The following is a conversation with John Clark.

He's a friend, a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt, former MMA

fighter, and at least in my opinion, one of the great UFC

cornermen coaches to listen to.

And also he's my current Jiu Jitsu coach at Broadway Jiu Jitsu in

South Boston.

He was once for a time a philosophy major in college and is now,

I would say, a kind of practicing philosopher, opinionated,

brilliant, and someone I always enjoy talking to, even when,

especially when we disagree, which we do often.

He's definitely someone I can see talking to many times on this

podcast.

In fact, he hosts a new podcast of his own called, Please Allow

Me.

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As a side note, let me say that martial arts, especially Jiu

Jitsu and Judo have been a big part of my growth as a human

being, so I think I will talk to a few martial artists on

occasion on this podcast.

I hope that is of interest to you.

I won't talk to people who are simply great fighters or great

athletes, but people who have a philosophy that I find to be

interesting and worth exploring, even if I disagree with parts

or most of it.

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scientists, fighters and biologists, and between totally

different world views and personalities like Elon Musk and

Michael Malice.

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diversity of weirdness that is human civilization.

I love the weird and the brilliant, and hope you join

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Freedman.

And now here's my conversation with John Clark.

You ready for this?

I've been ready for this my whole life.

All right.

I was thinking of doing a Kerouac style road trip across

the United States, you know, after this whole COVID thing

lifts, you ever take a trip like that?

I've done a handful of long distance driving trips, up and

down the East Coast, but also from the West Coast, back to

the East Coast, and then returning to California.

So I've definitely done my fair share of driving in this

country.

Do you have the longing for the great American road trip?

I think there are so many things that I've been lucky

enough to see in the world that I now, at this point in my

life, realize there are tons of things that I need to see here

in this country, and a road trip could potentially be the

best way to see them.

I think to do it effectively, you need an amount of time

where you can be as leisurely as possible.

There's no deadline and there's no, I've got to make it from

Chicago to St. Louis by sundown to get to this place at this

time.

I think you really need to be able to take your time and kind

of like let the road take you where you need to go.

It feels like you need a mission though.

Ultimately, like there's a reason you need to be in San

Francisco.

That's like the Kerouac thing.

You have to meet somebody somewhere kind of loosely in a

few weeks, and then it's the, as you struggle on towards

that mission, you meet weird characters that get in your

way, but ultimately sort of create an experience.

I think having a loose deadline is good, but that's a

beginning and an end point.

And what I mean is I don't want to have to be, all right,

we're leaving, say Boston on Sunday night.

Let's get to New York by Monday morning.

And then from New York, we're going to go to Philly, and we've

got to be in Philly at four.

A vague beginning and end is fine, but I think having very

strict guidelines in between will rob you of certain

experiences along the way.

If you have a timeframe to get from Philly to Indianapolis,

in some awesome shit starts to happen in Philly, do you really

want to have to cut it short because you've got to be in

Indianapolis by sunup?

Why do you have to be anywhere by any time for any reason?

Really?

Well, plans change.

Plans change all the time, exactly.

But if we're talking about having a mission or the type of

road trip, I just think it would be best to have it as loose

and flexible as possible.

I don't know.

You got to make hard deadlines and then break them, totally

change the plans, disappoint people, break promises.

That's the way of life.

Somebody's waiting for you in St. Louis, and all of a sudden

you fell in love with a biker in New York.

I don't know.

I don't know what you're up to.

I can appreciate that.

But on a trip like that, I feel like a trip with deadlines is

for a different point in your life.

And at this point in my life, I don't want any of the deadlines

because it's not about meeting someone and disappointing them

in St. Louis.

It's about me not disappointing myself.

You want to have enough time in what you're doing to make sure

that you get the full breadth of every experience that you encounter.

How would you fully experience a place?

How would you?

You know, I don't think I've actually fully experienced Boston.

Like how, if you were showing up to a city for a week on this road

trip, what would you do?

So I'm going to answer that in two parts.

A few years ago, I had an opportunity to move out of Boston.

And the thing that kept me here, no question about it, was the fact

that I felt like I had a contract with my students and I did not.

I felt like a great many of them took a leap of faith by joining my gym

and like, you know, asking me to teach them what I know.

And when I had an opportunity to leave Boston, I thought of those people

and I thought, I want to fulfill my obligation to them.

So because I made a decision to stay here, I then that summer made a

decision to endear myself to the city of Boston.

And I tried to find lots and lots of different things to do.

I can tell you that the coolest thing that I found to do in this city

is the MFA, where they have like on Friday nights, they'll have

like different exhibits and stuff.

And they'll have like little beer carts and food tents.

And you can go do a painting class off in the, on the side, very

cool night of things to do.

But in general, whenever I'm in a new city, I try not to pay attention

to Google and I try not to do anything that I find on a travel site.

The best thing to do is to walk out of your hotel or wherever it is you're

staying and find the most normal looking bar, have a drink and talk to a bar tender.

So the people, the people, the people, and then you can experience that town,

the way that they experience it, even in a city where there are tons

of tourist attractions, locals probably visit the same tourist attractions

when they have visitors come from out of town.

But you want to see how they view those places and how they visit them.

And you want to go to eat where they're going to eat.

Like, you know, you're going to, for the most part, the North End is not

a place where I would take someone and say, Hey, this is Boston's, the

pinnacle of Boston dining, because it's very touristy.

There are a handful of really good restaurants there.

But I want to know where the, where the, I want to go to Bogie's place.

I want to know like the down low spots where the hell's Bogie's place.

It's like a little steakhouse in the back of jam, Curly's, exactly.

It's like a shitty bar, jam, Curly's.

No, it's just a bar with like bar food.

But I think that like, it's not Boston, it is in Boston.

Yeah, it's like South Boston.

No, it's in, it's in the downtown area.

Like, I don't know what the neighborhoods are called here, honestly,

because they call, they, they have an area called downtown Boston.

And I don't even know what the hell that means.

And they used to have financial districts.

Where's Southie, because I've heard about this, Southie.

Southie is South Boston.

But is there, is there a difference in South Boston, Southie?

No, it's the same thing.

No, but like, you know, the mythical Southie.

I think the mythical Southie is something that's long gone now.

And the term now actually is Sobo.

Oh, no.

Yeah, it's, it's changed.

What, who, who took over?

What, what's the, you know, the goodwill hunting personality?

That's Southie, isn't it?

Strong accent, those badass dudes.

I came here right at the end of like, what was South Boston?

So when I got, and my gym is in South Boston, the neighborhood was just starting to change.

So I think as gentrification happened and they started building more luxury condominiums,

they were buying all these old businesses out, all the mom and pop businesses.

And I think that kind of changed the, the makeup of the community.

And it wasn't only because there was an influx of new young people with disposable

income is because there's an exodus of the older people who kind of grew up and raised

their families there because they were being offered humongous sums of money for their homes

that they had bought like in the late seventies and early eighties so that they could develop

those areas.

So you have a combination of the influx of new people and the exodus of the old.

And now you just got this totally new neighborhood in its place.

What do you love about Boston?

Is there a love still for Boston?

You certainly have the love of the thing that's gone as well.

Yeah, I think I don't want to pinpoint pin this on Boston because it's happening in all great cities.

As these areas become gentrified, what's happening is the personality and the character

of the neighborhood is just being run out.

And I have nothing against people coming in and making money and things like that.

But when you do it at the expense of the culture, the character and the personality

of the neighborhood, I mean, you're kind of standing on the shoulders of giants.

These are the people that came here and built these areas up.

It happens here in Boston.

It happens in all over New York, happens on the West Coast.

So what I love about Boston is not nearly as romantic as what it might have been 15

years ago and what I used to love about New York.

What I love about Boston is that it's walkable.

Well, the food scene is on the rise here.

But I think you're hard pressed to find the charm that people think of when they think

of old Boston and old New England city.

Yeah, I see it differently.

People sometimes criticize like MIT for the thing that it is now.

But I think it is always like that.

I tend to prefer to carry the flame of the greatness, the greatest moments of its history

and like sort of enjoy that, the echoes of that in the halls of MIT.

In the same way in Boston, you think about the history and that history lives on in the few individuals.

Like you can't just look around where Boston is now and be like, what has Boston become?

I think it was always carried by a minority of individuals.

I think we kind of look back in history and think like times were greater in a certain

kind of dimension back then, but that's because we remember this is a ridiculous,

non data driven assertion of mine is to remember just the the the brightest stars of that history.

And so we romanticize it.

But I think if you look around now, those special people are still living in Boston.

For which Boston will be remembered as a great city in like 50 years.

I think you're probably right.

But isn't there some sort of theory about the point that there's like a certain age in your life

where things resonate differently to you?

Like I think they've done studies where most people stop searching for new music after age 19.

Most dads you see like wearing super old clothes, like that's the style of the time period

of the last great part of their life.

So like there's an evolution in people and it could also be the most important thing

in the memories of where they live.

And when I was 17, of course, my neighborhood was the best then because I was having the most fun.

And we always kind of look at things through that that tint, I think.

And you're right.

And I don't think there's anything wrong with the way cities are evolving now.

It's just not I I prefer to time of like a mom and pop store, not a fabricated

like gastropub that could just be like on a four lane super highway on your

way out of Epcot Center and it's actually owned by like some conglomerate.

But there's still the special places like I this takes us back to the road trip is

maybe I tend to romanticize the experiences of like the diners in the middle of nowhere.

What would you say makes for like

it feels like life is made up of these experiences that maybe on paper seem mundane,

but are actually somehow give you a chance to pause and reflect on life with like a certain

kind of people, whether like really close friends or complete strangers,

maybe alcohol is involved in the middle of nowhere.

It seems like a road trip facilitates that if you allow it to.

Like what do you think makes for those kinds of experience?

Have you had any?

I think in the context of a road trip, I think it's like hyper localization.

And I think it is those those experiences along the way with people and

the people that you're with will color the experiences differently depending on the person.

The road trip you took was with somebody else or alone.

So I've driven up and down the East Coast several times when I drove from LA to New York.

My friend was on the run from the cops.

Yeah.

So we were trying to get traffic tickets.

Yeah, traffic tickets.

Yeah, allegedly we were trying to get out of LA because he was going to have to go away

for a little while.

So we drove from LA and we just, you know, we're young kids.

We had no idea what we were doing and we drove east and then, you know,

we had an unbelievable trip mostly because we didn't really have a destination.

We didn't really have a time frame.

Thank goodness, because he got arrested again in Pennsylvania.

So we got kind of stuck there.

And then, you know, and then we drove back to LA when he got out in Pennsylvania.

But all the stops along the way

were kind of like weird things like you have no money, right?

So you're finding that like a little diamond in the rough place to eat the diner you talk

about like that place.

I once was in, where was I?

I think I was in Buenos Aires and the guy that I was with,

he said, I know this quaint little spot around the corner.

And I was young, I was like 25 and I thought the coolest thing in the world

would be to be such a citizen of the world that you know these quaint little

spots around the corner in like all these great cities.

Like I know where to get this great chicken sandwich in Argentina.

I know where to get this great meal in Costa Rica.

I know where to get this super local like egg in another country.

I just thought that that was really cool.

The ability to do that anywhere in the world.

Did you get closer with that guy when through the trip?

I found that like, so I took a trip across the United States with a guy friend of mine.

We had different goals.

I was searching for a meaning in life and he was searching for

what's the politically correct way of phrasing it.

But just basically trying to sleep with every kind of woman that this world has to offer.

What's the difference between those two things?

Well, I guess he was searching for the different kinds of meanings.

I mean, I just I still think that you can't find meaning between a woman's legs,

I suppose that made you try to all of them.

But there was a tension there.

We grew closer with those experiences, but we've gotten in fights.

You know, there was a lot of like literal almost fights and then we're close.

And there was like silences, but then we were like brothers and this whole weird

journey of friendship that we went on.

I think any time you spend that much time in like a small space with another person,

you're going to have the the different parts of the relationship will manifest themselves.

You'll have the periods of closeness.

You'll have the periods of vulnerability where it's like maybe you're driving

through Denver and it's three in the morning and you talk about something you

might not have otherwise talked about.

You'll have the periods where you don't want to see that motherfucker ever again,

right? He didn't and depending could be because of anything.

But the guy that I drove twice with, we are still we're still in contact.

We're still buddies.

We we have very different goals also.

But at that point in our lives, we were not.

We never even contemplated the meaning of life.

We were about

probably more to the point of the friend that you drove with.

We were more about racking up experiences, whatever they were.

Right.

I want to be able to retell this.

Hmm.

Stories.

Yeah, I want to be able to retell this and it's got to sound cool.

Like, I don't want to retell the story about, yeah, and then we drove through

Alabama and they've got a lovely library and I checked out this book and, you know,

I'm not interested in retelling that.

Do you remember any?

Well, this is a kids show.

Do you remember any stories that the kids would enjoy from those times that were

profound in some kind of way?

There were some impactful moments

on the beginning of our road trip where we had no money and as a couple of kids who

knew nothing, we literally had to, we stopped in Vegas and we went to Circus Circus

at the time they had $3 blackjack and we had like 12 bucks and my buddy was a kind

of a degenerate gambler, so he knew what was up.

I was just like kind of stuffing chips in my pockets, making sure we could pay for

the gas and just being at the point, which is like a starting line and like we drove

from LA to Vegas, which is only about four hours and being at the starting line

and realizing like we may not even like get off the starting line here.

And if we don't, what are we doing?

We're going to be two guys stuck in Vegas with no money.

We can't go west because you're going to get pinched.

We have no money to go east.

What the hell are we going to do?

We're going to wind up in Vegas.

So, you know, that that was kind of a profound thing where you just

it's a turning it potentially could have been a turning point in our lives.

Had we not made enough money to continue going east?

That's the beautiful thing about road trips when you're broke is like

in retrospect, everything turned out fine, but you're facing the complete

darkness, the uncertainty of the possibilities laid before you.

And like, I don't know if you were confident at that time, but like I was

really full of self doubt, like just like all I could see is all the trajectories

where you just screw up your life.

Like, what am I doing with my life?

I'm a failure like all these dreams I've had.

I've never realized I'm a complete piece of shit.

All those kinds of I had no concept of consequence.

I like I was I probably had toxoplasmosis.

I had literally no concept of consequence.

Immediate gratification was all I cared about.

Oh, so existentialist.

Yeah, it did not it did not even enter my mind at in my like early 20s that

anything that I was doing at that point could reverberate for the rest of my life.

I think part of me didn't even think I'd make it this far.

And so I was not interested in like the long play.

I remember thinking like, why should I be acting now in a way that might impact a

point in my life I never reach?

And yet now you are a man who searches for meaning in life, at least.

I would say to put another way, you have

you think deeply about this world and in a philosophical context, while also

appreciating the violence of hurting other friends of yours, right?

On a regular basis.

So what why do you think I mean, maybe there's a broader question there,

but also a personal question.

It seems that people who fight

for prolonged periods of time, like Jiu Jitsu people,

a martial arts mixed martial arts people, even military folks,

become over time philosophers.

What what is that?

Is that is there a parallel between fighting and violence and the philosophical

depth with which you now have a right from the starting point of being the full

existentialist of like just living in the moment to like being introspective

human now, I would say to that being a soldier or a warrior

hundreds of years ago is probably what started the marriage between martial

arts and philosophy.

If you're constantly under someone else's charge and you're told to go out and walk

in a line and overtake some Germanic tribe somewhere and that happens all the time,

your job is being a soldier.

There's on any given day, you might not come home.

So I think that you have to start your day by thinking deeply about

how you've lived to that point and the people that are living in and around you

and how you've treated them and I think that probably is what started the marriage

of being kind of like a philosophical martial artist.

You've got to really like

on a daily basis take stock of of what's going on around you and inside you

because we all suffer with this kind of idea.

If today is my last day, did I do it right?

And we don't really do it so much nowadays because we're so comfortable.

But if we're being marched out to war every day,

I think you'd see people live a little bit differently.

You know, and you treat the people around you a little bit differently.

Do you think there's echoes of that in just even the sport of like grappling

and Jiu Jitsu where you're facing your own mortality?

We don't really think of it that way, but.

To be honest, I think that a lot of people that train in a martial art

in contemporary society, I don't consider them all martial artists.

I think just because you train a martial art does not mean you're a martial artist.

There are so many people that use martial arts as a form of exercise

and like this little piece of self concept.

They use martial arts as a tagline in their Instagram bio.

And it's really a form of exercise.

It's something they do.

It's not something they are.

And I think there's a big difference there.

There's a bunch of stuff mixed up in there

because the Instagram thing is something you do for.

It's also it could be something you are for display versus who you are in the

private moments of searching and thinking and struggling and all that kind of stuff.

Instagram is a surface layer that much of modern society

operates in, which is really problematic because there's that gap

between the person you show to the world and the person you are in private life.

And if you make majority of your project of the human project of your

sort of few years on this earth, the optimization of the public Instagram

profile, then you never develop this private person.

But it does seem that if you do just so long enough,

it's very difficult not to fall into like this has become

a personal journey, an intellectual journey.

Because like if you get your ass kicked thousands of times,

there's a certain point to where that maybe it's like a defense mechanism.

But that turns into some kind of deeply profound introspective

experience versus like exercise yoga.

Yeah. So let me let me go back first and address the Instagram point, which I think

there's a difference between people who whose Instagram is intrinsically tied

to their profession and they have to put a specific profile out there.

And I think in general,

people who truthfully are their businesses tied to their Instagram profile.

I want to exclude them.

I think that most people Instagram is how they want to be seen.

And that's not always congruent with who you are.

But I think there is a level of dishonesty there.

Yeah.

Like this is how I want people to see me.

I'm going to put all this stuff in my Instagram bio, but

that's really not me.

And when you do that,

I think it's it's a little disingenuous and you're right.

There's not you're never really going to marry those two things together and it

gets tough. Let me sorry to interrupt.

Let me push back on something.

It's a good time to address

the the many flaws of the great and powerful John Clark.

OK, let's let's let's let's go there because it's interesting.

You strive so hard for excellence in your life and for extreme competence

that you are visibly and physically off put by people who are who have not

achieved competence.

Do you think we should be nicer to the people who are those early?

Like you mentioned, a person who first picks up an art,

picks up, becomes vegan, starts through and cross fists are doing jiu jitsu for

the first time and create that as their, you know, they're they're struggling

through this, like, who am I and they're really overly proud and it's kind of

ridiculous and you and your wise chair of CVC in many battles, yeah,

that you see the ridiculousness of that.

I tend to

I'm learning to give those folks not to mock them and to sort of give them a

chance to do their ridiculousness because I think I was that too.

Let me first clarify, I want to be clear about what you mean when you say a level

of competence. Now, I I've never won a world championship.

I've never, you know, there are plenty of things in my life where I've not

achieved what most people would consider to be the penultimate level of success.

Now, that's accomplishments.

It's accomplishments, it's ribbons, it's things like that.

And it's not that those things don't mean anything to me.

And the fact that I haven't in some arenas is is something that I want to change,

which is we can talk about that in a second.

But I think that there's a difference between the very eager noob of whatever

it is they're doing, who does the thing so that they can

signal they do the thing.

That's a person I have less respect for.

So we know each other primarily through Jiu Jitsu.

Look at a Jiu Jitsu tournament.

There's this there's this idea that people espouse online.

I respect anyone with the guts to get on the mat and put it on the line and sign

up for a tournament. That is the biggest load of shit I have ever heard.

This is great.

Do you know, do you know how easy it is for you to put your name on something and

pay the registration fee and walk in there?

That's not the hard part.

That's the easiest part.

I don't care if you lose your first match,

but I respect the person who signs up for the tournament, registers for the tournament,

goes on a diet, loses weight the right way, trains their ass off and does the things

properly and then goes on the mat.

The person who simply signs their name on the registration form and jumps on the mat.

If they haven't done these other things, they actually have nothing to lose.

Because what they've done is they've stepped

onto the mat in the ring in the cage with a bucket full of excuses.

Yeah.

Sure, you signed up.

But you're not really vulnerable because you didn't run, you didn't do this.

You didn't do all the things you were supposed to do.

The person who

eliminates every possible excuse and then steps on the mat and gets their ass kicked

in the first round, I have so much more respect for that person than the person who

does nothing and maybe on natural ability wins a couple of matches.

And then writes on Facebook on how I lost to the eventual champion.

That's worth zero.

That's worth zero.

And in that process, what did you learn about yourself?

You learned about yourself that you've got a natural level of aptitude for whatever

this activity is that you're doing, but you didn't actually learn how to maximize

it through training and through dedication and through all these other things.

I'm an incredibly interested, novice musician.

I love I like to play bass, but I don't put that on anything.

And, you know, I stink at it.

I would really love to be sick at it.

I'm currently not.

But like I'm not running around, you know, talking about entering, you know,

any of those other things like I do it, it's for myself.

And I want to I want to reach a level of competence in that.

So the person that you have respect for is a person who takes it fully seriously,

takes takes the effort fully seriously.

So for bass, that would be that you agree with yourself that you're going to perform

live and just in your own private moments, your private thoughts,

you're not going to give yourself an excuse out like, I'm just going to have fun.

This is a nice experience.

You're going to you're going to think I'm going to try to be the best possible

bass player given given everything that's going on in my life, but I'm going to do

my like, yes, and put it all on the line.

And if I fail, that is that's not because I didn't try.

It's because I'm a failure.

Exactly.

And then and then sit in that sick feeling of like, I'm a failure.

But isn't that an important thing to know?

Absolutely.

But there there's a there's a.

That's like the best thing we could be.

But sometimes it's fun to lose yourself in

in the in the bragging in the in the lesser ways of life.

And I think I'm careful not to

because too many people in my life, when I brought them with like a little candle

of a fire of a dream, they would just go like, you know, they would just blow that

fire out that they would dismiss me because they see like, you know, I would say,

I've said I've said a lot of ridiculous stuff, but the one, you know, I've always

dreamed about like putting a I always dreamed of having this world full of robots.

And, you know, every time I would

bring these ideas up, they'll be shut down by the different people by my parents.

But, you know, you know, then you need to first get to get an education.

You need to succeed in these dimensions in order to do all these things.

You have to get good grades.

You have to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Like there's all this stuff that it's indirect or direct ways of blowing out

that little ridiculous dream that you present.

And it's like, you know, I remember sort of bringing up,

I don't know,

things like becoming a state champion and wrestling, right?

It's a it's a weird dance because, of course, the coaches will tell they'll

kind of dismiss that it's like, OK, OK.

But at the same time, it feels like in those early days, you have to preserve that

little, little fire, that's Johnny I've, I don't know if you know who that is, is a

designer at Apple, he was a chief designer.

He's behind most iPhone, all that stuff.

And he always talked about that he wouldn't bring his ideas to Steve Jobs until

they were matured because he would always shit on them.

He would he wanted them to like little as little babies like live for a little bit

before they get completely shut down.

And I always think about that when I see a beginner sort of bragging on Instagram.

You have to be careful.

Let let them play with that little dream.

You know, are you playing with a little

dream that you're nurturing and you're trying to take that little flame and you're

trying to create a roaring blaze with it, or are you playing with the idea of it?

And behind behind that, there's no substance.

It's hard to know the difference.

That's why I struggle with is it.

I don't think it necessarily is.

Certainly, you're wrong.

And when I say Instagram, I don't want to impute a bunch of strangers,

but I have a gym with a lot of members.

And I can tell you that the number of years I've been in the gym,

when someone comes to me and says, this is my goal, I don't I don't tell them

yes or no in general, but I know I can tell by the way they say it to me.

I can thin slice it.

I've seen the look on people's faces.

And when people start to like say they want to do X, Y and Z, I know right off

the bat, this person is either going to put an effort in or they're not going to

put an effort in. So to me, it's about the effort behind that.

If you're busting your ass and you're a new at something and you're brand new,

but you're working really hard and you have a series of like moderate

successes in that like that's the guy I want to champion because that persistence

and that grit over time, those successes will no longer be moderate.

They'll be huge.

But the person who's having moderate success by doing nothing,

chances are they'll never learn to put that work in and the successes will never grow.

You have an admiration for Mike Tyson.

I love him.

I was going to let that sit for a brief moment.

Why?

I think there's a combination of factors.

One is like the timeliness of his career and like the age I was when he came to

prominence, the raw, brutal violence and the raw, brutal honesty when he speaks.

I think it's easy for people to hear him or see his life and cast him aside as

some simianesque, like just cretin scourge on society.

But when you hear him speak like this is not a guy who's unintelligent.

This is a guy who knows himself better than probably most of us know ourselves.

It's disarming and, you know, that's a humongous part of my admiration for him.

Who is Mike Tyson?

Because it feels like there's similarity between him and you.

It feels like there's a violent person in there, but also a really kind person.

And they're all like living together in a little house and you're the same.

There's a thoughtful person, but there's also a scary, violent person.

And they're like having a picnic.

They're having a picnic.

I think there are dialectical tensions in everyone.

These opposing forces that are constantly pulling at you and at different

points in your life, like it's sliding scale.

And I think that it's certainly when I was a younger person that there was a lot

more manifestation of the violence and a lot less of the kindness.

People who were not as close to me

probably saw more of the violent side and only the very close people to me.

So I like what would pass for the kind side.

And now that's sliding in the other direction.

And I worry actually sometimes that

there could be a situation where I need that old version of me and he's getting

further and further away and I can't call him up if I need him.

And that that concerns me to a to a certain degree.

The sad aging warrior seeing his girl self fade away, but you still compete.

Is that that person returned?

Seems like for Mike Tyson, that person returned at the prospect of competition.

It returns, but I've learned I've learned better how to manifest it in

competition in terms of like the effects that that type of emotion has on you

physically in the middle of a competition.

So I've better learned how to utilize that energy.

But I think another side effect of this is like having a gym where you're a bigger

guy and you're the head instructor, you can't be as mean and violent as you once

were, because you're also now trying to run a business.

And you spend so long, so many so many years trying not to be mean and to

soften your your technique a little bit, that that all of a sudden just becomes

who you are. And I don't necessarily like that.

So I've been trying to reclaim that a little bit on the mat.

But I think in competition.

There's

there has to be.

An athlete really wants to score the points.

A fighter really wants to

incapacitate you and put you in a position where they can do their own bidding.

And the result in a Jiu Jitsu match might just still be two points,

but the motivations are very, very different.

What do you make of Tyson on Joe Rogan saying that he was aroused by violence?

Do you think that's insane?

Do you think that's deeply honest for him?

And do you think that rings true for many of us others who practices in different degrees?

I don't I can't speak for a lot of people.

And I think that it was a brutally honest statement by him.

And I think it's something that even if a lot of people feel it,

they're not that comfortable admitting it or saying it.

But I think like there's there is great joy.

And like landing a flush right hand on someone's jaw and then watching them crumble.

You don't even feel it.

You ever play baseball as a kid?

You can hit a base hit off the end of the bat and it will sting your hands

because of the way that you hit it.

You can hit a home run and you won't feel anything and it just feels so good in your hands.

And that's, I think, like one of the joys of physical contact.

When you do it the right way, that goes for all physical contact.

When you do it the right way, the physical pleasure you can derive from it and the mental pleasure,

it's it's unparalleled.

See, but that's different. Let me let me draw a distinction.

I'm not.

I've had the fortune of being a wrestler.

And I would draw a distinction between a very well executed and competition,

double leg, single leg takedown or a pin.

There's some as an OCD person, there's something so

comforting about a well executed pin because it's like two seconds and it's just like

everything is flush and nice and like it's all clean.

I mean, OK, is this OCD person who likes to align show show is just beautiful.

OK, that's good technique.

Wrestling also provides you.

Maybe more than other sports, the feeling of dominating another human.

Yes. Of breaking.

No, not just of them being very cocky and very powerful.

You feel this power of another human being.

And then you breaking them and like.

I'm not as honest as Mike Tyson.

Well, but that's that.

I don't think I've ever sort of looked in the mirror and said

like that that was I enjoyed that aspect of it.

But it certainly seems like you chase that.

So when I was a wrestler in high school,

I lost so many matches because of over aggressiveness, like,

you know, I would pick the top position and let you stand just so that I could do

a mat return and I wasn't trying to return you to the mat.

I was actually trying to like drive you through the mat and through the ground.

Like I took like I it gave me joy to do that.

Yeah, like it wasn't like I was trying to, you know, just return you to the mat

so that I could pin you that what you just talked about, like the the dominating

another person, I used to look at that as you've got someone who in theory is

equally trained and equally skilled as you are and you're you're absolutely out

there totally dominating them.

There's joy in that you could get in an MMA fight and you could take someone down

and you could mount them and all that feels great.

But when you start raining down the punches on their face from Mount and like

dropping elbows and stuff like there's another level of satisfaction there.

And it's it's tough to describe and I don't think that everyone is made for it.

When I was I think when I was a senior in high school,

my wrestling coach said, look, you've got to stop with all this crazy aggressive

wrestling like they try to turn me into a technician.

And and it and it did work to a degree.

And it was a humongous shift for me in terms of success.

But it wasn't the same level of enjoyment out of it.

Like, I mean, I got disqualified from New England because my coach said cross face

and I cross face and he said harder and I basically wound up and blasted a kid in

the face and his nose got busted everywhere.

But I didn't think not to do it because that felt good.

It felt good to cross face him like that.

I was I was a lot of like.

That's a weird American warrior ethos that I've picked up.

But I also have in me the the Russian, the city of brothers that don't see it.

Don't see it as that they don't get drawn.

They think that there is a tension between the art of the martial art

and the violence of the martial art is a poetic way.

I could put it, but they're not so fascinated with this.

Dan Gable dominating another human.

They think of the effortlessness, the effortlessness of the technique

and your mastery of the art is exhibited in its effortlessness.

How much you lose yourself in the moment and the timing that just the beauty of a

timing like there's much more like one example in judo, but also in wrestling.

You can look at the foot sweep wrestlers in America and even judo players in

America and much of the world don't admire the beauty of the foot sweep.

But a well timed foot sweep, which is a way to sort of off balance to find the right

timing to just effortlessly change the tape, turn the tables of dominate your

opponent is as seen as the highest form of mastery in Russian wrestling.

And in the case of judo, it's in Japanese judo.

It's interesting.

I'm not sure I'm not sure what what that tension is about.

I think it actually takes me back to, I don't know, if you listen to Dan

Carl in hardcore history and Genghis Khan, if you've ever read a great, great book

on Genghis Khan, I'm still, I'm still trying to adjust.

Most of my life said Genghis Khan, but the right pronunciation is actually Genghis

Khan.

There's a tension there.

We kind of think, I don't know, we, I kind of thought as Genghis Khan is

a ultra violent, a leader of ultra violent men.

But another view, another way to see them is the people who warriors that

valued extreme competence and mastery of the art of fighting with weapons, with

bows, with horse riding, all that kind of stuff.

And I'm not sure exactly where to place them on my sort of thinking about violence

in our human history.

I think in a context of like combat sports, I think there's a difference between

an athlete winning a contest under a certain set of rules and a fighter winning

a fight under those exact same rules.

There's a different approach to it.

And I don't think one is any better than the other.

And like in MMA, I think a great example would be George St. Pierre.

George St. Pierre is a tremendous, it's a tremendous athlete.

And he considers himself to be a martial artist first.

He's trying to win an athletic competition.

Like Nick Diaz is trying to bust your ass.

Right. There's a different approach to it.

And yes, they've had different results at the highest level of competition.

But it's difficult to attribute the difference in results just to their

approach to the sport, because they're different human beings with different

abilities and different physical attributes.

The CITF brothers have that luxury of being able to talk about the beauty of a

perfectly timed slide by, right?

There are other wrestlers that will never be able to pull that off.

And therefore they have to pursue other ways to defeat someone.

And maybe it is the Dan Gable breaking a man's spirit by outworking him type thing,

which is beautiful in its own way.

But we we we tend to self select the ways in which we're able to be successful

and then kind of take a deep dive into that.

What do you think is more beautiful?

Brute force or effortless execution of technique that dominates another human?

I think it's a subjective thing based on what skills you perceive yourself to have.

I'm never I've never been a slick, super athletic, dexterous, competitor in anything.

And I've always been more about I've got to outwork you.

I've got to out grind you.

I've got to out mean you.

And so because I've lived that, I tend to see the beauty in that more because I

have a perceptual awareness that I don't have for the people who have the luxury

of being very slick and athletic and and using beautiful technique.

Now, that said, there's a phenomenal little video the other day I sent to a friend

of a compilation of foot sweeps by Liotta Machida in MMA.

And they're so beautiful and they're so awesome.

And it's not that I don't have an appreciation for those.

But I can't emulate those because I lack the physical ability to do that.

Whereas I at least have a chance to emulate some of the people who do it through grit

and through outworking people.

But I would love to return to Genghis Khan and get your thoughts about,

like I have so many mixed feelings about

whether he is evil or not, whether

the violence that he brought to the world had ultimately the fact that he had maybe

kind of like Dan Carlin describes, cleansed the landscape.

It's like a reset for the world through violence had ultimately

a progressive effect on human civilization, even though in the short term it led to

massive, you could say, suffering.

I don't know what to make of that, man.

What are your thoughts on Genghis Khan?

I think it's always difficult to look at a historical figure and their actions of

their time through a modern day lens, because it's very easy for us to

kind of impugn their achievements and the things that they did and say, oh, well,

you know, what he did was wrong.

Well, of course, that can be true.

But a lot of times we don't actually have any real good context or concept of

the times they were living in and what really was deemed wrong and what really

wasn't. We're looking at it through a very cushy modern lens.

That being said, from what I've read about Genghis Khan,

yeah, he was a violent dude, but also he gave you an option.

He when he when he got to a village, he said, look,

I'm going to we're going to you have a choice.

You can come with us or you can run.

And, you know, he gave them an option to join

his legion of fighters who he took very good care of.

You know, he was the first military leader to pay his soldiers

families when they died.

And he did that based on the the booty that they got when they raided a village.

He took that money, he took a share and they divided that up amongst the soldiers

and then the soldiers families.

I think he also is credited with

first like horseback mail routes or something like that.

Right. Is he the godfather of the modern postal system?

There's something something like that.

Yeah, he's the Bernie Sanders of the

the Mongol Empire.

I do think the the offering of surrender is an interesting one because.

It's interesting, like as a thought experiment,

whether you would sacrifice your way of like the pride of nations or the nationalism,

pride of your country, whether you're willing to give that up

for, you know, to survive.

It depends on who depends on you.

If you have a if you have a family and like young kids and stuff like that,

I think your your obligation is primarily to them.

And therefore surrender has to be something that you can

consider in that in that moment in time so that you can take care of those people.

If you're a man alone and you've got like all these principles and all this

stuff and you just don't you're not down with what Jengaskhan is doing and what

he's selling, yeah, try and escape, do your thing and just know that, you know,

what waits on the other side of that for you potentially.

But I think if there's someone else out there that depends on you,

your obligation should be to them.

It feels like historically people valued principles more than life.

In this weight of like, what do I value more?

The principles I hold versus survival.

It seems that now we don't value principles as much.

Your principles could be also religion, it could be your values, whatever.

We're OK, sort of sacrificing those for to preserve our survival.

And that applies in all forms, like actual survival or like on social media,

like preserving your reputation, all those kinds of things.

It seems like we,

especially in America, value individual life, that death is somehow a really bad

thing, as opposed to saying sacrificing your principles is a very bad thing and

everybody dies and it's OK to die as what's horrible is to sacrifice your

principles of who you are just to live another day.

I think a big problem is people don't really

even know what their principles are anymore.

People, you know,

social media and just the way that we live nowadays, where we're separated

from the human contact like this, like we're not, you're not contacting

people in a community anymore.

You're not whether your religious or not, like you're not congregating at a church.

You're not part of a parish, like you would be like in, you know, down south.

You're not part of that community anymore.

And so it's difficult to figure out what your principles and values are because

you're constantly jumping from one bucket to the next online.

And you don't get a lot of like direct, like reasonable feedback from people.

You just get dipshit feedback like, oh, you don't believe this, well, you're a jerk.

I think the hard thing

currently is having the integrity and character to stick by your principles

when under, I don't want to equate murder of in the jengas,

con times to social media, cancel culture.

But it certainly doesn't feel good when people are attacking on social media.

And it does take a lot of integrity to

without anger, without emotion, without without being without mocking others or

attacking others unfairly, standing by the ideas you hold.

Or in another way,

standing by your friends, standing by this little group like loyalty of the people

that, you know, are good people.

I find that in cancel culture, one of the sad things is whenever somebody gets

quote unquote canceled, everybody just gets all their friends become really quiet

and don't defend them or worse.

I mean, quiet is at least understandable.

They kind of signal that they throw them out of the bus, I guess, is one way to put it.

And that's something I think about a lot because from coming for me, it's like.

I hold an ethic.

I don't know if others hold this ethic.

Maybe it's this like Russian mobster ethic of like,

you should help your friends bury the body.

You shouldn't criticize your friends for committing the murder.

Like there's certain levels of like,

you know, yeah, you have that discussion after you bury the body that like maybe

you shouldn't have done that murder thing.

I don't know.

You know, I understand that that's a problematic

with the terminology that's a problematic ethical framework within which to operate.

But at the same time, it feels like what else do we have in this world except

the brotherhood, the sisterhood, the love we have for a very small community.

But perhaps that's the wrong way of thinking.

Perhaps the 21st century would be

defined by the dissipation of this community of this loyalty concept.

No, we're all just individuals.

I think you're right.

And I think you have to have some sort of core framework of principles and beliefs

that you operate on.

And I think what I was what I was referencing is a little bit different.

But to speak to your point,

you need a framework of core principles on which you can then base a lot of your

other decisions, like I believe these three things to be true, whatever they are.

And that will help inform other decisions you make in your life.

As far as how you treat your friends,

I've got I've got probably three friends that if they called me right now and said,

let's bury the body.

Sorry, Lex, I got to go.

There are other people in my life that if they said,

hey, we've got to go bury the body, I would say, who is this?

You know, yeah.

So I think it depends on the relationship.

I wonder if that's a good it's a really good measure.

I would love to have.

I would love that to be in your profile.

People put like pronouns.

I would love to put like

honestly, like objectively, not self report, but objective.

How many people in your life?

If they committed murder, you would not ask any questions and you would help them

hide the body.

I would love to know that number for people.

Yeah.

And I think it's a weird thing too, because you think right away, like, OK,

it must be the group of people that are the closest to you.

That's who you're first thinking of, right?

But obviously, for like my best friend, I would do it.

No question about it.

But I've got other people that are close to me that

are close to me in other ways.

And I probably wouldn't do that only because I don't think they do it for me.

Yeah.

And and that is a consideration.

So I guess it's the principle there then that you do for your friends what you

think they would do for you is that the underlying principle or do you just have

a blind loyalty to, you know, people in your life for different reasons?

I got people that are not on my inner circle that I probably

wouldn't help change a tire at two in the morning if they're on the highway.

But if they called me and said, hey, we got to bury the body,

I might show up for that.

It's just these weird different connections.

Yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah, I have close friends that like I probably be exactly.

The tires, a good example would be like, can't you find somebody else to do this?

I think part of that is just this leap of faith into like giving yourself

to the other person that creates a deep connection that makes life

fulfilling, like meaningful, that doesn't exist if you don't take that leap.

I mean, it's not about the murder, we're sort of focusing.

I think that's a I think you have to what is it across that bridge when you get there?

I'm not exactly sure.

Is this just the thought experiment?

But it's it's I think about that a lot, especially these COVID times.

And as like people become more and more isolated and separated from each other,

like how important is it to have those deep, deep connections to other humans?

I think especially like what you're talking about there.

Have you ever seen the movie The Town?

There's a great line in the movie where one of the main characters walks into

his friend's house and he says, I need your help.

We're going to go hurt some people and you can never ask me about it again.

And the friend looks up and he says, who's car we taking?

Like that that is the type of person you need in your life.

And the people like there are people that will walk through that door and say that

to you and you drop everything you're doing.

And then there's a people that walk to you doing you're like, you know what?

I got a hot pocket in the microwave.

I'm a little bit I'm a little bit tied up right now, but I'd love to help you out.

But, you know, I don't want to do that.

And you don't have that deep connection with those people.

You mentioned some principles that you've

changed your mind on. Is there do you want to go there?

Is there some interesting principles and the process of changing that is useful to talk about?

I can't really cite a specific thing, except that

understanding that the principles that you have at different points in your life

can change and it's OK to change them without being a total pussy and being

bullied by other people into thinking what you thought was wrong.

If you come to these conclusions of your own volition and you decide to change them,

that's great. And it can be really it can be really liberating.

It's really liberating to have an idea that you hold so true to your.

Your core belief system. And then to actually have someone change your mind for you

and be OK with it, as opposed to being like, no, I got to die with this.

I got to die with this. It's really liberating.

There are definitely ideas.

You want to die on that hill and no one's ever going to change your mind.

But it's really liberating to be confident enough to say, change my mind.

I'm lucky enough to have some smart motherfuckers around me who can tell me,

listen, you're being a total dipshit, like let's let's rethink this.

Or like I have one friend who does the five

wise all the time and he loves back in me into a corner.

And what's the five wise?

You just like when someone makes a statement about something to really get

to the core issue, they say, if you ask why five times, make a statement.

Well, why is that? And you answer that?

Well, why? And you phrase the wise differently, obviously.

But then you get to the core.

They say five times you can get to the core of the issue.

And that's a challenging thing.

But I find later in life, it's so liberating for me to be confident enough

to be like, man, was I fucking way off the mark on this and have my mind changed.

And be able to say that to others that I was wrong.

Totally.

That ability and I never used to have that.

And it feels real good.

And there's a hunger for that, too.

Yeah, you're so right, actually, on a personal level, it feels very good.

Exactly, as you said, it's liberating because you're free to then think as opposed to

defend, yeah, without thinking.

Yeah, you get so sick of defending the same thing over and over and over.

And you start to think about it.

And it's like, well, I would really like to evolve my thought process here.

And when you're constantly defending one point, it's difficult to let other ideas in.

You discount the possibility that you can have your mind change when you're

constantly on the defense, but you have to have a crack in the front line in order

to let a new idea come in and possibly flourish.

And maybe the new idea doesn't even prove your current belief system to be wrong.

But maybe it's like the water to a seed and it grows and now it's something even

bigger and better and you can start to work with that instead.

And it's a tough thing because I'm a stubborn fuck.

And it's very difficult for me.

It was historically to say I was wrong about this one or I messed this one up or

I wish I could have that one back.

There's a public figure for me thing, too, which

there is there's a difference between changing your mind with the small circle

of friends and changing your mind publicly about something.

But it has equal one echoes the other.

It is equally liberating.

But people people will not make that change easy, but it doesn't matter.

That's that's the point.

It doesn't I think it's ultimately liberating as a human being public figure

or not to to think deeply about this world and to keep changing, which is like.

I think there's a deep hunger for that in like political discourse that people

are so tribal currently about politics that they want to see somebody who says,

you know what, I changed my mind on this.

Right.

And then keep changing their mind and keep asking questions, keep showing that

they're open minded, all that kind of stuff.

But you want someone in a position of political power to change their mind

because they realize that there might be a better way, not because they realize

that by changing their mind, they're going to get a new demographic to vote for them.

That's transparent as shit.

Nobody wants to see that.

Like that's right.

That's a person who can't separate their their position from their people.

They're supposed to be helped.

Yeah.

And you can usually smell that.

That's what we're just talking offline about.

There's something about Hillary Clinton,

which she talked about changing her mind on gay marriage that it felt

like this is a political calculation versus like really deeply thinking about

like what, you know, what things do we do in this world that violate basic human

rights, like really thinking about deeply?

And, you know, of course, politicians are calculating this, but you can see it.

This is the thing.

That's why like on the human level,

there's like political policies, but there's also humans.

And I've always liked Bernie Sanders, for example.

I don't know, not the later, perhaps Bernie Sanders,

but I used to listen to him back in the day.

And it felt like people might disagree with me, but it felt like there was a real

human struggling with ideas, whatever, agree with him or not.

It felt like he wasn't doing political calculation.

He was just a human.

He couldn't be further away from my political ideals, but also like

there's an obvious authenticity to his passion for what he's saying that is not

present in other candidates.

And you could see it all these people that have been in politics forever,

like from all the way back when Hillary was a lawyer in the 70s.

There's a couple of shots of her in a courtroom in the 70s, though.

She's looking all right.

She's got those big glasses on.

Yeah, kind of a little bit of a nerdy babe back in the day.

Oh, you mean like?

Yeah.

Well, John Clark says Hillary Clinton was a babe back in the day.

Seventy three hit Clinton, yeah.

That's an interesting question about authenticity in politicians.

Do you think like Hillary Clinton, just the Clintons are a good example

of that, why do you think they become over time so inauthentic?

Is it the system that changes them?

Is it their own hunger for power?

Is it what is it?

Or were they always inauthentic?

Well, first, I'd like to say that I don't know if you know this, but I come

from a bit of a political dynasty myself.

I was on the student government several times in high school and my dad won

the runoff in a special election in Bradenton Beach, Florida.

I think there's like 700 people there.

So your dad got you the job?

Yeah, we're basically a lot of people come Paris to the Kennedys.

My guess with the politicians is that and you can you can see it now as we're

becoming more like cognizant as people to the political process.

I think the process corrupts people.

And I think that I don't know the ins and outs of it.

I've listened to people who are far more educated on it than me.

And I'm unprepared to cite any of their points.

I think you can see it a little bit in Dan Crenshaw.

Can I say this? Yeah.

So I like him.

I really liked Dan, especially like a year, year and a half ago.

He seemed very levelheaded.

It's clear to me now that as he panders more and more to the right,

it's because he's setting himself for for a presidential run.

It's clear that that's happening.

And he just doesn't seem like the same authentic, ideals oriented guy that he

did a year and a half ago.

Now, I could be wrong on that and it could be way off.

But I think that you can take someone as honest as you want to.

When you start them on that path to the presidency,

you become so unbelievably beholden to so many people and entities along the way.

But by the time you get to the final destination, the Oval Office,

all you're doing is paying back the favors that got you there and you never

get to serve the people you're supposed to serve.

Your primary focus is on your office and not on the people that you're supposed

to be helping. I think that that's a humongous problem.

And like we could talk all about campaign,

finance reform and the two party system.

But at the end of the day, the people who are running

for political posts, they're working to keep a job.

They're not working to improve the lives of the constituents, which is different.

A long, long time ago, like a lot of politicians, like those were like part time

jobs, and they held other posts out west.

They were ranchers by day and sheriff by night, whatever the case might be.

But now you have such a cushy path for the rest of your life that the goal is to

just be a politician, not do the things that you think a politician is supposed to do.

And that's a problem.

By the way, I'll talk to Dan on this.

It's funny, I like the version of him from a year ago and I haven't been really

paying attention, so I'll be, I'll actually pay more attention now and ask him that exact

question, like how do you prevent yourself from changing, becoming what the Clintons became?

I tend to believe like there's conspiratorial stuff about Clintons and all these politicians.

I tend to believe that they were actually good, thoughtful people back in the day.

At some point.

And the system changes them.

On the, it's not even the system, there's something about just the process of campaigning.

I just think it wears you down to where if you look at the percentage of time you

spend on the kinds of conversations you have, it's like one, you do these speeches,

which you repeat the same thing over and over and over.

It beats the the process of thinking, you just exhaust your brain to where you're

not thinking anymore, you're just repeating.

It's very, it's exceptionally difficult to keep making speech after speech after

speech, saying the same thing over and over and over again.

And at the same time, thinking deeply and changing your mind and learning.

And then also the pandering to financial, like having phone calls, like fundraising,

all those kinds of things.

That's what they do now.

They spend most of their time fundraising.

They're not worried about anything.

Sorry to interrupt you, but I was going to say that you can see there's a fuel like

the the more attention and the higher regard you're held in and your community

and the more sycophants like continue to blow smoke up your ass, the more it

changes the way you present yourself and you can see it in every walk of life.

I mean, jujitsu is a tiny, tiny little section of the world,

but you see it in the jujitsu community when someone all of a sudden starts

a social media page or whatever and they get a bunch of people like basically

like, you know, cyber philating them on their Instagram page, they they change.

Philating, is that a word?

I think so.

So giving a show.

Yeah.

So philating.

Yeah.

Jamie, look it up.

I think, but in those people, it changes their character.

Yeah, it changes who they are because they become emboldened.

And, you know, now they've got this like mythical cyber mob behind them.

There's a sign at the entrance to your gym that reads for every moment of triumph.

It's a quote by Hunter S. Thompson.

It reads, for every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty,

many souls must be trampled.

What does this quote mean to you?

That quote to me is about mostly about sacrifice.

And it's about to achieve anything great or anything beautiful or to triumph.

You have to have sacrificed so many things to get there unless you're the most

unbelievably genetically gifted person in the world and greatness is just, you know,

falls upon you, which is raining from the sky.

I think on your path to greatness, on your path to success and triumph,

you leave a lot of carnage in your wake, personal relationships,

other goals, things that you didn't pursue,

you know, other unfulfilled dreams.

And you kind of have to sell a lot of that out in order to be really the

at the peak of your field or or what you want to be.

I know that that's happened in my life.

I mean, there's tons and tons of relationships that, you know, couldn't survive

the way that I was living my life because when I was trying to be a big time

fighter or like when I was just training all the time, tons of relationships

dissolve themselves naturally, some not so naturally.

Some people get it.

Some people don't get it.

Some people hate you.

You miss tons of other opportunities.

And I think that's kind of what that quote means to me.

It's about sacrifice.

It's about you're giving up what you want now for what you want more.

And it's the the trampling of souls.

It's messy, too, because it's not clear what what the right path is.

Like that sacrifice is not obvious that those are the right sacrifices to make.

You might be you might be ruining your own life.

But the fact that you're willing to take that risk and

sort of go all in on whether it's stupid or not to go all in on something.

That the possibility of creating something beautiful is there.

Who says it's stupid?

If you're going all in on it, you don't think it's stupid.

Someone else might think it's stupid.

But I mean, who really cares?

Well, I'm of many minds on many things.

So I feel like there's certain minds, certain moves of the day where you think it's stupid.

Like relationships is a beautiful one, which is you've seen the movie Whiplash

by any chance? Yes.

It seems like in a man's life, it could be a woman's, but I don't identify as a woman.

So I know the man.

It's 2020, bro.

But my lived experience for now is that of a man we'll see about tomorrow.

And there is in the pursuit of excellence, there's often a choice of

some of the souls that must be trampled are personal relationships with humans in

your life that you might deeply care about.

It could be family, it could be friends.

It could be loved ones of all different forms.

It could be the people that your colleagues that depended on you, people who will lose

jobs because of the decisions you make, all this kind of stuff.

It seems that that moment happens.

And I'm not sure that sacrifice is always the correct one.

Like to me, the movie Whiplash for people who haven't seen the spoiler alert maybe.

I don't even know if that movie has any spoilers.

But there is a relationship with a female.

There's a student, there's a drummer that's pursuing excellence of this particular

art form of drumming and he has a brief, fleeting relationship with a female.

And he also has an instructor that's pushing him to his limits in what appears

to be awfully a lot like a toxic relationship.

And he chooses, not chooses, he naturally makes the decision to sacrifice

the romantic relationship with the woman in further pursuit of this chaos,

of this chaotic pursuit of excellence.

And it feels, that doesn't feel like a deliberate decision.

It feels like a giant mess of like an emotional mess where you're just like

kind of like a fish swimming against stream, just like fuck it.

You let go of all the things that convention says you should appreciate.

You throw away the possibility of a stable life, of a comfortable life,

of what society says is a meaningful life and just pursue this crazy thing full

of seeming toxicity with crazy people surrounding you.

I don't know.

So I don't know what the right decision is.

Part of my brain says you should stay with the girl.

Fuck that instructor that's making you,

that's pushing you to places where it's like that are destructive, potentially

destructive, like could lead to suicide, could lead you to

completely

fail or fail on your pursuit of excellence or destroy the possibility,

destroy the dream, the passion, a pursuit of the thing that you've always dreamed

for in that case is drumming.

I don't know. I'm on many minds there.

Like what is the right thing to do?

So my first two thoughts are number one, fuck convention.

What is convention?

It's like some laid out paths, some linear progression of the way your life is supposed

to go, like, you know, that someone can draw a picture of at the end.

That's just that first of all, it's just boring and whatever.

And it's it's I don't want to say that it's cowardly because it isn't cowardly,

but for someone who's not conventional to not be nonconventional is cowardly to get

sucked into the convention. That's first.

Second of all, I believe that scene in the diner in that movie where he tells her,

yeah, you're in my way because I'm going to want to be with you or you're going to

want me to be going out to dinner with you.

And I know I should be practicing or I know I should be training.

And ultimately, I'm going to make I'm either going to feel bad about not being

with you by training or I'm going to skip the training to be with you.

And neither one is right.

The whole thing that they don't mention in that is that that's the wrong girl.

That's the wrong girl.

The right girl is a gangster.

The right girl says, oh, you have you have you have practiced tonight.

I'll leave you a sandwich and some milk so that you can, you know, outside the door.

Let me know when you're done or you have some like free time.

Like the right girl compliments that she's not an impediment in any way,

even if what you want to do is be with her so much that you're putting the drums

down or you're putting the bass down or you're picking up the pizza or you're not

going to training like that girl without even telling you why she's making decisions

is making decisions to help you achieve your goal.

Now, that might sound like some sort of like chauvinistic king of the castle type

shit, like where everyone should cater to you.

But the fact of the matter is

that person is a compliment to your life in helping you do your thing.

And in your own way, you're helping them to achieve whatever their goals are also.

It's uncommon that you have two people under the same roof,

striving to be unbelievably excellent in one small area.

It's not impossible, but it's uncommon.

Like relationships have to be like binary systems, like two stars.

Like the gravitational pull is what keeps you together and circling around one

another, right? And, you know, one is bigger than the other and they'll fluctuate.

And, you know, the stars will get bigger and they'll get small in their contract

based on positioning and, you know, composition.

That's the way a relationship should be.

Not an asteroid coming in to disrupt, you know, the surface of your planet.

It's a binary system.

It's a compliment. That girl was the wrong girl for him.

So you shouldn't like the big unconventional dreams

should not be adjusted to fit into this world.

Because I mean, there is a part of me that's like full of self thought.

Well, maybe you're just a dick, maybe, maybe hairs, Lex.

So first of all,

who chairs this is by the way, by the way, somebody who is

you have you have recently gotten well recently in the span of the history

of the universe is recently you've gotten to a relationship, but you haven't always

you have not felt the need to be in the relationship just because you're supposed

to by society's kind of momentum.

If you I think that if you really want anything,

you've got to be prepared fully to be the exact opposite.

If you're a person who's looking for a relationship,

the only way you're going to get in an awesome relationship is by being

comfortable being alone, because that's the risk.

If you're a person who's driven by money, you've got to be comfortable

being totally poor because that's the risk, right?

And when you're when you're when you're constantly hedging your bets,

you're never all in, you're never all in on the thing you're trying to do.

A relationship has to compliment your life.

You can't say

it's OK to want to be in a relationship, but you can't want to be in a relationship

so bad that you take someone in who fits the suit.

And it's like, oh, our schedules kind of work out.

You live near me and this and that and the other thing,

because the logistics of a relationship are not always perfect.

It's what matters is when the two people are together.

That's the perfect part of it.

And it's great to want to meet people and say, if we meet and

some sort of a relationship develops, I'm willing to run with it.

But I'm not meeting you hoping a relationship develops.

I think you kind of put the cart before the horse in a lot of those situations.

It's like when guys meet, like no guy goes out and is like, I'm looking for a bro.

Right. Nobody does that.

You go to the gym and you run into a bunch of dudes and the next thing you know,

someone's cool and they want to talk about fighting and you're fucking shotgun

and beers and all of a sudden you got a bro and that's how it works.

It works the same same way with what's the shotgun and beers.

I'll show you after this.

Poke a hole in the bottom and you open the top.

Yeah, yeah, this is the problem with America drink vodka like a man.

OK, now don't poke holes in beers.

This is the problem with the frat culture.

They don't really know how to drink.

They think they know how to drink.

They don't know how to drink.

What do you think makes a successful relationship?

If we can linger on that a little longer, like.

Let me ask John Clark about love.

I didn't ask a question, but let me just say love.

About love.

Are you one of those people who never says I love you?

No, no, I'm an extreme person and like my emotions are also extreme.

And one of the things I concern myself with.

Maybe this is philosophical and martial arts warrior soldier type related stuff is

like I don't want anyone if I die tonight on the drive home.

Hopefully that doesn't happen.

I hope that no one has left questioning how I felt about them.

And people I don't like probably are not questioning that.

And so the the thing that I've had to learn how to do later in life is to tell

the people that you care about that you care about them.

And

each thing can be equally off putting to the receiver of the message.

Each thing can be equal.

When you when you're letting someone know how much you dislike them,

that can be off putting to the person receiving that message.

And we tell someone how much you care about them.

It can also be off putting to the person,

depending on how they view their relationship with you.

But it's still important to get it out there.

Like you shouldn't you shouldn't hold those things in because you're worried

about how they'll be received or if they'll come back at you.

So you're OK going all in on these.

Yeah, not afraid of commitment.

No, I'm not afraid of commitment.

Anyone who says they're afraid of commitment is full of shit.

You know what they're afraid of?

They're afraid of commitment with that person.

That's what they're afraid of.

Like you don't know when someone knocks

your your knocks you on your ass and they come into your life and you're

flush with all these emotions, you're not worried about, oh, I don't really like

commitment. No, because they've knocked you on your ass.

You want to be with them.

You want those things that the two most alive points in your life.

I think people feel is the euphoria of a new relationship and then and then the

loss when that love is gone.

You'll never feel more, I don't think, than in those those moments in in your

life. See, the nice thing about the loss is it lasts longer.

Yeah.

That's a Lucy K point that he makes, which is like

that like in his show, I think is a

conversation with an older gentleman that says, like, that's his favorite part of

the relationship is that period between the loss of the relationship and the real

death, which is forgetting the person, but that period lasts the longest.

And that's the like the most fulfilling, like missing the other person is as

fulfilling as the actual like love, the the early infatuation, which is interesting.

I also think of the Bukowski.

I return to that.

There's a little clip of him in an interview

saying that love is a fog that dissipates with the first light of reality or

something like that. So basically emphasizing that it's this very, very,

very fleeting thing that it's a it's a it's a moments thing.

And then it just fades and everything else is is something else.

So love is only a temporary thing, which is interesting.

I think some people say that cynical.

I don't know. I don't know what to think of it.

I think it's important to understand

that everything is fleeting when you don't put effort into it.

Almost everything will be fleeting.

If you don't put effort into it, most people will get fat and lazy.

If you don't put effort into something, you're going to not be good at

playing guitar or playing bass.

You've got to put effort into it.

The same thing goes for a relationship

that the the awesome part of it, that like love part that dies soon and early on

in a relationship, because it's so good that we think we don't have to work at it.

But you do, you have to like keep doing the things and you got to keep things new

and crisp and fresh. And, you know, when you when you.

Different people probably feel differently about this, but like,

I don't know, you walk around your girl and you start like farting and stuff like

that's when it all dies. Yeah, that's when it dies.

You know, we're all human beings.

Well, you know, have, you know, we're all here and our bodies work in the same way.

But like you start to chip away at this like beautiful thing when you when you

stop.

When you buck conventional courtesy and and things like that.

Well, take it for granted, basically take it for granted.

I mean, that's the same thing with life.

It's like it's the same.

I'm a big fan of meditating on death that you could die today.

In the same way you should meditate on like this relationship could end today.

This connection with another human could be this is the last time you could

you could be interacting.

And your chances of that increase when you take it for granted and you should on

people, but when you work at it, the chances of that decrease.

It's not it's never going to be zero, but it decreases.

And when you do that, when you're the person and you're you're trying to maintain

and you're trying to, you know, work at the relationship, you got to make sure that

both people are working at it. Otherwise, you're just a fucking chump.

OK, let's return back to mixed martial arts.

Let me ask the ridiculous question of who do you think are the top three,

maybe top five greatest fighters of all time?

It's so hard to compare fighters across generations.

And maybe on one way to say it is which metrics would you put on the table as to

measure what a great fighter is?

Yeah, there was a guy named Dioxapus

in the fourth century.

Yeah. And he was such a bad ass that in the Olympics in 336 BC,

no one even showed up to fight him in the pancreation event.

Nobody even showed up because he was fucking everybody up.

Years later, he was retired and this crazy Macedonian dude came there at some dinner

for Alexander the Great.

Everyone's chilling, drinking, you know, whatever they were drinking out of their

chalices and this Macedonian dude threatened him and challenged him.

So Dioxapus said, yeah, man, we'll throw it out.

And, you know, they set the time and the place.

Macedonian dude comes out like body armor, spear, shield, all this other shit.

Dioxapus came out absolutely naked with a wooden club

and took on this much younger guy, beat the living crap out of him and then put his

foot on his throat and then didn't even kill him in the show of ultimate power

for the time.

So I think there's something about the guy being naked too.

It's just extra demeaning.

Extra demeaning.

Yeah. OK, can we rephrase the question then?

Because those are clearly going to be some probably forgotten warriors in history.

Well, it's taken to like modern day mixed martial arts in the UFC.

Perhaps, well, just mixed martial arts there.

Who do you think are the top fighters of all time?

What metrics would you consider in trying to answer this perhaps unanswerable question?

I think one of the things you want to think about is a strength of opponent at

the time you fought them.

So, for example, fighting BJ Penn in his prime and beating him is far different

than beating BJ Penn last year, right?

So to say you have a victory over BJ Penn is not the same given the time frame

of when it happened, not to take anything away from anyone who's beaten BJ Penn.

Just use that as an example of someone whose career went into a different direction.

Yes, I would say

the guy who I think is probably the best that people are the least familiar with

would be Marilo Bustamante and I think he was a guy who was one of the guys with

the first really good physical build for MMA, which I think is narrow from the chest

to the back and long shoulder to shoulder and kind of sinewy made out of steel cable.

That was a guy who could box.

That was a guy who could wrestle and that was a guy who had great jiu jitsu.

It wasn't great kickboxer, but at the time he didn't need it.

Fought everybody and gave everybody a run.

I think he's probably one of those guys who's got to be considered.

Yeah, there's a few killers that never

because why is he not in the discussion?

Because I think greatness

requires both the skill and the opportunity to meet each other.

And when you talk about a fighter, the other thing that really a good

fighter needs to become great is a foil.

Yeah.

And so many fighters don't have a foil.

That's one of the biggest attractions, I think, of early Mike Tyson's career.

He didn't have a foil.

He had no one driving him.

And by the time he did, by the time he had a foil in Holyfield,

his career was in a different place.

But he's one of the greats all the time and he never really had a foil.

So his greatness was in

unparalleled destruction of like nobody's well, you know, of lesser opponents.

Right.

And so when people debate the, you know, the level of greatness of Mike Tyson,

that's one of the things they say, like he didn't fight a lot of killers in their

prime, I think you've obviously got to say in that conversation,

I have a really difficult time keeping George St.

Pierre out of the conversation only because he was able to beat you with anything.

He could he could out jab you.

He could out wrestle you and he could he could submit you.

The problem I have with Fedor is

his career also took a drastic turn towards the end.

And when he was fighting in pride, he was doing a lot more grappling.

And then he just started casting that overhand right at people.

And his game kind of changed at that point.

You can't take anything away from his greatness.

But at that time, the great heavyweights were not really in fighting in pride

and they didn't really exist yet.

And by the time he fought a really good one, Fabricio Verdun,

he did get submitted there.

Does his later performance color, are your and our perception of his greatness?

Like in general about fighters?

Not mine, but I'm someone who's like intimately involved in the sport,

but it colors everyone else's.

Same with Anderson Silva.

Like I don't think Anderson Silva doesn't want to fight in like seven years or

something or is like one, like that's a guy who in his prime was one of the best

fighters I've seen in the top five for you.

I think he's probably in the top five.

Yeah, greater striker of all time or no.

In MMA and mixed martial arts and mixed martial arts.

That's a tough question.

The greatest MMA striker because like the timing,

the we're talking about foot sweeps, right?

Who makes it look easier than Anderson Silva?

I think in an incredibly short sample of his prime,

it's got to be Anderson Silva and I think you have to consider discussing

Liotta Machida for his unbelievable manipulation of distance,

which is something that people don't really talk too much about in terms of

fighting unless you're someone in the sport.

His use of distance and the ability to like what we call pop out and make you

miss by one inch so that he could follow your fist back in as you retract it and

hit you over the top that that's a thing of beauty.

Anderson Silva, when he became a counter striker,

when he got to his prime in the UFC, that was a thing of beauty.

That was a thing of beauty.

So I think definitely those two guys and

Marilla Bustamante has got to be the third guy.

There's just so many good guys now.

So where do you put in terms of metrics?

You mentioned GSB and Anderson Silva.

I think they have a large number of defenses of a title.

Is that important to you?

Like this kind of consistent domination?

No, because it's easily manipulated by the people making money off the fights.

So there is a great quote one time when the UFC was coming to prominence and

Vince McMahon from the WWE, he said,

you know, the difference between what we do and what the UFC does is that

when we have a superstar, I can make sure he stays on top until he's no longer

a superstar because we have predetermined results.

The UFC can't do that because they're actually having fights.

Well, it's true and false.

You can't do that, but you can give your superstars the most favorable

matchups to keep them on top for the longest.

So people always talk about title defenses as if the guy they're fighting,

the challenger, is always the person most deserving of the shot.

And it's just not true.

So I don't put that much stock in it.

Is it possible to put a guy in

in consideration of one of the greats if all they had is one or two amazing fights?

I'll tell you like

and an amazing could be a lot of different definitions.

It could be just a war.

Like they never really reached the highest of excellences of domination.

But they've

like this is where this discussion about Kyle Bakniak, right?

Yeah.

To me, that's a perfect example here, this famous fight against the beat.

Mugamat Sharapov, Sharapov.

Where on one side you have an Anderson Silva type of fighter and in Zabit,

like just a very good striker, like and then there's like the warrior on the

on the Kyle side and just the fight, they created something special together.

It was a fight at night or whatever.

But, you know, that fight was special

on that night because because the two dance partners.

You can have a great performance without being a great fighter.

Not saying neither of those guys is a great fighter.

But to answer your first question,

I think that having one or two great performances does not necessarily mean that you are great.

I need a larger sample size.

I have no idea what that is.

I don't have an idea what that is.

And also where how much weight does toughness have when you're thinking

about the criteria when you define a great fighter?

That's that's that's a good question.

And I don't have the answer to it.

I admire the underdog that rises to the occasion through brute force.

They didn't have they didn't bring the skill set to the table that perhaps some

of the greats have, but they rose to the occasion.

I mean, there's something about that.