
Ali versus Fred. I mean, it could have been really historic. And I would argue,
I guess the biggest disappointment I have, and I understand it, and I also honor it as a martial
artist, but too, I'm disappointed that Khabib doesn't seem to even consider the possibility of
doing in Moscow fight number two. So, and because that could be narrative wise, if they do it right,
that's one of the, could be one of the greatest fights in history.
Yeah. I think in terms of Khabib and inspiring a country, is it possible that by staying true
to the values that he had his entire career and getting to the zenith of his art form
and still doing it in that humble way, isn't it possible that that inspires his country?
I should clarify that. I think they're just hearing from people from my fellow comrades,
is they love that. They love that. But they...
There's also a brash beer chugging, shit talking thing that people really like about Conor. And I
do love that. But the beautiful narrative would have been the clash, the real clash of those cultures.
So, Khabib chooses to live the culture by walking away. There's also like a clash of them,
sort of walking, not walking away from the fire, but walking into the fire of this brashness.
It's the sort of the cool, collected, like calmness of the Dagestan people.
It's like you were talking about the Scythia brothers. So, they just view it totally differently.
And there are stereotypes about the Irish where they're maybe potentially a louder,
more boisterous culture. And I thought they each played their part perfectly. And
all those things that you're describing could have happened. Maybe Khabib steps up and he carries
the proverbial flag, so to speak, for a nation of people and they go to battle. But the fight,
if it plays out the same way, is still the fight. And it was an okay fight. It wasn't a great fight.
The fight was okay. And I think that, again, I don't have any idea what Khabib's obligations to
his family are. I don't think either of those guys want for more money to do another fight
is just a legacy thing. It's just about fulfilling some part of a legacy.
And I admire the possibility of a great legacy that is bigger than either of the fighters.
I think with Khabib, he's not as concerned about legacy, I think.
Your promoter's dream, because you want the rematch, and the only thing that makes more
money than the rematch is the trilogy. You got to split the rematch, you hope Connor wins,
and then you had the trilogy fight. And now you're all in.
Yeah. Yeah, I can't get into Khabib's head, but I know Putin, just the game, the entirety of it,
especially at the time, especially if it was Trump as president, if he was as president at the time,
and Putin, and in Russia, and just knowing how masterful Connor is at like,
because Connor would be a different Connor. I think he would be a calmer Connor, like there
would be a different, like, because you don't want to be over the top Connor with the Russian people.
Right, no. It's like dangerous ground. When Kyle fought to beat, that was the episode
in the hotel in Brooklyn, when some of the Russian guys confronted Ardom, and then Connor came over.
It's not, but the danger of that. I mean, there is the element of just like real danger, and the real,
there's almost a war. It's, I don't know. It was like when Chael Sonnen was talking so much smack,
maybe it was against Van der Lee Silva, I don't know, and there's one of those fights where they
just didn't think he was going to make it out of Brazil. Americans don't get it. People take
some of that shit in different parts of the world very, very seriously. But that's what makes it
beautiful. That's what makes a great story, and I think fighting is very much about the stories,
not just about the particular outcomes of a fight or the skill set matching or like
the chess of the fight. It's also about the story of the greater context of societies,
of warring. We're like warring cultures. We're no longer can have great, big, hot wars between
nations because of nuclear weapons. This is our wars that we can have, and in some sense,
I feel robbed of the great war that could have happened. It doesn't mean there aren't lots of
wars going on, but yeah, the big one is not going to happen. There's too much of a balance of power
with nuclear weapons and technology and stuff, but then it's not the end of war. No. Do you think
there's always going to be war? I think there'll always be war, especially in underdeveloped parts
of the world. Isn't there always underdeveloped, relatively, parts of the world? Yeah, I mean,
at some point, though, you'd think, I mean, the way that technology is expanding and we're bringing
technology to weird parts of the world that you wouldn't think of as technologically advanced,
the way that the Chinese are inhabiting certain areas for mining purposes and things like that,
I think underdeveloped parts of the world will get developed quickly.
I just wondered what the nature of that war might be. It could be cyber. It could be all
those kinds of things. I think in developed nations, it's going to be cyber. I think that's
probably the next phase of war. But I mean, I think you talk about parts of the world like
the Middle East, and it's just still going to be warring tribal factions. We can't even begin
to understand what those people are fighting about over there. Yet everyone sitting in America
on their couch has an opinion. You can't even begin to understand it. I sure can't.
Yeah, it's back to the principles discussion. When what's violated is much deeper than just
kind of anything we can even in a middle class existence can even comprehend.
A lot of times American soldiers will go to war because that's what they're told to do.
Maybe they disagree with the orders and maybe they agree with the orders. But I get a sense
that people in the Middle East fighting all believe in what they're fighting for. It's not
a thing where they're told to go do it. I believe they really believe that what they're doing is
the right thing and they're defending some sort of principle.
Are you generally optimistic about the future, speaking of war, of human civilization? Do you
think people talk about the Fermi paradox and asking why haven't aliens visited us,
if you believe they haven't visited us? One of the thoughts is that there's a
kind of a great filter that intelligence and civilization reach a point where it destroys
itself naturally. So that's why we haven't seen them. They don't last very long.
There does seem to be a kind of, we seem to be advancing faster and faster and faster. We keep
developing more and more powerful ways of destroying ourselves in all kinds of ways,
not even just even to say nuclear weapons alone. But there's all kinds of new ways,
engineer pandemics, nanotechnology, AGI, all those kinds of things.
It seems to be that the argument that we are going to destroy ourselves in some kind of creative
way very shortly is not too crazy of an argument to make. Are you more optimistic or pessimistic
about the prospects of human civilization and maybe the 22nd century? Is it possible that your
generation is the last generation to be alive on earth? No, but I wouldn't say that five generations
from now that could be true. I guess I think of it really selfishly. I'm a big believer that
when your time here on earth is over, the overwhelmingly vast majority of people will
be forgotten within 12 calendar months. People with no family will be forgotten sooner.
And so I don't give a lot of thought to what will happen to earth or mankind when I'm gone.
I give more thought to maximizing my time here now and I want to do it in a way where I'm not
overtly hindering the future of civilization or humankind, but I'm definitely taking a
me first approach to how I live on earth. Do you have a philosophy behind why you have or don't have
kids on this topic? Because for many people when they have kids, there's a sense, it's almost like
a genetic sense or something like that, where all of a sudden you do start caring about what happens
five generations from now. I mean, I think I'm just too selfish. I mean, I think that's the
easy answer. I know that your whole life has to change. Your focus, everything shifts and
just don't want to do that. And also, I guess if I have to really unpack it, there's probably a
level of lack of hope in the future. I don't think the world and humanity is going in the right
direction. What does the right direction look like? I think the right direction looks like people
coming back together in a more impactful human way in person, touching, feeling, talking face to
face. So all the things you're describing is what we had, as you mentioned before, when you were
like a teenager. Yeah. So the state of the world, but that's because your mind was formed then.
It very well could be. It very well could be. It's very possible that the virtual reality
worlds that we'll create will be actually a much higher level of existence. In fact,
now we're moving slowly away from tribalism. Perhaps you could argue the ideas of nations
and we're moving into the realm of ideas and it could be a higher form of existence where we're
sort of moving past the constraints of our meat vehicles into the space of our minds.
It depends what you value because when you sit here and you talk about it and you're talking
about these things and these humongous levels on these macro levels. And I don't think a lot
of people view it that way. I think a lot of people view it as like, what kind of pizza am I
getting tonight? It's a much different outlook. And sure, the virtual world that's on the horizon,
I'm sure it's got benefits and will help people, but is it going to help the things that you find
valuable? Like, was it going to help commerce? Okay, sure. Is that the thing you find the most
valuable? Is it going to help communication? Well, it'll help disseminating information.
Is it going to help explain the information you're disseminating? Probably not.
Is it going to hinder interpersonal communication? Absolutely. And those are things I find valuable.
Interpersonal communication, talking to people. It saddens me when I go into a restaurant
and there's five-year-old kids who slam it away on an iPad and can't make eye contact with anybody
or teenagers who don't say please and thank you when they order from the waitress. Like,
that to me is wrong. That shit's wrong. And I don't know this for a fact, but I do attribute that to
using technology as a crutch when we're raising kids. I think those are things that I find valuable.
I tried to empathize. I mean, I agree with you as a person who grew up in a certain age,
but like prior to the internet, I suppose, but or at least solidified the early philosophies of
the way I see the world prior to the inter... During the time of AOL, let's put it this way.
What was your aim screen name? I never had one. Okay. Dude, I was the last person I knew to get
a cell phone. I was so anti all that stuff because I just felt like I didn't want to be a part of it.
I did not want to be a part of it. I joined the underground forum about MMA in 2000 or 2001 when
I first started training. I think right at the tail end, I got a MySpace, but I didn't have any of
that stuff and I didn't want any of it. I don't know why. It just was not into it. I felt like
what are the good things that are going to come out of it? Oh, I'm going to get my package in
two days instead of four days. Does that make my life better? I tried to deeply empathize with a
lot of experiences of other people. One of the things, I love the smell of paper books and books
in general. Early on, this is like five years ago, I just gave away all my books and I said,
I'm really going to try to fall in love with the books in the same way I did before, but now with
a Kindle or not a Kindle, like Paperwhite, whatever, the EE Book Reader. I'm still not there, but I've
been kind of trying to fall in love with that experience. In the same way, I try to think like
teenagers are really into TikTok now, like making these short videos. I try to consider the possibility
that their existence will be a much happier one than I've had because of this kind of interaction.
From my sort of skeptical perspective, it's like the attention span is so short, they don't really
deeply think or deeply experience things. They construct a social layer that they present to the
world and they work on creating this social layer, like the presentation to the world much more than
really sitting alone with their thoughts and the sadnesses and their hopes and dreams and fears
and working on the project that is their own actual person that exists in this physical world
as opposed to working on the project of a particular social platform that they show.
But perhaps that project, who cares who you are in the physical space? Maybe what you are is what
your Instagram shows. That's the more important project to work on.
But what's reality?
Yeah, what's reality.
Perception is reality. So how other people perceive this constructed thing, that's their
reality of you. But is it your reality? Like we said earlier, how you want people to see you
is very rarely in line with how you really are or how you see yourself.
And I can remember being a 13-year-old kid and when you go through a bunch of weird
13-year-old kid shit, sitting in my room, turning a red light on and listening to a sad record
and trying to figure out what's going on inside. Sometimes you like it, sometimes you don't like
it. But I feel like those experiences are lost on kids constantly connected to a phone and I
don't know what the remedy for those situations is nowadays. Like I don't know, do they make a
TikTok video? Do they blog about it? Do they make a video or a...
Nobody blogs anymore, bro.
Whatever, man. Or a video, a story about, oh, this is what happened to me and blah,
blah, blah, blah. Does that actually help them work it out? Or does it just create more
noise and more static on how to get to the root of the problem and learn about themselves?
I don't know what future social networks are exactly. I do know on a shallow level,
it does feel good when somebody clicks like on something. I think that is more of a drug than
an actual deep, long-lasting fulfilling happiness. But perhaps there is a way to make a social
network that does lead to long-lasting happiness that's somehow detached from the physical
meat space. I don't know, but it feels like you want to give that a chance.
Do you think when people are liking things on social media,
do you think there's just a group of people, an overwhelming majority of people that are
going to like whatever you put out there, they're clicking like? And then there's another section
of people that just constantly scroll and like, scroll and like, and scroll and like.
Do you think when you get a like on content you put out, that that like perhaps came from someone
who normally doesn't like your content, but you've just changed their mind on something,
or you've turned them around on it? I tend to think that when I get likes on social media,
those are just the people that like all my shit no matter what I say. They probably don't even
read it. Like I could, you know, put the most preposterous thing up there and you're still
going to get a handful of the same exact likes. That's interesting. But I tend to, the way I see
likes, you're kind of, you said multiple things. I think in one sense you see social media as like
a battleground of ideas and like is it kind of indicated, like the best possible like is an
indicator of like, of the, of you winning over somebody on an idea and they really appreciate
that idea. That's the best possible. Like to me, a like is just two strangers smiling at each other.
Like a moment of like, like, I got you, bro. Yeah, I got you, bro. Yeah. Yeah. Like fist bump,
like, yeah, we're in this fucking thing together. This whole thing doesn't make any sense, but we're
in this together. And I think, yeah, it's possible for likes to be that. I don't think the actual
clicking of a like, I think social media at its best might be that where it's like, I got you, bro,
at a large scale, as opposed to kind of this weird like crazy pool of dopamine where everyone's
just obsessed with this likes and likes and then the division drives like more of this like weird
anxious engagement. I think that's just the dark version of it in the early days of social media.
I think you called it a battleground of ideas, but I think social media is nothing but a
battleground of fragile egos. But humans are fragile egos. I mean, maybe, but I think the
people, I think, particularly on social media, they're the most fragile. Like,
would you be doing all the things you're doing? What would you be doing if you weren't,
um, if you weren't podcasting and posting the things you do on social media, what would you
be doing? You'd probably be much the same guy, right? But I think that on social media, the fragile
ego people, what you see on social media is not what they'd be doing without social media. Does
that make any sense? Like you're probably your mission is probably somewhat congruent in your
path. You're just utilizing social media. But I think a lot of people, social media has changed
their path and now they're doing something totally foreign to them. And they're only able to do it
maybe because of social media. I think you're focusing on a particular moment in time of people
in their less great moments, like in their less great version of themselves. I think you're just
focusing on the masses struggling to, uh, to become the best version of themselves. And then you,
yeah, sure, for stretches of time, whether it's days, weeks or months, you could be a shady person
on the internet. I think you're, uh, focusing on that. And unfortunately, social media platforms
emphasize they love it when you're like that, when you're not doing great in your own,
in your own life because it increases anxiety, increased engagement, makes you more susceptible
to the argument and then really get pulled into like conspiracy theories, all that kind of stuff.
But it's, the other side works too. I think there's also the people who are on social media,
like fronting, like they're these positive figures and like, you know, go into the gym,
like whatever it is, the positivity that they spew out. But in real life, they're the most negative
fucks you've ever met in your life. And they're just so full of crap. And it's just people playing
to an audience. It's like, like you said, like they, it's like a politician sometimes, like a
politician wakes up one day and they decide, who's the group I can pander to the best to get the
most likes equals votes. And it's the same thing on social media. People wake up and whether it's
conscious or not, what's the group I can pander to the best to get the most likes? Is it the
positivity motivated crowd? Is it the woe was me crowd? Like, what is it? Who's going to give me
the most likes? That's what I'll do. I don't know how to argue against that. I guess it's, it's,
it rings true what you're saying, but I just kind of refuse to believe it. I guess I'm pandering to
the optimistic crowd. Like I met with my marketing team and I just feel that love has the, the best
what do you call it? No, I don't know. There's a lot of people that accuse me of being like
exactly that, which is like, why are you always being positive? It's like, well, because I'd like
to be that. Yeah. But I don't, I wouldn't consider you someone who panders. No, but you know, I guess
what I'm saying is like, it's easy to say that everyone is pandering, but like, maybe they're
just trying, I do believe that social media platforms could encourage people when they're
trying to be the best version of themselves, whatever that is, it could be like Conor McGregor
talking shit, it could be just being positive, it could be actually creating cool things in this world,
putting out instructional videos for Jiu Jitsu or like inspiring students through competition,
I don't know, all those kinds of things, educational content. I think that people are trying,
like I tend to believe that people want to be good, like the, like they want to be successful,
whatever that definition of success is. And they're kind of struggling to do that. And
they're just awkward at it at first. And like, it's easy to focus on the awkwardness and the
stumbling around us, people have that, and they start shitting at each other. It's easy to kind
of focus in on that. But I think that's just like people, you know, white belts, there's more white
belts in the world than there are black belts, but you gotta give them a chance to kind of grow.
I think on social media, if you put your stuff out there, whatever your stuff is, your content,
your views or whatever, you let the chips fall where they may, like that's a different thing
than being like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna tweak what I normally might say and put it up this way,
because I want these people to like it. And in terms, I also think I have a different
viewpoint than you do on people wanting to be successful. I actually don't think that many
people want to be successful. I think people want to have the appearance of wanting to be
successful, but to be successful takes a shitload of work. And most people don't want to put that
work in. So they craft this persona of a person who's trying really hard, but just can't catch
the break or, you know, these motherfuckers with getting back on my grind. You've never been on
a grind. You've been on the couch. I still disagree with you. I get it. I get it. You,
that's your foil. You enjoyed that guy in the couch with the cheetah. That's you. That's your
motivation. But just own it. Be like, don't be like back on the ground. Be back on the couch.
Yeah. Well, you, you're like David Goggins, who was like talking shit to the one guy with the
eating Cheetos. And in so doing inspires millions to like, to actually pursue their success. I
get it. But I just think that most people really do want to be successful and are like, are trying
to work hard and they keep failing. So I mean,
But why is it, why is it continue? I'm sorry to interrupt you, but like, let's take a person
who's overweight. Yeah. Do you not think that person wants to be skinny? Of course they want
to be skinny. They just don't want it enough to put the pizza or the pie down and go to the gym.
They want it, but they want it to be easy. Of course they want to be skinny.
Well, everyone wants it to be easy. Right. And of course people,
people want to be successful, but do they want it enough to do the work? I don't think they do.
I think the easy thing to do is to, to create a, an outward facing persona of the person who
really wants it. And you get the same reward from a lot of people as the person who actually is
successful. Very few people differentiate from the person who's found success and the, and the
person who's showing you how they're trying to get success on social media. People see that as the
same. I see, I see you're going after the marketing dollar that represents the people that want to
work hard. I like it. You started a podcast recently called, which people probably from
this conversation can, I guess we didn't really talk about politics much or the fact that you're
a business owner or the fact that you're a red blooded American and love this country, America.
We didn't really talk about that, but from the name of the podcast, I can probably infer it.
And the name is please allow me. Good name. What have you learned from doing this podcast?
What's your hope of doing this podcast for? People should definitely listen to it. You have a few
episodes out. You're damn good at it, which is very interesting. I'm sure you'll evolve and
change, but so this is like the early days. I'm curious to see where it goes. But what, like,
what's your thinking around it as an intellectual, putting your thoughts out into the world?
I think that one of the things that COVID did when we were all kind of in lockdown was,
as a business owner, it made me take stock of what's the future of brick and mortar businesses.
I've always been reluctant to be an online presence in any way, just because it's not my
thing because I believe that I'm a force of nature and people need to experience me.
Right? And the few characters that Twitter has, it's not enough to
experience the force of nature. There's John Clark. Right. I want you to feel
physically uncomfortable around me. Three hours of me being physically uncomfortable.
I'm scared for my life. And so I thought that that would be one of the ways in which I could
increase. I came to the conclusion that with the lockdown and potential future lockdowns,
you know, in order to pay my mortgage and, you know, my bar tab and my grubhubs out of control,
that I would need to find ancillary ways to- Door-dash-Lex. You don't want to use grubhub-grubhub
sucks. Door-dash. They actually do- Door-dash. No, I'm just kidding. Just walk to your local food
area. 7-Eleven. Yeah, and get the food. You can order 7-Eleven from Door-dash. Or from Postmates.
Code-Lex. Okay, I'm sorry. But anyway, I thought it was like, oh, I should probably increase a
little bit my online presence and what would be a way to do that that would be fun for me and
entertaining. And I thought, well, a lot of people yourself included that I know have done some
podcasts and I find that inspiring. And I'm fortunate enough to know a bunch of cool motherfuckers
that, you know, I can talk to about a wide range of topics. Then there is, sorry to drop in,
there's an aspect to which podcasting does capture the force of nature, but in individual form,
podcasting captures the force of nature of a human being better than other mediums, perhaps.
Yeah, definitely. There's that. I just felt like, you know, when it's midnight and you're in the bar
and you get the sense that, you know, the bar is going to close in 90 minutes and you think,
you know, not enough people have seen me yet. And maybe we should go to another bar so more
people can see me. Yeah. I feel like podcasting is like, is like that for me. Not enough people
have heard my thoughts. And I feel like my mom raised me to be a giver. She didn't want me to
be selfish. And I have these thoughts that I think, that I think... It'd be a waste if you
didn't give it to the world. People seem to really enjoy them. Yeah. And while I've probably been on
my best behavior today on this episode of the podcast. So if you want the uncensored, unfiltered,
the full spectrum, the force of nature that's John Clark, you go to the podcast. You, funny enough,
I think you're drinking throughout most of the podcast. Yeah. Tequila. So they only last like
an hour because you seem to like, I'm guessing that you just lose it one hour. Like it's like
Cinderella turns into a frog or whatever. One of the things I'm learning is sometimes you have
great conversations when you're drunk and sometimes you don't. Like I was, I went into it with the
right drunk edit sober mentality. Yes. Hemingway. Hemingway, yes. But turns out that sometimes
you don't have that much to edit when you're super shitfaced. And so I've been scaling that back a
little bit. What do you mean exactly by that? Like where does it go wrong when you're drunk?
I'm curious about that because it gets, you, especially when you have a personal relationship
with the person that you're talking to, rather than trying to put some ideas on display for
other people to hear and maybe talk about, you wind up just having like a conversation with
your bro about inside jokes and things like that. And it's like, it's not that interesting. No one
wants to like watch, you know, go to a bar and watch two people at the sitting there getting
drunk and talking to each other is different than listening to like strong discourse.
Yes. One interesting thing as a fan of Joe Rogan. I've been a fan of Joe Rogan for a long time and
he has his friends over a lot, right? And there, there is a aspect to those three, four, five hour
conversations that I really enjoy. There's a magic to those. I think he taught the world
that those kinds of long form conversations can work. The, what you forget is Joe Rogan is a
comedian. His friends are also celebrities. Like they know what it's like to be on the mic. They
know there is a challenge to actually having your friends on a microphone. Totally. Like that,
they've never, this is the first time they've been on a microphone. And that's actually what
you've been doing, which is a very interesting experiment. And you find that some are more
awkward than others. Like they're trying to find like, what do I do with this kind of thing?
Why, why do you not talk to strangers? Why did you go with people that you're actually
know? So the simple answer is the people that I selected are both interesting and I thought
would be good at talking. But then I noticed the thing you just mentioned. My buddy Paul did the
first one and Paul's a wild man. And if you went out with Paul, he can talk about a bazillion topics
to a certain, to a, to a significant level of depth, right? And he's got a good understanding
and he's got a unique perspective on a lot of things. And I think he was the first guy invited
on my podcast. And it was almost like he was on a little bit less than natural about it. And then
by the time he loosened up with some drinks, he was, it just, we were all shitfaced.
There's a, there's a face shift that totally, totally. And so he's going to come back on
and he'll be more comfortable with it. And it'll probably be awesome because he's a great person
to talk to. I had my friend Dave on who's a restaurateur and a musician. That, that one will
be released pretty soon. But yesterday I had a guy on who you might really enjoy listening to
who's a friend of mine. His name is Mark Clem. He's an endurance athlete. And he's been compared.
He's been called the white Dave Goggins. And he talks about like those comparisons and what he
hates about it and the various events and stuff. And he's just a guy who's just always kind of like
natural. And like, I knew he'd be great to get on the podcast. And so I started with friends
who I thought could handle it and who also are just really interesting people. And I did it
so that I could also establish a level of comfort because it was a new thing for me.
And they, I knew that they wouldn't really give a shit what I was doing and be like,
Hey, this is cool. I'm going over J.C.'s house. We're going to drink some tequila and talk shit.
There's just going to be a microphone there this time. I mean, it's amazing what you're doing,
the freedom of it. I mean, you're not currently doing any advertisements or any of that kind
of stuff. You're just exploring your voices. One of the mediums that you're just trying it out.
My 11 subscribers know what I'm about. Your 11 subscribers is in the double digits.
For both you and I, do you have advice for me as a podcaster and for yourself as a podcast?
If you were to think like you're going to do, say, I mean, who knows, but say you do
a thousand more episodes, right? I can imagine a world where that your life continues in that
direction that this is like a little parallel. Like for me, this thing is like a little side
hobby, but it's also one that's deeply fulfilling. So not just from a business perspective, which is
not the way I think about it. I just think from a life human perspective, it's, I probably wouldn't
have this kind of conversation with you off mic. Like this long, this deep, this attentive,
there's something really fulfilling about these conversations. So what advice would you have
for me? What advice do you have for yourself? Or have you not introspected this that deeply?
I have advice. I think the first advice I would give to you is I think you should have me on more
often. Yeah. That's first. And second is go on your podcast and I would say, I would say you
come on my podcast when you're ready, when you feel like the product that I'm putting out
would benefit from your presence in vice versa. Not as a favor to a bro, but at the right time.
I do sense actually, it's an interesting, there's a dance to it, which is like Joe Rogan, I recently
did, like Joe Rogan had a conversation with me on this podcast. There's a very specific kind of
thing where you're helping each other out, but the timing on that has to be right.
If that makes any sense, you're supporting each other. It doesn't make a difference,
you would think, because it's just people talking, it doesn't matter what microphone,
but it changes things. It does. And there's an order to the guests that I've had on.
And the next guest that I'll have on will be a friend we have in common and we'll be talking
about teaching and how to teach different styles of teaching and what you're teaching,
all these other things. Do you mind saying who? Sean Fisher. And I think there's an order to,
it's not scientific, but it's based on my gut. Is it astrologically based?
What do you mean it's not scientific? Your gut, so you have a sense, like Joe Rogan,
for example, tries to do left, right, he tries to alternate like this gut feeling
of like these bins of people, and he tries to alternate worldviews.
That's interesting.
Like he kind of, so that he doesn't feel like it, like it shakes, it constantly shakes him,
it's more about him, like constantly pulls him in multiple directions about like
how he sees the world. And that keeps him balanced. That keeps the conversation kind of exciting.
That's interesting. I did it in a way where I knew Paul was going to be wild and we might get
a little out of control and like have some technical hiccups along the way. And then my friend Jake,
who's a CEO of a pharmaceutical company, that was very timely because he was able to speak to
vaccines. And that was kind of scientific flavored. Yeah. And what I learned listening back on that
is like, I learned it for myself about, I wasn't asking the next level questions
to really draw out great answers. And part of it is you're simultaneously hanging out with
a bro, but also I was trying to learn something and I didn't learn what I wanted to learn.
And that's my fault because I didn't ask the questions. He's an expert in that field. He
doesn't know that I'm an absolute dipshit when it comes to that stuff. And so I didn't do a good
job. And if I don't know what that means, the thing I was trying to tease out of him, no one
who was going to listen is going to learn that either. So I learned that. Then I had the one
with soap on, which I thought was pretty good. There's the rest. There's also a farmer.
Right. And a social worker. And kind of humble and thoughtful.
Yeah. Thoughtful guy. Like slower. It's not a wild man, that kind of thing.
Not a wild man in the sense that I'm wild, but he does preach this philosophy of being more wild.
Like being in touch with nature. Nature. That kind of. Right. And then my buddy Dave,
he came on because I love music and I wanted to talk a lot about music. And he's one of the most
knowledgeable people about music that I know. And he's got a restaurant coming up. And I thought
my buddy Mark Clem, being an endurance athlete, like when you hear some of the, I didn't even
know these things existed that this fucking kid did. He's out of his mind. And, you know,
I think Sean and I will have probably the most intellectual conversation that I'll have had
on my podcast to date. And so there's a little bit of alternating there. But, you know,
I did it that way. So that. There's a gut feeling behind. Oh, so that what?
Is there, where are you going? Do you know where you're going?
I don't have a destination, but I want to,
I want to see it to its end, whether that's it gets somewhere of its own volition,
or it takes on a new life at some point. And then I know how to drive it where it needs to go.
So I think the advice I have for both of us is I think I need to,
no, I don't think so. I think for you, I see an inner turmoil. I see a storm that bruises you
because I feel like there's a concern for what you're saying. And is it going to get,
is it going to, is it going to lead to negative feelings towards you or the thing that you're
doing? And I feel like we're different people and I have such an easier time saying fuck off to
everybody. And that's a liberating thing, but it also can keep me from achieving the thing that
I want to achieve because I'm so flippant with opinions that I don't listen to them and let
them direct me when they should. There's a balance. Let me push back on that. Please do.
I think you believe that about yourself. And nevertheless, your social media presence indicates
otherwise. If I were to be very harsh, you're like one of the mentally strongest,
characterized people I know. And yet on social media, you don't put your face to the world.
One of the reasons you sense the fear in me, which exists, I of course want to let go of it,
is because I put my face and my name on things. And so when I say something stupid, it hurts
when people say, look, that guy said something stupid. And so there's a fear of saying something
stupid in all of his different forms of being my lesser self. It's the same feeling I have
in competition of losing, not just losing, losing doesn't matter. It's embarrassing myself.
I like losing, being the lesser version of myself. And when you put yourself out there in a full way,
I think you would, I would venture to say you're also, because you like said, you wouldn't give
yourself that advice. I feel like you're also afraid of standing behind some of the ideas,
because right now you're doing guerrilla warfare. You're free to say things, to speak your mind
from the sidelines. But the moment you're standing and when people can throw shit at you,
I feel like you haven't faced that fire yet. You've been avoiding that fire. I'm not sure.
Maybe I'm projecting. No, to a degree, you're right. I think a big thing for me was putting
ads for our jujitsu online curriculum. That was a big thing for me, because for several reasons,
in the climate of everyone under the sun having a jujitsu tutorial online and social media,
not social media necessarily, but forums specifically that critique and shit the bed,
one thing I have not done that I've thought about doing and probably you're right in your analysis
of it is I've not gone the way that I do see you on things like Reddit and say, hey Reddit,
I'm doing this. I could easily go to Reddit and say, hey Reddit, I got this website up,
here's a sample video, whatever the fuck people do on there. But yeah, you're right,
I haven't done that. And part of it might be because I know also if I get suckered in for
one second into the negativity, I'm going to become an online warrior and I don't want to be
that person. So yeah, you're probably right. You're self-aware about that. I mean, one of the things
I've early on decided is I've always really enjoyed being positive, so I'm going to make sure
I stay that way. And when there's negativity, it's like, I'm not just ignoring it. I'm literally
just returning it with positivity. I probably am the same way as you. Most people are with egos.
You want to become the warrior against the negativity and many wars, there's no winning.
There's no winning that war. Especially online. Especially on the internet.
And so in that sense, that's been a journey to try to face the fire of the negativity.
And it's not actually that bad. It sounds like very dramatic. There's not many people
that are negative, but it's like when you put advertisements, so you put your face on an
instructional or something like that. There's an aspect to it, which you're being a salesman.
You're being a gimmicky thing. It just feels wrong and people will point out, look that guy is a
fraud. It's fake. Look, he's trying, but those people are going to be out there. And if you're
trying to do your best, trying to be authentic and not trying to be a snake oil salesman
and being the shady kind of salesman, I think they keep you honest. They keep you honest
and being the most authentic self. And podcasting is the best medium because you're being real.
Those one hour plus that you put out there, that's like real John. That's not a,
like people fall in love with that. And then that's the beautiful aspect of podcasting is
there's no long form doesn't give any possibility for you not to be authentic.
Right.
And that's why it's a magical medium. The tough thing is you're not, you know, popularity
takes time, popularity. And so like, you shouldn't be doing it for that reason.
I don't, it's not the thing that really drives me.
Is there three books, technical fiction or philosophical that had an impact on you? Like,
is there books that you kind of return to that you enjoy and they've had, you know,
that you find profound in some way?
I would say like probably the thing I read is in one of Emerson's essays that I read at a,
you know, point in my life where I needed that type of thing. And I read self-reliance and,
you know, he's got a ton of good essays, but I thought self-reliance was probably the most
impactful to me. You know, I've read later in life like a handful of, you know, existential authors
and they're all great. But at the time, a lot of it has to do with timing. And when I read self-reliance
and it was about the individual that was really good and made it was impactful. There's also a
book called Jonathan Livingston's Seagull by Richard Bach, I think. And it's kind of along
the same lines. It's about this seagull who, you know, wants to break conformity and learn to fly
and do all these other great things. And so it's a very short read. So if people are interested
in that, that's good. The book, which I was lucky enough to read before the movie ever even came
out, which is just a pleasure of mine was American Psycho. Just from a writing standpoint, I found
that the writing was awesome. Brett Easton Ellis is the author of that and several other books who
have like intertwining characters. He's a New England prep school guy. And so a lot of like the
stories and a lot of the visuals rang true for me. And anyone who can write four pages of prose
on like a Huey Lewis album and kudos to you. And I also would say no one will do this. But
I would at some point read as much of one of the big three religious texts as possible.
It really gives you perspective. There are so many overlapping stories in
religious texts. And then the way that they're written gives you a unique perspective on
different people throughout the world. And you know, if you're a Roman Catholic, maybe
don't read the Bible, read one of the other texts and that would be an interesting take.
But I'm embarrassed to say that first of all, I've never read the Bible, which is
embarrassing to say. It's like I read a bunch of stuff about the Bible, not the Bible itself. And
the same, not equating them, but I haven't read Marx directly. I haven't read Mein Kampf by Hitler
directly. And it feels like sometimes, because you think like it's better to read stuff about the
books, but ultimately you want, because like the analysis will be better in the texts that
followed it, but there's value to actually reading like the actual words. Yeah, there's
power in the words that there's a reason why like the Bible is one of the most impactful books ever.
You know, it's in those words and it's a value to return to those words.
The Communist Manifesto is truly frightening if you read it in like modern context.
It's worth reading. Yeah.
It's worth reading. And so is Mein Kampf, not obviously, well, it's not obvious, but it is
not very well written. But all the ideas that led to the evil that is Hitler are all in there,
which is fascinating to think about because probably some of the world leaders at the time
should have probably read the books. He outlined everything he's going to do.
You've mentioned, offline, you mentioned an Emerson quote that I really like. So let's try
to end on this powerful quote.
It's easy in the world to live after the world's opinion. It's easy in solitude to live after
your own. The great man is who in the midst of the world keeps with perfect sweetness the
independence of solitude. What does this quote mean to you?
It's kind of reinforces the idea that you're here to live your life and that even when people are
trying to influence you or comment on the decisions that you make for your life, you should have the
strength to stick by living your life the way you want to live it, that there's one immutable
truth for you and it doesn't apply to everyone. And so people who frown upon or judge the way
that you live, because it's not air quotes conventional, their opinion should not be something
that impacts the choices that you make. You're in a relationship now. Is that
deeply meaningful or are you ultimately still alone? Are you still just a man in the cold
of the life that is suffering? No, I'm a man who's warm, nestled in a bosom.
I don't think there's a better way to end, John. You're a friend, you're my coach. I'm sure we'll
talk many more times in the future. Thanks for wasting all your time with me today. Thanks,
brother. Thanks, Lex. I had an awesome time. Hope to be back soon. Thanks for listening to this
conversation with John Clark. And thank you to our sponsors, TheraGun, the device I use for
post workout muscle recovery, magic spoon, low carb keto friendly cereal that I think is delicious,
AteSleep, a mattress that cools itself and gives me yet another reason to enjoy sleep.
And finally, Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out the sponsors in
the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe
on YouTube, review it with 5 stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon.
I'll connect with me on Twitter and Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from Miyamoto
Masashi. Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world. Thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time.