back to indexJohn Danaher: The Path to Mastery in Jiu Jitsu, Grappling, Judo, and MMA | Lex Fridman Podcast #182
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The following is a conversation with John Donoher,
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widely acknowledged as one of the greatest coaches
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and minds in the martial arts world,
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having coached many champions in jiu jitsu,
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submission grappling, and MMA,
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including Gordon Ryan, Gary Tonin, Nick Rodriguez,
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Craig Jones, Nicky Ryan, Chris Weidman,
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and George St. Pierre.
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Quick mention of our sponsors,
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Onnit, SimpliSafe, Indeed, and Linode.
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Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that John
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is a scholar of not just jiu jitsu,
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but judo, wrestling, Muay Thai, boxing, MMA,
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and outside of that, topics of history, psychology,
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philosophy, and even artificial intelligence,
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as you will hear in this conversation.
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After this chat, I started to entertain the possibility
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of returning back to competition as a black belt,
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maybe even training with John and his team
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for a few weeks leading up to the competition.
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For a recreational practitioner such as myself,
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the value of training and competing in jiu jitsu
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is that it is one of the best ways to get humbled.
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To me, keeping the ego in check is essential
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for a productive and happy life.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast,
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and here is my conversation with John Donoher.
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Are you afraid of death?
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Let's start with an easy question.
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There's no warmup?
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Let's break that down into two questions.
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I'm a human being, and like any human being,
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I'm biologically programmed to be terrified of death.
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Every physical element in our bodies
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is designed to keep us away from death.
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I'm no different from anyone else in that regard.
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If you throw me from the top of the Empire State Building,
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I'm gonna scream all the way down to the concrete.
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If you wave a loaded firearm in my face,
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I'm gonna flinch away in horror
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the same way anyone else would.
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So in that first sense of, are you afraid of death?
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My body is terrified of injury leading to death
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the same way any other human being would.
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So when death is imminent, there's a terror that.
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Yeah, I go through the same adrenaline dumps
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that you would go through.
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But on the other hand,
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you're also asking a much deeper question,
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which is presumably, are you afraid of nonexistence?
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What comes after your physical death?
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And that's the more interesting question.
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No, I should start by saying from the start,
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I'm a materialist.
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I don't believe that we have an immortal soul.
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I don't believe there's a life after our physical death.
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In this sense, from someone who starts
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from that point of view,
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you have to understand that everyone has two deaths.
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We always talk about our death as though there was only one,
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but we all have two deaths.
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There was a time before you were born when you were dead.
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You weren't afraid of that period of nonexistence.
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You don't even think about it.
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So why would you be afraid of your second period
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You came from nonexistence.
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You're gonna go back into it.
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You weren't afraid of the first.
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Why are you somehow afraid of the second?
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So it doesn't really make sense to me
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as to why people would be afraid of nonexistence.
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You dealt with it fine the first time.
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Deal with it the second time.
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But your mind didn't exist for the first death.
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And it won't exist after you die either.
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But it does exist now enough to comprehend
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that there's this thing that you know nothing about
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that's coming, which is nonexistence.
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Actually, you do know about it,
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because you know what it was like before you were born.
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It was just nothing.
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Every time you go to sleep at night,
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you get a sneak preview of death.
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It's just this kind of nothing happens.
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You wake up in the morning, you're alive again.
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But it's not about the sleeping.
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It's about the falling asleep.
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And every night when you fall asleep,
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you assume you're going to wake up.
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Here you know you're not waking up.
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And the knowledge of that.
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But there's a whole step from that
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to the idea of fearing it.
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I'm fully aware that there's gonna be a time
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But are you gonna be afraid of it?
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Is there some mortal terror you have of this?
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No, you didn't have it before.
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You don't have it when you sleep.
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Going from the fact that you know you won't wake up
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to terror is two different things.
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That's an extra step.
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And at that point, you're making a choice at that point.
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What about what some people in this context
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we might call like the third death,
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which is when everybody forgets the entirety
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of consciousness in the universe
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forgets that you've ever existed,
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that John Donahue ever existed.
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It's almost like a cosmic death.
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It's like everything goes, yeah.
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Not just, I would say it's like knowledge.
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The history books forget about who you are
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because the history books.
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This is inevitable, by the way.
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We're all very, very small players in a very big game.
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And inevitably, we're all going to go at some point.
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Yeah, but doesn't, so you're.
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It's disappointing, of course.
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But it's not even, it would be arrogance to say
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I'm disappointed in the idea that I will disappear.
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But there's far greater things than me that will disappear.
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I mean, it's crushing to think
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that there's going to come a time
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where no one will ever hear Beethoven's symphonies again.
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That the mysteries of the pharaohs will be lost
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and no one will even comprehend that they once existed.
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Humanity has come up with so many amazing things
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over its existence.
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And to think that one day this is just all happening
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on a tiny speck in a distant corner of a very small galaxy
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and among millions of galaxies,
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that this is all for nothing.
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Okay, I can understand.
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There's a kind of dread that comes with this.
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But there's also a sense in which the moment you're born
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and the moment you can think about these things,
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you know this is your inevitable fate.
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Is it so inevitable?
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So if we look at, we're in Austin
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and there's a guy named Elon Musk.
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And he's hoping, in fact, that is the drive
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behind many of his passions,
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is the human beings becoming a multi planetary species
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and expanding out, exploring and colonizing
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the solar system, the galaxy,
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and maybe the rest of the universe.
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Is that something that fills you with excitement?
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As a project, it's very exciting.
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The whole, I mean, we all grew up with science fiction,
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the idea of exploration.
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The same way human beings in earlier centuries
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were thrilled at the idea of discovering a new world,
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you know, America or some other part of the world
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that they sail to and come back.
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But now instead of sailing oceans,
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you're sailing solar systems and ultimately even further.
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So of course that's exciting.
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But as far as relieving us from non existence,
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it's just playing a delaying game
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because ultimately, even the universe itself,
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if the laws of thermodynamics are correct,
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will ultimately die.
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Of course, we might not understand most of the physics
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and how the universe functions.
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You said laws of thermodynamics,
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but maybe that's just a tiny little fraction
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of what the universe actually is.
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Maybe there's multiple dimensions,
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maybe there's multiple universes,
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maybe the entirety of this experience.
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You know, there's guys like Donald Hoffman
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that think that all of this is just an illusion
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that we don't, like human cognition and perception
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constructs a whole, it's like a video game
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that we construct that's very distant
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from the actual reality.
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And maybe one day we'll understand that reality,
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maybe it'll be like the matrix kind of thing.
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So there's a lot of different possibilities here.
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And there's also a philosopher named Ernest Becker.
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I don't know if you know who that is.
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He wrote Denial of Death.
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And his idea, he disagrees with you, but he's dead now,
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is that he thinks that the terror of death,
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the terror of the knowledge that we're going to die
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is within all of us and is in fact the driver
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behind most of the creativity that we do.
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Exploring out into the universe,
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but also you becoming one of the great scholars
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of the martial arts, the philosophers of fighting
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is because you're actually terrified of death
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and you want to somehow permeate your knowledge,
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your ideas, your essence to permeate human civilization
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so that even when your body dies, you live on.
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I would agree with him insofar as death
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is the single greatest motivator for action.
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But going beyond that and saying it's somehow terrifying,
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that's an extra step on his part.
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And not everyone's going to follow him on that step.
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I do believe that death is the single most important element
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in life that gives value to our days.
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If you think, for example, of a situation
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where a God came to you and gave you immortality,
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life would be very, very different for you.
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You're a talented research scientist, you work to a schedule.
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Because ultimately you know your life is finite
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and actually very finite.
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And could be even more so if fate plays its hand
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and you die an early death or what have you.
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We never know what's going to happen tomorrow.
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As such, we get work done as soon as we can.
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The moment you gain immortality,
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you can always put every project off.
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You can always say, I don't need to do this today
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because I can do it four centuries from now.
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And as you extend artificially a human life,
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the motivation to get things done here and now
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and work industriously and excel fades away
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because you can always come back to the idea
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that you can do this in the future.
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And so what gives value to our days is ultimately death.
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And value, it's not the only reason behind value,
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but a huge part of what we consider value is scarcity.
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And death gives us scarcity of days
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and is probably the single greatest motivator
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for almost every action we partake in.
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It's kind of tragic and beautiful
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that what makes things amazing is that they end.
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Yeah, I think it would actually be a terrible burden
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Life would be in many ways very hollow and meaningless,
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People talk about death taking away the meaning of life,
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but I think immortality would have a very similar effect
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in a different direction.
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So given this short life, we can think about jujitsu,
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we can think about any kind of pursuit.
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What do you think makes a great life?
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Is it the highest peak of achievement?
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You know, you think about like an Olympic gold medal,
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the highest level of performance,
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or is it the longevity of performance,
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of doing many amazing things and doing it for a long time?
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I think the latter is kind of what we talk about
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in at least American society.
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You know, we want people to be healthy, balanced,
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perform well for a long time.
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And then there's maybe like the gladiator ethic,
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which is the highest peak is what defines.
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You asked an initial question,
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which what makes a great life,
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but then pointed towards two options,
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one of longevity versus degree of difficulty.
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There's gotta be a lot more than that, surely.
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I mean, think about, first of all,
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we have to understand from the start
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that there's never gonna be an agreed upon set of criteria
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for this is a great life from all perspective.
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If you look from the perspective of, say, Machiavelli,
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then Stalin lived a great life.
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He was highly successful at what he did.
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He started from nothing.
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So the degree of difficulty in what he did
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was extraordinarily high.
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He had massive impact upon world history.
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He oversaw the defeat of almost all of his major enemies.
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He lived to old age and died of natural causes.
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So from Machiavelli's point of view, he had a great life.
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If you ask the Ukrainian farmer in the 1930s
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whether he lived a great life,
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you get a very different answer.
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So everything's gonna come
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from what perspective you begin with this.
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You're going to look out at the world
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with a given point of view,
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and you're gonna make your judgments.
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Was this a great life or was this a terrible life?
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Going back to your point, you were actually,
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I think, focusing the question on more
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in terms of great single performances
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versus longevity of performances.
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Presumably, this isn't really a question
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about what makes a great life, then,
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because there's so much more than that to a great life.
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I'm gonna push back on that.
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So I think the parallels are very much closer
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than you're making them seem.
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I think, let's compare Stalin.
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Stalin is an example of somebody who held power,
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considered by many to be one of the most powerful men ever.
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He held power for 30 years.
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So that's what I'm referring to, longevity.
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And then there's a few people,
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I wish my knowledge of history was better,
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but people who fought a few great battles,
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and they did not maintain power, but they were.
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Let's contrast, say, for example, Alexander the Great,
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who died at 33 from probably unnatural causes,
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had around four to five truly defining battles in his life,
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which responsible for the lion's share of his achievements,
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and burned very bright, but didn't burn long.
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Stalin, on the other hand, started from nothing,
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and quietly, methodically worked his way
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through the revolutionary phase,
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and gained increasing amounts of power,
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and as he said, went all the way to the end of his career.
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Yeah, there's definitely something to be said
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for longevity, but as to which one is greater than the other,
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you can't give a definition, or a set of criteria,
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which will definitively say this is better than that.
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But when you look...
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Ultimately, we look at Alexander as great,
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but in a different way, and we look at Stalin.
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I didn't think many people would say
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Stalin was a great person,
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but from the Machiavellian point of view,
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you would say he was great also.
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But when you think about beautiful creations
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done by human beings in the space of, say,
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martial arts, in the space of sport,
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what inspires you, the peak of performance?
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I see where you're coming from.
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It's a great question.
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For me, it always comes down to degree of difficulty,
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but things are difficult in different ways, okay?
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A single, flawless performance in youth
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is still that wins a gold medal.
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Let's say, for example, Nadia Comaneci
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won the Olympic gold medal in gymnastics,
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the first person ever to get a perfect score.
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If she had disappeared after that,
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we would still remember that as an incredible moment.
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And the degree of difficulty to get a perfect score
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in Olympic gymnastics is just off the charts.
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And contrast that with someone who went to four Olympics
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and got four silver medals.
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I mean, they're both incredible achievements.
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They're just different.
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The attributes that lead to longevity
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typically tend to conflict with the attributes
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that bring a powerful, single performance.
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One is all about focus on a particular event.
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The other is on spreading your resources over time.
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Both present tremendous difficulties.
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There's no need to say one is better than the other.
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There's also just, for me personally,
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the stories of somebody who truly struggled
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are the most powerful.
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I know a bunch of people don't necessarily agree,
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because you said perfection.
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Perfection is kind of the antithesis of struggle.
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But I look at somebody, okay, my own life,
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somebody I'm a fan, oh, I'm a fan of everybody.
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I'm a huge fan of yours.
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I'm trying not to be nervous here.
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But somebody I'm a fan of in the judo world
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is Travis Stevens.
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He's a remarkable fellow, by the way.
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A remarkable human being.
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Insane in the best kinds of ways.
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I think I started judo, I really started martial arts.
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I wrestled, if you consider those martial arts.
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That's been in my blood.
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But beyond that, the whole pajama thing we wear, the gi,
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I started by watching Travis in 2008 Olympics.
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Was that accidental, or did you know Travis
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prior to watching him?
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No, no, no, I just tuned in.
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Now, that's an unusual choice.
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It was just random, you just tuned in
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and you saw Travis Stevens.
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I tuned in to the Olympics,
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and I was wondering what judo is.
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And then I started watching.
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We're all proud of our countries and so on,
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so I started watching.
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He was, I think, the only American
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in the Olympics for judo.
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Maybe the, so this Kayla Harrison was 2012.
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Rhonda was there too, so I watched Rhonda and Travis.
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But obviously, sort of, I was focused on somebody
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who also weighed the same as I did,
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so there was a kinda, I think, 81 kilograms.
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So there's a connection, but also there's an intensity
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to him, like, he would get angry at his own failures
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and he would just refuse to quit.
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It's that kinda Dan Gable mentality.
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I just, that was inspiring to me, that he's the underdog.
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And the way people talk about him, the commentators,
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that it was an unlikely person to do well, right?
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And I, the FU attitude behind that,
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saying, no, I'm gonna still win gold.
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Obviously, he didn't do well in 2008,
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but that was somehow inspiring.
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And I just remember he pulled me in,
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but then I started to see this sport,
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I guess you can call it,
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of effortlessly dominating your opponent in throwing.
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Because to me, wrestling was like a grind.
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You kind of control, you slowly just break your opponent.
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The idea that you could, with like a foot sweep,
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was fascinating to me, that just because of timing,
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you can take these like monsters, giant people,
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like incredible athletes, and just smash them.
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With, it just doesn't, there was no struggle to it.
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It was always like a look of surprise.
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Judo, dominance in Judo has a look,
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like the other person is like, what just happened?
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This is very different from wrestling.
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It's built into the rule structure too,
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the whole idea of an epon,
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of a match being over in an instant.
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And that creates a thrilling spectator sport,
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because you can, as you say, with Ashiwaza,
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the foot sweeps, you can take someone out
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who's heavily favored, and if you're not,
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Judo is the most unforgiving of all the grappling sports.
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If you have a lapse of concentration for half a second,
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it's done, it's over.
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If those guys get a grip on each other,
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any one of them can throw the other.
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The idea, when you see someone like Nomura,
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who won three Olympic gold medals,
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to win across three Olympics,
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and that's an incredible achievement,
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given how many ways there are to lose
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in the standing position in Judo,
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and how unforgiving it is as a sport,
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it shows an incredible level of dominance.
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And I think when I was also introduced at that time
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to the idea, just like in Judo,
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I think in Jiu Jitsu is the same,
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a lot of sports is probably the same,
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is there's ways to win that include kind of,
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if I were to use a bad term, stalling,
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which is like use strategy to slow down,
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to destroy all the weapons your opponent has,
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and just to wait it out,
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to sort of break your opponent by,
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yeah, shutting down all their weapons,
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but not using any of your own.
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And now, Travis was always going for,
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he's of course really good at gripping
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and couldn't do that whole game,
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but he was going for the big throws.
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And he was almost getting frustrated
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by a lot of the opponents.
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I remember Ola Bischoff, I think.
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Yes, from Germany.
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I know he's very good at doing big throws
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and he's an incredible judoka,
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but he was also incredible
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at just frustrating his opponents
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with gripping and strategy and so on.
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And I just remember feeling the pain of this person,
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like Travis, who went through just,
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he broke like every part of his body.
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He went through so many injuries.
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Just this person who dedicated his entire life
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to this moment in 2008 and then 2012 and 2016,
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just gave everything.
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You could see it on his face
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that his weapons are being shut down
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and he's still pushing forward.
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He's still with that, both the frustration and the power.
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I mean, the kind of throw he does is his main one,
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I think, is the standing, it was called Seoi Nage.
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But that was the other thing is like,
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the techniques he used was these big throws
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that there's something to me about the Seoi Nage.
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I fell in love with that throw.
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That's my main throw, standing Seoi Nage.
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Why do you favor the standing variation?
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Because of the amplitude?
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You get a more powerful wind up.
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Are you a fan of Koga?
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That's when I, Travis,
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so Koga and Travis opened up my...
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Travis uses the same gripping patterns
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for Seoi Nage as Koga.
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All the same, and the way he uses his hips and turns.
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And I remember going to my judo club
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and other judo clubs and they were all saying,
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this is the wrong way to do it.
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The way Travis does it is the wrong way to do it.
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I've always been amazed by this, by the way.
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I don't mean to cut you off,
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but I could literally fill 20 hours
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of reproductions of people who will tell me
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that either my students or other great world champions
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are doing things wrong.
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And I'm looking at them and I'm like,
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who would I rather trust here in their judgment?
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Koga, who was one of the greatest throwers of all time,
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or you, a recreational guy who couldn't throw my grandmother.
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I'm supposed to take your word over his.
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Well, say, don't listen to what people say.
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I'm gonna give you a piece of advice here.
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Watch what the best people do, okay?
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That's how you get superior athletic performance.
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I'm gonna say that again.
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Don't listen to what people say.
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Watch what they do,
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particularly under the stress of high level competition,
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because that's when you see their real game,
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what they really do under pressure, okay?
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And if you can emulate that,
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you're gonna be very successful.
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I guess what I was frustrated with, to your point,
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is that the argument against Koga
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is he has a very specific body type
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and he figured out something that worked for him.
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The statement is that might not be applicable to you
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or to the general public of judo players
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that wanna succeed.
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That, by the way, at the shallow level, might be true.
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The point is there might be a body of knowledge
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that's yet to be discovered and explored that Koga opened up
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that I wanted to understand why his technique worked.
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It made no sense to me that with a single foot,
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like the way you turn the hip,
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the single foot that steps in, why does that work?
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Because it was actually very difficult to make work
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for me as a white belt in the very beginning.
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It doesn't make sense.
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Like people just, they don't get loaded up onto your hip.
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Anyway, for people who don't watch Koga highlights,
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watch Travis Stevens highlights,
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but the details of the technique don't make sense,
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but when mastered, it feels like
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there's something fundamental there
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that hasn't been explored yet.
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It's like Koga and Travis made me think
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that we don't know most of the body mechanics involved
link |
in dominance in judo.
link |
Like we just kind of found a few pockets
link |
that work really well.
link |
There's Yamada, there's these different throws, Osorogari.
link |
I wonder if there's like totally cool new things
link |
that we haven't discovered.
link |
And that Seinagi gave a little peak
link |
because there's very few people that I'm aware of
link |
that do it the way Travis and Koga did.
link |
May I ask you a question?
link |
The choice of standing Seinagi,
link |
I should say this for your listeners.
link |
They're probably thinking,
link |
what the hell are these two guys talking about?
link |
Seinagi is one of the more high percentage throws
link |
in the Olympic sport of judo.
link |
Probably Uchimata is probably number one
link |
and variations of Seinagi would be
link |
in the top five for sure.
link |
The basic choice you have in modern competition
link |
is the more difficult standing Seinagi
link |
where you literally are up on your feet
link |
and you perform a shoulder throw
link |
that takes your opponent over from a full standing position.
link |
The most popular form of Seinagi
link |
in modern competition by a landslide
link |
is not the standing version.
link |
It's a drop Seinagi where you go down to your knees.
link |
This means you have a much easier time
link |
getting underneath your opponent's center of gravity.
link |
The defining feature of any Seinagi
link |
is getting underneath your opponent's center of gravity
link |
Seoi literally means to lift and carry.
link |
Why did you choose the more difficult version?
link |
What was your motivation?
link |
You know, you're a smart kid.
link |
You know right from the start
link |
that for every standing Seinagi,
link |
there's 20 drop Seinagis in modern competition.
link |
One is obviously more high percentage.
link |
One obviously works for a wider variety of body types.
link |
The number of people who are successful
link |
with standing Seinagi is dramatically lower.
link |
And it appears to be a move which is completely absent
link |
in the heavyweight divisions
link |
and rarely seen in the lightweight divisions.
link |
What was the motivation?
link |
Why did you willingly adopt the less high percentage
link |
over the more high percentage?
link |
And this would be very interesting.
link |
I would love you to break it apart
link |
because I apply the same kind of thinking
link |
to basically everything.
link |
I mentioned to you offline,
link |
there's these Boston Dynamics Spot Robots.
link |
When I first met Spot, I fell in love.
link |
I don't understand what exactly,
link |
but there's magic there.
link |
And I just got excited by it.
link |
And that fire burns.
link |
I wanna work with these robots.
link |
I wanna work with the robots.
link |
I want to, I felt like there's something special there
link |
that I could build something interesting with,
link |
create something interesting with.
link |
And the same with the standing Seinagi
link |
from Koga and Travis.
link |
I just fell in love with that technique.
link |
Just even watching,
link |
I didn't even know what the hell to do with it.
link |
The standing Seinagi is more beautiful in execution.
link |
There's no question.
link |
In my own, we're talking about love here, right?
link |
In my own definition of aesthetic, yes.
link |
It's not just beauty.
link |
Cause you could argue there's more elegant sort of Uchimata
link |
is very beautiful and effortless.
link |
I love something about the dominance of it.
link |
I love the idea in sport of two people
link |
that are the best in the world.
link |
And one of them dominating the other.
link |
And to me, the standing Seinagi, you're lifted off your feet
link |
and especially when it's done perfectly
link |
and with really strong resistance from the other person,
link |
it results in a big slam.
link |
And that was like beautiful to me.
link |
That's the Alexander Karelian like big pickups.
link |
It's interesting, you're correct in so far as
link |
you're not just going with aesthetic
link |
and the sense of beauty, but also,
link |
but you are making as it were value judgments
link |
And that's fascinating to me
link |
because there's two elements to any grappling sport.
link |
I'm always insistent upon the idea
link |
that Jiu Jitsu is both an art and a science, okay?
link |
It has scientific elements in so far as it works
link |
according to the laws of physics
link |
and lever and fulcrum, et cetera, et cetera.
link |
But it also has an aesthetic element
link |
in so far as you're making choices with technique.
link |
You're expressing who you are as a person.
link |
You have 10,000 different variations of moves you could use,
link |
but you're specifically choosing these.
link |
That's an element of choice and self expression on your part.
link |
And in so far as that is true,
link |
combat sports are not just a science,
link |
but they're also an art.
link |
So most combat sports have this sense
link |
which they have the features of both an art and a science.
link |
And it's not just about high percentage in your case.
link |
I mean, me personally, I'm obsessed with percentages.
link |
What are the ways to make you win?
link |
That's the science part.
link |
Yeah, but that's also choices involved, yeah.
link |
But there is an undeniably aesthetic element
link |
to martial arts where you, as it were,
link |
express who you are as a person
link |
in terms of the techniques you're ultimately going to choose.
link |
Does that get in the way?
link |
Do you allow yourself to enjoy
link |
the aesthetic beauty of a technique?
link |
When martial arts are done well,
link |
it's the most beautiful sport in the world, okay?
link |
When it's done poorly, it's the ugliest.
link |
But a beautifully applied submission hold, a perfect throw,
link |
a superbly set up takedown are among
link |
the most difficult techniques to execute in all of sports.
link |
And when they're done well, they're magic to observe.
link |
But do you prefer certain techniques over others
link |
because of their, like for example,
link |
I'll tell you, for me, chokes of all sorts
link |
with the gi, without the gi,
link |
probably with the gi is the most beautiful to me, personally.
link |
I value them above all others.
link |
People mostly associate myself and my students with leg locking.
link |
They're usually rather surprised to learn
link |
that I actually value strangle holds far above leg locks.
link |
But not for aesthetic reasons, for effectiveness.
link |
We can talk about that later if you wish.
link |
Well, let's step back.
link |
Sorry, we drifted awfully far off topic there.
link |
I think this is beautiful.
link |
We drifted along the river of life and martial arts.
link |
Can you explain the fundamentals of jiu jitsu?
link |
Yes. If I couldn't, I wouldn't be much of a coach.
link |
Jiu jitsu is an art and science
link |
which looks to use a combination of tactical
link |
and mechanical advantage to focus a very high percentage
link |
of my strength against a very low percentage
link |
of my opponent's strength at a critical point on their body,
link |
such that if I were to exert my strength
link |
upon that critical point,
link |
they could no longer continue to fight.
link |
Well, that's about weapons and defenses.
link |
But then, is there something more to be said
link |
about the set of tools that we're talking about?
link |
That's where the art comes in.
link |
Because ultimately, you have a set of choices,
link |
and those choices that you make will be an act
link |
of self expression on your part.
link |
Some will prefer this, some will prefer that.
link |
That's where you come in as an individual.
link |
That's an overall definition of jiu jitsu,
link |
of being a set of choices that where you're using
link |
the things you're powerful in versus the things
link |
your opponent is weak in.
link |
No, I was only talking about percentages of body strength.
link |
If I have, for example, let's say we have two athletes,
link |
athlete A and athlete B.
link |
Athlet A has 100 units of strength,
link |
however we define that overall.
link |
OK, so ostensibly, athlete A is twice as strong as athlete B.
link |
But athlete B can maneuver his body
link |
into a set of positions focused around a critical point
link |
of his opponent's body, where he can apply 40 units of strength
link |
out of his total of 50.
link |
His opponent can only defend with 20 units of strength
link |
out of his total of 100.
link |
You have now completely reversed the strength discrepancy.
link |
Originally, athlete A was twice as strong as B.
link |
Now, on that one localized point, the knee, the elbow,
link |
the neck, B is now twice as strong as A.
link |
Under those circumstances, B should win.
link |
I guess what I'm trying to get at, by the way,
link |
that's really beautifully said, is what you just said
link |
could be applied to other games, other battles.
link |
It could be applied to the game of chess.
link |
It could be applied to war, most obviously in war.
link |
I think about, for example, the American strategic bombing
link |
campaign in World War II.
link |
The Eighth Army Air Force was tasked
link |
with the idea of destroying German industry.
link |
Did they attack all of German industry?
link |
That would be stupid.
link |
They attacked the ball bearing industry.
link |
Because almost all of modern machines
link |
require ball bearings in order to operate.
link |
In order for the mechanical interfaces of machines
link |
to operate, you have to reduce friction.
link |
It's done through ball bearings.
link |
If you knocked out one tiny component of German industry,
link |
the ball bearing industry, the rest of it couldn't operate.
link |
So too with the human body.
link |
I didn't have to fight your whole body.
link |
I just have to fight your left knee.
link |
If I can break your left knee, the rest of your body
link |
is irrelevant to me.
link |
But then isn't the art of jiu jitsu discovering
link |
the left knee, discovering the weak points?
link |
Yeah, a huge part of jiu jitsu is understanding
link |
the strengths and weaknesses of the human body.
link |
There's parts of the human body that are shockingly robust
link |
and there are other parts that are shockingly vulnerable.
link |
The major joints, and of course the most vulnerable of all,
link |
the unprotected neck.
link |
So if we take something I'm not familiar with
link |
but I was incredibly impressed by is the body lock
link |
that I saw Nick Rodriguez use last time a few weeks ago.
link |
But then I also got to hang out with Craig Jones
link |
He also has a very good body lock.
link |
So that was, I don't know if this body lock applies
link |
to all positions, but I was seeing it from when Craig
link |
is on top of the opponent and trying to pass in the guard,
link |
use the body lock as a controlling position.
link |
The principle behind it is that it shuts down,
link |
as you've spoken about, it shuts down the weapons
link |
of a very strong opponent.
link |
That's absolutely correct.
link |
In the case of guard position, what makes guard position
link |
dangerous, what makes someone a powerful guard player
link |
is the movement of their hips forward and backward
link |
Body locking is designed to shut down that movement
link |
and does a very fine job of it.
link |
You'll see all of my students excel at it.
link |
Gordon Ryan is probably the single best body lock
link |
guard passer I've ever seen.
link |
Nicky Ryan is outstanding with it.
link |
Nick Rodriguez is very good.
link |
Craig Jones is outstanding.
link |
All of my students use this for a very simple reason.
link |
Understand what is the central problem of shutting down
link |
a dangerous guard player, it's his hips.
link |
That's what makes him a dangerous leg locker.
link |
You go up against a dangerous leg locker,
link |
body lock guard pass, single best way to shut down
link |
most of his entries.
link |
We're all strong in leg locks.
link |
So in our gym, you gotta control the hips
link |
as soon as possible.
link |
Otherwise it's gonna be a very difficult thing
link |
to avoid leg entanglements as you go to pass.
link |
And across the board, my students excel
link |
in body lock guard passing.
link |
They understand what's the most dangerous feature
link |
their opponent has, the lateral movement of their hips.
link |
What's the single best way to stop that body lock
link |
and then work from there.
link |
So if this asymmetry of power is fundamental to jiu jitsu,
link |
how do you discover that?
link |
How did you discover the body lock?
link |
That as one of many methodologies
link |
of achieving this asymmetry.
link |
It would be an overstatement to say
link |
we discovered the body lock.
link |
Body lock passing has been around longer
link |
than we've been around.
link |
But what I would say is that in a room full
link |
of dangerous leg lockers, you've gotta have a way
link |
to shut down the hips.
link |
And so once we started using body locks,
link |
we saw that was one excellent way
link |
to get around that problem.
link |
But as with all development, it comes from trial and error.
link |
You will often see people teach the technique
link |
to a certain level and you see the teaching,
link |
you're like, there's a lot of inadequacies there.
link |
And that doesn't cover a lot of the problems
link |
that we're encountering.
link |
And so trial and error is the single most important part
link |
of the development.
link |
Trial and error in?
link |
In the training room amongst ourselves.
link |
In hard training or?
link |
No, it never begins with hard training or everything.
link |
Techniques are born the same way we're born.
link |
Weak and in need of nutrition.
link |
You have to build them up organically like children.
link |
And you start with minimal resistance
link |
and you make progress over time.
link |
When you first go to the gym, do you put 500 pounds
link |
on the bench press and try to bench press it?
link |
No, you'll be killed.
link |
You start off with the bar, you build over time
link |
and then one day, five years from now,
link |
you really are lifting 500 pounds.
link |
But only a forward attempt, they're on their first attempt.
link |
And they're born like children in your mind first?
link |
Like there's a spark of an idea.
link |
Yes, there's always a spark.
link |
It's like scientific development on a subject matter
link |
which is intrinsically simpler.
link |
Okay, there's a sense in which naive
link |
and overly simplistic assessments
link |
of scientific method may not work well
link |
at advanced levels of science, but they work damn well
link |
in the training room with jiu jitsu
link |
where the subject matter is inherently simpler
link |
than it is in research science.
link |
And as a result, there'll be a spark.
link |
You'll see something, there's possibilities there.
link |
Okay, let's puzzle this out, let's work with this.
link |
And you run into a lot of failures.
link |
You've suddenly been, oh man, if I put my hip this way,
link |
this works really well.
link |
And then suddenly you just try and spar
link |
and you get caught in a simple, normal platter.
link |
And you're like, okay, that didn't work as well
link |
And then you look to rectify things.
link |
If things go in promising research directions,
link |
If not, you discard them.
link |
Well, it's funny you say science.
link |
It feels more like art.
link |
There's somebody I really admire
link |
that talks about this kind of ideas.
link |
Johnny I from Apple, he's the lead designer.
link |
He recently left, but he was the designer
link |
behind most of the products we know and love from Apple.
link |
When you say designer, be more precise.
link |
What exactly was he working on in Apple?
link |
Which parts of the iPhone did he work on?
link |
The entirety of it.
link |
Was he a leader of a research team
link |
or was he the person personally responsible
link |
for the development?
link |
He's kind of, I would say, very similar to your position.
link |
He wasn't necessarily the last, the person executing
link |
the fine, the manufacturer, right?
link |
But there's the, he's somebody that's very hands on.
link |
And it's like, okay, so he worked obviously
link |
extremely close to Steve Jobs.
link |
Steve Jobs has this idea.
link |
We should have a computer that's as thin
link |
as a sheet of paper, and then you start to play
link |
with ideas of like, what does that actually look like?
link |
The reason I bring it up is because he talked about,
link |
he had these ideas that he would not tell Steve
link |
because he talked about in the same exact language
link |
as you're saying, is there's like a little baby
link |
that it's very fragile.
link |
It needs time to grow.
link |
And then Steve Jobs would often roll in.
link |
This is, he would destroy ideas.
link |
Because Johnny Ive and the team didn't have
link |
actually good responses to the criticism at first.
link |
Because when they're babies, you can't defend the baby.
link |
But you need a time to develop.
link |
You need to sleep on it.
link |
You need to rethink it, dream things
link |
and all those kinds of things.
link |
It's fascinating you say this, Lex,
link |
because this is actually the entire history
link |
of scientific development is literally the story
link |
of the juxtaposition between the need to protect
link |
and nurture new theories versus the need
link |
to rigorously test them with harsh testing
link |
that either verifies them or falsifies them.
link |
And learning to find a satisfactory compromise
link |
between those two is a very, very difficult thing.
link |
When you look at the history of science,
link |
you will see that there's some pretty damn chaotic moments
link |
anytime there's major theory change
link |
where all kinds of apparently undesirable tricks
link |
are used to protect certain theories
link |
with ad hoc hypotheses, et cetera, et cetera.
link |
And ultimately, only time and success over time
link |
will justify a theory.
link |
There's usually a period where when one theory goes in
link |
to replace another, there's something
link |
of a battle between competing groups of scientists, some
link |
of whom advocate theory A, some who advocate theory B.
link |
They often use seemingly unscrupulous methods
link |
to protect or attack another person's theory.
link |
They dig for proofs.
link |
And usually, some period of time has to go by.
link |
Sometimes, in some cases, it simply
link |
involved older scientists protecting an initial theory
link |
dying off and new scientists just replacing them
link |
And this is a common, common theme.
link |
And the same applies in jiu jitsu.
link |
So many times, especially when I first
link |
started working with leg locks, I would show things
link |
I had worked on to even world champion black belts.
link |
And they would try it once or twice and fail and be like,
link |
yeah, it doesn't work.
link |
And I'd be like, you tried it once on another guy who's
link |
also a world champion who has a strong ability to resist it.
link |
And then five years later, they would
link |
see my students finishing world champions with it.
link |
And in some cases, finishing the very people
link |
who said that the technique would never work.
link |
I mean, if there was ever a refutation of a statement,
link |
that's a pretty clear example.
link |
And there has to be a sense in which you
link |
can't be too forgiving.
link |
You have to test hypotheses.
link |
But on the other hand, you can't be too ruthless either.
link |
You have to look for promise.
link |
And my advice is start slow.
link |
Again, the analogy of lifting weights.
link |
You don't lift the heaviest weights on your first day.
link |
You work progressively over time.
link |
Now, you also have to have some common sense here.
link |
You can't be too forgiving to a technique
link |
if it's repeatedly failing and good people have tried it
link |
and multiple good people have tried it
link |
and it's just not working out, then, OK, it's
link |
time to dismiss it.
link |
But don't be too quick.
link |
Is this where your idea of training with lower belts
link |
quite a bit comes from?
link |
I've actually just, as a side comment,
link |
and maybe you can elaborate, the place, the gym,
link |
Balanced Studios with Phil and Rick McGarry's where I got
link |
my black belt, where I grew up as a jujitsu person
link |
in Philadelphia, they have a huge number of black belts,
link |
but they have a huge number of all other ranks.
link |
And the way they picked sparring partners,
link |
people you train with, is very ad hoc.
link |
It's one of those places, one of those gyms
link |
where you can train for like three, four hours.
link |
And you could take a break or you could jump back in.
link |
And you can go to war with black belts,
link |
but then you can also play around
link |
with the purple and the blue belts and so on.
link |
And that was really beneficial for growth.
link |
And you can pick which, because everybody has a style,
link |
and you can pick which style you really want to work on.
link |
And then I came to Boston, Broadway Jiu Jitsu,
link |
with John Clark, who I love.
link |
He's a good friend.
link |
But it's a little bit more formal.
link |
And I found myself, it was a very interesting journey.
link |
I would be training with black belts the whole time.
link |
And it was a very different experience.
link |
I found myself exploring much less.
link |
I found myself learning much less.
link |
I mean, part of that is on me,
link |
but part of it was also realizing that,
link |
wow, there's a value to training with people
link |
that are much worse than you.
link |
Yes, is there a philosophy you could speak to on that?
link |
Yeah, you probably know it already.
link |
You know from your studies in artificial intelligence
link |
that all human beings are naturally risk averse.
link |
This is a bias which is deeply seated in all of us.
link |
I'm sure you're well read on people like Tversky and et
link |
cetera, who talk about this all the time.
link |
For your viewers, there are numerous psychological
link |
experiments that are showing that most people,
link |
to the point of irrationality, fear loss more
link |
than they are excited at the prospect of an equivalent gain.
link |
So for example, if you have $100 in your wallet,
link |
you're more worried about the idea of losing the $100
link |
that you have now than you would be
link |
excited by the prospect of gaining $100 that I could
link |
potentially offer you.
link |
This comes out whenever you get black belt versus black belt
link |
confrontations or any kind of similar skill level.
link |
Whenever you get similar skill levels,
link |
the chances of defeat get very, very high.
link |
Interestingly, if you're a white belt
link |
and you're going against a black belt, you'll take risk.
link |
Because there's no shame in losing to a black belt
link |
when you're a white belt.
link |
So you'll play more lightheartedly
link |
and you'll have a more fun role.
link |
But when you have very similar skill levels,
link |
you're going to come back to what?
link |
The techniques that are most likely to get you a win.
link |
That number of techniques is usually pretty small.
link |
And if you're always battling with the same tough opponents
link |
every day, where if you make even a single error,
link |
it will cost you that match inspiring
link |
and you don't like losing, you're
link |
going to stay with a very small set of moves.
link |
You might get slightly better at direct execution over time,
link |
but you as an individual will not grow.
link |
Growth, as it does in organic life forms,
link |
comes from small beginnings and builds over time.
link |
You can't take an untested, untried move
link |
and get it on a world champion black belt.
link |
It's going to get crushed, so it's not ready for that.
link |
It's like a lion cub being thrown out
link |
into the Serengeti plains.
link |
A lion cub is just too small and too ineffective.
link |
It's a lion, but it's a cub.
link |
And it's not until it grows into maturity
link |
that it can be a lion that can dominate the Serengeti plains.
link |
That's why I always encourage my students to play
link |
with a variety of belt types and spend
link |
the majority of their time with lesser belts
link |
for development purposes.
link |
When you're getting closer to a competition,
link |
you obviously want to change that.
link |
You want to be getting more a competitive sense
link |
of hard work, but you must learn to divide up your training
link |
cycles into non competition cycles
link |
where you're presumably working with people
link |
who are slightly lower in level than yourself,
link |
and in some cases, quite a bit lower than yourself.
link |
And then competition cycles where
link |
you're working with people much closer to your own skill level.
link |
Is there something to be said about the flip side of that,
link |
which is when you're training with people at the same skill
link |
level, being OK losing to them?
link |
You have to see training for what it is.
link |
Training is about skill development,
link |
not about winning or losing.
link |
You've got to understand that you
link |
don't need to win every battle.
link |
You only need to win the battles that count.
link |
And the battles that count are in the world championship
link |
That's the one that counts.
link |
Think about that win.
link |
That's the one you're going to be remembered for.
link |
You're not going to be remembered for the battle you
link |
lost on Tuesday afternoon at 3 PM in some nameless gym
link |
with some guy that no one cares about.
link |
No one's going to remember that.
link |
You're going to be remembered for your peak performances,
link |
not your everyday performances.
link |
Focus your everyday performances on skill development
link |
so that your peak performances you can focus on winning.
link |
This is not a therapy session, but if I could just speak.
link |
Every session's a therapy session.
link |
There is still an ape thing in there.
link |
You think I don't feel it?
link |
You think everyone in the room doesn't feel it?
link |
Because, for example, you have never seen me roll.
link |
When there's people, I've seen the look in people's eyes
link |
when they see me train.
link |
And I could see, maybe it's me projecting,
link |
but they think, I thought you were supposed to be good.
link |
I thought you were supposed to be a black belt.
link |
That look, they're like studying.
link |
I'm going to give you some therapy.
link |
Do you know how many people have come up
link |
to me over the years who have visited the training
link |
halls that I work in, and they come up to me and they go,
link |
man, I rolled with Gary Tonin.
link |
I did really well with him, like really well.
link |
I'm like, oh, that's very good, very impressive.
link |
And then I see them talking to their friends, like, man,
link |
I tapped out Gary Tonin.
link |
And I'm sitting there going, yeah.
link |
And you can see that they're just like, whoa, dude,
link |
I'm way better than I thought I was.
link |
Gary Tonin, all of my students, I
link |
push them in the direction of giving up bad positions
link |
so that they practice working, getting out
link |
of critical situations.
link |
It's a huge part of our training program.
link |
But Gary Tonin takes that to a level
link |
that just no one else even gets close.
link |
It's just amazing.
link |
He will put himself in impossible situations
link |
where it's a fully locked strangle, 100% on with both
link |
his arms behind his back.
link |
And he'll try to work out from there.
link |
And seven times out of 10, he does.
link |
But three times out of 10, he gets caught.
link |
I'm a huge advocate of handicap training,
link |
where you handicap yourself to work on skills.
link |
He's took that to heart to a level that few people, I
link |
believe, can match.
link |
I just wonder what his psychology is like, because there's.
link |
It goes back to what we talked about before, Lex.
link |
You have to understand it's skill development.
link |
Don't take it personally.
link |
I hear where you're coming from.
link |
We've all got what you call the ape reflex, where
link |
we want to be dominant, OK?
link |
Because there's thousands of white belts out there
link |
that have tapped Gary Tonan, and they're walking around,
link |
and they're posting online.
link |
I tapped Gary Tonan.
link |
Gary Tonan's one of the best in the world,
link |
so I'm one of the best in the world.
link |
And does Gary get upset about this?
link |
No, of course not.
link |
Because Gary knows that when it counts on stage,
link |
he's going to be going 100% with a set of skills
link |
that very few people can match.
link |
He can go into an EBI overtime at the 205 pound weight
link |
division against an ADCC champion,
link |
starting in a full arm lock position,
link |
and effortlessly get out with no problems in seconds.
link |
Because he's been in that situation 25,000 times
link |
with varying degrees of skilled opponents.
link |
And there's just no panic, no fear.
link |
He's just doing what he's done so many thousands of times.
link |
And that's a fine, fine example of a guy
link |
who didn't give a damn what happened in the training room,
link |
but when it counted on the stage, in front of the cameras,
link |
Yeah, he's an incredible inspiration, actually.
link |
He's a practitioner of something you've recently
link |
talked quite a bit about, which is the power
link |
of escaping sort of bad positions.
link |
I think you've talked about it,
link |
which is really interesting framing,
link |
is escaping bad positions is one of the best ways,
link |
if not the best way, to demonstrate dominance
link |
psychologically over your opponent.
link |
That anything they throw at you,
link |
like their weapons are useless against you.
link |
There's a little bit of Lex Friedman
link |
kicking through on this question.
link |
Your obsession with dominance is skewing your point of view.
link |
It's a therapy session, it's a therapy session.
link |
I'm coming from a wrestling perspective.
link |
I think it's not just Lex Friedman.
link |
I think it's Dan Gable.
link |
I think it's dominant.
link |
The Gary Tonin ethic, it just goes against everything
link |
wrestling is about.
link |
You never put yourself in a bad position.
link |
And the fact, it's a, philosophically,
link |
I don't know what to do with it.
link |
It's a total reframing of showing dominance
link |
by escaping any bad position.
link |
Let's talk about the idea of what is the value of escapes?
link |
Why do I put this in as the first skill
link |
that every Jiu Jitsu student must master?
link |
Believe it or not, when I talked about how it
link |
pertains to dominance,
link |
that's its smallest value.
link |
Its greatest value has nothing to do with dominance.
link |
It has to do with confidence.
link |
You can train someone and teach them technique
link |
until you're blue in the face.
link |
But at some point, the athlete in question
link |
has to go out there on the stage and pull the trigger
link |
when the time is right.
link |
What's going to give you that ability
link |
to go from the physical skills that you've learned
link |
to execution under pressure is confidence.
link |
I always talk about skill development.
link |
And yes, skill development is the absolute bedrock
link |
of my training programs.
link |
But you can't finish at that level.
link |
There has to be something more than that.
link |
And you have to go from the physical element of skill
link |
into the psychological element of confidence.
link |
I can teach you an armbar all day.
link |
You can get to a point where you can flawlessly execute
link |
armbars in drilling and even in a certain level
link |
But if you believe that you can do it,
link |
in a certain level of competition, but if you believe
link |
that in attempting an armbar on a dangerous opponent
link |
with good guard passing skills,
link |
say the armbar has been performed from guard position,
link |
that if the armbar fails and your opponent uses that failure
link |
to set up a strong pass and get into a side pin,
link |
possibly into the mount, and you don't have the ability
link |
to get out of that side pin or mount,
link |
you won't pull the trigger on the armbar.
link |
And so even though you had all the requisite physical skills
link |
to perform the technique, when push came to shove
link |
and the critical moment came, you backed down.
link |
You didn't pull the trigger.
link |
Building that confidence is the key
link |
to championship performance.
link |
And the single best way to do it is to take away
link |
the innate fear that we all have of bad outcomes
link |
that makes us naturally risk averse.
link |
When you don't believe you can be pinned,
link |
when you don't believe your guard can be passed,
link |
you'll take risks because there's no downside
link |
An unpinnable person and an unpassable person
link |
doesn't have much to fear in a jiu jitsu match.
link |
You can come out and fire with all guns blazing
link |
because then you know at the end of the day,
link |
no one's gonna hold you down,
link |
no one's gonna pass you guard.
link |
That's your first two goals in jiu jitsu.
link |
They're the most boring goals.
link |
They're not exciting to learn.
link |
No one wants to come in and their first thing we're told,
link |
okay, you're gonna practice escapes
link |
for the next year of your life.
link |
Okay, it's not going, are you kidding me?
link |
But that's what you gotta have, that's your first skill.
link |
And that's what I push upon all of my students.
link |
You'll see almost all of them are very, very strong
link |
They know that if things go wrong,
link |
they can always get out.
link |
They can always live to fight another day.
link |
And that is what gives them the ability
link |
to attack without fear.
link |
I think that is so profound and so rare.
link |
It's so rare to hear this.
link |
I think it's because it's the most painful thing to do.
link |
Always ask yourself,
link |
when you enter a jiu jitsu match,
link |
you already know ahead of time,
link |
if you're going to lose, how you're going to lose.
link |
Okay, there's only a certain number of realistic submissions
link |
that work in the sport of jiu jitsu.
link |
The number is very small.
link |
So ahead of time, you already know
link |
the most likely methods of submission loss in jiu jitsu
link |
are gonna be things like heel hook,
link |
armbar, rear naked strangle, guillotine, et cetera, et cetera.
link |
Just work backwards from that knowledge.
link |
So start off learning how to defend all of those things.
link |
You know what the major losing positions are in jiu jitsu.
link |
Someone gets mounted on you, rear mount,
link |
side control, knee on belly.
link |
Those positions you can only lose from.
link |
So work backwards from there,
link |
getting out of those positions.
link |
And that's how I always start.
link |
I always say with my students,
link |
I teach beginners from the ground up
link |
and I teach experts backwards.
link |
What does that mean?
link |
When a young student comes to me with no skills,
link |
they learn from the ground up.
link |
They start on their backs, defending pins.
link |
Then they start on their backs working
link |
from half guard bottom,
link |
then on their backs working from variations of guard.
link |
They don't even get to see top position
link |
until they're strong off their backs.
link |
Then they go onto their knees and they start passing,
link |
start standing and passing.
link |
And then they work their pins and transitions.
link |
And then ultimately they stand up to their feet
link |
and they work standing position on their feet.
link |
So they work from ground back on the floor
link |
to ground knees on the floor,
link |
ground standing and then both athletes standing.
link |
It's a gradual progression over time
link |
where they work from the bottom to the top.
link |
With regards to experts, I teach them end game first.
link |
They must become very, very strong
link |
in what finishes the match, which is submission holds.
link |
Okay, in chess, we always talk about end game.
link |
I do the same thing in Jiu Jitsu.
link |
I start experts just looking at the mechanics
link |
of breaking people and all the submission holds that I teach.
link |
You should know that I teach only
link |
a very small number of submission holds, around six.
link |
It's interesting that my students have by far and away
link |
the highest submission rate in contemporary Jiu Jitsu,
link |
but they only learn around six to seven submission holds.
link |
I start them with mechanics where they learn the end game,
link |
how to break someone.
link |
Once they develop in their mind,
link |
the belief that if, the conditional if,
link |
they can get to one of those six positions,
link |
there's a very high likelihood they'll win.
link |
If they truly believe then, when it's competition time,
link |
they'll fucking find a way to get to those positions.
link |
That's confidence.
link |
But if you don't believe, let's say you believe,
link |
man, if I get to a finishing position,
link |
an armbar or a strangle,
link |
there's only like a 20% chance I'll finish with it.
link |
How hard are you gonna fight to get to that position?
link |
Why, why would you?
link |
But if you believe there's a 98% chance,
link |
if you get to that position, you'll finish.
link |
You'll find a way to get there.
link |
That is so powerful.
link |
There's certain things,
link |
it may be going back to Judo a little bit,
link |
is there's a clock choke for people who are listening.
link |
It's with the gi when a person is in a turtle position,
link |
in a crouching position.
link |
And this is something that's done in Judo quite a bit.
link |
But I have, it doesn't matter what the technique is,
link |
I have a belief in my head
link |
that there's not a person in the world
link |
that I can't choke with that clock choke.
link |
That's a good belief to have.
link |
And I've done that.
link |
And that it was, it built on itself.
link |
The belief made the technique better and better and better.
link |
Now you're onto something.
link |
That's exactly the mindset that I'm trying to coach.
link |
But that's step one.
link |
You have to believe that once you get there.
link |
But you gotta start somewhere.
link |
And then it's step one.
link |
But then you have to create a system
link |
how to get there. But it's a damn important step.
link |
So you coach the end game first,
link |
and then you fill in the details afterwards.
link |
Yeah, that's a huge confidence builder.
link |
But I just, I have to say, to admit,
link |
and it makes me sad, but I think I'm not alone.
link |
I think a majority of Jiu Jitsu people are like this,
link |
that I didn't do the beginner step that you talk about,
link |
which is focusing on escapes.
link |
I think I learned the wrong lessons from losing.
link |
I remember in a blue belt competition long ago,
link |
I was, I think it was, yeah,
link |
it was the finals of Atlanta IBJJF tournament.
link |
And there's a person that passed my guard and he took mount.
link |
And he stayed in mount for a long time.
link |
And I couldn't breathe.
link |
And it was like one of those things
link |
where I was truly dominated.
link |
I don't think I've been dominated in Jiu Jitsu match
link |
quite like that before or after.
link |
And the lesson I learned from that is I'm not gonna let,
link |
like as opposed to working on escapes,
link |
I'm not gonna let anyone pass my guard.
link |
What you learned is don't take risks.
link |
Which is ultimately what kills you.
link |
Ultimately, if you become the best you can,
link |
you gotta take risks.
link |
As they say, nothing risk, nothing gain.
link |
Failure usually makes us even more risk averse
link |
We're already mentally biased,
link |
being human beings in that direction.
link |
And failure tends to reinforce that.
link |
I work hard in my training programs
link |
to try and correct that fault.
link |
Is it still possible for a person who's a black belt
link |
to then just go back to that beginning journey, I guess?
link |
Let me tell you something.
link |
I'm probably gonna catch a lot of flack for saying this.
link |
I won't say something, I won't call it knowledge
link |
because it's not known, but I have a fervent belief.
link |
That human beings in most skill activities,
link |
not all skill activities, but I will say combat sports,
link |
for sure, can reinvent themselves in five year periods.
link |
Now you might be saying five years?
link |
What's magical about five years?
link |
Mike Tyson was 13 years old
link |
when he was taken in by custom auto.
link |
By the age of 18, he was beating world class boxers
link |
in the gym and had already made a strong name for himself
link |
in international boxing.
link |
He was already a known figure.
link |
It was five years.
link |
Yasuhiro Yamashita, the judo player, began judo at 13.
link |
He placed silver in the All Japans at 17.
link |
I could go on all day with examples of athletes
link |
who within a five year timeframe of starting a sport
link |
were competing at world championship level.
link |
I'm gonna give you a rough and ready definition
link |
of sport mastery, okay?
link |
I believe that if you can play a competitive match
link |
against someone ranked in the top 25 in your sport,
link |
and it's a serious international sport,
link |
I would call you someone who's mastered that sport.
link |
Okay, you're damn good.
link |
If you can go with the number 25 wrestler in the world
link |
and give them a hard competitive match in the gym,
link |
you may not win it, but they had a good workout,
link |
you know, they had a good workout.
link |
You have shown mastery of wrestling
link |
or indeed any other combat sport you care to name.
link |
There are numerous examples of people doing far better
link |
than that in five years, winning medals
link |
at world championships and even Olympic games
link |
in that five year period.
link |
This is not an unrealistic goal.
link |
There is a lot of empirical evidence to show
link |
that people have done this in the past, a lot of it.
link |
So if you fully immerse yourself in a sport
link |
with a well worked out, well planned training program,
link |
there is a mountain of evidence to show
link |
that in a five year period,
link |
you can go from a complete beginner
link |
to like very, very impressive skill level
link |
to the point where you're competitive
link |
with some of the best people on the planet.
link |
You can reinvent yourself in these five year periods.
link |
What happens with most people is they get to a certain level
link |
and they get complacent, they get lazy
link |
and they just keep doing the same old thing
link |
they've been doing.
link |
But if you're diligent and you're purposeful,
link |
five years, you can accomplish an awful lot
link |
and as I said, there's a mountain of evidence to show it.
link |
By the way, as a small aside,
link |
somebody who's mentioned Tversky and Yamashita
link |
in the same conversation,
link |
you're one of the most impressive people I've ever spoken to.
link |
But as a small aside,
link |
so if there's this complete beginner,
link |
this is really interesting.
link |
There is empirical evidence
link |
that you can achieve incredible things
link |
in a short amount of time.
link |
There's a complete beginner standing before you
link |
and that beginner has fire in their eyes
link |
and they want to achieve mastery.
link |
Where do you place most of the credit
link |
for a journey that does achieve mastery?
link |
Is it the set of ideas they have in their mind?
link |
Is it the set of drills or the way they practice?
link |
Is it genetics and luck?
link |
Those are all good insights.
link |
All of those factors you've mentioned play a definite role.
link |
Let's start with luck, okay?
link |
We are all subject to fortune
link |
and fortune can be good and fortune can be bad.
link |
Life is in many ways beautiful, but life is also tragic.
link |
And I've had students who showed enormous promise
link |
and just tragic events occurred in their lives.
link |
The vicissitudes of fortune can be
link |
a wonderful thing in your life
link |
and they can be a terrible tragedy.
link |
I've had students who died for various reasons
link |
who could have gone on to become world champions.
link |
I've had students who on a much lighter note
link |
just fell in love and just wanted to have kids
link |
and move away and that's a wonderful thing,
link |
but different direction.
link |
You just never know.
link |
So luck does play some role.
link |
Even things like where you're born, the location of,
link |
your physical location in the world
link |
or even the socioeconomic location can play a role
link |
which could be detrimental or favorable.
link |
So yeah, luck does play some role.
link |
Thankfully, it's one of the smaller elements.
link |
And I do believe that a truly resourceful mind
link |
can overcome the majority of what fortune throws at us
link |
and get to goals provided you're sufficiently
link |
Other things you mentioned, genetics.
link |
I do believe in certain sports,
link |
genetics really do play a powerful, powerful role.
link |
For example, in any sport where power output
link |
and reaction speed, ability to take physical damage,
link |
then there are genetic elements which will help.
link |
For example, I couldn't imagine a world
link |
in which even if I have a crippled leg,
link |
so even if I grew up in a world where my leg was normal
link |
and I had normal legs and everything was fine with my body,
link |
I don't believe that I could win the Olympic gold medal
link |
in 100 meter sprinting, for example.
link |
I just don't have enough fast twitch muscle fibers.
link |
But the more a sport involves skill and tactics,
link |
the less you will see genetics playing a role.
link |
If you look at the medal podiums in jiu jitsu, for example,
link |
you will see that no one body type
link |
is definitively superior to another.
link |
You will see every variation of body type
link |
and the medal platforms in jiu jitsu.
link |
As skill and tactics become more and more important
link |
and things like just power output over time
link |
become less and less important,
link |
then you will see that genetics play
link |
less and less of a role.
link |
I'm happy to say that the sport of jiu jitsu,
link |
the evidence seems pretty clear
link |
that there's no one dominant body type
link |
in the sport of jiu jitsu.
link |
Rather, there's just advantages for one type
link |
and there's advantages for another.
link |
You just have to learn to tailor your game to your body.
link |
With regards to training program,
link |
yes, I believe with all my heart and all my soul
link |
that your training program does make a difference.
link |
I've dedicated my life to that.
link |
Obviously, I'm biased in this regard.
link |
I do believe that all of the students that I taught
link |
who became world champions would have been great athletes
link |
whether or not they had met me or not.
link |
But I do also believe it would have taken them a lot longer
link |
and they may not have gotten to the level that they did.
link |
I'm sure they would have been impressive,
link |
but I do believe that the nature of a training program
link |
plays an enormous difference.
link |
I don't mean to say this in an arrogant way.
link |
I believe that there's, again,
link |
a mountain of evidence to suggest this is true
link |
because you see it in many different sports.
link |
Let's talk, for example, about your country, Russia,
link |
and its wrestling program.
link |
Russia is an enormous country,
link |
but the location where Russia's wrestling program comes from
link |
is actually very small
link |
and the population is actually very small.
link |
I can't verify this, but I was told once,
link |
I can't verify this, but the number of people
link |
who wrestle in Russia is actually significantly smaller
link |
than the number of people who wrestle in the United States.
link |
It's also not part of the school athletics
link |
and it is in the United States.
link |
Yes, that's a different point.
link |
We'll come back right to that
link |
because that's also an important point.
link |
But if you look at the actual numbers of people there,
link |
they're actually pretty small.
link |
So ostensibly, if it comes down to a numbers game,
link |
America should dominate at the Olympics
link |
because we have more wrestlers.
link |
Now, the story gets more complicated
link |
because America has a different style of wrestling,
link |
the collegiate style than the international freestyle.
link |
That is a complicating factor.
link |
But nonetheless, what you see there
link |
is that numbers aren't everything.
link |
Rather, the manner in which people are trained
link |
clearly has an impact.
link |
And we know very little about the,
link |
there's very little reliable information
link |
about the training program for wrestling
link |
in the Russian States.
link |
But one thing is incontestable is the amount of success
link |
that they've had in international world championship
link |
and Olympic competition.
link |
They are disproportionately successful
link |
despite their relatively small numbers.
link |
There's nothing genetically special about them.
link |
You can talk about performance enhancing drugs,
link |
but those are a worldwide phenomenon.
link |
They don't have any access to technology
link |
that the rest of the world doesn't have.
link |
At some point, you gotta start asking,
link |
what are they doing differently in the training room?
link |
And there are many other examples of similar situations.
link |
My country, New Zealand, has an insanely successful
link |
rugby program, the sport of rugby,
link |
which they have dominated for literally generations
link |
despite the fact that our population is very, very small
link |
compared with the rest of the country.
link |
And we don't excel in many other sports.
link |
New Zealand does fairly well in sports overall,
link |
but nothing like they do in rugby.
link |
And you've got to ask yourself, is there a culture there
link |
which built this up?
link |
And the world is full of examples of seemingly small
link |
and unpromising areas or locations
link |
putting out disproportionately high numbers
link |
of successful athletes.
link |
And that points to the idea that different training programs
link |
have different success rates.
link |
And so I truly believe with all my heart and all my soul
link |
that how you train does make a significant difference.
link |
I would even go further and say
link |
it makes the most difference.
link |
Is it the only thing?
link |
We've already talked about fortune.
link |
We've talked about genetics.
link |
If you wanna get nasty, you can even talk about things
link |
like performance enhancing drugs
link |
that obviously plays a role in modern sports.
link |
But I do believe that the majority of what creates success
link |
is the interaction between the athlete
link |
and the training program.
link |
Now, the training program is one thing.
link |
I do believe that's the single most important,
link |
but right behind it is the athlete themselves.
link |
In my own experience, people talk about athletes
link |
that I've trained successfully,
link |
but they never talk about athletes
link |
that I've trained unsuccessfully.
link |
Always remember that for every champion coach produces,
link |
there's always going to be a difference.
link |
Always remember that for every champion a coach produces,
link |
there's a hundred people that they coach
link |
that no one ever heard of, and this is completely normal.
link |
A coach can never take the lion's share of the credit.
link |
A coach creates possibilities,
link |
but it's the athlete who actualizes the possibilities.
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And so building that rapport and finding the right people
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to excel in your training program is also a big part of it.
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What makes the difference between the successful,
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your successes and your failures as a coach?
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A range of reasons.
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The single most important is persistence.
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People will point to all kinds of virtues amongst athletes.
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This guy's the most courageous.
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This guy's the strongest.
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These are all virtues,
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but the one indispensable virtue is persistence,
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the ability just to stay in the game long enough
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to get the results you seek.
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But what does persistence really look like?
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If we can just break that apart a little bit.
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It's actually, this is a great question you're asking
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because most people see it
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as a kind of simplistic doggedness
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where you just show up every day.
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The most important form of persistence
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is persistence of thinking,
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which looks to push you in increasingly efficient,
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more and more efficient methods of training.
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Famously, people talk about the idea
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that the hardest work of all is hard thinking,
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and they're absolutely right.
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Okay, coming into the gym
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and just doing the same thing for a decade
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isn't going to make you better.
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What's going to make you better
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is progressive training over time
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where you identify clear goals marked out
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in time increments, three months, six months,
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12 months, five years,
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and build those short term goals
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into a program of long term goals,
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making sure that the training program changes over time
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so that as your skill level rises,
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the challenges you face in the gym
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become higher and higher.
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Don't kill them at the start
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with challenges that are too hard for them
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to deal with, they get discouraged and leave.
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Build them slowly over time,
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but make sure they don't just get left in a swamp
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where they're just doing the same thing
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they were doing three years ago and they get bored.
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And there's two ways you can leave in a gym.
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You can leave from adversity, it was too tough,
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or you can leave from boredom.
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Everyone talks about the first,
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no one talks about the second.
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Most people, when they get to black belt,
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They know what their game is,
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they know what they're good at,
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they know what they're not good at.
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When they compete, they stick with what they're good at,
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and they avoid what they're not good at,
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and they get bored.
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They reach a plateau, and that's it.
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My whole thing is to make sure it's not so tough
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at the start that they leave because of adversity,
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and then for the rest of their career
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to make sure it's not boring
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so they leave because of boredom.
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Travis Stevens actually said something
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that changed the way I see training.
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He said it as a side comment,
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but he said that at the end of a good training session,
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your mind should be exhausted, not your body.
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And I've, for most of my life,
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saw good training sessions where my body was exhausted.
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Yes, I believe that's the case with most people.
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You should come out of the training session
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with your mind buzzing with ideas,
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like possibilities for tomorrow.
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And by the way, on that note,
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I would go further and say that the training session
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doesn't finish when your body stops moving.
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It finishes when your mind stops moving,
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and your mind shouldn't stop moving.
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After that session, there should be analysis.
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What did I do well?
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What did I do badly?
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How could I do better with the things that I did well?
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Can I ask you about something that I truly enjoy
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and I think is really powerful,
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but most people don't seem to believe in that,
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Maybe people are different, but I love the idea,
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maybe even outside of jiu jitsu,
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of doing the same thing over and over.
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It's like Jiro dreams of sushi.
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I love doing the thing that nobody wants to do
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and doing it 10 times, 100 times, 1,000 times
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more than what nobody wants to do.
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So I'm a huge fan of drilling.
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Obviously, I'm not a professional athlete,
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but I feel like if I actually gave myself,
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if I wanted to be really good at jiu jitsu,
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like reach the level of being in the top 25
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when I was much younger, like really strive,
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I think I could achieve it by drilling.
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I had this belief untested.
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Can you challenge this idea or agree with it?
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First off, fascinating.
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However, we're going to have to disagree.
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We're just gonna have to start to understand
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what are we talking about when we talk about drilling?
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It's a very vague term.
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Okay, at this moment, many of your listeners
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are probably having the same thought process,
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which is, oh, drilling.
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Yeah, I know what that is.
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We go into the gym and we pick a move
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and we practice it for a certain number of repetitions.
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And if I do that, I'm gonna get better at the technique.
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Okay, they're wrong.
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We've got to have a much more in depth understanding
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of what the hell we're talking about
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when we talk about drilling.
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Ultimately, any movement in the gym
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that doesn't improve the skills you already have
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or build new skills is a waste of time,
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a waste of resources.
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Everything you do should be done with the aim
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and the understanding that this is gonna make me better
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at the sport I practice.
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If it's not, shouldn't be there.
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The majority of what passes for drilling
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in most training halls will not make you better,
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including some of the most cherished forms of drilling,
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which is repetition for numbers.
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The moment you say to someone,
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I want you to do this a hundred times,
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what are they really thinking about?
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They're saying, okay, I'm at repetition 78.
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I'm at 80, 20 more to go.
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All they're talking, their primary thought process
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That's not the point of drilling.
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The point is skill acquisition.
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When people drill, don't get them focused on numbers,
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get them focused on mechanics.
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That's what they have to worry about.
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I never have my students drill for numbers ever.
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Just one, two, three, get the fuck out of here.
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Are you kidding me?
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Like how are you gonna get better with that?
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Okay, get them working on the sense of gaining knowledge.
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I have to give them knowledge.
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I have to explain to them what they're trying to do.
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That starts them on the right track.
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But knowledge is one thing.
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If jiu jitsu was just about knowledge,
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then all the 60 and 70 year old red belts
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would be the world champions.
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Jiu jitsu isn't won by knowledge, it's won by skill.
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Knowledge is the first step in building skill.
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So my job as a coach is to transmit knowledge.
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Then I have to create training programs
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with a path from knowledge to polished skill
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That's the interface between me and my students.
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And so I give them drills where the whole emphasis
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is upon getting a sense where they understand
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what are the problems they're trying to solve
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and working towards practical solutions.
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They never work with numbers.
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They work with mechanics and feel.
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Then you have to bring in the idea of progression.
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When you drill, there's zero resistance.
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When you fight in competition, there's 100% resistance.
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You can't go from zero to 100.
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There has to be progress over time
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where I have them work in drills
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with slightly increasing increments of resistance.
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And just as we talked about earlier with the weightlifter
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who doesn't start with 500 pounds,
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but who begins with the bar and then over time
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builds the skills that one day out there in the future
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he will lift 500 pounds.
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So too, that Jujikutami that you're working on today
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is feeble and pathetic, but five years from now
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you'll win a world championship with it.
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You can't have this naive idea of drilling.
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It's something you just come out,
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you randomly pick a move and you work for numbers
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until you've satisfied a certain set of numbers
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that your coach threw at you
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and then think you're gonna get better.
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There's even dangers with drilling.
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There is no performance increase that comes
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once you get to a certain level
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and you just keep doing the same damn thing.
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Let's say, for example, you come out
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and you hit a hundred repetitions of the arm
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by Jujikutami from guard position.
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And you're all proud of yourself
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because you hit a hundred repetitions
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and your body's tired and you're telling yourself,
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man, I got a good workout.
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And you come in tomorrow, you do exactly the same thing.
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You come in the day after that and a week goes by
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and you've done the same thing.
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Then a year later, you do the same thing.
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Ask yourself, has your Jujikutami really gotten better?
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No, you've performed literally thousands
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and thousands of repetitions.
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You've spent an enormous amount of training time
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and energy that could have gone in different directions
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on something which didn't make you any better.
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Drills have diminishing returns.
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Once you get to a certain skill level,
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if you just keep hammering on the same thing
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in the same fashion for the same amount of time,
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you stop getting better.
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Can I, partially for fun, partially for Dallas Advocate,
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but partially because I actually believe this
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to push back on some points, is it possible?
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So everything you said, I think is beautiful and correct.
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But the asking yourself the question, am I getting better?
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It's a really important one
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and you could do that in training.
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Is there a set of techniques,
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maybe a small subset of all the techniques
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that are in Jiu Jitsu,
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where you can have significant skill acquisition
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if you put in the numbers or the time, whatever,
link |
on a technique against an opponent who's not resisting?
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Here's, let me elaborate.
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What I've, in my, maybe I'm different.
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You'll probably have to finish an example.
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Let me first make a general statement
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and then I can give examples.
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The general statement is I found that through repetitions,
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and this is high repetitions combined with training,
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but high repetitions against a non resisting opponent,
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I've gotten to understand the way my body moves,
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the way I apply pressure on a human.
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Because it's not actually zero resistance.
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The opponent's still laying there.
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They're still keeping their legs up.
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They're still doing, they might not be resisting,
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but they're still creating a structure.
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A non dynamic structure.
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They're presenting a target.
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But it's not dynamic.
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So you can't master the timing of things,
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but you can master the, not master,
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but I felt like I could gain an understanding
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of how to apply pressure to the human body
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over thousands of repetitions.
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Now, for example, I just, just to give you an example
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to know what we're talking about.
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There's a guy named Saulo Herbaro and Shanji Herbaro
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that have this, I guess, I already forgot,
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but the headquarters position or something like that.
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But putting pressure as you pass guard,
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like medium passing distance kind of pressure.
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I've did thousands of repetitions of that
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to understand what putting pressure with my hips feels like.
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To truly understand that movement,
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I felt like I was getting much better.
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It's like, it's hard to put into words,
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but that skill acquisition is so subtle.
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Just the way you turn your hips.
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But you're already talking about
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a better form of drilling now.
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You're going beyond the basic numbers
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and you're getting the sense of feel and mechanics,
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which is what we want in drilling.
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But the reason I say numbers,
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and maybe you can speak to this,
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but this might be an OCD thing,
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but it allows you to take a journey
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that doesn't just last a week or two weeks,
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but a journey where you stay with the technique
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for two, three years.
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And there's a dedication to it.
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Where it's a long term commitment
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to where you're forcing yourself,
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perhaps there's other mechanisms,
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but you're forcing yourself to stay with a technique
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longer than most people around you
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are staying with whatever they're working on.
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And you're taking that long journey.
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And the numbers somehow enforce that persistence
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and that dedication.
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First thing, that journey's a wonderful thing.
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And if that technique is a crucial part of what you do,
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then it's time well invested.
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But always understand
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that it comes at an opportunity cost.
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That by spending that amount of time on that one technique,
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you've sacrificed other things
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that you could have learned that could have won you matches.
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So understand that every focus upon one element of the game
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comes at the opportunity cost of other elements.
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Now, as long as you're playing a part of the game
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where, okay, this is central to what I do.
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Yes, okay, that's fine.
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But just be aware of the danger of opportunity cost.
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That's something no one talks about in the training room,
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but it becomes very important.
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Secondly, the other question you have to start
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asking yourself is, okay,
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that training clearly had benefits for you early on.
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But when the point of diminishing return starts coming
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and if you feel you're just doing the same thing,
link |
then it's time to switch.
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Now, if you feel you're still getting benefit from it,
link |
by all means, continue.
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That will be a call on your part.
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You've been playing this game a long time now,
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so I would trust your call on that.
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But my job as a coach is to look out and say,
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okay, this kid's been working
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cross Ashigarami for six months
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and I feel he's gotten to a good skill level.
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If he stays any further on it,
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the opportunity cost becomes greater
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than the expected benefits of continuing it.
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And that's my job as a coach,
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is to direct things in that fashion.
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If I can do a good job with that,
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then I can take them to the next level of drilling
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and start amping it up.
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And that's how I keep progress over time.
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My biggest fear is to have students
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run past the point of diminishing returns,
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staying stagnant where opportunity costs comes in
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and they're not making the progress they could
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in the time that they've been working.
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it was almost a philosophical question for me.
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That's what I was always on a search on
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because I know my mind is likes drilling.
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I don't like relying on other people for improvement
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and drilling allows me to do something
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It's interesting Lex,
link |
you say you don't like relying on other people in drilling,
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but in drilling, you really do rely a lot on your partner.
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One of the first things I do when I coach people
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is I teach them how to drill.
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That's a skill in itself.
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And drilling is in a sense,
link |
the opposite of sparring.
link |
Drilling is a cooperative venture
link |
where you work as dance partners,
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complimenting each other's movement.
link |
If I drill with Gordon Ryan and I want him to work on bars,
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I will move my body in ways
link |
which make it an interesting exercise for Gordon.
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I'm not just sitting there and he does a repetition
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and I'm, okay, he does 10.
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I can't wait for this to be over so I can do my 10
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and I can't wait for all this to be over
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so we can just spar and get over all this bullshit.
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That's the sad truth of most drilling in Jiu Jitsu.
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There's a sense in which when good people drill,
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it's like watching good people dance.
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They move in unison and compliment each other's movement
link |
and make each other look better.
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Sparring, on the other hand, is the exact opposite of that.
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That's resistance where you're trying to make
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the other person look as bad as possible.
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And once you understand the different directions
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in which drilling and sparring go,
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that's when things start getting interesting.
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You start getting fast progress.
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Yeah, you're absolutely right.
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I think I was not very eloquent describing what I mean.
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I found myself not able to find in Jiu Jitsu
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too many people that are willing to dedicate
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a huge amount of time to a particular technique.
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I concur with you on Netflix.
link |
Now, answer the interesting question, why?
link |
Why can't you get people to drill with you?
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By the way, if I could just shout out
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the people that did drill with me
link |
is usually blue belt women because they're smaller,
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they don't like training because they get their ass kicked
link |
because they're much smaller.
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So they're willing to invest a significant amount of effort
link |
That's good, but their motivation for doing so is not good.
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But your motivation for drilling is
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because you don't want to get your ass kicked.
link |
That's not a good motivation. No black belt ever.
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I could never find a black belt
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that I could drill with like this.
link |
Now let's go back to that question, why?
link |
I don't mean this, I am somebody
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who likes to say nice things about people.
link |
So let me answer for you.
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Two reasons, because they find it boring.
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And secondly, perhaps more importantly,
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they don't believe it works.
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Yeah, those are good answers.
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And now let's go further
link |
and ask the truly interesting question.
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Why do they believe that?
link |
If I were to answer it in the context of Russian wrestling,
link |
where drilling is much bigger part,
link |
is I think culturally that was knowledge
link |
that everybody tells each other in Jiu Jitsu
link |
that drilling doesn't work.
link |
Because they never taught how to drill.
link |
No one ever sits you down one day and says,
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okay, this is how you drill.
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And so the exercise feels futile.
link |
They don't feel their skill level is going up.
link |
They don't associate drilling with increased skill level.
link |
They associate sparring with increased skill level,
link |
but not drilling, which is a tragedy
link |
because it is a fantastic way to introduce
link |
and expand the repertoire of a developing student.
link |
It's an essential part of every workout I teach.
link |
I always say the game of Jiu Jitsu begins with knowledge
link |
and builds up to skill.
link |
Who wins is the one who has greater skill
link |
and nine times out of 10.
link |
So to me, it's a tragedy that what you're saying
link |
breaks my heart to hear that you couldn't get a black belt
link |
to drill with you, that's shameful.
link |
But I understand, I sympathize with those black belts too
link |
because the way in which most people are told to drill
link |
does feel ineffective and it is damn boring.
link |
They'd rather just spar.
link |
They feel like they get more out of the workout.
link |
And that's, if anything, an indictment
link |
upon most of the training programs around the nation.
link |
Would you say that drilling,
link |
if you were to build a black belt world champion,
link |
would drilling be, what percent of their training,
link |
in the entirety of their career would be drilling?
link |
Let's first put a proviso on it
link |
that I don't do the same thing for all athletes.
link |
Everyone's got a different personality.
link |
And like Nicky Rod, I can only hold his attention
link |
for two minutes at a time.
link |
And Gary Tonin, five minutes.
link |
Gordon Ryan, five hours.
link |
Like George St. Pierre, five hours.
link |
Travis Stevens, five hours.
link |
They are just laser focused.
link |
So everyone's different.
link |
Let's put that down as our first proviso.
link |
You probably knew those answers already.
link |
But as a general rule,
link |
if I run a two and a half hour class,
link |
you can expect an hour and a half of it to be,
link |
I'm going to use the word drilling,
link |
but I'm also going to say that this is too complex
link |
of a story to give now with words.
link |
I would need to demonstrate it.
link |
But the way in which we drill
link |
is not your standard method of drilling.
link |
And then it's into sparring.
link |
But if you give me a choice
link |
between a bad drilling partner and sparring,
link |
I could make the same choice that most black belts make,
link |
which I would go with sparring.
link |
Because you can create drilling
link |
within the sparring environment.
link |
Like good drilling is a wonderful thing.
link |
Bad drilling is just a worthless waste of time.
link |
Okay, before, I have a million questions for you,
link |
but I have to ask,
link |
can you, we've described the fundamentals of jiu jitsu.
link |
Can we describe the principles, the fundamentals
link |
of one of the interesting systems you've developed,
link |
which is the leg lock system?
link |
Yeah, anything in particular
link |
or just like a general understanding
link |
of what are some of the major principles of it?
link |
Well, it's like me coming to Miyamoto Musashi and asking,
link |
can you describe the principles of sword fighting?
link |
You're too generous.
link |
Let's start off with some context.
link |
When I began the sport of jiu jitsu,
link |
I was taught a fairly classical approach to jiu jitsu,
link |
which leg locks were a part of it,
link |
but not an emphasized part of it.
link |
The overall culture of the times is the mid 1990s.
link |
The overall culture of the time saw leg locks
link |
as largely ineffective.
link |
It was, we were told that against good opposition,
link |
they just didn't work very well.
link |
They were low percentage techniques.
link |
We were also told that they were tactically unsound
link |
because if you ever attempted them
link |
and you lost control of the leg lock,
link |
your opponent would end up on top of you
link |
or in some kind of good position
link |
and you'd be in terrible trouble.
link |
And we were also told that they were unsafe,
link |
that if they were applied in the gym,
link |
there'd be far too many injuries
link |
and people would be badly hurt.
link |
And that was the received wisdom of that time.
link |
And so I didn't even work with them at all.
link |
And they would be shown occasionally in the gym
link |
and you'd learn them, you'd drill them.
link |
But in sparring, I showed no interest.
link |
You probably know that change when I met
link |
the great American grappler, Dean Lister,
link |
who early in his career was using Achilles locks
link |
with considerable success.
link |
I met him in the gym, wonderful fellow.
link |
Achilles locks is like a straight full lock.
link |
Yes, that's correct, yes.
link |
And he went on to become a heel hooker
link |
and win 280 CCs later on in his career.
link |
But we never met again after that.
link |
And that opened some doors of inquiry and...
link |
Well, he asked this first principles question
link |
is why would you only use half the body in a game
link |
that involves the human body?
link |
So that opened doors to inquiry.
link |
And if you looked around the Jiu Jitsu world at that time,
link |
the number of specialized leg lockers was very small.
link |
And most of them were from outside of conventional Jiu Jitsu.
link |
For example, you could look around and see people
link |
like Romina Sato had sharp leg locks
link |
for that time period in the 1990s.
link |
So they were out there, they existed.
link |
And you'd see people like Ken Shamrock
link |
would use heel hooks in competition
link |
and he had some good success with them.
link |
When I began experimenting in the gym,
link |
fairly soon, certain truths started to become evident.
link |
And the most important of these
link |
can be understood very quickly.
link |
And they were relatively easy to discover.
link |
The first was that most people,
link |
when they went to understand and study leg locking.
link |
And when I talk about leg locking,
link |
I'm gonna talk about one specific type,
link |
which is the most high percentage type.
link |
This is leg locks, which are performed
link |
with entanglements of your opponent's legs with your legs.
link |
There are other forms of leg lock,
link |
but these are relatively low percentage
link |
and don't figure heavily in competition.
link |
So I'll ignore them.
link |
Most people made no distinction
link |
between the mechanism of control
link |
versus the mechanism of breaking.
link |
The heel hook is what ultimately breaks the ankle.
link |
But the mechanism of control
link |
is the entanglement of your legs to your opponent's legs.
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The Japanese term ashigurami
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literally just means like leg entanglement.
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It's a generic term.
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It could apply to any form of entanglement.
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There are many options.
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My idea was let's focus on the entanglement first
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and worry about the breaking mechanism second.
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This was analogous to the idea of position before submission.
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Only you couldn't talk about it
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in terms of conventional positions
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because ashigurami doesn't really fit
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into the traditional hierarchies,
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positional hierarchies of jiu jitsu.
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So the conversation was switched from position to submission
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to control to submission.
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Now, wrapping two of your legs
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around one of your opponent's legs
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gives you many different options.
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You can do it with your feet on the outside,
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so called 50, 50 variations.
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You can do it with your feet on the inside
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and form what we call inside foot position.
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There's pros and cons to both.
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There's also methods of harmonizing the two.
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So you have one foot on the inside
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and one foot on the outside.
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You can do it with a straight leg
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where you heel hook from the outside
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or you can bring the leg across your center line
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and heel hook from the inside.
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You will start to notice
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as you work through these different variations
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that some present advantages over others.
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All of them come at a price to some degree,
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regardless of which ashigurami option you use.
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There will be some degree of foot exposure
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on my part to my opponent
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and some degree of back exposure
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on my part relative to my opponent.
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So that's the downside of it.
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Variations within those different ashigurami
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enable you to lessen danger in some respects
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and at the price of gaining dangers in others.
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So you get this wide array of choices.
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There's not this kind of simplistic hierarchy
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that you see in the basic position.
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The basic positions of jiu jitsu,
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but there are hierarchies.
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I do, for example, generally favor inside heel hooks
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over outside heel hooks.
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If I feel my opponent is very good at exposing my back
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while I'm in ashigurami,
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I generally prefer 50, 50 situations.
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If I believe my opponent is very good at counter leg locks,
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I generally prefer my feet on the inside
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working with variations of insides and kaku,
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et cetera, et cetera.
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So there are broad heuristic rules
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that we can give to work in these situations.
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Once you start to understand
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there's a variety of entanglements you can use,
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then you start getting into the really interesting ideas
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that as you perform one given attack, one given heel hook,
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you can flow through different forms of ashigurami
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where you can create new dangers
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and avoid possible pitfalls in a very short timeframe
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as you switch from one ashigurami to another over time.
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So that as your opponent's lines of resistance
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to an initial attack change,
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you can accommodate those
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by switching to another form of ashigurami
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so that your mechanism of control
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is always pointing in opposite directions of his escape.
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And if you focus on this idea of control through the legs,
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you can completely change the nature of leg locking
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and take it away from what it was in the 1990s
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an opportunistic method of attack
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based upon surprise, speed and power
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into one based on control.
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If you can do this,
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you can undermine many of the basic criticisms
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of leg locking which were prevalent when I began.
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I began the sport of jiu jitsu.
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For example, if I can completely control and immobilize you,
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I can perform the lock very, very safely.
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If my only way of breaking your leg
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is to be faster and more powerful than you,
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nine times out of 10 when I apply it,
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I'm gonna hurt your leg as much by accident as anything.
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But if I can completely immobilize you
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and as every attempt you make to escape,
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I can follow you and immobilize you in new directions,
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then I can apply the lock with as much force
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or as little force as possible.
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And so you'll see in our training room
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despite over considerably more than two decades,
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sorry, a decade and a half now
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of heel hooking using these methods,
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the number of people severely injured by heel hooks is tiny.
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I would say I've seen more people injured by far
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by kimuras in the time I've been training
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than I have by heel hooks,
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despite them having a similar twisting dynamic to them.
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If you build a culture where people focus on control
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rather than speed of execution,
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then the injury rate goes down appreciably.
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The whole idea of positional loss,
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everyone was critical of leg locks.
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Now, if you go for leg locks and they don't work,
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well, now you're in trouble.
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The guy's gonna be on top of you.
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They never make that criticism with armbars.
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Okay, you can be in the mounted position,
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go for an armbar, end up on bottom,
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lose the armbar and lose position,
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but I've never heard anyone criticize armbars
link |
More importantly, I believed from early on
link |
that the best place to attack leg locks is not top position,
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it's bottom position.
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You'll see that over 90% of my athletes
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attack leg locks from underneath people,
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not on top of people.
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So there is no positional loss.
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You're already underneath them.
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And so that criticism was null and void.
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And by focusing on this idea of breaking down
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and distinguishing between the mechanism of control
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and the mechanism of breaking,
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that created something new and something interesting.
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There was also another advantage that I had
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in terms of creating influence with leg locking.
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When you look at the great leg lockers of the past,
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they were basically iconoclasts.
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They were people who came out of nowhere
link |
who just had this remarkable success with leg locks.
link |
But they were just seen as unique individuals.
link |
They had their game and they were good at it.
link |
What was unique about the squad
link |
is you had not just one person,
link |
but a team of people who came out
link |
and did pretty much the same thing.
link |
These people had very different body types
link |
and very different personalities.
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So it wasn't that one kind of body type was good at it.
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You had tall people like Gordon Ryan.
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You had short people like Nikki Ryan.
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You had someone in the middle like Gary Tonin.
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You had fast people like Gary Tonin.
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You had slow people like Gordon.
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There was every kind of body type involved.
link |
And it was like, people could see this was different
link |
because it worked for an entire team
link |
as opposed to a unique individual
link |
who had unique attributes.
link |
And then started to foster the belief
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that if it can work for a team, it can work for anyone,
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which means it can work for me.
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And I think that had a big effect.
link |
That's why I owe a lot to those early students,
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Gordon Ryan, Gary Tonin, Eddie Cummings, and Nikki Ryan.
link |
And those four kids came from nowhere.
link |
Gary had some success in grappling,
link |
like low level success in grappling
link |
before becoming a full time member of the squad.
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But the others were just nobodies who no one had known.
link |
And yet within a five year timeframe,
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they were all going up against world championship competition
link |
and doing exceedingly well.
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And which gives further credence
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to the idea of the five year program.
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And I think by operating as a team,
link |
those young men did an incredible job
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of convincing the grappling world
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that this wasn't just about, well, they're just different
link |
or it works for their body type or them as individuals.
link |
It was like, no, if a team can do it, anyone can do it.
link |
And I think that's what really convinced people
link |
that this was something worth studying.
link |
This is something that could be a big part of their lives.
link |
But also convinced you and convinced each other
link |
in those early days when you're developing the science.
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Essentially what was missing
link |
is an entire science and system of leg locks.
link |
Because it's not like you knew for sure
link |
that there's a lot here to be discovered
link |
in terms of control.
link |
You perhaps hadn't, just like you said, an initial intuition,
link |
but you have to have enough,
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there's perseverance required to take,
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it's the Johnny Ive thing to take from the initial idea
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to an entire system.
link |
Is there a sense you have about how complicated
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and how big this world of control in leg locks is?
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How complicated is it?
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You've achieved a lot of success.
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You have a lot of powerful ideas
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in terms of inside, outside,
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what's high percentage, what's not,
link |
what's higher reward, what's a low risk,
link |
all those kinds of things.
link |
And then you also mentioned kind of transitions,
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not transitions, but how you move with your opponent
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to resist their escape through control.
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How much do you understand about this world?
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This is a fascinating question.
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As a general rule, the most powerful developments
link |
are always at the onset of a project, okay?
link |
Let's give an example.
link |
The jet engine was, I believe, first conceived
link |
in the late 1930s, just around the time of World War II.
link |
It was developed with great pace because of World War II.
link |
Obviously, military research was a huge thing back then.
link |
And first fielded, I believe, by the jet engine,
link |
first fielded, I believe, by the Germans in around 1943.
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Jet aircraft didn't play a big role in World War II.
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They were there at the end
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and they did play a significant role,
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but in terms of numbers, they just weren't there.
link |
So by around 1945, you had the onset of the jet age
link |
and the jet engine began to replace the piston engine
link |
It was the new way of doing things.
link |
If you look at the pace of development
link |
of jet engine aircraft technology from 1945 to 1960,
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it is unbelievable.
link |
There was a solid decade where they were gaining
link |
almost 100 miles an hour per year for a decade.
link |
That's a form of growth that, I mean,
link |
in the world of engineering,
link |
that's the only time you see growth like that
link |
is in things like Bitcoin and that's about it, okay?
link |
Let's put things in perspective, okay?
link |
In World War II, the standard US aircraft bomber
link |
was the B17, which was a midsize bomber
link |
with a fairly limited load capacity
link |
and I think top speed well below 300 miles an hour.
link |
Just 10 years later, you had the B52,
link |
which could fly across continents
link |
and deliver nuclear weapons
link |
and carry bomb loads of up to 70,000 pounds.
link |
In a decade, that happened.
link |
If you took a B17 pilot in 1943
link |
and put them inside a B52 a decade later,
link |
he would literally think he was on a UFO,
link |
a ship from another planet.
link |
That was the speed of development.
link |
Now, contrast that with the speed of modern development.
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If I took you in a time machine
link |
and I put you in a civil airliner in 1972,
link |
let's say a Boeing 737,
link |
it's not that different from what you fly in today.
link |
Flies at the same speed, has the same range,
link |
flies at the same altitude.
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It's not that different.
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The amount of progress between 1973 and 2020
link |
isn't very impressive,
link |
but the amount of progress from 1945 to 1955,
link |
or even better, 1960 was staggering.
link |
And so the initial progress tends to be meteoric,
link |
but after that, it tends to be incremental.
link |
That said, there's a guy named Elon Musk.
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There's been almost no development
link |
in terms of space rocket propulsion
link |
and rocket launches and going out into orbit
link |
or going out into deep space.
link |
And one guy comes along,
link |
one John Donahue type character,
link |
and says, it doesn't make sense why we don't use
link |
reusable rockets, why we don't make them much cheaper,
link |
why we don't launch every week
link |
as opposed to every few years.
link |
It doesn't make any sense why we don't go to the moon again
link |
over and over and over.
link |
It doesn't make any sense why we don't go to Mars
link |
and colonize Mars.
link |
It feels like it's not just a single jump to a B52.
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It's a series of these kinds of jumps.
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So the question is, is there another leap
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within the leg locking system?
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I do believe that we're in a phase now
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where the really big jumps have already been made
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and we're in the incremental phase at this point.
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What I do believe is that you will start
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to see new directions start to emerge,
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where you start to see the interface
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between leg locking and race link, for example.
link |
The interface between leg locking and back attacks.
link |
And that will provide new avenues of direction
link |
which will create new spurts of growth.
link |
But in terms of breaking people's legs,
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just the simple act of breaking legs,
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I believe we're in the incremental phase now
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rather than the meteoric phase.
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Let me ask you a ridiculous question.
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How hard is it to actually break a leg?
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Is this something you think about?
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I remember, because I'm a big fan
link |
of the straight foot lock, not, again,
link |
we're talking about to the standing Seoi Nage.
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Maybe it's my Russian roots with Samba
link |
or something like that.
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Maybe it's the Dean Lister, Achilles lock.
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But I love, maybe it's my body, something like that.
link |
I just love the squeeze of it, the control
link |
and the power of a straight foot lock.
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And I remember trying to,
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there's a few people in competition
link |
that didn't want to tap.
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And I remember in particular, there was one person,
link |
again, the finals match, Purple Belt.
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I remember it was a straight foot lock, it was perfect.
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Everything just perfect.
link |
And I remember going all in and there was a pop, pop, pop.
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And I couldn't do anything more.
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It wasn't breaking.
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It was just bending and bending and bending.
link |
And there's damage to it of some kind.
link |
But I wanted to like, you know, I wanted to see,
link |
first of all, it's very difficult psychologically
link |
because it's like, can I be violent here?
link |
That was a whole nother thing.
link |
With adrenaline, you can't really think that fast.
link |
But I also thought like, where else is there to go?
link |
Like, is it the shin going to break?
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What is it supposed to break?
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So I wondered that.
link |
Yeah, in the case of the Achilles lock,
link |
it's going to be the anterior tibialis tendon.
link |
That's the, it runs down, there's two of them.
link |
It'll be the minor one that runs on the outside
link |
of the front of the ankle.
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It's not going to be the Achilles tendon.
link |
A lot of people promulgate this absurdity.
link |
The Achilles tendon can rupture, but not from pressure.
link |
Does the tendon or the bone, it's going to break?
link |
The bone won't break.
link |
I have seen on one occasion,
link |
a shin bone break from an Achilles lock,
link |
but there was an enormous size and strength disparity.
link |
And there may have been other complicating factors too.
link |
But in the vast majority of cases,
link |
the Achilles lock doesn't really do tremendous damage.
link |
It can do significant damage.
link |
You'll definitely feel it the next day,
link |
but it's, of all the major locks,
link |
it's the one where it is most likely
link |
a psychologically strong opponent
link |
will be able to absorb damage and go on to win a match.
link |
In answer to your first question,
link |
how difficult is it to break a leg?
link |
Not very difficult.
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It will come down to what is the skill level
link |
of my opponent's resistance?
link |
If your opponent is not resisting
link |
and you have an inside heel hook,
link |
it is absurdly easy to break a man's leg.
link |
Not a challenge at all.
link |
You can be a 105 pound woman,
link |
could easily snap the relevant knee ligaments
link |
in a 240 pound man's leg
link |
if he doesn't know how to defend himself.
link |
That's an easy thing, very easy to accomplish.
link |
So the basic answer is yes, it's very easy.
link |
If your opponent does know how to defend
link |
and they can position their foot,
link |
play tricks of lever and fulcrum,
link |
it becomes significantly more difficult.
link |
It becomes still more difficult under match conditions
link |
where they're actively looking to position their body
link |
and work their way out of the lock,
link |
then it can become very difficult indeed.
link |
Always bear in mind that there have been some cases
link |
in our history as a team where people have literally
link |
just let their knees snap and continue fighting.
link |
Always remember that submission is a choice
link |
when it comes to the joint locks.
link |
And we've had some people who just made the choice
link |
that I'm willing to let my knee break
link |
so that I can continue in this match.
link |
That's a tough decision to make and I admire their bravery.
link |
Is there something about that,
link |
just to speak to that, that you admire?
link |
Yes, it's mental toughness.
link |
Would I agree with it, would I advocate it?
link |
No, but that doesn't mean I can't admire aspects of it.
link |
Who is the greatest grappler ever?
link |
You were very astute in the way you asked that question.
link |
You didn't say the greatest jiu jitsu player of all time,
link |
you specified grappler.
link |
What's the bigger category?
link |
Jiu jitsu is the bigger category.
link |
Jiu jitsu has four faces.
link |
There is gi competition, there is no gi competition,
link |
there is mixed martial arts competition,
link |
and there is self defense.
link |
So jiu jitsu has four aspects.
link |
Grappling typically refers only to the no gi
link |
aspect of jiu jitsu, so it's one out of four possibilities.
link |
So who's the greatest jiu jitsu practitioner ever,
link |
and then who is the greatest grappler ever?
link |
I believe that the greatest jiu jitsu player,
link |
certainly that I ever met, and I believe of all time,
link |
I don't want to sound arrogant on that
link |
because really you can only go with your own experiences
link |
and there are some great athletes that other people mention
link |
that I just never met.
link |
So, but in my estimation, the greatest jiu jitsu player
link |
is Haja Gracie, my reasoning for that is
link |
out of the four faces of jiu jitsu, he excelled in three.
link |
And in two of them in particular,
link |
he was the best of his generation by a landslide.
link |
In gi grappling, no gi grappling,
link |
Haja dominated his generation to a degree
link |
that is truly impressive.
link |
What do you attribute that dominance to, by the way?
link |
Is there something, if you were to analyze him?
link |
Fascinating question, I'll come back to it.
link |
In mixed martial arts, he was at his peak,
link |
I believe ranked in the top 10
link |
in the world of mixed martial arts.
link |
He wasn't the best in mixed martial arts
link |
the way he was in grappling, but he was damn good.
link |
And he beat some significant people.
link |
So he showed tremendous versatility,
link |
gi, no gi, mixed martial arts.
link |
He's not really known in the world of self defense,
link |
but there's no real criteria by which
link |
you would become dominant in self defense.
link |
So that's kind of a, you can't really judge people by that.
link |
Believe me, if Haja got into a fight in the street,
link |
I'm sure he would do just fine.
link |
So I have no concerns about that.
link |
So I would say that if you look at jiu jitsu
link |
for what I believe it is, a sport with four faces,
link |
I believe you have to go with Haja Gracie
link |
as the one who went out and empirically proved
link |
his ability to go across those elements
link |
and do extraordinarily well in all of them.
link |
He even made the extraordinary step
link |
of coming out of retirement and beating the best
link |
of the generation that came after him.
link |
Yes, that's a truly difficult feat.
link |
That was incredible.
link |
Yeah, and a sport which progresses very, very rapidly,
link |
that's a truly impressive accomplishment.
link |
If you ask the question who is the greatest grappler
link |
that I've ever seen, I would say I've never seen
link |
anyone better than Gordon Ryan.
link |
Now people are gonna jump when I give these two names.
link |
They're gonna say, well, Dan, you're close friends
link |
with Haja and you're close friends with Gordon,
link |
I can't answer them to that, it's true.
link |
I'm good friends with both of them.
link |
I'm also a notoriously cold and unemotional person
link |
and I'm saying this based upon things that I've observed.
link |
If I honestly believed that I'd seen other people
link |
who were better, I would have said it.
link |
Will that convince the people who criticize me
link |
are biased, probably not, but those are the two names
link |
that I will mention.
link |
I think it's an uncontroversial statement to say
link |
that Gordon Ryan is one of the greatest grappler ever.
link |
Yeah, Gordon's obviously a very polarizing figure
link |
and people tend to react to Gordon on an emotional level
link |
rather than a statistical level
link |
and that colors a lot of people's minds,
link |
but I also have the benefit that I've seen both
link |
of these guys extensively in the gym
link |
and that adds a whole new perspective.
link |
If you think those guys are dominant on the stage,
link |
wait till you see them in the gym.
link |
It's even a different level of domination
link |
above and beyond what they did in competition.
link |
Have they trained against each other in the gym?
link |
No, they never trained together.
link |
They've been in the same gym, I think, only on one occasion.
link |
When Hodger was stopped by New York,
link |
he came by to say hello and Gordon was here at the time.
link |
They shake hands, they know each other
link |
and they're both wonderful people in their own way.
link |
So I'd like to talk to you about Gordon,
link |
Hodger and George GSP.
link |
Let's first talk about what do you think,
link |
because it's very different from my perspective,
link |
maybe you can correct me, but very different artists,
link |
masters of their pursuits.
link |
So what makes Hodger so good?
link |
Hodger was probably the living embodiment
link |
of someone who played a classical jiu jitsu game
link |
based around the fundamental four steps of jiu jitsu.
link |
And like if you took someone
link |
who had taken introduction lessons in jiu jitsu
link |
for three months, they would recognize the outlines
link |
of Hodger's game with many of the techniques
link |
they learned in those first three months.
link |
Hodger was the best example of the dichotomy
link |
between the fundamentals of jiu jitsu,
link |
but also a kind of hidden sophistication
link |
underneath those fundamentals.
link |
People always say, oh, Hodger's game was so basic.
link |
No, the outlines of Hodger's game were basic,
link |
but the degree of sophistication
link |
and the application was extraordinary, and his ability
link |
to refine existing technology was truly impressive.
link |
I never saw anyone in his generation
link |
that even came close to his ability,
link |
both in competition and in the gym.
link |
So for people who don't know,
link |
Hodger Gracie basically used, just like you said,
link |
a very simple techniques on the surface
link |
from the outsider's perspective that most people learn
link |
when they start jiu jitsu, like passing guard
link |
in a very simple way, taking mount and choking from mount.
link |
Also, when he's on his back, it's closed guard
link |
and all the basic submissions from closed guard,
link |
arm bar and triangle, and just, that's it.
link |
And being able to dominate, shut down, and submit.
link |
So control and submit the best people in the world
link |
for many, many years, just like you said,
link |
including coming out of retirement and beating the best,
link |
perhaps by far the best of the next generation.
link |
So that just kind of lays out the story.
link |
Is there some lessons about his systems
link |
that you learn in developing your own systems?
link |
Excellent question.
link |
The thing which always impressed me the most about Hodger
link |
was his relentless pursuit of position to submission.
link |
Everything was done with the belief
link |
that no victory was worthwhile
link |
if it didn't involve submitting his opponent.
link |
That's a mindset that I tried very, very hard
link |
to imbue in my students.
link |
The easiest path to victory in jiu jitsu
link |
is the one which takes the least risk.
link |
So for example, you will see many modern athletes
link |
focus on scoring the first point or the first advantage,
link |
and then doing the minimum amount of work
link |
to eke out a victory once they've done that.
link |
They get a small tactical advantage,
link |
they realize they're ahead, take no more risks,
link |
and just do the minimum amount of work to get the victory.
link |
Hodger's mindset was always to take
link |
the riskier gambit of submission,
link |
which entails a lot more work,
link |
and in many cases, a lot more skill.
link |
What I always liked about Hodger
link |
is he never tried to play tactics.
link |
It was always just go out there
link |
and try to win by submission.
link |
And that more than anything,
link |
that mindset of looking for the most perfect victory
link |
rather than the victory that takes the least skill
link |
and the least effort is probably the thing
link |
I took from his career the most
link |
and tried to work on in my students.
link |
I always wonder what are the little details
link |
he's doing under there when he's in mount,
link |
the little adjustments.
link |
But perhaps that's almost indescribable,
link |
the details of that control.
link |
What makes Gordon Ryan, the greatest grappler of all time,
link |
With Gordon, he's also very strong on fundamentals,
link |
all of my students are,
link |
but he's also obviously a member
link |
of a new generation of no geek grapplers
link |
that also bring in technologies
link |
that weren't really emphasized
link |
in previous generations specifically.
link |
The prolific use of lower body attacks,
link |
especially from bottom position.
link |
This means that he can play a game
link |
between upper body and lower body,
link |
which was not really a part of Hodges game.
link |
Nonetheless, you will also see significant similarities.
link |
He's got a very strong and crushing passing game to mount
link |
and a very strong and crushing passing game to the back.
link |
You will see that the major differences
link |
between the two are from bottom position.
link |
Hodges bottom game is essentially based
link |
around his close guard.
link |
Gordon Ryan's game is based around his butterfly guard.
link |
So one is based on outside control
link |
and one is based on inside control.
link |
One focuses almost entirely on the classical notion
link |
of getting past the legs to the upper body
link |
and the other one works between the two as alternatives
link |
and sees them as competing alternatives
link |
where the stronger you become at one,
link |
the more your opponent has to overreact
link |
and become vulnerable to the second.
link |
So they have strong similarities in top position
link |
but are very different in bottom.
link |
He has, from an outsider's perspective,
link |
a calm to him in the heat of battle
link |
that's inspiring and confusing.
link |
Is there something you could speak
link |
to the psychological aspect of Gordon Ryan?
link |
People will talk all day about sports psychology
link |
and they will often have heated arguments
link |
as to what's the right psychological state to be in
link |
when you go out to compete.
link |
I've never seen any one school of thought
link |
which gave noticeably better sports performance than another.
link |
I've never seen any psychological mindset
link |
prove to be reliably more efficient
link |
or effective than another.
link |
I've seen fighters that were scared out of their minds
link |
when they went out every time to fight
link |
and yet they were very successful.
link |
I've seen fighters go out who were relaxed and calm
link |
and they too can be successful.
link |
I've seen both mindsets win, I've seen both mindsets lose.
link |
I've seen every extreme between them.
link |
What I generally recommend
link |
with regards your mind and preparation going in,
link |
find what works for you.
link |
Everyone's different.
link |
Don't try to give a one size fits all
link |
in something as vague and confusing as the human mind.
link |
Having said that, my preference,
link |
I don't force it on people because everyone's different,
link |
but my preference is to try and advocate
link |
for a mindset of unexceptionalism.
link |
Most people see competition as something exceptional.
link |
It's not your everyday grappling session.
link |
You train 300 times for every time you compete
link |
and so they see competition as something exceptional,
link |
different, scarier, more nerve wracking.
link |
There's a crowd watching, there's cameras.
link |
My reputation is on the line.
link |
I'm gonna be observed and judged
link |
and so they see it as this exceptional event.
link |
My general preference is to see it
link |
as an unexceptional event, to see everything else,
link |
the noise, the cameras, the crowd as illusions.
link |
The only reality is a stage,
link |
an opponent on the other side of it
link |
and a referee adjudicating you
link |
and to make it as unexceptional as possible.
link |
Gordon does an extraordinarily good job of doing that.
link |
Gordon looks more tense in most of his training sessions
link |
than he does in his competitions
link |
because he knows his training partners
link |
are typically better than the people
link |
he's actually going out to compete against.
link |
And you see it in his demeanor.
link |
It's one of just complete calm.
link |
It also goes back to what we talked about earlier
link |
about the power of escapes.
link |
Gordon Ryan is almost impossible to control
link |
for extended periods of time
link |
in most of the inferior positions in the sport
link |
and most of the submissions.
link |
So he goes out in the full knowledge
link |
that the worst case scenario isn't that bad for him
link |
and so nothing could really go that badly wrong.
link |
He can always recover from any given mistake
link |
and go on to victory.
link |
When you believe those things,
link |
you're gonna have a calm demeanor.
link |
Then if you look at somebody who is quite a bit different
link |
than that, George St. Pierre,
link |
who at least in the way he describes it,
link |
he's basically exceptionally anxious
link |
and terrified approaching a fight
link |
and he loves training.
link |
And hates fighting.
link |
And hates fighting.
link |
So and just like you said, he made it work for him.
link |
But he's somebody, he speaks very highly of you.
link |
He's worked with you quite a bit in training.
link |
And you've studied him.
link |
You've worked with him.
link |
You've coached him.
link |
Interesting, I've actually coached George
link |
for twice the length of any of the squad members.
link |
So my knowledge of him is far greater than it is
link |
for the contemporary squad.
link |
So can you speak to what makes George St. Pierre,
link |
who I think even though I'm Russian
link |
and a little bit partial towards Fedor and the Russians,
link |
but I think he is in the four categories you mentioned,
link |
the greatest mixed martial artist of all time.
link |
What makes him so good?
link |
His approach, his techniques, his mind.
link |
His approach is certainly part of it.
link |
George started mixed martial arts at a time when the sport
link |
was in a pretty wild phase.
link |
It was illegal to show on most American TV networks.
link |
And there was talk about it being banned as a sport.
link |
In his native Canada, it was banned.
link |
You could only fight on Indian reservations in Canada.
link |
I believe his first fight may have
link |
been on an Indian reservation.
link |
So the sport at that stage was very much in its infancy.
link |
And it's probably fair to say that most
link |
of the athletes involved in the sport
link |
came from a training program that would probably
link |
describe as unprofessional in the contemporary scene.
link |
George is one of a handful of people
link |
who started approaching the sport in a truly
link |
professional fashion.
link |
It was like, OK, here's what great athletes
link |
in other sports do.
link |
I'm going to try to emulate that.
link |
And his ability to invest in himself.
link |
In my own experience, for example,
link |
George, when I first met him, was a garbage man.
link |
And he would jump on a bus from Montreal to New York.
link |
Now, that's a long bus ride.
link |
He would come down on a Friday afternoon
link |
when he finished work as a garbage man,
link |
stay for the weekend, and then late on Sunday night,
link |
he would jump on a bus all the way back to Montreal
link |
and work as a garbage man.
link |
That's an extraordinary commitment
link |
for a young man to make.
link |
And George was a blue belt at the time.
link |
And so he would come down.
link |
And we had a very talented room.
link |
So he didn't do well in the room when he first came in.
link |
He was inexperienced in jiu jitsu.
link |
And the people who went against were considerably better
link |
than him at jiu jitsu.
link |
So imagine investing 25% of your weekly income, maybe even more.
link |
New York's an expensive town, 50%,
link |
to come down and just get your ass kicked month by month.
link |
Yeah, that says a lot about who he is.
link |
First of all, let's talk about the whole idea
link |
of delayed gratification here.
link |
I mean, that's a guy who's saying,
link |
this is highly unpleasant.
link |
But I have a vision of myself in the future.
link |
And I have to go through this extreme case
link |
of delayed gratification to get to that distant goal, which
link |
And that's a level of commitment and self belief,
link |
which is just extraordinary.
link |
I always laugh when people say, oh, George was afraid,
link |
so he was mentally weak.
link |
No, that's a very, very shallow understanding
link |
of mental strength and weakness.
link |
George felt anxiety.
link |
But let's understand from the start,
link |
there's different kinds of mental strength.
link |
And the most important kind isn't
link |
whether you feel fear or don't feel fear
link |
before you step into fight.
link |
The most important form of mental strength
link |
is discipline and training.
link |
That's where most people break.
link |
I know dozens of people who are fearless to fight,
link |
but you couldn't get them to come into the gym
link |
for three months in a row and work on skills.
link |
So they're mentally strong one way, they don't feel fear.
link |
But they're mentally weak in another,
link |
which is to instill the discipline which keeps you
link |
on a road to progress over time.
link |
That's much tougher than not feeling fear
link |
before you go out to fight.
link |
Understand also that when George talks about fear,
link |
he's not afraid of his opponent.
link |
He's afraid of failure.
link |
He's got high standards.
link |
Someone who's got high standards can change the world.
link |
His standards were very, very high.
link |
That's what he was afraid of.
link |
He wasn't afraid of his opponents.
link |
And yet, that's always been the misinterpretation.
link |
He wasn't mentally weak.
link |
He was mentally strong as an ox.
link |
To stay in his training regimen year after year after year
link |
and do so while he became one of the first stars
link |
in mixed martial arts to actually make money.
link |
And it gets tough to stay in the training gym
link |
with people who are young and hungry
link |
and want to punch you in the face.
link |
You're coming out of a luxury room,
link |
living in finery towards the end of his career
link |
and still training as hard as ever.
link |
That's an impressive thing.
link |
And always he valued perfection.
link |
And you're right, the fear was not achieving the perfection.
link |
Is there something you've observed
link |
about the way he approaches training that stands out to you?
link |
Or is it simply the dedication?
link |
No, it's never just about dedication.
link |
There's lots of dedicated people in the world,
link |
but most of them are unsuccessful.
link |
If you want to be the best in the world at anything,
link |
you have to do, out of the many skills of whatever industry
link |
you're in, you have to take at least one of those skills
link |
and be the best in the world at it.
link |
There's many skills in mixed martial arts.
link |
But George identified one skill, which
link |
is the skill of striking to take downs.
link |
He calls it shootboxing.
link |
Shootboxing was barely even a category of skill
link |
when George began.
link |
It was just the idea that wrestlers grabbed people
link |
and took them down the same way they did in wrestling.
link |
And you threw some punches before you did it.
link |
George largely pioneered the science
link |
of creating an interface between striking and take downs.
link |
He did it at a time where no one else before him
link |
had made it into a system or a science.
link |
He did it largely on his own.
link |
And I've always said George is the only athlete
link |
that I ever coached who taught me more than I taught him.
link |
And almost singlehandedly, he created this strong sense
link |
of shootboxing as a science, which
link |
enabled him throughout his career
link |
to determine where the fight would take place.
link |
Would it be standing, or would it be on the ground?
link |
And that, more than anything else,
link |
was the defining characteristic of his success.
link |
I will always be immensely impressed
link |
by his accomplishment in that regard.
link |
He was an innovator.
link |
He did things differently.
link |
This is such an important point.
link |
You can't go out there in combat sports
link |
and do the same things that everybody else is doing
link |
and expect to get different results.
link |
Life doesn't work that way.
link |
If you want to be dominant, you've
link |
got to find one important part of the sport,
link |
and preferably more important than the rest of the sport,
link |
and preferably more than one, and be the best in the world
link |
You can't be weak at anything, but you can't be strong
link |
at everything either.
link |
Life's not long enough for us to develop
link |
a truly complete skill set.
link |
So you've got to be good at everything,
link |
and you've got to be the best at at least one thing.
link |
And George was the best at two.
link |
In his era, he was the best at striking to takedowns,
link |
and he was the best at integrating striking
link |
and grappling on the floor.
link |
Let me ask you a completely ridiculous question,
link |
but it's a fascinating one for me
link |
from an engineering and a scientific perspective.
link |
When I look at a sport, really any problem,
link |
one way to ask how difficult is this problem
link |
is to see how can I build a machine that competes
link |
with a human being at that problem.
link |
You can look at chess.
link |
You can look at soccer, Robocup,
link |
and then you can look at grappling.
link |
There's something about when you start to think,
link |
how would I build an AI system, a robot that defeats somebody
link |
like a Gordon Ryan, where it forces you to really think
link |
about formalizing this art as an engineering discipline
link |
in the same way you do, but you still have some art
link |
injected in there.
link |
There's no space for art when you actually have
link |
to build the system.
link |
That's not a ridiculous question.
link |
That's a damn interesting question.
link |
Let's put aside, like I mentioned
link |
with the Boston Dynamics spot robots,
link |
what people don't realize is the amount of power
link |
they can deliver is huge.
link |
So let's take that weapon aside,
link |
just the amount of force you're able to deliver.
link |
Yeah, I'm glad you're specifying that.
link |
So essentially, your question is, can a talented group
link |
of engineers create a robot which could defeat Gordon Ryan?
link |
On the face of it, as you just pointed out,
link |
that's the easiest project in the world,
link |
just create a robot that carries a nine millimeter automatic
link |
and shoot them five times in the chest.
link |
Okay, that's it, Gordon Ryan's done.
link |
So that's not the interesting question.
link |
The interesting question, and if I understand you correctly,
link |
is if we had the ability to create a robot
link |
whose physical powers were identical to Gordon Ryan,
link |
not inferior and not superior, what would it take
link |
to create a mind inside that robot that would beat
link |
Gordon Ryan in the majority of matches?
link |
Yeah, and there's two ways to build AI systems.
link |
This is true for autonomous driving, for example,
link |
which has been quite contested recently.
link |
So one is you basically, one way to describe it
link |
is you have a giant set of rules.
link |
It's like this tree of rules where you apply
link |
in different condition when there's a pattern you see,
link |
you apply a rule and they're hard coded in.
link |
You basically get like a John Donr type of character
link |
who tries to encode, hard code into the system,
link |
all the moves you should do in every single case.
link |
Of course, you can't actually do that fully.
link |
So you're going to be taking shortcuts,
link |
what are called heuristics,
link |
just a basic kind of generalizations
link |
and apply your own expertise as an expert of,
link |
in this case, grappling,
link |
to see how that can be coded as a rule.
link |
Now, the other approach,
link |
Elon Musk and Tesla are taking this approach,
link |
which is called machine learning,
link |
which is create a basic framework
link |
of the kind of things you should be observing
link |
and what are the measures, metrics of success,
link |
and then just observe and see which things lead to success,
link |
more success and which lead to less success.
link |
And there's a delta.
link |
Like when you see a thing,
link |
first of all, the way machine learning works
link |
is you predict, you see a position or you see a situation
link |
and then you predict how good that is
link |
and then you watch how it actually turns out
link |
and if it's worse or better, you adjust your expectations.
link |
And through that process, you can learn quite a lot.
link |
and this might be a very true challenge in grappling,
link |
is like in driving, you can't crash.
link |
So there's a physical world.
link |
In chess, for example,
link |
where this approach has been exceptionally successful,
link |
you can work in simulation.
link |
So you can have AI system that, for example,
link |
as in the case with AlphaZero by DeepMind,
link |
Google's DeepMind,
link |
it can play itself in simulation millions of times,
link |
billions of times.
link |
It's difficult to know if it's possible to do that
link |
in simulation for anything that involves human movement,
link |
So that's, my sense is,
link |
if we first look at the hard encoding,
link |
if you were to try to describe Gordon Ryan to a machine,
link |
how many rules are in there, do you think?
link |
Yeah, first off, let me tell you,
link |
that's one of the most fascinating questions
link |
I've ever been asked.
link |
And I'm tremendously happy to answer this.
link |
How about what we do is,
link |
this is a massive question you've asked.
link |
There's a huge amount of ways
link |
this could get very interesting and very confusing.
link |
Let's set some ground rules for the discussion.
link |
Lex alluded to the idea of man versus machine and chess.
link |
Okay, and I think that's a really good place
link |
for us to start the discussion.
link |
I'm gonna just tell people about a little bit,
link |
the history of man versus chess,
link |
to give you guys some background on this.
link |
In 1968, there was a party in which a highly ranked,
link |
not a world champion, but a highly ranked chess player,
link |
his name was Levy,
link |
and he met a computer engineer at a party,
link |
and they had a lighthearted bet
link |
that in a 10 year timeframe,
link |
a human chess player would be defeated by a computer.
link |
Now, you gotta remember, 1968,
link |
computing power was very, very low.
link |
The computers that got America to the moon
link |
were actually pretty damn primitive.
link |
Your iPhone would kick all of their asses.
link |
So computational power was very, very low in those days.
link |
So interestingly, the chess player fully believed
link |
that no computer could beat him in the 10 year timeframe,
link |
and the computer engineer was very optimistic
link |
that he was wrong, and in fact,
link |
10 years, the computer would win.
link |
10 years later, they had a competition,
link |
and the human won, decisively, in fact.
link |
So computational power simply hadn't risen to that level yet.
link |
Through the 1980s, computational power increased,
link |
but not sufficient to get to championship level.
link |
There were computer programs in the 1980s
link |
which were competitive with good, solid chess players,
link |
but not world beaters.
link |
Understand right from the start
link |
that there's a fundamental problem here.
link |
The number of options that the two players in a chessboard
link |
can run through is astronomically high.
link |
There are 64 squares on a chessboard.
link |
The number of possible options that could work
link |
or could play out on a chessboard,
link |
and this is a truly shocking thing for you to think about,
link |
the number of possible options is higher
link |
than the number of atoms in the known universe.
link |
Think about that for a second in terms of complexity, okay?
link |
The number of atoms on this table is massive, okay?
link |
That is an unbelievably large number.
link |
We're talking about a situation where if a computer
link |
had to go through all the options at the onset of a match,
link |
they would have to run numbers greater
link |
than the number of atoms in the known universe.
link |
The number of galaxies in our universe is vast, okay?
link |
It's measured in the billions.
link |
Like, the number of atoms,
link |
that's just a number so mind blowing it's impossible, okay?
link |
So no computer is ever going to be able to work
link |
with those kinds of numbers, okay?
link |
I didn't even know future generations of quantum computers
link |
could work with those kinds of numbers.
link |
So that's the fundamental problem, okay?
link |
The number of options in a chess match
link |
is just so astronomically large
link |
that no computer could ever figure out
link |
all the available options
link |
and make decisions in a given timeframe.
link |
So that's the fundamental problem.
link |
So as Lex correctly pointed out,
link |
the way you get around this is by the use of heuristics.
link |
These are rules of thumb,
link |
which give general guidelines to action.
link |
So for example, in jiu jitsu,
link |
I could give you a general rule of thumb.
link |
Don't turn your back on your opponent, okay?
link |
That's a solid piece of advice.
link |
There are obviously some exceptions to that rule,
link |
but it's a good solid piece of advice to give a beginner.
link |
The moment you give that heuristic rule,
link |
you rule out a lot of options, okay?
link |
You've already told someone don't turn your back,
link |
don't turn your back on someone.
link |
So a lot of possibilities
link |
have just been turned away right there.
link |
So you've cut the number of options in half right there
link |
just by giving one heuristic rule, okay?
link |
If you were decent at chess, not great, but decent,
link |
and you knew enough to give say 10 heuristic rules,
link |
you could chop that initially vast number of options down
link |
And now you're starting to get to a point
link |
where if a computer had sufficient computational power,
link |
it could start getting through the number of options
link |
in that acceptable timeframe.
link |
So that's the general pattern of the development.
link |
Now, things started getting very interesting
link |
in the mid 1990s with IBM's computer Deep Blue.
link |
There was a great chess champion of the late 1980s
link |
and early through the 1990s called Gary Kasparov,
link |
who had been more or less undefeated for a decade.
link |
In 1996, he took on IBM's computer Deep Blue.
link |
Just to correct the record, he was undefeated.
link |
I apologize, Russian, gotta make sure.
link |
They get very nationalistic about their chess.
link |
Be careful of these guys.
link |
Deep Blue lost the first confrontation, I believe, in 1996.
link |
It was competitive, but lost.
link |
Then in 1997, Deep Blue won.
link |
And it wasn't a complete walkover.
link |
Kasparov, I believe, won one of the matches.
link |
But they did, Deep Blue unequivocally won the confrontation.
link |
And it was seen as like this watershed moment
link |
where a computer beat the best human chess player
link |
on the planet, and that was it.
link |
There's no coming back from that.
link |
I think it would be remembered as one of the biggest moments
link |
in computing history, is really when the first time
link |
a machine beat a human at a thing
link |
that humans really care about
link |
in the domain of intellectual pursuits.
link |
Yeah, it was a powerful, powerful moment.
link |
Now, not only was that a powerful moment,
link |
but things started getting truly interesting
link |
from that moment forward,
link |
because then you started having
link |
different areas of development.
link |
The general way in which the progress is made
link |
from those early starts in 1968,
link |
all the way through to Deep Blue's victory,
link |
was of the use of heuristic rules
link |
that brought down the number of potential options
link |
to a manageable level.
link |
As computer power increased,
link |
then it could make faster and faster
link |
and wiser and wiser decisions,
link |
and make them at a rate which no human,
link |
even the best human, could keep up with.
link |
So that was the general way in which the debate went.
link |
But things got more interesting after this,
link |
with the advent of computers that, as you pointed out,
link |
make use of so called machine learning.
link |
There were, a company put out a program, AlphaZero,
link |
which can look at the basic rule structures of chess,
link |
and then ultimately play itself in trials,
link |
and make trial and error assessment
link |
of what are good and bad strategies,
link |
so that with no human intervention,
link |
a computer could start doing remarkable things.
link |
Not only did this company create AlphaZero,
link |
and there were some other ones too,
link |
they fought not only in chess,
link |
but in the much more complex Asian game of Go,
link |
which has far more potential options
link |
than chess does, by a very significant margin.
link |
These machine learning programs,
link |
not only easily defeat any human in chess,
link |
but in Go as well.
link |
And what's truly remarkable
link |
is they weren't just beating them.
link |
When AlphaZero took on a rival chess program,
link |
which by itself was already superior to any human,
link |
it only required four hours,
link |
starting from learning the rules of chess,
link |
to figuring out how to beat
link |
the second most powerful chess program in the world.
link |
That's literally like taking a human,
link |
telling the rules of chess,
link |
they play some games with themselves for four hours,
link |
and they go out and beat Garry Kasparov.
link |
This is, I don't know,
link |
this is, to me, this is a truly exciting development,
link |
far beyond even what Deep Blue did.
link |
I like how you said exciting, not terrifying,
link |
because I agree with you on the exciting.
link |
Now, things also get exciting in a different direction.
link |
There is another possibility,
link |
which few people foresaw after the Deep Blue episode.
link |
This is where a new form of chess started to emerge,
link |
sometimes called cyborg chess or centaur chess,
link |
where humans of moderate chess level playing ability,
link |
not world champions, just decent, but not great,
link |
I guess you might say like purple belts in jiu jitsu,
link |
allied themselves with computers.
link |
So the humans and computers worked as a cyborg team.
link |
The humans supplied the heuristic insight.
link |
The computers supplied the computational power.
link |
And fascinatingly, they proved to be superior
link |
to both the best humans and the best chess programs.
link |
The united force of human insight with heuristics,
link |
with computers ability to go through numbers
link |
in far more rapid form than any human could ever hope to do,
link |
proved to be one of the strongest combinations
link |
and enabled that pairing of human and computer
link |
to overwhelm both the best single human
link |
and the best single computer.
link |
That adds a whole new level of fascination to this topic.
link |
So to wind things up here,
link |
we've got this fascinating initial question from Lex,
link |
the idea of could there be a computer inside a robot
link |
which doesn't have any special physical properties?
link |
This is mind versus mind
link |
because the bodies negate each other.
link |
The robot is the same body as Gordon Ryan.
link |
This is a thought experiment.
link |
What would it take to create a mind
link |
that would defeat the mind of Gordon Ryan?
link |
Based on the chess example,
link |
it would appear that this is entirely feasible
link |
at some point in the future.
link |
And in fact, I would go further and say,
link |
it's actually quite likely
link |
based on what we've seen from the example of chess.
link |
The rate of progress in AI in the last 20 years
link |
has dwarfed anything from the previous 50 years.
link |
And the rate continues to increase.
link |
We're talking now at a level where the machine learning
link |
of defeating world champions in chess and Go in four hours,
link |
like just from starting from the rules of the sport,
link |
this is gonna be difficult for humans to keep up with.
link |
Now in humans favor, could we take Gordon Ryan
link |
and put a chip inside his brain
link |
that created the same cyborg effect
link |
as we saw in centaur chess and cyborg chess,
link |
and then take Gordon Ryan to a new level
link |
and suddenly his computational powers
link |
were massively increased.
link |
He still has his heuristic insight,
link |
but he has vastly augmented computational powers.
link |
That's the interesting battle.
link |
You asked a great question, Lex.
link |
Let me give you my initial push for an answer
link |
would be that if it's just Gordon Ryan
link |
versus your robot technology,
link |
in 10 years, I would say with machine learning,
link |
I'd say you guys win every time.
link |
But if it is cyborg Gordon Ryan,
link |
where he's part Gordon Ryan with heuristics
link |
and part machine, then, and now that's where I throw
link |
the question back at you, young man, what do you think?
link |
Well, I'm fascinated to hear your answer.
link |
That's very interesting because there's a lot
link |
of different ways you can build a cyborg Gordon Ryan.
link |
So one is there's the Neuralink way,
link |
which is basically doing what you're suggesting,
link |
which is expanding the computational capabilities
link |
of Gordon Ryan's brain,
link |
like directly being able to communicate
link |
between a computer and the brain.
link |
So you preserve most of what there is in the human body,
link |
including the nervous system and the computing system
link |
we currently have that's biological
link |
and expanding over the computer.
link |
There's also on the cyborg chess front,
link |
like Magnus Carlsen, the current world champion in chess,
link |
he studies AlphaZero games.
link |
Like it's not a regular thing for high level grandmasters.
link |
From what I understand, almost every chess master
link |
now studies computer games for inspiration.
link |
Like just as great chess players from the past
link |
used to go back into old leather bound books
link |
of previous grandmasters and study games and books.
link |
Nowadays, most people, when they wanna study
link |
the most perfect games,
link |
they actually study programs like AlphaZero.
link |
Yeah, and it's not just for inspiration, it's education.
link |
I mean, it's literally part of their training regimen.
link |
This isn't like a fun side thing.
link |
This is the main way to get better.
link |
So there's a certain element there
link |
where even our human brains can be trained
link |
by observing the partial explorations
link |
of an AI systems in the space of grappling.
link |
That could be actually in simulation.
link |
It doesn't have to be in the physical world.
link |
It could be in, if we construct sufficiently good
link |
biomechanical models of human beings,
link |
machines can learn how they grapple.
link |
There's quite a bit of that already.
link |
OpenAI has the system of, they're like sumo wrestlers
link |
with some basic goals of pushing each other off of a platform.
link |
And you know nothing from the, you don't even know.
link |
So you have a basic model of a bipedal system.
link |
It doesn't even know in the beginning how to stand up.
link |
It just falls, right?
link |
So it has to learn how to get up
link |
and they do that through self play.
link |
They learn how to get up, they learn how to move
link |
enough to achieve the final goal
link |
which is to push your opponent off of the thing.
link |
So they learn that.
link |
Now OpenAI is not, those folks are currently
link |
not that interested in the grappling world.
link |
So they kind of stop there.
link |
But it's very possible in simulation to then develop ideas.
link |
In fact, this is something that I should probably do,
link |
but it's pretty natural to do it easy,
link |
is ideas of control and submission and all the,
link |
you add the ability to, I don't know how to put it nicely,
link |
but to choke your opponent
link |
and to break their body parts off,
link |
which is what jiu jitsu is.
link |
Add that in and what kind of ideas it'll come up with
link |
is very fascinating.
link |
I actually don't know, until this conversation,
link |
I don't know why I never even thought about that.
link |
I've been very obsessed with just like walking
link |
and running and all those kinds of things,
link |
like evolving different strategies
link |
for when you have a bunch of,
link |
so one difficult thing for robots
link |
is when you have uneven terrain
link |
and there's uncertainty about the terrain
link |
is how to keep walking.
link |
Or when there's a bunch of things being thrown at you,
link |
all that kind of stuff,
link |
and you learn through self play
link |
how to be able to navigate those uncertain environments
link |
when there's a lot of weird objects
link |
and all those kinds of things.
link |
There's no reason why you can't just do that
link |
with submissions and so on in simulation.
link |
That'll be actually fascinating.
link |
But once we might be surprised
link |
by the kind of strategies in simulation
link |
these AI systems will develop,
link |
and that might make a much better Gordon Ryan
link |
and much better John Donahar
link |
in asking the Dean Lister question of like,
link |
why are we only using,
link |
why are we not doing X?
link |
But on the actual sort of grappling event
link |
in the physical space,
link |
I've been very surprised and a little bit disappointed
link |
by how difficult it's to build
link |
a system that's able to have the body of Gordon Ryan
link |
or a human being actually,
link |
which means it's not just the biomechanics
link |
which is very difficult to do,
link |
but also all of the senses that are involved.
link |
Be able to perceive the world as richly,
link |
to be able to, there's something called soft robotics,
link |
which is incredibly difficult to do through touch,
link |
understand the hardness of things.
link |
We don't understand as human beings
link |
just how much we're able through touch
link |
to experience the world and to manipulate the world.
link |
Like the process of picking up a cup
link |
is very similar to the process of grappling.
link |
All the feeling that you do,
link |
all the leverage that you're applying,
link |
there's so many degrees of freedom
link |
in both the, in the interactive sense,
link |
in the sensing and the applying,
link |
sensing and applying,
link |
you're doing that through so much of your body,
link |
that it's just going to be very difficult
link |
to build a system that's able to experience the world
link |
and act onto the world as richly as we humans can.
link |
Yeah, if picking up a cup
link |
is a seemingly insurmountable challenge,
link |
then taking someone down, controlling them,
link |
getting past their legs,
link |
that's going to be one hell of a project.
link |
Exactly, I mean, there could be shortcuts,
link |
but I mean, currently that's the field
link |
called robotic manipulation, which is picking up objects.
link |
Usually they have like a ball and a triangular object
link |
and your whole task is to like pick it up
link |
and move it around.
link |
Generalizing that to the human body is harder,
link |
but perhaps not as hard as we might think.
link |
The question is, how do you construct experiments
link |
where you can do that safely?
link |
In chess, that's very easy,
link |
but here it's very, very problematic.
link |
I guess you could just have robot versus robot
link |
teamed up with each other and then they learn
link |
and then they go out to take on a human opponent.
link |
Yes, exactly, so you have two physical robots
link |
that interact with each other.
link |
Everything you've said so far suggests
link |
that many of the problems, these tactile elements,
link |
they're easy tasks for humans.
link |
So which becomes more powerful more quickly?
link |
Robots that are taught to think like humans
link |
or humans that are given the computational power
link |
of computers and robots themselves,
link |
which wins first, a cyborg Gordon Ryan
link |
or an artificial robot Gordon Ryan?
link |
Really, really strong question,
link |
and I think by far the cyborg Gordon Ryan.
link |
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking here.
link |
The problems you're talking about
link |
with regards to the robots, those are deep problems.
link |
Like if picking up a cup is problematic,
link |
it's gonna be damn difficult,
link |
but to a human, a two year old can do that.
link |
You're highlighting a very important difference
link |
is human beings have something called common sense
link |
that we don't know how to build into computers currently.
link |
That's what picking up the cup is.
link |
It's some basic rules about the way this world works.
link |
We're able to, this is when we're children
link |
and we'll crawl around and we pick up.
link |
What humans don't have that machines have
link |
is incredible computational power
link |
and access to infinite knowledge.
link |
Computers can do that.
link |
So if you have a Gordon Ryan with the infinite knowledge
link |
and compute power, that's just going to,
link |
because we know how to do that,
link |
that's going to blow out of the water
link |
a robot that's trying to learn to crawl.
link |
Has there been any update on the phenomenon
link |
of cyborg or centaur chess?
link |
There was some debate as to whether or not
link |
cyborg chess teams could stay competitive
link |
with the latest machine learning.
link |
Has there been any update on that?
link |
I believe at this point machines dominate
link |
over the machine human pairs.
link |
With the human pairs, when they first came out,
link |
they were good chess players, but not great chess players.
link |
Does it make any difference if you have, say,
link |
Garry Kasparov and a computer working in unison
link |
versus Joe Blow from?
link |
It does make a huge difference,
link |
but yeah, both are destroyed by machines at this point.
link |
And it's not even competitive now?
link |
No, it's not competitive.
link |
But they also lost interest in this kind of idea.
link |
So I think there's still competitions
link |
between human machine pairs versus human machine pairs,
link |
almost like to see how the two work together.
link |
But in terms of machine versus human machine pair,
link |
machines still dominate.
link |
So, and now we've retrieved back as human beings
link |
caring mostly about human versus human competitions,
link |
which is probably what the future will look like.
link |
It's very interesting to think,
link |
but like that in chess happened really quickly.
link |
It won't happen, and it wasn't so painful in chess
link |
because we care about chess,
link |
but it's not so fundamental to human society.
link |
And when you started talking about cyborg Gordon Ryans,
link |
which really beyond grappling is referring
link |
to robots operating physical space
link |
or human robot hybrids operating physical space,
link |
you're talking about our society is now full of cyborgs.
link |
And that transition might be very painful
link |
or transformative in a way we can't even predict.
link |
And that very much has applications
link |
as both China and US now have legalized
link |
is autonomous weapon systems.
link |
So use of these kinds of systems in military applications.
link |
So it used to be, there'd been a big call
link |
in the AI community to ban autonomous weapons.
link |
So the use of artificial intelligence in war,
link |
just like bioweapons are banned internationally.
link |
So you're not allowed to use bioweapons in war.
link |
And actually most people, even terrorists,
link |
have kind of agreed on this ban.
link |
It's not like, there's been a quiet agreement,
link |
like we're not going to be doing this
link |
because everybody's gonna get really pissed off.
link |
With autonomous weapon systems, that's not been the case.
link |
China has said that they're going to be using AI
link |
in their military.
link |
And the US in 2021 just released a report
link |
saying that they're going to add
link |
increasing amounts of artificial intelligence
link |
into our military systems.
link |
Into drones, into just everything that's doing
link |
any kind of both strategic and actual bombing
link |
and defense systems.
link |
I presume a drone army would easily defeat
link |
a human army in the near future.
link |
Like, I mean, just off the top of my head,
link |
just think about the implication of kamikaze drones
link |
versus a naval fleet.
link |
I mean, kamikazes was humans in World War II,
link |
did terrible damage to our navy.
link |
Imagine swarms of mechanical kamikazes
link |
which have no fear, no remorse, I mean.
link |
But it's very inefficient.
link |
Kamikaze is very inefficient.
link |
You want to be very, like war is,
link |
it's the same discussion to jiu jitsu, right?
link |
You want to be, you want to create an asymmetry of power
link |
and you want to be efficient is in the way you deliver
link |
It's actually goes back to the picking up a cup.
link |
Currently, a lot of things we do in war,
link |
like most of the drones that you hear about,
link |
they're not autonomous, not most, all.
link |
They're usually piloted by.
link |
They're piloted remotely by humans.
link |
And humans are really good at this kind of
link |
what's necessary to deliver the most damage,
link |
targeted damage, effective as part of the largest strategy
link |
you have about bombing the area or all that kind of stuff.
link |
I don't know how difficult that is to automate.
link |
I think the biggest concern,
link |
I actually have a sense that it's very difficult to automate.
link |
The biggest concern is almost like
link |
an incompetent application of this
link |
and consequences that are not anticipated.
link |
So you have a drone army where you say,
link |
we want to target,
link |
you give it power to target a particular terrorist.
link |
And then there's some bug in the system
link |
that has a, like for example,
link |
has a large uncertainty about the location of that terrorist.
link |
And so it decides to bomb an entire city.
link |
You know, almost like there's a bug, a software bug.
link |
I'm much more concerned about like bad programming
link |
and software engineering than I am about
link |
like malevolent AI systems that destroy the world.
link |
So the more we rely on automation,
link |
this is the lesson of human history.
link |
The more we give to AI, to software, to robotic systems,
link |
the more we forget how to supervise
link |
and oversee some of the edge cases,
link |
all the weird ways that things go wrong.
link |
And then the more stupid software bugs
link |
can lead to huge damage.
link |
Like, you know, even like nuclear explosions,
link |
those kinds of things.
link |
If we add AI into the launch systems
link |
for nuclear weapons, for example,
link |
I think human history teaches us that software bugs
link |
is what will lead to World War III,
link |
not malevolent AI or human beings.
link |
By the way, I deeply appreciate how knowledgeable you are
link |
about the history of artificial intelligence.
link |
Oh no, it's fascinating stuff.
link |
You know, I remember reading when I was a child
link |
about, you know, Turing tests and things like this,
link |
and visionaries from the 1950s had ideas.
link |
To see it come this far is just so fascinating to me.
link |
Okay, so what can we as jiu jitsu players
link |
take away from this?
link |
We saw that when it comes to computers versus humans
link |
in chess tournaments,
link |
humans had something truly valuable
link |
to give to the computers.
link |
That was heuristic rules.
link |
In every coaching program that I run,
link |
I make an endless quest to search out
link |
and find effective heuristic rules.
link |
That's the basis of a good training program.
link |
Heuristic rules and principles
link |
give vast informational content,
link |
which can rapidly increase your performance on the mat,
link |
just as they rapidly increase the performance
link |
of chess computers to overcome their human adversaries.
link |
The great human weakness is computational power.
link |
Most people vastly overestimate their ability
link |
to reason and problem solve under stress.
link |
In fact, numerous psychological studies have shown
link |
that humans can balance a relatively small number
link |
of competing options in stressful decision making.
link |
But what we do have,
link |
what is the great and unique human gift
link |
is this idea to come up and arrive
link |
at heuristic rules and principles,
link |
which turn out to be very effective guides to behavior
link |
for both human behavior
link |
and artificially intelligent behavior.
link |
Make that your focus in study.
link |
Don't try to remember 10,000 different details on a move.
link |
Okay, that's human weakness, not human strength.
link |
Our strength is heuristics.
link |
Make that your focus,
link |
not endless computations over 25 details here
link |
merged with 27 details here.
link |
That's not what humans are good at.
link |
The uniquely human strength is arriving
link |
at these heuristic rules and principles
link |
which guide our behavior,
link |
which provides simplifications,
link |
which enable us to take vast amounts of information
link |
and parry it down to a few simple rules
link |
that effectively guide our behavior.
link |
Take that core insight from the discussion
link |
that Lex and I just had.
link |
It was a complex discussion.
link |
We both apologize for going a little bit overboard.
link |
Then dragging you into some details there,
link |
but take that away from it.
link |
It'll make you better at jujitsu.
link |
That was a really exciting discussion,
link |
and the depths of knowledge
link |
in the dimensions of knowledge you have
link |
and interests you have is just fascinating.
link |
Is there advice you have for complete beginners,
link |
for white belts that are starting jujitsu,
link |
that are listening to this,
link |
that haven't done jujitsu?
link |
I know there's a lot of people
link |
who are super curious to start.
link |
Is there advice you would give them on their journey?
link |
Yeah, I'm just gonna talk about
link |
just getting better on the mat, okay?
link |
Because there's a thousand other things
link |
you can talk about in terms of morale and persistence
link |
and how often that you're trained
link |
is a thousand things you'd give.
link |
Break up with your girlfriend or boyfriend.
link |
Let's put that aside.
link |
That's probably the best advice we could give.
link |
It goes back to what we said earlier.
link |
I always advocate start your training from the ground up.
link |
Okay, your first sessions in jujitsu,
link |
you're going to find to your horror
link |
that everyone gets on top of you and you can't get out.
link |
And it's a dispiriting, crushing kind of feeling
link |
that you just have no skills
link |
and you have no prospects in the sport.
link |
So your first skill is the skill of being able
link |
to free yourself from positional pins.
link |
Most of the escapes in jujitsu go to guard position.
link |
And so once you get someone in your guard,
link |
they're going to be looking to pass your guard
link |
and get back into those positional pins
link |
that you just escaped from.
link |
And that's just as crushing as getting pinned.
link |
You feel like every time you try to hold someone in guard,
link |
they just effortlessly pass you by.
link |
So your first two skills,
link |
you got to be able to get out of any pin
link |
and you got to be able to hold someone in your guard.
link |
So pin escapes and guard retention
link |
are your first two skills.
link |
I generally advocate the idea of learning to fight
link |
from your back first and then learning to fight
link |
from on top second.
link |
Because the brute fact is when you first start off,
link |
you just don't have enough skills to hold top position
link |
or gain top position through a takedown.
link |
So inevitably you're going to end up underneath people
link |
for most of your training time.
link |
Your training should reflect that in the early days
link |
Start with the first two skills you need.
link |
They're not the most exciting.
link |
They're not sexy skills that are going to make you look
link |
like a stud in the training room,
link |
but they're going to keep your life long enough
link |
to learn those sexy skills in the future
link |
that will make you look like a stud.
link |
Start with pin escapes, go to guard retention
link |
and focus heavily on those two.
link |
When you start to get into offense,
link |
start with bottom position.
link |
So there's a clear continuity between your pin escapes,
link |
your guard retention, and then your guard itself.
link |
You've got different options with guard.
link |
Some of you are going to like closed guard.
link |
Some of you are going to like variations of open guard.
link |
Some of you are going to like to be seated.
link |
Some of you are going to like to be supine.
link |
Some of you are going to like half guard.
link |
As a general rule, this is a heavy generalization,
link |
but I'm going to give it to you.
link |
In my experience, most people benefit the most
link |
by starting with half guard first.
link |
I know that traditionally Jiu Jitsu has been taught
link |
closed guard first,
link |
and then all the other guards come after that.
link |
I'm a big believer in the idea of start with pin escapes,
link |
then go to guard retention,
link |
and then start with half guard bottom.
link |
That way you get a nice continuity
link |
between your first three skills,
link |
and you'll make good progress
link |
over those first critical six months in Jiu Jitsu.
link |
What does it take to get a black belt in Jiu Jitsu?
link |
To show up, pay your fees.
link |
Don't set your goals low, okay?
link |
Don't even ask yourself that question.
link |
No one cares if you've got a black belt, okay?
link |
The only thing that counts is the skills you have.
link |
I know plenty of black belts that suck, okay?
link |
There's a lot of them out there.
link |
Don't lower your standards by saying,
link |
I want to get a black belt.
link |
Ask yourself something much more important.
link |
How good do I want to be?
link |
You want to be damn good, right?
link |
You want to do something in this time,
link |
and you want to be the best you can.
link |
Wearing a belt around your waist doesn't guarantee that.
link |
Build skills, focus on that.
link |
Let me ask you about the fourth thing
link |
in facet face of Jiu Jitsu, which is self defense.
link |
Let's say the bigger things,
link |
I don't know why it's called self defense.
link |
Let's call it street fighting.
link |
Let's call it fighting, okay?
link |
Maybe you can contest that terminology.
link |
How about non sport fighting?
link |
Non sport fighting.
link |
It's funny, like street fighting.
link |
What happens if you go out on a playground,
link |
and you're fighting on grass?
link |
Is there no longer street fighting?
link |
You have like Wimbledon, like grass courts,
link |
it's a whole nother thing.
link |
What do you think is the best martial art
link |
for street fighting?
link |
What is the best set of,
link |
we talked about advice for white belts
link |
to advance in grappling in Jiu Jitsu.
link |
What is the set of techniques,
link |
maybe martial art that is best for street fighting?
link |
Okay, again, you're asking some
link |
truly fascinating questions here.
link |
The way this gets framed as a question
link |
is often condemns you to bad answers from the start.
link |
As a questioner, I'm trying to achieve asymmetry of power.
link |
Put you in a bad position.
link |
Don't worry so much about...
link |
People are always gonna say,
link |
you know, is this martial art better?
link |
Or is this martial arts better?
link |
The truth is there's only one way to say this.
link |
Combat sports are your best option for self defense.
link |
There are many martial arts,
link |
and there is a rough divide between the two.
link |
Those that fall into combat sports,
link |
and those that fall into non sporting martial arts,
link |
where there's no competitive live sparring element,
link |
where most of the knowledge is limited
link |
to theoretical knowledge reinforced by passive drilling.
link |
If you have a choice between a combat sport
link |
versus a non sporting art
link |
based around theoretical knowledge and passive drilling,
link |
go with a combat sport.
link |
Nothing will prepare you for the intensity
link |
of a genuine altercation better than combat sports.
link |
Many people, as I say these words,
link |
they're probably horrified to hear me say this,
link |
and immediately going to rebut and say,
link |
no, combat sports is exactly the wrong thing for you to do
link |
because they have safety rules, et cetera, et cetera,
link |
which would easily be exploited in a real fight.
link |
And if I fought a world championship boxer,
link |
I would just poke him in the eye
link |
or kick him in the groin, et cetera, et cetera.
link |
You've heard these arguments a thousand times.
link |
Yes, there is some validity to these things,
link |
but as a general rule,
link |
if you ask me to bet in any form of street fight,
link |
call it what you want,
link |
between a combat sport adherent
link |
versus someone who simply trains with drills
link |
and talks in terms of theories
link |
of what they would do in a fight,
link |
I'm gonna go with the combat sport guy every single time.
link |
Now, having said that,
link |
combat sports need to be modified
link |
for the use of self defense street fighting.
link |
We haven't agreed on a term yet.
link |
We'll figure it out later.
link |
What does this modification consist of?
link |
Well, some of it is technical, okay?
link |
For example, a boxer in a street fight
link |
now has to punch without wrapped or gloved hands,
link |
and that's problematic, okay?
link |
Your hands are not really designed
link |
for heavy extended use of clubbing hard objects.
link |
There's a very high likelihood of breaking your hands.
link |
Mike Tyson was one of the finest punchers that ever lived,
link |
but in one of his more famous street fights
link |
against Mitch Green in the late 1980s,
link |
he broke his hand with one punch
link |
that he threw at his opponent.
link |
He hit the wrong part of the head and broke his hand,
link |
and he was one of the most gifted punchers of all time.
link |
you'll certainly have trouble protecting your hands
link |
when you go to throw blows.
link |
Nonetheless, this was easily modified,
link |
and so a boxer can throw with open hands or with elbows,
link |
and so just a small modification and technique
link |
can overcome that problem.
link |
So what you'll find is that the general physical,
link |
mental conditioning, and skill development
link |
that comes from combat sports
link |
allied with technical modifications,
link |
and then the most important of all,
link |
tactical modifications will provide your best hope
link |
in altercations outside of sports in the street
link |
or wherever you find yourself.
link |
The least effective approaches to self defense
link |
that I have observed in my life
link |
have been those where, as I said,
link |
people talked theory, drilled on passive opponents,
link |
and generally had no engagement in live competition
link |
or sparring in their training programs.
link |
The most effective by a landslide
link |
were those that put a heavy emphasis on live sparring
link |
and sporting competition modified both technically
link |
and tactically for the circumstances
link |
in which they found themselves.
link |
People talk, for example, about how, you know,
link |
and with some validity that weapons
link |
will change everything in a street fight.
link |
There's absolute truth to that,
link |
but this extends into weapons as well, okay?
link |
The most effective forms of knife fighting that you'll see
link |
will be those who come from a background in fencing
link |
because it has sparring and a competitive sport aspect to it,
link |
but would pure fencing be the appropriate thing?
link |
Of course not, you'd have to modify it,
link |
but the reflexes, endurance, physical mobility
link |
that you gain from the sport of fencing
link |
could easily be modified to bladecraft in a fight situation.
link |
What you want to look for with regards street
link |
and self defense is not, okay, which style should I choose?
link |
Should I choose taekwondo?
link |
Should I choose karate?
link |
Should I choose this variation of kung fu?
link |
No, focus on the most important thing.
link |
Does it have a sport aspect to it?
link |
Then once you've made sufficient progress
link |
in the sport aspect of that martial art,
link |
start asking yourself, what are the requisite modifications
link |
and technique and tactics that I have to use
link |
or to input to make it effective for street situations?
link |
That's always the advice that I give.
link |
Let me zoom in on a very particular aspect
link |
of street fighting where, with all due respect,
link |
I disagree with Mr. Joe Rogan and George St. Pierre on,
link |
which is the suit and tie situation.
link |
Now, to criticize GSP, yeah, yeah,
link |
he's very accomplished and everything,
link |
but to criticize him for a bit,
link |
he made claims about how dangerous the tie is
link |
in a street fighting situation
link |
without ever having used it in a fighting situation.
link |
So he made sort of broad proclamations
link |
without understanding the fundamentals.
link |
So I thought I would go to somebody who thinks in systems.
link |
What do you think, is it dangerous to wear a tie
link |
or not in a grappling situation
link |
versus all the other weapons?
link |
Yeah, but we would do it in a street fight, yeah.
link |
It would be rather strange to wear a tie
link |
in a grappling competition.
link |
It would be, it would be.
link |
Yes, in a street fight situation.
link |
Joe Rogan thinks it is like the most dangerous,
link |
it's like it becomes your weakest point
link |
if you wear a tie because it's very easy to choke.
link |
George St. Pierre seemed to have agreed with that.
link |
Also, George added that you can grab the tie
link |
and pull the person down to a knee.
link |
Yeah, this is the go to.
link |
Joe Rogan will go for the choke,
link |
George St. Pierre will go for the tie to the knee,
link |
which I was saying is ridiculous.
link |
So what do you think?
link |
Okay, first off, I actually can speak with experience
link |
on this because I worked as a bouncer for over a decade
link |
and most of the clubs I worked at
link |
did not require a suit and tie,
link |
but occasionally they did.
link |
Okay, let's first differentiate
link |
between the kinds of threats when you wear a tie.
link |
If you wear a tie, if there is gonna be a threat,
link |
by far the more important threat is not strangulation.
link |
Okay, being strangled by your tie is possible,
link |
but it is a poor choice.
link |
There are many other ways to strangle people
link |
that are far more efficient.
link |
If I strangle by your tie, I'm literally in front of you.
link |
That means as I go to apply the strangle hold,
link |
I can easily be eye gouged, et cetera, et cetera.
link |
If you're gonna strangle people in the street,
link |
do it from behind and there's just much better ways
link |
to do it than that.
link |
Hear that, Joe Rogan?
link |
With regards to the snap down question,
link |
that is more a problem.
link |
I always recommend if you are going to work as a bouncer
link |
with a tie, wear a clip on tie
link |
so it just comes off immediately.
link |
If you don't like clip ons, then you can use a bow tie.
link |
I used to work for years in hip hop clubs
link |
with members of the Nation of Islam security team.
link |
They were known, they had various factions,
link |
but the one I worked with were the X Men,
link |
and they would always wear bow ties,
link |
which of course can't be grabbed.
link |
Now, the bow tie was a recognizable part of their brand
link |
as security guards, so everyone knew
link |
that that's what they wore.
link |
If I wore a bow tie in a security situation,
link |
people would probably think that I was some kind
link |
of Nancy boy and want to fight with me,
link |
so I couldn't wear one.
link |
So I would always wear a tie
link |
which you should become familiar with, Mr. Freeman.
link |
That's the Texas bolo tie, which is a kind of shoestring tie
link |
which is very, very thin, almost like shoestring
link |
and rather short and just has a simple pendant in the middle.
link |
This is perfect if you need to wear a tie
link |
in a situation where you believe
link |
there's a high likelihood of you being grabbed.
link |
Because it can't be grabbed.
link |
Yeah, there's nothing to grab.
link |
It's literally like string.
link |
Like if you pulled it,
link |
it would just slip through your hand.
link |
That tie that you're wearing now,
link |
that would give me tremendous control of your head,
link |
and I could easily turn it into a hockey fight situation
link |
where your head was being pulled down out of balance,
link |
and you would have a hard time recovering.
link |
So strangulation, not really a problem.
link |
Getting pulled down, possible problem.
link |
Solutions, clip on tie, bow tie,
link |
or if you don't want to look like a Nancy boy,
link |
Beautiful, so you disagree with Joe Rogan,
link |
agree with George St. Pierre, I love it.
link |
I feel like this is an instruction we put together
link |
here on street fighting and the tie.
link |
Speaking of Joe Rogan, let me ask the following question.
link |
He's currently doing a podcast with Gordon Ryan,
link |
and probably going to try to convince him and you,
link |
as he's already been doing, to move to Austin.
link |
What are the chances of the Donoher Death Squad
link |
coming to Austin and opening a school in Austin
link |
and making Austin home so I can attend the classes there?
link |
I would definitely have to think about that.
link |
I do know that I personally love New York,
link |
but every single person in the squad despised New York
link |
and wanted to leave for a long time.
link |
What was the nature of your love for New York, by the way?
link |
It was truly an international city.
link |
I'm a big believer in the idea of breadth of experience,
link |
and if you want, breadth of experience
link |
usually requires extensive travel,
link |
but training people means you have to be in a fixed location
link |
working according to a schedule,
link |
and those two push in different directions.
link |
New York was the compromise
link |
where everyone from around the world came there
link |
so you had breadth of experience of world culture,
link |
but at the same time, you had a fixed location
link |
so you could run a training program
link |
that produced world champions,
link |
so it was the ideal compromise.
link |
It was a fascinating thing to teach classes
link |
of over 120 people where literally the entire world
link |
was represented on the map
link |
and go outside and see the same thing.
link |
It was truly the world's leading international city.
link |
It was like the world's unofficial capital,
link |
a fascinating place to live,
link |
so I loved it, but the squad hated it.
link |
For them, it was like an expensive thing.
link |
They never actually lived in Manhattan.
link |
They always lived in New Jersey or Long Island,
link |
had to commute in,
link |
so all they ever saw was the bridges and the tunnels,
link |
the expensive daily parking fees.
link |
They only saw the worst of New York,
link |
and despite my pleas for them to move into Manhattan,
link |
they never did, and so they hated it
link |
because when all you see of New York
link |
is the bridges and the tunnels
link |
and the parking garage, that's not a pleasant thing,
link |
so I understand where they're coming from,
link |
so then when COVID broke out,
link |
they wanted to move to Puerto Rico and work there.
link |
Now, Puerto Rico is a beautiful alternative to New York.
link |
In many ways, it has many advantages over New York.
link |
It's physically beautiful.
link |
The people are wonderful,
link |
and it's just a wonderful place to spend time.
link |
Freedom, low taxes, all those kinds of things
link |
that Puerto Rico stands for.
link |
It's Texas, on the other hand.
link |
I know everyone in the squad.
link |
It's a compromise, right?
link |
Texas is a compromise between those two.
link |
Actually, I must say that everyone on the squad,
link |
myself included, loves Texas.
link |
There's no question about that.
link |
I know Gordon loves it, Gary, Craig, Nicky,
link |
everyone who comes here just loves Texas.
link |
That is incontestable.
link |
Of course, in Texas, there's many great cities.
link |
Austin has always been one of my favorites.
link |
I love Dallas, I love Austin,
link |
and it has the advantages of better infrastructure
link |
as a place to train.
link |
It has a much higher population density
link |
so that you could get a larger number
link |
of prospective students and form a larger squad.
link |
It would definitely be a fantastic place to open up a gym.
link |
I couldn't give an answer off the top of my head.
link |
It would be a big move if we did make that move,
link |
but the basic idea would be very agreeable
link |
to everyone on the team, I will say that.
link |
Well, I'll just have to call on my Russian connections
link |
to threaten the right kind of people,
link |
and I definitely would love,
link |
the way you approach training,
link |
the way you approach the martial arts
link |
is something that I deeply admire
link |
as a scholar of these arts,
link |
so it would be amazing if you do come here,
link |
but either way, it'd be amazing to train together.
link |
Let me ask a big, ridiculous question.
link |
What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?
link |
We talked about at the beginning of the conversation
link |
about death and the fear of it.
link |
The other big question we ask about life is its meaning.
link |
Do you think there's a meaning to our existence here
link |
on this little spinning ball?
link |
That's, you've thrown some powerful questions.
link |
That's the most powerful.
link |
For most of human existence,
link |
the meaning of life was very, very simple, survival.
link |
The only thing that humans cared about was just surviving
link |
because it was so damn difficult
link |
for the early years of human existence on this Earth.
link |
If you look at ourselves as biological agents,
link |
everything about our body is set up for one mission,
link |
and that is survival.
link |
Every reflex we have, every element of our structure
link |
is just built up on the battle to survive.
link |
And then humans did something remarkable.
link |
They elevated themselves through the use of technology
link |
and social structure to the top of the food chain
link |
so that they went from extremely vulnerable.
link |
If you take a naked human being alone
link |
and put them in the Serengeti Plains in Africa,
link |
they're in some deep shit.
link |
If you look at a human being as a survival organ,
link |
just by itself, naked, they are among the most feeble
link |
at that task in the entire animal kingdom.
link |
You compare us with predatory animals.
link |
We are weak and soft and easily killed.
link |
But if you take that same human and put them in the Serengeti
link |
human and put them in a group,
link |
and you give them basic technology,
link |
steel, a spear, a knife,
link |
he goes from the bottom of the food chain
link |
to pretty much at the top.
link |
And so humanity found itself in a crisis
link |
that emerged out of its own success.
link |
For most of its history, their only interest
link |
was the battle to survive, and they did it.
link |
I don't know how they did it, but they did it.
link |
They got through ice ages, droughts, famines,
link |
disease, everything, and they found a way
link |
to get to the top of the food chain.
link |
And that's where it all got interesting.
link |
Because an organism whose only interest was in survival
link |
had for the first time in their history
link |
a more or less guaranteed survival.
link |
And so the big question now is, now what?
link |
There's no more danger.
link |
The average human being finds himself in a world now
link |
where there's almost zero danger from predatory animals,
link |
where getting a meal is the easiest thing ever,
link |
where getting to and from work is not problematic at all,
link |
where the majority of infectious diseases,
link |
medical complaints can be resolved
link |
in a hospital fairly easily.
link |
And so they start casting their mind around,
link |
okay, what do I do now?
link |
And so the minute mankind's existence
link |
became more or less guaranteed,
link |
the problem shift from survival to meaning.
link |
And we found ourselves grappling with a whole new issue
link |
that had never occurred to our ancient forefathers,
link |
but which now becomes one of the centerpieces
link |
of our modern lives.
link |
I mean, when you look at your own life,
link |
when you look back, you think, I did a hell of a good job.
link |
You know, Hunter S. Thompson has this line
link |
that I often think about,
link |
that life should not be a journey to the grave
link |
with the intention of arriving safely
link |
in a pretty and well preserved body,
link |
but rather to skid in roadside in a cloud of smoke,
link |
thoroughly used up, totally worn out,
link |
and loudly proclaiming, wow, what a ride.
link |
Which is the complete opposite of survival.
link |
Well, not complete opposite of survival,
link |
but basically embracing danger, embracing risk,
link |
going big, just living life to the fullest.
link |
So within that context,
link |
what would make you proud of a life well lived?
link |
When you look back, you, John Donahart,
link |
looking back at your life.
link |
First, I will address that question,
link |
but let's first look at why Hunter Thompson could say that.
link |
Why Hunter Thompson could say that?
link |
Because his life was more or less guaranteed and safe.
link |
If you look at animals in the animal kingdom,
link |
the pattern of their life is very simple.
link |
They take the least risk possible to secure their existence.
link |
Lions are powerful creatures, but when they go hunting,
link |
they typically go for the weakest animals they can kill
link |
because they don't want to take the risk
link |
of injuring themselves, knowing that if they do, they die.
link |
So the brute reality is the only people
link |
who can talk about having casual danger in their lives
link |
are those whose lives are guaranteed.
link |
And a fascinating small tangent,
link |
Hunter Thompson took his own life.
link |
So that seems like a deeply human thing, suicide.
link |
That's a fascinating question in itself.
link |
If you look at the number of suicides per year,
link |
it's a shocking, shocking statistic
link |
that gets almost no recognition.
link |
And yes, uniquely human.
link |
You don't, very, very few animals, you see,
link |
killing themselves because their whole thing
link |
And that humans paradoxically,
link |
when survival is more or less guaranteed,
link |
are killing themselves in vast numbers.
link |
It's usually linked back to the idea of meaning
link |
because it's so hard.
link |
It was hard to win the battle for survival,
link |
but it's 10 times harder to win the battle for meaning.
link |
When I think about it,
link |
first off, I'll say right from the bat,
link |
there's never going to be an agreed upon sense of meaning.
link |
As I said, there was one thing
link |
that our physical bodies agreed upon
link |
and which is hardwired biologically into us
link |
and that's survival.
link |
But once we got to a more or less guaranteed survival,
link |
then all bets were off.
link |
At that point, you just have to start
link |
listing your own criteria
link |
and what one person will describe as a meaningful life,
link |
another person will decry as meaningless or wasted.
link |
There's something terrible about the idea
link |
that we're sitting around waiting for meaning
link |
to show up on our doorstep.
link |
But what I find the best people do
link |
is they take charge of it
link |
and they look at their lives in a form of authorship
link |
where they see their life as a tale to be written
link |
and they do their best to write that tale
link |
and put as much control over the direction of the story
link |
In the end, we all have to just try and write our own story.
link |
We all have our own interests.
link |
I try to bring in the sense that even though I'm an atheist,
link |
I don't believe that we go on to live after this.
link |
I believe that there's a possibility of God in an afterlife.
link |
I don't say it's impossible,
link |
but in order for me to believe that they exist,
link |
I'd have to see better evidence than I see currently.
link |
Nonetheless, I do believe that there is a great value
link |
in the idea of living for something bigger than yourself.
link |
The moment you see yourself as the be all
link |
and end all of your existence,
link |
you're in for a meaningless life
link |
and nothing will ever satisfy you.
link |
You can have all the money in the world.
link |
You can have all the power in the world.
link |
You'll be empty inside.
link |
I do believe that humans have a deep and abiding need
link |
to follow the interests of a group
link |
bigger than themselves as an individual.
link |
Is it an answer to the meaning of life?
link |
Nope, because eventually that group will itself die out.
link |
So there's a sense in which it just plays
link |
a kind of delaying game.
link |
But I do believe that in order to live a happy life,
link |
meaning is a central part of that.
link |
And the deepest sense of meaning,
link |
not a fully complete answer, but a better answer
link |
than most people give is to find something
link |
which hopefully does very little harm
link |
to the people around you and mostly benefits them,
link |
which enables you to become part of a community
link |
and to live, as I said,
link |
for something larger than you as an individual.
link |
If there is such a thing as a perfect conversation,
link |
it would be a conversation on death, meaning, and robots
link |
with the great John Donoher.
link |
John, I've been a fan.
link |
It's a huge honor that you would waste all your time today.
link |
Thank you so much for talking today.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation
link |
with John Donoher, and thank you to Onnit,
link |
SimplySafe, Indeed, and Linode.
link |
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
link |
And now let me leave you some words
link |
from John Donoher himself.
link |
In fighting and competition, the objective is victory.
link |
In training, the objective is skill development.
link |
Do not confuse them.
link |
As such, one of the best ways to train
link |
is to identify the strengths of your various partners
link |
and regularly expose yourself to those strengths.
link |
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.