John Danaher: The Path to Mastery in Jiu Jitsu, Grappling, Judo, and MMA | Lex Fridman Podcast #182

Procesado: 2025-08-19

💭 Hacer Pregunta

📊 Análisis

RESUMEN

Conversación con John Danaher

Esta transcripción detalla una extensa conversación entre Lex Fridman y John Danaher, un reconocido entrenador de artes marciales. La conversación abarca una amplia gama de temas, desde la filosofía de la muerte y el significado de la vida hasta los fundamentos del jiu-jitsu, el grappling, el judo y las estrategias de entrenamiento.

Puntos Clave de la Conversación

Miedo a la muerte: Danaher comparte su perspectiva materialista sobre la muerte, argumentando que el miedo a la no existencia es irracional, ya que ya existimos en un estado de no existencia antes de nacer. Considera la muerte como el motor principal que impulsa a la acción y le da valor a la vida.
Significado de la vida: Danaher enfatiza la importancia de encontrar un propósito más allá de uno mismo, argumentando que vivir solo para el propio beneficio lleva a una vida vacía. Propone que la construcción de una 'historia de vida' a través de la acción y la contribución a algo más grande que uno mismo proporciona significado.
Fundamentos de Jiu-Jitsu: Danaher describe el jiu-jitsu como un arte y una ciencia que utiliza la asimetría de poder (enfocando la fuerza en los puntos débiles del oponente) para lograr la sumisión. Destaca la importancia de la elección y la autoexpresión en la selección de técnicas.
Sistema de Leglocks: Danaher explica sus principios de leglocks, enfatizando el control sobre la ruptura. Se centra en el control del movimiento de las caderas del oponente a través de diversos tipos de "ashigarami" (enredos de piernas) para lograr la sumisión segura y reducir el riesgo de lesiones.
Entrenamiento: Danaher aboga por un enfoque holístico en el entrenamiento, incluyendo la importancia del desarrollo de habilidades, la confianza a través de ejercicios de escape, y la progresión en la resistencia. Desarrolla su concepto de trabajar con diferentes cinturones para el crecimiento y la competencia contra oponentes de nivel similar para perfeccionar las habilidades.
Importancia del Drills: Danaher critica el drill tradicional basado en repeticiones, enfatizando la comprensión y la ejecución mecánica sobre los números. Promueve la progresión en la resistencia y la búsqueda constante de la mejora.
Comparación de Grandes Grapplers: Danaher compara a tres grandes grapplers: Roger Gracie (el mejor practicante de Jiu-Jitsu de todos los tiempos según él), Gordon Ryan (el mejor grappler de todos los tiempos), y Georges St-Pierre (el mejor artista marcial mixto de todos los tiempos). Analiza las fortalezas, estrategias y mentalidades de cada uno, destacando sus enfoques únicos y sus contribuciones a sus respectivos campos.
Artes Marciales para defensa personal: Danaher aconseja optar por un arte marcial con un aspecto competitivo. Sugiere que los deportes de combate son la mejor opción para la defensa personal, pero recomienda modificar las técnicas para las situaciones reales fuera del deporte.
Inteligencia Artificial y Grappling: La conversación explora la posibilidad de crear una IA que pueda vencer a Gordon Ryan, analizando los avances de la IA en juegos como el ajedrez y el Go, y las limitaciones actuales en la incorporación del "sentido común" y las habilidades físicas complejas necesarias para el grappling.

IDEAS PRINCIPALES

La muerte como motivador y constructor de valor en la vida.
El significado de la vida se encuentra en la contribución a algo más grande que uno mismo.
La importancia de la asimetría de poder en las artes marciales y otras áreas de la vida.
Un enfoque holístico y progresivo en el entrenamiento que busca el desarrollo de habilidades, la confianza y la evitación del estancamiento.
El papel crucial de la perseverancia y la búsqueda de la eficiencia en el entrenamiento.
La combinación de heurística humana con la potencia de cálculo de la IA como el futuro del desarrollo en diversos campos.

INSIGHTS

La perspectiva de Danaher sobre la muerte proporciona una nueva forma de abordar el miedo a lo desconocido.
Su enfoque en la asimetría de poder ofrece una nueva perspectiva sobre la estrategia no solo en las artes marciales, sino también en otras áreas de la vida.
Su modelo de entrenamiento progresivo, que se centra en los escapes de posiciones desfavorables, es una estrategia innovadora para desarrollar la confianza y aumentar el rendimiento.
Su análisis de la evolución de la IA y sus implicaciones para el futuro, incluyendo la aplicación en contextos militares, es un comentario esclarecedor sobre las tendencias tecnológicas actuales.

🎯 Sabiduría

John Danaher Podcast Analysis

RESUMEN

Lex Fridman entrevista a John Danaher, un reconocido entrenador de artes marciales, sobre la maestría en jiu-jitsu, grappling, judo y MMA, la muerte, el significado de la vida y la IA.

IDEAS

El miedo a la muerte es biológico, pero el miedo a la inexistencia es una elección.
Dos muertes: la preexistencia y la pos-existencia, ambas igual de no-existentes.
Dormir es un anticipo de la muerte; la muerte no es un terror inherente.
El olvido cósmico es inevitable, pero la creatividad humana busca la inmortalidad.
La exploración del espacio es emocionante, pero solo retrasa la inevitable muerte del universo.
La muerte es el gran motivador de la acción; la inmortalidad anularía la motivación.
Una gran vida se define por la longevidad del desempeño, no solo por picos de logro.
No hay criterios universales para definir una "gran vida"; depende del punto de vista.
Stalin es un ejemplo de longevidad en el poder, Alejandro Magno de logros intensos pero cortos.
Grandes logros requieren gran dificultad, ya sea en un pico o en una carrera prolongada.
Las historias de lucha y superación son las más poderosas, incluso sin alcanzar la perfección.
El judo, a diferencia de la lucha, permite la dominación instantánea, creando emoción e imprevisibilidad.
La dominación en judo se caracteriza por la sorpresa del oponente; un estilo diferente a la lenta imposición de la lucha.
Travis Stevens, un judoka inspirador, ejemplifica la perseverancia a pesar de las limitaciones.
La técnica de Koga y la forma de usarla por Stevens desafiaron las enseñanzas tradicionales del judo.
No escuches lo que la gente dice, observa lo que hacen, especialmente bajo presión.
El Standing Seoi-nage, técnica de judo, fue elegida por su estética y la belleza de su dominación.
El Jiu-Jitsu es un arte y una ciencia que busca la asimetría de poder al aprovechar las debilidades del oponente.
El Jiu-Jitsu se centra en atacar puntos críticos del cuerpo, no en combatir todo el cuerpo.
El Body Lock en el Jiu-Jitsu es un método eficaz para neutralizar el movimiento de las caderas del oponente.
El desarrollo de técnicas en Jiu-Jitsu surge de la prueba y el error, comenzando con mínima resistencia.
La perseverancia intelectual, más que la física, es vital para el progreso en las artes marciales.
Entrenar con cinturones inferiores reduce la aversión al riesgo y fomenta el crecimiento.
El valor del entrenamiento no está en ganar, sino en el desarrollo de habilidades.
Gary Tonin, un ejemplo de dominio psicológico a través del escape de posiciones difíciles.
Escapar de malas posiciones genera confianza, clave para el rendimiento en competición.
Un programa de entrenamiento efectivo incluye ciclos de competición y ciclos de desarrollo de habilidades.
En Jiu-Jitsu, el entrenamiento con oponentes de nivel similar limita el crecimiento debido a la aversión al riesgo.
El perfeccionamiento de las técnicas se logra a través del entrenamiento repetitivo y la atención a la mecánica.

INSIGHTS

La búsqueda de significado surge de la seguridad existencial, un fenómeno exclusivamente humano.
La muerte impulsa la acción, pero el significado se construye a través de la autoría de la propia vida.
La perseverancia intelectual, enfocada en la búsqueda de principios heurísticos, es crucial para el dominio.
El entrenamiento eficaz debe equilibrar la dificultad con la motivación para evitar la desmotivación.
La confianza se basa en la habilidad de escapar de posiciones de desventaja, más que en la dominación.
El progreso en artes marciales requiere ciclos de entrenamiento con oponentes de diferentes niveles.
La maestría en cualquier disciplina se puede lograr mediante un entrenamiento planificado en un período de cinco años.
La capacidad para reinventarse en períodos de cinco años es clave para el dominio de cualquier disciplina.
El éxito en las artes marciales depende de la interacción entre el atleta y su programa de entrenamiento.
La persistencia, particularmente en el pensamiento, es la virtud más crucial para lograr la maestría.

CITAS

"Soy un ser humano, y como cualquier ser humano, estoy biológicamente programado para sentir terror ante la muerte."
"Todos tenemos dos muertes: hay un tiempo antes de que nacieras en el que estabas muerto, y no tenías miedo de ese periodo de no existencia."
"Cada noche cuando te duermes, asumes que vas a despertarte, y ese conocimiento está a un paso de la idea de temerlo."
"La muerte es el único elemento más importante en la vida, el que da valor a nuestros días."
"Creo que sería una carga terrible ser inmortal. La vida sería, en muchos sentidos, muy hueca y sin sentido."
"No hay un conjunto de criterios acordados para lo que es una gran vida."
"No hay necesidad de decir que uno es mejor que el otro. Simplemente son diferentes."
"Para mí siempre se reduce al grado de dificultad, pero las cosas son difíciles de diferentes maneras."
"No escuches lo que la gente dice, observa lo que hacen, particularmente bajo el estrés de una competencia de alto nivel."
"El Jiu-Jitsu es un arte y una ciencia que busca usar una combinación de ventaja táctica y mecánica."
"No tengo que pelear contra todo tu cuerpo, solo tengo que pelear contra tu rodilla izquierda."
"Una gran parte del Jiu-Jitsu es comprender las fortalezas y debilidades del cuerpo humano."
"El Body Lock guarda el paso, la mejor manera de detener el movimiento lateral de las caderas de tu oponente."
"La prueba y el error son la parte más importante del desarrollo."
"El crecimiento, como en los organismos vivos, comienza en pequeños comienzos y crece con el tiempo."
"El entrenamiento es sobre el desarrollo de habilidades, no sobre ganar o perder."
"Solo necesitas ganar las batallas que importan, y las batallas que importan son en las finales del campeonato mundial."
"Escapar de malas posiciones es una de las mejores maneras, si no la mejor, de demostrar dominio psicológico sobre tu oponente."
"Construir esa confianza es la clave para el rendimiento de campeonato, y la mejor manera de hacerlo es eliminar el miedo innato que todos tenemos a los malos resultados."
"Siempre empieza con escapes. Luego trabaja en la retención de la guardia."
"Enseño a los principiantes desde cero y a los expertos al revés."
"Creo fervientemente que los seres humanos, en la mayoría de las actividades de habilidad, pueden reinventarse en periodos de cinco años."
"En mi propia experiencia, la gente habla de los atletas que he entrenado con éxito, pero nunca hablan de los atletas que he entrenado sin éxito."
"La virtud indispensable es la persistencia, la capacidad de mantenerse en el juego el tiempo suficiente para obtener los resultados que buscas."
"Al final del entrenamiento, tu mente debe estar agotada, no tu cuerpo."
"No trabajes con números, trabaja con mecánica y sensaciones."
"Los trabajos tienen rendimientos decrecientes una vez que llegas a cierto nivel de habilidad."
"El objetivo en la pelea y la competencia es la victoria; en el entrenamiento, el objetivo es el desarrollo de habilidades."

HÁBITOS

Enfoque en el desarrollo de habilidades, no solo en la victoria.
Análisis post-entrenamiento para identificar áreas de mejora.
Entrenamiento progresivo con creciente resistencia para evitar el estancamiento.
Priorizar la persistencia mental en el entrenamiento.
Combinar entrenamiento con diferentes niveles de oponentes para un crecimiento holístico.
Buscar la perfección y la eficiencia en cada técnica, más allá de la simple repetición.
Dividir los ciclos de entrenamiento en etapas de competencia y desarrollo de habilidades.
Desarrollar una mentalidad de confianza y autoeficacia a través del escape de posiciones difíciles.
Priorizar el aprendizaje de los principios heurísticos y su aplicación práctica.
Buscar un equilibrio entre la práctica de la técnica y el combate para maximizar el crecimiento.

HECHOS

Mike Tyson se convirtió en una figura internacional del boxeo en cinco años, desde los 13 hasta los 18.
Yasuhiro Yamashita logró la medalla de plata en los Juegos Olímpicos de Judo a los 17 años, tras haber comenzado a practicarlo a los 13.
El número de personas que practican lucha en Rusia es significativamente menor que en los Estados Unidos.
Nueva Zelanda, a pesar de su pequeña población, tiene un programa de rugby increíblemente exitoso.
El número de opciones en un juego de ajedrez es mayor que el número de átomos en el universo conocido.
Deep Blue, de IBM, derrotó a Garry Kasparov en 1997, marcando un hito en la historia de la computación.
Alpha Zero, un programa de aprendizaje automático, derrotó a los mejores programas de ajedrez y Go en cuatro horas después de aprender las reglas básicas.
Los equipos de ajedrez cyborg, formados por humanos y computadoras, demostraron ser superiores a los mejores jugadores humanos e IA cuando surgieron por primera vez.
China y Estados Unidos han legalizado el uso de sistemas de armas autónomas que emplean IA.
El desarrollo de la técnica de los jet engines fue meteórica al comienzo y después fue incremental.

REFERENCIAS

CONCLUSIÓN EN UNA FRASE

La maestría en artes marciales se alcanza a través de la persistencia, la búsqueda de principios heurísticos y un entrenamiento estructurado.

RECOMENDACIONES

Prioriza el desarrollo de habilidades sobre la búsqueda de victorias inmediatas.
Entrena con oponentes de diferentes niveles para maximizar tu crecimiento.
Desarrolla una mentalidad de confianza a través del dominio de escapes y técnicas defensivas.
Establece metas a corto y largo plazo, y adapta tu entrenamiento a tu progreso.
Enfócate en la comprensión y aplicación de principios heurísticos básicos, más que en la memorización de detalles técnicos.
Aprende a identificar tus debilidades en el grappling para perfeccionar esas áreas.
Combina entrenamiento técnico con el combate para prepararte para situaciones de alto estrés.
Analiza tus entrenamientos para mejorar tus habilidades y eficiencia técnica.
Prioriza la persistencia y la práctica repetitiva para dominar las técnicas fundamentales.
Sé consciente del costo de oportunidad al enfocarte en una sola técnica durante un período de tiempo prolongado.
Evalúa y ajusta tu rutina de entrenamiento para evitar estancarse en la práctica repetitiva.
Practica técnicas defensivas para generar confianza y reducir el miedo al fracaso.
Utiliza el entrenamiento con oponentes menos experimentados para reducir la aversión al riesgo.
Adapta tu entrenamiento para lograr un equilibrio entre el desarrollo técnico y el rendimiento en competición.
El desarrollo eficaz de las habilidades de Jiu-Jitsu requiere progresión en el entrenamiento.

🔮 Sabiduría PRO

Powered by SOLUTORIA AI

the following is a conversation with<br>john donahue widely acknowledged<br>as one of the greatest coaches and minds<br>in the martial arts world<br>having coached many champions in jiu<br>jitsu submission grappling and<br>mma including gordon ryan gary tonin<br>nick rodriguez craig jones nikki ryan<br>chris weidman and george saint-pierre<br>quick mention of our sponsors onnet<br>simply safe<br>indeed and lynnode check them out in the<br>description to support this podcast<br>as a side note let me say that john is a<br>scholar of not just jiu jitsu<br>but judo wrestling muay thai boxing<br>mma and outside of that topics of<br>history psychology<br>philosophy and even artificial<br>intelligence<br>as you'll hear in this conversation<br>after this chat<br>i started to entertain the possibility<br>of returning back to competition as a<br>black belt<br>maybe even training with john and his<br>team for a few weeks<br>leading up to the competition for a<br>recreational practitioner such as myself<br>the value of training and competing in<br>jiu jitsu is that it is one of the best<br>ways to get humbled<br>to me keeping the ego in check is<br>essential<br>for a productive and happy life this<br>is the lex friedman podcast and here is<br>my conversation<br>with john donahue are you afraid of<br>death<br>let's start with an easy question<br>there's no warm-up that's<br>it they're jumping jacks<br>let's uh let's break that down into two<br>questions<br>um i'm a human being and like any human<br>being<br>i'm biologically programmed to be<br>terrified of death<br>every physical element in our bodies<br>is designed to keep us away from death<br>i'm no different from anyone else in<br>that regard<br>if you throw me from the top of the<br>entire state building<br>i'm gonna scream all the way down to the<br>concrete um if you wave a<br>loaded firearm in my face i'm gonna<br>flinch away in horror the same way<br>anyone else would um so<br>in that first sense of are you afraid of<br>death<br>uh my my body is<br>terrified of injury leading to death the<br>same way<br>in any other human being would so when<br>death is imminent<br>there's a terror that goes through the<br>same adrenaline dumps that you would go<br>through<br>um uh but on the other hand you're also<br>asking a much deeper question which is<br>presumably are you afraid of<br>non-existence what comes after<br>your physical death and that's the more<br>interesting question um<br>no uh i should start<br>right uh by by by scene from from the<br>start i<br>i'm a materialist i don't believe that<br>we have an immortal soul i don't believe<br>there's a life<br>after our physical death um in this<br>sense from someone who<br>starts from that point of view you have<br>to understand that<br>everyone has two deaths<br>we always talk about our death as though<br>there was only one<br>but we all have two deaths there was a<br>time before you were born<br>when you were dead<br>you weren't afraid of that period of<br>non-existence<br>you don't even think about it so why<br>would you be afraid<br>of your second period of non-existence<br>you came from non-existence<br>you're going to go back into it you<br>weren't afraid of the first<br>why are you somehow afraid of the second<br>so it doesn't really make sense to me<br>as to why people would be afraid of<br>non-existence you dealt with it fine the<br>first time<br>um deal with it the second time but your<br>mind didn't exist<br>for the first death and it won't exist<br>after you die either<br>but it does exist now enough to<br>comprehend that there's this<br>thing that you know nothing about that's<br>coming which is non-existent actually<br>you do know about it because you know<br>what it was like before you were born<br>there was just nothing<br>every every every time you go to sleep<br>at night you get a sneak preview of<br>death<br>it's just this kind of<br>nothing happens you wake up in the<br>morning you're alive again<br>but it's not about the sleeping it's<br>about the falling asleep<br>and every night when you fall asleep<br>you assume you're going to wake up here<br>you know<br>you're not waking up and the knowledge<br>is a whole step from that<br>to the idea of fearing it i'm fully<br>aware that there's going to be a<br>time i don't wake up but are you going<br>to be afraid of it is there some mortal<br>terror you have of this no you didn't<br>have it before<br>you don't have it when you sleep um<br>going from<br>the fact that you know you won't wake up<br>to terror is<br>two different things that's an extra<br>step and at that point you're making a<br>choice at that<br>at that point what about what some<br>people<br>in our in this context we might call<br>like the third death which<br>is when um<br>everybody forgets the entirety of<br>consciousness in the universe forgets<br>that you've ever existed that john<br>donahue<br>ever existed so it's almost like a<br>cosmic death it's like<br>everything goes yeah not not just<br>i would say it's like knowledge the<br>history books forget about who you are<br>because the history books this is<br>inevitable by the way we're all<br>very very small players in a very big<br>game and<br>inevitably we're all going to go at some<br>point<br>yeah but doesn't so you're it's it's<br>disappointing of course like<br>it's um but but it's not even it would<br>be arrogance to say<br>um i'm disappointed in the idea that i<br>will disappear but there's this far<br>greater things than me that will<br>disappear i mean it<br>it's crushing to think that<br>there's going to come a time when no one<br>will ever hear beethoven's symphonies<br>again that<br>the mysteries of the pharaohs will be<br>lost and no one will even comprehend<br>they once existed like<br>humanity has come up with so many<br>amazing things over<br>its existence and to think that one day<br>this is just all happening on a tiny<br>speck in a distant corner of a very<br>small<br>galaxy and among millions of galaxies<br>that<br>this is all for nothing okay i can<br>understand there's a kind of dread that<br>comes with this<br>um uh but there's also a sense in which<br>the moment you're born and the moment<br>you can think about these things you<br>know this is your<br>inevitable fate is it so inevitable so<br>if we<br>look at we're in austin and there's a<br>guy named elon musk<br>and he's hoping in fact that is the<br>drive behind many of his passions<br>is the human beings becoming<br>multi-planetary species<br>and expanding out exploring and<br>colonizing<br>the solar system the galaxy and maybe<br>the rest of the universe<br>is that something that fills you with<br>excitement uh it's<br>as a project it's very exciting i um<br>the whole i mean we all grew up with<br>science fiction the idea of exploration<br>the same way<br>uh human beings in earlier centuries<br>were thrilled with the idea of<br>discovering a new world you know america<br>or<br>some other part of the world that they<br>sailed to and come back<br>but now instead of sailing oceans you're<br>sailing solar systems and<br>ultimately even further um so of course<br>that's exciting<br>but as far as relieving us from<br>non-existence it's just<br>plain a delaying game because ultimately<br>even<br>the universe itself if the laws of<br>thermodynamics are correct will<br>ultimately die of course we might not<br>understand<br>most of the physics and how<br>the universe functions you said laws of<br>thermodynamics but maybe that's just a<br>tiny little<br>fraction of what the universe actually<br>is maybe there's multiple dimensions<br>maybe<br>maybe there's multiple universes maybe<br>the entirety of this experience<br>you know there's guys like donald<br>hoffman i think that all of this is just<br>an illusion that we don't<br>like human cognition and perception<br>constructs a whole it's like a video<br>game it would construct that's very<br>distant from the actual reality<br>and maybe one day we'll understand that<br>reality maybe it'll be like the matrix<br>kind of thing<br>so there's a lot of different<br>possibilities here and there's also<br>philosopher<br>named ernest becker i don't know if you<br>know that is he wrote<br>denial of death and his idea he<br>disagrees with you but he's dead now<br>is is that he thinks that the terror of<br>death<br>the terror of the knowledge that we're<br>going to die<br>is within all of us and is in fact the<br>driver behind<br>most of the creativity that we do<br>exploring out into the universe<br>but also you becoming one of the great<br>scholars of the martial arts the<br>philosophers<br>of fighting is because you're actually<br>terrified of death<br>and you want you want to somehow<br>permeate<br>like your knowledge your ideas your<br>essence to permeate<br>human civilization so that even when<br>your<br>body dies you live on<br>i would agree with him and so far as uh<br>death<br>is the single greatest motivator for<br>action<br>but going beyond that and saying it's<br>somehow terrifying<br>that's that's an extra step on his part<br>um and not everyone's going to follow<br>him on that step<br>i do believe that death is<br>the single most important element in<br>life<br>that gives value to our days if you<br>think for example of a situation where<br>a god came to you and gave you<br>immortality<br>life would be very very different for<br>you uh<br>you're a talented research scientist<br>you work to a schedule why because<br>ultimately you know your life is finite<br>and actually very finite<br>and could be even more so if fate plays<br>its hand and you<br>die an early death or what have you we<br>never know what's going to happen<br>tomorrow<br>as such we get work done<br>as soon as we can the moment you gain<br>immortality<br>you can always put every project off you<br>can always say<br>i don't need to do this today because i<br>can do it<br>four centuries from now and as you<br>extend<br>artificially a human life the motivation<br>to get things done here and now<br>and work industriously and and excel<br>fades away because you can always come<br>back to the idea that you can do this in<br>the future<br>and so what gives value to our days is<br>ultimately death and value<br>it's not the only form of the reason<br>behind value but a huge part of what we<br>consider value is scarcity and death<br>gives us scarcity of days<br>and is probably the single greatest<br>motivator for<br>almost every action we partake in it's<br>kind of tragic and<br>beautiful that what<br>what makes things amazing is that they<br>end<br>yeah i think it would actually be a<br>terrible burden to be<br>immortal you would um<br>life would be in many ways very hollow<br>and meaningless i think<br>people talk about death taking away the<br>meaning of life<br>but i think immortality would have a<br>very similar effect in a different<br>direction<br>so given this short life<br>we could think about jiu jitsu we can<br>think about any kind of pursuit<br>what do you think makes a great life<br>is it the highest<br>peak of achievement you know you think<br>about like an olympic gold medal<br>the highest level of performance or is<br>it<br>the longevity of performance of doing<br>many amazing<br>things and doing it for a long time i<br>think the latter<br>is kind of what we talk about in at<br>least american society<br>you know we want people to be healthy<br>balanced<br>perform well for a long time and then<br>there's<br>maybe like the gladiator<br>ethic which is the highest peak is what<br>defines<br>you asked an initial question which what<br>makes a great life<br>but then pointed towards two options<br>one of longevity versus are there a<br>degree of difficulty there's got to be a<br>lot more than that shortly<br>i mean think about um first of all<br>we have to understand from the start<br>there's never going to be an agreed-upon<br>set of criteria for this is a great life<br>from all perspective<br>uh if you look from the perspective of<br>say machiavelli<br>then stalin lived a great life he was<br>highly successful at what he did he<br>started from nothing so<br>the degree of difficulty and what he did<br>was extraordinarily high<br>he had massive impact upon world history<br>he oversaw the defeat of almost all of<br>his major enemies<br>he lived to old age and died of natural<br>causes<br>so from machiavelli's point of view he<br>had a great life<br>if you ask the ukrainian farmer in the<br>1930s whether he lived a great life you<br>get a very different answer<br>so everything's going to come from what<br>perspective you<br>you begin with this you're going to look<br>out at the world with a given point of<br>view and you're going to make your<br>judgments was this a great life or was<br>this a terrible life<br>um going back to your point you were<br>actually<br>i think focusing the question on on more<br>in terms of uh great single performances<br>versus longevity performances yes<br>presumably this isn't really a question<br>about uh<br>what makes a great life then because<br>there's so much more than<br>that to a great life i don't know i'm<br>going to push back on that so<br>i think their parallels are very much<br>closer than you're making them seem<br>i think let's compare stalin stalin is<br>an example<br>of somebody who held power considered by<br>many to be one of the most powerful men<br>ever he held power for 30 years<br>so that's what i'm referring to<br>longevity and then there's a few people<br>i have to i wish my knowledge of history<br>was better<br>but people who fought a few great<br>battles<br>and they did not maintain power but<br>that's this contrast here for example<br>alexander the great yes who died at 33<br>um from probably unnatural causes<br>um uh had around<br>four to five truly defining battles<br>in his life which uh<br>responsible for the for the lion's share<br>of of his achievements<br>and burned very bright but didn't burn<br>long<br>um stalin on the other hand started from<br>nothing and quietly methodically worked<br>his way<br>through the revolutionary phase and uh<br>gained increasing amounts of power<br>and as he said um went all the way to<br>the end of her<br>uh of his career um yeah there's there's<br>definitely something to be said for<br>for longevity um<br>but as to which one is greater than the<br>other you can't<br>give a a definition or um<br>a set of criteria which will<br>definitively say this is better than<br>that<br>but when you look ultimately we look at<br>alexander as great but in a different<br>way and we look at stalin<br>i didn't think many people would say sam<br>was a great person but from the<br>machiavellian point of view<br>he would say he was great also<br>but when you think about beautiful<br>creations<br>done by human beings in the space of<br>say martial arts in the space of sport<br>what inspires you the peak of<br>performance i i see where you're coming<br>from like<br>it's a great question um for me it<br>always comes down to<br>degree of difficulty but things are<br>difficult in different ways<br>okay um a single flawless<br>performance in youth is still<br>that wins a gold medal let's say for<br>example um<br>uh nadia komenichi won the olympic gold<br>medal in gymnastics the first person<br>ever to get a perfect score<br>um if she had disappeared after that we<br>would still remember that as<br>an incredible moment and the degree of<br>difficulty to<br>to get a perfect score in olympic<br>gymnastics is<br>just off the charts um and contrast that<br>with someone who went to<br>four olympics and got four silver medals<br>i mean they're both<br>incredible achievements they're just<br>different<br>the the attributes that lead to<br>longevity um<br>typically tend to conflict with the<br>attributes that bring<br>a powerful single performance one is all<br>about<br>focus on on a particular event the other<br>is<br>uh on spreading your resources over time<br>both that present tremendous<br>difficulties<br>there's no need to say one is better<br>than the other there's also just<br>for me personally the stories of the<br>of somebody who truly struggled are<br>are the most powerful i know a bunch of<br>people don't necessarily agree because<br>you said perfection<br>perfection is kind of the antithesis of<br>struggle<br>but i look at somebody okay my own life<br>somebody i<br>i'm a fan oh i'm a fan of everybody i'm<br>a huge fan of yours i'm trying not to be<br>nervous here but<br>uh somebody i'm a fan of in the judo<br>world is travis stevens<br>he's a remarkable fella by the way a<br>remarkable human being<br>insane in the best kinds of ways i think<br>i started judo i<br>i really started martial arts i have<br>wrestled if you consider those martial<br>arts that's<br>my that's been in my blood i'm russian<br>so<br>but beyond that you know the the whole<br>pajama thing we wear the ghee<br>i started by watching travis in 2008<br>olympics<br>was that accidental did you know travis<br>prior to watching no no<br>i just tuned in now that's an unusual<br>choice it was just random you just tuned<br>in and you saw travis stevens<br>i tuned into the olympics and i was<br>wondering what judo is<br>and then s i started watch<br>we're we're all proud of our countries<br>and so on so i started watching<br>he was i think the only american<br>in the olympics for judo uh maybe the<br>so this kayla harrison was 2012. and<br>ronda was there too so i watched rhonda<br>and travis<br>but obviously sort of i was i was<br>focused on somebody who also weighed the<br>same as i did so there was a kind of<br>i think 81 kilograms so there's a<br>connection<br>but also there's an intensity to him<br>like he would get<br>like angry at his own failures and he<br>would just refuse to quit<br>it's that kind of dan gable mentality i<br>just<br>that was inspiring to me that he's the<br>underdog and the way people talk about<br>him<br>the commentators that it was an unlikely<br>person to do well<br>right and i they the fu attitude<br>behind that saying no i'm gonna still<br>win gold<br>obviously he didn't do well in 2008 but<br>that<br>was the that was somehow inspiring and<br>i just remember he pulled me in but then<br>i started to see this<br>sport i guess you can call it<br>of effortlessly<br>dominating your opponent and like<br>throwing<br>because i in to me wrestling was like a<br>grind<br>you kind of control you slowly just<br>break your opponent<br>the idea that you could with like a foot<br>sweep<br>was fascinating to me that just because<br>of timing<br>you can take these like monsters giant<br>people<br>like incredible athletes and just smash<br>them<br>with it it just doesn't there was no<br>struggle to it it was always like a look<br>of surprise judo<br>dominance in judo has a look like the<br>other person is like what<br>what just happened yes this is very<br>different from wrestling it's built into<br>the rule structure too the whole idea of<br>an epon of a<br>match being over in an instant and um<br>that creates a a thrilling spectator<br>sport because<br>you can as you say with usherwise or the<br>footsweeps<br>you can take someone out who's heavily<br>favored<br>and if you're not judo is the most<br>unforgiving of all the grappling sports<br>you can if you have a lapse of<br>concentration for half a second<br>it's done it's over um if those guys get<br>a grip on each other<br>any one of them can throw the other the<br>the idea<br>you know uh when you see someone like um<br>nomura who won three olympic gold medals<br>to<br>to win across three olympics and that's<br>an incredible achievement given<br>how many ways there are to lose in the<br>standing position in judo and how<br>unforgiving it is as a sport it shows an<br>incredible level of dominance<br>i think when i was i was also introduced<br>at that time<br>to the idea jessica judo i think in<br>jiu-jitsu is the same<br>a lot of sports is probably the same is<br>there's ways to win that include<br>kind of um if i were to use a bad<br>term stalling which is like use strategy<br>to slow down<br>to destroy all the weapons your opponent<br>has and just to wait it out<br>to sort of break your opponent by<br>yeah shutting down all their weapons but<br>not using any of your own<br>yes and now travis was always going for<br>he's off of course really good at<br>gripping and con to that whole game but<br>he was going for the big throws<br>and he was almost getting frustrated uh<br>by<br>a lot of the opponents i remember uh<br>ola bishop i think yes uh from germany<br>from germany very talented<br>very incredible i know he's very good at<br>doing big throws and he's incredible<br>judoka but<br>he was also incredible at just<br>frustrating his opponents with like<br>gripping and strategy and so on<br>and i just remember feeling the pain of<br>this person<br>like travis who went through just he<br>broke like every part of his body he<br>went through so many injuries<br>just this person who dedicated his<br>entire life<br>to this moment in 2008 and then 2012 and<br>in 2016 just ever gave everything you<br>could see it on his face<br>that you know his weapons are being shut<br>down<br>and he's still pushing forward he's<br>still with that both the frustration<br>and the power i mean the the the kind of<br>throw he does<br>is the his his main one i think is the<br>standing<br>was called tsunagi keep on saying i can<br>hit pause<br>that was that was the other thing is<br>like the techniques he used<br>was the these big throws that<br>there's something to me about the<br>synagogue i fell in love with that throw<br>uh that's my become my main throw<br>standing sanagi<br>that is like why do why do you favor the<br>standing variation because of the<br>amplitude<br>you get a more powerful yeah power<br>it's like are you a fan of koga yes<br>that's so that's why<br>travis so koga and travis opened up<br>my uh travis uses the same gripping<br>patterns for saying i guess<br>all the same and the way he uses his<br>hips and turns<br>and i remember like going to my judo<br>club and other judo clubs and<br>ask and they're all saying this is the<br>wrong way to do it<br>the way travis does is the wrong way to<br>do it and i remember like i've always<br>been amazed by this by the way<br>i don't mean to cut you off but i i<br>could literally<br>fill 20 hours of reproductions of people<br>who will tell me that<br>either my students or other great world<br>champions<br>um are doing things wrong yeah and<br>i'm i'm looking at them and i'm like<br>who would i rather trust here in in<br>their judgment<br>koga who was one of the greatest<br>throwers<br>of all time or you<br>[Laughter]<br>a recreational guy who couldn't throw my<br>grandmother yes<br>um uh i'm supposed to take your word<br>over his well say don't listen to what<br>people say<br>i'm going to give you a piece of advice<br>here watch what the best people<br>do okay that's how you get<br>superior athletic performance i'm going<br>to say that again<br>don't listen to what people say watch<br>what they do<br>particularly under the stress of high<br>level competition because that's when<br>you see their real game<br>what they really do under pressure okay<br>and if you can emulate that<br>you're going to be very successful i<br>guess what i was frustrated with<br>to your point is that the argument<br>against koga is<br>what he has a very specific body type<br>and he figured out something that worked<br>for him<br>thus the statement is that might not be<br>applicable to you or to the general<br>public of<br>of uh judo players that want to succeed<br>that by the way at the shallow level<br>might be true might be true the point is<br>there might be a body of knowledge<br>that's yet to be discovered and explored<br>that koga opened up that i wanted to<br>understand<br>why his technique worked<br>it made no sense to me that with a<br>single foot like the way you turn the<br>hip<br>the single foot that steps in why does<br>that work<br>because it was actually very difficult<br>to make work uh for me as a<br>white belt in the very beginning it<br>doesn't make sense<br>like people just they don't they don't<br>get loaded up onto your hip<br>anyway for people don't watch koga<br>highlights watch travis stevens<br>highlights<br>but the the the details of the technique<br>don't make sense<br>but when mastered that it feels like<br>there's something fundamental there that<br>hasn't been explored yet<br>it's like koga and travis made me think<br>that we don't know most of the body<br>mechanics involved<br>in dominance in judo like we just kind<br>of found a few pockets<br>that work really well the ichimoda<br>there's these different throws<br>also i wonder if there's like totally<br>cool new things that we haven't<br>discovered<br>and that's saying i gave a little peek<br>because there's very few people<br>that i'm aware of that do it the way<br>travis and koga did<br>may i ask you a question yes um<br>the choice of standing sanagi um i i<br>should<br>uh say this for you for your listeners<br>they're probably thinking what the hell<br>are these two guys talking about<br>um uh sanagi is one of the more high<br>percentage throws in the olympic sport<br>of judah<br>um probably uh<br>uchimata is probably number one and<br>variations of sanagi would be<br>in the top five for sure um the basic<br>choice you have<br>in modern competition is the more<br>difficult standing<br>where you literally are up on your feet<br>and you perform<br>a shoulder throw that takes your<br>opponent over from a full<br>standing position the most popular form<br>of synagi and modern competition by a<br>landslide is not the standing version<br>it's a drop saying argue where you go<br>down to your knees um<br>this means you have a much easier time<br>getting underneath your opponent's<br>center of gravity the defining feature<br>of any synagogue<br>is getting underneath your opponent's<br>center of gravity and lifting them that<br>ceo<br>literally means to to lift and carry<br>why did you choose the more difficult<br>version what was your motivation<br>you know you're a smart kid you know<br>right from the start<br>that for every standing sanagi there's<br>20 drops and argues in modern<br>competition one is obviously more high<br>percentage<br>one obviously works for a wider variety<br>of body types<br>uh the number of people who are<br>successful with standing sanagi is<br>dramatically lower<br>and it appears to be a move which is<br>completely absent in the heavyweight<br>divisions<br>and rarely seen in the lightweight<br>divisions<br>why what was the motivation why did you<br>willingly adopt the less high percentage<br>over the this would be very interesting<br>percentage i i<br>i i would love you to break it apart<br>because um<br>i apply the same kind of thinking to<br>basically everything i mentioned you<br>offline there's these boston dynamics<br>spot robots when i first met spot i<br>found love<br>i don't understand what exactly but<br>there's magic there and i just got<br>excited by it<br>and that met that fire burns i want to<br>work these robots i want to work with<br>robots<br>i want to i felt like there's something<br>special there that<br>i could build something interesting with<br>create something interesting with<br>and the same with with the same standing<br>sanagi<br>from koga and travis i just fell in love<br>with that technique just even watching i<br>didn't even know what the hell to do<br>with it<br>was it aesthetic it's the standing scene<br>i guess more beautiful in execution<br>there's no<br>engine in in my own<br>let's we're talking about love here<br>right in my own<br>definition of aesthetic yes it's not<br>just beauty because you could argue<br>there's more elegance sort of ichimata<br>is very beautiful and effortless<br>i love i love something about the<br>dominance of it<br>i love the idea in sport<br>of two people that are the best in the<br>world<br>and one of them dominating the other<br>and uh to me the standing say nagi<br>you're lifted off your feet<br>and especially when it's done perfectly<br>and with really strong resistance from<br>the other<br>person it results in a big slam<br>and that was like beautiful to me that's<br>the uh alexander carell and like<br>big pickups i love that it's interesting<br>though<br>it's you're correct and so far as you<br>you're not just going with<br>aesthetic and the sense of beauty but<br>also<br>but you are making uh as it were value<br>judgments<br>yes about the throw and that's<br>fascinating to me<br>um because there's two<br>elements to any grappling sport i've<br>always i'm always<br>um insistent upon the idea that jujitsu<br>is both an art<br>and a science okay it has scientific<br>elements insofar as it<br>works according to the laws of physics<br>and lever and fulcrum et cetera et<br>cetera<br>um but it also has<br>an aesthetic element and so far as<br>you're making choices<br>with technique you're expressing who you<br>are as a person you have<br>10 000 different variations of moves you<br>could use but you're specifically<br>choosing these<br>that's an element of choice and<br>self-expression on your part and insofar<br>as that is true<br>combat sports are not just a size but<br>they're also an art<br>so most combat sports have this sense<br>which they<br>have the features of both an art and a<br>science and<br>um it's not just about<br>high percentage in in your case i mean<br>me personally i'm obsessed with<br>percentages what what are the ways to<br>make signs yeah<br>but that's also choices involved yeah<br>but um but there is an<br>undeniably aesthetic element<br>to martial arts where you as it were<br>express<br>who you are as a person in terms of the<br>techniques you're ultimately going to<br>choose<br>does that get in the way do you allow<br>yourself to enjoy the aesthetic beauty<br>of a technique<br>of course yeah when i when martial arts<br>have done well<br>it's the most beautiful sport in the<br>world okay when it's done poorly it's<br>the ugliest<br>but but<br>a beautifully applied submission holder<br>perfect throw a<br>a superbly set up takedown are among the<br>most difficult<br>techniques to execute in all of sports<br>and when they're done well they're magic<br>to observe<br>but do you uh prefer certain techniques<br>over others because of their<br>like for example i'll tell you for me<br>chokes<br>of all sorts with the ghee without the<br>ghee probably with the geese the most<br>beautiful to me personally<br>i i value them above all others um<br>people mostly associate myself and my<br>students with leg locking<br>they're usually rather surprised to<br>learn that i actually value<br>strangleholds far above<br>leg logs um but<br>not for aesthetic reasons for<br>effectiveness we can talk about that<br>later a few wish<br>well let's step back sorry we drifted<br>awfully far off topic man<br>this is with i think this is beautiful<br>uh<br>we're drifting along the river of uh<br>life and martial arts<br>can you explain the fundamentals of jiu<br>jitsu yes<br>if i couldn't i wouldn't be much of a<br>coach um<br>jiu-jitsu is an art and science<br>which looks to use a combination of<br>tactical<br>and mechanical advantage to focus<br>a very high percentage of my strength<br>against a very<br>low percentage of my opponent's strength<br>at a critical point<br>on their body such that if i were to<br>exert my strength upon that critical<br>point<br>they could no longer continue to fight<br>well that's about weapons and defenses<br>but then is there something more to be<br>said about the set of tools<br>that are that we're talking about that's<br>where the art comes in<br>because ultimately you have a set of<br>choices and those choices that you make<br>will be an act of self-expression on<br>your part<br>some will prefer this some will prefer<br>that<br>that's where you come in as an<br>individual that's an overall definition<br>of jiu jitsu<br>of being a set of choices<br>that where you're<br>using the things you're powerful in<br>versus<br>the things your opponent is weak in no<br>i was only talking about percentages of<br>body strength if i have<br>for example let's say um we have two<br>athletes athlete a and athlete b<br>athlete a has 100 units of strength<br>however we define that overall<br>athlete b has 50. okay so ostensibly<br>athlete a is twice as strong as athlete<br>b<br>but athlete b can maneuver his body<br>into a set of positions focused around a<br>critical point<br>of his opponent's body where he can<br>apply<br>40 units of strength out of his total of<br>50.<br>his opponent can only defend with 20<br>units of strength out of his total<br>of 100 you have now completely reversed<br>the strength discrepancy originally<br>athlete a was twice as strong as b<br>now on that one localized point the knee<br>the elbow the neck<br>b is now twice as strong as a under<br>those circumstances<br>b should win i guess what i'm trying to<br>get at by the way that's really<br>beautifully said<br>is what you just said could be applied<br>to<br>other games other battles it could be<br>applied to the game of chess<br>uh it could be applied to war most<br>obviously in war<br>i think about for example um<br>the american strategic bombing campaign<br>in world war ii<br>the eighth army air force was tasked<br>with the idea of destroying german<br>industry<br>did they attack all of german industry<br>of course not<br>that would be stupid they attacked the<br>ball bearing industry<br>why because almost all<br>of modern machines require ball bearings<br>in order to operate<br>in order for the mechanical interfaces<br>of machines to operate you have to<br>reduce friction it's done through ball<br>bearings<br>if you knocked out one tiny component<br>of german industry the ball bearing<br>industry the rest of it<br>couldn't operate so too with the human<br>body i didn't have to fight your whole<br>body<br>i just have to fight your left knee if i<br>can break your left knee the rest of<br>your body is irrelevant to me<br>but then isn't the art of jiu jitsu<br>discovering the the left knee<br>the discovering the weak points<br>you know a huge part of jiu-jitsu is<br>understanding the weak strengths and<br>weaknesses of the human body<br>there's parts of the human body that are<br>shockingly robust<br>and there are other parts that are<br>shockingly vulnerable the major joints<br>and of course the most vulnerable of all<br>the unprotected neck<br>so if we take the something i'm not<br>familiar with but i was incredibly<br>impressed by is the body lock<br>that i saw um<br>nick rodriguez nick rodriguez used last<br>time a few weeks ago<br>but then i also got to hang out with<br>craig jones who<br>also has a very good body loan so that<br>that was uh i don't know if this body<br>lock applies to all positions but i was<br>seeing it from when craig is uh<br>on top of your opponent<br>and trying to pass the go or passing the<br>guard use the body lock as a controlling<br>position<br>the the principle behind it is that it<br>shuts down<br>as you've spoken about it shuts down<br>the weapons of a very strong opponent<br>that's absolutely correct in the case of<br>um<br>guard possession what makes god position<br>dangerous what makes someone a powerful<br>guard player<br>is the movement of their hips forward<br>and backward and side to side<br>body locking is designed to shut down<br>that movement<br>and does a very fine job of it you'll<br>see all of my students accelerate gordon<br>ryan is probably the single best body<br>dog guard passer i've ever seen<br>nikki ryan is outstanding with it nick<br>rodriguez is very good<br>craig jones is outstanding all of my<br>students use this for a very simple<br>reason<br>understand what is the central problem<br>of shutting down a<br>dangerous guard player it's his hips<br>that's what makes him a dangerous leg<br>locker you go up against a dangerous leg<br>lock him<br>body lock guard pass single best way to<br>shut down<br>most of his entries um<br>we're all strong in leglogs so in our<br>gym<br>you gotta control the hips as soon as<br>possible these can otherwise can be a<br>very difficult thing to avoid<br>leg entanglements as you go to parts and<br>across the board my students excel in in<br>uh<br>in body lock guard passing they<br>understand what's the most dangerous<br>feature their opponent has the lateral<br>movement of their hips<br>what's the single best way to stop that<br>body lock and then<br>work from there so if this asymmetry of<br>power<br>is fundamental to jiu jitsu how do you<br>discover that how do you<br>how did you discover the body life that<br>as a<br>as one of many methodologies of<br>achieving this asymmetry<br>um it would be an overstatement to say<br>we discovered the body line right body<br>law passing has been around<br>longer than we've been around um but<br>what i would say is that<br>in a room full of dangerous leg lockers<br>you've got to have a way to shut down<br>the hips<br>and so once we started using body locks<br>we saw that was one<br>excellent way to get around that problem<br>as with all development it comes from<br>trial and error<br>you will often see people teach the<br>technique to a certain level and<br>you see the teaching you know there's a<br>lot of inadequacies there<br>and that doesn't cover a lot of the<br>problems that we're encountering<br>and so trial and error is the single<br>most important part of the development<br>trial and error in um in the training<br>room amongst ourselves<br>in in hard training or no it never<br>begins with hard training<br>or everything techniques are born the<br>same way we're born<br>weak and in need of nutrition<br>uh you have to like this build them up<br>organically like children<br>and you start with minimal resistance<br>and you make progress over time<br>when you first go to the gym do you put<br>500 pounds on the bench press and try to<br>bench press it no you'll be killed<br>you start off with the bar you build<br>over time and then one day<br>five years from now perhaps you really<br>are lifting 500 pounds<br>but only a four would attempt that on<br>their first attempt<br>and they're born like children in your<br>mind first like<br>uh there's a spark of another one it's<br>like scientific development<br>on a subject matter which is<br>intrinsically simpler<br>okay there's a sense in which<br>naive and overly simplistic assessments<br>of scientific method<br>may not work well at advanced levels of<br>science but they work damn well in the<br>training room with jiu-jitsu<br>whether the subject matter is inherently<br>simpler than it is in research science<br>and as a result<br>there'll be a spark you'll see something<br>right and there's possibilities there<br>okay<br>let's let's puzzle this out let's work<br>with this<br>and uh you run into a lot of failures<br>this<br>you know you've suddenly been oh man if<br>i put my hip this way this works really<br>well then suddenly you try and spare and<br>you get caught in a simple alma plata<br>and you know okay that didn't work as<br>well as i thought<br>and then you look to rectify things if<br>things go on promising research<br>directions you keep them<br>if not you discard them well it's funny<br>you say science<br>it feels like more like art there's<br>somebody i really admire<br>that talks about this kind of ideas<br>johnny i from apple<br>he's the lead designer he recently left<br>but he was the designer<br>behind most of the products we know and<br>loved from apple<br>and when you say designer be more<br>precise what exactly was he<br>was he working on in apple the iphone<br>which which parts of the iphone did he<br>would like the<br>entirety of it was he a leader of a<br>research<br>team or was he the person personally<br>responsible for their development<br>he's kind of i would say<br>very similar to your position<br>he wasn't necessarily the last the<br>person executing the fine<br>the manufacturer right yeah of course<br>but there's the<br>uh he's somebody that's very hands-on<br>and it's it's like okay so he worked<br>obviously extremely close to steve jobs<br>steve jobs has this idea<br>we should have a computer that's as thin<br>as a sheet of paper<br>and then you start to play with ideas of<br>like what does that actually look like<br>the reason i bring it up is because he<br>talked about<br>he had these ideas that he would not<br>tell steve<br>because he he talked about in the same<br>exact language as<br>you're saying is there's like like a<br>little baby<br>that it's very fragile<br>it it needs time to grow absolutely and<br>then steve jobs would<br>often roll in was too ruthless you're<br>too ruthless<br>this is he would destroy ideas because<br>uh<br>johnny ive and the team<br>didn't have actually good responses to<br>the criticism at first<br>because when they're babies you can't<br>defend the baby<br>uh but you needed time to develop you<br>need to sleep on it you need to rethink<br>it to do dream<br>things and all those kinds of things<br>it's fascinating you say this lex<br>because this is<br>actually the entire history of<br>scientific development is<br>literally the story of the juxtaposition<br>between the need<br>to protect and nurture new theories<br>versus the need to rigorously test them<br>with<br>with harsh testing that either verifies<br>them or falsifies them<br>and learning to find a satisfactory<br>compromise between those two<br>is a very very difficult thing when you<br>look at the<br>history of science you will see that<br>there's some pretty damn chaotic moments<br>anytime there's major theory change<br>where<br>all kinds of apparently um<br>uh undesirable tricks they use to<br>protect<br>certain theories with ad hoc hypotheses<br>etc etc<br>and uh and ultimately<br>only time and<br>success over time will justify a theory<br>there's usually a period where<br>when one theory goes in to replace<br>another there's<br>something of a battle between competing<br>uh groups of scientists some of whom<br>advocate theory a some who advocate<br>theory b<br>they often use seemingly<br>unscrupulous methods to protect or<br>attack another person's theory they dig<br>for proofs<br>and usually some period of time has to<br>go by<br>sometimes in some cases it simply<br>involved older scientists protecting an<br>initial theory dying off<br>and new scientists just<br>replacing them with numbers and<br>this is a common common theme and the<br>same applies in jujitsu you know<br>so many times especially when i first<br>started working with leglocks i would<br>show<br>things i had worked on to<br>even world champion black belts they<br>would try it once or twice<br>and fail be like it doesn't work and<br>we're like<br>you tried it once on it on another guy<br>who's also a world champion who<br>has a strong ability to resist it and<br>that's it no more it doesn't work and<br>then<br>uh five years later they would see my<br>students<br>finishing world champions with it and in<br>some cases finishing the very people<br>who said that the technique would never<br>work<br>i mean if there was ever a refutation of<br>a statement that that's a pretty clear<br>example<br>um and there has to be a sense in which<br>you you can't be too forgiving you have<br>to test hypotheses<br>but on the other hand you can't be too<br>ruthless either you have to<br>look for uh promise and and uh<br>my advice is start slow like again<br>the analogy of lifting weights you don't<br>lift the heaviest weights on your first<br>day you build up<br>you work progressively over time um<br>now you also have to have some common<br>sense here you can't be too forgiving to<br>a technique if it's repeatedly failing<br>then and good people have tried it and<br>multiple good people have tried and it's<br>just not working out then okay<br>it's time to dismiss it but don't be too<br>quick you know<br>is this where your idea of uh training<br>with lower<br>belts yeah quite a bit comes from yeah<br>i've actually just as a side comment and<br>maybe you can<br>elaborate i the the place<br>the gym uh balance studios with the phil<br>and rick mcglarees where i got my black<br>belt where i grew up as a jiu jitsu<br>person in philadelphia<br>they have a huge number of black belts<br>but they have a huge number of<br>all other ranks and the way they picked<br>sparring partners people you train with<br>is very ad hoc<br>it's very loose it's very one of those<br>places one of those gyms where you can<br>just kind of<br>you can train for like three four hours<br>and it's great<br>you could take a break or you could jump<br>back in very informal yeah and you can<br>go to war with black belts but then you<br>can also<br>play around with the purple and the blue<br>belts and so on excellent<br>and that was really beneficial for<br>growth and you know you can pick<br>which because everybody has a style you<br>can pick which style you really want to<br>work on right<br>and then i came to um uh boston broadway<br>jiu jitsu<br>with john clark who i love he's a good<br>friend but<br>you know the it's a little bit more<br>formal<br>and i found myself it's a very<br>interesting journey if i would be<br>training with black belts the whole time<br>and uh it was a very different<br>experience<br>i found myself exploring much less i<br>found myself<br>learning much less i mean part of that<br>is on my on me<br>but part of it was also realizing that<br>uh wow there's a value to training with<br>people that are much worse than you<br>yes is there is there a philosophy you<br>could speak to on that yeah<br>um you probably know it already um you<br>know from your studies and artificial<br>intelligence that<br>all human beings are naturally<br>risk-averse this is a<br>bias which is deeply seated in<br>in all of us i'm sure you're you're well<br>read on people like duversky and etc<br>who talk about this all the time for<br>your viewers<br>uh there are numerous psychological<br>experiments that have shown that most<br>people<br>to the point of irrationality fear loss<br>more than they are excited at the<br>prospect of an equivalent gain<br>so for example if you have a hundred<br>dollars in your wallet<br>you're more worried about the idea of<br>losing the hundred dollars that you have<br>now then you would be excited by the<br>prospect of gaining a hundred dollars<br>that i could potentially offer you um<br>this comes out whenever you get black<br>belt versus black belt confrontations or<br>any kind of<br>similar um skill level whenever you get<br>similar skill levels<br>the chances of defeat get very very high<br>interestingly if you're a white belt and<br>you're going against a black belt you'll<br>take risks why<br>because there's no shame in losing to a<br>black belt when you're a white ball so<br>you'll<br>you'll play more light-heartedly and<br>you'll you'll have a more fun role<br>but when you have very similar skill<br>levels<br>you're going to come back to what the<br>techniques<br>that are most likely to get you a win<br>that number of techniques is usually<br>pretty small<br>and if you're always battling with the<br>same tough opponents<br>every day where if you make even a<br>single error<br>it will cost you that match in sparring<br>and you don't like losing<br>you're going to stay with a very small<br>set of moves<br>you might get slightly better at their<br>execution over time<br>but you as an individual will not grow<br>growth<br>as it does in organic life forms<br>comes from small beginnings and builds<br>over time<br>you can't take an untested untried move<br>and get it on a world champion black<br>belt it's going to get crushed so it's<br>not ready for that<br>it's like a a lion cub being thrown out<br>into the serengeti plains<br>the lion cub is just too small and too<br>ineffective it's a lion<br>but it's a cub and it's not until it<br>grows into maturity that it can be a<br>line that can dominate the serengeti<br>plains<br>why i always encourage my students to<br>play with a variety of belt types<br>um and spend the majority of their time<br>with lesser belts for development<br>purposes when you're getting closer to a<br>competition you obviously want to change<br>that<br>you want to be getting more a<br>competitive sense of<br>of hard work but you must learn to<br>divide up your training cycles<br>into non-competition cycles<br>where you're presumably working with<br>people who are<br>slightly lower in leveling yourself and<br>in some cases quite a bit lower than<br>yourself<br>and then competition cycles where you're<br>working with people much<br>closer to your own skill level is there<br>something to be said<br>about the the flip side of that which is<br>um<br>when you're training with people at the<br>same skill level<br>being okay losing to them yes you have<br>to see<br>training for what it is training is<br>about skill development<br>not about winning or losing you've got<br>to you've got to understand<br>that you don't need to win every battle<br>you only need to win the battles that<br>count and the<br>the battles that count are in the world<br>championship finals okay<br>that's the one that counts think about<br>that win<br>okay that's the one you're going to be<br>remembered for you're not going to be<br>remembered for the battle you lost on<br>tuesday afternoon at 3 p.m and some<br>nameless gym with some guys that<br>no one cares about no one's going to<br>remember that you're going to be<br>remembered for your peak performances<br>not your everyday performances focus<br>your everyday performances on skill<br>development<br>so that your peak performances you can<br>focus on winning<br>you know i just this is not a therapy<br>session<br>but if i could just speak<br>every session is a therapy session<br>there is still an<br>ape thing in there of course you think i<br>don't feel it<br>you think everyone in the room doesn't<br>feel it because<br>for example you haven't never seen me<br>roll<br>uh you know when there's people you know<br>i've seen the look in people's eyes when<br>they see me<br>train and they i could see maybe it's me<br>projecting but they think i thought you<br>were supposed to be good<br>i thought you're supposed to be a black<br>belt like<br>that look they're like i'm gonna give<br>you some therapy<br>okay<br>do you know how many people have come up<br>to me<br>over the years who have visited<br>the training halls that i work in and<br>they come up to me and go man<br>i rolled with gary tonan i did really<br>well with him<br>like like really well really wrong i'm<br>like oh that's very very good very<br>impressive<br>and then i see them talking to their<br>friends like man<br>i tapped out gary toner<br>and i'm i'm sitting there going<br>yeah and you can see that they're just<br>like wow<br>dude i'm i'm way better than i thought i<br>was<br>gary tonin all of my students<br>um i pushed him in the direction of of<br>giving up bad positions so that they<br>practice working getting out of critical<br>situations is a huge part of our<br>training program<br>but gary tonan takes that to a level<br>that just no one else<br>even gets close it's it's just amazing<br>like he will put himself<br>in impossible situations where<br>it's a fully locked strangle<br>a hundred percent on with both his arms<br>behind his back<br>and he'll try to work out from there<br>yeah and<br>seven times out of ten he does but three<br>times out of ten he gets caught<br>he i'm a huge advocate of handicapped<br>training<br>where you handicap yourself to work on<br>skills<br>he's took that to heart to a level that<br>few people i believe can match i just<br>wonder what his psychology is like<br>because<br>it goes back to what we talked about<br>four legs you have to understand<br>its skill development don't take it<br>personally<br>um i understand i hear where you're<br>coming from we've all got what you call<br>the ape<br>reflex where we want to be dominant okay<br>we all do like<br>because there's thousands of white belts<br>out there that have tabbed gary tonin<br>yeah and they're walking around and<br>they're people saying online dude i tap<br>gary tonan<br>like gary tonan's like one of the best<br>in the world so i'm one of the best in<br>the world<br>and um uh does gary get upset about this<br>no of course not because gary knows that<br>when it counts on stage he's going to be<br>going<br>100 with a set of skills that very few<br>people can match<br>um he can go into an ebi overtime<br>at the 205 pound weight division against<br>an adcc champion<br>starting in a full arm lock position and<br>effortlessly get out with no problems in<br>seconds<br>because he's been in that situation 25<br>000 times<br>with varying degrees of skill opponents<br>and there's just no panic no fear<br>he's just doing what he's done so many<br>thousands of times<br>and that's a fine fine example of a guy<br>who didn't give a damn what happened in<br>the training room<br>but when it counted on the stage in<br>front of the cameras<br>it it kicked in yeah he's he's an<br>incredible inspiration actually uh<br>this he's a practitioner something<br>you've recently<br>talked quite a bit about which is uh the<br>power of escaping<br>sort of bad positions uh i think<br>you've talked about it which is really<br>interesting framing is uh<br>escaping bad positions is one of the<br>best ways<br>if not the best way to demonstrate<br>dominance psychologically over your<br>opponent<br>that anything they throw at you<br>like their weapons are useless against<br>you um<br>there's a little bit of legs friedman<br>kicking through on this question<br>your obsession with dominance is um uh<br>it's a therapy session it's a therapy<br>session<br>i'm coming from a wrestling perspective<br>i think it's not just lex friedman i<br>think it's dan gable i think it's<br>dominant the gary tonan ethic<br>it just goes against everything<br>wrestling is about you<br>never put yourself in a bad position and<br>the fact this it's uh philosophically i<br>don't know what to do with it it's a<br>total reframing<br>of showing dominance<br>by escaping any bad position<br>yeah let's talk about the idea of what<br>what what is the value of escapes<br>why do i put this in as as the first<br>skill<br>that every jdc student must master<br>um believe it or not uh<br>when i talked about how it<br>pertains to dominance that's its<br>smallest<br>value its greatest value has nothing to<br>do with dominance<br>it has to do with confidence<br>you can train someone and teach them<br>technique<br>until you're blue in the face but at<br>some point<br>the athlete in question has to go out<br>there on the stage<br>and pull the trigger when the time is<br>right<br>what's going to give you that ability to<br>go from the physical<br>skills that you've learned to execution<br>under pressure is confidence<br>i always talk about skill development<br>and yes<br>skill development is the absolute<br>bedrock of my training programs<br>but you can't finish at that level<br>there has to be something more than that<br>and you have to go from the physical<br>element of skill<br>into the psychological element of<br>confidence<br>i can teach you an armbar all day<br>you can get to a point where you can<br>flawlessly execute armbars and drilling<br>and even in a certain level of<br>competition but if you believe<br>that in attempting an armbar on a<br>dangerous opponent with good guard<br>passing skills say the armbar is being<br>performed from guard position<br>that if the armbar fails and your<br>opponent<br>uses that failure to set up a strong<br>pass and get into a side pin possibly<br>into the mount<br>and you don't have the ability to get<br>out of that side panel mount<br>you won't pull the trigger on the armbar<br>and so even though you had all<br>the requisite physical skills to perform<br>the technique<br>when push came to shove and the critical<br>moment came<br>you back down you didn't pull the<br>trigger<br>building that confidence is the key<br>to championship performance and the<br>single<br>best way to do it is to take away the<br>innate<br>fear that we all have of bad<br>outcomes that makes us naturally risk<br>averse<br>when you don't believe you can be pinned<br>when you don't believe your god can be<br>passed<br>you'll take risks because there's no<br>downside to your actions<br>an unpinnable person and an unpassable<br>person<br>doesn't have much to fear in a jujitsu<br>match you can come out and fire with all<br>guns blazing<br>because then you know at the end of the<br>day no one's going to hold you down no<br>one's going to pass your guard<br>that's your first two goals in jujitsu<br>they're the most boring goals<br>they're not exciting to learn no one<br>wants to come in and they first met told<br>okay you're going to practice escapes<br>for the next year of your life i can't<br>still go you're kidding me<br>but that's what you gotta have that's<br>your first skill<br>and that's what i push upon all of my<br>students you'll see almost all of them<br>are very very strong and escape skills<br>they know that if things go wrong<br>they can always get out they can always<br>live to fight another day<br>and that is what gives them the ability<br>to attack without fear<br>i think that is so profound and so rare<br>it's so rare to hear this i think it's<br>because it's the most painful thing to<br>do<br>always ask yourself when you enter a<br>jujitsu match you<br>already know ahead of time<br>if you're going to lose how you're going<br>to lose<br>okay there's only a certain number of<br>realistic submissions that work in the<br>sport of judas who the number is very<br>small<br>so ahead of time you already know<br>the most likely methods of submission<br>loss and jujitsu are going to be things<br>like heel hook<br>armbar renegade strangle guillotine etc<br>just work backwards from that knowledge<br>so start off<br>learning how to defend all of those<br>things you know what the major<br>losing positions are in jiu-jitsu<br>someone gets mounted on you rear mount<br>side control neon valley those are<br>positions you can only lose from<br>so work backwards from there getting out<br>of those positions<br>and that's how i always start i always<br>say with my students<br>i teach beginners from the ground up<br>and i teach experts backwards<br>what does that mean when a young student<br>comes to me with no skills<br>they learn from the ground up they start<br>on their backs defending pins<br>then they start on their backs working<br>from half guard bottom<br>then on their backs working from<br>variations of guard they don't even get<br>to see top position<br>until they're strong off their backs<br>then<br>they go on to their knees and they start<br>passing<br>start standing and passing and then they<br>work their pins and transitions<br>and then ultimately they stand up to<br>their feet and they work<br>standing position on their feet so they<br>work from ground<br>back on the floor to ground knees on the<br>floor<br>ground standing and then both athletes<br>standing is a gradual progression over<br>time where they work from the bottom to<br>the top<br>with regards experts i teach them in<br>game first<br>they must become very very strong and<br>what finishes the match<br>which is submission holds okay<br>in chess we always talk about end game<br>i do the same thing in judetsum i start<br>experts<br>just looking at the mechanics of<br>breaking people and all the<br>sufficient holds that i teach you should<br>know that i teach only a very small<br>number of submission holds<br>around six um it's interesting<br>my students have by far and away the<br>highest submission rate<br>in contemporary jiu-jitsu but they only<br>learn around six to seven submission<br>holds<br>i start them with mechanics where they<br>learn the end game<br>how to break someone<br>once they develop in their mind<br>the belief that if the conditional<br>if they can get to one of those six<br>positions<br>there's a very high likelihood they'll<br>win<br>if they truly believe then<br>when it's competition time they'll<br>fucking find a way<br>to get to those positions that's<br>confidence but if you don't believe<br>let's say you believe man if i get to a<br>finishing position an armbar or a<br>strangle<br>there's only like a 20 chance i'll<br>finish with it how hard are you going to<br>fight to get to that position<br>you're not why why would you<br>but if you believe there's a 98 chance<br>if you get to that position you'll<br>finish you'll find a way to get down<br>that is so powerful there are certain<br>things maybe going back to judo a little<br>bit as<br>the there's a clock choke for people who<br>are<br>listening it's with the ghee when a<br>purple<br>or when a person is in a turtle position<br>in a crouching position<br>and this is something that's done in<br>judo quite a bit but i have<br>doesn't matter what the technique is i<br>have a belief in my<br>head that there's not a person in the<br>world<br>that i can't choke with that clock joke<br>and i've done that and that it was a<br>it built on itself the belief<br>made the technique better and better and<br>better now you're on to something<br>that's exactly the mindset that i'm<br>trying to coach but that's step<br>one you have to believe that<br>but you got to stop somewhere and then<br>it's step one but then you have to<br>create a system but it's a damn<br>important step yeah<br>so you coach the end game first and then<br>you fill in the details afterwards<br>yeah that's a huge confidence builder<br>but i just i have to say<br>to admit and it makes me sad but i think<br>i'm not alone i think a<br>majority of jiu jitsu people are like<br>this that<br>uh i didn't do the the beginner step<br>that you talk<br>about which is the focusing and escapes<br>i think i learned the wrong lessons from<br>being<br>from losing i remember in a blue belt<br>competition<br>long ago one<br>i was uh i think it was yeah it was the<br>finals of atlanta ibjf tournament<br>and there's a person that passed my<br>guard<br>uh and he took him out<br>and he stayed a mount for a long time<br>and i couldn't breathe and it was like<br>one of those things where i was truly<br>dominated<br>i don't think i've been dominated just a<br>match quite like that before<br>and or after and the lesson i learned<br>from that<br>is i'm not gonna let like<br>as opposed to working on escapes i'm not<br>gonna let anyone pass my guard<br>what you learned is don't take risks<br>don't take risks<br>which is ultimately what kills you<br>ultimately you become the best you can<br>you got to take risks as they say<br>nothing risk nothing gained<br>failure usually makes us even more<br>risk-averse than we started we're<br>already<br>mentally biased being human beings in<br>that direction<br>and failure tends to reinforce that um<br>i work hard in my training programs to<br>try and correct that fold<br>is it still possible for a person who's<br>a black ball to to then just go back to<br>that beginning journey i guess<br>of course let me tell you something<br>i'm probably going to catch a lot of<br>flack for saying this i have<br>a belief i won't say something i won't<br>call it knowledge because it's not known<br>but i have a fervent belief<br>that human beings in<br>most skill activities not all skill<br>activities but i will say combat sports<br>for sure can reinvent themselves in five<br>year<br>periods now you might be saying<br>five years what's magical about five<br>years<br>mike tyson was 13 years old when he was<br>taken in by customarto<br>by the age of 18 he was beating<br>world-class boxers in the gym and had<br>already made a<br>a strong name for himself in<br>international boxing it was already a<br>known figure<br>it was five years<br>yasiro yamashita the judo player<br>began judo at 13.<br>he placed silver and the old japans<br>at 17.<br>i could go on all day with examples<br>of athletes who within a<br>five-year time frame of starting a sport<br>were competing at world championship<br>level i'm going to give you<br>a rough and ready definition of sport<br>mastery<br>okay i believe that if you can play<br>a competitive match against someone<br>ranked<br>in the top 25 in your sport<br>and it's a serious international sport i<br>would call you someone who's mastered<br>that sport<br>okay you're damn good<br>if you can go with the number 25<br>wrestler in the world<br>and give them a hard competitive match<br>in the gym you may not win it but<br>you know they had a good workout you<br>have<br>shown mastery of wrestling<br>or indeed any other combat sport you<br>care to name<br>there are numerous examples of people<br>doing far better than that<br>in five years winning<br>medals at world championships and even<br>olympic games in that five-year period<br>this is not an unrealistic goal there is<br>a lot of empirical evidence to show that<br>people have done this in the past a lot<br>of it<br>so if you fully immerse yourself in a<br>sport<br>with a well worked out well-planned<br>training program there is a mountain of<br>evidence to show that in a five-year<br>period<br>you can go from<br>a complete beginner to a<br>very very impressive skill level to the<br>point where you're competitive with some<br>of the best people on the planet<br>you can reinvent yourself in these<br>five-year periods<br>what happens with most people is they<br>get to a certain level and they get<br>complacent they get lazy<br>and they just keep doing the same old<br>thing they've been doing<br>but if you're diligent and you're<br>purposeful<br>five years you can accomplish an awful<br>lot and as i said there's a mountain of<br>evidence to show it<br>by the way as a small aside somebody<br>who's mentioned taversky and yamashita<br>in the same conversation you're one of<br>the most impressive people i've ever<br>spoken to<br>but it's that's a small side uh<br>so if if there's this complete beginner<br>this is really interesting<br>there is empirical evidence that you can<br>achieve incredible things in a short<br>amount of time<br>there's a complete beginner standing<br>before you<br>and that beginner has fire in their eyes<br>and they want to achieve mastery<br>where do you place most of the credit<br>for it for a journey that does achieve<br>mastery<br>is it the set of ideas they have in<br>their mind<br>is it the the set of drills or the way<br>they practice<br>is it genetics and luck<br>those are all good in science all of<br>those factors you've mentioned<br>play a definite role let's start with<br>luck okay<br>we are all subject to fortune<br>and fortune can be good and fortune can<br>be bad<br>uh life is in many ways beautiful but<br>life is also tragic<br>and i've had students who showed<br>enormous promise and just tragic events<br>occurred in their lives<br>the vicitudes of fortune can be<br>a wonderful thing in your life and they<br>can be a a terrible tragedy<br>um i've had students who who died uh<br>for various reasons who could have gone<br>on to become world champions<br>i've had students who uh on a much<br>lighter note just<br>fell in love and just wanted to have<br>kids and move away and<br>that's that's a that's a wonderful thing<br>but different direction<br>um you just never know so luck does<br>play some role um even things like where<br>you're born<br>uh the location of your physical<br>location in the world or even the<br>socio-economic location can<br>can play a role which could be<br>detrimental or favorable<br>so yeah luck does play some role<br>thankfully it's one of the smaller<br>elements<br>and i do believe that a truly<br>resourceful mind can overcome<br>the majority of what fortune throws at<br>us<br>and and get two goals provided you're<br>sufficiently mentally robust<br>other things you mentioned genetics<br>[Music]<br>i do believe in certain sports genetics<br>really do<br>play a powerful powerful role for<br>example in any sport where<br>power output and reaction speed<br>ability to take physical damage then<br>there are genetic elements which<br>will help okay for example i<br>couldn't imagine a world in which even<br>if i i have a crippled leg so<br>even if i uh grew up in a world where my<br>leg was<br>was normal and i had normal legs and<br>everything was fine with my body<br>i don't believe that<br>i could win the olympic gold medal in<br>100 meter sprinting for example okay i<br>just don't have enough<br>fast twitch muscle fibers but the more<br>a sport involves skill and tactics<br>the less you will see genetics playing a<br>role<br>if you look at the middle podiums in<br>jiu-jitsu for example<br>you will see that no one body type<br>is definitively superior to another you<br>will see<br>every variation of body type and the<br>metal platforms and jujitsu<br>as skill and tactics become more and<br>more important and things like just<br>power output over time become less and<br>less important<br>then you will see that um genetics play<br>less and less of a role i'm i'm happy to<br>say that the sport of jiu-jitsu<br>the evidence seems pretty clear that<br>there's no one dominant body type in a<br>sport of judas who rather there's just<br>advantages for one type and there's<br>advantages for another<br>you just have to learn to tailor your<br>game to your body<br>with regards to training program yes i<br>believe with all my heart<br>and all my soul that<br>your training program does make a<br>difference i've dedicated my life to<br>that obviously i'm biased<br>in this regard um i do believe that all<br>of the students that i taught<br>who became world champions would have<br>been great athletes whether or not they<br>had met me or not<br>i believe that but i do also believe it<br>would have taken them a lot longer<br>and they may not have gotten to the<br>level that they did they<br>i'm sure they would have been impressive<br>but i do believe<br>that the nature of a training program<br>plays an enormous difference<br>i don't mean to say this in an arrogant<br>way i believe that<br>there's again a mountain of evidence to<br>suggest this is true because you see it<br>in many different sports<br>let's talk for example about your<br>country<br>russia and its wrestling program<br>russia is an enormous country but the<br>location<br>where russia's wrestling program comes<br>from is actually very small<br>and the population is actually very<br>small i can't<br>verify this but i was told once i can't<br>verify this but the number of people who<br>wrestle in russia is actually<br>significantly<br>smaller than the number of people who<br>wrestle in the united states<br>it's also not part of the school uh uh<br>athletics and it is in the united states<br>yes that's a different point we'll come<br>back to right to that because that's<br>also an important point<br>but if you look at the actual numbers of<br>people there they're actually pretty<br>small<br>so ostensibly if it comes down to a<br>numbers game america should dominate at<br>the olympics if we have more wrestlers<br>now this the story gets more complicated<br>because america has a different<br>style of wrestling the collegiate style<br>than the international freestyle that<br>is a complicating factor<br>but nonetheless uh what you see there<br>is that numbers on everything rather<br>the manner in which people are trained<br>clearly has an impact<br>and we know very little about the this<br>very little reliable information about<br>the training program for wrestling<br>in uh in the russian states<br>but one thing is incontestable is the<br>amount of success that they've had in<br>international world championship and<br>olympic competition<br>they are disproportionately successful<br>despite their relatively small numbers<br>there's nothing genetically special<br>about them<br>um you can talk about<br>performance-enhancing drugs but those<br>are a worldwide phenomenon<br>they don't have any access to technology<br>that the rest of the world doesn't have<br>at some point you've got to start asking<br>what are they doing differently in the<br>training room<br>and there are many other examples<br>of similar situations my country new<br>zealand um<br>has an insanely<br>successful rugby program the sport of<br>rugby<br>which they have dominated for<br>literally generations despite the fact<br>that our population is<br>very very small compared with the rest<br>of the country and we don't excel in<br>many other sports<br>it's new zealand does fairly well and<br>sports overall but nothing like they do<br>in rugby<br>and you've got to ask yourself is there<br>a culture there which which<br>built this up and the world is full of<br>examples<br>of seemingly small and unpromising<br>areas or locations putting out<br>disproportionately high<br>numbers of successful athletes<br>and that points to the idea that<br>different training programs<br>have different success rates and so i<br>truly believe with all my heart and all<br>my soul<br>that how you train does make a<br>significant difference<br>i would even go further and say it makes<br>the most difference is it the only thing<br>absolutely not we've already talked<br>about fortune we've talked about<br>genetics<br>if you want to get nasty you can even<br>talk about things like performance<br>enhancing drugs that obviously plays a<br>role in modern sports<br>um uh but i do believe<br>that the majority of uh<br>of what creates success is the<br>interaction between the athlete and the<br>training program<br>now the training program is one thing i<br>do believe that's the single most<br>important but<br>right behind it is the athlete<br>themselves okay<br>um in my own experience uh people<br>talk about athletes that i've trained<br>successfully but they never talk about<br>athletes that i've trained<br>unsuccessfully<br>um always remember that for every<br>champion a coach producers there's a<br>hundred<br>people that they coach that no one ever<br>heard of and<br>this is completely normal<br>a coach can never take the lion's share<br>of the credit<br>a coach creates possibilities<br>but it's the athlete who actualizes the<br>possibilities<br>and so building that rapport and finding<br>the right people to excel in your<br>training program is also a big part of<br>it<br>what makes the difference between the<br>successful your successes and your<br>failures as a coach<br>a range of reasons the single most<br>important is persistence<br>people will point to all kinds of<br>virtues amongst athletes this guy's the<br>most courageous the sky's the strongest<br>these are all virtues but the one<br>indispensable<br>virtue is persistence the ability just<br>to stay in the game long enough to get<br>the results you seek<br>but what does persistence really look<br>like<br>if we can just break that apart a little<br>bit it's actually this is a great<br>question you're asking because<br>most people see it as a kind of<br>simplistic<br>doggedness where you just show up every<br>day that's not it<br>the most important form of persistence<br>is persistence of<br>thinking which looks to push you in<br>increasingly<br>efficient more and more efficient<br>methods of training<br>famously people talk about the idea that<br>the hardest work of all is hard thinking<br>and they're absolutely right okay coming<br>into the gym and just doing the same<br>thing<br>for a decade isn't going to make you<br>better what's going to make you better<br>is progressive training over time where<br>you identify<br>clear goals marked out in time<br>increments three months six months 12<br>months five years<br>and build those short-term goals into a<br>program of long-term goals<br>[Music]<br>making sure that the training program<br>changes over time so that as your skill<br>level rises the challenges you face in<br>the gym become higher and higher<br>don't kill them at the start with<br>challenges that are too hard for them to<br>deal with they get discouraged and leave<br>build them slowly over time but make<br>sure they don't just get left in a swamp<br>where they're just doing the same thing<br>that we're doing three years ago and<br>they get bored and<br>there's two ways you can leave in a gym<br>you can leave<br>from adversity it was too tough or you<br>can leave from boredom<br>everyone talks about the first no one<br>talks about the second<br>most people when they get to black belt<br>they get bored<br>they know what their game is they know<br>what they're good at they know what<br>they're not good at<br>when they compete they stick with what<br>they're good at and they avoid what<br>they're not good at<br>yeah and they get bored they reach a<br>plateau<br>and that's it my whole thing is to make<br>sure it's not so<br>tough at the start that they leave<br>because of adversity<br>and then for the rest of their career to<br>make sure it's not boring so they leave<br>because of boredom travis stevens<br>actually said something that<br>changed the way i see training he said<br>it as a side comment but he said<br>that at the end of a training at the end<br>of a good training session<br>your mind should be exhausted not your<br>body<br>and um i've for most of my life<br>saw good training sessions where my body<br>was exhausted<br>yes i believe that's the case with most<br>people<br>yeah you should come out of the training<br>session with your mind<br>buzzing with ideas like possibilities<br>for tomorrow<br>and by the way on that note i would go<br>further and say that<br>the training session doesn't finish when<br>your body stops moving<br>it finishes when your mind stops moving<br>and your mind shouldn't stop moving<br>after that session there should be<br>analysis what did i do well what did i<br>do badly<br>how could i do better with the things<br>that i did well i can ask about<br>something that<br>i truly enjoy and i think is really<br>powerful but most people don't seem to<br>believe in that but<br>it's drilling i don't know<br>maybe people are different but i love<br>the idea<br>maybe even outside of jiu jitsu of doing<br>the same thing over and over<br>it's like jiro dreams of sushi i love<br>doing the thing uh that<br>nobody wants to do and doing it 10 times<br>100 times thousand times more than<br>what nobody wants to do so<br>i'm a huge fan of drilling obviously i'm<br>not a professional athlete but i feel<br>like if i actually<br>gave myself if i wanted to be really<br>good at jiu jitsu like<br>reach the level of being in the top 25<br>when i was much younger<br>like really strive<br>i think i could achieve it by drilling<br>hmm that's i had this belief untested<br>can you challenge this idea or<br>or first off fascinating<br>however we're going to have to disagree<br>no<br>no okay um we're just going to have to<br>start to understand what are we talking<br>about when we talk about drilling it's a<br>very vague term<br>okay if you're at this moment many of<br>your listeners are probably seen<br>having the same thought process which is<br>a drilling yeah i know what that is<br>we go into the gym and we pick a move<br>and we practice it for a certain number<br>of repetitions<br>and if i do that i'm gonna get better at<br>the technique<br>okay um<br>they're wrong<br>we've got to have a much more<br>in-depth understanding<br>of what the hell we're talking about<br>when we talk about drilling<br>ultimately any movement<br>in the gym that doesn't<br>improve the skills you already have or<br>build new skills<br>is a waste of time a waste of resources<br>everything you do should be done with<br>the aim<br>and the understanding that this is going<br>to make me better at the sport i<br>practice<br>if it's not it shouldn't be there<br>the majority of what passes for drilling<br>in most training halls will not make you<br>better<br>including some of the most cherished<br>forms of drilling<br>which is repetition for numbers<br>the moment you say to someone i want you<br>to do this a hundred times<br>what are they really thinking about<br>volume<br>they're saying okay i'm at repetition 78<br>i'm at 80 20 more to go all they talk<br>their primary thought process<br>is on numbers that's not the point of<br>drilling<br>the point is skill acquisition<br>when people drill don't get them focused<br>on numbers<br>get them focused on mechanics that's<br>what they have to worry about<br>i never have my students drill for for<br>numbers ever<br>just one two three get the fuck out of<br>here<br>are you kidding me like how are you<br>gonna get better with that okay<br>get them working on the sense of gaining<br>knowledge<br>that's my job i have to give them<br>knowledge i have to explain to them<br>what they're trying to do that starts<br>them on the right track<br>but knowledge is one thing skill<br>is another if jiu jitsu was just about<br>knowledge<br>then all the 60 and 70 year old<br>red belts would be the world champions<br>they're not<br>isn't one by knowledge it's one by skill<br>knowledge is the first<br>step in building skill so my job as a<br>coach is to transmit<br>knowledge then i have to create training<br>programs<br>with a path from knowledge to polished<br>skill is carried out<br>that's the interface between me and my<br>students and so i give them<br>drills where the whole emphasis<br>is upon getting a sense where they<br>understand what are the problems they're<br>trying to solve<br>and working towards practical solutions<br>they never work with numbers they work<br>with<br>mechanics and feel then<br>you have to bring in the idea of<br>progression<br>when you drill there's zero resistance<br>when you fight in competition there's a<br>hundred percent resistance<br>you can't go from zero to a hundred<br>there has to be progress over time<br>where i have them work in drills<br>with slightly increasing increments<br>of resistance and just as we talked<br>about earlier with the weightlifter who<br>doesn't start with 500 pounds<br>but who begins with the bar and then<br>over time builds the skills that one day<br>out there in the future he will lift 500<br>pounds<br>so too that judy gatami that you're<br>working on today<br>is feeble and pathetic but five years<br>from now you'll win a world championship<br>with it<br>you can't have this naive idea of<br>drilling it's something you just come<br>out<br>you randomly pick a move and you<br>work for numbers until you satisfy a<br>certain set of numbers that your coach<br>threw at you and then think you're going<br>to get better<br>there's even dangers with drilling<br>there is no performance<br>increase that comes<br>once you get to a certain level and you<br>just keep doing the same damn thing<br>let's say for example you come out<br>and you hit a hundred repetitions of the<br>arm by judy tommy from guard position<br>and you're all proud of yourself because<br>you hit 100 repetitions and your body's<br>tired and you're telling yourself<br>man i got a good workout and you come in<br>tomorrow<br>you do exactly the same thing you come<br>in the day after that and a week goes by<br>and you've done the same thing<br>then a year later you do the same thing<br>ask yourself has your judy katami really<br>gotten better<br>no you've performed literally thousands<br>and thousands of repetitions<br>you have spent an enormous amount of<br>training time and energy that could have<br>gone in different directions<br>on something which didn't make you any<br>better<br>drills have diminishing returns<br>once you get to a certain skill level if<br>you just keep<br>hammering on the same thing in the same<br>fashion<br>for the same amount of time you stop<br>getting better can i partially for fun<br>partially for dallas advocate but<br>partially because i actually believe<br>this to push back on some points<br>is it possible so everything you said i<br>think is<br>beautiful and correct but<br>the asking yourself the question am i<br>getting better is a really important one<br>and you could do that in training<br>is there a set of techniques maybe a<br>small subset of all the techniques that<br>are in jiu jitsu<br>where you can have significant<br>skill acquisition if you put in the<br>numbers<br>or the time whatever on a technique<br>against an opponent who's not resisting<br>here's let me elaborate what i've in my<br>maybe i'm different you'll probably have<br>to finish an example yes<br>let me first make a general statement<br>and i can give examples<br>the general statement is i found that<br>through repetitions<br>and this is high repetitions combined<br>with training but high repetitions<br>against a non-resisting opponent<br>i've gotten to understand the way my<br>body moves<br>the way i apply pressure on a human<br>because it's not actually zero<br>resistance the opponent's still laying<br>there<br>they're still keeping their legs up<br>they're still doing<br>they might not be resisting but they're<br>still creating a structure<br>yes they're presenting a target<br>yes it's not dynamic so you can't<br>master the timing of things but you can<br>master<br>the not master but i felt like i could<br>gain<br>an understanding of how to apply<br>pressure to the human body<br>over thousands of repetitions now for<br>example i<br>just just to give you an example to to<br>know what we're talking about<br>uh there's a guy named uh like sal<br>hibero and<br>sean jihabero that have this i guess the<br>uh<br>i already forgot but the headquarters<br>position or something like that<br>but putting pressure as you pass guard<br>uh like medium passing distance kind of<br>pressure<br>i've did thousands of repetitions of<br>that to understand<br>what what putting pressure with my hips<br>feels like<br>to truly understand that movement i felt<br>like i was getting<br>much better it's it's like it's hard to<br>put into words but that skill<br>acquisition is<br>it's so subtle just the way you turn<br>your little like hips<br>but you're already talking about a<br>better form of drawing now<br>you're going beyond the basic numbers<br>and you're getting the sense of feel and<br>mechanics which is what we want in<br>drilling<br>but the reason i say numbers and maybe<br>you can speak to this but the<br>this might be an ocd thing but it it<br>allows you to take a journey<br>that doesn't just last a week or two<br>weeks<br>but a journey where you stay with the<br>technique for two<br>three years and there's a dedication to<br>it<br>where it's a long-term commitment<br>to where you're forcing yourself perhaps<br>there's other mechanisms but<br>you're forcing yourself to stay with a<br>technique longer than most people around<br>you are staying with whatever they're<br>working on<br>and you're taking that long journey and<br>the numbers somehow<br>enforce that persistence and that<br>dedication um<br>first thing that journey is a wonderful<br>thing and if that technique<br>is a a crucial part of what you do<br>then it's time well invested but always<br>understand that it comes at an<br>opportunity cost<br>that by spending that amount of time on<br>that one technique you've sacrificed<br>other things that you could have<br>learned that could have won your matches<br>so understand that every<br>focus upon one element of the game comes<br>at the opportunity cost of other<br>elements<br>um now as long as you're playing a part<br>of the game where<br>okay this is central to what i do yes<br>okay that's fine<br>but um just be aware of the danger of<br>opportunity cost that's something no one<br>talks about in the training room but<br>it becomes very important secondly the<br>other question you have to start asking<br>yourself is<br>okay that training clearly had benefits<br>for you<br>early on but when the point of<br>diminishing returns starts coming and if<br>you feel you're just doing<br>the same thing then it's time to switch<br>now if you feel you're still getting<br>benefit from it<br>by all means continue that will be a<br>call on your part you're<br>you've been playing this game a long<br>time now so i would trust your call on<br>that<br>but my job as a coach is to look out and<br>say<br>okay this kid's been working across<br>hashigorami<br>for six months and i feel he's gotten to<br>a good skill level<br>if he stays any further on it the<br>opportunity<br>cost becomes greater than the expected<br>benefits of continuing it<br>and that's my job as a coach is to<br>direct things in that fashion if i can<br>do a good job with that<br>then i can take them to the next level<br>of drilling and<br>start amping it up and that's how i keep<br>progress over time<br>my biggest fear is to have students<br>run past the point of diminishing<br>returns staying<br>stagnant where opportunity cost comes in<br>and they're not making the progress they<br>could in the time that they've been<br>working<br>i mean that was it was almost a<br>philosophical question for me<br>that's what i was always in a search on<br>because i know my mind<br>is uh likes drilling i don't like<br>relying on other people<br>for improvement and drilling<br>allows me to do something that that<br>that is percent most interesting legs<br>but you say you don't like relying on<br>other people on drilling but in drilling<br>you really do rely a lot on your partner<br>one of the first things i do when i<br>coach people is i teach them how to<br>drill<br>like that's a skill in itself and um<br>drilling is in a sense the opposite<br>of sparring drilling is a cooperative<br>venture<br>where you work as dance partners<br>complementing each other's movement<br>if i drill with gordon ryan and i want<br>him to work armbars i will move my body<br>in ways which<br>make it an interesting exercise for<br>gordon<br>um i'm not just sitting there and he<br>does a repetition and i'm<br>okay he does 10. um i can't wait for<br>this to be over so i can do my ten<br>and i can't wait for all the spares so<br>we can just spar and get over with all<br>this bullshit<br>um that's the sad truth of most drilling<br>and jujitsu<br>um there's a sense in which when good<br>people drill<br>it's like watching good people dance<br>they move in unison and complement each<br>other's movement and make each other<br>look better<br>sparring on the other hand is the exact<br>opposite of that that's resistance where<br>you're trying to make the other person<br>look as bad as possible<br>and once you understand the different<br>directions in which drilling and<br>sparring go<br>that's when things start getting<br>interesting you start getting fast<br>progress<br>yeah just uh you're absolutely right i i<br>think i was<br>not very eloquent describing what i mean<br>i found myself<br>not able to find and jiu-jitsu too many<br>people that are willing<br>to dedicate a huge amount of time to a<br>particular technique<br>i concur with you on netflix now answer<br>the interesting question<br>why why can't you get people to drill<br>with you<br>by the way if i could just shout out the<br>people that did draw with me<br>is usually blue belt women<br>because they're smaller they don't like<br>training<br>because they get their ass kicked<br>because they're much smaller<br>so they're willing to improve it invest<br>significant amount of effort into uh um<br>into training that's that's good but<br>their motivation for doing so is not<br>good well yes but your motivation for<br>drilling is because you don't want to<br>get your ass kicked<br>no good black belt ever i could never<br>find a black belt that i could draw with<br>like this<br>this the uh now let's go back to that<br>question why<br>i don't i mean this i i am<br>somebody who likes to say nice things<br>about people so let me let me answer for<br>you yeah<br>two reasons because they find it boring<br>yes and secondly<br>perhaps more importantly they don't<br>believe it works yeah<br>those are good answers and now let's go<br>further and ask the truly interesting<br>question<br>why do they believe that<br>if i were to answer it in the context of<br>russian wrestling where drilling is much<br>bigger part is i think culturally<br>that was knowledge that everybody tells<br>each other<br>in jiu jitsu that uh drilling<br>doesn't work because they're never<br>taught how to drill<br>no one ever sits you down one day and<br>says okay this is how you drill<br>and so the exercise feels futile they<br>don't feel the skill level is going up<br>they don't associate drilling with<br>increased skill level they associate<br>sparring with increased<br>skill level but not drilling which is a<br>tragedy because<br>it is a fantastic way to introduce and<br>expand the repertoire<br>of a developing student it's an<br>essential part of every workout i teach<br>i always say that game of judity begins<br>with knowledge and<br>builds up to skill who wins is the one<br>who has greater skill<br>and nine times out of ten um so<br>to me it's a tragedy that what you're<br>saying breaks my heart to hear that you<br>couldn't get a black belt to drill with<br>you that's<br>that's shameful and i but i understand i<br>i i sympathize with those black belts<br>too because<br>the way in which most people are told to<br>drill does feel<br>ineffective and it is damn boring they'd<br>rather just spar<br>they feel like they get more out of the<br>workout and that's<br>that's if anything an indictment upon<br>most of the training programs around the<br>nation<br>would you say that drilling if you were<br>to build<br>a black belt world champion would<br>drilling be<br>what percent of their training in the<br>entirety of their career would be<br>drilling<br>good great question um let's first put a<br>proviso on it that i<br>don't do the same thing for all athletes<br>everyone's got a different personality<br>and like nikki rod i can only hold his<br>attention for two minutes at a time<br>and uh gary tonen<br>um five minutes uh gordon ryan<br>five hours like uh george saint pierre<br>five hours<br>travis stevens five hours they are just<br>laser focused so everyone's different<br>let's put that down as our first proviso<br>um uh you probably knew those answers<br>already<br>yeah um that's hilarious but<br>uh as a general rule<br>uh if i run a two and a half hour class<br>uh you can expect an hour and a half of<br>it to be<br>i'm going to use the word drilling but<br>i'm also going to say that<br>this is too complex of a story to give<br>now with words i would need to<br>demonstrate it<br>but the way in which we drill is not<br>your standard method of drilling<br>and then it's into sparring<br>but if you give me a choice between a<br>bad drilling partner and sparring<br>i could make the same choice that most<br>black belts make without go with<br>sparring<br>because you can create drilling with it<br>like good drilling is a wonderful thing<br>bad drilling is just a worthless waste<br>of time<br>okay before i have a million questions<br>for you but i have to ask<br>can you we've described the fundamentals<br>of jiu jitsu<br>can we describe the principles the<br>fundamentals<br>of one of the interesting systems you've<br>developed which is the leglock system<br>yeah anything in particular or just like<br>a general<br>understand what are some of the major<br>principles of it<br>well it's like me coming to uh miyamoto<br>musashi and asking can you describe<br>the principles of sword fighting<br>you're too generous um let's<br>start off with some context um when i<br>began the sport of jiu-jitsu i was<br>taught<br>a fairly classical approach to uh<br>jiu-jitsu which leglocks were a part of<br>it but not an emphasized part of it<br>um the overall culture of the times is<br>the mid-1990s<br>the overall culture of the time saw leg<br>locks<br>as uh<br>largely ineffective it was<br>we were told that against good<br>opposition they just didn't work very<br>well they were low percentage techniques<br>we were also told that they were<br>tactically<br>unsound because if you ever attempted<br>them and you<br>lost control of the leg lock<br>your opponent would end up on top of you<br>or in some kind of good position and<br>you'd be in<br>terrible trouble um and we're also told<br>that they were unsafe<br>that uh if they were applied in the gym<br>there'd be far too many injuries and<br>people would be badly hurt and<br>that was the received wisdom of that<br>time and so i<br>i didn't even would work with them at<br>all<br>and uh they would be shown occasionally<br>in the gym<br>and you'd learn them you drilled them<br>and but inspiring i showed no interest<br>um you probably know that change when i<br>met<br>the the great american grandpa dean<br>lester who<br>uh early in his career was using<br>achilles logs with<br>considerable success i met him in the<br>gym wonderful fellow<br>and um i give these locks as like a<br>straightforward yes that's correct yes<br>and um uh he went on to become a<br>heel hooker and win 280 cc's later on in<br>his career but we never met again after<br>after that<br>and uh that<br>opened some doors of inquiry and<br>uh well he asked this first principles<br>question is why would you only use half<br>the body<br>in a game which makes a human body<br>perfect sense<br>so that opened doors to to inquiry and<br>if you looked around the judiciary world<br>at that time um<br>the number of specialized leg lockers<br>was very small and most of them<br>were from outside of conventional<br>jiu-jitsu for example you could look<br>around and see people like<br>romina sato had sharp leg locks for that<br>time period in the 1990s<br>um so they were out there they existed<br>and uh you'd see people like ken<br>shamrock would would use uh<br>here hawks in competition and he had<br>some some good success with them<br>when i began experimenting with the in<br>the gym<br>fairly soon certain truths started to<br>become<br>evident and<br>the most important of these can be<br>understood very quickly and they were<br>relatively easy to discover<br>the first was that most people<br>when they went to<br>understand and study leg locking<br>and when i talk about leg locking i'm<br>going to talk about one specific type<br>which is the most high percentage type<br>this is leg locks which are performed<br>with entanglements of your opponent's<br>legs with your legs there are other<br>forms of leg<br>log but these are relatively low<br>percentage and don't figure heavily in<br>competition so i'll<br>i'll ignore them<br>most people made no distinction between<br>the mechanism of control<br>versus the mechanism of breaking<br>the heel hook is what ultimately<br>breaks the the angle but the mechanism<br>of control is the entanglement of your<br>legs<br>to your opponent's legs the japanese<br>term ashigorami literally just means<br>like<br>leg entanglement it's a generic term it<br>could apply to any form of entanglement<br>there are many<br>options my idea<br>was let's focus on the entanglement<br>first<br>and worry about the breaking mechanism<br>second<br>this was analogous to the idea of<br>position before submission<br>only you couldn't talk about it in terms<br>of conventional positions because<br>ashigorami doesn't really fit into the<br>traditional hierarchies<br>positional hierarchies of jiu-jitsu so<br>the<br>the the conversation was switched from<br>position to submission to control<br>to submission now<br>wrapping two of your legs around one of<br>your opponent's legs gives you many<br>different options you can do it with<br>your feet on the outside<br>so-called 50-50 variations you can do<br>with your feet on the inside and<br>um form what we call inside<br>foot position um there's pros and cons<br>to both there's also<br>methods of harmonizing the two so you<br>have one foot on the inside and one foot<br>on the outside<br>you can do it with a straight uh<br>leg where you heel hook from the outside<br>or you can bring the leg across your<br>center line and<br>he'll hook from the inside you will<br>start to<br>notice as you work through these<br>different variations that<br>some present advantages over others<br>all of them come at a price to some<br>degree<br>regardless of which ashigorami option<br>you use there will be some degree of<br>foot exposure on my part to my opponent<br>and some degree of back exposure<br>on my part relative to my opponent so<br>that's the downside of it<br>variations within those different<br>ashigorami<br>enable you to lessen danger in some<br>respects<br>and at the price of gaining dangers<br>in others so you get this wider array of<br>choices<br>there's not this kind of simplistic<br>hierarchy that you see in<br>the basic positions of you but there are<br>hierarchies<br>i do for example generally favor inside<br>heel hooks over outside heel hooks<br>if i feel my opponent is very good<br>at exposing my back while i'm in<br>ashigara<br>i generally prefer 50 50 situations if i<br>believe my opponent is very good at<br>counter leg locks i generally prefer<br>my feet on the inside working with<br>variations of<br>uh insights and cargo etcetera etcetera<br>so there are<br>broad heuristic rules that we can give<br>to to work in these situations<br>once you start to understand there's a<br>variety<br>of entanglements you can use then you<br>start getting to the really interesting<br>ideas<br>that as you perform one<br>given attack one given here hook you can<br>flow through different forms of<br>ashigorami<br>where you can create new dangers<br>and avoid possible uh<br>pitfalls in a very short time frame as<br>you switch from one ashy grammy to<br>another over time<br>so that as your opponent's lines of<br>resistance to an initial attack<br>change you can accommodate those by<br>switching to another form of ashigorami<br>so that your mechanism of control is<br>always<br>pointing in opposite directions of his<br>escape<br>and if you focus on this idea of control<br>through the legs<br>you can completely change the nature of<br>leg locking<br>and take it away from what it was in the<br>1990s an opportunistic<br>method of attack based upon surprise<br>speed and power<br>into one based on control if you can do<br>this<br>you can undermine<br>many of the basic criticisms of leg<br>locking which were prevalent when i<br>began<br>the sport of jujitsu for example<br>if i can completely control and<br>immobilize you<br>i can perform the lock very very safely<br>if my only way of breaking your leg is<br>to be faster and more powerful than you<br>nine times out of term when i apply it<br>i'm gonna hurt your leg<br>as much by accident as anything but if i<br>can completely immobilize you<br>and as every attempt you make to escape<br>i can follow you<br>and immobilize you in new directions<br>then<br>i can apply the the lock with as much<br>force or as little force<br>as possible and so you'll see in our<br>training room despite<br>over considerably more than um<br>two decades sorry a decade and a half<br>now of<br>hillhawking using these methods<br>the number of people severely injured by<br>hill hawks is<br>is tiny like um<br>i would say i've seen more people<br>injured by far<br>by kimuras in the time i've been<br>training that i have by heal hawks<br>despite them having a similar twisting<br>dynamic to them if you build a culture<br>where people focus on control rather<br>than speed of execution<br>then the injury rate goes down<br>appreciably<br>the whole idea of positional loss<br>everyone was critically critical of leg<br>loss now if you go for leg locks and<br>they don't work<br>well now you're in trouble the guy's<br>going to be on top of you<br>they never make that criticism with arm<br>bars<br>okay you can be in the mounted position<br>go for a number end up on bottom lose<br>the armbar and lose position but<br>i've never heard anyone criticize<br>armbars on that account<br>more importantly i believed<br>from early on that the best place to<br>attack leg locks is not top position<br>it's bottom position you'll see that<br>over 90 of my<br>athletes attack leg locks from<br>underneath people not on top of people<br>so there is no position or loss you're<br>already underneath them<br>and so that criticism was null and void<br>and by focusing on this idea of breaking<br>down<br>and distinguishing between the mechanism<br>of control and the mechanism of breaking<br>that created something new and something<br>interesting<br>there was also another advantage that i<br>had<br>in terms of creating influence with leg<br>locking<br>when you look at the great leg lockers<br>of the past they they were basically<br>iconoclasts they were people who<br>came out of nowhere who just had<br>this remarkable success with leglocks<br>[Music]<br>but<br>they were just seen as unique<br>individuals they had their game and they<br>were good at it<br>what was unique about the squad is you<br>had<br>not just one person but a team of people<br>who came out and did pretty much the<br>same thing<br>these people had very different body<br>types and very different personalities<br>so it wasn't that one kind of body type<br>was good at it you had tall people<br>like gordon ryan you had uh short people<br>like nikki ryan<br>you had someone in the middle like gary<br>tonin<br>you had fast people like gary tony you<br>had slow people like gordon<br>um there were<br>there was every kind of body type<br>involved and it was like people could<br>see this was different because it<br>it worked for an entire team as opposed<br>to a unique individual who had unique<br>attributes<br>and that started to foster the belief<br>that<br>if it can work for a team it can work<br>for anyone<br>which means it can work for me and i<br>think that had a big effect<br>that's why i owe a lot to<br>those early students um<br>gordon ryan gary tone and eddie cummings<br>and<br>uh nikki ryan there it was those four<br>kids<br>came from nowhere um uh<br>gary had some success in grappling like<br>low-level success and grappling before<br>uh before becoming a full-time member of<br>the squad<br>but the others were just nobodies who<br>no one had known and yet within a<br>five-year time frame they were all going<br>up against world championship<br>competition and doing exceedingly well<br>and which gives further credence the<br>idea of the five-year<br>program and<br>[Music]<br>i think by operating as a team those<br>young men did an incredible job of<br>convincing<br>the grappling world that this wasn't<br>just about well they're just different<br>or their<br>it works for their body type or or them<br>as individuals it was like no<br>if a team can do it anyone can do it and<br>i think that's what really<br>convinced people that this was something<br>worth studying this is something that<br>could be a big part of their lives but<br>also convince you<br>and convince convince each other in<br>those early days when you're developing<br>the science<br>essentially what was missing is an<br>entire science and system<br>of leglocks because it's not like you<br>knew for sure that there's a lot here to<br>be discovered in terms of control<br>you perhaps hadn't just like you said an<br>initial intuition<br>but you know you have to have enough um<br>there's perseverance required to uh take<br>is the johnny eye thing to take from the<br>initial idea to the entire system<br>is there is there a sense you have about<br>how<br>complicated and how big this world of<br>control<br>uh in the in leg locks is<br>how complicated is it you've achieved a<br>lot of success<br>you have a lot of powerful ideas in<br>terms of inside outside what's high<br>percentage what's not<br>what's high reward what's low risk all<br>those kinds of things<br>and then you also mentioned kind of<br>transitions not transitions but<br>how you move with your opponent to uh<br>resist their escape through control<br>this is how much do you understand about<br>this world this is a fascinating<br>question<br>um as a general rule<br>the most<br>the most powerful developments are<br>always at the onset of a project<br>okay um let's give an example um<br>the jet engine was uh<br>i believe first conceived in the late<br>1930s<br>just around the time of world war ii it<br>was developed<br>with great pace because of world war ii<br>that obviously military research was a<br>huge thing back then and first<br>fielded i believe by the germans uh<br>in around 1943. um<br>jet aircraft didn't play a big role in<br>world war ii they were there at the end<br>and they did play<br>a significant role but in terms of<br>numbers they just weren't there<br>so by around 1945 you had the onset<br>of the jet age and the jet engine began<br>to replace the piston engine<br>in most aircraft it was it was the new<br>way of of doing things<br>if you look at the pace of development<br>of jet engine aircraft technology from<br>1945<br>to 1960 it is<br>unbelievable there was a<br>solid decade where they were gaining<br>almost 100 miles an hour per year<br>for a decade that's a form of growth<br>that i mean in the world of engineering<br>that's<br>that's the only time you see growth like<br>that is on things like bitcoin<br>and that's about it okay um uh<br>let's put things in perspective okay um<br>in world war ii the standard us aircraft<br>bomber<br>was the b-17 which was a<br>mid-sized bomber with a fairly limited<br>load capacity and<br>i think top speed well below 300 miles<br>an hour<br>just 10 years later you had the b-52<br>which could fly across continents and<br>deliver nuclear weapons<br>and carry bomb loads of up to 70 000<br>pounds<br>uh in a decade that happened<br>i if you took a b-17 pilot<br>in 1943 and put them inside a b-52<br>a decade later he would literally think<br>he was on a ufo<br>a ship from another planet that was the<br>speed<br>of development now contrast that<br>with the speed of modern development if<br>i took you in a time machine<br>and i put you in a civil airliner<br>in 1972<br>let's say a boeing 737 it's not that<br>different from what you fly in today<br>that's right flies at the same speed has<br>the same range<br>flies at the same altitude it's not that<br>different<br>the amount of progress between 1973<br>and 2020 isn't very impressive<br>but the amount of progress from 1945<br>to 1955 or even better 1960 was<br>staggering<br>and so the initial progress tends to be<br>meteoric but after that it tends to be<br>incremental<br>that's that with lake longs there's a<br>guy named elon musk<br>there's been almost no development in<br>terms of uh<br>space rocket propulsion<br>and rocket launches and going out<br>into orbit or going out into deep space<br>and one guy comes along one john donahue<br>type character<br>and says it doesn't make sense why we<br>don't use reusable rockets<br>why we don't make it much cheaper why we<br>don't launch every week as opposed to<br>every few years it doesn't make any<br>sense why we don't<br>go to the moon again over and over and<br>over it doesn't make any sense why we<br>don't go to mars and colonize mars<br>it feels like it's not just a single<br>jump to a b-52 it's a series of these<br>kinds of jumps<br>so the question is is there another leap<br>within the leg locking system time will<br>tell<br>um i do believe that<br>we're in a phase now where the really<br>big<br>jumps have already been made and we're<br>we're in the incremental phase at this<br>point<br>um what i do believe is that you will<br>start to see new directions<br>start to emerge where you start to see<br>the interface between leg locking and<br>wrestling for example<br>the interface between leg locking and<br>back attacks and that will provide<br>new avenues of direction which will<br>provide<br>create new spurs of growth<br>but in terms of uh breaking people's<br>legs this the simple act of breaking<br>legs i<br>i believe we're in the incremental phase<br>now rather than the meteoric phase<br>let me ask you a ridiculous question how<br>hard is it to actually break a leg this<br>is something you think about i remember<br>because i'm a big fan of the straight<br>foot lock<br>not again we're talking about to the<br>standing sanagi<br>maybe it's my uh russian roots with<br>samba or something like that maybe it's<br>the dean lister<br>uh achilles lock but i i love<br>maybe it's my body something like that i<br>just love the squeeze of it the control<br>and the power of a straight foot lock<br>and i remember<br>trying to there's a few people in<br>competition that<br>didn't want to attack absolutely and<br>i remember in particular there was one<br>one person it was a again a finals match<br>purple belt<br>i remember it was a straight foot lock<br>is perfect everything's just perfect<br>and i remember going all in and there<br>was a pop pop pop<br>and i couldn't do anything more it<br>wasn't breaking<br>it was it was just bending and bending<br>and bending and there's damage to it<br>of some kind but i wanted to like<br>you know i wanted to see first of all<br>it's very difficult psychologically<br>because it's like<br>can i be violent here that wasn't a<br>whole nother<br>thing with adrenaline you can't really<br>think that fast but i also thought like<br>where<br>where else is there to go like is it the<br>shin going to break what is supposed to<br>break<br>so i wonder yeah in the case of the<br>achilles log it's going to be the<br>anterior tibialis tendon<br>and what's that uh let's see it runs<br>down there's two of them<br>uh it'll be the minor one that runs on<br>the outside of the front of the ankle<br>um it's not going to be the achilles<br>tendon a lot of people<br>promulgate this uh this absurdity the<br>achilles tendon<br>can rupture but not from pressure it's<br>rather tender not the bone<br>it's going to break the bone won't break<br>i have seen on one occasion a shin bone<br>break<br>from an achilles log but there was a<br>enormous<br>size and strength disparity and there<br>may have been other complicating factors<br>too<br>um but in the vast majority of cases<br>the achilles lock doesn't really do<br>tremendous damage it can<br>do significant damage you'll definitely<br>feel it the next day but it's<br>of all the major logs it's the one where<br>it is most likely<br>a psychologically strong opponent will<br>be able to absorb damage and go on to<br>win a match<br>um and answer to your first question how<br>difficult is it to break a leg<br>um not very difficult it will<br>come down to what is the skill level of<br>my opponent's resistance if your boner<br>is not resisting and you have an inside<br>heel hook it is<br>absurdly easy to break a man's leg not a<br>challenge at all<br>um you can be a 105 pound woman could<br>easily<br>snap um the the relevant<br>knee ligaments uh in a 240 pound<br>man's leg if he doesn't know how to<br>defend himself that's an easy thing<br>very easy to accomplish so<br>the basic answer is yes it's very easy<br>if your opponent does know how to defend<br>and they can position their foot<br>play tricks of lever and fulcrum it<br>becomes significantly more difficult it<br>becomes<br>still more difficult under match<br>conditions where they're actively<br>looking to<br>position their body and work their way<br>out of the lock then it can<br>become very difficult indeed<br>always bear in mind that there have been<br>some cases in our history as a team<br>where<br>people have literally just let their<br>knees<br>snap and continue fighting<br>always remember that submission is a<br>choice when it comes to the joint locks<br>and uh we've had some people who just<br>made the choice and i<br>i'm willing to let my knee break so that<br>i can<br>can continue in this match that's a<br>tough decision to make and i admire<br>their bravery<br>um is there something about that just to<br>speak to that that you you admire<br>yes yeah it's mental toughness i would i<br>agree with it would i advocate it no<br>um but that doesn't mean i can't admire<br>aspects of it<br>who is the greatest grappler ever<br>you were very astute in the way you<br>asked that question you didn't say the<br>greatest jujitsu player<br>of all time you specified grappler<br>what's the bigger<br>category jiu-jitsu is the bigger<br>category jujitsu has four faces<br>there is ghee competition there is no<br>ghee competition<br>there is mixed martial arts competition<br>and there is self-defense<br>so jiu-jitsu has four aspects<br>grappling typically refers only to the<br>nogi<br>aspect of jiu-jitsu so it's one out of<br>four possibilities<br>so who's the greatest jiu jitsu<br>practitioner ever<br>and then who is the greatest grappler<br>ever i believe<br>that the greatest jujitsu player<br>certainly that<br>i ever met and i believe of all time i i<br>i don't want to sound arrogant on that<br>because really you can only go with your<br>own experiences and there are<br>some great athletes that other people<br>mentioned that i i just never met<br>so but in my estimation the greatest jiu<br>jitsu player<br>is hodger gracie my reasoning for that<br>is out of the four faces of jiu-jitsu<br>he excelled in three<br>and in two of them in particular he was<br>the best of his generation by a<br>landslide<br>um in ghee grappling<br>nogi grappling hodger dominated<br>his generation to a degree that<br>is truly impressive<br>what do you attribute that dominance to<br>by the way is there something if you<br>were to analyze them<br>fascinating question i'll come back to<br>it in mixed martial arts<br>he was at his peak<br>i believe ranked in the top ten in the<br>uh<br>in the world of mixed martial arts uh he<br>wasn't the best<br>in mixed martial arts the way he was in<br>grappling but he was damn good<br>and he beat some significant people so<br>he showed tremendous versatility ghee<br>nogi mixed martial arts<br>he's not really known in the world of<br>self-defense but there's no real<br>criteria by which you would become<br>dominant in self-defense so that's kind<br>of a<br>you can't really judge people by that<br>i'm believing i'm<br>if i thought you got into a fight in the<br>street i'm sure he would do just fine<br>so i i had no concerns about that um<br>uh so i would say that if you look at<br>jujitsu for what i believe it is a<br>sport with four faces i believe it's<br>uh you you have to go with roger gracie<br>as uh the one who<br>went out and empirically proved his<br>ability to to go across those those<br>elements and do extraordinarily well in<br>all of them<br>he even made the um the extraordinary<br>step of coming out of retirement and<br>beating the best<br>of the generation that came after him<br>and that's<br>sure yes that's a truly difficult sounds<br>incredible yeah and a sport which<br>progresses very very rapidly that's a<br>truly impressive accomplishment<br>um if you ask the question who is the<br>greatest<br>grappler that i've ever seen uh i would<br>say<br>i've never seen anyone better than<br>gordon ryan um<br>now people are going to jump when i give<br>these two names they're going to say<br>well<br>daniel you're close friends with hodger<br>and you're close friends with<br>gordon so you're biased um i i<br>can't answer them to that it's true i'm<br>good friends with both of them<br>um i'm also a notoriously cold and<br>unemotional person and i'm saying this<br>based upon<br>things that i've observed if i honestly<br>believed that<br>i'd seen other people who were better i<br>would have said it um<br>that's i will that convince the people<br>who<br>uh criticize me of bias probably not but<br>those are the two names that i will<br>mention i think it's uncontroversial<br>statement to say that uh gordon ryan<br>is one of the the greatest grappler ever<br>yeah gordon's obviously a very<br>polarizing figure and<br>people tend to react to gordon on an<br>emotional level rather than<br>a statistical level and<br>that colors a lot of people's minds but<br>i also have the benefit that i've seen<br>both of these guys extensively in the<br>gym<br>and that all adds a whole new<br>perspective like if you think those guys<br>are dominant<br>on the stage wait till you see them in<br>the gym it's even a different level of<br>domination<br>uh above and beyond what they did in<br>competition<br>have they trained against each other no<br>they never trained together they've been<br>in the same gym i think only on one<br>occasion<br>when haju was stopped by new york he<br>came back and came by to say hello and<br>uh gordon was here at the time they they<br>shake hands<br>they know each other and they're both<br>wonderful people in their own way<br>so i'd like to talk to you about gordon<br>hodger and george gsb<br>let's first talk about what do you think<br>is this very different<br>from my perspective maybe you can<br>correct me a very different<br>artists yes masters of their uh pursuits<br>so what makes hajir so good<br>hoja was probably the living embodiment<br>of someone who played a classical<br>jujitsu game based around the the<br>fundamental<br>four steps of jiu-jitsu and and um uh<br>like if<br>if you took someone who had<br>taken introduction lessons in jiu-jitsu<br>for<br>three months they would recognize<br>the outlines of hodges game<br>with many of the techniques they learned<br>in those first three months<br>hodger was the best example of the<br>dichotomy between<br>the fundamentals of jiu-jitsu but also a<br>kind of hidden sophistication<br>underneath those fundamentals<br>people always say oh you know hodges<br>game was so basic<br>no the outlines of hodges game were<br>basic<br>but the degree of sophistication and the<br>application was extraordinary<br>and his ability to refine<br>existing technology was truly impressive<br>i never saw anyone in his generation<br>that even came close to his<br>uh his ability both in competition and<br>uh<br>uh in the gym so for people who don't<br>know<br>how to gracie basically use just like<br>you said a very<br>simple techniques on the surface<br>from the outsider's perspective that uh<br>most people learn when they start jiu<br>jitsu<br>like a passing guard in a very simple<br>way taking mount<br>and choking from mount also<br>when he's on his back this closed guard<br>and all the basic submissions from coast<br>guard armbar and<br>triangle and just that's it<br>and being able to dominate shut down<br>and submit so control and submit the<br>best people in the world<br>for many many years just like you said<br>including<br>coming out of retirement and beating the<br>best<br>perhaps by far the best of the next<br>generation<br>so that's that just kind of lays out the<br>story is there some lessons<br>about his systems<br>that you uh learn in developing your own<br>system<br>excellent question the the thing which<br>always impressed me the most about<br>uh hodgeo was<br>his relentless pursuit of uh<br>of position to submission everything was<br>done<br>with the belief that<br>no victory was worthwhile if it didn't<br>involve submitting his opponent<br>that's a mindset that i try very very<br>hard to imbue in my students the easiest<br>part to victory in jiu-jitsu is the one<br>which<br>takes the least risk so for example you<br>will see many modern athletes<br>focus on scoring the first point or the<br>fourth first advantage and then doing<br>the minimum amount of work<br>to each out a victory once they've done<br>that they get a small tactical advantage<br>they realize they're ahead take no more<br>risks and just<br>do the minimum amount of work to get the<br>victory<br>hodges mindset was always to take<br>the riskier gambit of submission which<br>entails a lot more work<br>and in many cases a lot more skill<br>what i always liked about hodger is he<br>never tried to play<br>tactics it was always just go out there<br>and try to win by submission and<br>that more than anything that mindset of<br>looking for the most perfect victory<br>rather than the victory that takes the<br>least skill<br>and the least effort is probably the<br>the thing i took from his career the<br>most and tried to work upon in my<br>students<br>i always wonder what are the little<br>details he's doing<br>under there when he's in mount the<br>little adjustments<br>you know but perhaps that's like almost<br>indescribable<br>the the details of that control<br>what makes gordon ryan the greatest<br>grappler<br>of all time so good with gordon he's<br>also very strong on fundamentals all of<br>my students are<br>but he's also obviously a member of a<br>new generation of<br>nogi grapplers that also bring in<br>technologies that<br>uh weren't really emphasized in previous<br>generations specifically<br>the prolific use of lower body attacks<br>especially from bottom position um<br>this means that he can play a game<br>between upper body and lower body<br>which was not really a part of hodge's<br>game<br>nonetheless you will also see<br>significant similarities he's got a very<br>strong and crushing<br>passing game to mount and a very strong<br>and crushing<br>passing game to the back um<br>you will see that the major differences<br>between the two<br>are from bottom position hodges bottom<br>game is essentially based around his<br>close guard<br>gordon ryan's game is based around his<br>butterfly guard<br>so one is based on outside control and<br>one is based on inside control<br>one focuses almost entirely on the<br>classical notion of<br>getting past the legs to the upper body<br>and the other one works between the two<br>as alternatives and sees them as<br>competing alternatives<br>where the stronger you become at one the<br>more your opponent has to overreact and<br>become vulnerable to the second<br>so they have strong similarities in top<br>position but are very different in<br>bottom<br>he has uh from an outsider's perspective<br>a calm to him in the uh<br>in the heat of battle that's like<br>uh that's inspiring and confusing is<br>there<br>something to speak to the psychological<br>aspect of gordon ryan<br>yes people will talk<br>all day about sports psychology and<br>um they will often have heated arguments<br>as to what's the right side<br>psychological state to be and when you<br>go out to compete<br>i've never seen any one school of<br>thought which<br>gave noticeably better sports<br>performance than another<br>i've never seen any psychological<br>mindset<br>prove to be reliably more efficient<br>or effective than another i've seen<br>fighters that were<br>scared out of their minds when they went<br>out every time to fight<br>and yet they were very successful i've<br>seen fighters go out<br>who were relaxed and calm and they too<br>can be successful<br>i've seen both mindsets win i've seen<br>both mindsets lose<br>i've seen every extreme between them<br>what i generally recommend with regards<br>your mind and preparation going in find<br>what works for you<br>everyone's different don't try to give a<br>one-size-fits-all<br>in something as vague and confusing as<br>the human mind<br>um having said that<br>my preference i don't force it on people<br>because everyone's different but my<br>preference<br>is to try and advocate for a mindset of<br>unexceptionalism most people see<br>competition as something exceptional<br>it's not your everyday grappling session<br>you know you train<br>300 times for every time you compete and<br>so they see competition is something<br>exceptional different scarier more<br>nerve-wracking there's a crowd watching<br>these cameras<br>my reputation is on the line i'm going<br>to be observed and judged<br>and so they see it as this exceptional<br>event my general preference<br>is to see it as an unexceptional event<br>to see everything else<br>the noise the cameras the crowd<br>as illusions the only reality is a stage<br>an opponent on the other side of it<br>and a referee adjudicating you and to<br>make it as<br>unexceptional as possible gordon does an<br>extraordinarily good job<br>of of doing that gordon looks<br>more tense in most of his training<br>sessions than he does in his<br>competitions<br>because he knows his training partners<br>are typically better than the people<br>he's actually going out to compete<br>against<br>and you see it in its demeanor it's one<br>of just complete calm<br>it also goes back to what we talked<br>about earlier about the power of escapes<br>gordon ryan is almost impossible to<br>control for<br>extended periods of time in most of the<br>inferior positions in the sport<br>and most of the submissions so he goes<br>out<br>in the full knowledge that the worst<br>case scenario<br>isn't that bad for him and so nothing<br>could really go<br>that badly wrong he can always recover<br>from any given mistake and go on to<br>victory<br>when you believe those things you can<br>have a calm demeanor<br>then if you look at somebody who is<br>quite a bit different than that<br>george st pierre who at least in the way<br>he describes it<br>he's basically exceptionally anxious<br>yes and terrified approaching a fight<br>ago<br>and he loves training and hates fighting<br>and hates fighting<br>so and just like you said he made it<br>work for him<br>but you he's somebody he speaks very<br>highly of you he's worked with you<br>quite a bit in training<br>and you've studied him you've worked<br>with him<br>you've coached him interestingly i've<br>actually coached george for twice the<br>lengths of any of the<br>squad members so my knowledge of<br>homelessness is far greater than it is<br>for<br>really a contemporary squad so can you<br>speak to what makes<br>george st pierre who i think even though<br>i'm russian<br>and a little bit partial towards fedor<br>and the the russians but i think he is<br>in the four categories you mentioned the<br>greatest mixed martial<br>artist of all time what makes him so<br>good<br>his approach his techniques his mind<br>his approach is certainly part of it<br>george started mixed martial arts at a<br>time when<br>the sport was in a pretty wild phase um<br>uh it was illegal to show on most<br>american tv networks<br>and there was talk about it being banned<br>as a sport<br>uh in his native canada it was banned<br>you could only fight on indian<br>reservations and in canada i believe his<br>first<br>fight may have been on an indian<br>reservation um<br>so the sport at that stage<br>was very much in its infancy and<br>it's probably fair to say that most of<br>the athletes<br>involved in the sport came from<br>a training program that would probably<br>be described as<br>unprofessional and in um<br>in the contemporary scene<br>um george is one of a handful of people<br>who started<br>approaching the sport in a truly<br>professional fashion it was like okay<br>here's what great athletes in other<br>sports do i'm gonna try to emulate that<br>and uh<br>his ability to invest in himself<br>in my own experience for example uh<br>george<br>when i first met him was a garbage man<br>and he would jump on a<br>bus from montreal to new york<br>now that's a that's a long bus ride he<br>would come down on a friday afternoon<br>when he finished<br>work as a garbage man stay for the<br>weekend and then late on sunday night he<br>would jump on a bus<br>all the way back to montreal and work as<br>a garbage man um<br>that's an extraordinary commitment for a<br>young man<br>to make that's and<br>george was a blue belt at the time and<br>so he would come down and<br>you know we had a very talented room so<br>uh he didn't do well in the room when he<br>first came in he was inexperienced in<br>jiu-jitsu and uh<br>the people who went against were<br>considerably better than him at<br>jiu-jitsu so imagine<br>investing 25 of your weekly income<br>maybe even more new york's an expensive<br>town 50 percent<br>to come down and just get your ass<br>kicked<br>months by month yeah that says a lot<br>let's talk about the whole idea of<br>delayed gratification here i mean um<br>that's that's a guy who's saying like<br>this is highly unpleasant but i have a<br>vision of myself in the future<br>and i have to go through this extreme<br>case of delayed gratification to get to<br>that distant goal<br>which may never happen and uh<br>that's a that's the level of commitment<br>and self-belief which is just<br>extraordinary<br>um i always laugh when people say you<br>know george was afraid so he was<br>mentally weak<br>like no that's that's a very<br>very shallow understanding of mental<br>strength and weakness<br>um george felt anxiety<br>but let's understand from the start<br>there's different kinds of mental<br>strength<br>and the most important kind isn't<br>whether you feel<br>fear or don't feel fear before you step<br>into fight the most important form of<br>mental strength<br>is discipline and training that's where<br>most people break<br>i know dozens of people who are fearless<br>to fight<br>but you couldn't get them to come into<br>the gym for three months in a row and<br>work on skills<br>yeah so they're mentally strong one way<br>they don't feel fear<br>but they're mentally weak in another<br>which is to instill them the discipline<br>which keeps you on a road to progress<br>over time<br>that's much tougher than not feeling<br>fear before you are defined<br>understand also that when george talks<br>about fear<br>he's not afraid of his opponent he's<br>afraid of failure<br>he's got high standards someone who's<br>got high standards<br>can change the world his standards were<br>very very high<br>that's what he was afraid of wasn't<br>afraid of his opponent<br>and yet that's always been the<br>misinterpretation he wasn't mentally<br>weak he was mentally strong as an<br>ox okay to stay in his<br>training regimen year after year after<br>year<br>and do so while he became one of the<br>first stars in mixed martial arts to<br>actually make money<br>and it gets tough to stay in the<br>training gym with people who are young<br>and<br>hungry and want to punch you in the face<br>you're coming out of a luxury room<br>living in finery towards the end of his<br>career and still training as hard as<br>ever that's an impressive thing<br>and always he valued perfection and<br>you're right that was<br>the fear was not achieving the<br>perfection<br>is there something you've uh observed<br>about the way he approaches<br>training that uh<br>stands out to you or is it simply the<br>dedication no<br>it's never just about dedication there's<br>lots of dedicated people in the world<br>but most of them are unsuccessful<br>if you want to be the best in the world<br>at anything<br>you have to do out of the many skills of<br>whatever<br>industry you're in you have to take at<br>least<br>one of those skills and be the best in<br>the world at it<br>there's many skills in mixed martial<br>arts<br>but george identified one skill<br>which is the skill of striking to take<br>downs he calls it shoot boxing<br>shoot boxing was barely even a<br>category of skill when george began it<br>was just the idea that wrestlers<br>grabbed people and took them down the<br>same way they did in wrestling and<br>and you threw some punches before you<br>did it<br>okay george<br>largely pioneered this science<br>of creating an interface between<br>striking and takedowns<br>he did it at a time where<br>no one else before him had made it into<br>a system or a science<br>he did it largely on his own and<br>i've always said george is the only<br>athlete that i ever coached who taught<br>me<br>more than i taught him and<br>almost single-handedly he created this<br>strong sense of shoot boxing as a<br>science<br>which enabled him throughout his career<br>to determine where the fight would take<br>place<br>would it be standing or would it be on<br>the ground and that<br>more than anything else was the defining<br>characteristic of his success<br>um i will always be<br>immensely impressed by his<br>accomplishment in that regard he was an<br>innovator he did things differently this<br>is such an important point<br>you can't go out there in combat sports<br>and do the same things that everybody<br>else is doing<br>and expect to get different results<br>life doesn't work that way if you want<br>to be dominant<br>you got to find one important part of<br>the sport and preferably more than one<br>and be the best in the world at it you<br>can't be weak at anything<br>but you can't be strong at everything<br>either life's not long enough for us to<br>develop a<br>truly complete skill set so you've got<br>to be good at everything<br>and you've got to be the best at at<br>least one thing and george was the best<br>at two in his era he was the best at<br>striking to take downs and he was the<br>best at integrating<br>striking and grappling on the floor<br>let me ask you a completely ridiculous<br>question<br>but it's a fascinating one for me from<br>an engineering and a scientific<br>perspective<br>when i look at a sport really any<br>problem<br>one way to ask how difficult is this<br>problem<br>is to see how can i build a machine<br>that competes with a human being at that<br>problem you can look at chess<br>you could look at soccer robocup<br>and then you could look at grappling<br>there's something about when you start<br>to think<br>how would i build an ai system a robot<br>that defeats<br>somebody like gordon ryan where it<br>forces you to really think<br>about formalizing this art<br>as a as an engineering discipline in the<br>same<br>way you do but you you you still have<br>some art injected in there<br>there's no space for art when you<br>actually have to build the system that's<br>not a ridiculous question that's a<br>damned interesting question<br>let's put aside the like like i<br>mentioned with the boston dynamics spot<br>robots<br>what people don't realize is the amount<br>of power<br>they can deliver is huge so let's take<br>that weapon aside<br>just the amount of force you're able to<br>deliver yeah yeah<br>i'm glad you're specifying that um uh<br>so essentially your question is okay can<br>can a talented group of engineers create<br>a robot which could defeat gordon ryan<br>on the face of it um as you just pointed<br>out that's the easiest project in the<br>world<br>just create a robot that carries a nine<br>millimeter automatic and shoot them five<br>times in the chest okay that's that<br>gordon ryan's done<br>um so that's not the interesting<br>question the interesting question<br>and i if i understand you correctly is<br>if we had the ability<br>to create a robot whose physical powers<br>were identical<br>to gordon ryan not inferior and not<br>superior<br>what would it take to create a mind<br>inside that robot that would be gordon<br>ryan in the majority of matches yeah<br>and there's two ways to build ai systems<br>this is true for autonomous<br>driving for example which has been quite<br>contested<br>recently so one is you basically one way<br>to describe<br>is you have a giant set of rules<br>it's like this tree of rules where you<br>apply a different condition when there's<br>a pattern you see<br>you apply a rule and they're hard coded<br>in you basically get<br>like a john donner type of character who<br>tries to<br>encode hard code<br>into the system all the moves you should<br>do in every single<br>case of course you can't actually do<br>that fully<br>so you're going to be taking shortcuts<br>uh what are called heuristics<br>just basic basic kind of generalizations<br>and apply your own expertise as an<br>expert of<br>in this case grappling to see how that<br>can be encoded as a rule<br>now the other approach elon musk and<br>tesla taking this approach<br>which is called machine learning which<br>is<br>create a basic framework of the kind of<br>things you should be observing<br>and what are the measures metrics of<br>success<br>and then just observe and see which<br>things lead to success<br>more success and which lead to less<br>success and there's a delta<br>you like when you when you see a thing<br>first of all the way machine learning<br>works is you predict<br>you see a position or you see a<br>situation<br>and then you predict how good that is<br>and then you watch<br>how it actually turns out and if it's uh<br>worse or better you adjust your<br>expectations yes<br>through that process you can learn quite<br>a lot<br>the the challenges<br>and this might be a very true challenge<br>in grappling<br>is uh in like in driving<br>you can't crash so<br>there's a physical world in chess for<br>example where this<br>approach has been exceptionally<br>successful you can work in simulation so<br>you can have<br>a ai system that for example<br>with as in the case with alpha zero by<br>deepmind google's demand<br>it can play itself in simulation<br>millions of times billions of times<br>it's difficult to know if it's possible<br>to do that<br>in stimulation for for for anything that<br>involves human movement<br>like grappling so that's<br>my sense is if we first look at the<br>hard encoding if you were to try to<br>describe gordon ryan to a machine how<br>many<br>rules are in there do you think yeah um<br>first off<br>let me tell you that's one of the most<br>fascinating questions i've ever been<br>asked<br>and uh i'm tremendously happy to answer<br>this<br>um how about what we do is this is a<br>this is a massive question you've asked<br>there's a<br>huge amount of ways this could get very<br>interesting and very confusing<br>let's set some ground rules for the<br>discussion<br>um uh lex alluded to<br>the idea of man versus machine and<br>chess okay and i think that's a really<br>good place for us to start<br>the the discussion um i'm going to<br>uh just tell people about a little bit<br>the history of<br>man versus chess to give you guys some<br>uh<br>some background on this in 1968 there<br>was a<br>a party in which a highly ranked not not<br>a world champion but a highly ranked<br>chess player and his name was levy<br>and he met a<br>a computer engineer at a party<br>and they had a a<br>a light-hearted bet that in a 10-year<br>time frame<br>a human chess player would be defeated<br>by a computer now you gotta remember<br>1968 computing power was<br>very very low the computers that got<br>america to the moon were<br>were actually pretty damn primitive your<br>iphone would kick all of their asses<br>so computational power was very very low<br>in those days<br>so interestingly the chess player fully<br>believed that no computer could beat<br>them in the 10-year time frame<br>and the the computer engineer was very<br>optimistic that he was wrong and<br>in fact 10 years uh the computer would<br>win<br>10 years later they had a competition<br>and the human won<br>uh decisively in fact so<br>computational power simply hadn't risen<br>to that level yet<br>through the 1980s computational power<br>increased<br>but not sufficient to to to get to<br>championship level<br>there were computer programs in the<br>1980s which were competitive with<br>good solid chess players but not world<br>beaters<br>understand right from the start that<br>there's a fundamental problem here<br>the number of options<br>that the two players in a chess board<br>can run through<br>is astronomically high there are 64<br>squares on a chess chessboard<br>the number of possible options that can<br>could work or could play out on a<br>chessboard<br>and this is a truly shocking thing for<br>you to think about<br>the number of possible options is higher<br>than the number of atoms in the known<br>universe think about that for a second<br>in terms of complexity okay the number<br>of atoms on this<br>table is massive<br>okay that is an unbelievably large<br>number<br>then we're talking about a situation<br>where if a computer had to go through<br>all the options at the onset of a match<br>they would have to<br>run numbers greater than the number of<br>atoms in the known universe the number<br>of galaxies and the number of<br>in our universe is vast okay it's<br>measured in the billions like the number<br>of atoms that's just<br>a number so mind blown it's impossible<br>okay so<br>no computer is ever going to be able to<br>work with those kinds of numbers<br>okay you that i don't even know if<br>future generations of quantum computers<br>could could work it with those kind of<br>numbers so that's the fundamental<br>problem okay the number of options in a<br>in a chess match is just so<br>astronomically large that no computer<br>could ever<br>figure out all the the available options<br>and make decisions in a given time frame<br>so that's<br>the fundamental problem so as lex<br>correctly pointed out the way you get<br>around this<br>is by the use of heuristics these are<br>rules of thumb<br>which give general guidelines to action<br>so for example in jiu-jitsu i could give<br>you a general rule of thumb<br>uh don't turn your back on your opponent<br>okay that's a solid piece of advice<br>there are obviously some exceptions to<br>that rule<br>but it's a good solid piece of advice to<br>give a beginner the moment you give that<br>heuristic rule<br>you rule out a lot of options okay<br>you've already told someone don't turn<br>your back don't turn your back on<br>someone<br>so a lot of possibilities have just been<br>turned away right there<br>so you've cut the number of options in<br>half right there just by giving one<br>heuristic<br>rule okay if you<br>were decent at j it's not great but<br>decent and you knew enough to give say<br>10 heuristic rules you could chop<br>that initially vast number of options<br>down<br>by a vast amount and now you're starting<br>to get to a point where if the computer<br>had sufficient<br>computational power it could start<br>getting through<br>the number of options in that acceptable<br>time frame so that's<br>the general pattern of the development<br>now things started getting very<br>interesting in the mid 1990s<br>with ibm's computer deep blue<br>there was a great chess champion of the<br>late 1980s and early 19<br>through the 1990s called gary kasparov<br>who<br>had been more or less undefeated for a<br>decade in 1996 he took on ibm's computer<br>deep blue<br>just to correct the record he was<br>undefeated<br>i apologize russian got it gotta make<br>sure they get very nationalistic about<br>their chairs be careful of these guys<br>deep blue lost the first confrontation i<br>believe in 1996 it was competitive but<br>lost<br>then in 1997 uh deep blue<br>won and it wasn't a complete walkover<br>kasparov i believe won one of the<br>matches but uh<br>they did unequiv er deeply unequivocally<br>won the confrontation<br>and it was seen as like this watershed<br>moment where<br>a computer beat the best human chess<br>player on the planet<br>and that was it there was there's no<br>coming back from that<br>i think it would be remembered as one of<br>the biggest moments in computing<br>history is is really when the first time<br>a machine beat a human at a thing that<br>humans really care about<br>in the in the domain of intellectual<br>pursuits yeah it was it was a<br>it was a powerful powerful moment now<br>not only was that a powerful moment but<br>things started getting truly interesting<br>from that moment forward<br>because then you started having<br>different areas of development<br>the general way in which<br>the progress is made from those early<br>starts in 1968<br>all the way through to deep blues<br>victory was<br>of the use of heuristic rules that<br>brought down<br>the number of potential options to a<br>manageable level<br>as computer power increased then it<br>could make<br>faster and faster and wiser and wiser<br>decisions and<br>make them at a rate which no human even<br>the best human could keep up with so<br>that was the general<br>way in which the the debate went<br>um but things got more interesting<br>after this with the advent of<br>computers that as you pointed out make<br>use of so-called machine learning<br>there were a company put out<br>uh a program alpha zero<br>which can look at the basic rule<br>structures<br>of chess and then ultimately play itself<br>in trial games and make trial and error<br>assessment of what are good and bad<br>strategies<br>so that with no human intervention a<br>computer could start doing remarkable<br>things<br>not only did uh<br>this company create alpha zero and there<br>were some other ones too that they<br>fought not only in chess but in the much<br>more complex asian game of go<br>which has far more potential options<br>than chester by a very significant<br>margin yes<br>these machine learning programs not only<br>easily defeat any human in chess but in<br>go<br>as well and what's truly remarkable is<br>they weren't just beating them<br>when alpha zero took on a rival chess<br>program which by itself was already<br>superior to any human<br>it only required four<br>hours starting from learning the rules<br>of chess<br>to figuring out how to beat the second<br>most powerful chess program in the world<br>that's insane that's literally like<br>taking a human<br>telling the rules of chess they play<br>some games with themselves<br>for four hours and they go out and beat<br>gary kasparov<br>this is like to me this is a<br>truly exciting development far beyond<br>even what deep blue did<br>i like how you said exciting not<br>terrifying yeah because i agree with you<br>on the exciting<br>now things also get exciting in a<br>different direction<br>there is another possibility which few<br>people foresaw<br>after the deep blue episode this is<br>where<br>a new form of chess started to emerge<br>sometimes called<br>cyborg chess or centaur chess<br>we're humans of moderate chess level<br>playing ability<br>not world champions just decent but not<br>great<br>i guess you might say like purple belts<br>and juditson<br>allied themselves with computers<br>so the humans and computers worked as a<br>cyborg<br>team the humans supplied<br>the heuristic insight the computers<br>supplied the computational power<br>and fascinatingly they proved to be<br>superior to both the best humans<br>and the best chess programs<br>the united force of human insight<br>with heuristics with computers ability<br>to go through<br>uh numbers in far more rapid form than<br>any human could ever hope to do<br>proved to be one of the strongest<br>combinations and enabled<br>that pairing of human and computer<br>to overwhelm both the best single human<br>and the best single computer that adds a<br>whole new level<br>of fascination to this topic so to<br>wind things up here we've got this<br>fascinating<br>initial question from lex the idea of<br>could there be<br>a computer inside a robot<br>which doesn't have any special<br>physical properties this is mind versus<br>mind because the bodies negate each<br>other the robot is the same body<br>as gordon ryan this is a thought<br>experiment what would it take<br>to create a mind that would defeat the<br>mind<br>of gordon ryan<br>based on the chess example it would<br>appear that this is entirely feasible<br>at some point in the future and in fact<br>i would go further and say it's actually<br>quite likely<br>based on what we've seen from the<br>example of chess<br>the rate of progress in a.i in the last<br>20 years<br>or has dwarfed anything from the<br>previous<br>50 years and the rate continues<br>to increase we're talking now at a level<br>with<br>machine learning defeating world<br>champions<br>in chess and go and four hours like<br>just from starting from the rules of the<br>sport<br>um this is this is going to be difficult<br>for<br>humans to keep up with now in humans<br>favor<br>could we take gordon ryan and put<br>a chip inside his brain that created the<br>same cyborg effect as we saw in centaur<br>chess and cyborg chairs<br>and then take gordon ryan to a new level<br>where suddenly his computational powers<br>were massively increased he still has<br>his heuristic insight<br>but he has vastly augmented<br>computational powers<br>that's the interesting battle i uh<br>you asked a great question lex let me<br>give you my initial<br>push or for an answer would be that if<br>it's just gordon ryan<br>versus your your uh your robot<br>technology<br>in 10 years i would say with machine<br>learning i<br>say you guys win every time but if it is<br>cyborg gordon ryan where he's part<br>part gordon ryan with heuristics and<br>part machine then<br>and now that's where i throw the<br>question back at you young man<br>what do you think well it's fascinating<br>to hear your answer that's very<br>interesting because because there's a<br>there's a lot of different ways you can<br>build a cyborg gordon ryan<br>so one is there's the neural link way<br>which is basically<br>say doing what you're suggesting which<br>is<br>expanding the computational capabilities<br>of gordon ryan's brain<br>like directly being able to communicate<br>between a computer and the brain<br>so most of you preserve<br>uh most of what there is in the human<br>body including the nervous system and<br>the the computing system we currently<br>have that's biological and expanding it<br>with the computer<br>there's also on the cyborg chest front<br>the like magnus carlson the current<br>world champion in chess<br>he studies alpha zero games<br>like that it's not a regular thing for<br>high-level grand masters<br>from what i understand almost every uh<br>chess master now<br>studies computer games for for<br>inspiration like that<br>just as um great chess players from the<br>past used to go back into old<br>leather-bound books of previous<br>grand masters and study games and books<br>nowadays most people<br>when they want to study the most perfect<br>games they actually study<br>programs like alpha zero yeah and it's<br>not just for inspiration it's education<br>it's i mean it's<br>literally part of their training right<br>yeah this isn't like a fun<br>side thing it's just the main way to get<br>better<br>so um so there's a certain element there<br>where even<br>our human brains can be trained by<br>observing<br>the partial explorations<br>of an ai systems in the space of<br>grappling<br>that could be actually in simulation it<br>doesn't have to be in the physical world<br>it could be uh in<br>if we construct sufficiently good<br>biomechanical models of human beings<br>machines can learn how they grapple<br>there's there's quite a bit of<br>that already open ai has the system of<br>uh<br>there's like sumo wrestlers with some<br>basic goals of pushing each other off of<br>a<br>platform and you know nothing from the<br>you don't even know<br>so you have a basic model of a bipedal<br>system<br>it doesn't even know in the beginning<br>how to stand up it just falls<br>right so it has to learn how to get up<br>and they do that through self play<br>they they learn how to get up they learn<br>how to move enough to<br>achieve the final goal which is to push<br>your opponent off of the thing<br>fascinating so they've learned that now<br>open ai<br>is not those folks are currently not<br>that interested in the grappling world<br>so they kind of stop there<br>but it's very possible in stimulation to<br>then<br>develop ideas in fact this is something<br>i<br>should probably do because it's pretty<br>natural to do and easy<br>is ideas of control and submission and<br>all all the<br>you know you add the ability to<br>[Music]<br>i don't know how to put it nicely but to<br>uh to<br>choke your opponent uh and uh<br>to break their body parts off which is<br>what<br>is add that in and what kind of<br>ideas they'll come up with is very<br>fascinating i<br>actually don't know until this<br>conversation i don't know why i never<br>even thought about that i've been very<br>obsessed with just like walking and<br>and running and all those kinds of<br>things like evolving<br>different strategies for when you have a<br>bunch of<br>so one difficult thing for robots is<br>when you have uneven terrain<br>and there's uncertainty about the<br>terrain it's how to keep walking<br>or when when there's a bunch of things<br>being thrown at you all that kind of<br>stuff<br>and you learn uh through self-play how<br>to be able to navigate those uncertain<br>environments when there's a lot of weird<br>objects and all those kinds of things<br>there's no reason why you can't just do<br>that with uh with submissions<br>and so on in simulation that'll be<br>actually fascinating but<br>once we might be surprised by the kind<br>of strategies<br>in simulation these ai systems will<br>develop<br>and that might make a much better gordon<br>ryan and much better john donohar<br>in wait it in asking the dean lister<br>question of like why are we only using<br>why are we not doing x but on the actual<br>sort of<br>grappling event in the physical space<br>i've been very surprised and a little<br>bit disappointed by how difficult<br>it's to build<br>a system that's able to<br>have the body of gordon ryan or a human<br>being actually<br>which means it's not just the the<br>biomechanics which is very difficult to<br>do<br>but also all of the senses that are<br>involved<br>be able to perceive the world as richly<br>to be able to<br>there's something called soft robotics<br>which is is incredibly difficult to do<br>through touch understand the hardness of<br>things<br>we don't understand as human beings just<br>how much we're able to touch to<br>experience the world<br>and to manipulate the world like the the<br>the process of picking up a cup<br>is very similar to the process of<br>grappling all the feeling<br>that you do all the leverage that you're<br>applying there is<br>so many degrees of freedom in both the<br>in the interactive sense<br>in the sensing and the applying sensing<br>and applying you're doing that<br>through so much of your body that's just<br>going to be<br>very difficult to build a system that's<br>able to experience the world and act<br>onto the world as richly as we humans<br>can<br>yeah if um if picking up a cup is<br>a seemingly insurmountable challenge<br>then then taking someone down<br>controlling them getting past their legs<br>that's going to be one hell of a project<br>exactly i mean there could be shortcuts<br>but i mean currently that's<br>um that's that's the field called uh<br>robotic manipulation which is picking up<br>objects<br>usually they have like a ball and a<br>triangular object and your whole task is<br>to like pick it up and<br>move it around generalizing that to the<br>human body<br>is harder but<br>perhaps not so so not as hard as we<br>might think<br>the question is how do you construct<br>experiments where you can do that safely<br>and chase that's very easy but here<br>it's very very problematic um<br>i guess you could just have robot versus<br>robot<br>teamed up with each other and then they<br>learn and they're about to take on a<br>human opponent<br>yes exactly so you have two physical<br>robots<br>that interact with each other everything<br>you've said so far suggests that<br>many of the problems these tactical<br>elements they're easy tasks for humans<br>so which becomes more powerful more<br>quickly<br>robots that are taught to think like<br>humans or humans that are given<br>the computational power of uh of<br>of computers and robots themselves which<br>wins first<br>a cyborg gordon ryan or an artificial<br>robot gordon ryan really really strong<br>question<br>and i think i think by far the cyborg<br>gordon ryan yeah that's what i'm<br>thinking here<br>the problems you're talking about uh<br>with regards to the robots those are<br>those are deep problems like if<br>if picking up a cup is problematic it's<br>gonna be<br>damn difficult to but to a human let's<br>say you know that two-year-old can do<br>that<br>you're highlighting a very important<br>differences<br>human beings have something called<br>common sense<br>that we don't know how to build into<br>computers currently that's what picking<br>up the cup is<br>is some basic rules about the way this<br>world works we're able to this is when<br>we're children and we'll crawl around we<br>pick up<br>what humans don't have that machines<br>have is<br>incredible computational power and<br>access to infinite knowledge<br>computers can do that so if if you have<br>a gordon rhine with the infinite<br>knowledge and compute power<br>that's just going to because we know how<br>to do that<br>that that's going to blow out of the<br>water<br>update on the um uh the phenomenon of<br>cyborg<br>or centaur chess there was some debate<br>as to whether or not<br>um cyborg chess teams<br>could stay competitive with the uh the<br>latest<br>machine learning has there been any<br>update on that yeah i believe at this<br>point<br>machines dominate over the<br>machine human pairs with the human pairs<br>when they first came out they were good<br>chess players<br>but not great chess players does it make<br>any difference if you have say<br>gary kasparov and uh<br>and a a computer work in unison buses<br>yeah<br>joe blow from no no it does make a huge<br>difference but yeah both<br>are destroyed by machines that are<br>interesting and it's not even<br>competitive no<br>no it's not competitive but they also<br>lost interest in this kind of<br>uh idea so i think there's still<br>competitions between<br>human machine pairs versus human machine<br>pairs almost like uh<br>to see how the two work together but in<br>terms of machine versus human machine<br>pair<br>machines still dominate interesting so<br>and and now we've retrieved back as<br>human beings<br>caring mostly about human versus human<br>competition which is probably what the<br>future will look like<br>it's very interesting to think but like<br>that that<br>in chess happened really quickly it<br>won't happen<br>and it wasn't so painful in chess<br>because we care about chess but<br>it's not so fundamental to human society<br>in uh when you started talking about<br>cyborg gordon ryan's which really beyond<br>grappling<br>is referring to robots operating<br>physical space or human<br>robot hybrids operating physical space<br>you're talking about<br>our society is now full of cyborgs yes<br>and that that might that transition<br>might be very painful or<br>transformative in a way we can't even<br>predict<br>and that very much has applications<br>as both china and us now have legalized<br>is autonomous weapon systems so use of<br>these kinds of systems<br>and military applications so it used to<br>be<br>there'd been a big call in the ai<br>community to ban autonomous weapons so<br>the use of artificial intelligence<br>in in war just like bio weapons are<br>banned uh internationally so you're not<br>allowed to use bioweapons in war<br>and actually most people even terrorists<br>have kind of agreed on this ban<br>it's not like a there's been a quiet<br>agreement like we're not going to be<br>doing this because everybody's going to<br>get really pissed off<br>with autonomous weapon systems that's<br>not been the case<br>with china has said that they're going<br>to be using ai in their military<br>and uh the us in 2021<br>just released a report saying that<br>they're going to um<br>they're they're going to add increasing<br>amounts of artificial intelligence<br>into our military systems into drones<br>into<br>just everything that's doing any kind of<br>both strategic<br>and actual like bombing and<br>uh defense systems i presume uh<br>a drone army would easily defeat a human<br>army in the in the near future<br>like um i mean think about<br>just off the top of my head just think<br>about the implication of kamikaze drones<br>versus a naval fleet i mean kamikazes<br>was humans and world war ii did<br>terrible damage to our navy imagine<br>swarms of of uh mechanical kamikazes<br>which have no fear no remorse i mean<br>but it's very uh inefficient kamikaze is<br>very inefficient you want to be very<br>like war is it's the same discussion to<br>jiu jitsu right<br>you want to be uh you want to create an<br>asymmetry of power and you want to be<br>efficient as in the way you deliver that<br>power<br>it's actually goes back to the picking<br>up a cup<br>currently a lot of things we do in war<br>like so most of the drones that you hear<br>about they're not autonomous not most<br>all they're usually piloted by they're<br>piloted remotely<br>by humans and humans are really good at<br>this kind of<br>what's necessary to deliver the most<br>damage targeted damage<br>effective as part of the largest<br>strategy have about bombing the area or<br>all that kind of stuff<br>i don't know how difficult that is to<br>automate i think<br>the biggest concern i actually have a<br>sense that's very difficult to<br>automate the biggest concern is almost<br>like<br>an incompetent application of this<br>and uh consequences that are not<br>anticipated<br>so you have a drone army where you say<br>we want to target you give it power to<br>target a particular terrorist<br>and then there's some bug in the system<br>that<br>has like for example has a large<br>uncertainty about the location of that<br>terrorist<br>and so decides to bomb an entire city<br>you know almost like as a bug a software<br>bug i'm much more concerned about like<br>bad programming and software engineering<br>that i am about<br>like malevolent ai systems that uh<br>destroy the world so the more we rely on<br>automation<br>this is the lesson of human history the<br>more we give to ai<br>to software to robotic systems<br>the more we forget how to<br>supervise and oversee some of the edge<br>cases<br>all the weird ways that things go wrong<br>and then<br>the more stupid software bugs can lead<br>to huge damage like<br>you know even like nuclear explosions<br>those kinds of things<br>if we add ai into the launch systems<br>for nuclear weapons for example<br>i think human history teaches us that<br>software bugs<br>is what will leave lead to world war<br>three<br>not malevolent ai or human beings<br>interesting<br>by the way i deeply appreciate how<br>knowledgeable you are about the history<br>of artificial intelligence that was<br>awesome oh no<br>it's fascinating stuff you know i<br>remember reading when i was a child<br>about<br>you know turing tests and things like<br>this and visionaries from the 1950s had<br>ideas but<br>to see it come this far is just<br>fascinating to me um<br>okay so so what can we as jujitsu<br>players take away from this<br>we saw that when it comes to computers<br>versus humans in chess tournaments<br>humans had something truly valuable<br>to give to the computers that was<br>heuristic rules<br>in every coaching program that i run<br>i make an endless quest<br>to search out and find effective<br>heuristic rules that's the basis of a<br>good training program<br>heuristic rules and principles<br>give vast informational content<br>which can rapidly increase your<br>performance on the mat<br>just as they rapidly increase the<br>performance of chess computers<br>to overcome the human adversaries<br>the great human weakness is<br>computational power<br>most people vastly overestimate their<br>ability<br>to reason and problem solve under stress<br>in fact numerous psychological studies<br>have shown that humans can balance<br>a relatively small number of uh<br>of competing options in in in stressful<br>decision making<br>but what we do have what is it the great<br>and unique<br>human gift is this idea to come up<br>and arrive at heuristic rules and<br>principles which turn out to be<br>very effective guides to behavior for<br>both human behavior<br>and artificially intelligent behavior<br>make that your focus in study<br>don't try to remember ten thousand<br>different details on a move<br>okay that's that's human weakness not<br>human strength<br>our strength is heuristics make that<br>your focus<br>not endless computations over 25 details<br>here merge with 27 details here<br>that's not that's not what humans are<br>good at<br>the uniquely human strength is arriving<br>at these heuristic rules and principles<br>which guide our behavior<br>which provides simplifications which<br>enable us to take<br>vast amounts of information and parry it<br>down to a few simple rules that<br>effectively guide our behavior<br>take that core insight from the<br>discussion that lex and i just had it<br>was a complex discussion we both<br>apologize for going a little bit<br>overwatch that was awesome then dragging<br>you into some details there but take<br>that away from it love it it'll make you<br>better at jiu-jitsu<br>sorry legs that was uh<br>that was a really exciting discussion<br>and uh<br>the depths of knowledge in the<br>dimensions of knowledge you have<br>and interests you have is just<br>fascinating is there advice you have for<br>complete beginners<br>for white belts that are starting jiu<br>jitsu that are listening to this they<br>haven't done jiu jitsu i know there's a<br>lot of people who are<br>super curious to start is there advice<br>you would give them<br>on their journey uh yeah i'm just going<br>to talk about just<br>getting better on the mat okay because<br>there's a thousand other things you can<br>talk about in terms of like<br>morale and persistence and um how often<br>they should train is a thousand things<br>you get break up with your girlfriend or<br>boyfriend<br>that's one let's put that aside um<br>that's probably the best advice we give<br>um it goes back to what we said earlier<br>uh i always advocate start your training<br>from the ground up<br>okay your first sessions in jiu-jitsu<br>you're going to find<br>to your horror that everyone gets on top<br>of you and you can't get out<br>and it's a dispiriting crushing kind of<br>feeling that you<br>just have no skills and you have no<br>prospects in the sport<br>so your first skill is the skill of<br>being able to free yourself<br>from positional pins most of the escapes<br>in jiu-jitsu<br>go to guard position and so once you get<br>someone in your guard they're going to<br>be looking to pass your guard<br>and get back into those positional pins<br>that you just escaped from<br>and that's just as crushing as getting<br>pinned you feel like every time you try<br>to hold someone a guard they just<br>efficiently pass you by<br>so your first two skills you gotta<br>better get out of any pin<br>and you gotta better hold someone in<br>your guard so pin escapes and guard<br>retention<br>are your first two skills i generally<br>advocate the idea of learning to fight<br>from your back<br>first and then learning to fight from on<br>top<br>second why because the brute fact is<br>when you first start off you just don't<br>have enough skills to hold top position<br>or gain top position through a takedown<br>so inevitably you're going to end up<br>underneath people for most of your<br>training time<br>your training should reflect that in the<br>early days as a white belt<br>start with the first two skills you need<br>they're not the most exciting they're<br>not sexy skills that are going to make<br>you look<br>stuck in the training room but they're<br>going to keep your life long enough to<br>learn those sexy skills in the future<br>that'll make you look like a stud<br>start with pen escapes go to guard<br>retention<br>and focus heavily on those two when you<br>start to get into<br>offense start with bottom position<br>so there's a clear continuity between<br>your pin escapes<br>your guard retention and then your guard<br>itself<br>okay you've got different options with<br>guard<br>some of you're going to like closed<br>guard some of you are going to like<br>variations of open guard<br>some of you going to like to be seated<br>some of you like to be supine<br>some of you are going to like half guard<br>as a general rule<br>this is a heavy generalization but i'm<br>going to give it to you<br>in my experience most people benefit the<br>most by starting with half guard first<br>i know that traditionally jujitsu has<br>been taught closed guard first and then<br>all the other guards come after that i'm<br>a big believer in the idea of<br>start with pen escapes then go to guard<br>retention<br>and then start with half guard bottom<br>that way you get a nice continuity<br>between your first three skills<br>and you make good progress over those<br>first critical six months in jiu-jitsu<br>what does it take to get a black belt in<br>jiu jitsu<br>very little<br>[Laughter]<br>to show up pay your fees<br>don't set your goals low okay don't even<br>ask yourself that question no one cares<br>if you've got a black belt<br>okay the only thing that counts is the<br>skills you have i know plenty of black<br>belts that suck<br>okay there's a lot of them out there um<br>don't lower your standards by saying i<br>want to get a black belt<br>ask yourself something much more<br>important how good do i want to be<br>you want to be damn good right you want<br>to do something invest time and you want<br>to be the best you can<br>wearing a belt around your waist doesn't<br>guarantee that build skills focus on<br>that<br>let me ask you about the fourth thing in<br>facet face of jiu jitsu which is self<br>defense<br>let's say the bigger things i don't know<br>if you<br>you know i don't know why it's called<br>self-defense it's called street fighting<br>let's call it fighting okay maybe maybe<br>you can contest us<br>that terminology how about non-sport<br>fighting<br>non-sports funny like street fighting<br>what happens if you go out on a<br>playground you're fighting on grass<br>they're no longer street fighting<br>it's like tennis you have like wimbledon<br>like grass courts and<br>it's a whole other thing uh no is there<br>um<br>what do you think is the best martial<br>art for street fighting<br>what is the best set of uh we talked<br>about advice<br>for white belts to advance in in uh<br>in grappling in jiu jitsu<br>what is the set of techniques maybe<br>martial art that is best<br>for street fighting okay um again<br>you're asking some truly fascinating<br>questions here<br>um<br>the way this gets framed as a question<br>is often<br>condemns you to bad answers from the<br>start<br>this is uh as a questioner i'm i'm<br>trying to achieve asymmetry of power<br>and i'm winning um<br>put you in a bad position don't worry<br>so much about people always gonna say<br>you know is this martial art better or<br>is this martial arts better<br>the truth is uh<br>there's only one way to say this<br>combat sports are your best option for<br>self-defense<br>there are many martial arts and there is<br>a rough divide<br>between the two those that fall into<br>combat sports and those that fall into<br>non-sporting martial arts where there's<br>no<br>uh competitive<br>live sparring element where<br>most of the knowledge is limited to<br>theoretical knowledge reinforced by<br>passive drilling<br>if you have a choice between a combat<br>sport versus<br>a non-sporting art based around<br>theoretical knowledge and passive<br>drilling<br>go with a combat sport<br>nothing will prepare you for the<br>intensity<br>of a genuine altercation better<br>than combat sports<br>many people as i say these words are<br>probably<br>horrified to hear me say this and uh<br>immediately going to rebut and say no<br>combat sports is exactly the wrong thing<br>for you to do<br>because they have safety rules etc etc<br>which<br>uh would easily be exploited in a real<br>fight and if i fought a world<br>championship<br>boxer i would just poke them in the eye<br>or kick them in the groin etc you heard<br>these arguments a thousand times<br>um yes there is some validity to these<br>things but as a general rule<br>if you ask me to bet in any form of<br>street fight call it what you want<br>between<br>a combat sport adherent versus someone<br>who<br>simply trains drills and<br>talks in terms of theories of what they<br>would do in a fight<br>i'm gonna go with the combat sport guy<br>every single<br>time now having said that<br>combat sports need to be modified<br>for the use of self-defense street<br>fighter we haven't agreed on it to him<br>yet we'll figure it out later<br>um what does this modification consist<br>of<br>well some of it is technical okay for<br>example<br>a boxer in a street fight now has to<br>punch<br>without wrapped or gloved hands and<br>that's problematic<br>okay your hands are not really designed<br>for heavy extended use of clubbing hot<br>objects there's a very high likelihood<br>of<br>breaking your hands mike tyson was one<br>of the finest punches that ever lived<br>but in one of his more famous street<br>fights against mitch green<br>in the late 1980s he broke his hand<br>with one punch that he threw his<br>opponent hit the wrong part of the head<br>and broke his hand and he was one of the<br>most gifted punches of all time<br>if he can do it you'll certainly have<br>trouble protecting your hands<br>and when you go to throw blows um<br>nonetheless this is easily modified and<br>so a boxer can throw with with uh<br>open hands or with elbows and so just a<br>small modification and technique<br>can overcome that problem so what you'll<br>find<br>is that the general physical<br>mental conditioning and skill<br>development that comes from combat<br>sports<br>allied with technical<br>modifications and then the most<br>important of all<br>tactical modifications will provide your<br>best<br>hope in altercations<br>outside of sports in the street or<br>wherever you find yourself<br>the least effective approaches to<br>self-defense that i have observed in my<br>life have been those where as i said<br>people talk to theory<br>drilled on passive opponents and<br>generally had no engagement<br>in live competition or sparring<br>in their training programs<br>the most effective by a landslide<br>with those that put a heavy emphasis on<br>live sparring and sporting competition<br>modified both technically and tactically<br>for the circumstances in which they<br>found themselves<br>people talk for example about how you<br>know um<br>and with some validity that weapons will<br>change everything in a<br>in a street fight there's absolute truth<br>to that but this extends into weapons as<br>well okay<br>the most effective forms of of<br>knife fighting that you'll see will be<br>those who<br>come from a background in fencing<br>because it has<br>sparring and a competitive sport aspect<br>to it but would pure fencing be the<br>appropriate thing of course not you'd<br>have to modify it<br>but the reflexes endurance physical<br>mobility that you gained from the sport<br>of fencing could<br>easily be modified to play craft in a in<br>a fight situation<br>what you want to look for with regards<br>street and self-defense is not okay<br>which style should i choose should i<br>choose taekwondo should i choose karate<br>should i choose this variation of kung<br>fu no<br>focus on the most important thing does<br>it have a sport aspect to it<br>then once you've made sufficient<br>progress in the sport aspect of that<br>martial art<br>start asking yourself what are the<br>requisite modifications and technique<br>and tactics that i have to<br>to use or to input<br>to make it effective for street<br>situations that's always the advice that<br>i give<br>so let me zoom in on a very particular<br>aspect of street fighting where<br>uh with all due respect i disagree with<br>mr joe rogan<br>and george st pieron which is uh the<br>suit and tie situation<br>now to criticize gsp yeah yeah he's very<br>accomplished and everything but to<br>criticize him for a bit<br>he made claims about how dangerous the<br>tie is<br>in a street fighting situation without<br>ever having used them<br>in a fighting situation so he made sort<br>of<br>broad proclamations without<br>understanding the fundamentals<br>so i thought i would go to somebody who<br>uh<br>thinks in systems what do you think<br>is it um is it dangerous to wear a tie<br>or not<br>in a grappling situation versus all the<br>other way<br>we were talking about in a street fight<br>here because there was nothing strange<br>to wear a tie in a grappling competition<br>he would be it would be uh yes in a<br>street fight situation okay<br>joe rogan thinks it is like the most<br>dangerous it's like it becomes your<br>weakest<br>point if you wear a tie because it's<br>very easy to choke<br>george saint pierre seemed to have<br>agreed with that also george added<br>that you can grab the tie and pull the<br>person down<br>to a knee yeah this is this is the go to<br>joe rogan will go for the choke<br>george st pierre will go for the tie to<br>the knee which i was saying is<br>ridiculous so what do you think<br>okay um first off i actually can speak<br>with experience on this because they<br>worked as a balancer for<br>over a decade and most of the clubs i<br>worked at did not require a suit and<br>time but occasionally they did<br>okay let's first differentiate between<br>the kinds of threats when you wear a tie<br>yes if you wear a tie if there is going<br>to be a threat<br>by far the more important threat is not<br>strangulation<br>okay being strangled by your tie is<br>possible<br>but it is a poor choice there are many<br>other ways to strangle people that are<br>far more efficient<br>if i strangle with you you're by your<br>tie i'm<br>literally in front of you um that means<br>as i go to apply the stranglehold i can<br>easily be eye gouged at sarah sarah<br>if you're going to strangle people on<br>the street do it from behind and<br>there's just much better ways to do it<br>than that hear that joe rogan<br>with regards to the snap down question<br>that's that is<br>more of a problem i always recommend if<br>you are going to work as a bouncer with<br>a tie<br>wear a clip-on tie so it just comes off<br>immediately<br>if you don't like clip-ons then you can<br>use a bow tie i used to work<br>for years with uh in hip-hop clubs with<br>uh members of the nation of islam<br>security team<br>that were known they had various<br>factions but the one i worked with<br>with the x-men and they would always<br>wear bow ties which of course can't be<br>grabbed<br>now um<br>the bow tie was that was a recognizable<br>part of their brand a security guard so<br>everyone<br>knew that that's what they were if if i<br>wore a bow tie<br>and a security situation people would<br>probably think that i was some kind of<br>nancy boy<br>and um uh and want to fight with me so i<br>couldn't wear one<br>so i would always wear a tie which you<br>should become familiar with mr freeman<br>that's the texas<br>bolo tie which is a kind of shoestring<br>tie<br>which is very very thin almost like<br>shoestring and rather short<br>and just has a simple pendant in the<br>middle um<br>this is perfect if you need to wear a<br>tie in a situation where you believe<br>there's a<br>high likelihood of you being grabbed<br>because it can't be grabbed yeah there's<br>nothing to grab it's literally like<br>string like if<br>if you pulled it it would just slip<br>through your hand um that tie that<br>you're wearing now<br>that would give me tremendous control of<br>your head and<br>i could easily turn into a hockey fight<br>situation where your head was being<br>pulled down out of balance<br>and you would have a hard time<br>recovering<br>so strangulation not really a problem<br>getting pulled down possible problem<br>solutions clip-on tie bow tie<br>or if you don't want to look like a<br>nancy boy wear<br>a bolo tie beautiful so you disagree<br>with joe rogan and agree with george st<br>pierre i love it<br>i feel like with i feel like this is an<br>instruction we put together here<br>on uh on street fighting it and the tie<br>speaking of joe rogan let me ask um<br>the following question he's uh currently<br>doing a podcast with gordon ryan<br>and probably going to try to convince<br>him<br>and you as he's already been doing to<br>move to austin what are the chances<br>of the donahue death squad coming in<br>to austin and opening a school in austin<br>and making austin home<br>so i can attend the classes there i<br>would definitely have to think about<br>that<br>um i do know that<br>i personally love new york yes but<br>every single person in the squad<br>despised new york<br>and wanted to leave for a long time so<br>um uh what was the nature of your love<br>for new york by the way<br>uh it was truly an international city<br>like i'm a big believer in the idea of<br>of breadth of experience and<br>if you want breadth of experience<br>usually requires extensive travel<br>but training people means you have to be<br>in a fixed location<br>working according to a schedule and<br>that pushed those two push in different<br>directions new york was the compromise<br>where<br>everyone from around the world came<br>there so you had breadth of experience<br>of world culture<br>but at the same time you had a fixed<br>location so you could run a training<br>program that produced world champions<br>so it was the ideal compromise um<br>it was a fascinating thing to teach<br>classes of over 120 people where<br>literally the entire world was<br>represented on the map<br>and go outside and see the same thing<br>it was truly uh<br>the world's leading international city<br>it was<br>um it was like the world's unofficial<br>capital a fascinating place to live so<br>um i loved it but the squad hated it for<br>them it was like an expensive<br>um things they never actually lived in<br>manhattan they always lived in<br>new jersey or long island had to commute<br>in so all they ever saw was the bridges<br>and the tunnels<br>the expensive daily parking fee so they<br>only saw the worst of new york<br>and um despite my pleas for them to move<br>into manhattan they never did<br>and so they they hated it they because<br>when all you see of new york is the<br>bridges and the tunnels and<br>yeah the the parking garage that's not a<br>pleasant thing<br>so um i understand where they're coming<br>from so<br>uh then when covert broke out um<br>uh they wanted to to move to puerto rico<br>and uh and and work there<br>now puerto rico is a beautiful<br>alternative to new york it's<br>in many ways has many advantages over<br>new york it's physically beautiful the<br>the uh the people are wonderful and um<br>uh it's it's a it's a just a wonderful<br>place to spend time<br>um freedom low taxes<br>all those kinds of things that's puerto<br>rico stands for yeah<br>it's uh texas on the other hand i know<br>everyone in the compromise right<br>texas is a compromise between those two<br>actually i must say that everyone<br>on the squad myself included loves texas<br>i<br>that there's no question about that i<br>know um gordon loves it<br>uh gary uh craig nikki that<br>everyone who comes here just loves texas<br>this that is incontestable<br>um of course in texas there's uh<br>many great cities austin has uh uh<br>always been one of my favorites i've i<br>love dallas i love austin<br>um and uh it has<br>the advantages of better infrastructure<br>as a place to train it has a much higher<br>population density<br>so that you could get a larger number of<br>prospective students and form a larger<br>squad<br>um it would uh it would definitely be a<br>fantastic place to to open up a gym<br>um i couldn't give an answer off the top<br>of my head it would be a big<br>move if we did make that move uh but<br>the the basic idea would be very<br>agreeable to everyone<br>on the team i will say that<br>well i'll just have to call my russian<br>connections to threaten the right kind<br>of people<br>and uh i definitely would love<br>the way you approach training the way<br>you approach the martial arts is<br>uh is something that's uh that i deeply<br>admire<br>as a scholar of these arts so it would<br>be amazing if you do come here<br>but either way it'd be amazing to train<br>together<br>let me ask a big ridiculous question<br>what do you think is the meaning of this<br>whole thing we talked about<br>at the beginning of the conversation<br>about death<br>and the fear of it the other big<br>question we ask about life is its<br>meaning<br>do you think there's a meaning to our<br>existence here on this little<br>spinning ball that's uh you<br>you've thrown some some powerful<br>questions that's the most powerful<br>um<br>for most of human existence<br>the meaning of life was very very simple<br>survival the only<br>thing that humans cared about was just<br>surviving because it was<br>so damn difficult for the early years of<br>human existence on this earth<br>if you look at ourselves as biological<br>agents everything about our body is set<br>up for one mission<br>and that is survival every reflex we<br>have every<br>element of our uh structure is just<br>built up on<br>the battle to survive<br>and then humans did something remarkable<br>they elevated themselves through the use<br>of<br>technology and social structure<br>to the top of the food chain<br>so that they went from extraordinary<br>extremely vulnerable if you take a a<br>naked human being<br>alone and put them in the serengeti<br>plains in africa<br>they're in some deep shit okay if you<br>look at a human being<br>as a survival organism just by itself<br>naked<br>they are among the most feeble at that<br>task in the entire animal kingdom<br>you compare us with predatory animals<br>we are weak and soft<br>and easily killed<br>but if you take that same human and put<br>them in a group<br>and you give him basic technology steel<br>a spear a knife<br>he goes from the bottom of the food<br>chain<br>to pretty much at the top<br>and so humanity found itself<br>in a crisis that emerged out of its own<br>success<br>for most of its history their only<br>interest was the battle to survive and<br>they<br>they did it i don't know how they did it<br>but they did it they got through ice<br>ages<br>droughts famines disease everything<br>and they found a way to get to the top<br>of the food chain<br>and that's where it all got interesting<br>because an organism whose only interest<br>was in survival<br>yeah had for the first time in their<br>history a more or less<br>guaranteed survival<br>and so the big question now is now what<br>we survived there's no more danger the<br>average human being<br>finds himself in a world now where<br>there's almost<br>zero danger from predatory animals where<br>getting a meal is the easiest thing ever<br>where getting to and from work is not<br>problematic at all<br>where the majority of infectious<br>diseases<br>medical complaints can be resolved in a<br>hospital<br>fairly easily<br>and so they start casting their mind<br>around okay<br>what do i do now and so<br>the minute mankind's<br>existence became more or less guaranteed<br>the problems shift from survival<br>to meaning and we found ourselves<br>grappling<br>with a whole new issue that had never<br>occurred to our ancient forefathers<br>but which now becomes one of the<br>centerpieces of our modern lives<br>i mean when you look at your own life<br>when you look back<br>you think i did a hell of a good job<br>you know uh hunter thompson has this<br>line that i often think about<br>that life should not be a journey to the<br>grave with the intention of arriving<br>safely in a pretty and well-preserved<br>body<br>but rather to skid in roadside in a<br>cloud of smoke<br>thoroughly used up totally worn out and<br>loudly proclaiming<br>wow what a ride that's which is the<br>complete<br>opposite of survival well not complete<br>opposite of survival but basically<br>embracing danger<br>embracing risk going big just<br>living life to the fullest so within<br>that context<br>what would make you proud of a life well<br>lived<br>when you look back you john donahue<br>looking back at your life<br>first i will address that question but<br>let's first look at<br>why hunter thompson could say that<br>because his life was more or less<br>guaranteed and safe<br>if you look at animals in the animal<br>kingdom the pattern of their life is<br>very simple<br>they take the least risk possible to<br>secure their existence<br>lions are powerful creatures but when<br>they go hunting they typically go for<br>the weakest animals they can kill in<br>order to eat because they don't want to<br>take the risk of injuring themselves<br>knowing that if they do they die so the<br>brute reality is<br>the only people who can talk about<br>having<br>casual danger in their lives are those<br>whose lives are guaranteed<br>and a fascinating small tangent hunters<br>thompson took his own life<br>so that's that seems like a deeply human<br>thing to suicide<br>yes um that's a fascinating question in<br>itself<br>if you look at the the number of<br>suicides per year it's a<br>shocking shocking statistic that gets<br>almost no recognition<br>and yes uniquely human you don't<br>very very few animals you see killing<br>themselves because their whole thing is<br>just survival<br>and that humans paradoxically when<br>survival is more or less guaranteed are<br>killing themselves in vast numbers<br>it's usually linked back to the idea of<br>meaning because it's so hard<br>it's it was hard to win the battle for<br>survival<br>but it's ten times harder to win the<br>battle for meaning<br>um<br>when i think about it first off i'll say<br>right from the back<br>there's never going to be an agreed upon<br>sense of meaning there's<br>as i said there was one thing that our<br>our physical bodies agreed upon<br>and which is hardwired biologically into<br>us and that's survival<br>but once we got to a more or less<br>guaranteed survival<br>then all bets were off at that point<br>you just have to start listing your own<br>criteria and what one person will<br>describe as a meaningful life another<br>person will<br>decry as is meaningless or wasted<br>um<br>there's something terrible about the<br>idea that we're<br>sitting around you know waiting for<br>meaning to show up on our doorstep<br>but what i find the best people do is<br>they take charge of it and they<br>look at their lives and in a form of<br>authorship<br>where they see their life as a tale<br>to be written and they do their best<br>to write that tale and put as much<br>control over the<br>the direction of this story as they can<br>in the end we all have to just try and<br>write our own<br>story we all have our own interests i<br>try<br>to bring in the sense that even though<br>i'm<br>an atheist i don't believe that we go on<br>to<br>to live after this i'm i i believe that<br>there's a possibility<br>of a god and afterlife i don't say it's<br>impossible<br>but in order for me to believe that they<br>exist i'd have to see better evidence<br>than i see<br>currently nonetheless i do believe<br>that there is a great value in the idea<br>of<br>living for something bigger than<br>yourself<br>the moment you see yourself as the be<br>all and end all of your existence you're<br>in for a meaningless life<br>and nothing will ever satisfy you you<br>can have all the money in the world you<br>can have all the power in the world<br>you'll be empty inside<br>i do believe that humans have a deep<br>and abiding need to follow<br>the interests of a group bigger than<br>themselves as an individual<br>is it ideal no is it an answer to the<br>meaning of life nope<br>because eventually that group will<br>itself die out so there's a sense in<br>which it<br>that just plays a kind of delaying game<br>but i do believe that in order to live<br>a happy life meaning<br>as a central part of that and the<br>deepest sense of meaning<br>not a fully complete answer but a better<br>answer than most people give us to<br>to find something which hopefully does<br>very little harm to the people around<br>you and mostly benefits them<br>which enables you to become part of a<br>community<br>and to live as i said for something<br>larger than than you as an individual<br>if there is such a thing as the perfect<br>conversation<br>it would be a conversation on<br>death meaning and robots<br>with the great john donna john i've been<br>a fan<br>it's a huge honor that you would waste<br>all your time today thank you so much<br>for talking today my pleasure thank you<br>thanks<br>thanks for listening to this<br>conversation with john donahue and thank<br>you to<br>onyet simplisafe indeed and linode<br>check them out in the description to<br>support this podcast<br>and now let me leave you some words from<br>john donahue himself<br>in fighting and competition the<br>objective is victory<br>in training the objective is skill<br>development<br>do not confuse them as such one of the<br>best ways to train<br>is to identify the strengths of your<br>various partners<br>and regularly expose yourself to those<br>strengths<br>thank you for listening and hope to see<br>you next time