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