The following is a conversation with Josh Barnett, one of the greatest fighters and
submission wrestlers in history, with an epic 25-year career that includes being the UFC
Heavyweight Champion and countless other accolades.
He also happens to be one of the most intelligent and brutally honest human beings in all of
martial arts, and especially so about his appreciation of and fascination with violence.
Quick mention of our sponsors, which feels ridiculous to say after that introduction.
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Click the sponsor links to get a discount at the support of this podcast.
As a side note, let me say that I've been a fan of Josh Barnett for a long time.
This conversation was indeed a long time coming, and I'm sure we'll talk many times again.
For what it's worth, I'm a student of combat sports and admire when they're done at the
highest level, either through masterful execution of skill or relentless dominance of pure
guts.
For context, I'm a black belt in jiu-jitsu and have competed in wrestling, submission
grappling, jiu-jitsu, judo, and even catch wrestling, which is a variant of submission
grappling that Josh is one of the great practitioners, scholars, and teachers of.
I could probably talk for hours about what I've learned from my time on the mat, but
if I were to say one thing, it is that the mat is honest.
You can't run away from yourself when you step on the mat.
It reveals your fears, the lies you might tell yourself, all the delusions you might
have, or at least I had, that there's anything in this world that can be achieved except
through blood, sweat, and tears.
That honesty, taken to the highest levels, as is the case with Josh, creates the most
special of human beings and definitely someone who is fascinating to talk to.
If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify,
support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman.
And now, here's my conversation with Josh Barnett.
Who were the philosophers and philosophical ideas that influenced you the most?
Are we just jumping right in?
We're right in into the deepest.
No foreplay on camera.
I had an interesting philosophical journey, at least I think it's interesting.
And that was, I think, as far as organized philosophy, or maybe authentic is not the
right word, but like, yeah, we'll say organized.
I would say that Nietzsche is probably one of the people with the most influence on me.
But I also feel like, to a degree, your personality will oftentimes dictate what philosophers that
you can vibe with.
So what ideas from Nietzsche was it, the Ubermensch?
Definitely the Ubermensch is huge to me because I see it as an extension of basically the
religious concepts of God and higher ideals, but just put into a different secular context.
And the idea also that the Ubermensch is a striving and overcoming something that you're
always working towards that very few will ever, it's not like the concept that you can
just make them.
It doesn't happen that way.
And it's not based simply upon, if you were, say, put through a genetic program and turned
into a super soldier, that wouldn't make it.
It's like the very surface level and incorrect understanding of what the Ubermensch is.
The Ubermensch is the idea of this kind of human that transcends all the weaker lower
aspects of humans, which we're full of.
But I also think that there's an element in Nietzsche's writing that suggests that it's
not something you can even be in all the time.
Like it's even a temporary state because it's not something that we're capable of maintaining.
It's something to strive for, like a morality, an image, an ideal, a set of principles that
we can connect to that doesn't rely on otherworldly kind of out there things deeply human.
With Nietzsche, I feel like the concept of the Ubermensch is something built on authenticity
as well.
So when you are authentic and Heidegger being a follower of Nietzsche's and highly influenced
by him, I think that the Ubermensch is an example of authenticity in that it isn't about trying
to be anything that you cannot be or to go against who you are, but to actually understand
that, accept that, and then work with what you can work with and create from your lump
of clay that is you.
Because there are certain things that are just not going to happen for me because it's
not in my proclivity.
I mean, I'm never going to be five foot tall and 120 pounds, that again, I guess.
But as you get more in tune with who you are, as you start learning more about what unique
things or at least what that combination that makes you, that gestalt part of yourself,
what those things are and how you can use them, then you can work towards taking what
that is and seeing if you can get to that point.
Now, the likelihood is, no, maybe probably never.
I mean, but we can never achieve Godhood yet and religion is a constant striving and a
look at a higher ideal concept.
Even if it's multiple gods or one god, it's still essentially all built around this concept.
Like I like the idea of Catholic's original sin.
If you think of sin, not as evil, but as missing the mark, the archer's term where it derives
or even like in Spanish without.
So if you accept that you are imperfect, if you accept that you need to constantly strive
even against yourself because you will figure out the best ways at which to submarine your
own capabilities, submarine your own dreams and wishes and whatever, you will ruin them
more than anything else.
And you will tell yourself that you ruined them on purpose for a good reason or you'll
say that you'll figure out a way to put it on everything else but yourself.
And so the idea of thinking of, well, as I'm starting off on this whole thing, I got a
lot of work to do and that's just the way it is.
And I got to figure out what areas those are going to be.
And so I thought, oh yeah, if I think of original sin actually can be, that can be kind of a
clever idea, but it's also just accepting that we're all uniquely strange and unequal
in our own ways.
But we have to figure out how that fits in.
The word authenticity kind of connects to all of that.
So striving to be your authentic self means figuring out exactly the shape of the flaws,
the character of your little demons that you get to play with and around them finding a
path to whatever the hell, ideal versions of yourself you can carve and pretending like
that's such a thing as even possible.
The other idea about Nietzsche is, on his idea of morality, he presents the argument
that morality is a human illusion and that there's not such a thing as good and evil
and these are all kind of constructs.
Do you think there's such a thing as good and evil that's connected to some objective
reality?
I think that there are some, I actually do believe that there are some universals.
I'm not Kantian in any way, but I do think that there are some universals.
And the thing that actually brought me to even the concept of that was Jung.
So Jung's concept of the collective unconsciousness and then taking that thought and then applying
it to looking through history and the most varied history you can find.
So I would say probably religion is your earliest one that you can get for written history or
written examples of human behavior and psychology at the furthest that we can look into it from
man's hand to whatever the medium is, cuneiform or whatever.
But as you do that, and then let's say going from Mesopotamia to India to Europe to and
just going from all these places as disparate as they may seem, as many different cultures
and ethnicities and religions and how the religions will vary quite a bit from monotheist
to polytheist and so on and so forth.
But then just seeing how there's all the through lines and of course Campbell, he did this
much earlier than me thinking about it.
But I think that by looking at things that way and starting to find the threads instead
of always just looking at everything as being its own compartmentalized concept is if it
only applies to this time, this people like getting overly pomo about it is just a really
idiotic postmodern.
So you think that there is just like Joseph Campbell, there's a thread that connects all
of these stories, narratives that we constructed for ourselves as we evolve and that thread
is grounded in some kind of absolute ideas of maybe on the morality side, which is the
trickiest one of good and evil.
Somewhat.
Yeah.
I think that a lot of this stuff is just derived from a biological perspective.
I feel like these things are innate within us.
Do you think our innately humans are good?
Like we?
No.
I don't.
I also feel like there's an issue of scale too.
Nassim Taleb likes to talk about how he views the way he interacts with groups in terms
of scale.
What is this thing about?
At the familial level, I'm a communist and then at the civic level, I'm a Republican
or something.
That's other level.
Then it goes on at the widest level, he's a libertarian or something of that nature.
Fundamentally, human interaction changes on scale and scale and also from subjective
to the environment around them.
I don't even mean environment just in the sake of physical environment, nature.
Nature's constantly trying to murder you.
Well, it's not really trying.
It's just nature's being nature, the universe is the universe.
At times, it takes you out.
Not with any particular compunction or prejudice, it just, oops, sorry, there's no more dodos.
My bad.
Don't you think the particular flavor of the complexity that is the human mind was created?
Let me make an argument for that all people are fundamentally good.
There's an evolutionary advantage to being, to striving, to cooperate, to add more love
to the world of compassion, empathy, all that kind of stuff and that the very thing that
created the human mind was this evolutionary advantage, whatever the force is behind this
evolutionary advantage.
And scale.
Yes.
So when we're dealing with a small tribe, sure.
When you meet another tribe, maybe there's other factors that are going to end to that.
Let's say you scale up and so your 150 has exceeded their 150 and you start to get to
a certain point where you can't really be close enough to someone down the line of that
next, like that 150 is 150, 150, and they just now all of a sudden become some guy,
whatever.
And when it comes to some guy, once it starts hitting scale, I don't know that it's capable.
People can be as magnanimous to a stranger as to the known.
If they orient themselves to be secure enough, because it does come to security, insecurity,
in one way or the other, either brought on by the unknown, brought on by an actual threat,
brought on by even their own, as we would use the word insecurity in that their own insecurity
within their own capabilities, their own belief in themselves, all these things can change
things from being compassionate and what have you to at least at the very least, maybe not
evil, but self-interest driven to the point of a negative results for those that aren't.
You know what I mean?
Right.
And another way to frame that is maybe it's less about scale and more about the amount
of resources available.
So if we're overflowing with resources in terms of security and safety, all the things
you've mentioned, if we have more than enough resources than the way we treat a stranger,
the way we position ourselves towards that stranger might be in a way that allows us
to be our real human selves as opposed to sort of our animal self.
And therefore, it's mostly about how clever can we descendants of AIDS be in coming up
with all cool kinds of technologies and ways to efficiently use the resources we have such
that we're not constrained.
And my hope is that we can, that human innovation will outpace the growth of our, the number
of people that are starving for resources.
Yes.
I think that there's a lot of rationality behind this argument.
And in some ways, I agree.
And in a lot of ways, I see it as missing the point of how this experiment has been playing
out across time.
When you look at what, for one, it's like defined resources.
You know, what is a resource of, as humans would define it, right, or wealth even.
And so you can say, well, you know, an iPhone's a resource, the internet's a resource, water
obviously is a resource.
But if we weigh them, what is more important to human beings, water, internet, or iPhones?
It's water, right?
So if we look at resources, if we start with what do human beings need to live?
I mean, actually live, not live here in this bullshit fantasy creation extension of our
own ingenuity and, you know, a prison of our own creation and also a paradise of our own
creation.
But this is not how human beings normally live.
This is all built upon stuff, built on concept, on idea, and some of it's built on just, well,
this is the paradigm, so this is what you do.
Human beings need food, they need water to survive, they need shelter from the elements,
and they need certain skills to perpetuate these things and be able to pass them down
so that they can, so that these things don't become, you don't end up in this gap where
you have to relearn things, because if it's lost, then that time before you can get it
back again is going to be a dark ages of sorts, you know, or it's going to be highly detrimental
to your group, because not knowing how to fish, not knowing how to hunt, not knowing
how to even clean and cook the game once you have it could be lethal.
That's fascinating, Jessica.
That is a basic resource.
The knowledge to attain the very low level things of water and food.
Right, and we'll figure it out.
We did it once before, and we've done it over and over and over and over again.
It's just costly.
Yes, it has costs, for sure.
But when you think of how you look at the, well, we'll just deal with the first world
of the West, you look at the path line, the pathway of Western civilization and its growth,
and then you look at how technology injected into it over time, how it magnifies things
or pushes things at orders of magnitude faster, and then the internet comes along even faster.
So you're watching industrial revolution to, what is it, the capacitor and then so on.
It goes further and further, and as the internet and technology, especially on the electronic
side of things, start increasing in capability, it massively outpaces even our necessity for
it at times.
It becomes, plant obsolescence happens quicker and over and over and over again, and wealth
increases and increases and increases in terms of the things that we're able to acquire.
I've seen homeless people with smartphones.
So we're living in the most wealth laden, luxury laden age of all of humanity yet.
What happens when we see calamity or people going hard time, what are they, the things
that they value, what do people go to an argument about the cost of things that are luxury items
generally and not necessity items?
We get into fights about things that are at the end of the day, not necessities to us.
People are so concerned about Netflix and the internet, and personally, I'm very concerned
about the internet because I look at it as my own little personal library of Alexandria
in my pocket.
That's what I love about it, and the ability to have a tool as effective as it is, even
though I'm in a constant battle to not let that tool become a vice or to become something
that actually brings me to a lower state.
The question is, are we willing to murder each other over Netflix versus murder each
other over water?
We're willing to murder each other over water.
That's a given.
Right, but that's our animalistic selves.
It's animalistic, but it's also either you do it or you don't.
If somebody's willing to share that water, or if that water is of such a limited capability
or such a limited amount, then you will have to murder to have that water.
The argument is the higher we get up to this hierarchy of what we consider in Los Angeles
resources, we're less willing to commit violence.
We're less willing to commit violence, I would say over Netflix, but we are willing
to commit violence over Netflix, over everything associated with Netflix, over televisions,
over sneakers, over, you know, I mean, when we look at a good, I mean, the majority of
the stuff that came with the riots, I mean, it was use car dealerships, targets, I mean,
and then you look and it's like, well, okay, what are people, what are they got, what are
they so hell bent to get out of this whole thing?
I'm even talking about the ideological elements or anything like that, just like, okay, something's
going on, boom, looting, whatever, you know, what are you going to loot, you know, you'll
have AOC say, oh, people needing bread, I didn't see a single loaf of bread, you know,
I saw television, it's poetry, Josh, you know, but to me, it is poetry in a sense, because
you get to see how we actually are operating, you know, what is becoming first principles
to most people.
Oh, wait, wait, but you could also argue that those riots were more like the madness of
crowds, which is definitely a lot more than just that.
I'm just saying that given a chance, it's like, okay, boom, the lights are off, the
grid is down, we've hacked into the whole system, turn into an 80s movie and you have
the ability to go get ahold of whatever it is that you think is most important.
And what do we do?
And I say we, as in, you know, I'm including all of us, we grab a TV, we attack it, we
break into a sneaker store on Melrose.
We do, it's just like, we still giant cause statues, where the value of that is completely
market driven.
Like, it's just a piece of polypropylene or whatever, butyl, and you know, it's cool.
I'm a big fan of art, but it's like, you know, I can't eat that.
And at the end of the day, man, you're sitting there with your, with your, like, what'd you
do today, honey?
What'd you get?
I mean, we were able to, you know, oh, I got this, I got this designer art statue.
Yeah.
Are you, are you going to go, well, you can't really sell it on the, on like the art markets
where people were really going to pay for it.
So are you going to become an underground art dealer with your one piece of cause art?
One interesting thing, just before I forget it, you mentioned the library of Alexandria
and your phone, well, your phone, but also just thinking of your little world that you're
creating for yourself on the internet.
It's a really powerful way to actually phrase it.
One of the things that you've been on Joe Rogan several times, although everybody always
comes to me and go, oh, that was so great.
I didn't know you, you're on, you've been on Joe Rogan.
I go, this is like my fifth time, dude.
I've been a fan of yours for a long time from, from other avenues.
This is a long time coming actually everybody.
You have no idea like how many times through messaging and missing each other over the
years.
This is ridiculous.
This is a long time coming.
You don't realize how special this is for us.
This is, well, I'm also starstruck.
We'll talk about this, but you symbolize something very important to me through my journey, through
wrestling, through jujitsu, through judo, through street fighting, through just combat.
There's a, you're the, in some sense, the devil on my shoulder of like, of violence
in a good, in a, in a, devil gets a bad rap.
He does get a bad rap.
I realize, you know, sitting in, in ice down at that low ass level, you know, it's, but
you know, the angel side is more like the athletic, the sport, the science, the tech,
the, the technical, the chest side of things.
So, uh, but on the library, Alexander, let me ask, uh, because you were on Joe Rogan,
it does make me really sad.
And I realized that I'm just probably being romantic that his, most of his library of
interviews that were on YouTube have not been taken down because he went to Spotify.
And that was the first, I'm probably an idiot, but it was the first time I realized that
this knowledge that we've been building up on the internet doesn't necessarily last forever.
No, it doesn't.
Unless you preserve it.
I mean, it's like all things.
If you do not preserve them, if you do not make, uh, efforts, um, you know, so many of
my, it just really brings the minor off the top of my head, all my, so many friends of,
uh, of mine that are Jewish, uh, you know, they're, they're basically secular, but yet
through even the secular aspect of just keeping the traditions alive, it's like, well, you
could always pick a book and read about, read about it.
Clearly it's called the Dora, but, um, if you don't put these things into action, if
you don't make them a part of your consciousness, maybe even on the subconsciousness just by
a through, through repetition, they will die and they will become simply something that
exists somewhere until you find it again.
And Carl Gott used to say something, um, he would say that I don't invent moves.
I just rediscover them.
But yet Gott and Billy Robinson also would understand, um, that you, if someone's not
carrying the torch, it'll go out.
Now that doesn't mean fire can't be rekindled.
It just means that it, that torch no longer is lighting the way on, on this knowledge.
And so it's, it's important to be an individual, even on, on an individual level to be a repository
for, for aspects of knowledge.
You mentioned Gott, you, uh, consider yourself a catch, uh, wrestler.
So I've mentioned you offline that I competed in a couple of catch wrestling tournaments.
Can we go Wikipedia level at the very basic, you're the exactly right person to ask what
is catch wrestling and what are its defining principles?
I would say the easiest way for us to talk about and give, uh, an overview of what catch
is in the simplest terms is think of collegiate wrestling with submissions.
That is essentially what catch is.
And it's not surprising because collegiate wrestling is actually derived from catch as
catch can.
It's just that over time, certain aspects were, were removed from the competition structure
so that they became null elements, things that were discarded.
But it's funny that you can take high level, uh, amateur collegiate types and you can
show them a move and then add a little bit to it and go, Oh, well, hey, that was just
like what we already do here, but except, Oh, I didn't know you could take it all the
way to this point or, you know, things of that nature, especially when it comes to professional
wrestling, like, uh, teaching people like, no, that, that, I know you're just using
this for, uh, in a show, but this is actually a real move and here's how it really feels.
And so collegiate wrestling and wrestling in general for people who are not aware is
basically two people starting their feet and that's a score that they're trying to take
each other down and they have to, um, they score points along the way.
You can end matches by pinning them, for example, on their back.
I think one way to describe wrestling is, uh, it's very much about figuring out ways
to establish control and leverage in these kind of, uh, tie ups or there's different
styles where you can do more from a distance to where it's more about the timing and all
that kind of stuff.
Ultimately, it's an art of like both upper body and lower body and you could choose the
different puzzles that you solve there.
You could be attacking the head, the arms, you could be attacking the legs.
There's also part of collegiate wrestling that's on the ground that has more, uh, what's
called like a referee's position.
Right.
The referee's position where you're on, uh, your hands and knees, basically.
And so, uh, do you, do you understand what that's supposed to simulate?
Why is that one of the standard positions?
It's one of the standard positions because one, it's one of the easiest ways to actually
get up, um, but two, it's because you cannot be on your back.
If you're on your back, you're getting pinned and the back exposure or being pinned is pretty
much the universal wrestling, uh, thing.
One, taking the guy from their feet to the floor, uh, and two, pinning them as you go
from like, what is it, uh, Cornish wrestling, Turkish oil wrestling, Mongolian, Sumo, uh,
Indian, uh, what I call it, Pellewani, it's also called Kushdi, um, Jiu Jitsu, Judo, um,
so many of them is like, there's a, you saw him, though, even if it doesn't end the match,
it's still like, what are the most important aspects of the competition itself across.
Also, but every style and this is where submission, like catch wrestling or, uh, submission wrestling
or Jiu Jitsu feels different, which it seems like for most wrestling, for a lot of wrestling,
the dominance is the, is the goal, uh, as opposed to submission, which I guess those
are two are related, but dominating the position.
So that's what pinning is.
It's almost like breaking your opponent, like breaking, uh, through all of their defenses
to where they're completely defenseless and you could do anything with them that you want.
Maybe that's, uh, what could be a definition of dominance?
I don't know.
And then, I mean, it sounds very much like a chain to a radiator.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This, uh, there's a threat that connects all partners, uh, but submission feels different.
Uh, I mean, it is actually different when you think about it across the landscape.
I don't think radically different, but still slightly different in that, um, if you think
of wrestling as being derived from, from, from combat, right?
So it, well, it is combat sports, but more, more lethal combat, getting somebody off their
feet and onto their back is about as lethal a place for the person on bottom to be in
general.
I mean, I, I don't, don't come at me with your talks about your fucking worm guards
and blah, blah, blah and whatever fit spider, baron.
Yeah.
We're out of here with that.
This is, we're not talking about you in this highly, uh, regimented sporting environment.
We're talking about general, you know, all the body hair, none of the waxing human beings.
So, um, getting someone on their back.
Okay.
They're, you guys, you're trying to get up.
You're getting hit with a rock or stabbed or what have you set on fire.
Who knows.
Generally, these conflicts are not just isolated to one on one.
You, it's, if it's four on two, you're, you're, you're, your buddy that was with you back
to back.
Now he's on his back.
What do you think?
And that was going to be one on one.
Well, three go on one.
So, and then you go, you elevate this to, to armored combat, right?
And it's boom.
Put them on the ground.
Oh crap.
It's hard to get up.
Well, while you're struggling to get up stab, you know, that's where jiu-jitsu's, uh, concepts
come from with all their leveraging and off balancing is, oh man, if I end up in this situation
and tight close quarters combat, yes, we could fight it out with swords and knives and what
have you, but it's way easier if the first thing I can do is foot sweep you on your
back and then pull my knife and just go stick.
Is there a thread that connects all of these different arts from not just arts, but from
the very base violence of war, just like you said, that there's no rules to the very regimented
uh, IBJF, jiu-jitsu tournaments and just, you've kind of laid out some of it, but can
you go all the way to the, well, so when you, you start off with absolute skills in the
sense of absolute offense and defense in the taking or preserving of life, right?
Full on at its, at its purest form of self-defense and self-preservation, okay?
And then you extrapolate part of that in that all animals train in violence.
All play usually degenerates into some sort of soft violence.
So be it cats, when they're kittens and puppies and all the, everything learns how to kill,
how to fight.
Not that, you know, just that, that dumb alpha meme stuff where the idea is that, oh, by being
alpha, that means you run around like basically just being a bully in a shithead.
No, actually alpha wolves spend very little time fighting because if you were actually
alpha, you don't get into fights.
There's no need to.
And if you're probably getting into any large amount of fights, it's probably because you're
being shitty at being an alpha and now people are tired of you being in charge.
And yet in the animal world, and it would be the same for human beings at that, that,
that base beginning level of violence, there's a big risk.
So I know that we live in this place with health care and where, or you might be in
a place with nationalized health, whatever, right?
There's, there's, there's band-aids, there's, there's a penicillin, there's all that kind
of stuff, but that's not the normal way of things, you know?
Yeah, there's a channel that just hurts me every time I used to follow and I had to unfollow
it because it was too painful for me as a human being called Nature's Metal on Instagram.
It was sobering and then it was like, this is too sober.
It's very sobering.
So in there, the risk is at its highest level.
The damage you take, the winner walks away, hurt.
Being blamed when you need every aspect of your physical and athletic faculties to survive
because it isn't going to be the, this isn't the first and it's definitely not going to
be the last, especially if you're the slowest one.
You know, it's a, what is it, there's a lyric from a clutch song.
Don't go for the fat ones, just go for the slow ones.
Man, but that, the universal truth of the way nature works is not cruel, it's not cruel
as just the way it is.
Yeah.
I mean, watch animals getting to fights on, on any of these sort of documentary stuff.
You'll see an intense short and then dispersal.
Like you'll see as soon as one feels like, uh, things have switched just enough to, boom,
the bear or whatever it is takes off.
It's like, I'm not, I'm done with this because if you can get out of there with just some
scars and what have you, okay, you lose an eye, nah, nah, it's not as good.
You really get hurt bad and get infected.
You're done.
Yeah.
You know?
So it, there's a, a serious risk to be, um, that can come with these sort of things yet.
I believe that we are inherently born for at least aspects of, and use of violence.
And so at the end of the day, we need these things not just to not just survive each other,
but they're, they're a part of being able to hunt and other things.
But, uh,
So violence is a part of human nature.
Violence is, is, is again, it's an absolute.
It is in every person.
It is a part of every interaction.
It is in part of every, every law, everything.
And I'm not, by the way, not an ANCAP.
So don't even, don't, don't hit your wagon to me on that one.
ANCAP is.
Anarchy.
Anarchy.
Capitalists.
Yes.
Not, not an ANCAP.
They have nice book, book shops.
Yeah.
They do.
I mean, I'm not, I'm not going to, you know, sit here and talk ANCAPs, although I also
used to get into the conversations with, uh, with, uh, an ANCOM, uh, anarcho-communist,
uh, a good friend of mine, and he would, he would bring up this stuff and I'm like, yeah,
cool, man.
I'm down with anarchy.
You ain't going to like it.
What do you mean?
I go, cause I'm going to take, I'm going to gather all kinds of people to, I'm going
to make this, I'm going to get the strongest together and I'm going to take your shit.
Okay.
Can I actually, on that topic, I have a friend of mine now, uh, a fellow Russian, uh, Ukrainian,
Michael Malis.
Oh, yeah.
I'm familiar with Michael Malis.
I watched a little bit of your guys's, uh, conversation.
So this is really good to ask you because, uh, I like how he's in the white suit and
you're in the white and black, but he, he lives in New York city.
Um, he is, uh, espouse his ideas at anarchism and his idea, and this is different than,
um, sort of the iron rand, uh, set of ideas that there's a line between sort of capitalism
that's backed by the state and just pure anarchism and his idea that violence won't take over
in an anarchism is one that feels to me not grounded in reality.
I may be, I may be wrong.
So is there some, so, uh, the idea with pure capitalism is that you mean laissez-faire
completely deregulated.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, what it will agree, it'll end up in one, it'll end up in, if, if you're anti-globalist,
it's going to be that it's going to be globalist 100% because it has no cons, pure
capitalism has no consideration for, uh, has no consideration for your, your native users
or of any sort.
Like it doesn't matter.
But the idea of governments is that the land, the little piece of land you're geographically
you're born on means you're going to stick to whatever founding documents created that
little land.
So anarchism is against that.
And the argument is you should be able to choose which ideas you live with.
And the concern there is nobody, uh, the, the geographical land, the governments that
organize on that land will not, do not need to protect you from the violence.
And my sense is there does need to be an army.
There does need to be police that help however the form that police takes, but there needs
to be a more centralized, not completely centralized, but more centralized safety net of to protect
you from the violence.
Scale again, right?
So if you want to have your anarchist utopia, well, well, we won't call it utopia.
Your anarchist creation here at certain scale, I'm sure it's doable, you know, um, but as
it scales, as the scale increases, it's completely untenable and a state will emerge.
A state will always emerge because even people always think of states as like people rubbing
their hands and smoking cigars and back rooms and just out of nowhere coming around and
just like, Oh, we're going to create this big centralized thing and just so that we
can tell everybody what to do and we can be in charge.
I mean, I know that there are people like that that exists, that they would like to
do things of that nature and that they see, uh, the use of power as something to be used
more for their, their personal gains over first, which again, self interest in human
beings.
But, um, uh, but eventually a state, people want a, they want something to go like, okay,
who's taking care of this and who's taking care of that and who, and how do we create
some sort of, uh, some sort of, uh, protocol for this?
Like, okay, well, when it's not Bob, when is it Susie?
When is it whatever?
I mean, like, how do we, you know, it's got to get done if we want this thing to become
bigger, if we want our, all of our plumbing to work right.
If we want, it's just, I'm sorry, a state's going to happen.
A state is also, when you think about it, it's supposed to have consideration to tribe,
right?
So if people think that we're not tribes, well, you're not, you're not really thinking
very deeply.
We're all tribes of a sort.
And, uh, everybody likes to use the word tribalism and this idea of, of this, uh, antagonistic
concept.
But, and while sure tribalism can be antagonistic, tribalism can also be, uh, a positive thing
or I could just say it just seems to be a natural thing.
People, you know, they create their, their groups of one sort or another.
And so when you have, well, when you think about where, when nation states really started
to become a thing, uh, and I don't mean even the more modern looking variants that we could
think back up and say the 19th century or something like that, even older than that.
I mean, you think the Assyrians didn't have a state of some sort?
Of course they did.
Um, they, how do you increase your, your, your, your empire if you don't actually have
a place to start from?
It has to be a ruler.
So you're saying like naturally, when you start talking and thinking about scale of humans,
naturally states emerge and can we try to make an argument for anarchism, which is,
uh, okay, okay, okay.
So, uh, anarchy in a sense is an opposition to the unhelpful, unproductive, inefficient
bureaucracies that eventually the states lead to.
Yes.
And that's what we can see.
I mean, I would say less anarchy, let more study James Burnham, you know, uh, or, well,
any, anybody that wants to talk about the, the managerial problem and the managerial.
So you, you have a sense, uh, I hope maybe let's think like, what is the path forward
with the inefficient state?
Is it revolution or is it to work within the system to constantly improve it?
Man, I don't know that one.
I mean, my general sense, uh, and maybe this is the Nietzschean part of me is that, yeah,
it would take maybe not even just, maybe not even defining, uh, it specifically as a revolution.
Maybe it would just take just total calamity to, to get people to stop being shitty, to
not stop being a lesser version of themselves, to stop thinking more about, uh, things from
the paradigm that we exist in now where we're, we're giving so much value to stuff that isn't
really all that valuable.
Yeah.
You know, we're, we're so concerned about likes and I don't just mean like whether we
get them or not, but that, oh man, maybe we should take this off of our platform because
this is too destabilizing to people and it's like, because once you exceed Dunbar's number,
I think it's actually without having the right faculties, which would need to be developed
because this is dealing with, this is dealing with tech that brings things, ways of approaching
being that we are not naturally programmed to be able, uh, to handle appropriately.
So, and I think it's even, even, even more, it's even more detrimental to women than
men because I think, uh, women have a more natural proclivity towards, um, uh, group
association and, uh, and, and more group oriented thinking and patterning and now, and with
also coupled with seemingly more sensitivity towards, towards human, uh, states.
So I feel like women, like the, the classic idea is like, oh, you know, women are psychic
and I have a sixth sense and what have you.
And I think that's just a, uh, uh, a way of, uh, simplifying what I think is that women
may be more in tune with picking up on the unsaid, like they might be better at, at,
at seeing, um, uh, physical cues, uh, inflection and tone, like different, like they may be
far more sensitive to these things, which to me would make sense because dealing with
children that can't, uh, communicate, uh, so, so,
There's generally more.
Distinctively.
In all the full forms.
Right.
Now, okay.
Now, whether it be a woman or a man, but especially with even the social push on this concept
of empathy, which of course it gets to the point where it loses any meaning anymore.
Like people use the word empathy in absolutely incorrectly all the time and they don't even
understand what you're really asking of people.
But let's just take it as, as we're using empathy in the correct sense and you're taking
on the emotional content of the thing itself.
Now you open that up to thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands of people all
across the world that you will never meet, that you will never know that you're not even
getting an actual true representation most of the time of who these people are.
You're meeting persona and some of these personas are even deliberately created to illicit
a response inauthentically.
Are you referring to bots or, uh, could be bots or actual people.
Bots are one thing, but I mean, there are literal people out there that will create something,
create, uh, go fund these for, for tragedies that never didn't really, or events that didn't
happen or any number of things.
Okay.
I mean, burn their own house down and then say, you know, we were attacked and then it
comes down, oh, you did it to yourself because you wanted money and empathy and this that
and you wanted all this, this emotional wealth, let's say this emotional, uh, coin as well
as actual if possible, you wanted to leverage it in some way.
That's not the majority of people, but I would say a good amount of folks are thinking, well,
if I post this photo, um, and I put this little blurb in there, I bet I can get this much
cachet out of it in this sense.
And I'm not even, and this isn't just a reference to like butt pics and stuff like that because
clearly obviously people understand that, that, uh, our inborn, uh, sexual nature is easy
to manipulate.
I mean, that's pretty, pretty obvious.
So you're saying this kind of new medium of communication on social media is, uh, is unnatural.
And it preys on us.
And so as you, you want this, you know, you look at, you look at an anarchist kind of
mindset, right?
And so you're just like, there's no, there, there is no overarching state to, to create
any kind of, uh, structure, right?
And so if you have that unfettered capitalism aspect with it, and before I say anything particularly
damning about unfettered capitalism, uh, I'm a massive capitalist because I view capitalism
essentially as what it boils down to, uh, these arguments of people too, they, they start
giving me all these extra definitions about capitalism like, no, no, this is obviously
some sort of theory you're taking from other shit, but that doesn't describe capitalism.
Is the ability for us to create whatever we want or, you know, create our thoughts, ideas,
physical things and trade them freely amongst each other in ways that we find, um, acceptable.
Right.
You know, I'm not even using the word fair because I might think it's fair to me.
You might think, huh, well, I mean, that was actually, I think he, what he thought was
unfair to him and it's more fair to me than someone a third observer goes, oh man, you
should have, you should not have paid that for that.
You should have paid this.
And it's like, well, you know what?
It works for me without sufficiently acceptable that you, you both agree to the transaction.
Correct.
And, uh, you know, but, but also at the, at the root of that is freedom, right?
And as far as I can tell, I've been banging this around in my head.
It's like for every one unit of freedom, you need two units of accountability.
And if you don't have that, what you end up with is human self-interest.
We're not even going to get into evil.
Human self-interest, sabotaging other things, even not in a sense to be malicious.
Okay.
So in terms of, uh, let's, let's put this as mathematically speaking, I love this.
So anarchism is more like two units of freedom and one unit of accountability or maybe zero
units of accountability.
Possibly.
I mean, the anarchists tend to think like, no, everyone will be accountable.
Like the fuck they will, when have you seen this happen in real life?
You know, I mean, people aren't even accountable in their revolutions at the time.
So, uh, you aren't looking at the way people really are.
It's like Marx is like, yeah, the people are like this, they're like that, look at how
capitalism does it.
I mean, he, of course, assigns a lot of really ridiculous economic principles and practice.
And also assumes that everybody, you know, who makes any profit from anything is somehow
stealing it and, you know, really assigns a negative moral aspect to them.
And then it's like, oh yeah, but eventually communism will happen to every, no one will
act that way anymore.
And you're like, whoa, hold on.
You just said that people are all, are you saying it's all due to capitalism or it's,
is it innate?
It's just, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of, and it's like, hey, look at you.
You're like a notorious, like anti-Semitic, angry, like, uh, just absolute curmudgeon
of a human being who seems to be really not all that fun to be around.
Marx?
Yeah.
And then it's just like,
So you have to think like, if, if there was one billion Marxists in the world, how would
they behave?
It would be absolutely, they would hate each other so bad.
And you know, this isn't, for me to even poison the well on Marx is like, oh, his personality
sucks.
That doesn't mean they can't make, I don't know that it's never, what, you know, somebody
argues he's just a, he's a loner.
I mean, I don't know that his personality sucked at all.
Let me walk that back and that he was human.
Say his personality sucked.
He was sometimes contradictory, irrational.
Sometimes he was, uh, quite sexist despite the emails I've gotten that, uh, that, that's
people was written to me that Nietzsche has been unfairly labeled a sexist in his discussion
about women.
I'm pretty sure there's a bunch of documents where he's just like, he's just a bitter
guy.
I will agree with you and Marx is as bitter as they come to, but, um, you know, a bitterness
in and of itself doesn't make like what, why I, I hate Marxism comes from, you know, the,
the whole, the entirety of the thing.
And but the dismissal of human nature, but I'm not going to say that Marxism or practic
man, you can find any forbidden book and it could have something good in it.
As colonels, a good idea.
Yeah.
And like, at the end of the day, you know, Marx is a human being, he's got a nice beard.
He does.
He had a hell of a beard.
You know, a decent portrait.
I mean, he looks like the kind of guy like, I wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley,
but thankfully I don't think he was much of a fighter, but in any case, I mean, not the
anarchists are, are, are, are, they're more hot for like, uh, Max Sterner.
People like to think that, uh, Nietzsche borrowed a lot from Sterner and my argument is one,
you don't have any real evidence for that and two, bullshit, you know, I mean, anybody
could, I, the fact that they have some overlapping thoughts doesn't make it, uh, lifted.
Not to mention, go read a lot more philosophy and see how there's so many different things.
Oh, this guy said it in, uh, 1722, well, and then this guy says that again in 1922, does
that mean he read the other guy's stuff?
Not necessarily.
I mean, he's working from the same type of human, uh, physiological construct as anybody
else.
Like, of course it's possible this guy could think the same thing.
We, we think a lot of the same things to be perfectly honest.
I mean, reading the Haggakure going back to philosophy books, this was really impactful
on me as a younger adult because here's a book written in the 19th century about someone
who lived through, uh, the 19th and 18th century at times as a samurai, now a monk, and his
objections to society at the time, the same objections one was having to society as I
was reading it, like the same human behaviors, the same, uh, uh, impetus for action that he
found, uh, a problem, like, well, that's the same, that's the same shit now.
Like we're not, and this was the thing and then I'm reading more religion, I go, oh,
we're no different than anyone who wrote the Torah or older.
We are the same thing with the same problems, with the same, uh, psychological issues, the
same human behaviors, like these things are not different and we haven't changed.
Growing set of tools, though, to, to kill each other with or communicate together and
all that kind of stuff, but underlying it, there's a human nature.
Well, we're also trying to understand that human nature.
I think we've, just like you said, learning how to fish, acquire more and more knowledge
about that human nature, uh, but it's been a very slow journey, slower than people realize
in terms of understanding, uh, human nature.
Let me ask, in terms of egoism, to be curious, uh, uh, to get your sons about Ayn Rand and,
um, her whole idea of virtue of like selfishness and her, because you mentioned that everybody
has a kernel of truth, there, there's potential for a kernel of truth to be discovered in
anything.
For example, I've been recently reading Mind Conf, uh, to touch.
You know what?
That's the thing.
And even there's something in, there's probably things in Mind Conf that are not the surface
level read.
If you get all hung up on, on all, probably all his crap about, uh, you know, his anger,
anger at Jews and this and that, all his crap, it's like, okay, yeah, that, that's right
on the surface.
Try to get below that.
Try to see, you know, how is he, how is he creating the Jews as a cope somehow?
Like, how is he using, why, why are they his, his scapegoat?
And I mean scapegoat in the, so René Girard's, uh, concept of the scapegoat, I mean, in
that sense, whereas, uh, you know, Hitler uses, he wants to make the, the Jews, uh,
the scapegoat for World War one.
Yeah.
I mean, for me, the starting point, similar with that in Rand is, uh, like, Mind Conf is
not a good place to search, not just because Hitler is evil, but it's just not full of
ideas.
No, it is not.
It has its significance due to a lot of, but the starting point for me with Hitler is like
to acknowledge that he's human and to at least consider the possibility that any one of us
could have been Hitler.
So like that, not to make, that's a Peterson kind of concept.
Also, um, Jonathan Haight has a thing about, uh, the difference between hate and disgust
mechanisms and things like that.
And so he used, he goes into the, looking at, uh, Hitler and his, through his, his diary
entries and journals and stuff like that to look, uh, and see it more as the, the disgust
mechanism, then also try and see like if there's any evolutionary biological, uh, attachment
to this, whatever.
I mean, you're right.
He is a human being.
Any of us are, we're all human beings.
It's not that it's probably jarring for people to think, but we're, we're all, I guess,
supposedly potentially capable of just being in, and all these evil people in the world
think they're doing it for the sake of good, which makes them the most dangerous.
And there's some, there's differences in levels of insane.
I think Hitler was way more insane than Stalin.
I think Stalin legitimately thought he was being, doing good.
I would say that's probably true.
Stalin, it was just outright brutal.
Yeah.
He had, he had his five year plan.
He had a look at the things, uh,
He's just had a much lower value for human life.
Yes.
And so he was willing to take, make decisions about what he actually, as a, as a good executive
of, which he was of managing different, uh, bureaucracies and so on.
He was willing to make decisions that resulted in mass human suffering where Hitler was,
it seems like to me, what, much moodier.
So allow emotions and moves to make decisions.
I think we also have to consider, um, the different trajectories and how, where and
when they were making their decisions.
And I mean, not by time specifically, but you know, Hitler engaged into this, this conflict
across multiple continents.
And then that everything that comes with basically fighting the whole world, Stalin had his conflict
and then he really mostly compartmentalized the rest of it.
So he was dealing with his own internal instead of dealing with the internal and the external.
So if Stalin was put under a world war scenario, I don't know, maybe he would have eventually
lost his marbles too.
Yeah.
I'm not, I'm not sure that that's your right there.
The hunger for power was more internalized for Stalin.
He wanted to control the land that already existed as opposed to wanting to colonize other
land.
He was as nationalistic as Hitler, but, uh, and was as capable and willing for, uh, violent
conflict as Hitler for the names of the state.
Yeah.
But he, he, he centered and internalized prior to then externalizing and moving outwards.
Whereas even maybe prior to him, there was an interest to continually push communism
in an aggressive sense, following on the momentum from the, the 1918 revolution.
And that, the halting of that, uh, through various aspects, I guess, uh, in Germany,
where that was, uh, the national socialist, like they, they came up and then they, they
were the other ones to fight the communists.
And so you had the two totalitarians going after it.
Um, but then in the rest of the world that was not dealing with, um, totalitarian aspects,
it was just, it wasn't going to stick, especially in the West and other places.
But Stalin, just, you know, casually thinking, it seemed like Stalin decided to go, all right,
well, we're not going to go just start launching right into more conflicts here.
We're going to, these dudes are going down.
So that's cool for us because they hate us and we hate them.
Um, but now we're going to, we're going to focus internally and then we're going to
work on growing at a slower rate and picking our battles a bit more specifically.
And of course there's, you know, you can get to the, even this is after Stalin, but yeah,
you got the Besmanov type stuff talking about subversion in, in cultural aspects.
Yeah.
I mean, there's, there's fascinating dynamics to propaganda throughout the whole period
that that's-
Yeah, that's a whole another kernel.
Yeah.
Do you think Hitler could have been stopped?
One of the things that's kind of fascinating to look at is how many nations, both journalists
and nations wanted almost crave to take Hitler at his word that he wanted peace until it
was too late.
They almost wanted to be delude themselves.
I mean, the same is true with the Stalin, uh, people want to take Stalin at his word
for it.
They still delude themselves.
Yeah.
I mean, we will delude, we, we will delude ourselves over any number of things and until
even after the fact where the history just says, Hey, fuckface, you know, you, you cannot
supplement your pseudo reality onto actual reality here anymore.
But yet we deal with people in pseudo realities constantly.
I mean, it, we will always find a way to, to change reality, to suit our needs.
Well, the nature of truth now, there's now multiple actual truth is kind of fascinating.
There's multiples versions of history that people are telling, you know, the, the, the
version, the version of the, the, the great patriotic war in Russia, the world war two
in Russia is very different today under Putin than the version that we're learning on the,
in the United States and then different than the version in Europe in the United States.
Uh, the, the hero of the war is the United States in Europe.
There's a much more sad and solemn story of suffering and so on and in Russia, it's the
great patriotic war and I was, it was a unifier of a sense and it, I mean, yeah, I mean, you
can't argue that war and conflict that and, or I just even reducing that to stressors,
agitation, suffering doesn't create human motivation.
You know, we started this off, you brought up, uh, Frankel, I'm like, yeah, Frankel's
dope, man, search for meaning, uh, has those great.
And, and I talked to you about how I started to think like, man, do the ability for human
beings to, to, to live and or potentially flourish in the worst environments you can
think of is pretty incredible in and of itself and that it's a crazy thought to think that
without Frankel and Maslow ending up in concentration camps, do they write some of the most important
books on philosophy in the 20th century?
And that's insane on a lot of different levels.
But uh, suffering is a creative force.
I mean, I don't, do you think we'll always have war?
Yes, we will always have war in some form or another.
We, we need quote unquote air quotes for those who's listening, uh, war to survive.
We need war to flourish.
We need at least.
Can you explain the quote of the air quotes?
Well, because, uh, take, take, take, take the words as violence.
No.
We're not violence.
So like, so when we're talking about quotes, because, uh, while you know what, us getting
on the mat or just getting on these hardwood floors and wrestling around is not literal
war.
It's war of a sorts.
You know, we're, you know, it is, it is a diluted form of war.
American football is a diluted form of war.
All this, these are diluted forms of war.
Tennis is a diluted form of war.
Um, and I think the, one of the best explanations I ever got from this and another person very,
uh, impactful on my life and outlook and thinking about things is Cormac McCarthy.
And so in blood meridian, there's this fantastic speech about war given by the judge, which
there's a ton of fantastic speeches on things given by the judge.
Yeah.
All that exists in creation without my knowledge does so without my consent.
Okay.
That's pretty heavy.
That's that's hard.
Can you break that up?
Can you say that again?
Uh, all things that exist in creation, all things that exist without my knowledge do
so without my consent.
What does that mean to you?
Well, I think from the judge's perspective, it's like, well, I didn't consent to, to that
bird or that dog or this building or all this, like all of this, you know, I didn't create
it.
So it's done so without my consent.
And if it's up to my consent, well, I'll design it how I want to.
Another similar, uh, look into how the judges in that book is he would study everything everywhere
he went.
So he's collected this group of ne'er-do-wells from all over to go on these hunts, uh, against
certain tribes in the Southwest, um, and getting paid by the U.S. government, the Mexican government.
So he's on these Indian hunts and yet they're going to all these different places and they
would stay the night in a cave somewhere and he would find cave paintings.
He would write them all down or he would find old pieces.
There's an example of him, uh, the narrator, uh, explaining how watching the judge and
how he drawing, everything's got this notebook just full of things, drawings and, and writings
and how he found like a piece of armor from a conquistador or something way back in the
day, a Spanish armor.
And he draws it into his, his book and then crushes it, you know, so that, so the reason
we'll always have war in the society is because there's these struggle of amongst people that
want to be the designers.
There's, there's that, but it's, I'm just saying that, uh, he's got this whole quote
on war, like war is about, is, is play war, war is a game.
And the difference is, is that what's at stake.
So all things are a game of some sort and some, you're putting up for it or you're what
you're willing to put up for it determines whether or not you're going to participate
or not.
And you know, all, all aspects of any game is war.
And it's just, what, what does it stake?
You know, if it's your life, it's a different story.
If it's just a coin, it's another thing.
A nice way to put it is, uh, humans play a game in this kind of pursuit of, uh, creating
what, what, whatever the hell the reason is that we keep creating cooler and cooler things
that, that it seems to be the result of a game that would naturally play, would naturally
crave.
I don't know.
I mean, that's been the struggle of philosophy is to understand what is the underlying force
of all that.
Is it the will to power?
Is it?
I think will to power is a really great way of, uh, of describing it.
Do you want to be the winner of the game?
No, not just, no, I don't look at will to power as being the winner of the game.
Uh, well, I mean, if we're going to get philosophical, yes, you want to be the winner of the game.
What does winning the game at define how you win?
Everybody's going to define that win differently.
You know, you could define the win in the most base level like, Oh, I got all the things.
Well, if you got all those things without the, the needing component of fulfillment,
then you're going to be a very unhappy person with a whole lot of things.
But there's a self-referential aspect to where to me, the winner of the game is defined
by the people playing the game.
So if I'm playing a game, I want to win in the sense that most of the other people who
are playing the game will say, yeah, that guy won by their, by our collective definition.
If I just come up, listen, I'm sort of, if I come up, that's a lot of weight on the external
on you.
Right.
But that's, that's how games seem to work somewhat.
So I'm already a winner in my life by defining my own, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm basically the
best person in the world at doing me.
At being Lex.
Yeah.
So like, and then I'm really happy with that.
That's the source of, well, I mean, think about games are also iterated, right?
So you, you start off with your game and then your game with your immediate and then the
game further than that, the game further than that, and then the game today and the game
tomorrow and the game next week.
And so it never ends.
And if you try to keep thinking about it that way, no wonder people go crazy, but we,
we don't want to think about things that way.
We don't want to think about being towards death.
We don't want to think about whether or not I'm going anywhere after this other than in
the ground or what have you, like, we, you know, all of these games are a sense of some
distraction.
This is where we brought up.
But I mean, it's, it's violence is that we need to let this out.
And so it is of our kids need to wrestle and play just like animals need to wrestle and
play.
We need to have forms of competition.
We need to have ways to, to test ourselves to create when, what is it, when at peace
a man of war makes war with himself.
And so we need to be able to competently go at war with ourselves and go at war with our
neighbor and go at war with our neighbor's neighbor in a way that is repeatable at the
very least.
So one, one way of saying that there will always be war, I mean, that's my hopeful view
is that most of the war conducted in the future will be like you said, the man must go to
war with himself.
That would be great.
That that's, that's what to me love is, is like focusing on yourself and your own improvement
and your own creativity and towards others feeling sort of emphasizing cooperative behavior
and compassion and empathy.
It would be great.
But I mean, you can have, well, I'll put it to you this way.
If you have a whole community of Randians and a whole community of Ancoms and they could
all like, I don't know, a toast of London on Netflix and they love Netflix and they
love the internet and they love picking apart Mon comp with you.
They love like, they like all these things, even the esoteric that they can, they can,
they can get on with.
At the, at the fundamental root, they cannot help but go to war because they are literally
oil and water.
No, but see, but they would, the, the various labels they assign to themselves would need
to dissipate.
Well, well, then you would have to stop being whatever it is that you took on as your ideological
or religious point, right?
Yeah.
I mean, I, there's some days I'm a and calm, some days I'm an end capsons, whatever the
other.
Anarchy, anarchy.
Capital.
I mean, there's, it depends on the, the hour, the minute of the day, you constantly changing
moods and embracing that flow, the change of opinions, of ideas.
As there's some days where I'm actually cognizant of the fact because you've been not getting
my sleep.
And after I get some sleep, I see, I'm so much more optimistic about the world.
The less and less sleep I get, the more sad and cynical I get.
I can see that.
Up and down.
I don't even let my, well, okay.
I try not to let.
In most days, it's never a problem.
Any sort of like, what are the kids call it now?
Black pilled way of thinking, be my, my, my over, my, the umbrella, which I hang under.
So we actually, to drag us back, can we talk about Carl Gotch and Kat Tressley?
Cause I do want to make sure I touch it.
I touch it.
I mean, what, who were.
And Carl Gotch is, uh, is he the greatest catch wrestler?
I don't know if he was the greatest catch wrestler ever.
I don't, I don't, I mean, he's one of them for a myriad of, uh, Carl Gotch, uh, Billy
Robinson, uh, Gotch and Robinson's trainer, Billy Riley.
Um, so who are these figures and what did they bring to him?
Miso Aumaeda.
He's one of the greatest catch wrestlers ever because he's responsible for Brazilian
Jiu Jitsu along with Gustavo Gracie.
Okay, there's so much of things I'd like to say here, but one of the things that catch
wrestling seemed to espouse as a principle, is that of violence.
I, I just, the, the tournaments I competed at, uh, the unfortunate thing, and we'll
probably hopefully talk about it a little bit.
They weren't disorganized and the level of competition was pretty low where people
really sucked.
Pretty typical.
Is that typical?
Okay.
I mean, think about, um, you know, local run of the mill, uh, Jiu Jitsu tournament
versus IBJJF created, you know, a vast difference.
So I, you know, but there is a, to me as a human being that like intellectually, philosophically,
it was more interesting to go to catch wrestling tournament.
It seemed more real and honest because of the way they communicated about violence and
aggression.
So it is, it is often, uh, more honest.
I think that.
Who is that from?
Is that originated from gosh?
Well, I mean, it originates from all wrestling in that, uh, even Wade, Wade Chalice, not
a, not a classically considered catch wrestler, yet the reason why he has the world record
for most amount of a world champion's pinned or the record for pins in the NCAA is because
well, of course the idea is to put you on your back and pin you, but you're, there's
no way you're going to let me do that.
Uh, so how do I make it so that you want me to pin you?
Well, it's by, you put them in excruciating pain.
So at the end of the day, you're both there.
You both want to win.
Neither one wants to allow anything to the other.
So how do I, how do I get you to lose to me?
I make it so unbearable for you that you decide losing is better than staying.
So those are two, those two are so fascinating because so coming from Russia, I don't know
if that's where I got it or if it's just my own predisposition is I always loved the,
there's two ways to get you to want to pin yourself.
One is to making it so painful not to pin yourself that you pin yourself or whatever.
And the other is it's sort of like a Bruce Lee water flows may make it so easy to pin
yourself.
So it's technique, it's like the elegance, the ease of movement.
This is the Satya brothers, Vasya Satya, uh, like the, just the elegance, the efficiency
that chases them.
They're practically like ballet watching those guys, you know, there's incredible Satya brothers
are massive.
And, uh,
So those are the two paths, right?
Also caveat a little bit that like, uh, if you're, if you're approaching this from
a, a Russian perspective, Russians are quite truthful about things, uh, especially when
it comes to something like combat, they just, this is how it is and this is how it's going
to be.
It's honest.
Yes.
And honesty is what I really like about, uh, catch wrestling because I find that we, given
any opportunity for us to be dishonest for any number of reasons, we're going to, especially
if it's a dishonesty towards a positive, right?
Like, oh, well, you know, it's all technique and it's all this and it's the gentle art
and blah, bro.
I have rolled with 80 CC world champions, you know, some of the best you have ever heard
of, there ain't a lot of gentleness when it comes to like, Oh yeah, they wanted to sweep
you and you said no.
And then you did said no again.
And then you said no and attacked their leg.
Yeah.
It ceases to be all that gentle because at the end of the day, these dudes are strong
as hell.
They're flexible.
They're all, I mean, they're, they're the difference between the athleticism and, and
the, the ability to actually win is a pretty wide gap.
The athleticism shows up, but then there's all that other extra.
And part of that is meanness and, and pain and, uh, getting what you need out of it.
But see, there is a philosophical difference in the way it's thought because.
I think some of it is just, they just in denial, like, Oh, people will, they like to, people
like to espouse a lot of things as theory.
And then it's like, okay, let me watch when they're, oh, you're not doing.
And anything about what you said right now, in fact, you're doing the opposite.
You're literally hurting that guy because you, your shit ain't working in the way that you'd
like it to.
So you're having to use strength.
You're having to, it's one of my favorites, like, Oh, you're using too much strength.
And it's like, well, hold on.
Do we want people not to use strength at this point to understand more of mechanics?
Or are you trying to tell people if they use strength at all, uh, that they're somehow
bad at what they do?
Cause you know, it's not my fault.
You're not stronger than.
I'm speaking of something else that's, uh, that's, well, I tend to think what it comes
down to is like, strength is fine until you beat me with it, then it sucks.
Okay.
So strength is another thing.
I'm speaking, I'm thinking about more like anger.
Oh, sure.
Okay.
So like a lot of angry guys in Jiu-Jitsu.
I know that.
Really?
Okay.
Okay.
Well, but let's talk about, let's talk about the highest level of competitions.
There's a book called wrestling tough.
Yeah.
There's a really good book.
Cause I've, I've encountered in my life, a few, uh, especially in wrestling, people
who really try to find a way to use anger, to get really angry at their opponent.
Not like stupid anger, but just like.
Intense pointed, uh, anger, uh, distilled into something, uh, that you can use fuel.
And like, I remember this story.
I don't know where I read it.
It might be wrestling tough where a person was imagining that their opponent just raped
their mother, raped their, uh, girlfriend or something like that to, to create this
like method acting thing in their head to be like, to, to snap them out of this polite
interaction of usual, like athletic convention and like, and really go to the primitive.
Design of necessity.
So my anecdote for this was I was sitting with, uh, backstage before a fight, not my
fight.
And I'm, I'm working with this guy and this dude is, this is a, this is a world champion
guy.
Uh, and he's competed at the highest levels, uh, and he, he looks at me and he goes, hmm,
you know, do you ever get nervous before fights?
And I looked at him and I went, no, I don't.
And he just looks at me and he's like, fuck man, I'm so nervous, you know, how do you
do it, man?
Well, you know, I wish it could be like you.
And I said, you know what, that doesn't mean that what I'm doing is better.
It's just what is necessary for me.
It's the way I am.
And I told him, so this anecdote goes into another anecdote.
This is a family guy episode, I guess, where some, uh, another famous high level guy told
me about this experience with a world champion boxer in Japan.
And this guy would get insanely nervous and worked up and anxious before his matches.
And he hated it and hated it and hated it.
And so he wanted to get rid of that feeling.
So he went to a hypnotist for a bunch of sessions and managed to, and he goes in and
the next fight, he's cool as a cucumber and doesn't perform and loses.
And so what I said, going back to anecdote one was, uh, you know, whatever is necessary
for you to get yourself in the best state of being right now to compete, whatever that
may be, it could be absolute stress and fear.
It could be anger, it could be calmness, it could be whatever.
But there is a, but there is a, there's a state at which you need to be in to do your
best.
You have to lose to the individual, you have to find that.
Can you comment on, uh, Tyson, Mike Tyson?
Oh, yeah, that thing.
So first, so he, uh, there's two things I want to know.
So he's a, in terms of fear, there's a clip there, I think from a documentary where he
talks about, he is like fully afraid as he walks up to the ring and as he gets closer
and closer and closer, he gets more confident until he gets in and then he's a God or something
like that.
That coupled with his statement on Joe Rogan, that he gets aroused, uh, at the possibility
of true, like I've hurting somebody in the ring.
So like he gets aroused at the violence.
Yeah.
Uh, I like it cause it's coupled to your, basically statement that we need to own, to find our
own unique way of existing at our top level of performance and that perhaps is Mike Tyson.
So do you think there's something more deeply universal to the, the Mike Tyson speaking
to the fact that he's aroused at the possibility of violence?
Yeah, I do actually, uh, although I don't think that it always equates to arousal for
people.
In fact, I would say in general, it doesn't, uh, I can say I've never had a boner in the
ring.
In fact, if anything, you know, old combat cock is like, we're not hanging around.
We're leaving.
We're going up.
Yeah.
We're taking off.
Yeah.
We don't want anything to do with this.
Yes.
You have fun.
Yeah.
But, uh, the power with the feeling of aliveness, yeah, I could see it.
It being, you know, back to the, even the concept of the Ubermensch, I feel like the
states, the highest states of being I've ever been in were in the midst of conflict.
I felt like that was the time those are the, those are the moments in my life where I felt
like I was at the highest level of being as a human in existence.
But yet even being in that state was not, it was not something that you could interact
with people that weren't in that state with you.
Like they wouldn't get it.
You would almost seem, and to be that way all the time, either A might drive you mad
or B is you're not, you're something that's untenable to the rest of society.
Like you can't function with everybody else.
It will not work.
It's just like you said with the Ubermensch, it's like, it's, perhaps that ideal is not
something you can hold for long.
That's the, the very nature of it is.
Yeah. Well, there was an example in the Spokesperson Zarathustra about a snake being down the person's
throat and biting it and then having this maniacal laughter erupting.
And you know, to me it was, at least I read it as, yeah, okay, there's this insane moment
that isn't forever, but that it is life and death and it is, and the overcoming it is
the thing that all of a sudden gives you that tapping into your, your highest state, right?
This is, you know, man is a chasm, a tightrope between man and Ubermensch.
Well, I don't want to leave your thought about, we'll call those things flourishes to the
aspect of Tyson's interpretation or his, his, his expression of his feelings in combat.
And so I gave this antidote to the guy and I just, you know, at my first anecdote to
that athlete I was working with and I said, you know, this isn't, there isn't a superior
way in this sense.
There is the way that works for you.
That may be something you can implement to other people if you find that person because
we all have different personalities and to me that's a, that is, that's an absolute,
I don't want to, nobody don't come at me with all your other fucking social sciences crap.
No, we have distinct personalities.
That personality, that, that, who you really are.
And this, you know, again, Heidegger, Dasein, like being authentic.
If you're authentic with who you are, goods and bads, you will know how to create what
that is.
And for me, violence and fighting and conflict was something that always felt normal to me.
And I don't mean normal and like I grew up in a war zone or abuse of household or something
like that.
And I was a kid who was very joyful and inquisitive and spent a lot of time around older people
of all things.
And also, while I don't think I have much capability towards engineering, my mom said
that one of the first things as like a little baby, when she put me in my sister's old
crib, instead of my sister who just milled about and was fine with it all, the first
thing I did was I completely deconstructed it and break it.
I figured out how to pull it apart.
Curiosity about the world.
And yet that wasn't in conflict with the idea of violence.
No, not at all.
And so being a very joyful and nice kid, but you know, kids are kids and if kids can find
that you respond maybe more easily to agitation, they will agitate you.
And if you should stand out in some way by being taller or bigger or something or caring,
especially they will agitate you.
They don't really fully understand it either.
And so I don't I don't hold anything against like any of the kids that used to pick on
me or whatever, especially at the youngest age is like, man, they don't know shit either.
So but once that line was pushed, for me, it was, Oh, well, I was I was being cool.
Now you're being uncool.
Yeah.
Well, then that gives me license for everything.
And so boom, we would just go at it or kids that would try to initiate a fight and okay,
and being in that moment of just going going to town with someone else, it just felt like
this is I belong here.
Yeah, it was it was never a problem for me.
Like the in fact, if anything, the over what I had to understand was, well, not only did
I learn the hard way that it doesn't matter at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter
what anybody else does, if your response and violence, even to their violence, if you're
the winner is often going to be penalized severely, you know, society, state apparatus,
they don't want any of that.
They want to be the only arbiter of violence in the world always.
But I learned a very difficult lesson with that.
And it was really impactful in a negative way on me.
But also I had to learn on an individual sense to you need to manage violence too.
Because hey, if someone attacks you or starts a fight with you and you go at it, okay, beating
them up is one thing, you know, you know, trying to grab a handful of broken glass from
the street and throw it in their face, maybe that's a bit much at seven.
So you need to learn what level is necessary, and you need to learn what comes with all,
what's the responsibility of when you enact violence, I mean, you take on something when
you you have a responsibility for that.
This is the extension of your actions.
So but as I got older, and especially as I found sports, and then combat sports, and
now this was a place for me to flourish, and to the point where I was more myself in that
space than I was outside of it until time enough where I could learn to get this back
together again.
And I never say that I that I'll merge the two or anything like that know all what happened
my my my journey from adolescence on to to manhood, a huge portion of it, besides the
normal finding yourself, whatever, whatever, actually, what it was was re getting back
to who I always was getting curious kid, the kind kid, getting back to the guy that I should
have been allowed to become instead of what happened under the pressures of other things.
Yeah.
And the attempt for society, and certain people within, you know, a managerial positions
to to compress what that was into something that they found more suitable.
Yeah, but those pressures allow you to discover this little world, forbidden world in many
ways of violence, then you could explore through sport, you can explore it in.
It's more socially acceptable to explore it to sport for sure.
And even but even then there's like, at times it's socially unacceptable.
So I beat some shilt.
I'm he cut my right eyebrow.
I cut him and busted his nose and he's bleeding all over me as I have an arm bar on top of
getting, you know, it's raining blood, quote, some slayer from a lacerated some shilt, bleeding
in his horror, creating my structures.
Now I shall rain in blood.
But I win the fight, arm bar, nasty one, I get on my feet.
And the first thing I do is I wipe all the blood off onto my hands and I lick it and
I do my thing.
And all the MMA journalists freaked out data wise, like man, I don't know about that.
You know, we don't want him doing, everybody had this huge problem.
And then some folks would even contend, oh, you know, we're trying to do like, no, no,
this isn't planned.
This isn't think of these things.
This isn't this is how I really feel.
This is who I really am.
And you know, it was even kind of comical after the fact, you know, and BJ Penn was on the
very card with me, watching him at some point in his career, all of a sudden win fights
and then do this licking the glove thing and everyone thinks it's the coolest thing ever.
And I'm like, hey, fuck faces.
I did this in 2002 or one, 2001.
And BJ Penn actually back then was like, dude, you're a badass, you're a killer, you know.
Where did that come from?
Because that seems like a deeply human moment.
I could say I could just be, you know, goofy about it and call it orgiastic, you know, to
align with Tyson.
Are we back to Tyson?
Yeah, but Tyson, but no, no, it isn't, it's beyond that.
Is it a celebration of human nature?
I've had some pretty decent orgasms in my life at this point, I'm 43.
So but no, none have ever compared to that.
Like I said, it is a feeling of highest being to me.
And that's your Ubermensch moment.
This is, this is where I feel like the restrictions of general existence in society are gone.
And I get to fully live in a state that feels more meaningful of the most meaning, you know,
I think of it as life and death.
And it's just, it is the way I'm built.
And I don't have, I've never had any problem applying violence.
Like it doesn't, I don't know where it comes from or how you would define it or whatever,
if you want to stick me under in a psychologist chair, but like I don't, there's a part of
me that can just like, no, if I'm gonna apply, I can apply violence to any level and be okay
with it.
And it doesn't, I don't lose sleep.
It doesn't bother me.
It's not a problem.
It was me learning how to fully understand violence, humans and the broader perspective
that allowed me to think about things and like, well, what am I, what, what do I really
want to accomplish with my actions in the world, just on a whole, you know, not compartmentalizing
my sporting career, even when I get in the ring, I don't have any mercy generally.
And if I do, it's because I make a really deliberate attempt to be in a state where
I can have mercy.
If I just go in there to fight with everything I got, there is zero, there's nothing, there's
nothing that will hold me back other than the referee.
And that's that, you know, I, I know I agreed to, to be allowed to do and not to do, but,
but within that, no, and I expect it to be done to me.
But in terms of values, in terms of seeing what, to me, violence is, is just yet another
canvas that humans can paint beautifully on.
Clearly.
I mean, we have venerated the violent.
There are communists that venerate the violent on their behalf.
There are national socialists that venerate the violent there.
And then if you remove it from an ideological perspective, we venerate the violent when they're
a hero.
We venerate the violent in our religion.
Well, I mean, I guess some people venerate the violence of Yahweh and Sodom and Gomorrah.
Right.
So, or do we say Jehovah?
I don't know.
Is there, you've already mentioned one, but is there a fight where you've achieved the
highest of heights for your own personal being?
Just when you look within yourself that you're the proudest of, or maybe it was your most
beautiful creation?
Is this something that stands out?
Yeah.
There, there are a few actually.
There's a writing semi-shield and a rematch.
Well, the first one was pretty good too.
But the rematch was, I was suffering, I had suffered early prior, the week prior, to food
poisoning.
And so while my abs are looking all right, I, in the ring, didn't have the power that
I expected to.
And I was struggling in ways, in some of the grappling for the submission stuff that I
hadn't accounted for.
Was it exhaustion or mental exhaustion?
No, I mean, like just physical, I wasn't back up to 100% in terms of this power output.
And semi was, well, he's always seven foot tall.
But this time he was, the first time I fought him, he was 260, 257 or 260 something, something
like that.
This time he was like 290.
And so he was a significantly bigger cat.
And he was, he's a big dude.
And I just remember being up against the ropes with him, changing levels, trying to take
him down.
And he's fighting, he's hippin'.
And I just thought in my head, there's no fucking way I'm going to lose this fight.
There's no way you are not going to beat me.
It's not going to happen.
And I arm barred him, the other arm.
And you remember the fact, he's like, I really wanted to get you for that.
I wanted to get that match back.
And then you fucking got my other arm, dick.
I'm like, dude, I still love you though.
But the whole time you're like, so this has to do the, the dichotomy of you're feeling
you're worst.
And having to overcome.
You're like literally mentally telling yourself, there's no way.
There's no fucking way I'm going to lose this fight.
And then there's even my last bare knuckle match and getting in the ring and fighting
bare knuckle boxing for the first time.
And just thinking, just being in a great state and just looking so forward to seeing, I mean,
I called someone and I was talking to them the night before and I said, yeah, well, I
want, you know, I video called you because this face might not look like this when I
see you next.
And they're just like, okay.
So it's not just like empty trash talk that's, that's like a clarity of mind and the seriousness
of all this.
I go, I might die.
I'm most pretty high of chance of being deformed some way.
So the fuck it.
I don't really care.
Do you think about, are you accepting your own death?
Yes.
100%.
Yeah.
I, in fact, and that's in a strange way, that's partially what makes it so elevated in terms
of my, my sense of feeling by being able to have death at my side, it feels good.
And to be there and to think that this could be the one like, why not?
You know, I'm not a religious person at all, even though I very much have to seem, seems
to bang on the drum about the usefulness or understanding the usefulness of religion
for people.
But you know, if, if, if, if I got to do something, then yeah, put me in Valhalla, man.
I don't want to be anywhere else.
Nothing else seems like a good place for me to be.
I want to, I want to fight all day long and feast all night.
You know, that sounds great.
I saw you throw your hat into the ring of Fader Emelie Nankin.
Yes.
He got COVID, I guess.
I hope he, I hope he overcomes it and comes out just as good, if not better.
Epic with that.
Did I understand correctly that that might be his last fight?
Yes.
That's my understanding.
And it would be epic as hell.
And it would be epic as hell because the, the person that I want to give my most to
is a person that I respect, especially at this, this long, uh, this long, this, this,
this long career of mine and getting at this, this, this quiet years, like two warriors.
And, and that's the thing about even this going in there with the aspect of being with
death and all that is that when that person is in there, there are my brother with me
in this.
And that, so when you give me your best, even if I, even if I win dominant fashion, but
if you show up and you're as authentic and being here as I am, then, then I love you
and I'm glad for you to be here and we're in this together.
And, and at this point, you know, your loss or my loss or whatever is no less deserving
of veneration than the win.
Like we're here in this.
And so to be in the ring with Fyodor and to venerate him in win or defeat, to be in
there with, with someone, uh, like that is to me, it's so rare.
So it's incredible how the ultimate violence is coupled with like love or respect.
And it's like, it's, it's weird how this is, uh, how the competition and his violent
form is also a, uh, veneration of just the human connection.
It's also the removal.
I feel like it's the purest, one of the purest ways, purest, honest, most honest places a
person can exist.
Uh, that line and fight club, you don't know really who you are until you've been in a
fight.
I mean, I believe that.
And, uh, I've seen so many examples of people trying to portray themselves as one thing.
And then in the ring, you see who they really are, or even when they're trying to portray
themselves as one thing and they're winning the crowd at times, we'll see who they really
are and still hate them, you know, it's like, but I said all the good things, bro, don't
work that way.
Yeah.
But speaking of Fyodor, if we take you out of the picture, who are the greatest mixed
martial arts fighters of all time?
Uh, I, I feel you out of the picture.
As a cop out to some degree, I feel like we need a little bit more time.
You know, so to, to, to see how, how this unfolds, because you got to compare a lot
of things.
And I, uh, did I, did I, I think I'm like, I did an interview.
I don't know about centuries, but that would help if we can keep accurate records and not
allow, uh, too much, uh, bias to, to fall, to fall in too much propaganda, but, um, I
made an argument, uh, I was in, I, I get a, it was, it was a interview with an MMA outlet
of some sort.
And I can't recall who it was, but oh, it was an argument about will the winner of
came Velazquez versus steep Miochik be the greatest MMA heavyweight of all time.
And I said, fucking no way.
Oh no, it's Cormier Miochik.
That's what it was.
I said, absolutely not, not even close, and I said, these guys need a bit more time to
see how things go and also how things go for some of their opponents.
And like, there's, there's more factors than just this one fight.
It really is.
And I go, and when you want to weigh these people, even if let's say we'll bring Alistair
or, uh, yeah, Alistair Overeem into the, into the equation, okay.
You judge him on what you know now, what he's done for you lately.
Okay.
Right.
Which is a very myopic way of doing it.
Okay.
What has he done over his career?
K1 champion.
Uh, he was a champion in, um, uh, dream, um, he strike force, blah, blah, blah.
His overall record, the entirety of all the, the different opponents he's fought.
And I just sit back and I go, okay, he's not the UFC champ, but his accolades, his merits
in some ways actually stand up higher than Cormier's and Miojito's.
So what about the moments?
Do you give much value to the special moments, like the highest, highest you rise to not in
terms of records or the strikes landed, but just creating a magical moment in, in a, in
a, in a fight.
It doesn't have to be even a championship fight, but just, you know, Conor McGregor is an example
of somebody who creates a narrative, who gets a story, creates a drama, and a special
magic happens, even if it's like, not when the myth is greater than reality.
And that is always the case.
But do you, do you, and so I understand that so very much.
And it takes an asshole like me to, to poo poo on your myth, at least get you at the end
of the day, you're not going to abandon your myth, but, um, perhaps temper it with the
facts and logic.
But, uh, so you're not a fan of myth.
No, I'm a absolute massive fan of myth.
But you prefer facts and logic.
It's like, it's like when I, no, I mean, I like saying facts and logic because people,
I also, I am not a materialist in that sense.
I don't think that materialism can solve for everything.
It's not enough.
It's not, it's not robust enough.
I'm sorry.
If facts and logic and or, uh, reason as the enlightenment scholars all thought, uh, including
Marx was enough for people, then we would never, we wouldn't have any religions.
We wouldn't have any, like there would be no, we wouldn't have narratives and myths and
all this kind of stuff.
It would not be, it just, I'm sorry, there is no, there's nothing about history that
supports the idea that rationality will over, will overcome all.
There's something about Ben Shapiro's facts.
Don't care about your feelings that feels to be missed feels to be missing something
fundamental about human nature.
It's not clear to me exactly what is missing.
To give all Ben a fair shake and, uh, you know, I don't know Ben Shapiro.
I don't really listen to Ben Shapiro, not against Ben Shapiro.
Um, I don't, I'm not here to say anything particularly bad about him.
Um, although I will say at one time, Tom Arnold was seemingly trying to pick an actionable
fight with Ben Shapiro.
In the ring or somewhere.
Yeah.
And I just, and I actually responded like, and I tried to get him to clarify, say, Hey,
are you saying that you want to fight Ben Shapiro that you're looking to actually, because
I was waiting for him to say something and then I can be like, okay, well, it's one thing
to want to get into a fight with someone.
It's another thing to go pick on a little tiny, you know, guy like Ben who's much smaller
than you and doesn't train or whatever.
But you know, if it's not me, I can find someone your size and you can go fight him.
You know, don't be a, basically don't be a bully piece of shit.
Yeah.
You know, which by the way, Tom Arnold, you are a mental midget.
You are never going to be able to compete even with Ben Shapiro in an argument on any
level about anything.
Oh, intellectual argument.
Yeah.
Intellectual argument.
Maybe you can scream louder than him, but whatever.
But, but nevertheless, in the discussion of greatness in fighting.
I think you, you need to look at some of the numbers and there's the magic.
There is some context also in that where did Alistair Overeem fight?
Oh, we fought in pride where you could soccer kick people and stomp their heads and this
and that.
And so the, the, the game environment is actually different too.
There's more uncertainty.
There's more chaos and pride.
There's more.
Go back a little further and go like, what about the guys that used to like Dan Severin
fought bare knuckle, head butts, the whole nine.
You beat Dan Severin, right?
I did beat Dan Severin.
That was, that was killing an idol, so to speak, although I didn't really kill him because
I still love him.
You know, he's still an eye.
He's still responsible for inspiration along this whole pathway.
You know, it's, it's meeting, meeting your God and then putting a knife in it, I guess.
Realizing they're human and then bringing them down to your level.
Exactly.
But also there's a, there's a huge misconception there and that is that I could bring, maybe
I could bring Dan Severin down to my level, but I couldn't bring his mustache down to
my level.
Oh.
It is, it is of mythic proportions and.
Great than yours.
Great.
Your facial hair is great than yours.
My facial hair is, is, is, is creating its own legacy, but it is not Dan Severin mustache
level or now Don Frymoustache.
So Don Frymoustache, Dan Severin mustache, you know, now you have like Shia versus Suni,
right?
Nice.
You think there'll be a Karl Marx, uh, like painting of Josh Barnett one day with the beard
and is that, is that basically what you started?
I hope so.
I will actually comb my hair unlike Marx, but, um, chaos is, uh, has a charm to it.
It does.
It does.
I mean, uh, we all thought talk brown and back to the future was, was quite charming.
So you have to throw that into the calculation where they fought.
Yes.
This is the.
And the rules that they fought under, you know, some of the guys like Eurvov Chanchin
won a 32 man tournament or something like that.
And I go, okay, uh, steep and Daniel Cormier are awesome.
And they may, they will, they will for sure be, uh, revered as when they're as for their
careers, 100% can you say that they're particularly even better overall than Eurvov Chanchin?
Maybe one of them could have beat them.
Maybe, maybe one of them wouldn't have, you know, maybe, maybe Eur would have fucking
got him with the knuckles right away.
Well, maybe if they fought him in pride, they wouldn't have won.
Maybe if they fought him bare knuckle, they wouldn't won.
I don't know.
And there's something about the cat.
Like do you put who is Gracie in the top 10?
You know, there's something about top 10 of all time in terms of competitors is capable.
Um, I don't know.
I'd have to think about that maybe not, but I was Gracie as like pyramid level.
Like, wow, dude, what a, what an amazing man.
Yeah.
He's so important.
Absolutely.
Incredibly important.
There's something about stepping into, uh, like fighting another human being under all
the uncertainty that the early UFC's had.
I mean, you don't know what is going to happen and couple that with not much money.
All of it.
Yes.
So that the purity of it too.
There's something about money.
I mean, I guess it's shit for that post world, but that ruins the purity of the violence.
Yeah, people given the opportunity for, yeah, yeah, well, the bigger things get the more,
I love the fact that, that fighting has opened up to such a degree that the career business
side of it, cause I, I absolutely distinctly separate the two.
The business side of it has opened up to give me far more possibilities, open way more doors
for me than I ever intended it to, uh, whereas the, the athlete side of things has, if anything
just gotten substantially worse, I would say, and, uh, some of this can be, some of
this is due to all the nature of all games will be learned, will be gamed, uh, without
even the rules being broken.
And once that's figured out, you need to make an adjustment.
No adjustments have been made.
So the game just appears to be the same game over and over and over and over and over again
on ESPN plus on whatever, on whatever, on whatever, it doesn't really matter which night
you watch.
It's the same game constantly.
And that's not because the, the athletes are worse or better because they have had
that game, uh, structure long enough that they figured out what do you do to be, to
be the most successful at it?
What is the highest percentage way of approaching it essentially, even if you're not thinking
of percentages?
What would the, if we take a step back, it's really fascinating to think about the early
UFC's.
Did you fight Dan Seven in the UFC?
I fought him in Super Brawl.
Super Brawl.
So that was in the early, early days.
You're undefeated.
2000.
Uh, what were those early days, let's say, of mixed martial arts, like, Div?
Let me tell you the day of high adventure.
Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun.
Yeah, it is.
It was so much fun and it made you feel absolutely like you were a part of a novel, a comic book.
I mean, I, I would love to transcribe my experiences as what I consider a second generation MMA
athlete, except I'm way too sensitive to anybody's personal, anything's that are not, not even
to, you know, I'm not a gossipy person.
I really do believe that like small people talk about others, big people talk about ideas.
So, um, but there's just some stories that just can't, you can't tell without telling
the whole story.
And there are so many amazing stories that could be told.
People being at their best, people being at their worst.
Yeah, the whole, the whole, is there something you could speak to the chaos of the time?
Oh, 100%.
Like, well, okay.
So we at AMC got, uh, connected to somebody that was thrown an event in Nampa, Idaho,
and we all piled into this and, uh, Matt Humes, uh, Subaru wagon, and we jammed out and we
left Kirkland and we headed over to Idaho, only to find out that there was nothing really
put in place.
It was absolute disrepair and chaos.
Like they're, they didn't have a ring, they didn't have this, it was such a bullshit adventure.
But we were like, well, you know, there's hardly anywhere to fight, it's tough to find
these opportunities.
So, okay.
Well, how about this, whoever is here to fight and is willing, all right, well, since there's
no venue, there's no this, whatever, we all got gloves, we got mouthpieces, we'll just
go to the park.
As long as you're still paid.
And so folks were kind of like, I don't know about that.
The guy I was going to fight was, he finally figured that they finally, he finally gets
information on who I actually am.
And I was undefeated at the time and I think I had fought Super Brawl 13 and already won
that tournament.
And so he's like, yeah, I had no clue.
I'm so glad we didn't fight, you would have murdered me, you know, what a setup.
And eventually Matt had to, had a strong arm, the guy and get our money that we were supposed
to all get and drive back and cause he, his whole position was, well, there ain't no fucking
way.
We drove all the way out here for free.
This is all in you.
You fucked this up, not my problem, but what is my problem is the lack of cash in my account.
So fix it, you know, or me fighting my first organized fight against an AMC guy on 11 days
notice through a connection to an old wrestling coach I had.
And I just gathered up with all my old martial arts, my old martial arts instructor that
I had worked with and we grappled in his apartment.
We did tie pads in the park.
I ran a couple of miles every day and then, all right, boom, show it up.
Won my fight by front joke in two minutes.
And then Matt goes, okay, well, hey, you did really great.
We'd like you to come back and fight again in the summer.
What do you think?
Okay, go back off to university.
And then I think, hmm, well, that fight didn't go exactly as how I wanted it to.
So I got to find a way to get more experience.
I would literally fight people in the university like rec center on the old wrestling mats as
they didn't know I had a wrestling team.
I would find anyone doing martial arts, anyone talking about getting into street fights,
anyone, whatever, and just basically go, oh, you ever watched UFC?
Yeah, yeah, that stuff's cool.
What do you think?
Oh man, I'm super into it, man.
That's badass.
Rad.
So would you want to fight?
I mean, it was way easier picking fights than it was, you know, getting a girlfriend.
So I just, you know, path lease resistance.
I think it might be useful for us to get some advice from you.
Yeah.
All right.
Because you've accomplished for the journey of a martial artist first.
If you've accomplished some of the greatest accolades there is in the sport, if somebody
who's starting out now or like early on in their journey, what advice would you give
on how to become a martial artist, catch wrestler, fighter?
Well, I mean, really what it comes down to is do it because you love it.
Do it for that reason and that reason alone.
Most people that get into this and attempt to make any sort of professional inroads with
it, you are not going to be the world champion.
You probably will never even fight for a belt.
You're probably not going to net make money at this.
So don't do it for those reasons.
Do it for the reason of the passion.
Do it for the reason to be the absolute best that you can be, whatever that ends up being.
You might at best only be mediocre, but you won't even be mediocre if you don't do it
like you really mean it.
So the passion look, where's the kernel of the passion, would you say?
Is it in the learning process itself?
The improvement?
I think it really depends on the person, right?
I mean, there's some people that really love the fact of they feel like they're growing,
right?
Well, it's power.
You're growing, growing stronger, growing better, the idea of eliminating weakness.
So to which I'll quickly define weakness as like things that weaken you, not like being
physically weak, sure, you could call that weakness, but maybe you're not meant to be
a super strong guy, but choosing to be weak is really a different story other than just
like we're all deficient in some way or another.
So that's neither here nor there.
It's a matter of what you decide to do with it, and that's an infinite strength and weakness,
at least the way I look at it, like strength is choosing regardless of the difficulty to
make improvements to strength is even choosing to acknowledge that you do lack and accept
it and then make a decision of what to do with it.
Yeah, but there's also, there's a bunch of stuff that just like you said is what you're
drawn to.
There's an honesty to just grappling that it seems more real than anything else you can
do.
Sure.
And that's where the passion and love can come from.
Yeah, I mean, it's being in an environment, hopefully that is as true as possible would
be a starter.
So it's hard to be a bullshit person when you're literally trying to tear each other's
arms off.
Yeah.
You know, as you really sort of see who somebody is.
I also feel like you really, really get to see somebody who, there are a couple of instances
where you really see who people are on the mats and in the bedroom.
So even the aspect of self-betterment growth along a path, I mean, hell, that's part of
the device of capture for martial arts as a business, give you a belt, put a stripe
on your belt.
Each of these iterations cost 20 bucks.
So
But there's a benefit to that too.
I really enjoyed the progression of belts.
Sure.
You know, a bit of it is OCD or whatever, but you're enjoying the recognition of your growth
when you feel, when you're made to feel, when I think genuinely you do earn it in that process.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree.
It makes complete sense to me.
It's anything that has a goodness in its purity can also have a detriment in its perversion.
And there's a value to competition.
I've gotten some shit in the past for saying this.
I've gotten the most value in giving everything I have to try to win and lose.
So like I've gotten, I remember most of the matches I've lost and I think that's what
I've gotten the most from the sport is losing.
Think about it.
I mean, if you really think about it, what makes you want to actually in detail go over
what happened?
Oh, it's the time when you didn't get what you wanted.
Yeah.
It's the time when you gave it everything you had and you came up short or failed miserably.
Okay.
Especially if you're embarrassed in some way.
Right.
So usually the only time people, again, calamity is the impetus for them to actually turn around
and go, who the fuck am I?
What am I doing?
And why am I doing it?
Yeah.
Instead of naturally going, hmm, okay, well, I won.
Why?
What was it the cause?
And so I think part of my success is that when I win, I'm brutal.
When I lose, I'm brutal and there is no in between.
So I remember losing the rematch against Nogara and I still feel like it was a bullshit call.
Like I feel like I won that fight, but my, my opinion is that, and this even came up.
So one of the coaches in the back was like, Oh, you did great.
You know, don't feel bad.
You know, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I go, no, fuck that.
I didn't finish him.
I allowed the referees to make a judge decision that I think is incorrect and bad, but that
came because I didn't take him out.
You know, fuck that.
No.
No.
He won.
He's going to get more money.
He's going to get more recognition, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I accept all this and it's not okay.
And I need to, if I, when I get a chance to fight him again, I got to figure out how to
wait to like take this guy out.
I don't want to say forever.
I'm not trying to put him six feet underground.
Well, when I fight, yes, I am, but, but the point being, I need to find a way to, like,
this is definitive, you don't get to say shit about it because I'm the only one who can
stand right now.
That's the way it's got to be.
Anything less than that is not good enough.
And even if I achieve that, then I got to figure out, okay, it's not a given.
How did I get to this point?
How did I make that happen?
Was it simply bent because of his own mistakes or was it because of my, my, my successful
action?
So it's always self-critical.
Always, constantly.
You love movies.
I've read this somewhere.
Yeah.
You mentioned Blade Runner as a favorite.
Number one of all time, the final cut.
That's my go-to.
So you would say Blade Runner is the greatest movie of all time.
It's one of the greatest movies of all time.
And it is my number.
What's in the top?
My top five, Blade Runner, final cut.
This is the original Blade Runner.
And I used to own, on tape, the original, the original cut.
Oh.
And, and I had the director's cut on DVD.
Why Blade Runner, by the way?
What, what can that be?
As a kid, I just thought it was so cool.
There was something about it that really spoke to me.
The whole cyberpunk landscapes and, you know, this guy chasing down rogue, androids, replicants
and all this.
Is it, is it just the entire cyberpunk universe or is it just robots as well?
No, it's, it's, I mean, the cyberpunk universe is part of it.
On the surface, I have a, I've always tended towards dark subject matter, like things that
are of the dark, so to speak, are things that have always been gravitated towards.
I think maybe part of it is that the things that are darker are more accepting and more
upfront with death.
And perhaps I think that maybe that is what was,
Yeah, somehow more honest, perhaps.
There's also the aspect of rebelliousness, usually, like there was, I was never one to
want to just do what somebody told me to do, you know, I'm not sitting around trying to
always be such a radical individual that I can't take orders.
No, in fact, I'm more than willing to take orders from somebody that I feel is competent
and has merit and reason behind what they're doing and makes like, okay, yeah, yeah, I'm
100% for it.
Not only will it kind of take orders, I will help you achieve whatever it is, if I think
it's worthwhile, even at my own expense.
But to get to that point is a rarity, like it's not, not a given.
And so you can even imagine like being a grade school teacher and this kid doesn't respect
you and he doesn't really think you're that smart.
They don't really appreciate that.
But so cyberpunk is number one.
What else?
Cyberpunk is kind of number one.
It's an environment I love.
But at the same time, Conan the Barbarian by John Millis is one of my favorite films
of all time.
And you know, that's such a pure film in a way, like the motivations are pure.
They're very easy to follow, but not lacking in depth, you know, it's not, it's not just
explosions and teal and orange.
It's, it's, it's more on the human condition and I love it.
And it's shot incredibly well.
It's got an incredible soundtrack.
Yeah.
I fucking love it.
But with Blade Runner also in a deeper sense, you know, again, the human condition, you
know, you start seeing like, what is, what is being?
What is it being human?
You know, how does this relate to, well, if you can make it and you can tell it what
to do, at what point is it like you should or you shouldn't, you know, why do you get
to determine what's alive and what's not, what's a life that should be allowed to live
and what isn't.
And what would be the strain of being Roy Batty and seeing all these incredible moments
that with his passing will no longer exist, especially if he hasn't had a chance to put
that flame into another torch, so to speak, if he hasn't written them down, if he hasn't
passed them down to somebody else, gone like tears in the rain.
Like tears in the rain.
That scene is incredible.
Yeah.
I mean, but it's funny because those two universes are very different cornering the barbarian
and cyberpunk because they're, that makes me curious about what else might be in the
list.
Uh, well, let me think.
It's a pretty.
Do you like the Godfather type of universe?
No, no.
I mean, I'm sure the Godfather, I've never actually even watched the whole Godfather.
No, but also like was it Casino, Goodfellas, Goodfellas is a good movie, but no, that's
not on my top.
It's a good flick, uh, but it doesn't really do it for me.
Uh, I, if people really want to get into this a little more, I did make a hundred, a list
of a hundred, a hundred of my favorite movies on my Facebook fan page.
Nice.
Uh, but, uh.
Do you remember what would like some?
Oh yeah.
Like Blazing Saddles is on there, Ridge of the Lost Ark, uh, Vahala Rising by Nicholas
from Winding Refn, uh, Maniac by, uh, William Lustig, uh, it's a 1980, gnarly, video nasty
horror movie about a serial killer, uh, who murders women and scalps them, uh, and it's
gnarly as hell and very brutal and very bleak and very, uh, um, I mean, it's the kind of
thing that like a lot of people would have a real hard time watching, but, uh, one, again,
I like things that are dark, but two, I thought the performances were fantastic in this film
and they really got out, I think what the underlying thing was, and it was, you know,
it was a guy who was basically just like run amuck by the overbearing mother, uh, Jungian
archetype and it, she was, she imparted her insanity into him and he, but yet there is
this aspect you could see of him, of him wanting to try and actually be able to be in the world
and have love and have, uh, feminine companionship to go with, with his masculine aspect, but
he had no way of understanding how to really make that happen and he had a complete negative
connotation to the feminine.
So his struggle with, and there's a little part in the, in the movie where he somehow
comes across this model or something and they actually, he starts to feel like maybe he
might be able to actually have a relationship with somebody and it goes somewhere.
But, uh, yeah, even the Elijah Wood remake I felt was really well done and captured most
of the essence of what the movie was about, but I still feel like the original by William
Lustig, uh, is the best.
What's the greatest, uh, love movie of all time?
Greatest love movie of all time.
So it's something where love is, I mean, I suppose love underlies most of these movies
and especially feel like the dark.
I mean, hell, Takashi Miké's films are all about family of all things as bonkers as those
movies are.
They, the general theme is family almost entirely in all of his films.
Uh, yeah, there's, there's very, I mean, even you can argue later on.
Yeah, there is.
It's everywhere.
Love film of all time, uh, that's, I mean, is Excalibur a film about love?
Uh, what's Excalibur about?
King Arthur.
Excalibur is about, uh, Arthur becoming King of the Britons and his love of his, his country
and his love of Guinevere, but eventually, yeah, it becomes more of about, um, the necessity
for the king to love, to, to hold, hold Excalibur, to stay, to realize that while if you're the
king, you can love your wife and you can love your best friend and they may fuck each other
behind your back and as they fall in love too, but at the end of the day, your responsibility,
your love has to be to the, to the country and everyone else first and not your own
personal, uh, wants, which, you know, well, it made a much more interesting story when
you have, uh, Carmen Berenna and, and, or, or there are, oh, oh, what is that one?
It's a German opera, but, uh, you know, and horses and slow mo and sword fights and an
epic death scene between, uh, Arthur and his, his son.
Okay.
I definitely have to watch it and I haven't watched it embarrassed.
Uh, it is John Borman's second film in Hollywood, his first one being, uh, Point Blank with
Lee Marvin, which is also on top of one of the upper echelon movies on my list, uh, derived
from a book by called The Outfit by, uh, what is his name?
Uh, I forget, but Darwin Cook, the comics illustrator, he did, Donald Westlake wrote.
So Darwin Cook does, does an amazing comic book send up of Darwin Cook's novels and
they are fucking incredible.
So anyways, but, uh, the Point Blank with Lee Marvin, uh, you know, it's a man driven
by purpose, revenge, but also by like really pure motivations.
He wants his money.
He was, he was betrayed and he wants his, his cash because this is what he agreed to
do the thing for, and this is, which also is part of the reason why I like no country
for old men so much, which I felt was a great, great, great movie, even better book.
But uh, I remember talking to my friend and I go, you know, Anton Chigar is the most pure
human being in that whole book.
Well, that guy's the villain.
I go, haha, is he evil?
He's the one.
He lies to no one.
He does everything he says he will do.
He always follows his word and on the rare occasion, he allows fate to make a decision
as he figures like, well, whatever all led us to here will, will, will, will lead us
one way or the other.
And if we're at this crossroads, what, how is there any better or worse way than to do
it over a coin flip?
And so that whole scene where the guy is going, well, what am I putting up?
And he goes, everything, you've been putting it up every day of your life.
And that's true.
Everything we do as a, as a, as a, as a decision, as a calling, as a, as a choice and toward
and then it bummed me out that they, they reduced the last interaction between Chigar
and, uh, what's his face is life and he finally finds her and she's like, you don't have to
do this.
I mean, she's, he's like, yes, yes, I do.
This is the way it is.
You can think that your life could have turned out any sort of ways.
You could have done this.
You could have done that.
But the reality is this is the way your life is.
And it's the way it was always going to be, you know, the fact that I'm here is the end
of it.
And that's that.
Yeah.
It's, it's fun.
If you're honest, this will, the dark movies reveal that the villains are the, the purest
of humans and can teach us the most like profound lessons.
And that's, that's certainly an example of it.
What do you think the big, ridiculous last philosophical question, what do you think
is the, the meaning of this whole thing we've got going on of life and existence on earth
from your individual perspective, but the entirety of the human species?
Life?
Uh, the universe and everything?
Yeah.
Don't.
We could just leave it at that.
You knew exactly where I was going.
I love it.
Josh, I love you very much.
You've been a huge inspiration.
I have a friend who she said, do you know, Lex Friedman?
Have you gone on Lex's con?
And I go, yes, I know, I know Lex Friedman is, uh, I've sadly been way too long in contact
without making it happen for too long.
And, uh, and yes, I will a hundred percent, uh, I even cut a shirt at the beginning of
the pandemic to make my own little mask at one point due to the, the Lex process.
Yeah.
And, uh, I can't really hear you like, but I'm demonstrating just let's see it through.
But, uh, no, this has been a blast.
And next time, next time let's drink some of the, the war bringer whiskey.
I will bring some war master.
Uh, I wasn't sure if you were, uh, if you imbibed at all in spirits.
100%.
It felt a little weird to do it early on in the morning, especially cause I'm flying
out there.
I mean, I've had some wonderful morning whiskey at times.
It, uh, now that you've mentioned it, it doesn't at all.
So next time let's make sure what you're working calls the, uh, adult beverages.
Hmm.
Let's, uh, make sure we indulge.
I have zero reservations for doing such a thing.
I'm into it.
Josh.
Thanks for talking to me.
Yeah.
My pleasure.
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And now let me leave you with some words from sun zoo in the art of war.
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.