back to indexJohn Clarke: The Art of Fighting and the Pursuit of Excellence | Lex Fridman Podcast #143
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The following is a conversation with John Clark.
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He's a friend, a Brazilian jiu jitsu black belt,
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former MMA fighter, and at least in my opinion,
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one of the great UFC corner man coaches to listen to.
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And also, he's my current jiu jitsu coach
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at Broadway Jiu Jitsu in South Boston.
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He was once, for a time, a philosophy major in college,
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and is now, I would say, a kind of practicing philosopher,
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opinionated, brilliant,
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and someone I always enjoy talking to even when,
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especially when, we disagree, which we do often.
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He's definitely someone I can see talking to
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many times on this podcast.
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In fact, he hosts a new podcast of his own
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called Please Allow Me.
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Quick mention of each sponsor,
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followed by some thoughts related to the episode.
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Thank you to Theragun,
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the device I use for post workout muscle recovery,
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Magic Spoon, low carb keto friendly cereal
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that I think is delicious,
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Eight Sleep, a mattress that cools itself
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and gives me yet another reason to enjoy sleep,
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and Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends.
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Please check out these sponsors in the description
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to get a discount and to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that martial arts,
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especially jiu jitsu and judo,
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have been a big part of my growth as a human being.
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So I think I will talk to a few martial artists
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on occasion on this podcast.
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I hope that is of interest to you.
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I won't talk to people who are simply great fighters
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or great athletes, but people who have a philosophy
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that I find to be interesting and worth exploring,
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even if I disagree with parts or most of it.
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I like alternating between historians
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and computer scientists, fighters and biologists,
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and between totally different worldviews and personalities,
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like Elon Musk and Michael Malice.
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This world, to me, is fascinating
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because of the diversity of weirdness
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that is human civilization.
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I love the weird and the brilliant,
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and hope you join me on the journey of exploring both.
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If you don't like an episode, skip it.
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For an OCD person like myself,
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sometimes not listening to a podcast episode
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is an act of courage.
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It's like not finishing a book even though you're 80% done.
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Listen to ones you like, and don't listen
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to the ones you don't like.
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I know, it's profound advice.
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If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
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review it with five stars on Apple Podcast,
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follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,
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or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
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And now, here's my conversation with John Clark.
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You ready for this?
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I've been ready for this my whole life.
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All right, I was thinking of doing a Kerouac style road trip
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across the United States,
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after this whole COVID thing lifts.
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You ever take a trip like that?
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I've done a handful of long distance driving trips
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up and down the East Coast, but also from the West Coast
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back to the East Coast, and then returning to California.
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So I've definitely done my fair share
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of driving in this country.
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Do you have the longing for the great American road trip?
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I think there are so many things
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that I've been lucky enough to see in the world
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that I now, at this point in my life, realize
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there are tons of things that I need to see here
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in this country, and a road trip could potentially
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be the best way to see them.
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I think to do it effectively, you need an amount of time
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where you can be as leisurely as possible.
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There's no deadline, and there's no,
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I've gotta make it from Chicago to St. Louis by sundown
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to get to this place at this time.
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I think you really need to be able to take your time
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and kind of let the road take you where you need to go.
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It feels like you need a mission though, ultimately.
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There's a reason you need to be in San Francisco.
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That's like the Kerouac thing.
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You have to meet somebody somewhere kind of loosely
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in a few weeks, and then it's the,
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as you struggle on towards that mission,
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you meet weird characters that get in your way,
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but ultimately sort of create an experience.
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I think having a loose deadline is good,
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but that's a beginning and an end point,
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and what I mean is I don't wanna have to be,
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all right, we're leaving, say, Boston on Sunday night.
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Let's get to New York by Monday morning,
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and then from New York, we're gonna go to Philly,
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and we've gotta be in Philly at four.
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A vague beginning and end is fine,
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but I think having very strict guidelines in between
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will rob you of certain experiences along the way.
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If you have a timeframe to get from Philly to Indianapolis
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and some awesome shit starts to happen in Philly,
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do you really wanna have to cut it short
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because you gotta be in Indianapolis by sunup?
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Why do you have to be anywhere by any time
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for any reason, really?
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Plans change all the time, exactly,
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but if we're talking about having a mission
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or the type of road trip,
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I just think it would be best to have it
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as loose and flexible as possible.
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You gotta make hard deadlines and then break them.
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Totally change the plans.
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Disappoint people, break promises.
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That's the way of life.
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Somebody's waiting for you in St. Louis,
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and all of a sudden, you fell in love
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with a biker in New York.
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I don't know what you're up to.
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I can appreciate that, but on a trip like that,
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I feel like a trip with deadlines
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is for a different point in your life,
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and at this point in my life,
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I don't want any of the deadlines
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because it's not about meeting someone
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and disappointing them in St. Louis.
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It's about me not disappointing myself.
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You wanna have enough time in what you're doing
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to make sure that you get the full breadth
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of every experience that you encounter.
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How would you fully experience a place?
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I don't think I've actually fully experienced Boston.
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If you were showing up to a city for a week
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on this road trip, what would you do?
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So I'm gonna answer that in two parts.
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A few years ago, I had an opportunity to move out of Boston,
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and the thing that kept me here, no question about it,
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was the fact that I felt like I had a contract
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with my students, and I did not.
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I felt like a great many of them took a leap of faith
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by joining my gym and asking me to teach them what I know,
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and when I had an opportunity to leave Boston,
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I thought of those people,
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and I thought, I wanna fulfill my obligation to them.
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So because I made a decision to stay here,
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I then that summer made a decision
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to endear myself to the city of Boston,
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and I tried to find lots and lots
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of different things to do.
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I can tell you that the coolest thing
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that I found to do in this city is the MFA,
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where they have on Friday nights,
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they'll have different exhibits and stuff,
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and they'll have little beer carts and food tents,
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and you can go do a painting class off on the side.
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Very cool night of things to do.
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But in general, whenever I'm in a new city,
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I try not to pay attention to Google,
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and I try not to do anything that I find on a travel site.
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The best thing to do is to walk out of your hotel
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or wherever it is you're staying
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and find the most normal looking bar,
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have a drink, and talk to a bartender.
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So the people, the people.
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The people, and then you can experience that town
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the way that they experience it.
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Even in a city where there are tons of tourist attractions,
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locals probably visit the same tourist attractions
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when they have visitors come from out of town,
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you wanna see how they view those places
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and how they visit them.
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And you wanna go to eat where they're going to eat.
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Like, you're gonna, for the most part,
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the North End is not a place where I would take someone
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and say, hey, this is Boston's,
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the pinnacle of Boston dining,
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because it's very touristy.
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There are a handful of really good restaurants there,
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but I wanna know where the,
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I wanna go to Bogie's Place.
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I wanna know the down low spots where.
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The hell's Bogie's Place?
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It's like a little steakhouse in the back of J.M. Curly's.
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It's like a shitty bar?
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No, it's just a bar with like bar food.
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But I think that like.
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It is in Boston, yeah.
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It's not South Boston?
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No, it's in, it's in the downtown area.
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Like, I don't know what the neighborhoods
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are called here, honestly,
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because they have an area called Downtown Boston,
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and I don't even know what the hell that means.
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And they used to have the Financial District.
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Cause I've heard about the Southie.
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Southie is South Boston.
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But is there a difference between South Boston and Southie?
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No, it's the same thing.
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No, but like, you know, the mythical Southie.
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I think the mythical Southie
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is something that's long gone now.
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And the term now actually is Sobo.
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It's changed, what, who took over what?
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What's the, you know, the good will hunting personality.
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That's Southie, isn't it?
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Strong accent, those bad ass dudes.
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I came here right at the end of like,
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what was South Boston.
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So when I got, and my gym is in South Boston,
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the neighborhood was just starting to change.
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as gentrification happened
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and they started building more luxury condominiums,
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they were buying all these old businesses out,
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all the mom and pop businesses.
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And I think that kind of changed
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the makeup of the community.
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And it wasn't only because there was an influx
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of new young people with disposable income,
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it's because there's an exodus of the older people
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who kind of grew up and raised their families there
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because they were being offered
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humongous sums of money for their homes
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that they had bought like in the late 70s and early 80s
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so that they could develop those areas.
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So you have a combination of the influx of new people
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and the exodus of the old,
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and now you just got this totally new neighborhood
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What do you love about Boston?
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Is there a love still for Boston?
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You certainly have the love of the thing
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that's gone as well.
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Yeah, I think, I don't wanna pinpoint pin this on Boston
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because it's happening in all great cities.
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As these areas become gentrified,
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what's happening is the personality
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and the character of the neighborhood
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is just being run out.
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And I have nothing against people coming in
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and making money and things like that.
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But when you do it at the expense of the culture,
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the character and the personality of the neighborhood,
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I mean, you're kind of standing on the shoulders of giants.
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These are the people that came here
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and built these areas up.
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It happens here in Boston,
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it happens in all over New York,
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happens on the West Coast.
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So what I love about Boston is not nearly as romantic
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as what it might've been 15 years ago
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and what I used to love about New York.
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What I love about Boston is that it's walkable.
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The food scene is on the rise here.
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But I think you're hard pressed to find the charm
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that people think of when they think of old Boston
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and old New England city.
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So yeah, I see it differently.
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People sometimes criticize like MIT
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like for the thing that it is now.
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But I think it is always like that.
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I tend to prefer to carry the flame of the greatness,
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the greatest moments of its history
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and like sort of enjoy the echoes of that
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in the halls of MIT.
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In the same way in Boston, you think about the history
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and that history lives on in the few individuals.
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Like you can't just look around what Boston is now
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and be like, what has Boston become?
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I think it was always carried by a minority of individuals.
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I think we kind of look back in history
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and think like times were greater
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in a certain kind of dimension back then.
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But that's because we remember,
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this is a ridiculous non data driven assertion of mine,
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is to remember just the brightest stars of that history.
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And so we romanticize it.
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But I think if you look around now,
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those special people are still living in Boston
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for which Boston will be remembered as a great city
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I think you're probably right, but isn't there some sort
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of theory about the point that there's like a certain age
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in your life where things resonate differently to you?
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Like, I think they've done studies
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where most people stop searching for new music
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Most dads you see like wearing super old clothes,
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like that's the style of the time period
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of the last great part of their life.
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So like there's an evolution in people
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and it could also be the memories of where they live.
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And when I was 17, of course my neighborhood
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was the best then because I was having the most fun.
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And we always kind of look at things through that tint,
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I think, and you're right.
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And I don't think there's anything wrong
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with the way cities are evolving now.
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It's just not, I prefer the time of like a mom and pop store,
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not a fabricated like gastropub that could just be like
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on a four lane super highway
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on your way out of Epcot Center.
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And it's actually owned by like some conglomerate.
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But there's still the special places.
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Like I, this takes us back to the road trip
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is maybe I tend to romanticize the experiences
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of like the diners in the middle of nowhere.
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What would you say makes for like,
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it feels like life is made up of these experiences
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that maybe on paper seem mundane,
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but are actually somehow give you a chance
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to pause and reflect on life
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with like a certain kind of people,
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whether like really close friends or complete strangers,
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maybe alcohol is involved in the middle of nowhere.
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It seems like a road trip facilitates that
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if you allow it to.
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Like what do you think makes for those kinds of experience?
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I think in the context of a road trip,
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I think it's like hyper localization.
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And I think it is those experiences along the way
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with people and the people that you're with
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will color the experiences differently
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depending on the person.
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The road trip you took was with somebody else or alone?
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So I've driven up and down the East Coast several times.
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When I drove from LA to New York,
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my friend was on the run from the cops.
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So we were trying to get out of.
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Yeah, traffic tickets.
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We were trying to get out of LA
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because he was going to have to go away for a little while.
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So we drove from LA and we just,
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we were young kids, we had no idea what we were doing,
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and we drove East.
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And then we had an unbelievable trip,
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mostly because we didn't really have a destination,
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we didn't really have a timeframe, thank goodness,
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because he got arrested again in Pennsylvania.
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So we got kind of stuck there.
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And then we drove back to LA
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when he got out in Pennsylvania.
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But all the stops along the way
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were kind of like weird things,
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like you have no money, right?
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So you're finding that like a little diamond
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in the rough place to eat,
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the diner you talk about, like that place.
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I once was in, where was I?
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I think I was in Buenos Aires.
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And the guy that I was with, he said,
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I know this quaint little spot around the corner.
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And I was young, I was like 25.
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And I thought the coolest thing in the world would be
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to be such a citizen of the world
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that you know these quaint little spots around the corner
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in like all these great cities.
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Like I know where to get this great chicken sandwich
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I know where to get this great meal in Costa Rica.
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I know where to get this super local egg in another country.
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And I just thought that that was really cool,
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the ability to do that anywhere in the world.
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Did you get closer with that guy through the trip?
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I found that like, so I took a trip across the United States
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with a guy friend of mine.
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We had different goals.
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I was searching for meaning in life
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and he was searching for,
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what's the politically correct way of phrasing it,
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but just basically trying to sleep
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with every kind of woman that this world has to offer.
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What's the difference between those two things?
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Well, I guess he was searching
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for the different kinds of meanings.
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Yeah, I mean, I still think that you can't find meaning
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between a woman's legs, I suppose.
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Have you tried all of them?
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But there was a tension there.
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We grew closer with those experiences,
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but we've gotten in fights.
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There was a lot of like literal almost fights
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and then we were close and there was like silences,
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but then we were like brothers
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and this whole weird journey of friendship that we went on.
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I think anytime you spend that much time
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in like a small space with another person,
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you're gonna have the different parts
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of the relationship will manifest themselves.
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You'll have the periods of closeness.
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You'll have the periods of vulnerability
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where it's like maybe you're driving through Denver
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and it's three in the morning
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and you talk about something
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you might not have otherwise talked about.
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You'll have the periods
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where you don't wanna see that motherfucker ever again.
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He didn't, and depending could be because of anything.
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But the guy that I drove twice with,
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we're still in contact, we're still buddies.
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We have very different goals also,
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but at that point in our lives,
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we never even contemplated the meaning of life.
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We were about probably more to the point
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of the friend that you drove with.
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We were more about racking up experiences,
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whatever they were.
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I wanna be able to retell this.
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Yeah, I wanna be able to retell this
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and it's gotta sound cool.
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Like I don't wanna retell a story about,
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yeah and then we drove through Alabama
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and they've got a lovely library
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and I checked out this book
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and I'm not interested in retelling that.
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Do you remember any, this is a kid's show,
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do you remember any stories that the kids would enjoy
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from those times that were profound in some kind of way?
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There were some impactful moments
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on the beginning of our road trip where we had no money
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and as a couple of kids who knew nothing,
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we literally had to, we stopped in Vegas
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and we went to Circus Circus.
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At the time they had $3 blackjack
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and we had like 12 bucks
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and my buddy was a kind of a degenerate gambler
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so he knew what was up.
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I was just like kind of stuffing chips in my pockets,
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making sure we could pay for the gas.
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And just being at a point which is like a starting line
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and like we drove from LA to Vegas,
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which is only about four hours
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and being at the starting line and realizing like,
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we may not even like get off the starting line here.
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And if we don't, what are we doing?
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We're gonna be two guys stuck in Vegas.
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We can't go West because you're gonna get pinched.
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We have no money to go East.
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What the hell are we gonna do?
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Are we gonna wind up in Vegas?
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So, you know, that was kind of a profound thing
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where you just, it's a turning,
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it potentially could have been a turning point in our lives
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had we not made enough money to continue going East.
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That's the beautiful thing about road trips
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when you're broke is like,
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in retrospect, everything turned out fine,
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but you're facing the complete darkness,
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the uncertainty of the possibilities laid before you.
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And like, I don't know if you were confident at that time,
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but like, I was really full of self doubt.
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Like just, all I could see is all the trajectories
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where you just screw up your life.
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Like, what am I doing with my life?
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I'm a failure, like all these dreams I've had,
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I've never realized I'm a complete piece of shit.
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All those kinds of things.
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I had no concept of consequence.
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I probably had toxoplasmosis.
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I had literally no concept of consequence.
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Immediate gratification was all I cared about.
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Oh, so existentialist.
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Yeah, it did not even enter my mind in my like early 20s
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that anything that I was doing at that point
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could reverberate for the rest of my life.
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I think part of me didn't even think I'd make it this far.
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And so I was not interested in like the long play.
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I remember thinking like,
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why should I be acting now in a way
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that might impact a point in my life I never reach?
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And yet now you are a man who searches for meaning in life,
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at least I would say to put another way,
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you think deeply about this world
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and in a philosophical context
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while also appreciating the violence
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of hurting other friends of yours, right?
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On a regular basis.
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So why do you think, I mean,
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maybe there's a broader question there,
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but it calls a personal question.
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It seems that people who fight for prolonged periods of time,
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like Jiu Jitsu people and mixed martial arts people,
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even military folks become over time philosophers.
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Is that, is there a parallel between fighting and violence
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and the philosophical depth with which you now have arrived
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from the starting point of being the full existentialist
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of like just living in the moment
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to like being introspective human now?
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I would say to that being a soldier
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or a warrior hundreds of years ago
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is probably what started the marriage
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between martial arts and philosophy.
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If you're constantly under someone else's charge
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and you're told to go out and walk in a line
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and overtake some Germanic tribe somewhere
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and that happens all the time, your job is being a soldier.
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On any given day, you might not come home.
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So I think that you have to start your day
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by thinking deeply about how you've lived to that point
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and the people that are living in and around you
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and how you've treated them.
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And I think that probably is what started the marriage
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of being kind of like a philosophical martial artist.
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You've got to really like on a daily basis,
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take stock of what's going on around you and inside you
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because we all suffer with this kind of idea.
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If today's my last day, did I do it right?
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And we don't really do it so much nowadays
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because we're so comfortable,
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but if we were being marched out to war every day,
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I think you'd see people live a little bit differently.
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And you treat the people around you
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a little bit differently.
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Do you think there's echoes of that
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in just even the sport of like grappling and Jiu Jitsu
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where you're facing your own mortality?
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We don't really think of it that way, but.
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To be honest, I think that a lot of people
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that train in a martial art in contemporary society,
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I don't consider them all martial artists.
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I think just because you train in martial art
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does not mean you're a martial artist.
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There are so many people that use martial arts
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as a form of exercise and like this little piece
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They use martial arts as a tagline in their Instagram bio.
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And it's really a form of exercise.
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It's something they do, it's not something they are.
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And I think there's a big difference there.
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There's a bunch of stuff mixed up in there
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because the Instagram thing is something you do for,
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it's also, it could be something you are for display
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versus who you are in the private moments
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of searching and thinking and struggling
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and all that kind of stuff.
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Instagram is a surface layer
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that much of modern society operates in,
link |
which is really problematic because there's that gap
link |
between the person you show to the world
link |
and the person you are in private life.
link |
And if you make majority of your project
link |
of the human project of your sort of few years
link |
on this earth, the optimization
link |
of the public Instagram profile,
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then you never develop this private person.
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But it does seem that if you do jiu jitsu long enough,
link |
it's very difficult not to fall into like,
link |
this has become a personal journey,
link |
an intellectual journey.
link |
Because like, if you get your ass kicked thousands of times,
link |
there's a certain point to where that,
link |
maybe it's like a defense mechanism,
link |
but that turns into some kind
link |
of deeply profound introspective experience
link |
versus like exercise.
link |
Yeah, so let me go back first
link |
and address the Instagram point,
link |
which I think there's a difference
link |
between people whose Instagram is intrinsically tied
link |
to their profession and they have
link |
to put a specific profile out there.
link |
And I think in general,
link |
people who truthfully their business is tied
link |
to their Instagram profile, I wanna exclude them.
link |
I think that most people,
link |
Instagram is how they want to be seen.
link |
And that's not always congruent with who you are,
link |
but I think there is a level of dishonesty there.
link |
Like this is how I want people to see me.
link |
I'm gonna put all this stuff in my Instagram bio,
link |
but that's really not me.
link |
And when you do that,
link |
I think it's a little disingenuous and you're right.
link |
There's not, you're never really gonna marry
link |
those two things together and it gets tough.
link |
Let me, sorry to interrupt,
link |
let me push back on something.
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This is a good time to address the many flaws
link |
of the great and powerful John Clark.
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Okay, let's go there.
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Cause it's interesting.
link |
You strive so hard for excellence in your life
link |
and for extreme competence that you are visibly
link |
and physically off put by people
link |
who have not achieved competence.
link |
Do you think we should be nicer to the people who are,
link |
like you mentioned, a person who first picks up an art,
link |
picks up, becomes vegan, starts doing CrossFit,
link |
start doing Jiu Jitsu for the first time
link |
and create that as their,
link |
they're struggling through this like, who am I?
link |
And they're really overly proud and it's kind of ridiculous.
link |
And you and your wise chair have seen many battles.
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Yeah, that you see the ridiculousness of that.
link |
I tend to, I'm learning to give those folks,
link |
not to mock them and to sort of give them a chance
link |
to do their ridiculousness because I think I was that too.
link |
Let me first clarify.
link |
I wanna be clear about what you mean
link |
when you say a level of competence.
link |
Now I've never won a world championship.
link |
I've never, you know, there are plenty of things in my life
link |
where I've not achieved what most people would consider
link |
to be the penultimate level of success.
link |
That's accomplishments.
link |
It's accomplishments, it's ribbons, it's things like that.
link |
And it's not that those things don't mean anything to me.
link |
And the fact that I haven't in some arenas
link |
is something that I wanna change,
link |
which is, we can talk about that in a second.
link |
But I think that there's a difference
link |
between the very eager noob of whatever it is they're doing
link |
who does the thing so that they can signal
link |
they do the thing.
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That's a person I have less respect for.
link |
So we know each other primarily through jujitsu.
link |
Look at a jujitsu tournament.
link |
There's this idea that people espouse online.
link |
I respect anyone with the guts to get on the mat
link |
and put it on the line and sign up for a tournament.
link |
That is the biggest load of shit I have ever heard.
link |
Do you know how easy it is for you
link |
to put your name on something
link |
and pay the registration fee and walk in there?
link |
That's not the hard part.
link |
That's the easiest part.
link |
I don't care if you lose your first match,
link |
but I respect the person who signs up for the tournament,
link |
registers for the tournament, goes on a diet,
link |
loses weight the right way, trains their ass off,
link |
and does the things properly and then goes on the mat.
link |
The person who simply signs their name
link |
on the registration form and jumps on the mat,
link |
if they haven't done these other things,
link |
they actually have nothing to lose.
link |
Because what they've done is they've stepped onto the mat,
link |
in the ring, in the cage with a bucket full of excuses.
link |
Sure you signed up, but you're not really vulnerable
link |
because you didn't run, you didn't do this,
link |
you didn't do all the things you're supposed to do.
link |
The person who eliminates every possible excuse
link |
and then steps on the mat
link |
and gets their ass kicked in the first round,
link |
I have so much more respect for that person
link |
than the person who does nothing
link |
and maybe on natural ability wins a couple of matches
link |
and then writes on Facebook
link |
on how I lost to the eventual champion.
link |
That's worth zero, that's worth zero.
link |
And in that process, what did you learn about yourself?
link |
You learned about yourself
link |
that you've got a natural level of aptitude
link |
for whatever this activity is that you're doing,
link |
but you didn't actually learn how to maximize it
link |
through training and through dedication
link |
and through all these other things.
link |
I'm an incredibly interested, novice musician.
link |
I like to play bass, but I don't put that on anything.
link |
And I stink at it.
link |
I would really love to be sick at it.
link |
I'm currently not, but I'm not running around,
link |
talking about entering, any of those other things.
link |
I do it, it's for myself
link |
and I wanna reach a level of competence in that.
link |
So the person that you have respect for
link |
is a person who takes it fully seriously,
link |
takes the effort fully seriously.
link |
So for bass, that would be that you agree with yourself
link |
that you're going to perform live
link |
and just in your own private moments, your private thoughts,
link |
you're not going to give yourself an excuse out,
link |
like, I'm just gonna have fun.
link |
This is a nice experience.
link |
You're going to think I'm going to try
link |
to be the best possible bass player
link |
given everything that's going on in my life,
link |
but I'm going to do my, like actually,
link |
and put it all on the line.
link |
And if I fail, that's not because I didn't try,
link |
it's because I'm a failure.
link |
And then sit in that sick feeling of like, I'm a failure.
link |
But isn't that an important thing to know?
link |
But there's a, that's like the best thing it could be,
link |
but sometimes it's fun to lose yourself
link |
in the bragging, in the lesser ways of life.
link |
And I think I'm careful not to,
link |
because too many people in my life,
link |
when I brought them with like a little candle
link |
of a fire of a dream, they would just go like,
link |
they would just blow that fire out,
link |
that they would dismiss me.
link |
Cause they see like, I would say,
link |
I've said a lot of ridiculous stuff,
link |
but I've always dreamed about like putting,
link |
I always dreamed of having this world full of robots.
link |
And every time I would bring these ideas up,
link |
they'll be shut down by the different people,
link |
by my parents, by, then you need to first get an education.
link |
You need to succeed in these dimensions.
link |
In order to do all these things,
link |
you have to get good grades.
link |
You have to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
link |
Like there's all this stuff that it's indirect
link |
or direct ways of blowing out that little ridiculous dream
link |
And it's like, I remember sort of bringing up,
link |
I don't know, things like becoming a state champion
link |
in wrestling, right?
link |
It's a weird dance because of course the coaches will tell,
link |
they'll kind of dismiss that.
link |
It's like, okay, okay.
link |
But at the same time, it feels like in those early days,
link |
you have to preserve that little fire.
link |
Johnny Ive, I don't know if you know who that is,
link |
is a designer at Apple.
link |
He was a chief designer.
link |
He's behind most of the iPhone, all that stuff.
link |
And he always talked about that he wouldn't bring his ideas
link |
to Steve Jobs until they were matured
link |
because he would always shit on them.
link |
He wanted them to as little babies live for a little bit
link |
before they get completely shut down.
link |
And I always think about that when I see a beginner
link |
sort of bragging on Instagram, you have to be careful.
link |
Let them play with that little dream.
link |
Are you playing with a little dream that you're nurturing
link |
and you're trying to take that little flame
link |
and you're trying to create a roaring blaze with it?
link |
Or are you playing with the idea of it
link |
and behind that there's no substance?
link |
It's hard to know the difference.
link |
That's what I struggle with.
link |
I don't think it necessarily is.
link |
Certainly you're wrong.
link |
And when I say Instagram,
link |
I don't wanna impugn a bunch of strangers,
link |
but I have a gym with a lot of members.
link |
And I can tell you that the number of years
link |
I've been in the gym,
link |
when someone comes to me and says, this is my goal,
link |
I don't tell them yes or no in general, but I know.
link |
I can tell by the way they say it to me,
link |
I can thin slice it.
link |
I've seen the look on people's faces.
link |
And when people start to say they wanna do X, Y, and Z,
link |
I know right off the bat,
link |
this person's either gonna put an effort in
link |
or they're not going to put an effort in.
link |
So to me, it's about the effort behind that.
link |
If you're busting your ass and you're a new at something
link |
and you're brand new, but you're working really hard
link |
and you have a series of like moderate successes in that,
link |
like that's the guy I wanna champion
link |
because that persistence and that grit over time,
link |
those successes will no longer be moderate.
link |
But the person who's having moderate success
link |
by doing nothing, chances are they'll never learn
link |
to put that work in and the successes will never grow.
link |
You have an admiration for Mike Tyson.
link |
I'm just gonna let that sit for a brief moment.
link |
I think there's a combination of factors.
link |
One is like the timeliness of his career
link |
and like the age I was when he like came to prominence,
link |
the raw, brutal violence
link |
and the raw, brutal honesty when he speaks.
link |
I think it's easy for people to hear him or see his life
link |
and cast him aside as some simianesque,
link |
like just cretin scourge on society.
link |
But when you hear him speak,
link |
like this is not a guy who's unintelligent.
link |
This is a guy who knows himself better
link |
than probably most of us know ourselves.
link |
It's disarming and that's a humongous part
link |
of my admiration for him.
link |
Who is Mike Tyson?
link |
Because it feels like there's similarities
link |
between him and you.
link |
It feels like there's a violent person in there,
link |
but also a really kind person.
link |
And they're all like living together in a little house.
link |
And you're the same.
link |
There's a thoughtful person,
link |
but there's also a scary, violent person.
link |
And they're like having a picnic.
link |
They're having a picnic.
link |
I think there are dialectical tensions in everyone,
link |
these like opposing forces
link |
that are constantly pulling at you
link |
and at different points in your life,
link |
like it's sliding scale.
link |
And I think that certainly when I was a younger person,
link |
that there was a lot more manifestation of the violence
link |
and a lot less of the kindness.
link |
People who were not as close to me
link |
probably saw more of the violent side
link |
and only the very close people to me saw like
link |
what would pass for the kind side.
link |
And now that's sliding in the other direction.
link |
And I worry actually sometimes that
link |
there could be a situation where I need
link |
that old version of me
link |
and he's getting further and further away
link |
and I can't call him up if I need him.
link |
And that concerns me to a certain degree.
link |
The sad aging warrior seeing his greater self fade away.
link |
But you still compete.
link |
Does that person return?
link |
It seems like for Mike Tyson,
link |
that person returned at the prospect of competition.
link |
It returns, but I've learned better
link |
how to manifest it in competition
link |
in terms of like the effects
link |
that that type of emotion has on you physically
link |
in the middle of a competition.
link |
So I've better learned how to utilize that energy.
link |
But I think another side effect of this
link |
is like having a gym where you're a bigger guy
link |
and you're the head instructor,
link |
you can't be as mean and violent as you once were
link |
because you're also not trying to run a business.
link |
And you spend so many years trying not to be mean
link |
and to soften your technique a little bit
link |
that that all of a sudden just becomes who you are.
link |
And I don't necessarily like that.
link |
So I've been trying to reclaim that a little bit
link |
on the mat, but I think in competition,
link |
there has to be an athlete really wants to score the points.
link |
A fighter really wants to incapacitate you
link |
and put you in a position where they can
link |
do their own bidding.
link |
And the result in a jujitsu match
link |
might just still be two points,
link |
but the motivations are very, very different.
link |
What do you make of Tyson on Joe Rogan
link |
saying that he was aroused by violence?
link |
Do you think that's insane?
link |
Do you think that's deeply honest for him?
link |
And do you think that rings true for many of us,
link |
others who practices in different degrees?
link |
I can't speak for a lot of people.
link |
And I think that it was a brutally honest statement by him.
link |
And I think it's something that even if a lot of people
link |
feel it, they're not that comfortable
link |
admitting it or saying it.
link |
But I think there's great joy
link |
in landing a flush right hand on someone's jaw
link |
and then watching them crumble.
link |
You don't even feel it.
link |
You ever played baseball as a kid?
link |
You can hit a base hit off the end of the bat
link |
and it will sting your hands
link |
because of the way that you hit it.
link |
You can hit a home run and you won't feel anything.
link |
It just feels so good in your hands.
link |
And that's, I think, one of the joys of physical contact.
link |
When you do it the right way,
link |
and that goes for all physical contact.
link |
When you do it the right way,
link |
the physical pleasure you can derive from it
link |
and the mental pleasure, it's unparalleled.
link |
See, but that's different.
link |
Let me draw a distinction.
link |
I've had the fortune of being a wrestler.
link |
And I would draw a distinction
link |
between a very well executed in competition,
link |
double leg, single leg take down or a pin.
link |
There's some, as an OCD person,
link |
there's something so comforting
link |
about a well executed pin
link |
because it's like two seconds
link |
and it's just like everything is flush and nice.
link |
And like, it's all clean.
link |
I mean, okay, this OCD person who likes to align show,
link |
it's just beautiful.
link |
Okay, that's good technique.
link |
And wrestling also provides you,
link |
maybe more than other sports,
link |
the feeling of dominating another human.
link |
Of breaking, no, not just of them being very cocky
link |
and very powerful,
link |
you feel this power of another human being
link |
and then you breaking them.
link |
And like, I'm not as honest as Mike Tyson.
link |
But that, I don't think I've ever sort of looked in the mirror
link |
and said like, that that was, I enjoyed that aspect of it.
link |
But it certainly seems like you chase that.
link |
So when I was a wrestler in high school,
link |
I lost so many matches because of over aggressiveness.
link |
Like, I would pick the top position and let you stand
link |
just so that I could do a mat return.
link |
And I wasn't trying to return you to the mat.
link |
I was actually trying to like drive you through the mat
link |
and through the ground.
link |
Like I took, like, it gave me joy to do that.
link |
Like, it wasn't like I was trying to, you know,
link |
just return you to the mat so that I could pin you.
link |
That what you just talked about,
link |
like the dominating another person,
link |
I used to look at that as you've got someone
link |
who in theory is equally trained
link |
and equally skilled as you are.
link |
And you're absolutely out there totally dominating them.
link |
There's joy in that.
link |
You could get in an MMA fight
link |
and you could take someone down and you could mount them.
link |
And all that feels great.
link |
But when you start raining down the punches
link |
on their face from mount and like dropping elbows and stuff,
link |
like there's another level of satisfaction there.
link |
And it's tough to describe.
link |
And I don't think that everyone is made for it.
link |
When I was, I think when I was a senior in high school,
link |
my wrestling coach said, look,
link |
you've got to stop with all this crazy aggressive wrestling.
link |
Like they tried to turn me into a technician
link |
and it did work to a degree.
link |
And it was a humongous shift for me in terms of success,
link |
but it wasn't the same level of enjoyment out of it.
link |
Like, I mean, I got disqualified from New England
link |
because my coach said cross face and I cross face
link |
and he said harder.
link |
And I basically wound up and blasted a kid in the face
link |
and his nose got busted everywhere.
link |
But I didn't think not to do it because that felt good.
link |
It felt good to cross face him like that.
link |
I was a lot of like.
link |
That's a weird American warrior ethos that I've picked up,
link |
but I also have in me the Russian, the Setyaev brothers
link |
that don't see it, don't see it as that.
link |
They don't get draw,
link |
they think that there is a tension between the art
link |
of the martial art and the violence of the martial art.
link |
I agree with that.
link |
It's a poetic way I could put it,
link |
but they're not so fascinated with this Dan Gable
link |
dominating another human.
link |
They think of the effortlessness of the technique
link |
and your mastery of the art is exhibited
link |
in its effortlessness,
link |
how much you lose yourself in the moment and the timing,
link |
that just the beauty of a timing.
link |
Like there's much more, like one example in judo,
link |
but also in wrestling, you can look at the foot sweep.
link |
Wrestlers in America and even judo players in America
link |
and much of the world don't admire the beauty
link |
of the foot sweep, but a well timed foot sweep,
link |
which is a way to sort of off balance
link |
to find the right timing to just effortlessly
link |
change the table, turn the tables of,
link |
I mean, dominate your opponent is seen as the highest form
link |
of mastery in Russian wrestling.
link |
In the case of judo, it's in Japanese judo.
link |
I'm not sure what that tension is about.
link |
I think it actually takes me back to,
link |
I don't know if you listened to Dan Carlin,
link |
Hardcore History and Genghis Khan, if you've ever.
link |
I've read a great, great book.
link |
I'm still trying to adjust.
link |
Most of my life said Genghis Khan,
link |
but the right pronunciation is actually Genghis Khan.
link |
There's a tension there.
link |
We kind of think, I don't know we,
link |
I kind of thought as Genghis Khan is a ultra violent,
link |
a leader of ultra violent men, but another view,
link |
another way to see them is the people who warriors
link |
that valued extreme competence and mastery of the art
link |
of fighting with weapons, with bows,
link |
with the horse riding, all that kind of stuff.
link |
And I'm not sure exactly where to place them
link |
on my sort of thinking about violence in our human history.
link |
I think in the context of like combat sports,
link |
I think there's a difference between an athlete
link |
winning a contest under a certain set of rules
link |
and a fighter winning a fight under those exact same rules.
link |
There's a different approach to it.
link |
And I don't think one is any better than the other.
link |
Like in MMA, I think a great example would be
link |
George St. Pierre.
link |
George St. Pierre is a tremendous athlete
link |
and he considers himself to be a martial artist first.
link |
He's trying to win an athletic competition.
link |
Like Nick Diaz is trying to bust your ass, right?
link |
There's a different approach to it.
link |
And yes, they've had different results
link |
at the highest level of competition,
link |
but it's difficult to attribute the difference in results
link |
just to their approach to the sport
link |
because they're different human beings
link |
with different abilities and different physical attributes.
link |
The PsyTF brothers have that luxury of being able
link |
to talk about the beauty of a perfectly timed slide by.
link |
There are other wrestlers that will never be able
link |
to pull that off and therefore they have to pursue
link |
other ways to defeat someone.
link |
And maybe it is the Dan Gable breaking a man's spirit
link |
by outworking him type thing,
link |
which is beautiful in its own way.
link |
But we tend to self select the ways in which
link |
we're able to be successful
link |
and then kind of take a deep dive into that.
link |
What do you think is more beautiful?
link |
Brute force or effortless execution
link |
of a technique that dominates another human?
link |
I think it's a subjective thing
link |
based on what skills you perceive yourself to have.
link |
I'm never, I've never been a slick, super athletic,
link |
dexterous competitor in anything.
link |
And I've always been more of an,
link |
I've gotta outwork you, I've gotta out grind you,
link |
I gotta out mean you.
link |
And so because I've lived that,
link |
I tend to see the beauty in that more
link |
because I have a perceptual awareness
link |
that I don't have for the people who have the luxury
link |
of being very slick and athletic
link |
and using beautiful technique.
link |
Now that said, there's a phenomenal little video
link |
the other day I sent to a friend of a compilation
link |
of foot sweeps by Leota Machida in MMA.
link |
And they're so beautiful and they're so awesome.
link |
And it's not that I don't have an appreciation for those,
link |
but I can't emulate those because I lack
link |
the physical ability to do that.
link |
Whereas I at least have a chance to emulate
link |
some of the people who do it through grit
link |
and through outworking people.
link |
But I would love to return to Genghis Khan
link |
and get your thoughts about,
link |
like I have so many mixed feelings
link |
about whether he is evil or not,
link |
whether the violence that he brought to the world
link |
had ultimately, the fact that it had maybe
link |
kind of like Dan Carlin describes,
link |
cleanse the landscape.
link |
It's like a reset for the world through violence
link |
had ultimately a progressive effect on human civilization,
link |
even though in the short term it led to massive,
link |
you could say suffering.
link |
I don't know what to make of that, man.
link |
What are your thoughts on Genghis Khan?
link |
I think it's always difficult to look at a historical figure
link |
and their actions of their time through a modern day lens
link |
because it's easy for us to kind of impugn
link |
their achievements and the things that they did
link |
and say, oh, well, what he did was wrong.
link |
Well, of course that can be true,
link |
but a lot of times we don't actually have
link |
any real good context or concept
link |
of the times they were living in
link |
and what really was deemed wrong and what really wasn't.
link |
We're looking at it through a very cushy modern lens.
link |
That being said, from what I've read about Genghis Khan,
link |
yeah, he was a violent dude,
link |
but also he gave you an option.
link |
When he got to a village, he said,
link |
look, you have a choice,
link |
you can come with us or you can run.
link |
And he gave them an option to join his legion of fighters
link |
who he took very good care of.
link |
He was the first military leader
link |
to pay his soldiers families when they died.
link |
And he did that based on the booty that they got
link |
when they raided a village.
link |
He took that money, he took his share
link |
and they divided that up amongst the soldiers
link |
and then the soldiers families.
link |
I think he also is credited with first horseback mail routes
link |
or something like that, right?
link |
Isn't he the godfather of the modern postal system?
link |
There's something like that.
link |
Yeah, he's the Bernie Sanders of the Mongol Empire.
link |
I do think the offering of surrender is an interesting one
link |
because it's interesting as a thought experiment,
link |
whether you would sacrifice your way of,
link |
like the pride of nations or the nationalism,
link |
pride of your country,
link |
whether you're willing to give that up to survive.
link |
It depends on who depends on you.
link |
If you have a family and young kids and stuff like that,
link |
I think your obligation is primarily to them
link |
and therefore surrender has to be something
link |
that you consider in that moment in time
link |
so that you can take care of those people.
link |
If you're a man alone and you've got all these principles
link |
and all this other stuff and you're not down
link |
with what Genghis Khan is doing and what he's selling,
link |
yeah, try and escape, do your thing
link |
and just know what waits on the other side of that
link |
for you potentially.
link |
But I think if there's someone else out there
link |
that depends on you, your obligation should be to them.
link |
It feels like historically people valued principles
link |
more than life in this weight of like,
link |
what do I value more?
link |
The principles I hold versus survival.
link |
It seems that now we don't value principles as much.
link |
Principles could be also religion,
link |
it could be your values, whatever.
link |
We're okay sort of sacrificing those
link |
for to preserve our survival.
link |
And that applies in all forms like actual survival
link |
or like on social media, like preserving your reputation,
link |
all those kinds of things.
link |
It seems like we, especially in America,
link |
value individual life,
link |
that death is somehow a really bad thing.
link |
As opposed to saying sacrificing your principles
link |
is a very bad thing and everybody dies
link |
and it's okay to die.
link |
What's horrible is to sacrifice your principles
link |
of who you are just to live another day.
link |
I think a big problem is people don't really even know
link |
what their principles are anymore.
link |
People, social media and just the way that we live nowadays
link |
where we're separated from the human contact like this,
link |
like you're not contacting people in a community anymore.
link |
You're not, whether you're religious or not,
link |
like you're not congregating at a church,
link |
you're not part of a parish
link |
like you would be like in down South,
link |
you're not part of that community anymore.
link |
And so it's difficult to figure out
link |
what your principles and values are
link |
because you're constantly jumping from one bucket
link |
to the next online.
link |
And you don't get a lot of like direct,
link |
like reasonable feedback from people.
link |
You just get dipshit feedback.
link |
Like, oh, you don't believe this?
link |
Well, you're a jerk.
link |
I think the hard thing currently
link |
is having the integrity and character
link |
to stick by principles one under.
link |
I don't want to equate murder in the Genghis Khan times
link |
to social media cancel culture,
link |
but it certainly doesn't feel good
link |
when people are attacking on social media.
link |
And it does take a lot of integrity to,
link |
without anger, without emotion,
link |
without mocking others or attacking others unfairly,
link |
standing by the ideas you hold,
link |
or in another way, standing by your friends,
link |
standing by this little group,
link |
like loyalty of the people that you know are good people.
link |
I find that in cancel culture,
link |
one of the sad things is whenever somebody gets
link |
quote unquote canceled,
link |
everybody just gets all their friends become really quiet
link |
and don't defend them or worse.
link |
I mean, quiet is at least understandable.
link |
They kind of signal that they throw them out of the bus,
link |
I guess is one way to put it.
link |
And that's something I think about a lot
link |
because from coming from me, it's like,
link |
I don't know if others hold this ethic.
link |
Maybe it's this like Russian mobster ethic of like,
link |
you should help your friends bury the body.
link |
You shouldn't criticize your friends for committing
link |
Like there are certain levels of like,
link |
yeah, you have that discussion after you buried the body
link |
that like maybe you shouldn't have done that murder thing.
link |
I don't know, I understand that that's a problematic,
link |
what's the terminology?
link |
That's a problematic ethical framework
link |
within which to operate.
link |
But at the same time, it feels like what else do we have
link |
in this world except the brotherhood, the sisterhood,
link |
the love we have for a very small community.
link |
But perhaps that's the wrong way of thinking.
link |
Perhaps the 21st century would be defined
link |
by the dissipation of this community,
link |
of this loyalty concept.
link |
No, we're all just individuals.
link |
I think you're right.
link |
And I think you have to have some sort of core framework
link |
of principles and beliefs that you operate on.
link |
And I think what I was referencing is a little bit different.
link |
But to speak to your point,
link |
you need a framework of core principles
link |
on which you can then base a lot of your other decisions.
link |
Like I believe these three things to be true,
link |
whatever they are,
link |
and that will help inform other decisions
link |
you make in your life.
link |
As far as how you treat your friends,
link |
I've got probably three friends that,
link |
if they called me right now and said,
link |
let's bury the body, sorry, Lex, I gotta go.
link |
There are other people in my life that if they said,
link |
hey, we've got to go bury the body,
link |
I would say, who is this?
link |
So I think it depends on the relationship.
link |
I wonder if that's a good, that's a really good measure.
link |
I would love to have,
link |
I would love that to be in your profile.
link |
People put like pronouns.
link |
I would love to put like, honestly, like objectively,
link |
not self report, but objective,
link |
how many people in your life, if they committed murder,
link |
you would not ask any questions
link |
and you would help them hide the body.
link |
Like, I would love to know that number for people.
link |
Yeah, and I think it's a weird thing too,
link |
because you think right away, like, okay,
link |
it must be the group of people that are the closest to you.
link |
That's who you're first thinking of, right?
link |
But obviously for like my best friend,
link |
I would do it, no question about it.
link |
But I've got other people that are close to me
link |
that are close to me in other ways.
link |
And I probably wouldn't do that only
link |
because I don't think they'd do it for me.
link |
And that is a consideration.
link |
So I guess, is the principle there
link |
then that you do for your friends
link |
what you think they would do for you?
link |
Is that the underlying principle?
link |
Or do you just have a blind loyalty
link |
to people in your life for different reasons?
link |
I got people that are not on my inner circle
link |
that I probably wouldn't help change a tire
link |
at two in the morning if they're on the highway.
link |
But if they called me and said,
link |
hey, we gotta bury the body, I might show up for that.
link |
It's just these weird different connections you have.
link |
Yeah, it's fascinating.
link |
Yeah, I have close friends that like,
link |
I'd probably be, exactly, the tire is a good example.
link |
I'd be like, can't you find somebody else to do this?
link |
I think part of that is just this leap of faith
link |
into like giving yourself to the other person
link |
that creates a deep connection
link |
that makes life fulfilling, like meaningful
link |
that doesn't exist if you don't take that leap.
link |
I mean, it's not about the murder.
link |
We're sort of focusing.
link |
I think that's a, I think you have to,
link |
what is it, cross that bridge when you get there.
link |
I'm not exactly sure.
link |
This is just a thought experiment.
link |
But it's, I think about that a lot,
link |
especially these COVID times.
link |
And as like people become more and more isolated
link |
and separated from each other,
link |
like how important is it to have those deep connections
link |
I think especially like what you're talking about there.
link |
Have you ever seen the movie, The Town?
link |
There's a great line in the movie
link |
where one of the main characters
link |
walks into his friend's house and he says,
link |
We're gonna go hurt some people
link |
and you can never ask me about it again.
link |
And the friend looks up and he says,
link |
whose car are we taking?
link |
Like that is the type of person you need in your life.
link |
And the people, like there are people
link |
that will walk through that door and say that to you
link |
and you drop everything you're doing.
link |
And then there's the people that walk through your door
link |
and you're like, you know what?
link |
I got a hot pocket in the microwave.
link |
I'm a little bit tied up right now,
link |
but I'd love to help you out.
link |
But you know, I don't wanna do that.
link |
And you don't have that deep connection with those people.
link |
You mentioned some principles
link |
that you've changed your mind on.
link |
Is there, do you wanna go there?
link |
Is there some interesting principles
link |
and the process of changing that is useful to talk about?
link |
I can't really cite a specific thing,
link |
except that understanding that the principles
link |
that you have at different points in your life
link |
can change and it's okay to change them
link |
without being a total pussy
link |
and being bullied by other people
link |
into thinking what you thought was wrong.
link |
If you come to these conclusions of your own volition
link |
and you decide to change them, that's great.
link |
And it can be really, it can be really liberating.
link |
It's really liberating to have an idea
link |
that you hold so true to your core belief system
link |
and then to actually have someone change your mind for you
link |
and be okay with it, as opposed to being like, no,
link |
I gotta die with this.
link |
I gotta die with this.
link |
It's really liberating.
link |
There are definitely are ideas you wanna die on that hill
link |
and no one's ever gonna change your mind.
link |
But it's really liberating to be confident enough
link |
to say, change my mind.
link |
I'm lucky enough to have some smart motherfuckers around me
link |
who can tell me, listen, you're being a total dipshit.
link |
Like let's rethink this.
link |
Or like I have one friend who does the five whys all the time
link |
and he loves backing me into a corner.
link |
What's the five whys?
link |
You just, like when someone makes a statement
link |
about something, to really get to the core issue,
link |
they say, if you ask why five times, make a statement,
link |
well, why is that?
link |
And you answer that, well, why?
link |
And you phrase the whys differently, obviously,
link |
but then you get to the core.
link |
They say five times, you can get to the core of the issue.
link |
And that's a challenging thing.
link |
But I find later in life, it's so liberating for me
link |
to be confident enough to be like,
link |
man, was I fucking way off the mark on this
link |
and have my mind changed.
link |
And be able to say that to others that I was wrong.
link |
That ability, and I never used to have that.
link |
And it feels real good.
link |
And there's a hunger for that too.
link |
Yeah, you're so right, actually, on a personal level,
link |
it feels very good.
link |
Exactly as you said, it's liberating
link |
because you're free to then think as opposed to.
link |
Yeah, without thinking.
link |
Yeah, you get so sick of defending the same thing
link |
over and over and over.
link |
And you start to think about it and it's like,
link |
well, I would really like to evolve my thought process here.
link |
And when you're constantly defending one point,
link |
it's difficult to let other ideas in.
link |
You discount the possibility
link |
that you can have your mind changed
link |
when you're constantly on the defense.
link |
You have to have a crack in the front line
link |
in order to let a new idea come in and possibly flourish.
link |
And maybe the new idea doesn't even prove your current
link |
belief system to be wrong,
link |
but maybe it's like the water to a seed and it grows
link |
and now it's something even bigger and better.
link |
And you can start to work with that instead.
link |
And it's a tough thing because I'm a stubborn fuck
link |
and it's very difficult for me, it was historically,
link |
to say I was wrong about this one,
link |
or I messed this one up,
link |
or I wish I could have that one back.
link |
There's a public figure for me thing too,
link |
which there's a difference between changing your mind
link |
with a small circle of friends
link |
and changing your mind publicly about something,
link |
but it has equal, one echoes the other.
link |
It is equally liberating,
link |
but people will not make that change easy,
link |
but it doesn't matter.
link |
I think it's ultimately liberating as a human being,
link |
public figure or not to just think deeply about this world
link |
and to keep changing, which is like,
link |
I think there's a deep hunger for that
link |
in like political discourse,
link |
that people are so tribal currently about politics
link |
that they want to see somebody who says,
link |
you know what, I changed my mind on this.
link |
And then keep changing their mind and keep asking questions,
link |
keep showing that they're open minded,
link |
all that kind of stuff.
link |
But when you want someone in a position of political power
link |
to change their mind because they realize
link |
that there might be a better way,
link |
not because they realize that by changing their mind,
link |
they're gonna get a new demographic to vote for them.
link |
Like that's transparent as shit.
link |
Nobody wants to see that.
link |
Like that's a person who can't separate their position
link |
from their people they're supposed to be helping.
link |
Yeah, and you can usually smell that.
link |
That's, we're just talking offline about,
link |
there's something about Hillary Clinton
link |
where she talked about changing her mind on gay marriage
link |
that it felt like this is a political calculation
link |
versus like really deeply thinking about like,
link |
what things do we do in this world
link |
that violate basic human rights?
link |
Like really thinking about deeply.
link |
And of course politicians are calculating this,
link |
but you can see it.
link |
This is the thing.
link |
That's why I like on the human level,
link |
there's like political policies, but there's also humans.
link |
And I've always liked Bernie Sanders, for example.
link |
I don't know, not the later perhaps Bernie Sanders,
link |
but I used to listen to him back in the day.
link |
And it felt that people might disagree with me,
link |
but it felt like there was a real human struggling
link |
with ideas, whatever, agree with him or not,
link |
it felt like he wasn't doing political calculation.
link |
He was just a human.
link |
He couldn't be further away from my political ideals,
link |
but also like, there's an obvious authenticity
link |
to his passion for what he's saying
link |
that is not present in other candidates.
link |
And you could see it,
link |
all these people that have been in politics forever,
link |
like from all the way back
link |
when Hillary was a lawyer in the 70s.
link |
There's a couple of shots of her in a courtroom
link |
in the 70s though, she's looking all right.
link |
She's got those big glasses on.
link |
She's kind of a little bit of a nerdy babe back in the day.
link |
Oh, you mean like.
link |
Well, John Clark says Hillary Clinton was a babe
link |
That's an interesting question
link |
about authenticity in politicians.
link |
Do you think like Hillary Clinton,
link |
just the Clintons in general are a good example
link |
that why do you think they become over time so inauthentic?
link |
Is it the system that changes them?
link |
Is it their own hunger for power?
link |
Is it, what is it, or are they always inauthentic?
link |
Well, first I'd like to say that,
link |
I don't know if you know this,
link |
but I come from a bit of a political dynasty myself.
link |
I was on the student government several times
link |
in high school and my dad won the runoff
link |
in a special election in Bradenton Beach, Florida.
link |
I think there's like 700 people there.
link |
So your dad got you the job?
link |
Yeah, we're basically,
link |
a lot of people compare us to the Kennedys.
link |
My guess with the politicians is that,
link |
and you can see it now as we're becoming more cognizant
link |
as people to the political process,
link |
I think the process corrupts people.
link |
And I think that, I don't know the ins and outs of it.
link |
I've listened to people who are far more educated
link |
on it than me and I'm unprepared to cite
link |
any of their points.
link |
I think you can see it a little bit in Dan Crenshaw.
link |
I really liked Dan,
link |
especially like a year, year and a half ago.
link |
He seemed very level headed.
link |
It's clear to me now that as he panders
link |
more and more to the right,
link |
it's because he's setting himself for a presidential run.
link |
It's clear that that's happening.
link |
And he just doesn't seem like the same authentic
link |
ideals oriented guy that he did a year and a half ago.
link |
Now I could be wrong on that.
link |
It could be way off.
link |
But I think that you can take someone
link |
as honest as you want to.
link |
When you start them on that path to the presidency,
link |
you become so unbelievably beholden
link |
to so many people and entities along the way
link |
that by the time you get to the final destination,
link |
the Oval Office, all you're doing is paying back
link |
the favors that got you there.
link |
And you never get to serve the people
link |
you're supposed to serve.
link |
Your primary focus is on your office
link |
and not on the people that you're supposed to be helping.
link |
And I think that that's a humongous problem.
link |
And like we could talk all about campaign finance reform
link |
and the two party system.
link |
But at the end of the day,
link |
the people who are running for political posts,
link |
they're working to keep a job.
link |
They're not working to improve the lives
link |
of the constituents, which is different.
link |
A long, long time ago, like a lot of politicians,
link |
those were like part time jobs.
link |
And they held other posts out West.
link |
They were ranchers by day and sheriff by night,
link |
whatever the case might be.
link |
But now, such a cushy path for the rest of your life
link |
that the goal is to just be a politician,
link |
not do the things that you think a politician
link |
is supposed to do.
link |
And that's a problem.
link |
By the way, I'll talk to Dan on this.
link |
It's funny, I like the version of him from a year ago
link |
and I haven't been really paying attention.
link |
So I'll be, I'll actually pay more attention now
link |
and ask him that exact question.
link |
Like, how do you prevent yourself from changing,
link |
becoming what the Clintons became?
link |
I tend to believe like there's conspiratorial stuff
link |
about Clintons and all these politicians.
link |
I tend to believe that they were actually
link |
good, thoughtful people back in the day.
link |
And the system changes them.
link |
It's not even the system.
link |
There's something about just the process of campaigning.
link |
I just think it wears you down to where
link |
if you look at the percentage of time you spend
link |
on the kinds of conversations you have,
link |
it's like one, you do these speeches,
link |
which you repeat the same thing over and over and over.
link |
It beats the process of thinking.
link |
You just exhaust your brain to where
link |
you're not thinking anymore, you're just repeating.
link |
It's very, it's exceptionally difficult
link |
to keep making speech after speech after speech,
link |
saying the same thing over and over and over again,
link |
and at the same time thinking deeply
link |
and changing your mind and learning.
link |
And then also the pandering to financial,
link |
like having phone calls, like fundraising,
link |
all those kinds of things.
link |
That's what they do now.
link |
They spend most of their time fundraising.
link |
They're not worried about anything.
link |
Sorry to interrupt you, but I was gonna say
link |
that you can see there's a fuel.
link |
Like the more attention and the higher regard
link |
you're held in in your community,
link |
and the more sycophants like continue
link |
to blow smoke up your ass,
link |
the more it changes the way you present yourself.
link |
And you can see it in every walk of life.
link |
I mean, jiu jitsu is a tiny, tiny little section
link |
of the world, but you see it in the jiu jitsu community.
link |
When someone all of a sudden starts a social media page
link |
or whatever, and they get a bunch of people,
link |
like basically like cyber fellating them
link |
on their Instagram page, they change.
link |
Fellating, is that a word?
link |
So giving fellatio?
link |
Jamie, look it up.
link |
I think, but in those people, it changes their character.
link |
It changes who they are because they become emboldened
link |
and now they've got this like mythical cyber mob
link |
There's a sign at the entrance to your gym
link |
that reads, for every moment of triumph,
link |
it's a quote by Hunter S. Thompson.
link |
It reads, for every moment of triumph,
link |
for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.
link |
What does this quote mean to you?
link |
That quote to me is about, mostly about sacrifice.
link |
And it's about to achieve anything great
link |
or anything beautiful or to triumph,
link |
you have to have sacrificed so many things to get there,
link |
unless you're the most unbelievably genetically gifted person
link |
in the world and greatness is just, you know,
link |
falls upon you, it's just raining from the sky.
link |
I think on your path to greatness,
link |
on your path to success and triumph,
link |
you leave a lot of carnage in your wake,
link |
personal relationships, other goals,
link |
things that you didn't pursue, you know,
link |
other unfulfilled dreams.
link |
And you kind of have to sell a lot of that out
link |
in order to be really at the peak of your field
link |
or what you want to be.
link |
I know that that's happened in my life.
link |
I mean, there's tons and tons of relationships
link |
that, you know, couldn't survive the way
link |
that I was living my life,
link |
because when I was trying to be a big time fighter
link |
or like when I was just training all the time,
link |
tons of relationships dissolve themselves naturally,
link |
some not so naturally.
link |
Some people get it, some people don't get it,
link |
some people hate you, you miss tons of other opportunities.
link |
And I think that's kind of what that quote means to me.
link |
It's about sacrifice.
link |
It's about you're giving up what you want now
link |
for what you want more.
link |
And it's the trampling of souls, it's messy too,
link |
because it's not clear what the right path is.
link |
Like that sacrifice is not obvious
link |
that those are the right sacrifices to make.
link |
You might be ruining your own life,
link |
but the fact that you're willing to take that risk
link |
and sort of go all in on whether it's stupid or not,
link |
go all in on something,
link |
that the possibility of creating something beautiful
link |
Who says it's stupid?
link |
If you're going all in on it, you don't think it's stupid.
link |
Someone else might think it's stupid,
link |
but I mean, who really cares?
link |
Well, I'm of many minds on many things,
link |
so I feel like there's certain minds,
link |
certain moves of the day where you think it's stupid.
link |
Like relationships is a beautiful one,
link |
which is, you've seen the movie Whiplash, by any chance?
link |
It seems like in a man's life,
link |
or it could be a woman's, but I don't identify as a woman,
link |
so I know the man, the lived experience.
link |
But my lived experience for now is that of a man.
link |
We'll see about tomorrow.
link |
And there is, in the pursuit of excellence,
link |
there's often a choice of,
link |
some of the souls that must be trampled
link |
are personal relationships with humans in your life
link |
that you might deeply care about.
link |
It could be family, it could be friends,
link |
it could be loved ones of all different forms.
link |
It could be the people that, your colleagues
link |
that are dependent on you, people who will lose jobs
link |
because of the decisions you make, all this kind of stuff.
link |
It seems that that moment happens,
link |
and I'm not sure that sacrifice is always the correct one.
link |
Like, to me, the movie Whiplash,
link |
for people who haven't seen, spoiler alert, maybe?
link |
I don't even know if that movie has any spoilers,
link |
but there is a relationship with a female.
link |
There's a student, there's a drummer
link |
that's pursuing excellence
link |
of this particular art form of drumming,
link |
and he has a brief, fleeting relationship with a female,
link |
and he also has an instructor
link |
that's pushing him to his limits
link |
in what appears to be awfully a lot
link |
like a toxic relationship.
link |
And he chooses, not chooses,
link |
he naturally makes the decision
link |
to sacrifice the romantic relationship with the woman
link |
in further pursuit of this chaos of,
link |
this chaotic pursuit of excellence.
link |
And that doesn't feel like a deliberate decision.
link |
It feels like a giant mess of like an emotional mess
link |
where you're just like,
link |
kind of like a fish swimming against stream,
link |
just like, fuck it.
link |
You let go of all the things that convention says
link |
you should appreciate.
link |
You throw away the possibility of a stable life,
link |
of a comfortable life,
link |
of what society says is a meaningful life,
link |
and just pursue this crazy thing
link |
full of seeming toxicity
link |
with crazy people surrounding you.
link |
So I don't know what the right decision is.
link |
Part of my brain says, you should stay with the girl.
link |
Fuck that instructor that's making you,
link |
that's pushing you to places where it's like,
link |
that are destructive, potentially destructive,
link |
like could lead to suicide,
link |
could lead you to completely
link |
fail or fail on your pursuit of excellence
link |
or destroy the dream,
link |
the passionate pursuit of the thing
link |
that you've always dreamed for,
link |
in that case is drumming.
link |
There's so many minds there.
link |
Like what is the right thing to do?
link |
So my first two thoughts are,
link |
number one, fuck convention.
link |
What is convention?
link |
It's like some laid out path,
link |
some linear progression of the way your life
link |
is supposed to go,
link |
like that someone can draw a picture of at the end.
link |
That shit's, first of all, it's just boring and whatever.
link |
And it's, I don't wanna say that it's cowardly
link |
because it isn't cowardly,
link |
but for someone who's not conventional
link |
to not be nonconventional is cowardly,
link |
to get sucked into the convention.
link |
I believe that scene in the diner in that movie
link |
where he tells her you're in my way
link |
because I'm gonna want to be with you,
link |
or you're going to want me to be going out to dinner
link |
with you and I know I should be practicing,
link |
or I know I should be training.
link |
And ultimately I'm gonna make,
link |
I'm either gonna feel bad about not being with you
link |
or I'm gonna skip the training to be with you
link |
and neither one is right.
link |
The whole thing that they don't mention in that
link |
is that that's the wrong girl.
link |
That's the wrong girl.
link |
The right girl is a gangster.
link |
The right girl says, oh, you've practiced tonight?
link |
I'll leave you a sandwich and some milk
link |
so that you can, outside the door,
link |
let me know when you're done,
link |
or you have some free time.
link |
The right girl compliments that.
link |
She's not an impediment in any way.
link |
Even if what you wanna do is be with her so much
link |
that you're putting the drums down,
link |
or you're putting the bass down,
link |
or you're picking up the pizza,
link |
or you're not going to training,
link |
that girl, without even telling you
link |
why she's making decisions,
link |
is making decisions to help you achieve your goal.
link |
Now that might sound like some sort of chauvinistic
link |
king of the castle type shit
link |
where everyone should cater to you,
link |
but the fact of the matter is
link |
that person is a compliment to your life
link |
in helping you do your thing,
link |
and in your own way you're helping them
link |
to achieve whatever their goals are also.
link |
It's uncommon that you have two people under the same roof
link |
striving to be unbelievably excellent in one small area.
link |
It's not impossible, but it's uncommon.
link |
Relationships have to be like binary systems,
link |
The gravitational pull is what keeps you together
link |
and circling around one another, right?
link |
And one is bigger than the other,
link |
and they'll fluctuate,
link |
and the stars will get bigger,
link |
and they'll get smaller,
link |
and they'll contract based on positioning and composition.
link |
That's the way a relationship should be,
link |
not an asteroid coming in to disrupt
link |
the surface of your planet.
link |
It's a binary system, it's a compliment.
link |
That girl was the wrong girl for him.
link |
like the big unconventional dreams
link |
should not be adjusted to fit into this world.
link |
Because I mean, there is a part of me
link |
that's like full of self thought,
link |
well, maybe you're just a dick.
link |
Lex, so first of all,
link |
This is, by the way, somebody who's,
link |
you have recently gotten,
link |
well, in the span of the history of the universe
link |
is recently you've gotten to a relationship,
link |
but you haven't always,
link |
you have not felt the need to be in the relationship
link |
just because you're supposed to
link |
by society's kind of momentum.
link |
If you, I think that if you really want anything,
link |
you've got to be prepared fully to be the exact opposite.
link |
If you're a person who's looking for a relationship,
link |
the only way you're going to get in an awesome relationship
link |
is by being comfortable being alone,
link |
because that's the risk.
link |
If you're a person who's driven by money,
link |
you've got to be comfortable being totally poor
link |
because that's the risk, right?
link |
And when you're constantly hedging your bets,
link |
you're never all in.
link |
You're never all in on the thing you're trying to do.
link |
So a relationship has to compliment your life.
link |
You can't say, it's okay to want to be in a relationship,
link |
but you can't want to be in a relationship so bad
link |
that you take someone in who fits the suit.
link |
And it's like, oh, our schedules kind of work out.
link |
You live near me and this and that and the other thing,
link |
because the logistics of a relationship
link |
are not always perfect.
link |
It's what matters is when the two people are together.
link |
That's the perfect part of it.
link |
And it's great to want to meet people and say,
link |
if we meet and some sort of a relationship develops,
link |
I'm willing to run with it,
link |
but I'm not meeting you hoping a relationship develops.
link |
I think you kind of put the cart before the horse
link |
in a lot of those situations.
link |
It's like when guys meet.
link |
No guy goes out and is like, I'm looking for a bro, right?
link |
You go to the gym and you run into a bunch of dudes
link |
and the next thing you know, someone's cool
link |
and they want to talk about fighting
link |
and you're fucking shotgun and beers.
link |
And all of a sudden you got a bro and that's how it works.
link |
It works the same way with women.
link |
What's a shotgun and beers?
link |
I'll show you after this.
link |
You poke a hole in the bottom and you open the top.
link |
Yeah, this is the problem with America.
link |
Drink vodka like a man.
link |
Okay, now don't poke holes in beers.
link |
This is the problem with the frat culture.
link |
They don't really know how to drink.
link |
They think they know how to drink.
link |
They don't know how to drink.
link |
What do you think makes a successful relationship
link |
if we can linger on that a little longer?
link |
Like, let me ask John Clark about love.
link |
I didn't ask a question, but let me just say love.
link |
Are you one of those people who never says I love you?
link |
No, no, I'm an extreme person.
link |
And like my emotions are also extreme.
link |
And one of the things I concern myself with,
link |
maybe this is philosophical and martial arts warrior
link |
soldier type related stuff is like, I don't want anyone.
link |
If I die tonight on the drive home,
link |
hopefully that doesn't happen.
link |
I hope that no one is left questioning
link |
how I felt about them.
link |
And people I don't like probably are not questioning that.
link |
And so the thing that I've had to learn
link |
how to do later in life is to tell the people
link |
that you care about, that you care about them.
link |
And each thing can be equally off putting
link |
to the receiver of the message.
link |
Each thing can be equally off putting
link |
to the receiver of the message.
link |
When you're letting someone know how much you dislike them,
link |
that can be off putting to the person
link |
receiving that message.
link |
And when you tell someone how much you care about them,
link |
it can also be off putting to the person,
link |
depending on how they view their relationship with you.
link |
But it's still important to get it out there.
link |
Like you shouldn't hold those things in
link |
because you're worried about how they'll be received
link |
or if they'll come back at you.
link |
So you're okay going all in on these?
link |
Not afraid of commitment?
link |
No, I'm not afraid of commitment.
link |
Anyone who says they're afraid of commitment
link |
You know what they're afraid of?
link |
They're afraid of commitment with that person.
link |
That's what they're afraid of.
link |
Like when someone knocks you on your ass
link |
and they come into your life
link |
and you're flush with all these emotions,
link |
you're not worried about,
link |
oh, I don't really like commitment.
link |
No, because they've knocked you on your ass.
link |
You want to be with them.
link |
You want those things.
link |
The two most alive points in your life,
link |
I think people feel is the euphoria of a new relationship
link |
and then the loss when that love is gone.
link |
You'll never feel more, I don't think,
link |
than in those moments in your life.
link |
See, the nice thing about the loss is it lasts longer.
link |
That's a Louis C.K. point that he makes,
link |
which is like that,
link |
like in his show, I think,
link |
is a conversation with an older gentleman
link |
that says like that's his favorite part
link |
of the relationship is that period
link |
between the loss of the relationship
link |
and the real death, which is forgetting the person.
link |
But that period lasts the longest
link |
and that's like the most fulfilling,
link |
like missing the other person
link |
is as fulfilling as the actual love,
link |
the early infatuation, which is interesting.
link |
I also think of the Bukowski.
link |
There's a little clip of him in an interview
link |
saying that love is a fog
link |
that dissipates with the first light of reality
link |
or something like that.
link |
So basically emphasizing
link |
that it's this very, very, very fleeting thing,
link |
that it's a moments thing and then it just fades
link |
and everything else is something else.
link |
So love is only a temporary thing, which is interesting.
link |
I think some people say that's cynical.
link |
I don't know what to think of it.
link |
I think it's important to understand
link |
that everything is fleeting
link |
when you don't put effort into it.
link |
Almost everything will be fleeting.
link |
If you don't put effort into it,
link |
most people will get fat and lazy.
link |
If you don't put effort into something,
link |
you're gonna not be good at playing guitar or playing bass.
link |
You've got to put effort into it.
link |
The same thing goes for a relationship.
link |
That the awesome part of it, that like love part,
link |
that dies soon and early on in a relationship
link |
because it's so good
link |
that we think we don't have to work at it, but you do.
link |
You have to keep doing the things
link |
and you gotta keep things new and crisp and fresh.
link |
And different people probably feel differently about this,
link |
but I don't know, you walk around your girl
link |
and you start like farting and stuff,
link |
like that's when it all dies.
link |
That's when it dies.
link |
We're all human beings.
link |
We're all here and our bodies work in the same way,
link |
but you start to chip away at this beautiful thing
link |
when you buck conventional courtesy and things like that.
link |
Well, take it for granted, basically.
link |
You take it for granted, yeah.
link |
I mean, that's the same thing with life.
link |
I'm a big fan of meditating on death
link |
that you could die today.
link |
In the same way you should meditate
link |
on this relationship could end today,
link |
this connection with another human could be.
link |
This is the last time you could be interacting.
link |
And your chances of that increase
link |
when you take it for granted and you shit on people.
link |
But when you work at it, the chances of that decrease.
link |
It's never gonna be zero, but it decreases.
link |
And when you do that, when you're the person
link |
and you're trying to maintain
link |
and you're trying to work at the relationship,
link |
you gotta make sure that both people are working at it.
link |
Otherwise, you're just a fucking chump.
link |
Okay, let's return back to mixed martial arts.
link |
Let me ask the ridiculous question
link |
of who do you think are the top three,
link |
maybe top five greatest fighters of all time?
link |
It's so hard to compare fighters across generations.
link |
And maybe one way to say it is which metrics
link |
would you put on the table
link |
as to measure what a great fighter is?
link |
There was a guy named Dioxapus.
link |
And in the fourth century, and he was such a badass
link |
that in the Olympics in 336 BC,
link |
no one even showed up to fight him in the Pancration event.
link |
Nobody even showed up because he was fucking everybody up.
link |
Years later, he was retired.
link |
And this crazy Macedonian dude came there
link |
at some dinner for Alexander the Great,
link |
everyone's chilling, drinking,
link |
whatever they were drinking out of their chalices.
link |
And this Macedonian dude threatened him and challenged him.
link |
So Dioxapus said, yeah, man, we'll throw down.
link |
And they set the time and the place.
link |
Macedonian dude comes out like body armor,
link |
spear, shield, all this other shit.
link |
Dioxapus came out absolutely naked with a wooden club
link |
and took on this much younger guy,
link |
beat the living crap out of him
link |
and then put his foot on his throat
link |
and then didn't even kill him in the show of ultimate power
link |
There's something about the guy being naked too
link |
is just extra demeaning.
link |
Extra demeaning, yeah.
link |
Okay, can we rephrase the question then?
link |
Because those are clearly going to be
link |
some probably forgotten warriors in history.
link |
Well, let's take it to like modern day mixed martial arts
link |
in the UFC, perhaps.
link |
Well, just mixed martial arts there.
link |
Who do you think are the top fighters of all time?
link |
What metrics would you consider
link |
in trying to answer this perhaps unanswerable question?
link |
I think one of the things you want to think about
link |
is strength of opponent at the time you fought them.
link |
So for example, fighting BJ Penn in his prime
link |
and beating him is far different
link |
than beating BJ Penn last year, right?
link |
So to say you have a victory over BJ Penn
link |
is not the same given the timeframe of when it happened.
link |
Not to take anything away from anyone who's beaten BJ Penn.
link |
Just use that as an example of someone whose career
link |
went into a different direction.
link |
I would say the guy who I think is probably the best
link |
that people are the least familiar with
link |
would be Marillo Bustamante.
link |
And I think he was a guy who was one of the guys
link |
with the first really good physical build for MMA,
link |
which I think is narrow from the chest to the back
link |
and long shoulder to shoulder
link |
and kind of sinewy made out of steel cable.
link |
That was a guy who could box,
link |
that was a guy who could wrestle,
link |
and that was a guy who had great jujitsu.
link |
He wasn't a great kickboxer,
link |
but at the time he didn't need it.
link |
Fought everybody and gave everybody a run.
link |
I think he's probably one of those guys
link |
who's gotta be considered.
link |
Yeah, there's a few killers that never,
link |
because why is he not in the discussion?
link |
Because I think greatness requires both the skill
link |
and the opportunity to meet each other.
link |
And when you talk about a fighter,
link |
the other thing that really a good fighter needs
link |
to become great is a foil.
link |
And so many fighters don't have a foil.
link |
That's one of the biggest detractions, I think,
link |
of early Mike Tyson's career.
link |
He didn't have a foil.
link |
He had no one driving him.
link |
And by the time he did,
link |
by the time he had a foil in Holyfield,
link |
his career was in a different place.
link |
But he's one of the greats of all time,
link |
and he never really had a foil,
link |
so his greatness was in unparalleled destruction
link |
of like nobody as well, of lesser opponents.
link |
Right, and so when people debate
link |
the level of greatness of Mike Tyson,
link |
that's one of the things they say,
link |
like he didn't fight a lot of killers in their prime.
link |
I think you've obviously got to say in that conversation,
link |
I have a really difficult time
link |
keeping George St. Pierre out of the conversation,
link |
only because he was able to beat you with anything.
link |
He could out jab you, he could out wrestle you,
link |
and he could submit you.
link |
The problem I have with Fedor
link |
is his career also took a drastic turn towards the end.
link |
And when he was fighting in Pride,
link |
he was doing a lot more grappling,
link |
and then he just started casting
link |
that overhand right at people.
link |
And his game kind of changed at that point.
link |
You can't take anything away from his greatness,
link |
but at that time, the great heavyweights
link |
were not really fighting in Pride,
link |
and they didn't really exist yet.
link |
And by the time he fought a really good one,
link |
Fabricio Verdun, he did get submitted there.
link |
Does his later performance color your and our perception
link |
of his greatness in general about fighters?
link |
Not mine, but I'm someone who's intimately involved
link |
in the sport, but it colors everyone else's.
link |
Same with Anderson Silva.
link |
I don't think Anderson Silva doesn't want to fight
link |
in like seven years or something, or he's like one.
link |
That's a guy who in his prime was one of the best fighters.
link |
Is he in the top five for you?
link |
I think he's probably in the top five, yeah.
link |
Greater striker of all time or no?
link |
In mixed martial arts.
link |
In mixed martial arts?
link |
In mixed martial arts, that's a tough question.
link |
The greatest MMA striker of all time.
link |
Because like the timing,
link |
we're talking about foot sweeps, right?
link |
Who makes it look easier than Anderson Silva?
link |
I think in an incredibly short sample of his prime,
link |
it's gotta be Anderson Silva,
link |
and I think you have to consider discussing Leota Machida
link |
for his unbelievable manipulation of distance,
link |
which is something that people don't really talk too much
link |
about in terms of fighting,
link |
unless you're someone in the sport.
link |
That his use of distance and the ability to like,
link |
what we call pop out, like make you miss by one inch
link |
so that he could follow your fist back in
link |
as you retract it and it hit you over the top,
link |
that that's a thing of beauty.
link |
Anderson Silva, when he became a counter striker,
link |
when he got to his prime in the UFC,
link |
that was a thing of beauty.
link |
That was a thing of beauty.
link |
So I think definitely those two guys
link |
and Murilo Bustamante's gotta be the third guy.
link |
There's just so many good guys now.
link |
So where do you put, in terms of metrics,
link |
you mentioned GSP and Anderson Silva,
link |
I think they have a large number of defenses of a title.
link |
Is that important to you?
link |
Like this kind of consistent domination?
link |
No, because it's easily manipulated
link |
by the people making money off the fights.
link |
So there was a great quote one time
link |
when the UFC was coming to prominence
link |
and Vince McMahon from the WWE, he said,
link |
you know, the difference between what we do
link |
and what UFC does is that when we have a superstar,
link |
I can make sure he stays on top
link |
until he's no longer a superstar
link |
because we have predetermined results.
link |
UFC can't do that because they're actually having fights.
link |
Well, it's true and false.
link |
You can't do that,
link |
but you can give your superstars the most favorable matchups
link |
to keep them on top for the longest.
link |
So people always talk about title defenses
link |
as if the guy they're fighting, the challenger,
link |
is always the person most deserving of the shot.
link |
And it's just not true.
link |
So I don't put that much stock in it.
link |
Is it possible to put a guy in consideration
link |
as one of the greats
link |
if all they had is one or two amazing fights?
link |
I'll tell you, like an amazing
link |
could be a lot of different definitions.
link |
It could be just the war.
link |
Like they never really reached
link |
the highest of excellences of domination,
link |
but they've, like this,
link |
we had this discussion about Kyle Bokniak, right?
link |
To me, that's a perfect example.
link |
He had this famous fight against Zabit Magomed Sharapov,
link |
where on one side you have an Anderson Silva type of fighter
link |
and Zabit, like just a very good striker.
link |
Like, and then there's like the warrior on the Kyle side.
link |
And just the fight,
link |
they created something special together.
link |
It was fight at night, whatever.
link |
But the, you know, that fight was special on that night
link |
because the two dance partners.
link |
You can have a great performance
link |
without being a great fighter.
link |
Not saying neither of those guys is a great fighter,
link |
but to answer your first question,
link |
I think that having one or two great performances
link |
does not necessarily mean that you are great.
link |
I need a larger sample size.
link |
I have no idea what that is.
link |
I don't have any idea what that is.
link |
where, how much weight does toughness have
link |
when you're thinking about the criteria
link |
when you define a great fighter?
link |
That's a good question.
link |
And I don't have the answer to it.
link |
I admire the underdog that rises to the occasion
link |
through brute force.
link |
they didn't bring the skillset to the table
link |
that perhaps some of the greats have,
link |
but they rose to the occasion.
link |
I mean, there's something about that.
link |
There's something about that.
link |
And so now we're more talking about like
link |
the internal attributes
link |
as opposed to the external physical attributes.
link |
And those are the things I think that you cannot teach.
link |
Those things, you come in the door
link |
and you either have that or you don't.
link |
I think, and we talk about this all the time,
link |
and this is one of the things
link |
where my mind changes regularly.
link |
Like on what makes a fighter,
link |
is it born or is it bred?
link |
And this week I'm of the opinion that it's in you.
link |
And maybe it's in you and you suppress it
link |
and people can tease it out of you,
link |
but I don't think you can make someone
link |
who doesn't have that seed in there.
link |
I don't think you can turn them into that great warrior
link |
with that level of grit and mental toughness.
link |
Now, when that fight, when Kyle fights Zabit,
link |
it's a unique situation for both guys.
link |
It was kind of a later replacement fight for Kyle.
link |
Zabit's star was on the rise.
link |
And Kyle put the blueprint out there on how to beat Zabit.
link |
Which is pressure him
link |
and try and drag him into the late rounds.
link |
You notice that later on when Calvin Kader fought him,
link |
they wouldn't give him five rounds.
link |
They wanted five rounds.
link |
And Zabit's camp, from what I understand,
link |
would not agree to the five round fight.
link |
Well, he didn't look.
link |
Right, so with Kyle, it was a three round fight.
link |
Three round fight.
link |
And did it went to decision?
link |
It went to decision.
link |
Well, Zabit won the decision, clearly.
link |
Did Kyle have a shot at winning the third round?
link |
I don't remember the exact score,
link |
but Kyle could have won the third round
link |
had he done a couple things differently.
link |
But I do believe in the fourth round,
link |
I think Kyle wouldn't have won a fourth round.
link |
And I think maybe even won the fight
link |
if there would have been a fifth round.
link |
And he was pressing forward,
link |
perhaps in a funny way that you could tell me I'm wrong,
link |
but it felt like he wasn't emphasizing head movement
link |
He went full Mike Tyson.
link |
There was a point at which,
link |
so it's funny that you say that.
link |
Which is a contradiction, actually, because.
link |
Mike Tyson had great head movement.
link |
I actually don't know exactly what I mean
link |
because he was in the pocket.
link |
I think he was trying to do the movement.
link |
He was just in the pocket and pressing forward.
link |
And the fuck you attitude of just not pressing down.
link |
That was a little bit later
link |
when Zabit's back was towards the cage.
link |
Towards the end of the round.
link |
We get that fight.
link |
And I said to Kyle, I was like,
link |
look, this kid has been training martial arts
link |
since he was three years old.
link |
There's not an area where you're gonna out technique him.
link |
And so we've gotta now channel some of that grit
link |
that we know you have.
link |
This is an opportunity to showcase it.
link |
And I don't know how long I did it for,
link |
because Kyle's much shorter than Zabit.
link |
So for a good long while,
link |
while we were training for Zabit,
link |
I didn't even say anything.
link |
And I just had clips of Mike Tyson training
link |
on the TV in the gym and the head movement.
link |
And I didn't even mention it.
link |
And then we started to like get into it
link |
and talk about getting inside the length
link |
of the longer fighter and things like that.
link |
And we kind of, which when some people train MMA,
link |
they say, okay, this guy's a really good wrestler.
link |
Let's think about avoiding the wrestling
link |
or being a better wrestler.
link |
And I think that when the difference in skill is so great,
link |
those are both the wrong answer.
link |
If a guy who's a really good wrestler wants to take you down
link |
and you don't have a lot of wrestling experience,
link |
he's probably gonna get you down
link |
if he's got a good coach, right?
link |
So you have to deal with that.
link |
To then say, I'm gonna then learn in eight weeks
link |
how to wrestle better than a guy who's been wrestling
link |
since he was eight years old is also a bad idea.
link |
So what we concentrated on for that camp
link |
and it worked beautifully was
link |
not getting caught in chain wrestling.
link |
These are the takedowns you're gonna get caught with.
link |
This is how to not get caught with the next step
link |
while you're defending takedown one.
link |
Cause it's the chain of techniques
link |
that are gonna get fucked, right?
link |
So we talked, we did a ton of work on get ups
link |
and breaking the hands from the various takedowns.
link |
Like it was a while ago now.
link |
So I don't remember exactly the techniques we worked on,
link |
but we concentrated on defend the first takedown
link |
and stay out of the chain.
link |
Don't get chained into a bunch of wrestling techniques
link |
cause you will be out wrestled.
link |
And that was really successful.
link |
And then in the third round, Zabit was tired.
link |
He's Zabit got tired.
link |
He cuts a tremendous amount of weight.
link |
Like I can't see him staying at 145 forever
link |
when they start giving him five round fights.
link |
I don't even know if he's had a five round fight
link |
and he may have, but I can't see him staying down there.
link |
He's, the guy's like six one.
link |
Guys, he's a giant of a guy.
link |
So Kyle pressed forward there and he said,
link |
he felt that there was no power left in Zabit's hands.
link |
And so he felt fine.
link |
And I think part of it was he fed off the crowd
link |
as he moved forward and, you know,
link |
saw that he wasn't taking a lot of damage.
link |
Like the punches weren't staying him.
link |
He started walking right through him.
link |
It goes to your question of what makes a fighter.
link |
Was the, him walking forward like that,
link |
something that you're born with
link |
or is that something you were training?
link |
Is that the Mike Tyson on TV?
link |
He's born with that.
link |
Kyle is born with that.
link |
And the crowd, I've been in a lot.
link |
No, he was in New York.
link |
He was in Brooklyn.
link |
I've been in a lot of arenas
link |
for a lot of different sporting events.
link |
That's one of the loudest things I've ever heard
link |
I was going crazy.
link |
And you ask about that being like taught or not.
link |
Kyle is so much like that,
link |
that I have to try and tease some of that out of him,
link |
Because he's also so very technical when he wants to be
link |
that the emotion and the fun of it
link |
gets in the way of his technique.
link |
And probably has cost him a couple of wins.
link |
And so that's one of the things
link |
we work on with him right now.
link |
It's like staying within yourself, being a professional,
link |
taking your time to download the information in round one
link |
and then starting your fight in round two.
link |
But the tension between those two things,
link |
what makes, what on that day created one of the,
link |
in my opinion, one of the greatest fights I've ever seen.
link |
Yeah, it's one of the greatest fights
link |
I've certainly ever seen.
link |
So like, it's funny that you as a coach,
link |
I can see the frustration of like,
link |
like throwing away some of the strategy kind of thing.
link |
Like you seeing like being not happy
link |
that there could be things
link |
that he could have done to win the fight.
link |
It's in retrospect.
link |
I think that at that time,
link |
we were playing with incredible house money.
link |
Like Kyle was a gigantic underdog in that fight.
link |
Zabit was unstoppable.
link |
I think people were probably picking him
link |
to finish the fight in round one.
link |
I think at that point,
link |
no one had ever gone the distance with Zabit.
link |
And no one certainly had, you know,
link |
put that kind of performance together.
link |
And I think Kyle put the blueprint out there.
link |
And in retrospect, when I look at the last round,
link |
yeah, there were things that could have been done differently,
link |
but we're playing with house money at that point.
link |
Like, I mean, let it fly.
link |
You get to a point where you've got it,
link |
you're down three rounds and there's 20 seconds left.
link |
You got to move all your chips to the center of the table
link |
and, you know, see what happens.
link |
Do you remember what Joe Rogan said about it?
link |
I remember like he got won over.
link |
I think I have trouble remembering
link |
because offline we talked about that fight
link |
and he's exceptionally impressed by,
link |
I mean, Joe's from Boston, so it's like,
link |
I mean, there's a story there.
link |
Okay, it sucks not,
link |
you naturally want to romanticize,
link |
like there's a Rocky versus like,
link |
there's a Rocky IV, a Draga.
link |
I mean, similar, I suppose, kind of chemistry.
link |
Kyle's style represents the American.
link |
Yeah, I mean, he's from Gloucester.
link |
It's like, you could have dragged him off the docks
link |
three hours before the fight and said,
link |
hey, you want to go fight?
link |
And he would have said yes.
link |
Oh man, that was a special fight.
link |
But that's, as per a discussion
link |
of like greatest fighters of all time,
link |
I tend to believe that that fight is more special
link |
than the championship belt defenses by George St. Pierre.
link |
Like, you know, there's something to that.
link |
It's like Rocky, Rocky I is more special
link |
than like Rocky III, right?
link |
So like, it's the underdog or it's whatever,
link |
like the dance partner is like going to war
link |
and like that moment, I mean, it's bigger.
link |
It's bigger than any individual fighter.
link |
They create that and that,
link |
I know it's not perhaps good for a career.
link |
It's not good for like in terms of money,
link |
in terms of longevity,
link |
in terms of all those kinds of things,
link |
but that's a special moment in the history of fighting
link |
that you both created.
link |
I can remember like right after,
link |
like there was so much excitement in the air
link |
during the third round.
link |
And I remember being in the corner
link |
and like, I was so excited at the end of it
link |
that I had forgotten what happened in the other two rounds.
link |
I didn't even know.
link |
And I looked to Sean, one of the other corner men,
link |
and I think I said to him, did we win?
link |
When you rewatch the fight,
link |
clearly we didn't win the fight.
link |
I mean, we lost the other rounds,
link |
but I got so caught up in that moment
link |
and I just remember like,
link |
I was so in awe of his performance
link |
that like I forgot what was going on.
link |
And it's so hard to not be a fan at that moment
link |
and to stay within yourself and try and like coach,
link |
but then what the fuck you even coaching at that point?
link |
It's like, we're rumbling.
link |
We got 30 seconds.
link |
We're trying to win here.
link |
And I remember like the performance itself,
link |
I'm not a fan of moral victories,
link |
but if ever there was gonna be one, that was one.
link |
And when the fight was over and I grabbed Kyle,
link |
like they hadn't even been to the center of the cage yet.
link |
And I just hugged him and I said, you're my fucking hero.
link |
And I remember being very emotional about that,
link |
that I was able to be a part of that.
link |
It feels wrong to say, but I was,
link |
I kind of avoided saying it,
link |
but I think if I'm being honest with my feelings,
link |
this is a safe space for feelings.
link |
Is I think it was the greatest mixed martial arts fight
link |
And I don't think I'm being biased.
link |
I was honestly thinking like, am I being biased?
link |
I honestly don't think so.
link |
I think that was the greatest fight.
link |
Like if you wanna rank fights I've ever seen,
link |
I think to me that was the greatest fight I've ever seen.
link |
It certainly was one of the greatest displays
link |
of like just dogged effort from an underdog
link |
who was out experienced and probably outsized.
link |
But I mean, like you just,
link |
Kyle's one of those kids,
link |
you're never gonna tell him he's out of a fight.
link |
He has something you can't teach.
link |
And I've seen tons of people with more physical attributes
link |
and they're just mental midgets
link |
and they got a million dollar body and a 50 cent heart.
link |
And Kyle is not that.
link |
And you can't teach it no matter what you do.
link |
But that was, I would say like my career in combat sports,
link |
which spans, if you wanna go all the way back
link |
to like wrestling, like that was one of probably
link |
the greatest experiences I've been a part of.
link |
It's a bittersweet sport.
link |
She's a fickle mistress.
link |
Yeah, I mean, the tragic aspect of that is
link |
like, I guess Kyle lost, right?
link |
So like if you look at the record
link |
and all the kind of things,
link |
perhaps like you look at the career,
link |
maybe like as a financial,
link |
from a financial perspective that perhaps is not
link |
the greatest thing for Kyle's career
link |
or that or in the history of the UFC,
link |
perhaps it's not like maybe many people
link |
didn't even watch that fight,
link |
but it was a special moment that stands in the history.
link |
There's not many of these in the history of fighting.
link |
But at the end of the day,
link |
when you look at someone's career in the UFC,
link |
like financially, there's a handful of people
link |
that make real money.
link |
Everybody else makes nothing.
link |
There's a handful of people that make real money.
link |
So did that loss cost him in the near term?
link |
Sure, but when you look back on your life,
link |
you're not gonna look back on that loss
link |
as something that derailed my life financially
link |
and I never recovered from it.
link |
That's not gonna happen.
link |
Like the sad thing is, is unless you were a champion
link |
and most people are gonna be forgotten
link |
right after they're gone.
link |
Most people will be forgotten.
link |
And if you're not forgotten,
link |
certainly your accolades are gonna be misrepresented.
link |
Either they're gonna be inflated or diminished
link |
one way or the other.
link |
So looking back on it, it's just so hard to quantify that.
link |
But it's an experience.
link |
And when you're in that moment
link |
and you're one of the people intimately involved in it,
link |
the value of that experience supersedes any financial gain.
link |
Where would you put Khabib
link |
in the discussion of the greatest of all time?
link |
So you recently, we worked together,
link |
we watched the fight of him and Justin Gaethje
link |
and Khabib retired.
link |
Would you put him up there as one of the greatest
link |
or did he never truly find his foil,
link |
like the great warrior that challenged him?
link |
And maybe do you think he's fully retired now?
link |
To answer the question about being fully retired,
link |
I don't have any idea.
link |
I can't for a second pretend to think that I understand
link |
the way that people from that part of the world
link |
think and respect their family and things like that.
link |
To an American who says,
link |
oh, I promised my mom I wouldn't do it.
link |
I mean, I promised my mom I wouldn't do a lot of things.
link |
I went right out the fucking back door and did them.
link |
But I think that that means something different
link |
to people in different parts of the world.
link |
So I have no idea what kind of weight that carries.
link |
So I can't answer that.
link |
I can say a lot of times when people think
link |
about great fighters,
link |
they think about the aspects that make up MMA.
link |
Like they think of MMA as a pie
link |
and they're all these different pieces that make up the pie.
link |
And how good is this piece?
link |
And how good is this piece?
link |
And how good is this piece?
link |
When the fact of the matter is
link |
is you only need one really, really, really good piece.
link |
And the other pieces are complimentary pieces
link |
to get you to where you're the strongest.
link |
And if you want to tell me
link |
that Khabib's not the greatest MMA fighter
link |
because he doesn't have really slick striking,
link |
you can make that argument.
link |
But what I can tell you is Khabib has good enough striking
link |
to get him to his grappling
link |
where he is clearly the best guy at 155 they've ever seen.
link |
So does that make him the greatest fighter
link |
in that division or not?
link |
To your point about the foil,
link |
they wanted Connor to be his foil
link |
and he just manhandled them.
link |
I mean, they wanted that to happen.
link |
Well, there's a kind of argument to be made which we kind of,
link |
now you get haters in this argument
link |
and you're going to be one of the haters
link |
because I know your, how should I put it?
link |
Lack of admiration for Connor McGregor.
link |
Football is a game of inches?
link |
There's a sense where that Connor,
link |
there's an argument to be made
link |
that Connor wasn't exactly dominated,
link |
that he ended up being dominant,
link |
meaning, let me phrase it differently,
link |
is there's a lot of points in the fight
link |
that a different trajectory could have happened.
link |
So he wasn't so far from having a chance
link |
at winning that fight.
link |
It's just the end.
link |
Those are the most important moments at the end.
link |
You've lost the most important moments.
link |
Right, but the road less taken.
link |
It could have been,
link |
if he didn't lose those very important moments,
link |
I'm saying out of all the people that Khabib fought,
link |
it's arguable that Connor was up there
link |
of the people that had a chance.
link |
Let me say this first.
link |
I'm going to get so much heat for this.
link |
I'm a huge Khabib fan
link |
because I'm a grappler first and foremost.
link |
Me too, because I'm also Russian.
link |
I love Khabib, calm down.
link |
When Connor came on the scene,
link |
I loved Connor because I'm an Irish American
link |
and I want to support him and things like that.
link |
And he was good fun.
link |
He got to be, for my personal taste,
link |
he got to be too much.
link |
Of all the people Khabib has fought,
link |
I would never fight Connor again if I were him.
link |
And I said this about the Diaz fight.
link |
Nate Diaz, who was one of my favorite fighters,
link |
has fought the exact same fight for 12 years.
link |
Connor will switch something up to give himself an edge.
link |
And I believe that Connor would figure something out
link |
in fight number two, I think,
link |
but I also thought that Gagey would give Khabib problems
link |
where it wouldn't be a matter of
link |
I'm going to out wrestle Khabib
link |
or become better at defending his wrestling takedowns.
link |
Connor would have figured out a way to not get wrestled.
link |
I feel like he's constantly changing.
link |
He's constantly evolving.
link |
And whether or not people realize it or not,
link |
I think Connor's one of the better overall athletes in MMA
link |
just from looking at his body and his movement
link |
and the way he's shaped.
link |
He's got a very tiny waist.
link |
He's got really pronounced glutes and shoulders.
link |
And I think he's a for real athlete.
link |
Whereas a lot of guys in MMA are not for real athletes.
link |
They're just good at one of the things that makes up MMA.
link |
I understand what you're saying about
link |
if this happened, if that happened,
link |
but I mean, you could say that
link |
about every single combat sports event ever.
link |
If Spinks's hook landed on Tyson,
link |
maybe that fight didn't end the way that it did,
link |
but you know what?
link |
You're absolutely right.
link |
But if we could talk about just Connor McGregor
link |
I can't wait to get your fan mail or hate mail.
link |
Speak to the innovation of Connor.
link |
I don't hear very many people making this argument,
link |
but is it possible to make an argument
link |
that Connor McGregor is one of the greatest fighters
link |
It's an interesting argument.
link |
And the problem, the only problem with the argument
link |
is there's so much emotion on either side.
link |
Yeah, I had a conversation, sorry to interrupt,
link |
with Yaron Brook, who is a philosopher,
link |
objectivist, which is the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
link |
And the amount of emotion around that particular human
link |
is fascinating to me.
link |
It's similar to the amount of emotion around Donald Trump.
link |
You can think of different personalities, maybe Elon Musk.
link |
Those are the people that aren't willing
link |
to have their mind changed.
link |
They're too emotionally attached to the argument.
link |
Yeah, but it's weird that why do we,
link |
why some people inspire so much emotion and others don't?
link |
But Connor McGregor, I feel like nobody's able
link |
to have a calm fight analysis of the guy.
link |
Look, to me, as just a fan of martial arts,
link |
like I studied judo, I love watching just hours
link |
of Olympic judo and appreciating the art form.
link |
Like I forget the humans involved.
link |
Teddy Renner, who's a heavyweight,
link |
the most probably the most dominant heavyweight
link |
in the history of judo, just studying his gripping,
link |
just the art of it.
link |
And who cares if there's shit talking?
link |
Like to me, I put all of that aside
link |
and just look at the art.
link |
And like what I really appreciate about Connor McGregor
link |
is his innovation, like of movement,
link |
of maybe it's romanticized, maybe you can correct me.
link |
I'm just a Cheeto eating fan of mixed martial arts,
link |
but like I seem to detect more innovation
link |
than almost any other fighter
link |
that I've paid attention to in Connor McGregor.
link |
I think first, I'll answer in two parts.
link |
I think, well, I'm not gonna answer the first part.
link |
It's just a comment, because you didn't ask the question.
link |
What was the question?
link |
I don't even remember.
link |
It's about how Connor McGregor fans are very emotional
link |
and Connor McGregor detractors are very emotional.
link |
I think fans become very emotional.
link |
They become cheerleaders of someone like Connor McGregor
link |
or Donald Trump, because they see that person
link |
exhibiting the qualities that they themselves lack.
link |
And so they become cheerleaders for that, right?
link |
And I think that for the most part,
link |
people who are detractors of Connor McGregors,
link |
they're not really Connor McGregor detractors.
link |
They're detractors of Connor supporters.
link |
There's a beef that they have
link |
with the people in that bucket, right?
link |
Like, it's not really a problem.
link |
And that applies probably in our current political climate,
link |
Donald Trump with the left and the right.
link |
It's more about like, they actually don't like
link |
on the other, the caricature, the most extreme versions
link |
of what they see in the supporters of the other side.
link |
Yeah, that's a good point.
link |
But I think the more interesting thing
link |
is the fighter himself.
link |
So let's put the supporters aside.
link |
I would say that, you know, what some people know
link |
and some people don't know is that Connor's base
link |
is in karate and the karate style of Connor McGregor,
link |
Steven Thompson, of Lyoto Machida,
link |
that type of distance management,
link |
a lot of times we think as martial artists,
link |
we think that the sport version of the art
link |
we've chosen to pursue somehow taints the authenticity
link |
and the effectiveness of it.
link |
But point karate is what led to that
link |
in and out distance management style of Connor,
link |
of Lyoto and of Steven Thompson.
link |
They all kind of use it a little bit differently,
link |
but they use it very effectively, all three of them.
link |
And that comes from a world of trying to kind of like
link |
step in, land contact on you from my point
link |
and then get back out before you can counterstrike me, right?
link |
And that's where that comes from.
link |
Connor is blessed to have a longer arms
link |
than someone his height probably normally has.
link |
And his movement is just so fluid.
link |
He's so athletic with the hinges of his body,
link |
the knees and the hips and the swivel of his body,
link |
which is also the hips and the shoulders.
link |
His movement, his distance,
link |
and the way he sets people up for the straight left hand
link |
while you're circling away from it
link |
and he can still land it,
link |
which is what he did to Chad Mendes.
link |
Hit him with a straight left
link |
while he was circling away from it.
link |
That is something that is very beautiful to watch.
link |
And sometimes people see the kicks
link |
and they see all the flashy snap kicks and the sidekicks.
link |
All that stuff is doing is setting people up
link |
for the left hand.
link |
It's all it's doing.
link |
It's you're corralling people, you're funneling people,
link |
or you're leading the dance and you're bringing them
link |
to a spot where you know you can land that left hand.
link |
And his ability to do that is masterful.
link |
People constantly shit on his ability to grapple
link |
because a couple of his losses
link |
have been to jujitsu guys or grapplers,
link |
but they've been to really good guys.
link |
Anyone who's gonna sit here and tell me
link |
Conor McGregor's not a good grappler, go grapple him.
link |
Let me see you grapple him.
link |
To that point, I'll also say a lot of people
link |
will use Conor McGregor's X guard sweep on Nate Diaz
link |
as evidence to his high level grappling in that fight,
link |
to which I would also counter,
link |
Nate Diaz didn't fight that off
link |
because he knew he was so much better at jujitsu
link |
off the bottom that he didn't even care if he got swept.
link |
So is Conor McGregor innovative?
link |
Is he one of the best fighters ever?
link |
It's tough to say because he's such a cash cow
link |
that he was fed people.
link |
I firmly believe no one who put
link |
that Conor McGregor Khabib fight together
link |
thought Khabib would win.
link |
I remember, so at that time it was not completely clear.
link |
There was a myth of the great Khabib.
link |
It wasn't completely clear how good is he really.
link |
So that's interesting.
link |
And it was unclear how good is Conor also.
link |
Because I think to me,
link |
maybe part of my admiration of Conor McGregor
link |
is rooted in the fact that I thought
link |
there was no way he beats Jose Aldo
link |
and I thought there's definitely no way
link |
he beats Eddie Alvarez.
link |
And so like when he did,
link |
I was like, my brain was like,
link |
there's something broken.
link |
It was like shut down, like on windows, like froze.
link |
We have to rethink this.
link |
Like this is a special human.
link |
Now people who argue he's not even in the running
link |
of like top 20 is,
link |
if you look at the number of defenses, for example,
link |
of his belt that he had very, very little.
link |
But like to me, I'm one of those people
link |
is back to our discussion of like,
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do moments make great fighters?
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That I think just being able to beat Jose Aldo
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and I would argue in his prime,
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some people might disagree in this,
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in a way where he like figures out the puzzle,
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gets in his head the entirety of the picture.
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And then to be, I mean, Eddie Alvarez,
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would he be considered a really strong wrestler?
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Like, or not strong wrestler,
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strong striker and wrestler,
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the whole combination of it.
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And also what's the other wrestler he fought?
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Chad Mendes. Chad Mendes.
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So let me comment on all those if I may.
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So I was at the Chad Mendes fight live.
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And there was a jujitsu tournament, we're out in Vegas.
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And so me and my best friend came out
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and we got some tickets.
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That night was supposed to be the first Aldo fight.
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Aldo got hurt, like right after I bought the tickets.
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They pulled Chad Mendes in.
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He was a little bit out of shape, whatever.
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You still got to fight the fight.
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But I don't want to use that fight as evidence
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to Conor's greatness because they pulled Chad Mendes in.
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He was like hunting and drinking beers in the woods
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and was a little out of shape.
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But if you want to talk about greatness,
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like that surpasses your in ring accomplishments.
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I was in the stands that night
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and the people that came from Ireland
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to see Conor fight that night,
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single handedly set the market
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for hotel room prices and airline tickets to Vegas
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These motherfuckers were all dressed like Conor
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They had wool suits on and big beards
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and the whole thing.
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I mean, they probably weren't pocket watches.
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I never saw more people trying to be someone else.
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Never saw more people try to be someone else.
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I mean, there's a level of,
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is there a level of greatness in that?
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I mean, I don't know how to parse all that out.
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You're somebody who doesn't admire that.
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I love that in the sense, the following sense, I think.
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And people don't seem to hold this belief at all,
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but to me, fighting is not just,
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this isn't like a quiet street fight that nobody watches.
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This is also a spectacle.
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This is also a story.
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There's like, there's a professional wrestling element
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This is not, like you think it's just about fighting.
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If it was just about fighting, you wouldn't,
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I mean, there's a story to it, I guess,
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is what I'm trying to get to.
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And greatness has to incorporate that.
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People that criticize, again, I might be wrong on this,
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but I honestly think that Conor McGregor,
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not nearly as much as Khabib,
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but he's a true martial artist.
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I think he respects his opponents despite the talk.
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Maybe I'm misreading it,
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but it feels like he is a storyteller,
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like Chael Sonnen type of like, he's constructed this image
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to play the story, like just the way he acts
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after the fight, the honor he shows to his opponents.
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There's a real martial artist in there,
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and to dismiss the fact that the story of the fight
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is part of it, because he doesn't just shit talk.
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This is what people don't seem to understand.
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He's good at shit talking.
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Very good, and I'm with you on basically everything you said.
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I think that there's greatness to that,
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and I think that he understands how to sell a fight,
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and I think what he did to Jose Aldo by getting in his head
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helped him win that fight.
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He insulted Jose Aldo and his country so much
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that he knew Aldo was gonna come forward
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right into that left hook.
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Was that fight in Brazil, by the way?
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Because I know he insulted all of Brazil,
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but I'm not sure if it was in Brazil.
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But when he tried to do that to Khabib,
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you could tell that he just was not gonna get
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Khabib was unflappable.
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But there is definitely something great
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about how he moves people.
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The Irish are like, I mean, Conor's walkout music,
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for people from Ireland of Irish descent,
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that shit is like very deep.
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You know, it's a very emotional song.
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I was, to be honest, a little bit upset with Khabib,
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that he didn't rise.
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I admire that entire culture.
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But there's an aspect to where he could have risen
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to the occasion of there's the same kind of depth
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of love of country that Russia has.
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Is there in Dagestan?
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Dagestan is a little weird in terms of like,
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but he could have, especially with Putin's support,
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wear for a bit the full Russian hat
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of like this is the great nation.
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Like rise above the culture of Dagestan,
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which is a small town boy with the small town values
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of family and all those kinds of things.
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There's a moment where you inspire entire nations.
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Like the step up and be the foil
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to the great Conor McGregor where also Khabib
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becomes the foil to, like both of them
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are the foil to each other and become like,
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that fight was already a great fight, right?
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But it could have been something historic.
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Ali versus Fred, I mean, it could have been really historic.
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And I would argue, I guess the biggest disappointment I have,
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and I understand it and I also honor it as a martial artist,
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but to, I'm disappointed that Khabib doesn't seem
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to even consider the possibility of doing in Moscow
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fight number two, and because that could be narrative wise
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if they do it right, that's one of the,
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could be one of the greatest fights in history.
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Yeah, I think in terms of Khabib and inspiring a country,
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is it possible that by staying true to the values
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that he had his entire career and getting to the zenith
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of his art form and still doing it in that humble way,
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isn't it possible that that inspires?
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Yeah, 100%, so I should clarify that I think
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they're just hearing from people,
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from my fellow comrades, no, is they love that.
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They love that, but they.
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There's also a brash, beer chugging, shit talking thing
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that people really like about Connor, and I do love that.
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But the beautiful narrative would have been the clash,
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the real clash of those cultures.
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So Khabib chooses to live the culture by walking away.
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There's also like a clash of them sort of walking,
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not walking away from the fire, but walking into the fire
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of this brashness.
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It's the sort of the cool collected calmness
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of the Dagestan people.
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It's like you were talking about the Saitya brothers.
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So they just view it totally differently.
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And there are stereotypes about the Irish
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where they're maybe potentially a louder,
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more boisterous culture.
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Haven't heard of that, yeah.
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And I mean, I thought they each played their part perfectly.
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And all those things that you're describing
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could have happened.
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Maybe Khabib steps up and he carries the proverbial flag,
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so to speak, for a nation of people and they go to battle.
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But the fight, if it plays out the same way,
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is still the fight.
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And it was an okay fight.
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It wasn't a great fight.
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It was, you know, the fight was okay.
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And I think that, again, I don't have any idea
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what Khabib's obligations to his family are.
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I don't think either of those guys want for more money.
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To do another fight is just a legacy thing.
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It's just about fulfilling some part of a legacy.
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And I just, I admire the possibility of a great legacy
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that is bigger than either of the fighters.
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I think with Khabib, he kind of, he's not as concerned
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about legacy, I think.
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Your promoter's dream, because you want the rematch,
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and the only thing that makes more money
link |
than the rematch is the trilogy.
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You gotta split the rematch, you hope Conor wins,
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and then you have the trilogy fight.
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And now you're all in.
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Yeah, I can't get into Khabib's head,
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but I know Putin, just the game, the entirety of it,
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especially at the time,
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especially if it was Trump as president,
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if he was as president at the time,
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and Putin, and in Russia,
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and just knowing how masterful Conor is at,
link |
because Conor would be a different Conor.
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I think he would be a calmer Conor.
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There would be a different,
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because you don't wanna be over the top Conor
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with the Russian people.
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Right, no, that's...
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It's like, ah, this is dangerous ground.
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See, that was the episode in the hotel in Brooklyn
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when some of the Russian guys confronted Artem,
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and then Conor came over.
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It's not, but the danger of that.
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I mean, there is the element of just like real danger,
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and the real, it was almost of war.
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It's, I don't know, it's...
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It was like when Chael Sonnen was talking so much smack,
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maybe it was against Vanderlei Silva.
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I don't know, and it was one of those fights
link |
where they just didn't think he was gonna make it
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Americans don't get it.
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People take some of that shit in different parts
link |
of the world very, very seriously.
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Yeah, but that's what makes it beautiful.
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That's what makes a great story,
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and I think fighting is very much about the stories,
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not just about the particular outcomes of a fight,
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or the skillset matching, or the chess of the fight.
link |
It's also about the story of the greater,
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like context of societies, of warring.
link |
We're like warring cultures, but we're still,
link |
we're still good, we're no longer can have great,
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big, hot wars between nations because of nuclear weapons.
link |
This is our wars that we can have,
link |
and in some sense, I feel robbed of the great war
link |
that could have happened.
link |
It doesn't mean there aren't lots of wars going on,
link |
but yeah, the big one is not gonna happen.
link |
There's too much of a balance of power
link |
with nuclear weapons and technology and stuff,
link |
but it's not the end of war.
link |
Do you think there's always gonna be war?
link |
I think there'll always be war,
link |
especially in underdeveloped parts of the world.
link |
Isn't there always underdeveloped,
link |
relatively, parts of the world?
link |
Yeah, I mean, at some point, though, you'd think,
link |
I mean, the way that technology's expanding
link |
and we're bringing technology to weird parts of the world
link |
that you wouldn't think of as technologically advanced,
link |
the way that the Chinese are inhabiting certain areas
link |
for mining purposes and things like that,
link |
I think underdeveloped parts of the world
link |
will get developed quickly.
link |
I just wonder what the nature of that war might be.
link |
It could be cyber, it could be all those kinds of things.
link |
I think in developed nations, it's gonna be cyber.
link |
I think that's probably the next phase of war,
link |
but I mean, I think you talk about parts of the world
link |
like the Middle East,
link |
and it's just still gonna be warring tribal factions.
link |
We can't even begin to understand
link |
what those people are fighting about over there.
link |
Yet, everyone sitting in America on their couch
link |
You can't even begin to understand it.
link |
Yeah, it's back to the principle discussion,
link |
when what's violated is much deeper
link |
than just kind of anything we can even,
link |
in a middle class existence, can even comprehend.
link |
A lot of times, American soldiers will go to war
link |
because that's what they're told to do,
link |
and maybe they disagree with the orders,
link |
and maybe they agree with the orders,
link |
but I get a sense that people in the Middle East fighting
link |
all believe in what they're fighting for.
link |
It's not a thing where they're told to go do it.
link |
I believe they really believe
link |
that what they're doing is the right thing,
link |
and they're defending some sort of principle.
link |
Are you generally optimistic about the future,
link |
speaking of war, of human civilization?
link |
Do you think we'll, people talk about the Fermi Paradox
link |
and asking why haven't aliens visited us,
link |
if you believe they haven't visited us.
link |
One of the thoughts is that there's kind of a great filter
link |
that intelligent civilization reach a point
link |
where it destroys itself naturally,
link |
so that's why we haven't seen them.
link |
They don't last very long.
link |
There does seem to be a kind of,
link |
we seem to be advancing faster and faster and faster.
link |
We keep developing more and more powerful ways
link |
of destroying ourselves in all kinds of ways,
link |
not even, just even to say nuclear weapons alone,
link |
but there's all kinds of new ways,
link |
engineer pandemics, nanotechnology, AGI,
link |
all those kinds of things.
link |
It seems to be that the argument that we are going
link |
to destroy ourselves in some kind of creative way
link |
very shortly is not too crazy of an argument to make.
link |
Are you more optimistic or pessimistic
link |
about the prospects of human civilization
link |
in maybe the 22nd century?
link |
Like, is it possible that your generation
link |
is the last generation to be alive on Earth?
link |
No, but I wouldn't say that five generations
link |
from now that could be true.
link |
I guess I think of it really selfishly.
link |
I'm a big believer that when your time here on Earth is over,
link |
the overwhelmingly vast majority of people
link |
will be forgotten within 12 calendar months.
link |
People with no family will be forgotten sooner,
link |
and so I don't give a lot of thought
link |
to what will happen to Earth or mankind when I'm gone.
link |
I give more thought to maximizing my time here now,
link |
and I wanna do it in a way where I don't,
link |
I'm not overtly hindering the future of civilization
link |
or humankind, but I'm definitely taking a me first approach
link |
to how I live on Earth.
link |
Do you have a philosophy behind why you have
link |
or don't have kids on this topic?
link |
Because for many people, when they have kids,
link |
there's a sense, it's almost like a genetic sense
link |
or something like that, where all of a sudden,
link |
you do start caring about what happens
link |
five generations from now.
link |
I mean, I think I'm just too selfish.
link |
I mean, I think that's the easy answer.
link |
Like, I know that your whole life has to change.
link |
You know, your focus, everything shifts,
link |
and just don't wanna do that.
link |
And also, I think that there's a level of,
link |
I guess if I have to really unpack it,
link |
there's probably a level of lack of hope in the future.
link |
Like, I don't think it's, I don't think the world
link |
and humanity is going in the right direction.
link |
What does the right direction look like?
link |
I think the right direction looks like people
link |
coming back together in a more impactful human way,
link |
in person, touching, feeling, talking face to face.
link |
So all the things you're describing is what we had,
link |
as you mentioned before, when you were like a teenager.
link |
So the state of the world.
link |
But that's because your mind was formed then.
link |
It very well could be.
link |
It very well could be.
link |
It's very possible that the virtual reality worlds
link |
that we'll create will be actually
link |
a much higher level of existence.
link |
In fact, like now we're getting,
link |
we're moving slowly away from tribalism,
link |
perhaps you could argue the ideas of nations,
link |
and we're going, we're moving into the realm of ideas
link |
and it could be a higher form of existence
link |
where we're sort of moving past the constraints
link |
of our meat vehicles into the space of our minds.
link |
It depends what you value.
link |
Cause when you sit here and you talk about it,
link |
and you're talking about these things
link |
in these humongous levels, on these macro levels.
link |
And I don't think a lot of people view it that way.
link |
I think a lot of people view it as like,
link |
what kind of pizza am I getting tonight?
link |
Like it's a much different outlook.
link |
And sure, the virtual world that's on the horizon,
link |
I'm sure it's got benefits and will help people,
link |
but is it gonna help the things that you find valuable?
link |
Like, was it gonna help commerce?
link |
Is that the thing you find the most valuable?
link |
Is it gonna help communication?
link |
Well, it'll help disseminating information.
link |
Is it gonna help explain the information
link |
you're disseminating?
link |
Is it gonna hinder interp