John Danaher: The Path to Mastery in Jiu Jitsu, Grappling, Judo, and MMA

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with John Donaher,

00:00:02.800 | widely acknowledged as one of the greatest coaches

00:00:06.000 | and minds in the martial arts world,

00:00:08.720 | having coached many champions in jiu-jitsu,

00:00:11.320 | submission grappling, and MMA,

00:00:13.520 | including Gordon Ryan, Gary Tonin, Nick Rodriguez,

00:00:18.000 | Craig Jones, Nicky Ryan, Chris Weidman, and George St. Pierre.

00:00:23.000 | Quick mention of our sponsors,

00:00:25.120 | Onnit, Simply Safe, Indeed, and Linode.

00:00:28.960 | Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

00:00:32.280 | As a side note, let me say that John is a scholar

00:00:35.200 | of not just jiu-jitsu, but judo, wrestling,

00:00:38.160 | Muay Thai, boxing, MMA, and outside of that,

00:00:42.720 | topics of history, psychology, philosophy,

00:00:46.040 | and even artificial intelligence,

00:00:48.200 | as you will hear in this conversation.

00:00:50.640 | After this chat, I started to entertain the possibility

00:00:54.520 | of returning back to competition as a black belt,

00:00:57.160 | maybe even training with John and his team for a few weeks,

00:01:00.320 | leading up to the competition.

00:01:02.200 | For a recreational practitioner, such as myself,

00:01:05.840 | the value of training and competing in jiu-jitsu

00:01:08.320 | is that it is one of the best ways to get humbled.

00:01:11.600 | To me, keeping the ego in check is essential

00:01:14.600 | for a productive and happy life.

00:01:17.360 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast,

00:01:20.000 | and here is my conversation with John Donaher.

00:01:23.560 | Are you afraid of death?

00:01:26.760 | - I start with an easy question.

00:01:29.200 | - There's no warmup, that's it?

00:01:30.400 | - No warmup. - We're straight up,

00:01:31.640 | no jumping jacks?

00:01:32.720 | - Let's break that down into two questions.

00:01:37.120 | I'm a human being, and like any human being,

00:01:40.640 | I'm biologically programmed to be terrified of death.

00:01:45.400 | Every physical element in our bodies

00:01:49.360 | is designed to keep us away from death.

00:01:52.200 | I'm no different from anyone else in that regard.

00:01:54.840 | If you throw me from the top of the Empire State Building,

00:01:58.280 | I'm gonna scream all the way down to the concrete.

00:02:01.200 | If you wave a loaded firearm in my face,

00:02:03.720 | I'm gonna flinch away in horror

00:02:05.400 | the same way anyone else would.

00:02:07.080 | So in that first sense of, are you afraid of death,

00:02:13.320 | my body is terrified of injury leading to death

00:02:18.720 | the same way any other human being would.

00:02:21.680 | - So when death is imminent, there's a terror that--

00:02:24.360 | - Yeah, I go through the same adrenaline dumps

00:02:26.560 | that you would go through.

00:02:27.860 | But on the other hand,

00:02:29.960 | you're also asking a much deeper question,

00:02:31.680 | which is presumably, are you afraid of non-existence?

00:02:35.560 | What comes after your physical death?

00:02:37.520 | And that's the more interesting question.

00:02:39.520 | No, I should start right by saying from the start,

00:02:45.520 | I'm a materialist.

00:02:48.400 | I don't believe that we have an immortal soul.

00:02:50.200 | I don't believe there's a life after our physical death.

00:02:54.160 | In this sense, from someone who starts

00:02:56.240 | from that point of view,

00:02:57.400 | you have to understand that everyone has two deaths.

00:03:03.400 | We always talk about our death as though there was only one,

00:03:08.040 | but we all have two deaths.

00:03:09.780 | There was a time before you were born when you were dead.

00:03:12.780 | You weren't afraid of that period of non-existence.

00:03:21.680 | You don't even think about it.

00:03:24.080 | So why would you be afraid

00:03:25.760 | of your second period of non-existence?

00:03:28.440 | You came from non-existence.

00:03:30.040 | You're gonna go back into it.

00:03:31.560 | You weren't afraid of the first.

00:03:33.320 | Why are you somehow afraid of the second?

00:03:35.700 | So it doesn't really make sense to me

00:03:37.920 | as to why people would be afraid of non-existence.

00:03:41.000 | You dealt with it fine the first time.

00:03:43.240 | Deal with it the second time.

00:03:44.720 | - But your mind didn't exist for the first death.

00:03:47.720 | - And it won't exist after you die either.

00:03:50.400 | - But it does exist now enough to comprehend

00:03:53.240 | that there's this thing that you know nothing about

00:03:56.280 | that's coming, which is non-existence.

00:03:58.240 | - Actually, you do know about it

00:03:59.400 | because you know what it was like before you were born.

00:04:01.560 | It was just nothing.

00:04:03.160 | Every time you go to sleep at night,

00:04:05.280 | you get a sneak preview of death.

00:04:06.880 | It's just this kind of nothing happens.

00:04:10.840 | You wake up in the morning, you're alive again.

00:04:13.280 | - But it's not about the sleeping.

00:04:15.520 | It's about the falling asleep.

00:04:17.640 | And every night when you fall asleep,

00:04:20.560 | you assume you're going to wake up.

00:04:22.760 | Here you know you're not waking up.

00:04:25.760 | And the knowledge of that--

00:04:26.600 | - But there's a whole step from that

00:04:28.200 | to the idea of fearing it.

00:04:29.920 | I'm fully aware that there's gonna be a time

00:04:32.400 | I don't wake up.

00:04:33.480 | But are you gonna be afraid of it?

00:04:34.800 | Is there some mortal terror you have of this?

00:04:36.680 | No, you didn't have it before.

00:04:38.080 | You don't have it when you sleep.

00:04:40.120 | Going from the fact that you know you won't wake up

00:04:43.120 | to terror is two different things.

00:04:45.080 | That's an extra step.

00:04:46.480 | And at that point, you're making a choice at that point.

00:04:50.840 | - What about what some people in this context

00:04:54.040 | we might call the third death,

00:04:55.800 | which is when everybody forgets,

00:05:00.800 | the entirety of consciousness in the universe

00:05:03.200 | forgets that you've ever existed,

00:05:04.720 | that John Donahuer ever existed.

00:05:06.760 | - It's almost like a cosmic death.

00:05:09.880 | It's like everything goes.

00:05:11.400 | - Not just, I would say it's like knowledge.

00:05:15.560 | The history books forget about who you are

00:05:17.800 | because the history books--

00:05:19.000 | - This is inevitable, by the way.

00:05:20.280 | We're all very, very small players in a very big game.

00:05:23.840 | And inevitably, we're all going to go at some point.

00:05:27.680 | - Yeah, but doesn't, to your--

00:05:31.640 | - It's disappointing, of course.

00:05:33.240 | (Lex laughing)

00:05:34.800 | But it's not even, it would be arrogant to say

00:05:38.320 | I'm disappointed in the idea that I will disappear.

00:05:40.560 | But there's far greater things than me that will disappear.

00:05:43.160 | I mean, it's crushing to think that there's gonna come

00:05:48.160 | a time where no one will ever hear

00:05:49.840 | Beethoven's symphonies again,

00:05:51.920 | that the mysteries of the pharaohs will be lost

00:05:54.880 | and no one will even comprehend that they once existed.

00:05:57.960 | Humanity has come up with so many amazing things

00:06:01.440 | over its existence.

00:06:02.680 | And to think that one day this is just all happening

00:06:06.560 | on a tiny speck in a distant corner of a very small galaxy

00:06:11.280 | and among millions of galaxies,

00:06:13.240 | that this is all for nothing.

00:06:15.040 | Okay, I can understand.

00:06:16.080 | There's a kind of dread that comes with this.

00:06:18.320 | But there's also a sense in which the moment you're born

00:06:22.800 | and the moment you can think about these things,

00:06:24.480 | you know this is your inevitable fate.

00:06:26.840 | - Is it so inevitable?

00:06:28.000 | So if we look at, we're in Austin

00:06:30.280 | and there's a guy named Elon Musk.

00:06:32.440 | And he's hoping, in fact, that is the drive

00:06:35.160 | behind many of his passions,

00:06:36.800 | is the human beings becoming multi-planetary species

00:06:40.720 | and expanding out, exploring and colonizing

00:06:44.200 | the solar system, the galaxy,

00:06:46.680 | and maybe the rest of the universe.

00:06:48.880 | Is that something that fills you with excitement?

00:06:52.200 | - As a project, it's very exciting.

00:06:54.220 | The whole, I mean, we all grew up with science fiction,

00:06:59.800 | the idea of exploration the same way human beings

00:07:04.800 | in earlier centuries were thrilled

00:07:07.120 | with the idea of discovering a new world,

00:07:08.760 | you know, America or some other part of the world

00:07:10.920 | that they sail to and come back.

00:07:13.560 | But now instead of sailing oceans,

00:07:15.280 | you're sailing solar systems and ultimately even further.

00:07:20.280 | So of course that's exciting.

00:07:21.900 | But as far as relieving us from non-existence,

00:07:25.080 | it's just playing a delaying game

00:07:26.960 | because ultimately, even the universe itself,

00:07:30.040 | if the laws of thermodynamics are correct,

00:07:31.940 | will ultimately die.

00:07:33.320 | - Of course, we might not understand most of the physics

00:07:39.560 | and how the universe functions.

00:07:42.560 | You said laws of thermodynamics,

00:07:44.080 | but maybe that's just a tiny little fraction

00:07:46.960 | of what the universe actually is.

00:07:49.040 | Maybe there's multiple dimensions.

00:07:50.320 | Maybe there's multiple universes.

00:07:52.920 | Maybe the entirety of this experience,

00:07:55.480 | you know, there's guys like Donald Hoffman

00:07:57.360 | that think that all of this is just an illusion,

00:07:59.380 | that we don't, like human cognition and perception

00:08:03.700 | constructs a whole, it's like a video game

00:08:05.560 | that we construct that's very distant

00:08:07.040 | from the actual reality.

00:08:08.580 | And maybe one day we'll understand that reality.

00:08:10.640 | Maybe it'll be like the matrix kind of thing.

00:08:12.720 | So there's a lot of different possibilities here.

00:08:15.080 | And there's also a philosopher named Ernest Becker.

00:08:18.840 | I don't know if you know who that is.

00:08:20.200 | He wrote "Denial of Death" and his idea,

00:08:23.920 | he disagrees with you, but he's dead now,

00:08:25.960 | is that he thinks that the terror of death,

00:08:31.880 | the terror of the knowledge that we're going to die

00:08:35.380 | is within all of us and is in fact the driver

00:08:38.040 | behind most of the creativity that we do.

00:08:41.480 | Exploring out into the universe,

00:08:43.600 | but also you becoming one of the great scholars

00:08:47.840 | of the martial arts, the philosophers of fighting

00:08:52.560 | is because you're actually terrified of death.

00:08:55.480 | And you want to somehow permeate like your knowledge,

00:09:00.480 | your ideas, your essence to permeate human civilization

00:09:05.520 | so that even when your body dies, you live on.

00:09:09.600 | - I would agree with him insofar as death

00:09:14.160 | is the single greatest motivator for action.

00:09:18.080 | But going beyond that and saying that it's somehow terrifying

00:09:22.120 | that's an extra step on his part.

00:09:24.200 | And not everyone's gonna follow him on that step.

00:09:27.560 | I do believe that death is the single most important element

00:09:34.040 | in life that gives value to our days.

00:09:37.280 | If you think for example of a situation

00:09:40.920 | where a God came to you and gave you immortality,

00:09:44.340 | life would be very, very different for you.

00:09:49.360 | You're a talented research scientist,

00:09:53.020 | you work to a schedule, why?

00:09:56.720 | Because ultimately you know your life is finite

00:09:59.260 | and actually very finite.

00:10:02.560 | And could be even more so if fate plays its hand

00:10:05.800 | and you die an early death or what have you,

00:10:08.960 | we never know what's gonna happen tomorrow.

00:10:11.120 | As such, we get work done as soon as we can.

00:10:18.160 | The moment you gain immortality,

00:10:21.340 | you can always put every project off.

00:10:23.960 | You can always say, I don't need to do this today

00:10:25.960 | because I can do it four centuries from now.

00:10:30.120 | And as you extend artificially a human life,

00:10:33.320 | the motivation to get things done here and now

00:10:36.120 | and work industriously and excel fades away

00:10:40.320 | because you can always come back to the idea

00:10:42.720 | that you can do this in the future.

00:10:45.120 | And so what gives value to our days is ultimately death.

00:10:49.960 | And value, it's not the only reason behind value,

00:10:54.960 | but a huge part of what we consider value is scarcity.

00:10:59.520 | And death gives us scarcity of days.

00:11:02.120 | And is probably the single greatest motivator

00:11:04.660 | for almost every action we partake in.

00:11:08.240 | - It's kind of tragic and beautiful

00:11:10.280 | that what makes things amazing is that they end.

00:11:15.280 | - Yeah, I think it would actually be a terrible burden

00:11:22.480 | to be immortal.

00:11:27.240 | Life would be in many ways very hollow

00:11:29.120 | and meaningless, I think.

00:11:30.880 | People talk about death taking away the meaning of life,

00:11:34.160 | but I think immortality would have a very similar effect

00:11:37.440 | in a different direction.

00:11:38.720 | - So given this short life,

00:11:45.360 | we can think about jiu-jitsu,

00:11:48.360 | we can think about any kind of pursuit.

00:11:51.320 | What do you think makes a great life?

00:11:54.360 | Is it the highest peak of achievement?

00:11:59.120 | You think about like an Olympic gold medal,

00:12:03.120 | the highest level of performance,

00:12:05.200 | or is it the longevity of performance

00:12:08.560 | of doing many amazing things and doing it for a long time?

00:12:12.240 | I think the latter is kind of what we talk about

00:12:15.400 | in at least American society.

00:12:17.640 | We want people to be healthy, balanced,

00:12:22.640 | perform well for a long time.

00:12:25.360 | And then there's maybe like the gladiator ethic,

00:12:30.360 | which is the highest peak is what defines--

00:12:33.800 | - You asked an initial question,

00:12:35.440 | which what makes a great life?

00:12:37.600 | But then pointed towards two options,

00:12:40.600 | one of longevity versus degree of difficulty.

00:12:43.440 | There's gotta be a lot more than that, surely.

00:12:45.740 | I mean, think about, first of all,

00:12:50.960 | we have to understand from the start

00:12:52.360 | that there's never gonna be an agreed upon set of criteria

00:12:55.080 | for this is a great life from all perspective.

00:12:58.680 | If you look from the perspective of say Machiavelli,

00:13:01.720 | then Stalin lived a great life.

00:13:03.880 | He was highly successful at what he did.

00:13:07.000 | He started from nothing.

00:13:08.360 | So the degree of difficulty in what he did

00:13:10.480 | was extraordinarily high.

00:13:12.400 | He had massive impact upon world history.

00:13:15.800 | He oversaw the defeat of almost all of his major enemies.

00:13:20.240 | He lived to old age and died of natural causes.

00:13:23.640 | So from Machiavelli's point of view, he had a great life.

00:13:26.920 | If you ask a Ukrainian farmer in the 1930s

00:13:30.000 | whether he lived a great life,

00:13:31.080 | you get a very different answer.

00:13:32.680 | So everything's gonna come from what perspective

00:13:36.400 | you begin with this.

00:13:37.760 | You're going to look out at the world

00:13:39.080 | with a given point of view

00:13:40.080 | and you're gonna make your judgments.

00:13:41.240 | Was this a great life or was this a terrible life?

00:13:43.940 | Going back to your point, you were actually, I think,

00:13:49.000 | focusing the question on more in terms of

00:13:52.360 | great single performances versus longevity performances.

00:13:57.320 | - Yes.

00:13:58.520 | - Presumably this isn't really a question about

00:14:00.920 | what makes a great life then

00:14:03.360 | because there's so much more than that to a great life.

00:14:06.920 | - I don't know.

00:14:07.760 | I'm gonna push back on that.

00:14:08.840 | So I think the parallels are very much closer

00:14:11.440 | in that you're making them seem.

00:14:13.080 | I think, let's compare Stalin.

00:14:14.920 | Stalin is an example of somebody who held power,

00:14:18.440 | considered by many to be one of the most powerful men ever.

00:14:22.080 | He held power for 30 years.

00:14:24.140 | So that's what I'm referring to, longevity.

00:14:26.120 | And then there's a few people,

00:14:27.920 | I wish my knowledge of history was better,

00:14:31.140 | but people who fought a few great battles

00:14:34.880 | and they did not maintain power.

00:14:37.840 | - Let's contrast here, for example, Alexander the Great

00:14:40.680 | who died at 33 from probably unnatural causes.

00:14:46.240 | Had around four to five truly defining battles in his life

00:14:51.240 | which responsible for the lion's share of his achievements

00:14:58.880 | and burned very bright, but didn't burn long.

00:15:04.520 | Stalin on the other hand started from nothing

00:15:07.360 | and quietly methodically worked his way

00:15:09.560 | through the revolutionary phase

00:15:10.960 | and gained increasing amounts of power.

00:15:14.420 | And as you said, went all the way

00:15:17.920 | to the end of his career.

00:15:20.280 | Yeah, there's definitely something to be said for longevity.

00:15:25.160 | But as to which one is greater than the other,

00:15:29.880 | you can't give a definition or a set of criteria

00:15:34.880 | which will definitively say this is better than that.

00:15:39.560 | But when you look, ultimately we look at Alexander is great,

00:15:42.000 | but in a different way.

00:15:42.840 | When we look at Stalin, I don't think many people

00:15:45.020 | would say Stalin was a great person,

00:15:46.220 | but from the Machiavellian point of view,

00:15:48.320 | say he was great also.

00:15:53.340 | - But when you think about beautiful creations

00:15:56.380 | done by human beings in the space of say martial arts,

00:16:00.700 | in the space of sport, what inspires you?

00:16:05.260 | The peak of performance?

00:16:06.900 | - I see where you're coming from, Lex.

00:16:08.460 | It's a great question.

00:16:10.180 | For me, it always comes down to degree of difficulty.

00:16:13.960 | But things are difficult in different ways.

00:16:16.100 | A single flawless performance in youth

00:16:22.320 | is still that wins a gold medal.

00:16:25.260 | Let's say for example, Nadia Comaneci won the Olympic

00:16:30.020 | gold medal in gymnastics,

00:16:31.240 | the first person ever to get a perfect score.

00:16:34.160 | If she had disappeared after that,

00:16:36.420 | we would still remember that as an incredible moment.

00:16:39.100 | And the degree of difficulty to get a perfect score

00:16:42.300 | in Olympic gymnastics is just off the charts.

00:16:46.000 | And contrast that with someone who went to four Olympics

00:16:50.240 | and got four silver medals.

00:16:52.060 | I mean, they're both incredible achievements.

00:16:53.940 | They're just different.

00:16:55.100 | The attributes that lead to longevity

00:16:58.380 | typically tend to conflict with the attributes

00:17:01.780 | that bring a powerful single performance.

00:17:05.260 | One is all about focus on a particular event.

00:17:08.560 | The other is on spreading your resources over time.

00:17:13.560 | Both present tremendous difficulties.

00:17:16.100 | There's no need to say one is better than the other.

00:17:19.440 | - There's also just, for me personally,

00:17:21.700 | the stories of somebody who truly struggled

00:17:26.700 | are the most powerful.

00:17:29.100 | I know a bunch of people don't necessarily agree

00:17:31.420 | 'cause you said perfection.

00:17:33.620 | Perfection is kind of the antithesis of struggle.

00:17:37.140 | But I look at somebody, okay, in my own life,

00:17:39.500 | somebody I'm a fan of, I'm a huge fan of yours.

00:17:42.840 | I'm trying not to be nervous here.

00:17:44.000 | But somebody I'm a fan of in the Judo world

00:17:47.100 | is Travis Stevens.

00:17:49.040 | - He's a remarkable fellow, by the way.

00:17:51.000 | - Remarkable human being.

00:17:52.480 | Insane in the best kinds of ways.

00:17:54.880 | I think I started Judo.

00:17:56.560 | I really started martial arts.

00:17:59.000 | I wrestled, if you consider those martial arts.

00:18:00.960 | That's been in my blood.

00:18:03.480 | I'm Russian, so.

00:18:04.780 | But beyond that, the whole pajama thing we wear, the gi,

00:18:08.820 | I started by watching Travis in 2008 Olympics.

00:18:12.740 | - Was that accidental?

00:18:14.260 | Did you know Travis prior to watching him?

00:18:16.060 | - No, no, no.

00:18:16.900 | I just tuned in.

00:18:17.740 | - Now, that's an unusual choice.

00:18:19.380 | It was just random?

00:18:20.220 | You just tuned in and you saw Travis Stevens?

00:18:22.300 | - I tuned into the Olympics

00:18:23.820 | and I was wondering what Judo is.

00:18:26.180 | And then I started watching.

00:18:29.060 | We're all proud of our countries and so on.

00:18:32.740 | So I started watching.

00:18:33.740 | He was, I think, the only American in the Olympics for Judo.

00:18:38.740 | Maybe the, so this Kayla Harrison was 2012.

00:18:43.620 | And Rhonda was there too.

00:18:45.020 | So I watched Rhonda and Travis.

00:18:47.360 | But obviously, sort of, I was focused on somebody

00:18:51.500 | who also weighed the same as I did.

00:18:53.060 | So there was a kind of, I think, 81 kilograms.

00:18:57.560 | So there's a connection,

00:18:58.780 | but also there's an intensity to him.

00:19:00.660 | Like, he would get angry at his own failures

00:19:05.660 | and he would just refuse to quit.

00:19:07.860 | It's that kind of Dan Gable mentality.

00:19:10.580 | I just, that was inspiring to me, that he's the underdog.

00:19:14.100 | And the way people talk about him, the commentators,

00:19:17.620 | that it was an unlikely person to do well, right?

00:19:21.400 | And I, the FU attitude behind that,

00:19:25.400 | saying, "No, I'm gonna still win gold."

00:19:27.260 | Obviously, he didn't do well in 2008,

00:19:29.260 | but that was somehow inspiring.

00:19:33.380 | And I just remember he pulled me in,

00:19:36.460 | but then I started to see this sport,

00:19:39.500 | I guess you can call it,

00:19:40.820 | of effortlessly dominating your opponent in, like, throwing.

00:19:47.140 | 'Cause to me, wrestling was like a grind.

00:19:52.240 | You kind of control, you slowly just break your opponent.

00:19:56.920 | The idea that you could, with like a foot sweep,

00:20:01.380 | was fascinating to me.

00:20:02.900 | That just because of timing,

00:20:06.100 | you can take these like monsters, giant people,

00:20:10.500 | like incredible athletes, and just smash them.

00:20:14.660 | It just doesn't, there was no struggle to it.

00:20:18.180 | It was always like a look of surprise.

00:20:19.980 | Judo, dominance in judo has a look of,

00:20:23.580 | like the other person's like, "What just happened?"

00:20:26.340 | - Yes.

00:20:27.180 | - This is very different from wrestling.

00:20:28.560 | - It's built into the rule structure, too.

00:20:30.640 | The whole idea of an Ippon,

00:20:32.040 | of a match being over in an instant.

00:20:34.280 | And that creates a thrilling spectator sport.

00:20:39.020 | Because you can, as you say,

00:20:41.080 | with Ashiwaza, the foot sweeps,

00:20:42.980 | you can take someone out who's heavily favored.

00:20:47.720 | And if you're not, judo is the most unforgiving

00:20:51.420 | of all the grappling sports.

00:20:53.480 | If you have a lapse of concentration for half a second,

00:20:56.380 | it's done, it's over.

00:20:59.220 | If those guys get a grip on each other,

00:21:01.160 | any one of them can throw the other.

00:21:04.660 | When you see someone like Nomura,

00:21:11.060 | who won three Olympic gold medals,

00:21:14.220 | to win across three Olympics,

00:21:17.500 | and that's an incredible achievement,

00:21:19.460 | given how many ways there are to lose

00:21:21.520 | in the standing position in judo,

00:21:22.900 | and how unforgiving it is as a sport,

00:21:25.660 | it shows an incredible level of dominance.

00:21:28.700 | - And I think when I was also introduced at that time

00:21:32.700 | to the idea, just like in judo,

00:21:36.420 | I think in jiu-jitsu is the same,

00:21:38.180 | a lot of sports is probably the same,

00:21:40.660 | is there's ways to win that include kind of,

00:21:44.160 | if I were to use a bad term, stalling.

00:21:48.140 | Which is like, use strategy to slow down,

00:21:51.320 | to destroy all the weapons your opponent has,

00:21:53.640 | and just to wait it out.

00:21:55.280 | To sort of break your opponent by,

00:21:58.460 | yeah, shutting down all their weapons,

00:22:00.200 | but not using any of your own.

00:22:01.880 | - Yes.

00:22:02.720 | - And now, Travis was always going for,

00:22:06.520 | he's of course really good at gripping,

00:22:09.020 | and can do that whole game,

00:22:10.320 | but he was going for the big throws.

00:22:12.920 | And he was almost getting frustrated

00:22:15.560 | by a lot of the opponents.

00:22:17.720 | I remember Ola Bischoff, I think.

00:22:21.680 | - Yes, from Germany.

00:22:23.640 | - From Germany.

00:22:24.480 | - Very talented.

00:22:25.320 | - Very incredible.

00:22:26.340 | I know he's very good at doing big throws,

00:22:28.600 | and he's incredible jidoka,

00:22:29.840 | but he was also incredible at just frustrating his opponents

00:22:33.760 | with gripping and strategy and so on.

00:22:36.080 | And I just remember feeling the pain of this person,

00:22:39.680 | like Travis, who went through,

00:22:42.120 | just, he broke like every part of his body.

00:22:44.400 | He went through so many injuries.

00:22:46.520 | Just this person who dedicated his entire life

00:22:50.040 | to this moment in 2008, and then 2012, and 2016,

00:22:55.040 | just gave everything.

00:22:57.160 | You could see it in his face,

00:22:58.660 | that his weapons are being shut down,

00:23:04.520 | and he's still pushing forward.

00:23:06.120 | He's still with that, both the frustration and the power.

00:23:09.600 | I mean, the kind of throw he does,

00:23:12.620 | is his main one, I think, is the standing.

00:23:15.720 | It's called Seinagi.

00:23:16.920 | - Ippon Seinagi.

00:23:17.760 | - Ippon Seinagi.

00:23:18.600 | But that was the other thing,

00:23:20.240 | is like the techniques he used was these big throws,

00:23:25.240 | that there's something to me about the Seinagi.

00:23:28.080 | I fell in love with that throw.

00:23:30.180 | That's become my main throw, standing Seinagi.

00:23:34.480 | That is like-

00:23:35.440 | - Why do you favor the standing variation?

00:23:37.280 | Because of the amplitude?

00:23:38.520 | You get a more powerful wind up.

00:23:41.920 | - Yeah, power.

00:23:43.400 | It's like-

00:23:44.240 | - Are you a fan of Koga?

00:23:45.400 | - Yes.

00:23:46.240 | So Koga and Travis opened up my-

00:23:51.200 | - Travis uses the same gripping patterns

00:23:54.640 | for Seinagi as Koga does.

00:23:55.840 | - All the same, and the way he uses his hips and turns.

00:23:59.640 | And I remember going to my judo club,

00:24:01.960 | and other judo clubs, and they were all saying,

00:24:05.120 | "This is the wrong way to do it.

00:24:07.160 | "The way Travis does it is the wrong way to do it."

00:24:08.960 | And I remember-

00:24:09.800 | - I've always been amazed by this, by the way.

00:24:11.240 | I don't mean to cut you off,

00:24:12.520 | but I could literally feel 20 hours of reproductions

00:24:17.520 | of people who will tell me that either my students

00:24:24.200 | or other great world champions are doing things wrong.

00:24:29.280 | And I'm looking at them, and I'm like,

00:24:35.040 | "Who would I rather trust here in their judgment?"

00:24:39.400 | Koga, who was one of the greatest throwers of all time,

00:24:44.320 | or you, a recreational guy who couldn't throw my grandmother.

00:24:50.480 | - Yes.

00:24:52.440 | - I'm supposed to take your word over his.

00:24:56.760 | Well, don't listen to what people say.

00:25:00.640 | I'm gonna give you a piece of advice here.

00:25:02.520 | Watch what the best people do, okay?

00:25:06.040 | That's how you get superior athletic performance.

00:25:09.240 | I'm gonna say that again.

00:25:11.160 | Don't listen to what people say.

00:25:13.040 | Watch what they do, particularly under the stress

00:25:16.280 | of high-level competition,

00:25:17.440 | because that's when you see their real game,

00:25:19.560 | what they really do under pressure.

00:25:22.280 | Okay, and if you can emulate that,

00:25:24.200 | you're gonna be very successful.

00:25:26.000 | - I guess what I was frustrated with, to your point,

00:25:29.720 | is that the argument against Koga is,

00:25:33.920 | he has a very specific body type,

00:25:37.040 | and he figured out something that worked for him.

00:25:39.560 | The statement is, that might not be applicable to you,

00:25:45.840 | or to the general public of judo players

00:25:49.440 | that wanna succeed.

00:25:51.200 | That, by the way, at the shallow level, might be true.

00:25:55.720 | Might be true.

00:25:57.240 | The point is, there might be a body of knowledge

00:26:00.240 | that's yet to be discovered and explored

00:26:03.040 | that Koga opened up,

00:26:05.440 | that I wanted to understand why his technique worked.

00:26:10.160 | It made no sense to me, that with a single foot,

00:26:12.640 | like the way you turn the hip,

00:26:14.400 | the single foot that steps in, why does that work?

00:26:17.680 | Because it was actually very difficult to make work,

00:26:20.680 | for me, as a white belt, in the very beginning.

00:26:23.360 | It doesn't make sense.

00:26:24.720 | Like, people just, they don't get loaded up onto your hip.

00:26:28.240 | Anyway, for people who don't watch Koga highlights,

00:26:30.920 | watch Travis Stevens highlights,

00:26:32.840 | but the details of the technique don't make sense,

00:26:36.880 | but when mastered, it feels like

00:26:40.320 | there's something fundamental there

00:26:42.360 | that hasn't been explored yet.

00:26:44.080 | It's like Koga and Travis made me think

00:26:48.520 | that we don't know most of the body mechanics

00:26:53.440 | involved in dominance in judo.

00:26:55.800 | Like, we just kind of found a few pockets

00:26:58.040 | that work really well.

00:26:59.000 | The uchimata, there's these different throws,

00:27:01.320 | osoto gari, I wonder if there's like totally cool new things

00:27:05.120 | that we haven't discovered,

00:27:06.160 | and that's saying I gave a little peek,

00:27:07.960 | because there's very few people that I'm aware of

00:27:10.960 | that do it the way Travis and Koga did.

00:27:13.840 | - May I ask you a question?

00:27:15.320 | - Yes.

00:27:16.160 | - The choice of standing seoi nage,

00:27:20.520 | I should say this for your listeners,

00:27:23.600 | they're probably thinking,

00:27:24.440 | what the hell are these two guys talking about?

00:27:26.800 | Seoi nage is one of the more high percentage throws

00:27:30.160 | in the Olympic sport of judo.

00:27:31.600 | Probably uchimata is probably number one,

00:27:36.280 | and variations of seoi nage would be

00:27:39.120 | in the top five for sure.

00:27:40.640 | The basic choice you have in modern competition

00:27:44.680 | is the more difficult standing seoi nage,

00:27:47.880 | where you literally are up on your feet

00:27:49.960 | and you perform a shoulder throw

00:27:52.320 | that takes your opponent over

00:27:53.640 | from a full standing position.

00:27:55.680 | The most popular form of seoi nage

00:27:59.240 | in modern competition by a landslide

00:28:01.080 | is not the standing version.

00:28:02.440 | It's a drop seoi nage where you go down to your knees.

00:28:05.480 | This means you have a much easier time

00:28:08.480 | getting underneath your opponent's central gravity.

00:28:10.440 | The defining feature of any seoi nage

00:28:12.480 | is getting underneath your opponent's central gravity

00:28:14.760 | and lifting them.

00:28:15.600 | The seoi literally means to lift and carry.

00:28:18.440 | Why did you choose the more difficult version?

00:28:23.520 | What was your motivation?

00:28:24.720 | You know, you're a smart kid,

00:28:26.880 | you know right from the start

00:28:28.680 | that for every standing seoi nage,

00:28:30.320 | there's 20 drop seoi nage in modern competition.

00:28:32.640 | One is obviously more high percentage.

00:28:34.840 | One obviously works for a wider variety of body types.

00:28:39.320 | The number of people who are successful

00:28:41.280 | with standing seoi nage is dramatically lower.

00:28:43.840 | And it appears to be a move which is completely absent

00:28:47.600 | in the heavyweight divisions

00:28:49.160 | and rarely seen in the lightweight divisions.

00:28:53.320 | Why, what was the motivation?

00:28:56.880 | Why did you willingly adopt the less high percentage

00:29:00.080 | over the more high percentage? - This would be

00:29:01.960 | very interesting.

00:29:03.360 | I would love you to break it apart

00:29:06.480 | because I apply the same kind of thinking

00:29:09.280 | to basically everything.

00:29:10.400 | I mentioned to you offline,

00:29:11.480 | there's these Boston Dynamics spot robots.

00:29:14.960 | When I first met Spot, I fell in love.

00:29:17.240 | I don't understand what exactly,

00:29:20.600 | but there's magic there.

00:29:22.720 | And I just got excited by it.

00:29:24.600 | And that fire burns.

00:29:26.440 | I wanna work with these robots.

00:29:27.680 | I wanna work with robots.

00:29:29.640 | I want to, I felt like there's something special there

00:29:33.600 | that I could build something interesting with,

00:29:36.480 | create something interesting with.

00:29:38.120 | In the same way with the standing seoi nage

00:29:41.280 | from Koga and Travis, I just fell in love

00:29:44.080 | with that technique.

00:29:44.920 | Just even watching, I didn't even know

00:29:46.160 | what the hell to do with it.

00:29:47.800 | - Was it aesthetic?

00:29:49.560 | The standing seoi nage is more beautiful in execution.

00:29:51.960 | There's no question.

00:29:52.880 | - In my own, we're talking about love here, right?

00:29:57.880 | In my own definition of aesthetic,

00:30:00.880 | yes, it's not just beauty 'cause you could argue

00:30:03.400 | there's more elegance, sort of uchimata

00:30:05.520 | is very beautiful and effortless.

00:30:07.320 | I love something about the dominance of it.

00:30:11.800 | I love the idea in sport of two people

00:30:16.800 | that are the best in the world

00:30:19.840 | and one of them dominating the other.

00:30:23.120 | And to me, the standing seoi nage,

00:30:25.960 | you're lifted off your feet.

00:30:27.880 | And especially when it's done perfectly

00:30:31.800 | and with really strong resistance from the other person,

00:30:37.240 | it results in a big slam.

00:30:40.160 | And that was like beautiful to me.

00:30:41.880 | That's the Alexander Kurelin, like big pickups.

00:30:45.600 | I love that.

00:30:46.720 | - It's interesting, you're correct.

00:30:49.480 | Insofar as you're not just going with aesthetic

00:30:52.240 | and the sense of beauty, but also,

00:30:54.840 | but you are making, as it were, value judgments

00:30:59.240 | about the throw.

00:31:00.160 | And that's fascinating to me

00:31:01.880 | because there's two elements to any grappling sport.

00:31:09.160 | I'm always insistent upon the idea

00:31:12.680 | that jiu-jitsu is both an art and a science.

00:31:15.880 | Okay, it has scientific elements

00:31:17.520 | insofar as it works according to the laws of physics

00:31:20.080 | and lever and fulcrum, et cetera, et cetera.

00:31:22.280 | But it also has an aesthetic element

00:31:28.000 | insofar as you're making choices with technique.

00:31:31.200 | You're expressing who you are as a person.

00:31:33.680 | You have 10,000 different variations of moves you could use,

00:31:37.680 | but you're specifically choosing these.

00:31:39.760 | That's an element of choice and self-expression on your part.

00:31:42.760 | And insofar as that is true,

00:31:44.160 | combat sports are not just a science,

00:31:45.920 | but they're also an art.

00:31:47.320 | So most combat sports have this sense

00:31:49.800 | which they have the features of both an art and a science.

00:31:53.160 | And it's not just about high percentage in your case.

00:31:58.160 | I mean, me personally, I'm obsessed with percentages.

00:32:02.240 | What are the ways to make you win?

00:32:03.400 | - That's the science part.

00:32:04.360 | - Yeah, but that's also, choice is involved.

00:32:07.400 | Yeah, but there is an undeniably aesthetic element

00:32:14.520 | to martial arts where you, as it were,

00:32:17.520 | express who you are as a person

00:32:20.640 | in terms of the techniques you're ultimately going to choose.

00:32:23.240 | - Does that get in the way?

00:32:24.720 | Do you allow yourself to enjoy

00:32:26.720 | the aesthetic beauty of a technique?

00:32:28.600 | - Of course, yeah.

00:32:29.520 | When martial arts are done well,

00:32:32.940 | it's the most beautiful sport in the world.

00:32:35.200 | Okay, when it's done poorly, it's the ugliest.

00:32:37.440 | But a beautifully applied submission hold,

00:32:42.880 | a perfect throw, a superbly set up takedown

00:32:47.320 | are among the most difficult techniques

00:32:50.480 | they execute in all of sports.

00:32:51.860 | And when they're done well, they're magic to observe.

00:32:54.860 | - But do you prefer certain techniques over others

00:32:57.460 | because of their, like for example, I'll tell you,

00:33:00.880 | for me, chokes of all sorts, with the gi, without the gi,

00:33:04.760 | probably with the gi is the most beautiful to me personally.

00:33:10.720 | - I value them above all others.

00:33:13.080 | People mostly associate myself and my students

00:33:16.720 | with leg locking.

00:33:17.640 | They're usually rather surprised to learn

00:33:19.320 | that I actually value strangleholds far above leg locks.

00:33:23.040 | But not for aesthetic reasons, for effectiveness.

00:33:28.520 | We can talk about that later if you wish.

00:33:30.660 | - Well, let's step back.

00:33:32.100 | - Sorry, we drifted awfully far off topic then.

00:33:36.400 | - I think this is beautiful.

00:33:38.920 | - We drifted along the river of life and martial arts.

00:33:43.320 | Can you explain the fundamentals of jiu-jitsu?

00:33:46.280 | - Yes, if I couldn't, I wouldn't be much of a coach.

00:33:48.960 | Jiu-jitsu is an art and science

00:33:55.240 | which looks to use a combination

00:33:59.320 | of tactical and mechanical advantage

00:34:03.260 | to focus a very high percentage of my strength

00:34:07.120 | against a very low percentage of my opponent's strength

00:34:11.280 | at a critical point on their body

00:34:13.720 | such that if I were to exert my strength

00:34:15.960 | upon that critical point,

00:34:17.440 | they could no longer continue to fight.

00:34:19.440 | - Well, that's about weapons and defenses.

00:34:26.640 | But then, is there something more to be said

00:34:30.880 | about the set of tools that we're talking about?

00:34:33.960 | - That's where the art comes in

00:34:35.280 | because ultimately, you have a set of choices

00:34:38.040 | and those choices that you make

00:34:39.560 | will be an act of self-expression on your part.

00:34:42.280 | Some will prefer this, some will prefer that.

00:34:46.140 | That's where you come in as an individual.

00:34:48.360 | - That's an overall definition of jiu-jitsu,

00:34:50.560 | of being a set of choices

00:34:53.560 | that where you're using the things you're powerful in

00:35:00.480 | versus the things your opponent is weak in.

00:35:04.560 | - No, I was only talking about percentages of body strength.

00:35:07.720 | If I have, for example, let's say we have two athletes,

00:35:12.040 | athlete A and athlete B.

00:35:13.920 | Athlete A has 100 units of strength,

00:35:17.000 | however we define that overall.

00:35:18.900 | Athlete B has 50.

00:35:20.920 | Okay, so ostensibly, athlete A is twice as strong

00:35:24.400 | as athlete B.

00:35:25.380 | But athlete B can maneuver his body

00:35:29.400 | into a set of positions focused around a critical point,

00:35:34.360 | this opponent's body,

00:35:36.000 | where he can apply 40 units of strength

00:35:38.840 | out of his total of 50.

00:35:40.280 | His opponent can only defend with 20 units of strength

00:35:44.740 | out of his total of 100.

00:35:46.960 | You have now completely reversed the strength discrepancy.

00:35:51.680 | Originally, athlete A was twice as strong as B.

00:35:54.660 | Now, on that one localized point,

00:35:56.840 | the knee, the elbow, the neck,

00:35:59.080 | B is now twice as strong as A.

00:36:01.060 | Under those circumstances, B should win.

00:36:04.540 | - I guess what I'm trying to get at,

00:36:07.560 | by the way, that's really beautifully said,

00:36:10.500 | is what you just said could be applied to other games,

00:36:15.500 | other battles, could be applied to the game of chess.

00:36:19.060 | It could be applied to war, most obviously in war.

00:36:22.380 | I think about, for example,

00:36:24.340 | the American strategic bombing campaign in World War II.

00:36:28.380 | The Eighth Army Air Force was tasked

00:36:32.200 | with the idea of destroying German industry.

00:36:34.500 | Did they attack all of German industry?

00:36:39.340 | Of course not, that would be stupid.

00:36:41.980 | They attacked the ball bearing industry.

00:36:45.300 | Why?

00:36:46.580 | Because almost all of modern machines

00:36:50.980 | require ball bearings in order to operate.

00:36:54.780 | In order for the mechanical interfaces

00:36:56.620 | of machines to operate, you have to reduce friction.

00:36:58.620 | It's done through ball bearings.

00:37:00.940 | If you knocked out one tiny component of German industry,

00:37:05.940 | the ball bearing industry, the rest of it couldn't operate.

00:37:09.920 | So too with the human body.

00:37:11.520 | I didn't have to fight your whole body.

00:37:13.260 | I just have to fight your left knee.

00:37:15.760 | If I can break your left knee,

00:37:16.960 | the rest of your body is irrelevant to me.

00:37:19.640 | - But then isn't the art of jiu-jitsu

00:37:22.680 | discovering the left knee,

00:37:27.400 | discovering the weak points--

00:37:30.000 | - Yeah, a huge part of jiu-jitsu

00:37:31.860 | is understanding the strengths and weaknesses

00:37:33.900 | of the human body.

00:37:35.200 | There's parts of the human body that are shockingly robust

00:37:38.760 | and there are other parts that are shockingly vulnerable.

00:37:41.480 | The major joints and of course the most vulnerable of all,

00:37:45.200 | the unprotected neck.

00:37:46.560 | - So if we take the something I'm not familiar with

00:37:49.680 | but I was incredibly impressed by is the body lock

00:37:52.920 | that I saw--

00:37:54.080 | - Nick Rodriguez.

00:37:57.400 | - Nick Rodriguez used last time a few weeks ago.

00:38:01.000 | But then I also got to hang out with Craig Jones

00:38:03.840 | who showed that--

00:38:04.680 | - Also has a very good body lock.

00:38:06.640 | - So that was, I don't know if this body lock

00:38:10.240 | applies to all positions,

00:38:11.440 | but I was seeing it from when Craig is on top

00:38:16.440 | of your opponent and trying to pass in the guard,

00:38:22.360 | use the body lock as a controlling position.

00:38:24.840 | The principle behind it is that it shuts down,

00:38:28.520 | as you've spoken about,

00:38:30.120 | it shuts down the weapons of a very strong opponent.

00:38:35.120 | - That's absolutely correct.

00:38:37.240 | In the case of guard position,

00:38:40.960 | what makes guard position dangerous,

00:38:43.600 | what makes someone a powerful guard player

00:38:47.200 | is the movement of their hips,

00:38:48.800 | forward and backward and side to side.

00:38:52.220 | Body locking is designed to shut down that movement

00:38:56.020 | and does a very fine job of it.

00:38:57.780 | You'll see all of my students excel at it.

00:38:59.780 | Gordon Ryan is probably the single best

00:39:02.500 | body lock guard passer I've ever seen.

00:39:04.220 | Nicky Ryan is outstanding with it.

00:39:05.980 | Nick Rodriguez is very good.

00:39:07.620 | Craig Jones is outstanding.

00:39:09.140 | All of my students use this for a very simple reason.

00:39:12.820 | Understand what is the central problem

00:39:15.280 | of shutting down a dangerous guard player.

00:39:17.880 | It's his hips.

00:39:18.940 | That's what makes him a dangerous leg locker.

00:39:20.420 | You go up against a dangerous leg locker,

00:39:22.060 | body lock guard pass,

00:39:23.060 | single best way to shut down most of his entries.

00:39:26.560 | We're all strong in leg locks.

00:39:30.420 | So in our gym,

00:39:31.740 | you gotta control the hips as soon as possible.

00:39:34.940 | Otherwise it's gonna be a very difficult thing

00:39:36.360 | to avoid leg entanglements as you go to pass.

00:39:39.260 | And across the board,

00:39:41.860 | my students excel in body lock guard passing.

00:39:46.420 | They understand what's the most dangerous feature

00:39:49.800 | their opponent has,

00:39:50.640 | the lateral movement of their hips.

00:39:52.320 | What's the single best way to stop that?

00:39:54.420 | Body lock.

00:39:55.260 | And then work from there.

00:39:56.840 | - So if this asymmetry of power is fundamental to jiu jitsu,

00:40:01.160 | how do you discover that?

00:40:02.300 | How did you discover the body lock

00:40:05.120 | that as one of many methodologies

00:40:09.240 | of achieving this asymmetry?

00:40:11.320 | - It would be an overstatement to say

00:40:12.740 | we discovered the body lock.

00:40:14.280 | Body lock passing has been around

00:40:15.820 | longer than we've been around.

00:40:18.880 | But what I would say is that

00:40:20.300 | in a room full of dangerous leg lockers,

00:40:22.360 | you've gotta have a way to shut down the hips.

00:40:25.080 | And so once we started using body locks,

00:40:28.500 | we saw that was one excellent way

00:40:30.300 | to get around that problem.

00:40:32.240 | As with all development,

00:40:35.140 | it comes from trial and error.

00:40:37.320 | You will often see people teach the technique

00:40:40.800 | to a certain level and you see the teaching,

00:40:43.780 | you're like, there's a lot of inadequacies there.

00:40:45.780 | And that doesn't cover a lot of the problems

00:40:47.880 | that we're encountering.

00:40:49.120 | And so trial and error is the single most important part

00:40:52.240 | of the development.

00:40:53.920 | - Trial and error in?

00:40:55.560 | - In the training room amongst ourselves.

00:40:58.640 | - In hard training or?

00:41:01.520 | - No, it never begins with hard training.

00:41:03.280 | Or everything, techniques are born

00:41:06.520 | the same way we're born, weak and in need of nutrition.

00:41:09.840 | (Luke laughs)

00:41:12.340 | You have to build them up organically like children.

00:41:16.880 | And you start with minimal resistance

00:41:18.800 | and you make progress over time.

00:41:20.560 | When you first go to the gym,

00:41:21.640 | do you put 500 pounds on the bench press

00:41:23.640 | and try to bench press it?

00:41:24.720 | No, you'll be killed.

00:41:26.000 | You start off with the bar, you build over time

00:41:29.080 | and then one day, five years from now,

00:41:30.880 | perhaps you really are lifting 500 pounds.

00:41:33.240 | But only a fool would attempt that on their first attempt.

00:41:36.140 | - And they're born like children in your mind first?

00:41:41.840 | Like there's a spark of an idea.

00:41:43.760 | - Yes, there's always a spark.

00:41:45.080 | It's like scientific development on a subject matter

00:41:48.320 | which is intrinsically simpler.

00:41:50.720 | There's a sense in which naive

00:41:56.560 | and overly simplistic assessments of scientific method

00:42:00.440 | may not work well at advanced levels of science,

00:42:03.080 | but they work damn well in the training room with jiu-jitsu

00:42:05.480 | where the subject matter is inherently simpler

00:42:08.800 | than it is in research science.

00:42:10.840 | And as a result, there'll be a spark.

00:42:15.320 | You'll see something, there's possibilities there.

00:42:17.760 | Okay, let's puzzle this out, let's work with this.

00:42:21.400 | And you run into a lot of failures.

00:42:24.000 | There's, you know, you've suddenly been,

00:42:25.680 | oh man, if I put my hip this way, this works really well.

00:42:28.120 | Then suddenly you try and spar

00:42:29.320 | and you get caught in a simple Loma Plata.

00:42:31.320 | And you're like, okay, that didn't work as well

00:42:32.560 | as I thought.

00:42:33.480 | And then you look to rectify things.

00:42:35.480 | If things go in promising research directions,

00:42:38.040 | you keep them.

00:42:38.880 | If not, you discard them.

00:42:41.000 | - It's funny you say science.

00:42:42.280 | It feels more like art.

00:42:44.200 | There's somebody I really admire

00:42:46.440 | that talks about this kind of ideas, Johnny I from Apple.

00:42:49.760 | He's the lead designer.

00:42:51.520 | He recently left, but he was the designer

00:42:54.120 | behind most of the products we know and love from Apple.

00:42:57.760 | - When you say designer, be more precise.

00:43:00.040 | What exactly was he working on in Apple?

00:43:02.620 | - The iPhone.

00:43:05.240 | - Which parts of the iPhone did he work on?

00:43:07.240 | - Like the entirety of it.

00:43:09.680 | - Was he a leader of a research team

00:43:12.560 | or was he the person personally responsible

00:43:14.840 | for the development?

00:43:15.760 | - He's kind of, I would say, very similar to your position.

00:43:20.760 | He wasn't necessarily the last,

00:43:24.640 | the person executing the manufacture, right?

00:43:27.840 | - Yeah, of course.

00:43:28.680 | - But there's the, he's somebody that's very hands-on.

00:43:33.240 | And it's like, okay, so he worked,

00:43:36.560 | obviously extremely closely with Steve Jobs.

00:43:39.000 | Steve Jobs has this idea.

00:43:41.120 | We should have a computer that's as thin

00:43:42.880 | as a sheet of paper.

00:43:44.400 | And then you start to play with ideas of like,

00:43:46.560 | what does that actually look like?

00:43:48.400 | The reason I bring it up is because he talked about,

00:43:51.720 | he had these ideas that he would not tell Steve

00:43:55.020 | because he talked about in the same exact language

00:43:58.200 | as you're saying is there's like a little baby

00:44:01.840 | that it's very fragile.

00:44:05.480 | It needs time to grow.

00:44:07.400 | - Absolutely.

00:44:08.240 | - And then Steve Jobs would often roll in.

00:44:10.640 | - Was too ruthless.

00:44:11.560 | - Too ruthless.

00:44:12.640 | This is, he would destroy ideas

00:44:15.260 | because Johnny Ive and the team didn't have actually

00:44:20.240 | good responses to the criticism at first

00:44:23.480 | because when they're babies, you can't defend the baby,

00:44:27.360 | but you need a time to develop.

00:44:29.520 | You need to sleep on it.

00:44:30.800 | You need to rethink it.

00:44:31.880 | Did you dream things and all those kinds of things?

00:44:33.880 | - Yes.

00:44:35.000 | It's fascinating you say this Lex

00:44:36.400 | because this is actually the entire history

00:44:39.720 | of scientific development is literally the story

00:44:43.680 | of the juxtaposition between the need to protect

00:44:47.480 | and nurture new theories versus the need

00:44:50.920 | to rigorously test them with harsh testing

00:44:54.400 | that either verifies them or falsifies them.

00:44:58.160 | And learning to find a satisfactory compromise

00:45:01.180 | between those two is a very, very difficult thing.

00:45:04.180 | When you look at the history of science,

00:45:06.660 | you will see that there's some pretty damn chaotic moments

00:45:10.580 | anytime there's major theory change

00:45:12.920 | where all kinds of apparently undesirable tricks

00:45:17.920 | are used to protect certain theories

00:45:23.340 | with ad hoc hypotheses, et cetera, et cetera.

00:45:25.980 | And ultimately only time and the ability

00:45:31.100 | and success over time will justify a theory.

00:45:36.100 | There's usually a period where when one theory

00:45:38.540 | goes in to replace another,

00:45:40.300 | there's something of a battle between competing groups

00:45:43.940 | of scientists, some of whom advocate theory A,

00:45:45.980 | some who advocate theory B.

00:45:47.840 | They often use seemingly unscrupulous methods

00:45:52.160 | to protect or attack another person's theory.

00:45:54.420 | They dig for proofs.

00:45:55.980 | And usually some period of time has to go by.

00:45:59.100 | Sometimes in some cases it simply involved

00:46:01.660 | older scientists protecting an initial theory dying off

00:46:05.160 | and new scientists just replacing them with numbers.

00:46:10.160 | And this is a common, common theme.

00:46:13.820 | And the same applies in jiu-jitsu.

00:46:16.300 | So many times, especially when I first started working

00:46:19.340 | with leg locks, I would show things I had worked on

00:46:23.900 | to even world champion black belts.

00:46:28.660 | And they would try it once or twice and fail.

00:46:31.620 | Be like, ah, it doesn't work.

00:46:33.900 | And I'd be like, you tried it once on another guy

00:46:37.740 | who's also a world champion,

00:46:39.020 | who has a strong ability to resist it.

00:46:42.420 | And that's it, no more, it doesn't work.

00:46:45.460 | And then five years later they would see my students

00:46:48.980 | finishing world champions with it.

00:46:52.020 | And in some cases, finishing the very people

00:46:54.420 | who said that the technique would never work.

00:46:57.700 | I mean, if there was ever a refutation of a statement,

00:47:01.420 | that's a pretty clear example.

00:47:02.920 | And there has to be a sense in which

00:47:07.860 | you can't be too forgiving, you have to test hypotheses.

00:47:11.820 | But on the other hand, you can't be too ruthless either.

00:47:14.060 | You have to look for promise.

00:47:17.780 | And my advice is start slow.

00:47:21.060 | Like again, the analogy of lifting weights,

00:47:23.940 | you don't lift the heaviest weights on your first day,

00:47:25.860 | you build up, you work progressively over time.

00:47:28.820 | Now, you also have to have some common sense here.

00:47:32.660 | You can't be too forgiving to a technique

00:47:35.180 | if it's repeatedly failing.

00:47:37.340 | And good people have tried it,

00:47:38.940 | and multiple good people have tried it,

00:47:40.740 | and it's just not working out,

00:47:41.820 | then, okay, it's time to dismiss it.

00:47:44.220 | But don't be too quick.

00:47:45.420 | - Is this where your idea of training with lower belts

00:47:50.900 | quite a bit comes from?

00:47:52.620 | I've actually just as a side comment,

00:47:54.260 | and maybe you can elaborate.

00:47:55.960 | The place, the gym, Balance Studios

00:48:00.900 | with Phil and Rick McElree's where I got my black belt,

00:48:03.540 | where I grew up as a jujitsu person in Philadelphia,

00:48:06.620 | they have a huge number of black belts,

00:48:08.660 | but they have a huge number of all other ranks.

00:48:11.980 | And the way they picked sparring partners,

00:48:16.100 | people you train with, is very ad hoc, it's very loose.

00:48:18.860 | It's very, one of those places,

00:48:20.980 | one of those gyms where you can just kind of,

00:48:23.380 | you can train for like three, four hours.

00:48:25.900 | - That's great.

00:48:26.740 | - You could take a break, or you could jump back in.

00:48:29.500 | - Very informal, yeah.

00:48:30.500 | - And you can go to war with black belts,

00:48:32.620 | but then you can also play around

00:48:34.780 | with the purple and the blue belts and so on.

00:48:36.540 | - Excellent.

00:48:37.380 | - And that was really beneficial for growth.

00:48:39.380 | And you can pick which, 'cause everybody has a style,

00:48:43.100 | and you can pick which style

00:48:44.060 | you really wanna work on, right?

00:48:45.900 | And then I came to Boston, Broadway Jiu-Jitsu,

00:48:51.660 | with John Clark, who I love, he's a good friend.

00:48:54.500 | But it's a little bit more formal,

00:48:58.160 | and I found myself, it's a very interesting journey.

00:49:00.980 | I would be training with black belts the whole time.

00:49:03.860 | And it was a very different experience.

00:49:07.940 | I found myself exploring much less.

00:49:10.620 | I found myself learning much less.

00:49:13.980 | I mean, part of that is on me,

00:49:16.260 | but part of it was also realizing that,

00:49:20.220 | wow, there's a value to training

00:49:22.860 | with people that are much worse than you.

00:49:24.940 | - Yes.

00:49:25.940 | - Is there a philosophy you could speak to on that?

00:49:28.420 | - Yeah, you probably know it already.

00:49:30.840 | You know from your studies in artificial intelligence

00:49:34.340 | that all human beings are naturally risk-averse.

00:49:37.580 | This is a bias which is deeply seated in all of us.

00:49:42.540 | I'm sure you're well-read on people like Dvorsky

00:49:45.380 | and et cetera, who talk about this all the time.

00:49:48.980 | For your viewers, there are numerous psychological

00:49:52.500 | experiments that are showing that most people,

00:49:55.700 | to the point of irrationality, fear loss more

00:49:59.860 | than they are excited at the prospect of an equivalent gain.

00:50:04.820 | So for example, if you have $100 in your wallet,

00:50:08.220 | you're more worried about the idea of losing

00:50:10.780 | the $100 that you have now than you would be excited

00:50:14.020 | by the prospect of gaining $100

00:50:16.360 | that I could potentially offer you.

00:50:18.660 | This comes out whenever you get black belt

00:50:24.640 | versus black belt confrontations,

00:50:26.300 | or any kind of similar skill level.

00:50:30.240 | Whenever you get similar skill levels,

00:50:32.300 | the chances of defeat get very, very high.

00:50:37.700 | Interestingly, if you're a white belt

00:50:39.480 | and you're going against a black belt, you'll take risk.

00:50:41.200 | Why?

00:50:42.340 | Because there's no shame in losing to a black belt

00:50:44.000 | when you're a white belt.

00:50:44.840 | So you'll play more lightheartedly

00:50:46.800 | and you'll have a more fun role.

00:50:49.140 | But when you have very similar skill levels,

00:50:52.760 | you're gonna come back to what?

00:50:54.780 | The techniques that are most likely to get you a win.

00:50:58.820 | That number of techniques is usually pretty small.

00:51:03.840 | And if you're always battling with the same tough opponents

00:51:08.220 | every day, where if you make even a single error,

00:51:11.820 | it will cost you that match in sparring,

00:51:14.560 | and you don't like losing,

00:51:15.860 | you're going to stay with a very small set of moves.

00:51:21.560 | You might get slightly better at direct execution over time,

00:51:24.720 | but you as an individual will not grow.

00:51:27.520 | Growth, as it does in organic life forms,

00:51:31.580 | comes from small beginnings and builds over time.

00:51:37.680 | You can't take an untested, untried move

00:51:41.240 | and get it on a world champion black belt.

00:51:43.440 | It's gonna get crushed.

00:51:44.460 | So it's not ready for that.

00:51:45.840 | It's like a lion cub being thrown out

00:51:48.600 | into the Serengeti Plains.

00:51:50.600 | A lion cub is just too small and too ineffective.

00:51:53.900 | It's a lion, but it's a cub.

00:51:56.400 | And it's not until it grows into maturity

00:51:58.100 | that it can be a lion

00:51:58.940 | that can dominate the Serengeti Plains.

00:52:00.840 | That's why I always encourage my students

00:52:06.160 | to play with a variety of belt types

00:52:10.400 | and spend the majority of their time

00:52:13.660 | with lesser belts for development purposes.

00:52:16.740 | When you're getting closer to a competition,

00:52:18.500 | you obviously want to change that.

00:52:19.900 | You want to be getting more

00:52:21.860 | a competitive sense of hard work.

00:52:24.660 | But you must learn to divide up your training cycles

00:52:28.220 | into non-competition cycles,

00:52:31.820 | where you're presumably working with people

00:52:35.140 | who are slightly lower in level than yourself,

00:52:37.220 | and in some cases, quite a bit lower than yourself.

00:52:40.340 | And then competition cycles,

00:52:43.100 | where you're working with people

00:52:44.020 | much closer to your own skill level.

00:52:45.820 | - Is there something to be said

00:52:48.260 | about the flip side of that,

00:52:50.080 | which is when you're training with people

00:52:53.580 | at the same skill level, being okay losing to them?

00:52:57.500 | - Yes.

00:52:58.340 | You have to see training for what it is.

00:53:00.980 | Training is about skill development,

00:53:03.140 | not about winning or losing.

00:53:04.780 | You've got to understand

00:53:06.860 | that you don't need to win every battle.

00:53:10.780 | You only need to win the battles that count.

00:53:13.620 | And the battles that count

00:53:15.100 | are in the World Championship finals.

00:53:17.100 | Okay, that's the one that counts.

00:53:18.860 | Think about that win.

00:53:20.900 | Okay, that's the one you're gonna be remembered for.

00:53:22.900 | You're not gonna be remembered

00:53:23.980 | for the battle you lost on Tuesday afternoon at 3 p.m.

00:53:26.740 | in some nameless gym with some guy that no one cares about.

00:53:29.860 | No one's gonna remember that.

00:53:31.400 | You're gonna be remembered for your peak performances,

00:53:33.620 | not your everyday performances.

00:53:35.500 | Focus your everyday performances on skill development

00:53:38.700 | so that your peak performances, you can focus on winning.

00:53:41.540 | - This is not a therapy session,

00:53:45.460 | but if I could just speak.

00:53:48.780 | - Every session's a therapy session.

00:53:50.620 | - There is still an ape thing in there.

00:53:56.660 | - Of course, you think I don't feel it?

00:53:58.620 | You think everyone in the room doesn't feel it?

00:54:02.180 | Because, for example, you haven't ever seen me roll.

00:54:05.280 | When there's people, I've seen the look in people's eyes

00:54:10.540 | when they see me train and I could see,

00:54:14.500 | maybe it's me projecting, but they think,

00:54:17.220 | I thought you were supposed to be good.

00:54:18.860 | I thought you were supposed to be a black belt.

00:54:21.020 | That look, they're like--

00:54:24.580 | - I'm gonna give you some therapy.

00:54:25.860 | - Okay. (laughs)

00:54:27.900 | - Do you know how many people

00:54:32.140 | have come up to me over the years

00:54:34.580 | who have visited the training halls that I work in

00:54:39.140 | and they come up to me and they go,

00:54:39.980 | man, I rolled with Gary Tonin.

00:54:43.820 | I did really well with him, like really well.

00:54:48.500 | I'm like, oh, that's very good, very impressive.

00:54:50.900 | And then I see them talking to their friends,

00:54:54.140 | I'm like, man, I tapped out Gary Tonin.

00:54:59.780 | And I'm sitting there going, yeah.

00:55:04.020 | And you can see that they're just like,

00:55:05.980 | whoa, dude, I'm way better than I thought I was.

00:55:10.020 | Gary Tonin, all of my students,

00:55:13.060 | I push them in the direction of giving up bad positions

00:55:19.220 | so that they practice working,

00:55:20.580 | getting out of critical situations.

00:55:22.140 | It's a huge part of our training program.

00:55:24.220 | But Gary Tonin takes that to a level

00:55:26.300 | that just no one else even gets close.

00:55:28.340 | It's just amazing.

00:55:30.420 | Like he will put himself in impossible situations

00:55:34.460 | where it's a fully locked strangle,

00:55:38.420 | a hundred percent on with both his arms behind his back.

00:55:42.260 | And he'll try to work out from there.

00:55:44.820 | And seven times out of 10, he does.

00:55:48.580 | But three times out of 10, he gets caught.

00:55:50.700 | I'm a huge advocate of handicap training

00:55:55.860 | where you handicap yourself to work on skills.

00:55:58.660 | He's took that to heart to a level

00:56:02.860 | that few people, I believe, can match.

00:56:05.660 | - I just wonder what his psychology is like because there's--

00:56:07.980 | - It goes back to what we talked about before, Lex.

00:56:10.420 | You have to understand it's skill development.

00:56:13.620 | Don't take it personally.

00:56:15.260 | I understand.

00:56:17.060 | I hear where you're coming from.

00:56:18.380 | We've all got what you call the ape reflex

00:56:20.900 | where we wanna be dominant, okay?

00:56:22.700 | We all do.

00:56:23.740 | - 'Cause there's thousands of white belts out there

00:56:25.700 | that have tapped Gary Tonin.

00:56:27.780 | - Yes.

00:56:28.620 | - And they're walking around and they're posting online.

00:56:29.460 | - They're saying, "Dude, I tapped Gary Tonin."

00:56:31.820 | Like Gary Tonin's like one of the best in the world.

00:56:34.420 | So I'm one of the best in the world.

00:56:36.380 | And does Gary get upset about this?

00:56:40.220 | No, of course not.

00:56:41.100 | 'Cause Gary knows that when it counts on stage,

00:56:43.420 | he's gonna be going a hundred percent

00:56:45.260 | with a set of skills that very few people can match.

00:56:48.580 | He can go into an EBI overtime

00:56:52.340 | at the 205 pound weight division

00:56:54.620 | against an 80 CC champion,

00:56:56.380 | starting in a full arm lock position

00:57:00.580 | and effortlessly get out with no problems in seconds.

00:57:04.700 | Because he's been in that situation 25,000 times

00:57:08.940 | with varying degrees of skill opponents.

00:57:12.780 | And there's just no panic, no fear.

00:57:16.140 | He's just doing what he's done so many thousands of times.

00:57:20.260 | And that's a fine, fine example of a guy

00:57:24.220 | who didn't give a damn what happened in the training room.

00:57:26.740 | But when it counted on the stage in front of the cameras,

00:57:30.580 | it kicked in.

00:57:32.140 | - Yeah, he's an incredible inspiration actually.

00:57:35.380 | He's a practitioner of something you've recently

00:57:38.380 | talked quite a bit about,

00:57:39.380 | which is the power of escaping sort of bad positions.

00:57:43.180 | I think you've talked about it,

00:57:46.340 | which is really interesting framing,

00:57:47.900 | is escaping bad positions is one of the best ways,

00:57:54.140 | if not the best way to demonstrate dominance

00:57:58.740 | psychologically over your opponent.

00:58:01.340 | That anything they throw at you,

00:58:04.020 | like their weapons are useless against you.

00:58:07.380 | - There's a little bit of Lex Friedman

00:58:10.260 | kicking through on this question.

00:58:11.740 | Your obsession with dominance is skewing you.

00:58:16.740 | - It's a therapy session.

00:58:18.060 | It's a therapy session.

00:58:19.380 | I'm coming from a wrestling perspective.

00:58:22.420 | I think it's not just Lex Friedman.

00:58:23.980 | I think it's Dan Gable.

00:58:25.020 | I think it's dominant.

00:58:26.860 | The Gary Tonin ethic,

00:58:28.740 | it just goes against everything wrestling is about.

00:58:32.300 | You never put yourself in a bad position.

00:58:35.580 | And the fact, it's a,

00:58:38.980 | philosophically, I don't know what to do with it.

00:58:40.740 | It's a total reframing of showing dominance

00:58:45.700 | by escaping any bad position.

00:58:49.060 | - Yeah, let's talk about the idea of

00:58:51.140 | what is the value of escape?

00:58:53.540 | Why do I put this in as the first skill

00:58:56.820 | that every Jiu-Jitsu student must master?

00:58:59.820 | Believe it or not,

00:59:02.380 | when I talked about how it

00:59:05.380 | pertains to dominance, that's its smallest value.

00:59:11.380 | Its greatest value has nothing to do with dominance.

00:59:14.980 | It has to do with confidence.

00:59:16.500 | You can train someone and teach them technique

00:59:22.540 | until you're blue in the face.

00:59:24.260 | But at some point, the athlete in question

00:59:29.340 | has to go out there on the stage

00:59:31.900 | and pull the trigger when the time is right.

00:59:34.740 | What's gonna give you that ability

00:59:40.220 | to go from the physical skills that you've learned

00:59:44.620 | to execution under pressure is confidence.

00:59:49.420 | (inhales)

00:59:51.580 | I always talk about skill development,

00:59:56.820 | and yes, skill development is the absolute bedrock

00:59:59.980 | of my training programs.

01:00:01.380 | But you can't finish at that level.

01:00:07.740 | There has to be something more than that.

01:00:10.020 | And you have to go from the physical element of skill

01:00:13.460 | into the psychological element of confidence.

01:00:16.460 | I can teach you an armbar all day.

01:00:19.100 | You can get to a point where you can flawlessly execute

01:00:22.980 | armbars in drilling and even in a certain level

01:00:25.980 | of competition.

01:00:26.900 | But if you believe that in attempting an armbar

01:00:32.940 | on a dangerous opponent with good guard passing skills,

01:00:36.260 | say the armbar is being performed from guard position,

01:00:38.940 | that if the armbar fails and your opponent uses that failure

01:00:45.860 | to set up a strong pass and get into a side pin,

01:00:49.380 | possibly into the mount,

01:00:51.020 | and you don't have the ability to get out of that side pin

01:00:54.300 | or mount, you won't pull the trigger on the armbar.

01:00:58.380 | And so even though you had all the requisite physical skills

01:01:02.460 | to perform the technique, when push came to shove

01:01:06.140 | and the critical moment came, you backed down.

01:01:09.860 | You didn't pull the trigger.

01:01:13.820 | Building that confidence is the key

01:01:17.740 | to championship performance.

01:01:19.900 | And the single best way to do it is to take away

01:01:24.740 | the innate fear that we all have of bad outcomes

01:01:29.540 | that makes us naturally risk averse.

01:01:33.340 | When you don't believe you can be pinned,

01:01:35.860 | when you don't believe your guard can be passed,

01:01:38.260 | you'll take risks because there's no downside

01:01:41.220 | to your actions.

01:01:42.660 | An unpinnable person and an unpassable person

01:01:46.140 | doesn't have much to fear in a jujitsu match.

01:01:48.820 | You can come out and fire with all guns blazing

01:01:51.700 | because then you know at the end of the day,

01:01:53.340 | no one's gonna hold you down,

01:01:54.540 | no one's gonna pass your guard.

01:01:56.460 | That's your first two goals in jujitsu.

01:01:58.900 | They're the most boring goals.

01:02:00.500 | They're not exciting to learn.

01:02:01.620 | No one wants to come in and they're first and be told,

01:02:03.620 | okay, you're gonna practice escapes

01:02:04.780 | for the next year of your life.

01:02:06.140 | Okay, it's a goal, are you kidding me?

01:02:08.300 | But that's what you gotta have.

01:02:09.900 | That's your first skill.

01:02:11.420 | And that's what I push upon all of my students.

01:02:14.140 | You'll see almost all of them

01:02:16.220 | are very, very strong in escape skills.

01:02:18.700 | They know that if things go wrong,

01:02:21.100 | they can always get out.

01:02:22.780 | They can always live to fight another day.

01:02:25.020 | And that is what gives them the ability

01:02:28.360 | to attack without fear.

01:02:30.040 | I think that it's so profound and so rare.

01:02:34.760 | It's so rare to hear this.

01:02:37.740 | I think it's because it's the most painful thing to do.

01:02:41.540 | Always ask yourself,

01:02:43.060 | when you enter a jujitsu match,

01:02:46.660 | you already know ahead of time

01:02:51.260 | if you're going to lose, how you're going to lose.

01:02:55.500 | Okay, there's only a certain number of realistic submissions

01:02:59.860 | that work in the sport of jujitsu.

01:03:01.060 | The number is very small.

01:03:03.220 | So ahead of time, you already know

01:03:06.460 | the most likely methods of submission loss in jujitsu

01:03:09.780 | are going to be things like heel hook,

01:03:11.460 | armbar, renegade strangle, guillotine, et cetera, et cetera.

01:03:14.660 | Just work backwards from that knowledge.

01:03:17.420 | So start off learning how to defend all of those things.

01:03:20.500 | You know what the major losing positions are in jujitsu.

01:03:23.500 | Someone gets mounted on you, rear mount,

01:03:25.260 | side control, knee on belly.

01:03:26.620 | Those are positions you can only lose from.

01:03:28.780 | So work backwards from there,

01:03:30.260 | getting out of those positions.

01:03:32.020 | And that's how I always start.

01:03:33.780 | I always say with my students,

01:03:36.380 | I teach beginners from the ground up

01:03:40.260 | and I teach experts backwards.

01:03:43.140 | What does that mean?

01:03:45.260 | When a young student comes to me with no skills,

01:03:48.100 | they learn from the ground up.

01:03:49.500 | They start on their backs, defending pins.

01:03:52.300 | Then they start on their backs,

01:03:54.220 | working from half guard bottom,

01:03:55.740 | then on their backs, working from variations of guard.

01:03:58.460 | They don't even get the seat top position

01:04:00.340 | until they're strong off their backs.

01:04:02.780 | Then they go onto their knees and they start passing,

01:04:06.420 | start standing and passing.

01:04:09.580 | And then they work their pins and transitions.

01:04:12.180 | And then ultimately they stand up to their feet

01:04:14.180 | and they work standing position on their feet.

01:04:16.660 | So they work from ground back on the floor

01:04:20.740 | to ground knees on the floor,

01:04:22.620 | ground standing, and then both athletes standing.

01:04:24.660 | It's a gradual progression over time

01:04:26.260 | where they work from the bottom to the top.

01:04:28.940 | With regards experts, I teach them in game first.

01:04:32.820 | They must become very, very strong

01:04:34.380 | in what finishes the match, which is submission holds.

01:04:37.500 | Okay?

01:04:40.540 | In chess, we always talk about end game.

01:04:43.940 | I do the same thing in jiu-jitsu.

01:04:45.620 | I start experts just looking at the mechanics

01:04:49.380 | of breaking people and all the submission holds that I teach.

01:04:52.300 | You should know that I teach only

01:04:53.980 | a very small number of submission holds, around six.

01:04:57.020 | It's interesting.

01:05:00.180 | My students have by far and away the highest submission rate

01:05:03.460 | in contemporary jiu-jitsu,

01:05:04.620 | but they only learn around six to seven submission holds.

01:05:07.460 | I start them with mechanics where they learn the end game,

01:05:13.960 | how to break someone.

01:05:15.180 | Once they develop in their mind the belief that if,

01:05:27.540 | the conditional if, they can get

01:05:30.180 | to one of those six positions,

01:05:32.020 | there's a very high likelihood they'll win.

01:05:36.560 | If they truly believe then, when it's competition time,

01:05:42.580 | they'll fucking find a way to get to those positions.

01:05:46.260 | - That's confidence.

01:05:47.860 | - But if you don't believe, let's say you believe,

01:05:50.420 | man, if I get to a finishing position,

01:05:52.060 | an armbar or a strangle,

01:05:54.020 | there's only like a 20% chance I'll finish with it.

01:05:56.180 | How hard are you gonna fight to get to that position?

01:05:58.820 | You're not.

01:06:00.100 | Why?

01:06:00.940 | Why would you?

01:06:02.260 | But if you believe there's a 98% chance,

01:06:04.920 | if you get to that position, you'll finish.

01:06:08.180 | You'll find a way to get there.

01:06:09.740 | - That is so powerful.

01:06:12.100 | There's certain things,

01:06:13.500 | and maybe going back to judo a little bit,

01:06:15.140 | is there's a clock choke for people who are listening.

01:06:20.140 | It's with the gi, when a person is in a turtle position

01:06:25.460 | and a crouching position,

01:06:27.380 | this is something that's done in judo quite a bit.

01:06:30.300 | But I have, it doesn't matter what the technique is,

01:06:32.580 | I have a belief in my head

01:06:35.300 | that there's not a person in the world

01:06:37.600 | that I can't choke with that clock choke.

01:06:40.500 | - That's a good belief to have.

01:06:41.620 | - And I've done that, and that it was,

01:06:44.740 | it built on itself.

01:06:47.980 | The belief made the technique better and better and better.

01:06:52.320 | - Now you're onto something.

01:06:54.220 | - That's exactly the mindset that I'm trying to coach.

01:06:56.780 | - But that's step one.

01:06:57.960 | You have to believe that--

01:07:00.740 | - But you gotta start somewhere.

01:07:02.740 | - And then-- - That's step one.

01:07:03.860 | - But then you have to create a system--

01:07:05.060 | - But it's a damn important step.

01:07:06.960 | So you coach the end game first,

01:07:08.980 | and then you fill in the details afterwards.

01:07:11.700 | - Yeah, that's a huge confidence builder,

01:07:13.340 | but I just, I have to say, to admit,

01:07:17.940 | and it makes me sad, but I think I'm not alone.

01:07:19.940 | I think a majority of Jiu-Jitsu people are like this,

01:07:23.100 | that I didn't do the beginner step that you talk about,

01:07:27.900 | which is focusing on escapes.

01:07:30.780 | I think I learned the wrong lessons from being, from losing.

01:07:35.740 | I remember in a blue belt competition long ago,

01:07:39.460 | when I was, I think it was, yeah,

01:07:44.460 | it was the finals of Atlanta IBJJF tournament,

01:07:47.720 | and there's a person that passed my guard,

01:07:52.560 | and he took mount, and he stayed in mount for a long time,

01:07:57.560 | and I couldn't breathe, and it was like one of those things

01:08:04.440 | where I was truly dominated.

01:08:06.440 | I don't think I've been dominated in a Jiu-Jitsu match

01:08:09.040 | quite like that before or after,

01:08:12.560 | and the lesson I learned from that is I'm not gonna let,

01:08:15.960 | like, as opposed to working on escapes,

01:08:20.120 | I'm not gonna let anyone pass my guard.

01:08:22.240 | - What you learned is don't take risks.

01:08:24.480 | - Don't take risks. - Yeah.

01:08:26.480 | Which is ultimately what kills you.

01:08:29.640 | Ultimately, if you become the best you can,

01:08:31.360 | you gotta take risks.

01:08:32.400 | As they say, nothing risk, nothing gain.

01:08:34.400 | Failure usually makes us even more risk-averse

01:08:38.400 | than we started.

01:08:39.240 | We're already mentally biased,

01:08:41.300 | being human beings in that direction,

01:08:43.360 | and failure tends to reinforce that.

01:08:48.520 | I work hard in my training programs

01:08:50.260 | to try and correct that fault.

01:08:52.600 | - Is it still possible for a person who's a black belt

01:08:56.280 | to then just go back to that beginning journey, I guess?

01:08:58.960 | - Of course.

01:08:59.800 | Let me tell you something.

01:09:03.120 | I'm probably gonna catch a lot of flack for saying this.

01:09:05.720 | I have a belief.

01:09:06.760 | I won't say something, I won't call it knowledge

01:09:10.000 | 'cause it's not known, but I have a fervent belief

01:09:14.200 | that human beings in most skill activities,

01:09:19.040 | not all skill activities, but I will say combat sports

01:09:21.960 | for sure, can reinvent themselves in five-year periods.

01:09:26.240 | Now, you might be saying five years?

01:09:29.240 | What's magical about five years?

01:09:30.840 | Mike Tyson was 13 years old

01:09:36.360 | when he was taken in by custom auto.

01:09:38.160 | By the age of 18, he was beating

01:09:43.920 | world-class boxers in the gym

01:09:46.600 | and had already made a strong name for himself

01:09:51.280 | in international boxing.

01:09:52.640 | He was already a known figure.

01:09:54.320 | It was five years.

01:09:55.360 | Yasuhiro Yamashita, the judo player,

01:10:02.840 | began judo at 13.

01:10:05.800 | He placed silver in the All Japans at 17.

01:10:12.260 | I could go on all day with examples of athletes

01:10:17.260 | who within a five-year timeframe of starting a sport

01:10:24.060 | were competing at world championship level.

01:10:26.980 | I'm gonna give you a rough and ready definition

01:10:30.620 | of sport mastery, okay?

01:10:32.660 | I believe that if you can play a competitive match

01:10:38.480 | against someone ranked in the top 25 in your sport,

01:10:42.820 | and it's a serious international sport,

01:10:46.240 | I would call you someone who's mastered that sport.

01:10:49.480 | Okay, you're damn good.

01:10:51.240 | If you can go with the number 25 wrestler in the world

01:10:56.200 | and give them a hard competitive match in the gym,

01:10:58.440 | you may not win it, but they had a good workout,

01:11:01.800 | you have shown mastery of wrestling

01:11:07.560 | or indeed any other combat sport you care to name.

01:11:10.120 | There are numerous examples of people doing far better

01:11:16.720 | than that in five years, winning medals

01:11:21.720 | at world championships and even Olympic games

01:11:24.080 | in that five-year period.

01:11:26.320 | This is not an unrealistic goal.

01:11:28.160 | There is a lot of empirical evidence to show

01:11:30.160 | that people have done this in the past, a lot of it.

01:11:32.760 | So if you fully immerse yourself in a sport

01:11:37.420 | with a well-worked out, well-planned training program,

01:11:40.140 | there is a mountain of evidence to show

01:11:41.860 | that in a five-year period, you can go from

01:11:44.600 | a complete beginner to a very, very impressive skill level

01:11:51.900 | to the point where you're competitive

01:11:54.360 | with some of the best people on the planet.

01:11:56.420 | You can reinvent yourself in these five-year periods.

01:12:00.520 | What happens with most people is they get to a certain level

01:12:03.120 | and they get complacent, they get lazy,

01:12:05.360 | and they just keep doing the same old thing

01:12:07.160 | they've been doing.

01:12:08.400 | But if you're diligent and you're purposeful,

01:12:11.560 | five years, you can accomplish an awful lot.

01:12:14.680 | And as I said, there's a mountain of evidence to show it.

01:12:18.040 | - By the way, as a small aside,

01:12:20.640 | somebody who's mentioned Tversky and Yamashita

01:12:22.960 | in the same conversation, you're one of the most

01:12:24.800 | impressive people I've ever spoken to.

01:12:27.160 | But as a small aside, so if there's this complete beginner,

01:12:32.160 | this is really interesting.

01:12:36.900 | There is empirical evidence that you can achieve

01:12:40.320 | incredible things in a short amount of time.

01:12:42.680 | There's a complete beginner standing before you

01:12:47.960 | and that beginner has fire in their eyes

01:12:50.560 | and they want to achieve mastery.

01:12:53.700 | Where do you place most of the credit

01:12:58.120 | for a journey that does achieve mastery?

01:13:01.560 | Is it the set of ideas they have in their mind?

01:13:04.760 | Is it the set of drills or the way they practice?

01:13:09.360 | Is it genetics and luck?

01:13:11.600 | - Those are all good insights.

01:13:15.040 | All of those factors you've mentioned play a definite role.

01:13:18.040 | Let's start with luck, okay?

01:13:19.680 | We are all subject to fortune,

01:13:24.960 | and fortune can be good and fortune can be bad.

01:13:28.600 | Life is in many ways beautiful, but life is also tragic.

01:13:32.120 | And I've had students who showed enormous promise

01:13:36.360 | and just tragic events occurred in their lives.

01:13:38.720 | The vicissitudes of fortune can be

01:13:43.200 | a wonderful thing in your life

01:13:46.120 | and they can be a terrible tragedy.

01:13:48.760 | I've had students who died for various reasons

01:13:53.400 | who could have gone on to become world champions.

01:13:56.540 | I've had students who, on a much lighter note,

01:13:59.360 | just fell in love and just wanted to have kids and move away.

01:14:03.920 | And that's a wonderful thing, but different direction.

01:14:08.040 | You just never know.

01:14:10.960 | So luck does play some role.

01:14:13.520 | Even things like where you're born,

01:14:15.920 | the location of your physical location in the world,

01:14:20.760 | or even the socioeconomic location can play a role,

01:14:24.320 | which could be detrimental or favorable.

01:14:26.800 | So yeah, luck does play some role.

01:14:28.720 | Thankfully, it's one of the smaller elements.

01:14:31.760 | And I do believe that a truly resourceful mind

01:14:36.320 | can overcome the majority of what fortune throws at us

01:14:41.080 | and get to goals, provided you're sufficiently

01:14:44.120 | mentally robust.

01:14:45.180 | Other things you mentioned, genetics.

01:14:49.240 | I do believe in certain sports,

01:14:53.880 | genetics really do play a powerful, powerful role.

01:14:58.480 | For example, in any sport where power output

01:15:02.800 | and reaction speed, ability to take physical damage,

01:15:07.720 | then there are genetic elements which will help.

01:15:11.160 | For example, I couldn't imagine a world

01:15:15.360 | in which even if I have a crippled leg,

01:15:17.440 | so even if I grew up in a world where my leg was normal

01:15:22.080 | and I had normal legs and everything was fine with my body,

01:15:25.200 | I don't believe that I could win the Olympic gold medal

01:15:30.200 | in 100 meter sprinting, for example.

01:15:32.160 | Okay, I just don't have enough fast twitch muscle fibers.

01:15:35.640 | But the more a sport involves skill and tactics,

01:15:40.640 | the less you will see genetics playing a role.

01:15:44.840 | If you look at the medal podiums in jujitsu, for example,

01:15:49.340 | you will see that no one body type

01:15:52.320 | is definitively superior to another.

01:15:54.840 | You will see every variation of body type

01:15:57.400 | in the medal platforms in jujitsu.

01:15:59.740 | As skill and tactics become more and more important

01:16:03.960 | and things like just power output over time

01:16:06.220 | become less and less important,

01:16:08.060 | then you will see that genetics

01:16:11.480 | play less and less of a role.

01:16:12.840 | I'm happy to say that the sport of jujitsu,

01:16:15.560 | the evidence seems pretty clear

01:16:17.200 | that there's no one dominant body type

01:16:19.080 | in the sport of jujitsu.

01:16:19.920 | Rather, there's just advantages for one type

01:16:22.880 | and there's advantages for another.

01:16:24.400 | You just have to learn to tailor your game to your body.

01:16:27.200 | With regards to training program,

01:16:32.640 | yes, I believe with all my heart and all my soul

01:16:36.680 | that your training program does make a difference.

01:16:40.160 | I've dedicated my life to that.

01:16:41.500 | Obviously, I'm biased in this regard.

01:16:43.860 | I do believe that all of the students that I taught

01:16:47.700 | who became world champions would have been great athletes,

01:16:50.120 | whether or not they had met me or not.

01:16:51.800 | I believe that.

01:16:53.900 | But I do also believe it would have taken them a lot longer

01:16:56.960 | and they may not have gotten to the level that they did.

01:17:00.040 | I'm sure they would have been impressive,

01:17:01.860 | but I do believe that the nature of a training program

01:17:06.060 | plays an enormous difference.

01:17:08.240 | I don't mean to say this in an arrogant way.

01:17:10.920 | I believe that there's, again, a mountain of evidence

01:17:14.200 | to suggest this is true

01:17:15.680 | because you see it in many different sports.

01:17:17.860 | Let's talk, for example, about your country, Russia,

01:17:21.720 | and its wrestling program.

01:17:23.660 | Russia is an enormous country,

01:17:28.660 | but the location where Russia's wrestling program comes from

01:17:32.880 | is actually very small,

01:17:34.140 | and the population is actually very small.

01:17:36.820 | I can't verify this, but I was told once,

01:17:39.580 | I can't verify this,

01:17:40.680 | but the number of people who wrestle in Russia

01:17:42.860 | is actually significantly smaller

01:17:44.940 | than the number of people who wrestle in the United States.

01:17:47.820 | - It's also not part of the school athletics

01:17:51.540 | and it is in the United States.

01:17:52.940 | - Yes, that's a different point.

01:17:54.660 | We'll come back to that

01:17:55.500 | 'cause that's also an important point.

01:17:57.760 | But if you look at the actual numbers of people there,

01:18:00.300 | they're actually pretty small.

01:18:02.060 | So ostensibly, if it comes down to a numbers game,

01:18:04.660 | America should dominate at the Olympics

01:18:06.420 | if we have more wrestlers.

01:18:07.820 | Now, the story gets more complicated

01:18:09.860 | because America has a different style of wrestling,

01:18:12.260 | the collegiate style, than the international freestyle.

01:18:14.460 | That is a complicating factor.

01:18:16.300 | But nonetheless, what you see there

01:18:21.780 | is that numbers aren't everything.

01:18:24.260 | Rather, the manner in which people are trained

01:18:27.660 | clearly has an impact.

01:18:29.460 | And we know very little about the,

01:18:32.820 | there's very little reliable information

01:18:34.540 | about the training program for wrestling

01:18:36.540 | in the Russian states.

01:18:39.340 | But one thing is incontestable is the amount of success

01:18:43.140 | that they've had at an international world championship

01:18:45.900 | and Olympic competition.

01:18:48.620 | They are disproportionately successful

01:18:52.140 | despite their relatively small numbers.

01:18:54.780 | There's nothing genetically special about them.

01:18:57.940 | You can talk about performance enhancing drugs,

01:19:01.140 | but those are a worldwide phenomenon.

01:19:03.460 | They don't have any access to technology

01:19:05.100 | that the rest of the world doesn't have.

01:19:07.060 | At some point, you gotta start asking

01:19:11.900 | what are they doing differently in the training room?

01:19:14.420 | And there are many other examples

01:19:18.100 | of similar situations.

01:19:20.220 | My country, New Zealand,

01:19:21.660 | has an insanely successful rugby program,

01:19:27.820 | the sport of rugby,

01:19:29.580 | which they have dominated for literally generations,

01:19:34.580 | despite the fact that our population is very, very small

01:19:38.700 | compared with the rest of the country.

01:19:39.900 | And we don't excel in many other sports.

01:19:42.580 | New Zealand does fairly well in sports overall,

01:19:45.900 | but nothing like they do in rugby.

01:19:47.900 | And you gotta ask yourself,

01:19:50.700 | is there a culture there which built this up?

01:19:54.260 | And the world is full of examples

01:19:56.900 | of seemingly small and unpromising areas or locations

01:20:01.900 | putting out disproportionately high numbers

01:20:04.780 | of successful athletes.

01:20:07.260 | And that points to the idea

01:20:10.500 | that different training programs

01:20:12.380 | have different success rates.

01:20:14.380 | And so I truly believe with all my heart and all my soul

01:20:17.660 | that how you train does make a significant difference.

01:20:22.180 | I would even go further and say it makes the most difference.

01:20:24.900 | Is it the only thing?

01:20:25.980 | Absolutely not.

01:20:26.820 | We've already talked about fortune.

01:20:28.060 | We've talked about genetics.

01:20:29.420 | If you wanna get nasty,

01:20:31.740 | you can even talk about things like performance

01:20:33.100 | enhancing drugs that obviously plays a role in modern sports.

01:20:36.100 | But I do believe that the majority

01:20:42.140 | of what creates success

01:20:46.540 | is the interaction between the athlete

01:20:48.660 | and the training program.

01:20:50.340 | Now the training program is one thing.

01:20:52.340 | I do believe that's the single most important,

01:20:54.420 | but right behind it is the athlete themselves.

01:20:57.280 | In my own experience,

01:21:01.280 | people talk about athletes that I've trained successfully,

01:21:04.180 | but they never talk about athletes

01:21:05.420 | that I've trained unsuccessfully.

01:21:07.060 | Always remember that for every champion a coach produces,

01:21:11.340 | there's a hundred people that they coach

01:21:14.300 | that no one ever heard of.

01:21:16.020 | And this is completely normal.

01:21:18.860 | A coach can never take the lion's share of the credit.

01:21:24.020 | A coach creates possibilities,

01:21:27.620 | but it's the athlete who actualizes the possibilities.

01:21:31.380 | And so building that rapport

01:21:33.260 | and finding the right people to excel

01:21:36.460 | in your training program is also a big part of it.

01:21:39.380 | - What makes the difference between the successful,

01:21:42.300 | your successes and your failures as a coach?

01:21:45.580 | - A range of reasons.

01:21:47.020 | The single most important is persistence.

01:21:50.740 | People will point to all kinds of virtues amongst athletes.

01:21:55.340 | This guy's the most courageous,

01:21:56.500 | this guy's the strongest, these are all virtues.

01:21:59.980 | But the one indispensable virtue is persistence.

01:22:04.980 | The ability just to stay in the game long enough

01:22:07.460 | to get the results you seek.

01:22:09.380 | - But what does persistence really look like?

01:22:12.660 | If we can just break that apart a little bit.

01:22:14.420 | - It's actually, and this is a great question you're asking,

01:22:17.020 | because most people see it as a kind of simplistic

01:22:21.220 | doggedness where you just show up every day.

01:22:23.740 | That's not it.

01:22:24.760 | The most important form of persistence

01:22:27.740 | is persistence of thinking,

01:22:30.460 | which looks to push you in increasingly efficient,

01:22:34.660 | more and more efficient methods of training.

01:22:38.060 | Famously, people talk about the idea

01:22:40.260 | that the hardest work of all is hard thinking,

01:22:42.700 | and they're absolutely right.

01:22:44.460 | Okay, coming into the gym and just doing the same thing

01:22:47.500 | for a decade isn't going to make you better.

01:22:50.280 | What's going to make you better

01:22:51.740 | is progressive training over time

01:22:53.820 | where you identify clear goals marked out

01:22:56.340 | in time increments, three months, six months,

01:22:58.900 | 12 months, five years,

01:23:01.620 | and build those short-term goals

01:23:04.380 | into a program of long-term goals,

01:23:06.580 | making sure that the training program changes over time

01:23:10.860 | so that as your skill level rises,

01:23:12.560 | the challenges you face in the gym become higher and higher.

01:23:15.820 | Don't kill them at the start with challenges

01:23:18.500 | that are too hard for them to deal with.

01:23:19.720 | They get discouraged and leave.

01:23:21.500 | Build them slowly over time,

01:23:23.340 | but make sure they don't just get left in a swamp

01:23:25.860 | where they're just doing the same thing

01:23:27.100 | they were doing three years ago, and they get bored.

01:23:29.620 | There's two ways you can leave in a gym.

01:23:32.300 | You can leave from adversity, it was too tough,

01:23:36.140 | or you can leave from boredom.

01:23:38.220 | Everyone talks about the first.

01:23:40.840 | No one talks about the second.

01:23:42.420 | Most people, when they get to black belt, they get bored.

01:23:47.500 | They know what their game is.

01:23:48.620 | They know what they're good at.

01:23:49.620 | They know what they're not good at.

01:23:51.220 | When they compete, they stick with what they're good at,

01:23:53.420 | and they avoid what they're not good at, and they get bored.

01:23:56.820 | They reach a plateau, and that's it.

01:23:59.500 | My whole thing is to make sure it's not so tough

01:24:02.380 | at the start that they leave because of adversity,

01:24:05.180 | and then for the rest of their career,

01:24:06.420 | to make sure it's not boring,

01:24:07.700 | so they leave because of boredom.

01:24:10.100 | - Travis Dean has actually said something

01:24:11.700 | that changed the way I see training.

01:24:13.840 | He said it as a side comment,

01:24:15.540 | but he said that at the end of a good training session,

01:24:19.940 | your mind should be exhausted, not your body.

01:24:24.460 | And I, for most of my life, saw good training sessions

01:24:29.220 | where my body was exhausted.

01:24:31.300 | - Yes, I believe that's the case with most people.

01:24:35.180 | You should come out of the training session

01:24:37.140 | with your mind buzzing with ideas,

01:24:39.260 | like possibilities for tomorrow.

01:24:41.540 | And by the way, on that note, I would go further

01:24:43.620 | and say that the training session doesn't finish

01:24:46.780 | when your body stops moving.

01:24:48.680 | It finishes when your mind stops moving,

01:24:51.180 | and your mind shouldn't stop moving.

01:24:53.180 | After that session, there should be analysis.

01:24:55.140 | What did I do well?

01:24:55.980 | What did I do badly?

01:24:57.300 | How could I do better with the things that I did well?

01:25:00.260 | - Can I ask you about something that I truly enjoy

01:25:03.660 | and I think is really powerful,

01:25:05.700 | but most people don't seem to believe in that,

01:25:07.640 | but is drilling?

01:25:08.740 | I don't know.

01:25:11.580 | Maybe people are different, but I love the idea,

01:25:15.420 | maybe even outside of Jiu-Jitsu,

01:25:16.860 | of doing the same thing over and over.

01:25:19.460 | It's like Jiro dreams of sushi.

01:25:21.700 | I love doing the thing that nobody wants to do

01:25:26.700 | and doing it 10 times, 100 times, 1,000 times more

01:25:30.980 | than what nobody wants to do.

01:25:32.900 | So I'm a huge fan of drilling.

01:25:36.900 | Obviously, I'm not a professional athlete,

01:25:38.700 | but I feel like if I actually gave myself,

01:25:41.220 | if I wanted to be really good at Jiu-Jitsu,

01:25:44.420 | like reach the level of being in the top 25

01:25:47.500 | when I was much younger, like really strive,

01:25:51.320 | I think I could achieve it by drilling.

01:25:56.320 | I had this belief untested.

01:25:59.120 | Can you challenge this idea?

01:26:00.680 | Or agree with it?

01:26:03.320 | - First off, fascinating.

01:26:05.400 | However, we're going to have to-

01:26:07.240 | - Disagree?

01:26:08.060 | - No, no.

01:26:08.900 | We're just going to have to start to understand

01:26:13.280 | what are we talking about when we talk about drilling.

01:26:15.580 | It's a very vague term.

01:26:18.600 | Okay, at this moment, many of your listeners

01:26:22.640 | are probably having the same thought process,

01:26:25.000 | which is, oh, drilling, yeah, I know what that is.

01:26:27.880 | We go into the gym and we pick a move

01:26:30.600 | and we practice it for a certain number of repetitions.

01:26:33.360 | And if I do that, I'm going to get better at the technique.

01:26:38.240 | They're wrong.

01:26:47.200 | We've got to have a much more in-depth understanding

01:26:52.200 | of what the hell we're talking about

01:26:55.680 | when we talk about drilling.

01:26:57.080 | Ultimately, any movement in the gym

01:27:03.440 | that doesn't improve the skills you already have

01:27:08.720 | or build new skills is a waste of time,

01:27:11.880 | a waste of resources.

01:27:14.480 | Everything you do should be done with the aim

01:27:17.520 | and the understanding that this is going to make me better

01:27:20.320 | at the sport I practice.

01:27:21.960 | If it's not, shouldn't be there.

01:27:23.620 | The majority of what passes for drilling

01:27:28.680 | in most training halls will not make you better,

01:27:31.460 | including some of the most cherished forms of drilling,

01:27:35.920 | which is repetition for numbers.

01:27:40.020 | The moment you say to someone,

01:27:42.440 | I want you to do this 100 times,

01:27:44.440 | what are they really thinking about?

01:27:47.960 | Volume.

01:27:48.780 | They're saying, okay, I'm at repetition 78.

01:27:52.240 | I'm at 80, 20 more to go.

01:27:55.380 | All they're talking,

01:27:56.220 | their primary thought process is on numbers.

01:27:59.680 | That's not the point of drilling.

01:28:03.240 | The point is skill acquisition.

01:28:05.140 | When people drill, don't get them focused on numbers.

01:28:09.680 | Get them focused on mechanics.

01:28:12.460 | That's what they have to worry about.

01:28:14.260 | I never have my students drill for numbers ever.

01:28:17.780 | This one, two, three, get the fuck out of here.

01:28:21.060 | Are you kidding me?

01:28:21.900 | Like, how are you going to get better with that?

01:28:23.580 | Okay, get them working on the sense of gaining knowledge.

01:28:28.220 | That's my job.

01:28:30.060 | I have to give them knowledge.

01:28:31.620 | I have to explain to them what they're trying to do.

01:28:34.180 | That starts them on the right track.

01:28:36.860 | But knowledge is one thing, skill is another.

01:28:41.280 | If jiu-jitsu was just about knowledge,

01:28:43.980 | then all the 60 and 70 year old red belts

01:28:47.980 | would be the world champions.

01:28:49.200 | They're not.

01:28:50.460 | Jiu-jitsu isn't won by knowledge, it's won by skill.

01:28:53.860 | Knowledge is the first step in building skill.

01:28:58.180 | So my job as a coach is to transmit knowledge.

01:29:01.980 | Then I have to create training programs

01:29:04.700 | where the path from knowledge to polished skill

01:29:08.460 | is carried out.

01:29:11.260 | That's the interface between me and my students.

01:29:13.780 | And so I give them drills where the whole emphasis

01:29:18.780 | is upon getting a sense where they understand

01:29:23.700 | what are the problems they're trying to solve

01:29:26.580 | and working towards practical solutions.

01:29:30.580 | They never work with numbers.

01:29:32.820 | They work with mechanics and feel.

01:29:36.080 | Then you have to bring in the idea of progression.

01:29:40.080 | When you drill, there's zero resistance.

01:29:44.840 | When you fight in competition, there's 100% resistance.

01:29:48.960 | You can't go from zero to 100.

01:29:51.280 | There has to be progress over time

01:29:55.000 | where I have them work in drills

01:29:59.200 | with slightly increasing increments of resistance.

01:30:04.200 | And just as we talked about earlier with the weightlifter

01:30:06.660 | who doesn't start with 500 pounds,

01:30:08.880 | but who begins with the bar,

01:30:10.880 | and then over time builds the skills

01:30:13.040 | that one day out there in the future

01:30:14.720 | he will lift 500 pounds.

01:30:16.740 | So too, that Judy Guittami that you're working on today

01:30:19.920 | is feeble and pathetic.

01:30:21.700 | But five years from now,

01:30:22.760 | you'll win a world championship with it.

01:30:24.760 | You can't have this naive idea of drilling

01:30:28.640 | as something you just come out,

01:30:30.360 | you randomly pick a move,

01:30:33.120 | and you work for numbers until you've satisfied

01:30:35.800 | a certain set of numbers that your coach threw at you,

01:30:37.760 | and then you think you're gonna get better.

01:30:39.760 | There's even dangers with drilling.

01:30:41.640 | There is no performance increase

01:30:50.120 | that comes once you get to a certain level,

01:30:54.480 | and you just keep doing the same damn thing.

01:30:57.240 | Let's say, for example, you come out

01:31:01.660 | and you hit 100 repetitions of the arm bar

01:31:05.120 | Judy Guittami from guard position,

01:31:06.740 | and you're all proud of yourself

01:31:07.880 | 'cause you hit 100 repetitions,

01:31:09.160 | and your body's tired, and you're telling yourself,

01:31:11.000 | "Man, I got a good workout."

01:31:13.000 | And you come in tomorrow, you do exactly the same thing.

01:31:16.360 | You come in the day after that,

01:31:17.600 | and a week goes by and you've done the same thing.

01:31:20.100 | Then a year later, you do the same thing.

01:31:23.360 | Ask yourself, has your Judy Guittami really gotten better?

01:31:28.820 | No, you've performed literally thousands

01:31:32.520 | and thousands of repetitions.

01:31:36.680 | You have spent an enormous amount of training time

01:31:40.680 | and energy that could have gone in different directions

01:31:43.120 | on something which didn't make you any better.

01:31:45.600 | Drills have diminishing returns.

01:31:51.880 | Once you get to a certain skill level,

01:31:54.040 | if you just keep hammering on the same thing

01:31:57.120 | in the same fashion for the same amount of time,

01:32:01.160 | you stop getting better.

01:32:03.360 | - Can I, partially for fun, partially for dollars,

01:32:05.600 | I love it, but partially because I actually believe

01:32:07.360 | this to push back on some points.

01:32:09.040 | Is it possible?

01:32:12.080 | So everything you said I think is beautiful and correct.

01:32:15.640 | But the asking yourself the question,

01:32:19.720 | am I getting better is a really important one,

01:32:21.400 | and you could do that in training.

01:32:23.280 | Is there a set of techniques,

01:32:25.160 | maybe a small subset of all the techniques

01:32:28.080 | that are in jiu-jitsu,

01:32:29.720 | where you can have significant skill acquisition

01:32:35.400 | if you put in the numbers or the time, whatever,

01:32:39.080 | on a technique against an opponent who's not resisting?

01:32:42.240 | Here's, let me elaborate.

01:32:45.120 | What I've, in my, maybe I'm different.

01:32:47.160 | - You'll probably have to finish an example.

01:32:48.800 | - Yes.

01:32:49.620 | Let me first make a general statement,

01:32:53.000 | then I can give examples.

01:32:54.660 | The general statement is I found that through repetitions,

01:32:58.000 | and this is high repetitions combined with training,

01:33:01.840 | but high repetitions against a non-resisting opponent,

01:33:05.120 | I've gotten to understand the way my body moves,

01:33:10.120 | the way I apply pressure on a human.

01:33:12.760 | 'Cause it's not actually zero resistance.

01:33:14.520 | The opponent's still laying there.

01:33:16.120 | They're still keeping their legs up.

01:33:18.040 | They're still doing, they might not be resisting,

01:33:20.620 | but they're still creating a structure.

01:33:22.560 | - Yes.

01:33:23.400 | - A non-dynamic structure.

01:33:24.760 | - They're presenting a target.

01:33:26.080 | - Yes, it's not dynamic,

01:33:27.960 | so you can't master the timing of things,

01:33:32.000 | but you can master the, not master,

01:33:34.800 | but I felt like I could gain an understanding

01:33:37.800 | of how to apply pressure to the human body

01:33:40.040 | over thousands of repetitions.

01:33:43.200 | Now, for example, just to give you an example

01:33:45.400 | to know what we're talking about,

01:33:47.280 | there's a guy named Salo Hubero and Shonji Hubero

01:33:52.200 | that have this, I guess, I already forgot,

01:33:55.240 | but headquarters position or something like that.

01:33:57.640 | But putting pressure as you pass guard,

01:34:01.040 | like medium passing distance kind of pressure.

01:34:03.500 | I've did thousands of repetitions of that

01:34:07.040 | to understand what putting pressure with my hips feels like,

01:34:12.040 | to truly understand that movement.

01:34:13.980 | I felt like I was getting much better.

01:34:17.640 | It's like, it's hard to put into words,

01:34:19.520 | but that skill acquisition is so subtle.

01:34:22.740 | Just the way you turn your little, like hips.

01:34:25.520 | - But you're already talking about

01:34:27.200 | a better form of drilling now.

01:34:28.800 | You're going beyond the basic numbers

01:34:30.520 | and you're getting the sense of feel and mechanics,

01:34:32.480 | which is what we want in drilling.

01:34:34.020 | - But the reason I say numbers,

01:34:36.120 | and maybe you can speak to this,

01:34:37.480 | but this might be an OCD thing,

01:34:39.800 | but it allows you to take a journey

01:34:43.320 | that doesn't just last a week or two weeks,

01:34:46.320 | but a journey where you stay with the technique

01:34:49.000 | for two, three years, and there's a dedication to it,

01:34:53.760 | where it's a long-term commitment,

01:34:57.040 | to where you're forcing yourself,

01:34:59.000 | perhaps there's other mechanisms,

01:35:00.400 | but you're forcing yourself to stay with a technique

01:35:03.280 | longer than most people around you

01:35:05.000 | are staying with whatever they're working on.

01:35:07.120 | And you're taking that long journey.

01:35:09.120 | And the numbers somehow enforce that persistence

01:35:12.360 | and that dedication.

01:35:13.480 | - First thing, that journey's a wonderful thing.

01:35:18.320 | And if that technique is a crucial part of what you do,

01:35:22.980 | then it's time well invested.

01:35:24.720 | But always understand that it comes at an opportunity cost,

01:35:27.520 | that by spending that amount of time on that one technique,

01:35:30.360 | you've sacrificed other things

01:35:31.680 | that you could have learned that could have won you matches.

01:35:34.980 | So understand that every focus upon one element of the game

01:35:39.980 | comes at the opportunity cost of other elements.

01:35:43.220 | Now, as long as you're playing a part of the game

01:35:46.600 | where, okay, this is central to what I do, okay, that's fine.

01:35:50.720 | But just be aware of the danger of opportunity cost.

01:35:53.700 | That's something no one talks about in the training room,

01:35:55.460 | but it becomes very important.

01:35:57.540 | Secondly, the other question you have to start asking

01:35:59.300 | yourself is, okay, that training clearly had benefits

01:36:03.880 | for you early on.

01:36:05.820 | But when the point of diminishing return starts coming,

01:36:08.620 | and if you feel you're just doing the same thing,

01:36:11.060 | then it's time to switch.

01:36:12.300 | Now, if you feel you're still getting benefit from it,

01:36:15.300 | by all means, continue.

01:36:17.300 | That will be a call on your part.

01:36:18.940 | You've been playing this game a long time now,

01:36:21.600 | so I would trust your call on that.

01:36:23.380 | But my job as a coach is to look out and say,

01:36:28.640 | okay, this kid's been working cross-ashigurami

01:36:32.740 | for six months, and I feel he's gotten

01:36:35.780 | to a good skill level.

01:36:37.280 | If he stays any further on it,

01:36:40.100 | the opportunity cost becomes greater

01:36:43.020 | than the expected benefits of continuing it.

01:36:45.860 | And that's my job as a coach,

01:36:47.100 | is to direct things in that fashion.

01:36:48.540 | If I can do a good job with that,

01:36:50.340 | then I can take them to the next level of drilling

01:36:52.820 | and start amping it up,

01:36:54.380 | and that's how I keep progress over time.

01:36:56.780 | My biggest fear is to have students run past the point

01:37:01.780 | of diminishing returns, staying stagnant,

01:37:05.340 | where opportunity cost comes in,

01:37:07.960 | and they're not making the progress they could

01:37:10.620 | in the time that they've been working.

01:37:13.260 | - And that was, it was almost a philosophical question

01:37:15.740 | for me, that's what I was always on the search on,

01:37:18.100 | 'cause I know my mind likes drilling.

01:37:22.540 | I don't like relying on other people for improvement.

01:37:26.580 | And drilling allows me to do something

01:37:30.660 | that is 100% me.

01:37:33.700 | - It's interesting, Lex, you say you don't like relying

01:37:35.460 | on other people in drilling, but in drilling,

01:37:37.460 | you really do rely a lot on your partner.

01:37:39.300 | One of the first things I do when I coach people

01:37:40.940 | is I teach them how to drill.

01:37:43.220 | That's a skill in itself.

01:37:44.900 | And drilling is, in a sense, the opposite of sparring.

01:37:49.900 | Drilling is a cooperative venture

01:37:55.780 | where you work as dance partners,

01:37:58.460 | complementing each other's movement.

01:38:00.260 | If I drill with Gordon Ryan and I want him to work armbars,

01:38:04.300 | I will move my body in ways

01:38:05.900 | which make it an interesting exercise for Gordon.

01:38:11.660 | I'm not just sitting there and he does a repetition

01:38:15.580 | and I'm, okay, he does 10.

01:38:17.740 | I can't wait for this to be over so I can do my 10

01:38:20.900 | and I can't wait for all this to be over

01:38:22.260 | so we can just spar and get over with all this bullshit.

01:38:25.620 | That's the sad truth of most drilling in jiu-jitsu.

01:38:28.500 | There's a sense in which when good people drill,

01:38:33.380 | it's like watching good people dance.

01:38:36.940 | They move in unison and complement each other's movement

01:38:39.820 | and make each other look better.

01:38:42.140 | Sparring, on the other hand, is the exact opposite of that.

01:38:44.420 | That's resistance, where you're trying to make

01:38:46.140 | the other person look as bad as possible.

01:38:48.260 | And once you understand the different directions

01:38:51.020 | in which drilling and sparring go,

01:38:52.740 | that's when things start getting interesting.

01:38:54.340 | You start getting fast progress.

01:38:56.500 | - Yeah, just, you're absolutely right.

01:38:58.980 | I think I was not very eloquent describing what I mean.

01:39:02.180 | I found myself not able to find in jiu-jitsu

01:39:07.180 | too many people that are willing

01:39:08.900 | to dedicate a huge amount of time

01:39:11.700 | to a particular technique.

01:39:13.300 | - I can agree with you on that, Lex.

01:39:14.940 | Now, answer the interesting question, why?

01:39:17.080 | Why can't you get people to drill with you?

01:39:20.980 | - By the way, if I could just shout out,

01:39:24.100 | the people that did drill with me

01:39:25.660 | is usually blue belt women, because they're smaller.

01:39:30.660 | They don't like training because they get their ass kicked

01:39:34.540 | because they're much smaller.

01:39:36.140 | So they're willing to invest a significant amount of effort

01:39:41.020 | into training.

01:39:44.220 | - That's good, but their motivation for doing so

01:39:47.580 | is not good.

01:39:48.500 | - Yes, exactly.

01:39:50.180 | - And your motivation for drilling

01:39:51.380 | is 'cause you don't wanna get your ass kicked.

01:39:52.660 | - No black belt ever.

01:39:55.460 | I could never find a black belt

01:39:57.060 | that I could drill with like this.

01:39:59.460 | - Now let's go back to that question, why?

01:40:01.580 | - I don't know if you mean this.

01:40:03.460 | I am somebody who likes to say nice things about people.

01:40:06.940 | - Let me answer for you.

01:40:09.820 | Two reasons, because they find it boring.

01:40:12.900 | And secondly, perhaps more importantly,

01:40:14.900 | they don't believe it works.

01:40:16.540 | - Yeah, those are good answers.

01:40:18.340 | - And now let's go further

01:40:20.100 | and ask the truly interesting question,

01:40:22.660 | why do they believe that?

01:40:23.940 | - If I were to answer it, in the context

01:40:28.820 | of Russian wrestling, where drilling is much bigger part

01:40:32.500 | is I think culturally, that was knowledge

01:40:35.620 | that everybody tells each other in jiu-jitsu

01:40:38.260 | that drilling doesn't work.

01:40:43.260 | - Because they're never taught how to drill.

01:40:47.540 | No one ever sits you down one day and says,

01:40:49.100 | okay, this is how you drill.

01:40:50.820 | And so the exercise feels futile.

01:40:54.300 | They don't feel their skill level is going up.

01:40:55.900 | They don't associate drilling with increased skill level.

01:40:59.060 | They associate sparring with increased skill level,

01:41:01.740 | but not drilling, which is a tragedy

01:41:03.780 | because it is a fantastic way to introduce

01:41:08.060 | and expand the repertoire of a developing student.

01:41:11.380 | It's an essential part of every workout I teach.

01:41:13.780 | I always say that game of jiu-jitsu begins with knowledge

01:41:17.780 | and builds up to skill.

01:41:20.460 | Who wins is the one who has greatest skill

01:41:23.180 | and nine times out of 10.

01:41:24.900 | So to me, it's a tragedy that what you're saying

01:41:28.980 | breaks my heart to hear that you couldn't get a black belt

01:41:31.220 | to drill with you, that's shameful.

01:41:33.420 | But I understand, I sympathize with those black belts too,

01:41:38.300 | because the way in which most people are told to drill

01:41:41.660 | does feel ineffective and it is damn boring.

01:41:44.940 | They'd rather just spar.

01:41:46.420 | They feel like they get more out of the workout.

01:41:48.500 | And that's, if anything, an indictment

01:41:51.780 | upon most of the training programs around the nation.

01:41:54.660 | - Would you say that drilling,

01:41:56.860 | if you were to build a black belt world champion,

01:42:01.540 | would drilling be what percent of their training

01:42:05.780 | in the entirety of their career would be drilling?

01:42:07.940 | - Good, great question.

01:42:09.500 | Let's first put a proviso on it

01:42:11.900 | that I don't do the same thing for all athletes.

01:42:14.180 | Everyone's got a different personality.

01:42:16.220 | And like Nicky Rod, I can only hold his attention

01:42:19.580 | for two minutes at a time.

01:42:20.900 | And Gary Tonin, five minutes.

01:42:26.460 | Gordon Ryan, five hours.

01:42:28.460 | George St. Pierre, five hours.

01:42:31.700 | Travis Stevens, five hours.

01:42:34.100 | They are just laser focused.

01:42:35.420 | So everyone's different.

01:42:36.340 | Let's put that down as our first proviso.

01:42:38.500 | You probably knew those answers already.

01:42:42.220 | - Yeah.

01:42:43.060 | That's hilarious.

01:42:45.180 | - But as a general rule,

01:42:49.260 | if I run a two and a half hour class,

01:42:53.780 | you can expect an hour and a half of it to be,

01:42:56.180 | I'm gonna use the word drilling,

01:42:59.220 | but I'm also gonna say that this is too complex of a story

01:43:02.380 | to give now with words.

01:43:03.940 | I would need to demonstrate it.

01:43:05.300 | But the way in which we drill

01:43:06.620 | is not your standard method of drilling.

01:43:08.580 | And then it's into sparring.

01:43:09.980 | But if you give me a choice

01:43:12.740 | between a bad drilling partner and sparring,

01:43:15.460 | I could make the same choice that most black belts make,

01:43:19.500 | which I would go with sparring.

01:43:21.220 | - 'Cause you can create drilling

01:43:23.340 | within the sparring environment.

01:43:24.940 | - Like good drilling is a wonderful thing.

01:43:28.380 | Bad drilling is just a worthless waste of time.

01:43:30.780 | - Okay, before I have a million questions for you,

01:43:36.060 | but I have to ask,

01:43:37.220 | can you, we've described the fundamentals of jiu-jitsu.

01:43:41.020 | Can we describe the principles, the fundamentals

01:43:44.460 | of one of the interesting systems you've developed,

01:43:46.760 | which is the leg lock system?

01:43:49.220 | - Yeah.

01:43:50.060 | Anything in particular?

01:43:50.940 | Or just like a general understanding

01:43:53.260 | of what are some of the major principles of it?

01:43:55.860 | - Well, it's like me coming to Miyamoto Musashi

01:43:59.100 | and asking, can you describe the principles

01:44:01.580 | of sword fighting?

01:44:03.940 | - You're too generous.

01:44:05.040 | Let's start off with some context.

01:44:08.480 | When I began the sport of jiu-jitsu,

01:44:13.500 | I was taught a fairly classical approach to jiu-jitsu,

01:44:20.660 | which leg locks were a part of it,

01:44:23.220 | but not an emphasized part of it.

01:44:25.020 | The overall culture of the time, this is the mid 1990s,

01:44:30.180 | the overall culture of the time saw leg locks

01:44:34.140 | as largely ineffective.

01:44:36.340 | We were told that against good opposition,

01:44:44.820 | they just didn't work very well.

01:44:46.000 | They were low percentage techniques.

01:44:48.160 | We were also told that they were tactically unsound

01:44:52.380 | because if you ever attempted them

01:44:54.420 | and you lost control of the leg lock,

01:44:56.480 | your opponent would end up on top of you

01:44:59.660 | or in some kind of good position

01:45:01.260 | and you'd be in terrible trouble.

01:45:03.400 | And we were also told that they were unsafe,

01:45:06.660 | that if they were applied in the gym,

01:45:09.620 | there'd be far too many injuries

01:45:10.860 | and people would be badly hurt.

01:45:12.420 | And that was the received wisdom of that time.

01:45:16.940 | And so I didn't even work with them at all.

01:45:21.180 | And they would be shown occasionally in the gym

01:45:24.360 | and you'd learn them, you'd drill them.

01:45:26.880 | But in sparring, I showed no interest.

01:45:31.300 | You probably know that change when I met

01:45:35.680 | the great American grappler, Dean Lister,

01:45:38.280 | who early in his career was using Achilles locks

01:45:41.520 | with considerable success.

01:45:43.000 | I met him in the gym, wonderful fellow.

01:45:46.380 | - Achilles locks is like a straight full lock.

01:45:48.160 | - Yes, that's correct, yes.

01:45:49.780 | And he went on to become a heel hooker

01:45:53.640 | and win 280 CCs later on in his career.

01:45:56.540 | But we never met again after that.

01:45:59.240 | And that opened some doors of inquiry.

01:46:04.240 | - Well, he asked this first principles question

01:46:09.240 | is why would you only use half the body in a game

01:46:13.400 | that involves the human body.

01:46:14.760 | - Perfect sense.

01:46:15.800 | So that opened doors to inquiry.

01:46:18.820 | And if you looked around the jiu-jitsu world at that time,

01:46:22.700 | the number of specialized leg lockers was very small.

01:46:27.700 | And most of them were from outside of conventional jiu-jitsu.

01:46:32.960 | For example, you could look around and see people

01:46:35.900 | like Romina Sato had sharp leg locks

01:46:39.480 | for that time period in the 1990s.

01:46:41.520 | So they were out there, they existed.

01:46:45.160 | And you'd see people like Ken Shamrock

01:46:47.320 | would use heel hooks in competition

01:46:50.280 | and he had some good success with them.

01:46:52.920 | When I began experimenting in the gym,

01:46:57.720 | fairly soon certain truths started to become evident.

01:47:03.960 | And the most important of these

01:47:07.800 | can be understood very quickly.

01:47:09.160 | And they were relatively easy to discover.

01:47:13.160 | The first was that most people,

01:47:17.440 | when they went to understand and study leg locking,

01:47:22.440 | and when I talk about leg locking,

01:47:26.000 | I'm gonna talk about one specific type,

01:47:27.640 | which is the most high percentage type.

01:47:29.800 | This is leg locks, which are performed

01:47:31.800 | with entanglements of your opponent's legs with your legs.

01:47:35.000 | There are other forms of leg lock,

01:47:36.320 | but these are relatively low percentage

01:47:38.120 | and don't figure heavily in competition.

01:47:39.820 | So I'll ignore them.

01:47:42.280 | Most people made no distinction

01:47:45.920 | between the mechanism of control

01:47:48.680 | versus the mechanism of breaking.

01:47:51.760 | The heel hook is what ultimately breaks the ankle,

01:47:56.760 | but the mechanism of control is the entanglement

01:47:59.000 | of your legs to your opponent's legs.

01:48:01.760 | The Japanese term, ashigurami,

01:48:03.880 | literally just means like leg entanglement.

01:48:05.920 | It's a generic term.

01:48:06.920 | It could apply to any form of entanglement.

01:48:08.880 | There are many options.

01:48:11.120 | My idea was, let's focus on the entanglement first

01:48:16.120 | and worry about the breaking mechanism second.

01:48:21.360 | This was analogous to the idea

01:48:23.120 | of position before submission,

01:48:25.080 | only you couldn't talk about it

01:48:26.560 | in terms of conventional positions

01:48:28.680 | because ashigurami doesn't really fit

01:48:31.240 | into the traditional hierarchies,

01:48:33.320 | positional hierarchies of jiu-jitsu.

01:48:35.400 | So the conversation was switched from position

01:48:39.200 | to submission to control to submission.

01:48:42.520 | Now, wrapping two of your legs

01:48:45.680 | around one of your opponent's legs

01:48:47.320 | gives you many different options.

01:48:48.520 | You can do it with your feet on the outside,

01:48:50.600 | so-called 50/50 variations.

01:48:52.280 | You can do it with your feet on the inside

01:48:53.720 | and form what we call inside foot position.

01:48:58.720 | There's pros and cons to both.

01:49:01.960 | There's also methods of harmonizing the two.

01:49:04.600 | So you have one foot on the inside

01:49:05.920 | and one foot on the outside.

01:49:07.400 | You can do it with a straight leg

01:49:11.160 | where you heel hook from the outside

01:49:13.160 | or you can bring the leg across your center line

01:49:15.000 | and heel hook from the inside.

01:49:16.560 | You will start to notice

01:49:19.640 | as you work through these different variations

01:49:22.000 | that some present advantages over others.

01:49:25.920 | All of them come at a price to some degree,

01:49:30.880 | regardless of which ashigurami option you use.

01:49:33.640 | There will be some degree of foot exposure

01:49:36.120 | on my part to my opponent

01:49:37.800 | and some degree of back exposure

01:49:40.160 | on my part relative to my opponent.

01:49:41.920 | So that's the downside of it.

01:49:43.360 | Variations within those different ashigurami

01:49:48.240 | enable you to lessen danger in some respects

01:49:52.420 | and at the price of gaining dangers in others.

01:49:56.320 | So you get this wide array of choices.

01:49:59.920 | There's not this kind of simplistic hierarchy

01:50:02.440 | that you see in the basic positions of jiu-jitsu,

01:50:05.480 | but there are hierarchies.

01:50:07.400 | I do, for example, generally favor inside heel hooks

01:50:10.800 | over outside heel hooks.

01:50:12.160 | If I feel my opponent is very good at exposing my back

01:50:18.800 | while I'm in ashigurami,

01:50:20.240 | I generally prefer 50/50 situations.

01:50:23.080 | If I believe my opponent is very good at counter leg locks,

01:50:25.880 | I generally prefer my feet on the inside,

01:50:28.400 | working with variations of inside senkaku, et cetera, et cetera.

01:50:32.360 | So there are broad heuristic rules

01:50:35.160 | that we can give to work in these situations.

01:50:37.920 | Once you start to understand

01:50:43.640 | there's a variety of entanglements you can use,

01:50:48.000 | then you start getting to the really interesting ideas

01:50:50.920 | that as you perform one given attack, one given heel hook,

01:50:55.920 | you can flow through different forms of ashigurami

01:51:01.320 | where you can create new dangers

01:51:04.760 | and avoid possible pitfalls

01:51:09.240 | in a very short timeframe

01:51:11.720 | as you switch from one ashigurami to another over time

01:51:14.520 | so that as your opponent's lines of resistance

01:51:16.800 | to an initial attack change,

01:51:18.760 | you can accommodate those

01:51:19.920 | by switching to another form of ashigurami

01:51:22.320 | so that your mechanism of control

01:51:24.680 | is always pointing in opposite directions of his escape.

01:51:28.080 | And if you focus on this idea of control through the legs,

01:51:33.840 | you can completely change the nature of leg locking

01:51:37.640 | and take it away from what it was in the 1990s,

01:51:40.640 | an opportunistic method of attack

01:51:42.880 | based upon surprise, speed, and power

01:51:46.000 | into one based on control.

01:51:48.400 | If you can do this,

01:51:49.720 | you can undermine many of the basic criticisms

01:51:55.680 | of leg locking,

01:51:56.920 | which were prevalent when I began the sport of jiu-jitsu.

01:52:01.320 | For example, if I can completely control and immobilize you,

01:52:06.320 | I can perform the lock very, very safely.

01:52:10.040 | If my only way of breaking your leg

01:52:11.800 | is to be faster and more powerful than you,

01:52:14.840 | nine times out of 10, when I apply it,

01:52:16.440 | I'm gonna hurt your leg as much by accident as anything.

01:52:19.960 | But if I can completely immobilize you,

01:52:22.040 | and as every attempt you make to escape,

01:52:24.040 | I can follow you and immobilize you in new directions,

01:52:27.960 | then I can apply the lock with as much force

01:52:31.520 | or as little force as possible.

01:52:33.920 | And so you'll see in our training room,

01:52:35.640 | despite over considerably more than two decades,

01:52:40.360 | sorry, a decade and a half now

01:52:41.920 | of heel hooking using these methods,

01:52:44.340 | the number of people severely injured by heel hooks is tiny.

01:52:50.620 | I would say I've seen more people injured by far

01:52:55.640 | by Kimuras in the time I've been training

01:52:58.640 | that I have by heel hooks,

01:53:00.000 | despite them having a similar twisting dynamic to them.

01:53:04.140 | If you build a culture where people focus on control

01:53:09.800 | rather than speed of execution,

01:53:11.880 | then the injury rate goes down appreciably.

01:53:15.040 | The whole idea of positional loss,

01:53:16.860 | everyone was critical of leg locks.

01:53:18.560 | Now, if you go for leg locks and they don't work,

01:53:20.240 | well, now you're in trouble.

01:53:21.840 | The guy's gonna be on top of you.

01:53:23.320 | They never make that criticism with arm bars.

01:53:25.560 | Okay, you can be in a mounted position,

01:53:27.720 | go for an arm bar, end up on bottom,

01:53:29.320 | lose the arm bar and lose position,

01:53:30.760 | but I've never heard anyone criticize arm bars

01:53:33.120 | on that account.

01:53:34.280 | More importantly, I believed from early on

01:53:38.400 | that the best place to attack leg locks

01:53:40.140 | is not top position, it's bottom position.

01:53:43.000 | You'll see that over 90% of my athletes

01:53:45.840 | attack leg locks from underneath people,

01:53:47.600 | not on top of people.

01:53:48.760 | So there is no positional loss.

01:53:50.080 | You're already underneath them.

01:53:51.760 | And so that criticism was null and void.

01:53:54.460 | And by focusing on this idea of breaking down

01:54:01.200 | and distinguishing between the mechanism of control

01:54:03.960 | and the mechanism of breaking,

01:54:05.960 | that created something new and something interesting.

01:54:08.720 | There was also another advantage

01:54:12.020 | that I had in terms of creating influence with leg locking.

01:54:17.020 | When you look at the great leg lockers of the past,

01:54:19.600 | they were basically iconoclasts.

01:54:21.880 | They were people who came out of nowhere,

01:54:24.000 | who just had this remarkable success with leg locks.

01:54:28.460 | But they were just seen as unique individuals.

01:54:35.200 | They had their game and they were good at it.

01:54:39.000 | What was unique about the squad is you had

01:54:41.960 | not just one person, but a team of people

01:54:44.620 | who came out and did pretty much the same thing.

01:54:47.800 | These people had very different body types

01:54:50.080 | and very different personalities.

01:54:52.440 | So it wasn't that one kind of body type was good at it.

01:54:55.120 | You had tall people like Gordon Ryan.

01:54:57.680 | You had short people like Nicky Ryan.

01:55:00.480 | You had someone in the middle like Gary Tonin.

01:55:03.520 | You had fast people like Gary Tonin.

01:55:05.240 | You had slow people like Gordon.

01:55:06.840 | There was every kind of body type involved.

01:55:12.520 | And it was like, people could see this was different

01:55:14.600 | because it worked for an entire team.

01:55:17.760 | As opposed to a unique individual who had unique attributes.

01:55:21.840 | And that started to foster the belief that

01:55:25.120 | if it can work for a team, it can work for anyone.

01:55:28.520 | Which means it can work for me.

01:55:31.160 | And I think that had a big effect.

01:55:33.400 | That's why I owe a lot to those early students.

01:55:37.880 | Gordon Ryan, Gary Tonin, Eddie Cummings, and Nicky Ryan.

01:55:46.320 | Those four kids came from nowhere.

01:55:48.800 | Gary had some success in grappling,

01:55:53.720 | like low level success in grappling

01:55:55.520 | before becoming a full-time member of the squad.

01:56:00.240 | But the others were just nobodies who no one had known.

01:56:04.760 | And yet within a five-year timeframe,

01:56:07.040 | they were all going up against world championship

01:56:09.240 | competition and doing exceedingly well.

01:56:14.960 | Which gives further credence to the idea

01:56:16.600 | of the five-year program.

01:56:18.640 | And I think by operating as a team,

01:56:23.640 | those young men did an incredible job

01:56:26.440 | of convincing the grappling world

01:56:28.440 | that this wasn't just about, well, they're just different.

01:56:31.400 | Or it works for their body type or them as individuals.

01:56:35.800 | It was like, no, if a team can do it, anyone can do it.

01:56:39.400 | And I think that's what really convinced people

01:56:41.920 | that this was something worth studying.

01:56:44.080 | This is something that could be a big part of their lives.

01:56:46.920 | - But it also convinced you and convinced each other

01:56:49.560 | in those early days when you're developing the science.

01:56:52.480 | Essentially what was missing is an entire science

01:56:54.840 | and system of leg locks.

01:56:57.760 | Because it's not like you knew for sure

01:57:01.280 | that there's a lot here to be discovered

01:57:03.760 | in terms of control.

01:57:04.720 | You perhaps had, just like you said, an initial intuition.

01:57:08.800 | But you have to have enough,

01:57:12.480 | there's perseverance required to take,

01:57:14.400 | it's a Johnny Ive thing to take from the initial idea

01:57:16.600 | to an entire system.

01:57:17.800 | Is there a sense you have about how complicated

01:57:22.800 | and how big this world of control in leg locks is?

01:57:28.000 | How complicated is it?

01:57:31.880 | You've achieved a lot of success.

01:57:33.520 | You have a lot of powerful ideas in terms of inside,

01:57:36.240 | outside, what's high percentage, what's not,

01:57:38.560 | what's high reward, what's low risk,

01:57:40.840 | all those kinds of things.

01:57:42.280 | And then you also mentioned kind of transitions,

01:57:45.640 | not transitions, but how you move with your opponent

01:57:49.400 | to resist their escape through control.

01:57:53.560 | How much do you understand about this world?

01:57:55.960 | - This is a fascinating question.

01:57:57.760 | As a general rule, the most powerful developments

01:58:04.600 | are always at the onset of a project.

01:58:11.040 | Let's give an example.

01:58:12.200 | The jet engine was, I believe, first conceived

01:58:18.600 | in the late 1930s, just around the time of World War II.

01:58:23.120 | It was developed with great pace because of World War II.

01:58:28.120 | Obviously, military research was a huge thing back then.

01:58:31.960 | And first fielded, I believe, by the Germans in around 1943.

01:58:40.680 | Jet aircraft didn't play a big role in World War II.

01:58:44.080 | They were there at the end,

01:58:45.320 | and they did play a significant role,

01:58:47.680 | but in terms of numbers, they just weren't there.

01:58:50.240 | So by around 1945, you had the onset of the jet age,

01:58:57.240 | and the jet engine began to replace the piston engine

01:59:00.840 | in most aircraft.

01:59:01.720 | It was the new way of doing things.

01:59:06.160 | If you look at the pace of development

01:59:10.480 | of jet engine aircraft technology from 1945 to 1960,

01:59:15.480 | it is unbelievable.

01:59:20.140 | There was a solid decade where they were gaining

01:59:25.040 | almost 100 miles an hour per year for a decade.

01:59:29.440 | That's a form of growth that,

01:59:31.620 | I mean, in the world of engineering,

01:59:35.000 | that's the only time you see growth like that

01:59:38.200 | is in things like Bitcoin, and that's about it.

01:59:41.100 | Let's put things in perspective.

01:59:45.580 | In World War II, the standard US aircraft bomber

01:59:51.160 | was the B-17, which was a mid-sized bomber

01:59:55.480 | with a fairly limited load capacity,

01:59:57.760 | and I think top speed well below 300 miles an hour.

02:00:04.440 | Just 10 years later, you had the B-52,

02:00:08.200 | which could fly across continents

02:00:10.200 | and deliver nuclear weapons and carry bomb loads

02:00:13.400 | of up to 70,000 pounds.

02:00:15.420 | In a decade, that happened.

02:00:19.080 | If you took a B-17 pilot in 1943

02:00:24.160 | and put them inside a B-52 a decade later,

02:00:27.400 | he would literally think he was on a UFO,

02:00:30.280 | a ship from another planet.

02:00:32.800 | That was the speed of development.

02:00:36.040 | Now, contrast that with the speed of modern development.

02:00:39.940 | If I took you in a time machine

02:00:42.520 | and I put you in a civil airliner in 1972,

02:00:48.120 | let's say a Boeing 737,

02:00:51.720 | it's not that different from what you fly in today.

02:00:55.040 | - That's right.

02:00:55.880 | - It flies at the same speed, has the same range,

02:00:59.120 | flies at the same altitude.

02:01:01.120 | It's not that different.

02:01:02.920 | The amount of progress between 1973 and 2020

02:01:07.120 | isn't very impressive,

02:01:09.540 | but the amount of progress from 1945 to 1955,

02:01:14.800 | or even better, 1960, was staggering.

02:01:17.520 | And so the initial progress tends to be meteoric,

02:01:23.160 | but after that, it tends to be incremental.

02:01:25.680 | - That said- - You see that with leg-longs.

02:01:28.160 | - There's a guy named Elon Musk

02:01:30.480 | who's been almost no development

02:01:32.560 | in terms of space rocket propulsion

02:01:37.560 | and rocket launches and going out into orbit

02:01:43.680 | or going out into deep space.

02:01:45.560 | And one guy comes along,

02:01:47.780 | one John Donahy type character,

02:01:50.280 | and says, "It doesn't make sense

02:01:52.040 | "why we don't use reusable rockets,

02:01:54.840 | "why we don't make them much cheaper,

02:01:56.340 | "why we don't launch every week

02:01:58.360 | "as opposed to every few years.

02:02:00.800 | "It doesn't make any sense

02:02:01.980 | "why we don't go to the moon again over and over and over.

02:02:05.040 | "It doesn't make any sense

02:02:05.960 | "why we don't go to Mars and colonize Mars."

02:02:09.360 | It feels like it's not just a single jump to a B-52,

02:02:14.360 | it's a series of these kinds of jumps.

02:02:18.400 | So the question is, is there another leap

02:02:21.720 | within the leg-locking system?

02:02:24.080 | - Time will tell.

02:02:26.720 | I do believe that we're in a phase now

02:02:30.320 | where the really big jumps have already been made

02:02:33.920 | and we're in the incremental phase at this point.

02:02:36.520 | What I do believe is that you will start

02:02:39.480 | to see new directions start to emerge,

02:02:42.460 | where you start to see the interface

02:02:44.040 | between leg-locking and wrestling, for example,

02:02:46.560 | the interface between leg-locking and back attacks.

02:02:49.440 | And that will provide new avenues of direction

02:02:52.640 | which will create new spurts of growth.

02:02:56.540 | But in terms of breaking people's legs,

02:03:00.880 | this is the simple act of breaking legs,

02:03:03.140 | I believe we're in the incremental phase now

02:03:04.880 | rather than the meteoric phase.

02:03:06.880 | - Let me ask you a ridiculous question.

02:03:08.360 | How hard is it to actually break a leg?

02:03:10.960 | Is this something you think about?

02:03:12.160 | I remember, 'cause I'm a big fan of the straight foot lock.

02:03:15.920 | Not, again, we're talking about to the standing say, Nagi,

02:03:19.720 | maybe it's my Russian roots with Samba

02:03:22.120 | or something like that.

02:03:22.960 | Maybe it's the Dean Lister, Achilles lock,

02:03:26.760 | but I love, maybe it's my body, something like that.

02:03:30.320 | I just love the squeeze of it, the control

02:03:34.000 | and the power of a straight foot lock.

02:03:38.200 | And I remember trying to,

02:03:42.780 | there's a few people in competition

02:03:44.480 | that didn't wanna tap.

02:03:45.920 | - Absolutely.

02:03:47.060 | - And I remember in particular, there was one person,

02:03:51.600 | it was again, a finals match, purple belt.

02:03:54.040 | I remember it was a straight foot lock, it was perfect.

02:03:56.720 | Everything just perfect.

02:03:58.440 | And I remember going all in and there was a pop, pop, pop,

02:04:03.400 | and I couldn't do anything more.

02:04:05.400 | It wasn't breaking.

02:04:06.960 | It was just bending and bending and bending

02:04:09.320 | and there's damage to it of some kind,

02:04:12.140 | but I wanted to like, you know,

02:04:15.040 | I wanted to see, first of all,

02:04:16.240 | it was very difficult psychologically

02:04:17.980 | because it's like, can I be violent here?

02:04:20.760 | That was in the whole nother thing.

02:04:22.780 | With adrenaline, you can't really think that fast,

02:04:25.200 | but I also thought like, where else is there to go?

02:04:27.940 | Like, is it the shin going to break?

02:04:29.580 | What is supposed to break?

02:04:31.060 | So I wondered that.

02:04:31.900 | - Yeah, in the case of the Achilles lock,

02:04:33.440 | it's going to be the anterior tibialis tendon.

02:04:35.600 | - What's that?

02:04:36.440 | - It's the, it runs down, there's two of them.

02:04:39.140 | It'll be the minor one that runs on the outside

02:04:41.020 | of the front of the ankle.

02:04:42.780 | It's not going to be the Achilles tendon.

02:04:44.300 | A lot of people promulgate this absurdity.

02:04:47.940 | The Achilles tendon can rupture, but not from pressure.

02:04:51.260 | - Is it the tendon or the bone that's going to break?

02:04:53.820 | - The bone won't break.

02:04:55.140 | I have seen on one occasion a shin bone break

02:04:59.260 | from an Achilles lock,

02:05:01.120 | but there was an enormous size and strength disparity.

02:05:04.520 | And there may have been other complicating factors too.

02:05:07.560 | But in the vast majority of cases,

02:05:11.460 | the Achilles lock doesn't really do tremendous damage.

02:05:15.020 | It can do significant damage.

02:05:17.100 | You'll definitely feel it the next day,

02:05:18.220 | but it's of all the major locks,

02:05:20.820 | it's the one where it is most likely

02:05:23.400 | a psychologically strong opponent

02:05:25.140 | will be able to absorb damage and go on to win a match.

02:05:27.900 | In answer to your first question,

02:05:30.460 | how difficult is it to break a leg?

02:05:32.340 | Not very difficult.

02:05:34.460 | It will come down to what is the skill level

02:05:37.700 | of my opponent's resistance?

02:05:38.840 | If your opponent is not resisting

02:05:40.140 | and you have an inside heel hook,

02:05:41.260 | it is absurdly easy to break a man's leg.

02:05:44.100 | Not a challenge at all.

02:05:45.260 | You can be a 105 pound woman could easily snap

02:05:50.260 | the relevant knee ligaments in a 240 pound man's leg

02:05:56.500 | if he doesn't know how to defend himself.

02:05:58.580 | That's an easy thing, very easy to accomplish.

02:06:02.060 | So the basic answer is yes, it's very easy.

02:06:06.200 | If your opponent does know how to defend

02:06:08.100 | and they can position their foot,

02:06:10.500 | play tricks of lever and fulcrum,

02:06:12.980 | it becomes significantly more difficult.

02:06:14.620 | It becomes still more difficult under match conditions

02:06:17.600 | where they're actively looking to position their body

02:06:21.260 | and work their way out of the lock,

02:06:23.660 | then it can become very difficult indeed.

02:06:26.040 | Always bear in mind that there have been some cases

02:06:32.180 | in our history as a team where people

02:06:34.940 | have literally just let their knees snap

02:06:38.020 | and continue fighting.

02:06:41.880 | Always remember that submission is a choice

02:06:45.760 | when it comes to the joint locks.

02:06:47.700 | And we've had some people who just made the choice

02:06:51.500 | that I'm willing to let my knee break

02:06:54.100 | so that I can continue in this match.

02:06:56.860 | That's a tough decision to make and I admire their bravery.

02:06:59.820 | Is there something about that,

02:07:02.160 | just to speak to that, that you admire?

02:07:04.940 | Yes, it's mental toughness.

02:07:07.420 | Would I agree with it, would I advocate it?

02:07:09.080 | No, but that doesn't mean I can't admire aspects of it.

02:07:12.820 | Who is the greatest grappler ever?

02:07:17.320 | You were very astute in the way you asked that question.

02:07:23.220 | You didn't say the greatest jujitsu player of all time,

02:07:26.720 | you specified grappler.

02:07:28.160 | What's the bigger category?

02:07:29.920 | Jujitsu is the bigger category.

02:07:31.600 | Jujitsu has four faces.

02:07:33.960 | There is Gi competition, there is no Gi competition,

02:07:37.740 | there is mixed martial arts competition,

02:07:40.160 | and there is self-defense.

02:07:41.840 | So jujitsu has four aspects.

02:07:43.680 | Grappling typically refers only to the no Gi

02:07:49.600 | aspect of jujitsu, so it's one out of four possibilities.

02:07:53.080 | So who's the greatest jujitsu practitioner ever

02:07:56.520 | and then who is the greatest grappler ever?

02:07:58.960 | I believe that the greatest jujitsu player,

02:08:02.920 | certainly that I ever met and I believe of all time,

02:08:05.720 | I don't wanna sound arrogant on that

02:08:08.720 | because really you can only go with your own experiences

02:08:10.980 | and there are some great athletes that other people

02:08:13.320 | mentioned that I just never met.

02:08:15.080 | But in my estimation, the greatest jujitsu player

02:08:19.480 | is Hodger Gracie.

02:08:20.620 | My reasoning for that is out of the four faces of jujitsu,

02:08:27.840 | he excelled in three.

02:08:31.480 | And in two of them in particular,

02:08:34.160 | he was the best of his generation by a landslide.

02:08:36.880 | In Gi grappling, no Gi grappling,

02:08:42.000 | Hodger dominated his generation

02:08:45.760 | to a degree that is truly impressive.

02:08:50.400 | - What do you attribute that dominance to, by the way?

02:08:53.440 | Is there something, if you were to analyze him--

02:08:56.040 | - Fascinating question, I'll come back to it.

02:08:58.920 | In mixed martial arts, he was at his peak,

02:09:02.280 | I believe ranked in the top 10

02:09:05.360 | in the world of mixed martial arts.

02:09:09.480 | He wasn't the best in mixed martial arts

02:09:11.960 | the way he was in grappling, but he was damn good.

02:09:14.360 | And he beat some significant people.

02:09:17.240 | So he showed tremendous versatility,

02:09:19.640 | Gi, no Gi, mixed martial arts.

02:09:21.880 | He's not really known in the world of self-defense,

02:09:24.080 | but there's no real criteria by which

02:09:26.360 | you would become dominant in self-defense.

02:09:28.200 | So that's kind of a, you can't really judge people by that.

02:09:31.080 | I'm believing, if Hodger got into a fight in the street,

02:09:34.160 | I'm sure he would do just fine.

02:09:36.240 | So I have no concerns about that.

02:09:38.320 | So I would say that if you look at jujitsu

02:09:42.680 | for what I believe it is, a sport with four faces,

02:09:46.320 | I believe you have to go with Hodger Gracie

02:09:50.000 | as the one who went out and empirically proved

02:09:53.800 | his ability to go across those elements

02:09:58.320 | and do extraordinarily well in all of them.

02:10:01.160 | He even made the extraordinary step

02:10:04.080 | of coming out of retirement and beating the best

02:10:06.880 | of the generation that came after him.

02:10:09.520 | - That's that, yeah?

02:10:10.360 | - Yes, that's a truly difficult feat.

02:10:11.840 | - Yeah, that was incredible.

02:10:12.680 | - Yeah, and a sport which progresses very, very rapidly,

02:10:15.160 | that's a truly impressive accomplishment.

02:10:17.200 | If you ask the question, who is the greatest grappler

02:10:22.400 | that I've ever seen, I would say I've never seen

02:10:26.880 | anyone better than Gordon Ryan.

02:10:28.440 | Now, people are gonna jump when I give these two names.

02:10:32.680 | They're gonna say, well, Dan Hur,

02:10:33.960 | you're close friends with Hodger

02:10:35.520 | and you're close friends with Gordon, so you're biased.

02:10:38.620 | I can't answer them to that.

02:10:42.200 | It's true, I'm good friends with both of them.

02:10:44.600 | I'm also a notoriously cold and unemotional person,

02:10:49.800 | and I'm saying this based upon things that I've observed.

02:10:54.800 | If I honestly believed that I'd seen other people

02:10:57.720 | who were better, I would have said it.

02:10:59.620 | Will that convince the people who criticize me of bias?

02:11:06.560 | Probably not, but those are the two names

02:11:08.600 | that I will mention.

02:11:09.440 | - I think it's an uncontroversial statement

02:11:11.240 | to say that Gordon Ryan is one of the,

02:11:14.840 | the greatest grappler ever.

02:11:17.240 | - Yeah, Gordon's obviously a very polarizing figure,

02:11:19.760 | and people tend to react to Gordon on an emotional level

02:11:23.480 | rather than a statistical level,

02:11:26.720 | and that colors a lot of people's minds.

02:11:29.080 | But I also have the benefit that I've seen

02:11:31.520 | both of these guys extensively in the gym,

02:11:33.660 | and that adds a whole new perspective.

02:11:36.400 | If you think those guys are dominant on the stage,

02:11:40.080 | wait 'til you see them in the gym.

02:11:41.380 | It's even a different level of domination,

02:11:43.480 | above and beyond what they did in competition.

02:11:47.520 | - Have they trained against each other in the gym?

02:11:49.840 | - No, they never trained together.

02:11:51.080 | They've been in the same gym, I think, only on one occasion.

02:11:53.640 | When Hodger was stopped by New York,

02:11:55.440 | he came by to say hello, and Gordon was here at the time.

02:11:59.840 | They shake hands, they know each other,

02:12:01.520 | and they're both wonderful people in their own way.

02:12:04.900 | - So I'd like to talk to you about Gordon, Hodger,

02:12:09.400 | and George, GSB.

02:12:12.180 | Let's first talk about what do you think,

02:12:14.920 | 'cause it's very different from my perspective,

02:12:17.240 | maybe you can correct me, but very different artists.

02:12:21.400 | - Yes.

02:12:22.240 | - Masters of their pursuits.

02:12:24.520 | So what makes Hodger so good?

02:12:26.720 | - Hodger was probably the living embodiment

02:12:32.160 | of someone who played a classical jujitsu game,

02:12:36.780 | based around the fundamental four steps of jujitsu.

02:12:43.560 | If you took someone who had taken introduction lessons

02:12:48.560 | in jujitsu for three months,

02:12:51.240 | they would recognize the outlines of Hodger's game

02:12:56.240 | with many of the techniques they learned

02:12:59.520 | in those first three months.

02:13:00.980 | Hodger was the best example of the dichotomy

02:13:06.720 | between the fundamentals of jujitsu,

02:13:10.000 | but also a kind of hidden sophistication

02:13:13.400 | underneath those fundamentals.

02:13:15.620 | People always say, "Oh, Hodger's game was so basic."

02:13:20.700 | No, the outlines of Hodger's game were basic,

02:13:24.480 | but the degree of sophistication

02:13:26.200 | and the application was extraordinary.

02:13:28.700 | And his ability to refine existing technology

02:13:35.280 | was truly impressive.

02:13:38.680 | I never saw anyone in his generation

02:13:42.560 | that even came close to his ability,

02:13:45.160 | both in competition and in the gym.

02:13:49.360 | - So for people who don't know,

02:13:50.720 | Hodger Gracie basically used, just like you said,

02:13:53.360 | very simple techniques on the surface,

02:13:57.700 | from the outsider's perspective,

02:14:00.340 | that most people learn when they start jujitsu,

02:14:04.400 | like passing guard in a very simple way,

02:14:06.240 | taking mount and choking from mount.

02:14:09.840 | Also, when he's on his back,

02:14:12.600 | this closed guard and all the basic submissions

02:14:14.880 | from closed guard, armbar, and triangle.

02:14:17.920 | And just, that's it.

02:14:20.680 | And being able to dominate, shut down, and submit.

02:14:25.680 | So control and submit the best people in the world

02:14:29.420 | for many, many years, just like you said,

02:14:32.400 | including coming out of retirement and beating the best,

02:14:37.520 | perhaps by far the best of the next generation.

02:14:40.560 | So that just kind of lays out the story.

02:14:43.040 | Is there some lessons about his systems

02:14:48.040 | that you learn in developing your own systems?

02:14:52.440 | - Excellent question.

02:14:53.480 | The thing which always impressed me the most about Hodger

02:14:58.400 | was his relentless pursuit of position to submission.

02:15:05.680 | Everything was done with the belief

02:15:09.960 | that no victory was worthwhile

02:15:14.120 | if it didn't involve submitting his opponent.

02:15:16.920 | That's a mindset that I try very, very hard

02:15:20.020 | to imbue in my students.

02:15:22.040 | The easiest path to victory in jujitsu

02:15:24.160 | is the one which takes the least risk.

02:15:27.360 | So for example, you will see many modern athletes

02:15:30.480 | focus on scoring the first point or the first advantage,

02:15:34.020 | and then doing the minimum amount of work

02:15:36.720 | to eke out a victory once they've done that.

02:15:40.400 | They get a small tactical advantage,

02:15:42.280 | they realize they're ahead, take no more risks,

02:15:44.800 | and just do the minimum amount of work to get the victory.

02:15:48.200 | Hodger's mindset was always to take

02:15:52.240 | the riskier gambit of submission,

02:15:54.960 | which entails a lot more work,

02:15:56.760 | and in many cases, a lot more skill.

02:15:58.600 | What I always liked about Hodger

02:16:03.000 | is he never tried to play tactics.

02:16:05.920 | It was always just go out there

02:16:08.640 | and try to win by submission.

02:16:10.280 | And that, more than anything,

02:16:14.160 | that mindset of looking for the most perfect victory

02:16:19.160 | rather than the victory that takes the least skill

02:16:23.080 | and the least effort is probably the thing

02:16:26.840 | I took from his career the most

02:16:28.760 | and tried to work on in my students.

02:16:32.560 | - I always wonder what are the little details

02:16:35.440 | he's doing under there when he's in mount,

02:16:38.120 | the little adjustments, you know?

02:16:39.920 | But perhaps that's like almost indescribable,

02:16:43.200 | the details of that control.

02:16:45.100 | What makes Gordon Ryan the greatest grappler

02:16:51.500 | of all time so good?

02:16:53.940 | - With Gordon, he's also very strong on fundamentals,

02:16:56.640 | all of my students are,

02:16:58.120 | but he's also obviously a member of a new generation

02:17:02.880 | of nogi grapplers that also bring in technologies

02:17:06.480 | that weren't really emphasized in previous generations,

02:17:10.880 | specifically the prolific use of lower body attacks,

02:17:15.880 | especially from bottom position.

02:17:18.320 | This means that he can play a game

02:17:22.300 | between upper body and lower body,

02:17:24.960 | which was not really a part of Hodge's game.

02:17:28.080 | Nonetheless, you will also see significant similarities.

02:17:32.420 | He's got a very strong and crushing passing game to mount

02:17:35.920 | and a very strong and crushing passing game to the back.

02:17:39.240 | You will see that the major differences

02:17:46.640 | between the two are from bottom position.

02:17:49.120 | Hodge's bottom game is essentially based

02:17:51.080 | around his close guard,

02:17:52.340 | Gordon Ryan's game is based around his butterfly guard.

02:17:55.400 | So one is based on outside control

02:17:57.400 | and one is based on inside control.

02:18:00.000 | One focuses almost entirely on the classical notion

02:18:03.140 | of getting past the legs to the upper body,

02:18:05.800 | and the other one works between the two as alternatives

02:18:08.340 | and sees them as competing alternatives.

02:18:10.600 | With a strong you become at one,

02:18:12.500 | the more your opponent has to overreact

02:18:14.200 | and become vulnerable to the second.

02:18:16.140 | So they have strong similarities in top position,

02:18:19.200 | but a very different in bottom.

02:18:22.280 | - He has, from an outsider's perspective,

02:18:25.480 | a calm to him in the heat of battle

02:18:30.480 | that's like, that's inspiring and confusing.

02:18:35.320 | Is there something you could speak

02:18:37.500 | to the psychological aspect of Gordon Ryan?

02:18:40.700 | - Yes.

02:18:41.540 | People will talk all day about sports psychology

02:18:47.580 | and they will often have heated arguments

02:18:52.180 | as to what's the right psychological state to be in

02:18:54.980 | when you go out to compete.

02:18:56.660 | I've never seen any one school of thought

02:18:59.380 | which gave noticeably better sports performance than another.

02:19:03.160 | I've never seen any psychological mindset

02:19:08.180 | prove to be reliably more efficient

02:19:11.740 | or effective than another.

02:19:13.900 | I've seen fighters that were scared out of their minds

02:19:17.300 | when they went out every time to fight

02:19:19.180 | and yet they were very successful.

02:19:20.980 | I've seen fighters go out who were relaxed and calm

02:19:23.980 | and they too can be successful.

02:19:25.740 | I've seen both mindsets win,

02:19:27.340 | I've seen both mindsets lose.

02:19:29.180 | I've seen every extreme between them.

02:19:31.040 | What I generally recommend with regards

02:19:35.260 | your mind and preparation going in,

02:19:37.580 | find what works for you.

02:19:39.020 | Everyone's different.

02:19:40.240 | Don't try to give a one size fits all

02:19:42.500 | in something as vague and confusing as the human mind.

02:19:46.400 | Having said that, my preference,

02:19:51.400 | I don't force it on people because everyone's different,

02:19:54.240 | but my preference is to try and advocate

02:19:57.600 | for a mindset of unexceptionalism.

02:20:01.040 | Most people see competition as something exceptional.

02:20:04.320 | It's not your everyday grappling session.

02:20:06.400 | You train 300 times for every time you compete.

02:20:09.960 | And so they see competition

02:20:11.240 | as something exceptional, different, scarier,

02:20:14.320 | or nerve wracking.

02:20:15.160 | There's a crowd watching these cameras.

02:20:17.400 | My reputation is on the line.

02:20:18.760 | I'm gonna be observed and judged.

02:20:21.040 | And so they see it as this exceptional event.

02:20:23.920 | My general preference is to see it

02:20:26.000 | as an unexceptional event, to see everything else,

02:20:29.640 | the noise, the cameras, the crowd, as illusions.

02:20:34.160 | The only reality is a stage,

02:20:36.060 | an opponent on the other side of it,

02:20:37.680 | and a referee adjudicating you.

02:20:39.880 | And to make it as unexceptional as possible.

02:20:43.760 | Gordon does an extraordinarily good job of doing that.

02:20:48.600 | Gordon looks more tense in most of his training sessions

02:20:52.440 | than he does in his competitions

02:20:54.120 | because he knows his training partners

02:20:55.600 | are typically better than the people

02:20:57.600 | he's actually going out to compete against.

02:20:59.760 | And you see it in his demeanor.

02:21:03.480 | It's one of just complete calm.

02:21:06.160 | It also goes back to what we talked about earlier

02:21:08.800 | about the power of escapes.

02:21:11.240 | Gordon Ryan is almost impossible to control

02:21:13.880 | for extended periods of time

02:21:16.320 | in most of the inferior positions in the sport

02:21:19.520 | and most of the submissions.

02:21:21.320 | So he goes out in the full knowledge

02:21:23.440 | that the worst case scenario isn't that bad for him.

02:21:27.400 | And so nothing could really go that badly wrong.

02:21:29.960 | He can always recover from any given mistake

02:21:32.360 | and go on to victory.

02:21:33.920 | When you believe those things,

02:21:35.480 | you're gonna have a calm demeanor.

02:21:37.720 | - Then if you look at somebody who is quite a bit different

02:21:41.400 | than that, Georges St. Pierre,

02:21:43.000 | who at least in the way he describes it,

02:21:46.760 | he's basically exceptionally anxious

02:21:50.360 | and terrified approaching a fight.

02:21:53.560 | And he loves training.

02:21:56.080 | - And hates fighting.

02:21:56.960 | - And hates fighting.

02:21:58.520 | So, and just like you said, he made it work for him.

02:22:02.400 | But he's somebody, he speaks very highly of you.

02:22:06.080 | He's worked with you quite a bit in training.

02:22:08.880 | And you've studied him, you've worked with him,

02:22:13.600 | you've coached him.

02:22:15.560 | - Interestingly, I've actually coached George

02:22:17.200 | for twice the length of any of the squad members.

02:22:20.160 | So my knowledge of him is far greater than it is

02:22:23.480 | for the contemporary squad.

02:22:26.240 | - So can you speak to what makes Georges St. Pierre,

02:22:29.120 | who I think, even though I'm Russian

02:22:31.920 | and a little bit partial towards Fedor and the Russians,

02:22:35.440 | but I think he is in the four categories you mentioned,

02:22:39.280 | the greatest mixed martial artist of all time.

02:22:43.080 | What makes him so good?

02:22:44.960 | His approach, his techniques, his mind.

02:22:48.280 | - His approach is certainly part of it.

02:22:50.240 | George started mixed martial arts at a time when

02:22:53.760 | the sport was in a pretty wild phase.

02:22:59.120 | It was illegal to show on most American TV networks.

02:23:04.760 | And there was talk about it being banned as a sport.

02:23:08.520 | In his native Canada, it was banned.

02:23:12.360 | You could only fight on Indian reservations in Canada.

02:23:15.680 | I believe his first fight may have been

02:23:17.600 | on an Indian reservation.

02:23:18.880 | So the sport at that stage was very much in its infancy.

02:23:25.680 | And it's probably fair to say that most of the athletes

02:23:30.120 | involved in the sport came from

02:23:33.440 | a training program that would probably be described

02:23:38.440 | as unprofessional in the contemporary scene.

02:23:43.520 | George is one of a handful of people

02:23:48.200 | who started approaching the sport

02:23:49.960 | in a truly professional fashion.

02:23:51.600 | It was like, okay, here's what great athletes

02:23:53.720 | in other sports do.

02:23:54.880 | I'm gonna try to emulate that.

02:23:57.000 | And his ability to invest in other sports

02:24:02.040 | and to invest in himself.

02:24:04.080 | In my own experience, for example,

02:24:06.160 | George, when I first met him, was a garbage man.

02:24:10.120 | And he would jump on a bus from Montreal to New York.

02:24:15.120 | Now that's a long bus ride.

02:24:16.880 | He would come down on a Friday afternoon

02:24:18.720 | when he finished work as a garbage man,

02:24:20.760 | stay for the weekend, and then late on Sunday night,

02:24:22.920 | he would jump on a bus all the way back to Montreal

02:24:25.000 | and work as a garbage man.

02:24:26.240 | That's an extraordinary commitment

02:24:31.000 | for a young man to make.

02:24:33.480 | And George was a blue belt at the time.

02:24:38.680 | And so he would come down and, you know,

02:24:41.040 | we had a very talented room.

02:24:42.480 | So he didn't do well in the room when he first came in.

02:24:46.040 | He was inexperienced in jujitsu.

02:24:47.600 | And the people he went against

02:24:51.640 | were considerably better than him at jujitsu.

02:24:53.440 | So imagine investing 25% of your weekly income,

02:24:59.120 | maybe even more, New York's an expensive town, 50%,

02:25:03.200 | to come down and just get your ass kicked.

02:25:05.300 | (Lex laughs)

02:25:06.680 | Month by month.

02:25:07.680 | - Yeah, that says a lot about who he is.

02:25:09.760 | - It tells you a lot.

02:25:11.300 | First of all, let's talk about the whole idea

02:25:13.440 | of delayed gratification here.

02:25:14.960 | I mean, that's a guy who's saying,

02:25:17.400 | like, this is highly unpleasant,

02:25:19.360 | but I have a vision of myself in the future,

02:25:22.160 | and I have to go through this extreme case

02:25:24.900 | of delayed gratification to get to that distant goal,

02:25:27.600 | which may never happen.

02:25:29.360 | And that's a level of commitment and self-belief,

02:25:33.200 | which is just extraordinary.

02:25:34.720 | I always laugh when people say, you know,

02:25:37.240 | oh, George was afraid, so he was mentally weak.

02:25:39.920 | Like, no, that's a very, very shallow understanding

02:25:44.920 | of mental strength and weakness.

02:25:47.620 | George felt anxiety, but let's understand from the start,

02:25:55.600 | there's different kinds of mental strength.

02:25:57.760 | And the most important kind isn't whether you feel fear

02:26:01.560 | or don't feel fear before you step in to fight.

02:26:03.880 | The most important form of mental strength

02:26:06.040 | is discipline and training.

02:26:09.720 | That's where most people break.

02:26:11.640 | I know dozens of people who are fearless to fight,

02:26:15.260 | but you couldn't get them to come into the gym

02:26:16.940 | for three months in a row and work on skills.

02:26:19.920 | So they're mentally strong one way, they don't feel fear,

02:26:22.720 | but they're mentally weak in another,

02:26:24.400 | which is to instill the discipline

02:26:26.320 | which keeps you on a road to progress over time.

02:26:29.120 | That's much tougher than not feeling fear

02:26:31.440 | before you go out to fight.

02:26:33.200 | Understand also that when George talks about fear,

02:26:36.400 | he's not afraid of his opponent.

02:26:38.000 | He's afraid of failure.

02:26:40.600 | He's got high standards.

02:26:44.660 | Someone who's got high standards can change the world.

02:26:49.260 | His standards were very, very high.

02:26:52.880 | That's what he was afraid of.

02:26:54.240 | He wasn't afraid of his opponent.

02:26:56.680 | And yet, it's always been a misinterpretation.

02:26:59.000 | He wasn't mentally weak, he was mentally strong as an ox.

02:27:02.240 | Okay, to stay in his training regimen

02:27:05.880 | year after year after year,

02:27:08.320 | and do so while he became one of the first stars

02:27:10.720 | in mixed martial arts to actually make money.

02:27:13.800 | And it gets tough to stay in the training gym

02:27:16.320 | with people who are young and hungry

02:27:18.080 | and wanna punch you in the face.

02:27:19.720 | You're coming out of a luxury room,

02:27:21.680 | living in finery towards the end of his career,

02:27:24.560 | and still training as hard as ever.

02:27:26.080 | That's an impressive thing.

02:27:27.440 | - And always he valued perfection, and you're right.

02:27:31.000 | That was, the fear was not achieving the perfection.

02:27:34.480 | Is there something you've observed

02:27:39.780 | about the way he approaches training

02:27:42.160 | that stands out to you?

02:27:46.280 | Or is it simply the dedication?

02:27:48.040 | - No, it's never just about dedication.

02:27:50.000 | There's lots of dedicated people in the world,

02:27:51.680 | but most of them are unsuccessful.

02:27:53.380 | If you wanna be the best in the world at anything,

02:28:00.440 | you have to do out of the many skills

02:28:04.760 | of whatever industry you're in,

02:28:07.260 | you have to take at least one of those skills

02:28:13.080 | and be the best in the world at it.

02:28:18.160 | There's many skills in mixed martial arts,

02:28:20.520 | but George identified one skill,

02:28:24.920 | which is the skill of striking to take down.

02:28:28.080 | So he calls it shoot boxing.

02:28:29.600 | Shoot boxing was barely even a category of skill

02:28:37.680 | when George began.

02:28:38.560 | It was just the idea that wrestlers grab people

02:28:40.960 | and took them down the same way they did in wrestling,

02:28:43.240 | and you threw some punches before you did it.

02:28:48.440 | Okay, George largely pioneered the science

02:28:53.440 | of creating an interface between striking and takedowns.

02:29:00.880 | He did it at a time where no one else before him

02:29:07.320 | had made it into a system or a science.

02:29:10.500 | He did it largely on his own,

02:29:14.520 | and I've always said,

02:29:19.520 | George is the only athlete that I ever coached

02:29:21.920 | who taught me more than I taught him.

02:29:24.060 | And almost single-handedly,

02:29:30.520 | he created this strong sense of shoot boxing as a science,

02:29:35.840 | which enabled him throughout his career

02:29:41.200 | to determine where the fight would take place.

02:29:44.480 | Would it be standing or would it be on the ground?

02:29:47.440 | And that, more than anything else,

02:29:49.340 | was the defining characteristic of his success.

02:29:52.060 | I will always be immensely impressed

02:29:58.240 | by his accomplishment in that regard.

02:30:00.120 | He was an innovator.

02:30:01.140 | He did things differently.

02:30:03.360 | This is such an important point.

02:30:05.120 | You can't go out there in combat sports

02:30:08.240 | and do the same things that everybody else is doing

02:30:11.400 | and expect to get different results.

02:30:13.500 | Life doesn't work that way.

02:30:16.480 | If you want to be dominant,

02:30:18.120 | you gotta find one important part of the sport

02:30:20.680 | and preferably more than one

02:30:22.700 | and be the best in the world at it.

02:30:24.560 | You can't be weak at anything,

02:30:26.680 | but you can't be strong at everything either.

02:30:28.640 | Life's not long enough for us

02:30:29.800 | to develop a truly complete skillset.

02:30:32.600 | So you gotta be good at everything

02:30:34.120 | and you gotta be the best at at least one thing.

02:30:36.600 | And George was the best at two in his era.

02:30:39.600 | He was the best at striking to takedowns

02:30:43.360 | and he was the best at integrating

02:30:45.160 | striking and grappling on the floor.

02:30:46.960 | - Let me ask you a completely ridiculous question,

02:30:52.400 | but it's a fascinating one for me

02:30:54.900 | from an engineering and a scientific perspective.

02:30:57.460 | When I look at a sport, really any problem,

02:31:02.640 | one way to ask how difficult is this problem

02:31:06.640 | is to see how can I build a machine

02:31:11.000 | that competes with a human being at that problem?

02:31:13.320 | You can look at chess, you can look at soccer,

02:31:16.360 | RoboCup, and then you can look at grappling.

02:31:21.360 | There's something about when you start to think,

02:31:25.600 | how would I build an AI system,

02:31:28.200 | a robot that defeats somebody like a Gordon Ryan,

02:31:31.840 | where it forces you to really think

02:31:34.340 | about formalizing this art as an engineering discipline.

02:31:39.340 | In the same way you do,

02:31:42.640 | but you still have some art injected in there.

02:31:46.520 | There is no space for art

02:31:48.120 | when you actually have to build the system.

02:31:49.600 | - That's not a ridiculous question.

02:31:50.920 | That's a damn interesting question.

02:31:52.800 | - Let's put aside, like I mentioned

02:31:55.760 | with the Boston Dynamics robot,

02:31:58.080 | what people don't realize is the amount of power

02:32:01.320 | they can deliver is huge.

02:32:02.600 | So let's take that weapon aside.

02:32:04.960 | Just the amount of force you're able to deliver.

02:32:07.520 | - Yeah, I'm glad you're specifying that.

02:32:10.100 | So essentially your question is, okay,

02:32:13.480 | can a talented group of engineers create a robot

02:32:17.800 | which could defeat Gordon Ryan?

02:32:19.000 | On the face of it, as you just pointed out,

02:32:22.780 | that's the easiest project in the world.

02:32:24.640 | Just create a robot that carries a nine millimeter automatic

02:32:27.120 | and shoot him five times in the chest.

02:32:28.480 | Okay, that's it, Gordon Ryan's done.

02:32:30.560 | - That's not the interesting question.

02:32:32.360 | The interesting question,

02:32:33.800 | and if I understand you correctly,

02:32:35.440 | is if we had the ability to create a robot

02:32:40.440 | whose physical powers were identical to Gordon Ryan,

02:32:45.120 | not inferior and not superior,

02:32:47.280 | what would it take to create a mind inside that robot

02:32:51.480 | that would beat Gordon Ryan in the majority of matches?

02:32:53.600 | - Yeah, and there's two ways to build AI systems.

02:32:56.800 | This is true for Thomas driving, for example.

02:33:00.440 | Which has been quite contested recently.

02:33:03.340 | So one is you basically, one way to describe it

02:33:06.160 | is you have a giant set of rules.

02:33:09.280 | It's like this tree of rules

02:33:11.240 | where you apply a different condition.

02:33:13.040 | When there's a pattern you see, you apply a rule.

02:33:15.360 | And they're hard-coded in.

02:33:17.240 | You basically get like a John Donahue type of character

02:33:20.520 | who tries to encode, hard-code into the system

02:33:25.520 | all the moves you should do in every single case.

02:33:29.720 | Of course, you can't actually do that fully.

02:33:32.480 | So you're going to be taking shortcuts,

02:33:34.760 | what are called heuristics,

02:33:36.880 | just a basic kind of generalizations,

02:33:41.040 | and apply your own expertise as an expert of,

02:33:45.040 | in this case, grappling,

02:33:47.040 | to see how that can be encoded as a rule.

02:33:49.080 | Now, the other approach,

02:33:50.840 | Elon Musk and Tesla are taking this approach,

02:33:53.240 | which is called machine learning,

02:33:55.440 | which is create a basic framework

02:34:00.440 | of the kind of things you should be observing

02:34:04.200 | and what are the measures, metrics of success,

02:34:09.680 | and then just observe and see which things lead to success,

02:34:13.920 | more success and which lead to less success.

02:34:16.080 | And there's a delta.

02:34:17.300 | When you see a thing, first of all,

02:34:21.360 | the way machine learning works is you predict,

02:34:23.760 | you see a position or you see a situation,

02:34:26.800 | and then you predict how good that is,

02:34:28.940 | and then you watch how it actually turns out,

02:34:31.280 | and if it's worse or better, you adjust your expectation.

02:34:34.800 | - Yes, that's correct. - And through that process,

02:34:37.200 | you can learn quite a lot.

02:34:39.020 | The challenges, and this might be a very true challenge

02:34:45.000 | in grappling, is in driving, you can't crash.

02:34:53.000 | So there's a physical world.

02:34:55.600 | In chess, for example,

02:34:57.040 | where this approach has been exceptionally successful,

02:35:00.960 | you can work in simulation.

02:35:02.640 | So you can have AI system that, for example,

02:35:06.400 | as in the case with AlphaZero by DeepMind,

02:35:10.280 | Google's DeepMind, it can play itself in simulation

02:35:14.040 | millions of times, billions of times.

02:35:15.720 | - Correct, yeah.

02:35:16.960 | - It's difficult to know if it's possible

02:35:19.400 | to do that in simulation for anything

02:35:23.160 | that involves human movement, like grappling.

02:35:28.160 | So that's, my sense is, if we first look

02:35:32.840 | at the hard encoding, if you were to try

02:35:36.160 | to describe Gordon Ryan to a machine,

02:35:39.480 | how many rules are in there, do you think?

02:35:41.400 | - Yeah, first off, let me tell you,

02:35:44.000 | that's one of the most fascinating questions

02:35:45.600 | I've ever been asked, and I'm tremendously happy

02:35:49.200 | to answer this.

02:35:50.120 | How about what we do is, this is a massive question

02:35:54.920 | you've asked, there's a huge amount of ways

02:35:56.840 | this could get very interesting and very confusing.

02:35:59.440 | Let's set some ground rules for the discussion.

02:36:03.100 | Lex alluded to the idea of man versus machine in chess.

02:36:09.800 | Okay, and I think that's a really good place

02:36:12.800 | for us to start the discussion.

02:36:16.760 | I'm gonna just tell people a little bit

02:36:20.160 | the history of man versus chess,

02:36:22.160 | to give you guys some background on this.

02:36:25.440 | In 1968, there was a party in which a highly ranked,

02:36:29.600 | not a world champion, but a highly ranked chess player,

02:36:31.920 | his name was Levy, and he met a computer engineer

02:36:36.920 | at a party, and they had a lighthearted bet

02:36:45.720 | that in a 10 year time frame, a human chess player

02:36:49.960 | would be defeated by a computer.

02:36:53.960 | Now, you gotta remember, in 1968, computing power

02:36:56.480 | was very, very low.

02:36:57.640 | The computers that got America to the moon

02:37:00.000 | were actually pretty damn primitive.

02:37:02.880 | Your iPhone would kick all of their asses.

02:37:04.980 | So computational power was very, very low in those days.

02:37:09.400 | So, interestingly, the chess player fully believed

02:37:12.800 | that no computer could beat him in the 10 year time frame,

02:37:15.360 | and the computer engineer was very optimistic

02:37:18.560 | that he was wrong, and in fact, 10 years,

02:37:21.560 | the computer would win.

02:37:24.280 | 10 years later, they had a competition,

02:37:26.240 | and the human won, decisively, in fact.

02:37:29.660 | So computational power simply hadn't risen

02:37:33.800 | to that level yet.

02:37:35.400 | Through the 1980s, computational power increased,

02:37:38.760 | but not sufficient to get to championship level.

02:37:43.940 | There were computer programs in the 1980s

02:37:45.820 | which were competitive with good, solid chess players,

02:37:49.740 | but not world beaters.

02:37:51.060 | Understand, right from the start,

02:37:56.800 | that there's a fundamental problem here.

02:38:00.540 | The number of options that the two players

02:38:05.380 | in a chess board can run through is astronomically high.

02:38:11.380 | There are 64 squares on a chess board.

02:38:14.380 | The number of possible options that could work

02:38:18.860 | or could play out on a chess board,

02:38:22.320 | and this is a truly shocking thing for you to think about,

02:38:25.980 | the number of possible options is higher

02:38:29.340 | than the number of atoms in the known universe.

02:38:34.340 | Think about that for a second in terms of complexity, okay?

02:38:38.460 | The number of atoms on this table is massive, okay?

02:38:43.060 | That is an unbelievably large number.

02:38:47.200 | And we're talking about a situation where,

02:38:50.340 | if a computer had to go through all the options

02:38:52.780 | at the onset of a match,

02:38:53.880 | they would have to run numbers greater

02:38:57.240 | than the number of atoms in the known universe.

02:39:00.420 | The number of galaxies in our universe is vast, okay?

02:39:05.420 | It's measured in the billions.

02:39:06.860 | Like the number of atoms, that's just a number

02:39:09.660 | so mind-blowing it's impossible, okay?

02:39:12.100 | So no computer is ever going to be able to work

02:39:17.100 | with those kinds of numbers, okay?

02:39:19.740 | I don't even know if future generations

02:39:21.660 | of quantum computers could work with those kinds of numbers.

02:39:24.420 | So that's the fundamental problem, okay?

02:39:26.380 | The number of options in a chess match

02:39:28.740 | is just so astronomically large

02:39:31.560 | that no computer could ever figure out

02:39:34.700 | all the available options and make decisions

02:39:37.060 | in a given timeframe.

02:39:37.980 | So that's the fundamental problem.

02:39:40.100 | So as Lex correctly pointed out,

02:39:43.540 | the way you get around this is by the use of heuristics.

02:39:46.580 | These are rules of thumb,

02:39:48.740 | which give general guidelines to action.

02:39:51.720 | So for example, in jiu-jitsu,

02:39:52.980 | I could give you a general rule of thumb.

02:39:55.620 | Don't turn your back on your opponent, okay?

02:39:57.940 | That's a solid piece of advice.

02:39:59.260 | There are obviously some exceptions to that rule,

02:40:01.300 | but it's a good solid piece of advice to give a beginner.

02:40:04.020 | The moment you give that heuristic rule,

02:40:06.540 | you rule out a lot of options, okay?

02:40:09.260 | You've already told someone, don't turn your back,

02:40:11.340 | don't turn your back on someone.

02:40:12.520 | So a lot of possibilities

02:40:14.060 | have just been turned away right there.

02:40:16.260 | So you've cut the number of options in half right there

02:40:18.620 | just by giving one heuristic rule, okay?

02:40:21.180 | If you were decent at chess, not great, but decent,

02:40:26.680 | and you knew enough to give, say, 10 heuristic rules,

02:40:30.540 | you could chop that initially vast number of options

02:40:33.860 | down by a vast amount.

02:40:36.380 | And now you're starting to get to a point

02:40:38.220 | where if a computer had sufficient computational power,

02:40:41.860 | it could start getting through the number of options

02:40:44.980 | in that acceptable timeframe.

02:40:46.640 | So that's the general pattern of the development.

02:40:50.440 | Now, things started getting very interesting

02:40:52.220 | in the mid-1990s with IBM's computer Deep Blue.

02:40:56.540 | There was a great chess champion of the late 1980s

02:41:01.380 | and early through the 1990s called Garry Kasparov,

02:41:05.340 | who had been more or less undefeated for a decade.

02:41:08.900 | In 1996, he took on IBM's computer Deep Blue.

02:41:12.200 | - Just to correct the record, he was undefeated.

02:41:16.380 | I apologize, Russian, gotta make sure--

02:41:20.460 | - They get very nationalistic about their chess,

02:41:22.020 | be careful of these guys.

02:41:23.420 | Deep Blue lost the first confrontation, I believe, in 1996.

02:41:26.980 | It was competitive, but it lost.

02:41:28.700 | Then in 1997, Deep Blue won.

02:41:33.020 | And it wasn't a complete walkover.

02:41:35.660 | Kasparov, I believe, won one of the matches.

02:41:38.060 | But they did, Deep Blue unequivocally

02:41:42.060 | won the confrontation.

02:41:43.500 | And it was seen as like this watershed moment

02:41:45.660 | where a computer beat the best human chess player

02:41:49.900 | on the planet, and that was it.

02:41:52.340 | There's no coming back from that.

02:41:54.580 | - I think it would be remembered as one of the biggest moments

02:41:57.540 | in computing history, as really when the first time

02:42:00.860 | a machine beat a human at a thing that humans

02:42:02.980 | really care about in the domain of intellectual pursuits.

02:42:06.540 | - Yeah, it was a powerful, powerful moment.

02:42:10.340 | Now, not only was that a powerful moment,

02:42:13.580 | but things started getting truly interesting

02:42:15.700 | from that moment forward.

02:42:17.140 | 'Cause then you started having different areas

02:42:19.020 | of development.

02:42:25.860 | The general way in which the progress is made

02:42:30.780 | from those early starts in 1968,

02:42:32.980 | all the way through to Deep Blue's victory

02:42:36.900 | was of the use of heuristic rules

02:42:39.420 | that brought down the number of potential options

02:42:42.660 | to a manageable level.

02:42:44.300 | As computer power increased,

02:42:46.380 | then it could make faster and faster

02:42:48.340 | and wiser and wiser decisions,

02:42:50.220 | and make them at a rate which no human,

02:42:52.740 | even the best human could keep up with.

02:42:54.500 | So that was the general way in which the debate went.

02:42:58.560 | But things got more interesting after this,

02:43:03.500 | with the advent of computers that, as you pointed out,

02:43:08.460 | make use of so-called machine learning.

02:43:10.700 | There were, a company put out a program, AlphaZero,

02:43:20.300 | which can look at the basic rule structures of chess,

02:43:25.300 | and then ultimately play itself in trial games,

02:43:29.140 | and make trial and error assessment

02:43:30.780 | of what are good and bad strategies.

02:43:32.780 | So that with no human intervention,

02:43:35.100 | a computer could start doing remarkable things.

02:43:38.640 | Not only did this company create AlphaZero,

02:43:45.780 | and there were some other ones too,

02:43:47.780 | that they fought not only in chess,

02:43:49.360 | but in the much more complex Asian game of Go,

02:43:53.580 | which has far more potential options than chess does,

02:43:58.220 | by a very significant margin.

02:44:00.020 | These machine learning programs,

02:44:04.380 | not only easily defeat any human in chess,

02:44:07.780 | but in Go as well.

02:44:09.560 | And what's truly remarkable

02:44:12.380 | is they weren't just beating them.

02:44:14.860 | When AlphaZero took on a rival chess program,

02:44:18.300 | which by itself is already superior to any human,

02:44:21.180 | it only required four hours,

02:44:27.460 | starting from learning the rules of chess,

02:44:30.220 | to figuring out how to beat

02:44:32.140 | the second most powerful chess program in the world.

02:44:35.180 | That's insane.

02:44:37.420 | That's literally like taking a human,

02:44:39.820 | telling them the rules of chess,

02:44:41.460 | they play some games with themselves for four hours,

02:44:44.580 | and they go out and beat Garry Kasparov.

02:44:47.180 | (chuckles)

02:44:48.240 | This is, to me, this is a truly exciting development,

02:44:53.240 | far beyond even what Deep Blue did.

02:44:55.540 | - I like how you said exciting, not terrifying.

02:44:57.420 | - Yeah. - 'Cause I agree

02:44:58.260 | with you on the exciting. - Yeah.

02:44:59.860 | Now, things also get exciting in a different direction.

02:45:03.460 | There is another possibility which few people foresaw

02:45:07.820 | after the Deep Blue episode.

02:45:10.060 | This is where a new form of chess started to emerge,

02:45:14.060 | sometimes called cyborg chess or centaur chess,

02:45:17.280 | where humans of moderate chess-level playing ability,

02:45:23.340 | not world champions, just decent, but not great,

02:45:27.020 | I guess you might say like Purple Belts and Juditzen,

02:45:30.240 | allied themselves with computers.

02:45:33.480 | So the humans and computers worked as a cyborg team.

02:45:37.480 | The humans supplied the heuristic insight,

02:45:43.040 | the computers supplied the computational power.

02:45:46.040 | And fascinatingly, they proved to be superior

02:45:51.540 | to both the best humans and the best chess programs.

02:45:55.040 | The united force of human insight with heuristics,

02:46:01.020 | with computers' ability to go through numbers

02:46:04.540 | in far more rapid form than any human could ever hope to do,

02:46:08.020 | proved to be one of the strongest combinations

02:46:10.300 | and enabled that pairing of human and computer

02:46:15.300 | to overwhelm both the best single human

02:46:18.780 | and the best single computer.

02:46:21.640 | That adds a whole new level of fascination to this topic.

02:46:26.600 | So to wind things up here,

02:46:29.160 | we've got this fascinating initial question from Lex,

02:46:33.720 | the idea of could there be a computer inside a robot

02:46:39.520 | which doesn't have any special physical properties?

02:46:43.640 | This is mind versus mind,

02:46:45.520 | 'cause the bodies negate each other.

02:46:46.860 | The robot is the same body as Gordon Ryan,

02:46:49.400 | this is a thought experiment.

02:46:51.040 | What would it take to create a mind

02:46:54.120 | that would defeat the mind of Gordon Ryan?

02:46:56.900 | Based on the chess example,

02:47:01.540 | it would appear that this is entirely feasible

02:47:05.440 | at some point in the future.

02:47:06.680 | And in fact, I would go further

02:47:07.840 | and say it's actually quite likely

02:47:09.720 | based on what we've seen from the example of chess.

02:47:13.960 | The rate of progress in AI in the last 20 years

02:47:18.240 | has dwarfed anything from the previous 50 years.

02:47:23.860 | And the rate continues to increase.

02:47:27.880 | We're talking now at a level where machine learning,

02:47:32.400 | defeating world champions in chess and Go in four hours,

02:47:38.200 | just from starting from the rules of the sport,

02:47:41.060 | this is gonna be difficult for humans to keep up with.

02:47:47.140 | Now in humans' favor, could we take Gordon Ryan

02:47:51.760 | and put a chip inside his brain

02:47:54.360 | that created the same cyborg effect

02:47:56.260 | as we saw in centaur chess and cyborg chess,

02:47:59.000 | and then take Gordon Ryan to a new level

02:48:01.360 | where suddenly his computational powers

02:48:03.640 | were massively increased.

02:48:05.120 | He still has this heuristic insight,

02:48:07.160 | but he has vastly augmented computational powers.

02:48:11.800 | That's the interesting battle.

02:48:13.480 | You asked a great question, Lex.

02:48:16.720 | Let me give you my initial push for an answer

02:48:19.680 | would be that if it's just Gordon Ryan

02:48:22.520 | versus your robot technology,

02:48:26.880 | in 10 years, I would say with machine learning,

02:48:29.320 | I'd say you guys win every time.

02:48:32.000 | But if it is cyborg Gordon Ryan,

02:48:35.340 | where he's part Gordon Ryan with heuristics

02:48:40.760 | and part machine, and now that's where I throw

02:48:43.880 | the question back at you, young man, what do you think?

02:48:48.240 | Well, I'm fascinated to hear your answer.

02:48:49.760 | - That's very interesting, 'cause there's a lot

02:48:52.360 | of different ways you can build a cyborg Gordon Ryan.

02:48:55.240 | So one is there's the Neuralink way,

02:48:58.360 | which is basically doing what you're suggesting,

02:49:03.360 | which is expanding the computational capabilities

02:49:07.080 | of Gordon Ryan's brain, like directly being able

02:49:11.240 | to communicate between a computer and the brain.

02:49:13.640 | So you preserve most of what there is in the human body,

02:49:18.640 | including the nervous system and the computing system

02:49:22.760 | we currently have that's biological

02:49:24.480 | and expanding it with the computer.

02:49:26.520 | There's also on the cyborg chess front,

02:49:28.920 | like Magnus Carlsen, the current world champion in chess,

02:49:35.360 | he studies AlphaZero games.

02:49:38.760 | Like it's not a regular thing

02:49:40.400 | for high-level grandmasters to do.

02:49:42.360 | - From what I understand, almost every chess master

02:49:45.720 | now studies computer games for inspiration.

02:49:48.880 | Like just as great chess players from the past

02:49:54.720 | used to go back into old leather-bound books

02:49:56.800 | of previous grandmasters and study games and books,

02:50:00.120 | nowadays most people, when they wanna study

02:50:03.360 | the most perfect games, they actually study programs

02:50:05.960 | like AlphaZero.

02:50:06.840 | - Yeah, and it's not just for inspiration, it's education.

02:50:10.000 | I mean, it's literally part of their training regimen.

02:50:12.360 | This isn't like a fun side thing,

02:50:14.840 | it's just the main way to get better.

02:50:17.300 | So there's a certain element there

02:50:21.400 | where even our human brains can be trained

02:50:24.400 | by observing the partial explorations

02:50:29.000 | of an AI systems in the space of grappling.

02:50:32.160 | That could be actually in simulation,

02:50:34.240 | it doesn't have to be in the physical world.

02:50:35.640 | It could be in, if we construct sufficiently good

02:50:40.640 | biomechanical models of human beings,

02:50:43.920 | machines can learn how they grapple.

02:50:46.240 | There's quite a bit of that already.

02:50:49.560 | OpenAI has the system of, they're like sumo wrestlers

02:50:53.280 | with some basic goals of pushing each other off of a platform

02:50:58.000 | and you know nothing from them.

02:50:59.480 | You don't even know, so you have a basic model

02:51:02.360 | of a bipedal system, it doesn't even know in the beginning

02:51:06.040 | how to stand up, it just falls, right?

02:51:08.600 | So it has to learn how to get up

02:51:10.920 | and they do that through self-play.

02:51:13.040 | They learn how to get up, they learn how to move,

02:51:15.940 | enough to achieve the final goal,

02:51:18.160 | which is to push your opponent off of the thing.

02:51:20.320 | - Fascinating.

02:51:21.160 | - So they've learned that.

02:51:22.680 | Now, OpenAI is not, those folks are currently

02:51:26.480 | not that interested in the grappling world,

02:51:28.520 | so they kind of stop there.

02:51:30.200 | But it's very possible in simulation to then develop ideas.

02:51:35.200 | In fact, this is something I should probably do,

02:51:38.920 | but it's pretty natural to do it easy,

02:51:41.200 | is ideas of control and submission and all the,

02:51:45.040 | you know, you add the ability to,

02:51:47.600 | I don't know how to put it nicely,

02:51:49.800 | but to choke your opponent

02:51:53.200 | and to break their body parts off,

02:51:58.000 | which is what Jiu-Jitsu is, add that in

02:52:01.000 | and what kind of ideas they'll come up with

02:52:04.000 | is very fascinating.

02:52:05.560 | I actually don't know, until this conversation,

02:52:07.360 | I don't know why I never even thought about that.

02:52:08.840 | I've been very obsessed with just like walking

02:52:11.000 | and running and all those kinds of things,

02:52:13.880 | like evolving different strategies for,

02:52:17.040 | when you have a bunch of,

02:52:18.880 | so one difficult thing for robots

02:52:21.240 | is when you have uneven terrain

02:52:22.720 | and there's uncertainty about the terrain

02:52:24.240 | is how to keep walking,

02:52:25.840 | or when there's a bunch of things being thrown at you,

02:52:29.000 | all that kind of stuff,

02:52:29.960 | and you learn through self-play

02:52:32.920 | how to be able to navigate those uncertain environments

02:52:35.240 | when there's a lot of weird objects

02:52:37.000 | and all those kinds of things.

02:52:38.560 | There's no reason why you can't just do that

02:52:40.400 | with submissions and so on in simulation.

02:52:43.440 | That would be actually fascinating.

02:52:44.880 | But once we might be surprised

02:52:49.040 | by the kind of strategies in simulation

02:52:52.280 | these AI systems will develop,

02:52:54.640 | and that might make a much better Gordon Ryan,

02:52:57.040 | a much better John Donahart,

02:52:58.520 | in asking the Dean Lister question of like,

02:53:01.840 | why are we only using,

02:53:03.760 | why are we not doing X?

02:53:06.280 | But on the actual sort of grappling event

02:53:10.320 | in the physical space,

02:53:12.640 | I've been very surprised and a little bit disappointed

02:53:15.520 | by how difficult it's to build

02:53:18.480 | a system that's able to have the body of Gordon Ryan,

02:53:25.880 | or a human being, actually,

02:53:28.000 | which means it's not just the biomechanics,

02:53:31.840 | which is very difficult to do,

02:53:33.680 | but also all of the senses that are involved,

02:53:37.840 | be able to perceive the world as richly,

02:53:40.320 | to be able to,

02:53:41.880 | there's something called soft robotics,

02:53:43.680 | which is incredibly difficult to do through touch,

02:53:47.640 | understand the hardness of things.

02:53:50.040 | We don't understand as human beings

02:53:52.800 | just how much we're able through touch

02:53:56.200 | to experience the world and to manipulate the world.

02:53:59.480 | Like the process of picking up a cup

02:54:02.200 | is very similar to the process of grappling.

02:54:05.240 | All the feeling that you do,

02:54:07.160 | all the leverage that you're applying,

02:54:09.340 | there's so many degrees of freedom

02:54:11.400 | in both the interactive sense,

02:54:14.580 | in the sensing and the applying, sensing and applying.

02:54:17.080 | You're doing that through so much of your body

02:54:20.400 | that it's just going to be very difficult

02:54:23.620 | to build a system that's able to experience the world

02:54:26.640 | and act onto the world as richly as we humans can.

02:54:30.160 | - Yeah, if picking up a cup

02:54:33.080 | is a seemingly insurmountable challenge,

02:54:36.160 | then taking someone down,

02:54:38.400 | controlling them, getting past their legs,

02:54:40.000 | that's going to be one hell of a project.

02:54:42.680 | - Exactly.

02:54:43.520 | I mean, there could be shortcuts,

02:54:45.000 | but I mean, currently that's the field

02:54:49.440 | called robotic manipulation, which is picking up objects.

02:54:52.800 | Usually they have like a ball and a triangular object,

02:54:55.680 | and your whole task is to like pick it up

02:54:57.640 | and move it around.

02:54:59.600 | Generalizing that to the human body is harder,

02:55:04.420 | but perhaps not as hard as we might think.

02:55:09.060 | The question is, how do you construct experiments

02:55:11.480 | where you can do that safely?

02:55:13.400 | - In chess, it's very easy.

02:55:15.320 | But here, it's very, very problematic.

02:55:18.720 | I guess you could just have robot versus robot

02:55:24.700 | teamed up with each other, and then they learn,

02:55:27.560 | and then they go out to take on a human opponent.

02:55:29.460 | - Yes, exactly.

02:55:30.300 | So you have two physical robots

02:55:33.240 | that interact with each other.

02:55:35.360 | - Everything you've said so far suggests

02:55:37.080 | that many of the problems, these tactile elements,

02:55:40.400 | they're easy tasks for humans.

02:55:43.560 | So which becomes more powerful more quickly?

02:55:46.220 | Robots that are taught to think like humans,

02:55:49.520 | or humans that are given the computational power

02:55:52.440 | of computers and robots themselves?

02:55:56.960 | Which wins first, a cyborg Gordon Ryan

02:55:59.920 | or an artificial robot Gordon Ryan?

02:56:03.320 | - Really, really strong question.

02:56:05.240 | And I think by far the cyborg Gordon Ryan.

02:56:09.720 | - Yeah, that's what I'm thinking here.

02:56:11.280 | The problems you're talking about,

02:56:13.160 | with regards to the robots, those are deep problems.

02:56:16.640 | Like if picking up a cup is problematic,

02:56:20.040 | it's gonna be damn difficult.

02:56:22.280 | But to a human, that two-year-old can do that.

02:56:25.400 | - You're highlighting a very important difference

02:56:28.120 | is human beings have something called common sense

02:56:31.360 | that we don't know how to build into computers currently.

02:56:35.000 | That's what picking up the cup is.

02:56:36.740 | It's some basic rules about the way this world works.

02:56:41.320 | We're able to, this is when we're children

02:56:43.400 | and we'll crawl around and we pick up.

02:56:46.120 | What humans don't have that machines have

02:56:48.480 | is incredible computational power

02:56:51.960 | and access to infinite knowledge.

02:56:54.400 | Computers can do that.

02:56:55.440 | So if you have a Gordon Ryan

02:56:57.340 | with the infinite knowledge and compute power,

02:57:00.040 | that's just going to, because we know how to do that,

02:57:03.680 | that's going to blow out of the water

02:57:07.640 | a robot that's trying to learn to crawl.

02:57:08.480 | - Has there been any update on the phenomenon

02:57:11.920 | of cyborg or centaur chess?

02:57:14.400 | There was some debate as to whether or not

02:57:16.440 | cyborg chess teams could stay competitive

02:57:22.740 | with the latest machine learning.

02:57:25.920 | Has there been any update on that?

02:57:27.280 | - Yeah, I believe at this point,

02:57:28.840 | machines dominate over the machine human pairs.

02:57:33.840 | - With the human pairs, when they first came out,

02:57:37.700 | they were good chess players, but not great chess players.

02:57:41.760 | Does it make any difference if you have, say,

02:57:43.880 | Garry Kasparov and a computer working in unison

02:57:48.880 | versus Joe Blow from--

02:57:52.000 | - No, it does make a huge difference,

02:57:53.920 | but yeah, both are destroyed by machines at this point.

02:57:56.760 | - And it's not even competitive now?

02:57:58.220 | - No, it's not competitive,

02:57:59.460 | but they also lost interest in this kind of idea.

02:58:03.220 | So I think there's still competitions

02:58:04.960 | between human machine pairs versus human machine pairs,

02:58:09.220 | almost like to see how the two work together,

02:58:12.680 | but in terms of machine versus human machine pair,

02:58:15.000 | machines still dominate.

02:58:16.040 | - Interesting.

02:58:17.240 | - So, and now we've retrieved back as human beings

02:58:21.920 | caring mostly about human versus human competition,

02:58:24.600 | which is probably what the future will look like.

02:58:27.160 | It's very interesting to think,

02:58:29.080 | but like that in chess happened really quickly.

02:58:32.200 | It won't happen, and it wasn't so painful in chess

02:58:36.320 | 'cause we care about chess,

02:58:37.400 | but it's not so fundamental to human society.

02:58:40.620 | And when you started talking about Cyborg Gordon Ryans,

02:58:46.180 | which really beyond grappling is referring

02:58:49.160 | to robots operating physical space

02:58:52.180 | or human robot hybrids operating physical space,

02:58:56.280 | you're talking about our society is now full of cyborgs.

02:59:00.120 | - Yes.

02:59:00.960 | - And that transition might be very painful

02:59:05.160 | or transformative in a way we can't even predict.

02:59:10.160 | And that very much has applications

02:59:13.800 | as both China and US now have legalized

02:59:17.200 | is autonomous weapon systems.

02:59:20.720 | So use of these kinds of systems in military applications.

02:59:24.920 | So it used to be, there'd been a big call

02:59:27.160 | in the AI community to ban autonomous weapons.

02:59:29.640 | So the use of artificial intelligence in war,

02:59:33.600 | just like bioweapons are banned internationally.

02:59:37.800 | So you're not allowed to use bioweapons in war.

02:59:40.200 | And actually most people, even terrorists,

02:59:43.320 | have kind of agreed on this ban.

02:59:46.400 | It's not like a, there's been a quiet agreement,

02:59:49.360 | like we're not going to be doing this

02:59:51.080 | 'cause everybody's gonna get really pissed off.

02:59:54.240 | With autonomous weapon systems, that's not been the case.

02:59:58.680 | What China has said that they're going to be using AI

03:00:01.840 | in their military and the US in 2021

03:00:06.720 | just released a report saying that they're going to,

03:00:10.020 | they're going to add increasing amounts

03:00:13.720 | of artificial intelligence into our military systems,

03:00:17.280 | into drones, into just everything that's doing any kind

03:00:20.280 | of both strategic and actual like bombing

03:00:24.320 | and defense systems.

03:00:27.200 | - I presume a drone army would easily defeat a human army

03:00:32.120 | in the near future.

03:00:33.560 | Like, I mean, think about, just off the top of my head,

03:00:38.560 | just think about the implication of kamikaze drones

03:00:41.000 | versus a naval fleet.

03:00:42.320 | I mean, kamikazes with humans in World War II

03:00:45.640 | did terrible damage to our Navy.

03:00:47.960 | Imagine swarms of mechanical kamikazes

03:00:52.960 | which have no fear, no remorse.

03:00:55.000 | I mean.

03:00:56.000 | - But it's very inefficient.

03:00:58.600 | Kamikaze is very inefficient.

03:00:59.960 | You want to be very, like war is,

03:01:03.440 | it's the same discussion to jiu-jitsu, right?

03:01:06.120 | You want to be, you want to create an asymmetry of power

03:01:10.680 | and you want to be efficient

03:01:11.720 | in the way you deliver that power.

03:01:13.880 | It actually goes back to the picking up a cup.

03:01:17.080 | - Currently, a lot of things we do in war,

03:01:21.600 | like most of the drones that you hear about,

03:01:24.000 | they're not autonomous, not most, all.

03:01:26.120 | - They're usually piloted by--

03:01:27.360 | - They're piloted remotely by humans.

03:01:30.160 | And humans are really good at this kind of

03:01:33.600 | what's necessary to deliver the most damage,

03:01:35.700 | targeted damage, effective as part of the largest strategy

03:01:39.360 | you have about bombing the area or all that kind of stuff.

03:01:43.020 | I don't know how difficult that is to automate.

03:01:45.500 | I think the biggest concern,

03:01:47.720 | I actually have a sense that it's very difficult to automate.

03:01:51.600 | The biggest concern is almost like

03:01:53.840 | an incompetent application of this

03:01:56.040 | and consequences that are not anticipated.

03:02:01.120 | So you have a drone army where you say,

03:02:04.960 | we want to target, you give it power

03:02:07.480 | to target a particular terrorist.

03:02:09.720 | And then there's some bug in the system that has a,

03:02:14.880 | like for example, has a large uncertainty

03:02:16.980 | about the location of that terrorist.

03:02:18.800 | And so it decides to bomb an entire city.

03:02:21.000 | Almost like there's a bug, a software bug.

03:02:25.120 | I'm much more concerned about bad programming

03:02:28.480 | and software engineering than I am about

03:02:31.240 | like malevolent AI systems that destroy the world.

03:02:36.160 | So the more we rely on automation,

03:02:38.720 | this is the lesson of human history,

03:02:40.160 | the more we give to AI, to software, to robotic systems,

03:02:45.160 | the more we forget how to supervise

03:02:49.680 | and oversee some of the edge cases,

03:02:52.160 | all the weird ways that things go wrong.

03:02:54.480 | And then the more stupid software bugs

03:02:58.520 | can lead to huge damage, like, you know,

03:03:02.200 | even like nuclear explosions, those kinds of things.

03:03:05.680 | If we add AI into the launch systems

03:03:09.680 | for nuclear weapons, for example,

03:03:11.460 | I think human history teaches us that software bugs

03:03:17.020 | is what will lead to World War III,

03:03:21.040 | not malevolent AI or human beings.

03:03:25.720 | - Interesting.

03:03:26.840 | - By the way, I deeply appreciate how knowledgeable you are

03:03:29.480 | about the history of artificial intelligence.

03:03:31.260 | That was awesome.

03:03:32.100 | - Oh, no, it's fascinating stuff.

03:03:33.640 | You know, I remember reading when I was a child

03:03:36.080 | about, you know, Turing tests and things like this,

03:03:38.560 | and visionaries from the 1950s had ideas,

03:03:41.240 | but to see it come this far is just fascinating to me.

03:03:44.700 | Okay, so what can we as jujitsu players take away from this?

03:03:51.320 | We saw that when it comes to computers versus humans

03:03:55.880 | in chess tournaments, humans had something truly valuable

03:04:00.880 | to give to the computers.

03:04:03.300 | And that was heuristic rules.

03:04:05.000 | In every coaching program that I run,

03:04:09.600 | I make an endless quest to search out

03:04:14.280 | and find effective heuristic rules.

03:04:17.680 | That's the basis of a good training program.

03:04:20.060 | Heuristic rules and principles

03:04:23.000 | give vast informational content

03:04:27.560 | which can rapidly increase your performance on the mat,

03:04:30.800 | just as they rapidly increase

03:04:32.480 | the performance of chess computers

03:04:34.440 | to overcome the human adversaries.

03:04:37.160 | The great human weakness is computational power.

03:04:43.680 | Most people vastly overestimate their ability

03:04:48.000 | to reason and problem solve under stress.

03:04:51.460 | In fact, numerous psychological studies

03:04:53.960 | have shown that humans can balance

03:04:55.800 | a relatively small number of competing options

03:05:00.500 | in stressful decision-making.

03:05:03.840 | But what we do have,

03:05:05.060 | what is the great and unique human gift

03:05:08.440 | is this idea to come up and arrive

03:05:11.900 | at heuristic rules and principles

03:05:14.160 | which turn out to be very effective guides to behavior

03:05:17.920 | for both human behavior

03:05:19.480 | and artificially intelligent behavior.

03:05:21.660 | Make that your focus in study.

03:05:26.500 | Don't try to remember 10,000 different details

03:05:30.440 | on a move, okay?

03:05:31.640 | That's human weakness, not human strength.

03:05:34.840 | Our strength is heuristics.

03:05:36.880 | Make that your focus,

03:05:38.840 | not endless computations over 25 details here

03:05:42.880 | merged with 27 details here.

03:05:44.480 | That's not what humans are good at.

03:05:46.500 | The uniquely human strength

03:05:49.840 | is arriving at these heuristic rules and principles

03:05:53.240 | which guide our behavior,

03:05:54.740 | which provide simplifications

03:05:56.920 | which enable us to take vast amounts of information

03:06:00.080 | and parry it down to a few simple rules

03:06:02.160 | that effectively guide our behavior.

03:06:04.340 | Take that core insight from the discussion

03:06:06.400 | that Lex and I just had.

03:06:07.400 | It was a complex discussion.

03:06:08.620 | We both apologize for going a little bit overboard.

03:06:10.880 | - That was awesome.

03:06:11.720 | - And dragging you into some details there,

03:06:13.160 | but take that away from it.

03:06:14.000 | - I love it.

03:06:14.840 | - It'll make you better at jiu-jitsu.

03:06:16.480 | Sorry, Lex.

03:06:17.320 | - (laughs)

03:06:18.560 | That was a really exciting discussion.

03:06:21.640 | The depths of knowledge

03:06:25.040 | and the dimensions of knowledge you have

03:06:27.400 | and interest you have is just fascinating.

03:06:30.040 | Is there advice you have for complete beginners,

03:06:32.900 | for white belts that are starting jiu-jitsu,

03:06:36.440 | that are listening to this, that haven't done jiu-jitsu,

03:06:38.440 | I know there's a lot of people who are super curious to start

03:06:42.600 | is there advice you would give them on their journey?

03:06:45.920 | - Yeah.

03:06:46.760 | I'm just gonna talk about just getting better on the mat.

03:06:49.760 | Okay, 'cause there's a thousand other things

03:06:51.280 | you can talk about in terms of like morale and persistence

03:06:54.200 | and how often they should train

03:06:56.240 | is a thousand things you'd get.

03:06:57.080 | - Break up with your girlfriend or boyfriend.

03:06:59.320 | - Yeah, that's one.

03:07:00.160 | No, I'm just kidding.

03:07:00.980 | Let's put that aside.

03:07:01.820 | - That's probably the best advice we could give.

03:07:05.840 | It goes back to what we said earlier.

03:07:07.920 | I always advocate start your training from the ground up.

03:07:11.980 | Okay, your first sessions in jiu-jitsu,

03:07:15.640 | you're going to find to your horror

03:07:18.160 | that everyone gets on top of you and you can't get out.

03:07:21.420 | And it's a dispiriting, crushing kind of feeling

03:07:24.760 | that you just have no skills

03:07:26.400 | and you have no prospects in the sport.

03:07:28.800 | So your first skill is the skill of being able

03:07:31.040 | to free yourself from positional pins.

03:07:33.900 | Most of the escapes in jiu-jitsu go to guard position.

03:07:39.040 | And so once you get someone in your guard,

03:07:41.480 | they're gonna be looking to pass your guard

03:07:43.120 | and get back into those positional pins

03:07:45.160 | that you just escaped from.

03:07:47.240 | And that's just as crushing as getting pinned.

03:07:49.520 | You feel like every time you try to hold someone in guard,

03:07:51.520 | they just effortlessly pass you by.

03:07:53.280 | So your first two skills,

03:07:56.360 | you got to be able to get out of any pin

03:07:58.160 | and you got to be able to hold someone in your guard.

03:08:00.280 | So pin escapes and guard retention

03:08:02.320 | are your first two skills.

03:08:04.240 | I generally advocate the idea of learning to fight

03:08:08.780 | from your back first

03:08:11.060 | and then learning to fight from on top second.

03:08:13.760 | Why?

03:08:14.600 | Because the brute fact is when you first start off,

03:08:16.960 | you just don't have enough skills to hold top position

03:08:19.320 | or gain top position through a takedown.

03:08:21.520 | So inevitably you're gonna end up underneath people

03:08:23.960 | for most of your training time.

03:08:25.920 | Your training should reflect that.

03:08:27.960 | In the early days as a white belt,

03:08:30.120 | start with the first two skills you need.

03:08:32.360 | They're not the most exciting.

03:08:33.560 | They're not sexy skills that are gonna make you look

03:08:35.400 | like a stud in the training room,

03:08:36.820 | but they're gonna keep you alive long enough

03:08:38.640 | to learn those sexy skills in the future

03:08:40.640 | that will make you look like a stud.

03:08:43.240 | Start with pin escapes,

03:08:45.240 | go to guard retention and focus heavily on those two.

03:08:49.440 | When you start to get into offense,

03:08:51.480 | start with bottom position.

03:08:53.820 | So there's a clear continuity between your pin escapes,

03:08:56.960 | your guard retention and then your guard itself.

03:09:00.560 | Okay?

03:09:01.380 | You've got different options with guard.

03:09:03.720 | Some of you are gonna like closed guard.

03:09:05.220 | Some of you are gonna like variations of open guard.

03:09:08.160 | Some of you are gonna like to be seated.

03:09:09.480 | Some of you are gonna like to be supine.

03:09:11.240 | Some of you are gonna like half guard.

03:09:13.620 | As a general rule, this is a heavy generalization,

03:09:17.360 | but I'm gonna give it to you.

03:09:18.980 | In my experience, most people benefit the most

03:09:22.440 | by starting with half guard first.

03:09:24.880 | I know that traditionally, Jiu-Jitsu has been taught

03:09:27.160 | closed guard first and then all the other guards

03:09:29.640 | come after that.

03:09:30.920 | I'm a big believer in the idea of start with pin escapes,

03:09:34.760 | then go to guard retention

03:09:36.400 | and then start with half guard bottom.

03:09:38.200 | That way you get a nice continuity

03:09:39.800 | between your first three skills

03:09:41.560 | and you'll make good progress

03:09:43.140 | over those first critical six months in Jiu-Jitsu.

03:09:45.960 | - What does it take to get a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu?

03:09:50.400 | - Very little.

03:09:51.640 | (laughing)

03:09:54.720 | Just show up, pay your fees.

03:09:56.960 | Don't set your goals low.

03:10:00.320 | Don't even ask yourself that question.

03:10:01.960 | No one cares if you got a black belt.

03:10:03.880 | The only thing that counts is the skills you have.

03:10:06.100 | I know plenty of black belts that suck.

03:10:08.420 | There's a lot of them out there.

03:10:10.920 | Don't lower your standards by saying,

03:10:13.880 | "I wanna get a black belt."

03:10:15.400 | Ask yourself something much more important.

03:10:19.000 | How good do I wanna be?

03:10:20.840 | You wanna be damn good, right?

03:10:21.960 | You wanna do something, invest time

03:10:23.120 | and you wanna be the best you can.

03:10:24.800 | Wearing a belt around your waist doesn't guarantee that.

03:10:27.720 | Build skills, focus on that.

03:10:29.540 | - Let me ask you about the fourth thing

03:10:33.560 | in facet face of Jiu-Jitsu, which is self-defense.

03:10:38.560 | Let's say the bigger things,

03:10:41.420 | I don't know why it's called self-defense.

03:10:44.800 | Let's call it street fighting.

03:10:46.800 | Let's call it fighting, okay?

03:10:49.000 | Maybe you can contest that terminology.

03:10:51.600 | How about non-sport fighting?

03:10:53.680 | - Non-sport fighting.

03:10:54.920 | - It's funny, like street fighting.

03:10:56.000 | What happens if you go out in a playground

03:10:57.400 | and you're fighting on grass?

03:10:58.320 | Is that no longer street fighting?

03:11:00.080 | - It's like tennis.

03:11:00.920 | You have Wimbledon, like grass courts.

03:11:03.000 | It's a whole other thing.

03:11:05.480 | What do you think is the best martial art

03:11:09.560 | for street fighting?

03:11:11.400 | What is the best set of, we talked about advice

03:11:15.280 | for white belts to advance in grappling, in Jiu-Jitsu.

03:11:21.280 | What is the set of techniques, maybe martial art

03:11:25.800 | that is best for street fighting?

03:11:27.760 | - Okay, again, you're asking some truly fascinating

03:11:32.120 | questions here.

03:11:32.960 | The way this gets framed as a question

03:11:39.960 | is often condemns you to bad answers from the start.

03:11:43.460 | This is--

03:11:46.440 | - As a questioner, I'm trying to achieve asymmetry of power.

03:11:50.900 | And I'm winning.

03:11:51.740 | Put you in a bad position.

03:11:55.460 | - Don't worry so much about, people are always gonna say,

03:11:59.860 | is this martial art better or is this martial art better?

03:12:01.980 | The truth is, there's only one way to say this.

03:12:06.980 | (laughing)

03:12:09.420 | Combat sports are your best option for self-defense.

03:12:15.480 | There are many martial arts and there is a rough divide

03:12:19.860 | between the two, those that fall into combat sports

03:12:23.420 | and those that fall into non-sporting martial arts

03:12:28.380 | where there's no competitive, live sparring element,

03:12:33.380 | where most of the knowledge is limited

03:12:40.760 | to theoretical knowledge reinforced by passive drilling.

03:12:44.700 | If you have a choice between a combat sport

03:12:49.420 | versus a non-sporting art based around theoretical

03:12:53.980 | knowledge and passive drilling, go with a combat sport.

03:12:56.880 | Nothing will prepare you for the intensity

03:13:02.060 | of a genuine altercation better than combat sports.

03:13:09.260 | Many people, as I say these words,

03:13:13.060 | they're probably horrified to hear me say this

03:13:15.980 | and immediately going to rebut and say,

03:13:19.500 | no, combat sports is exactly the wrong thing for you to do

03:13:23.140 | because they have safety rules, et cetera, et cetera,

03:13:26.620 | which would easily be exploited in a real fight.

03:13:30.280 | And if I fought a world championship boxer,

03:13:32.620 | I would just poke him in the eye

03:13:33.700 | or kick him in the groin, et cetera, et cetera.

03:13:35.220 | You've heard these arguments a thousand times.

03:13:38.220 | Yes, there is some validity to these things,

03:13:40.960 | but as a general rule, if you ask me to bet

03:13:45.620 | in any form of street fight, call it what you want,

03:13:48.540 | between a combat sport adherent versus someone

03:13:52.940 | who simply trains with drills and talks in terms of theories

03:13:57.940 | of what they would do in a fight,

03:14:00.980 | I'm gonna go with the combat sport guy every single time.

03:14:04.680 | Now, having said that, combat sports need to be modified

03:14:10.780 | for the use of self-defense street fighting.

03:14:14.460 | We haven't agreed on a term yet.

03:14:15.660 | We'll figure it out later.

03:14:16.960 | What does this modification consist of?

03:14:21.280 | Well, some of it is technical.

03:14:23.580 | For example, a boxer in a street fight now has to punch

03:14:28.580 | without wrapped or gloved hands, and that's problematic.

03:14:32.660 | Your hands are not really designed for heavy extended use

03:14:37.580 | of clubbing hard objects.

03:14:38.840 | There's a very high likelihood of breaking your hands.

03:14:41.660 | Mike Tyson was one of the finest punchers that ever lived,

03:14:44.820 | but in one of his more famous street fights

03:14:46.500 | against Mitch Green in the late 1980s,

03:14:50.140 | he broke his hand with one punch

03:14:52.900 | that he threw his opponent,

03:14:53.860 | hit the wrong part of the head and broke his hand.

03:14:56.380 | And he was one of the most gifted punchers of all time.

03:14:58.620 | If he can do it, you'll certainly have trouble

03:15:01.460 | protecting your hands when you go to throw blows.

03:15:04.340 | Nonetheless, this is easily modified.

03:15:09.660 | And so a boxer can throw with open hands or with elbows.

03:15:14.660 | And so just a small modification and technique

03:15:19.460 | can overcome that problem.

03:15:21.980 | So what you'll find is that the general physical,

03:15:26.260 | mental conditioning and skill development

03:15:28.740 | that comes from combat sports

03:15:30.460 | allied with technical modifications,

03:15:36.260 | and then the most important of all,

03:15:38.620 | tactical modifications will provide your best hope

03:15:43.380 | in altercations outside of sports in the street

03:15:47.300 | or wherever you find yourself.

03:15:49.300 | The least effective approaches to self-defense

03:15:55.460 | that I have observed in my life have been those

03:15:57.700 | where, as I said, people talked theory,

03:16:01.140 | drilled on passive opponents,

03:16:04.780 | and generally had no engagement in live competition

03:16:09.220 | or sparring in their training programs.

03:16:11.800 | The most effective by a landslide

03:16:16.700 | were those that put a heavy emphasis on live sparring

03:16:21.700 | and sporting competition modified both technically

03:16:26.660 | and tactically for the circumstances

03:16:28.820 | in which they found themselves.

03:16:30.380 | People talk, for example, about how, you know,

03:16:35.060 | and with some validity that weapons

03:16:37.540 | will change everything in a street fight.

03:16:39.620 | There's absolute truth to that,

03:16:41.380 | but this extends into weapons as well, okay?

03:16:44.660 | The most effective forms of knife fighting that you'll see

03:16:49.660 | will be those who come from a background in fencing

03:16:53.180 | because it has sparring

03:16:54.700 | and a competitive sport aspect to it.

03:16:56.940 | But would pure fencing be the appropriate thing?

03:16:59.340 | Of course not, you'd have to modify it.

03:17:01.040 | But the reflexes, endurance, physical mobility

03:17:04.020 | that you gain from the sport of fencing

03:17:05.820 | could easily be modified to blade craft

03:17:08.180 | in a fight situation.

03:17:10.600 | What you want to look for with regards

03:17:13.300 | street and self-defense is not,

03:17:16.860 | okay, which style should I choose?

03:17:18.380 | Should I choose Taekwondo?

03:17:19.500 | Should I choose karate?

03:17:20.460 | Should I choose this variation of Kung Fu?

03:17:22.500 | No, focus on the most important thing.

03:17:25.000 | Does it have a sport aspect to it?

03:17:27.700 | Then once you've made sufficient progress

03:17:30.100 | in the sport aspect of that martial art,

03:17:32.200 | start asking yourself what are the requisite modifications

03:17:35.600 | and technique and tactics that I have to use

03:17:38.620 | or to input to make it effective for street situations?

03:17:43.620 | That's always the advice that I give.

03:17:45.640 | Let me zoom in on a very particular aspect

03:17:47.600 | of street fighting where with all due respect,

03:17:50.920 | I disagree with Mr. Joe Rogan and George St. Pierre on,

03:17:54.700 | which is the suit and tie situation.

03:17:57.960 | Now to criticize GSB, yeah, yeah, yeah,

03:18:00.200 | he's very accomplished and everything,

03:18:01.560 | but to criticize him for a bit,

03:18:03.480 | he made claims about how dangerous the tie is

03:18:07.320 | in a street fighting situation without ever having used it

03:18:11.340 | in a fighting situation.

03:18:12.800 | So he made sort of broad proclamations

03:18:15.960 | without understanding the fundamentals.

03:18:18.480 | So I thought I would go to somebody who thinks in systems.

03:18:23.240 | What do you think, is it dangerous to wear a tie or not

03:18:30.160 | in a grappling situation versus all the other weapons?

03:18:33.280 | - We're talking about in a street fight here.

03:18:35.520 | 'Cause it'd be rather strange to wear a tie

03:18:37.280 | in a grappling competition.

03:18:38.440 | - It would be, it would be.

03:18:40.480 | Yes, in a street fight situation.

03:18:42.920 | Joe Rogan thinks it is like the most dangerous,

03:18:47.640 | it's like it becomes your weakest point if you wear a tie

03:18:51.100 | because it's very easy to choke.

03:18:52.960 | George St. Pierre seemed to have agreed with that.

03:18:55.240 | Also George added that you can grab the tie

03:18:59.020 | and pull the person down to a knee.

03:19:03.120 | Yeah, this is the go-to.

03:19:04.520 | Joe Rogan will go for the choke,

03:19:06.040 | George St. Pierre will go for the tie to the knee,

03:19:08.700 | which I was saying is ridiculous.

03:19:10.600 | So what do you think?

03:19:11.560 | - Okay, first off, I actually can speak with experience

03:19:15.100 | on this 'cause I worked as a bouncer for over a decade

03:19:17.800 | and most of the clubs I worked at

03:19:19.920 | did not require a suit and tie, but occasionally they did.

03:19:22.820 | Okay, let's first differentiate between the kinds of threats

03:19:28.500 | when you wear a tie.

03:19:30.100 | If you wear a tie, if there is gonna be a threat,

03:19:33.200 | by far the more important threat is not strangulation.

03:19:36.560 | Okay, being strangled by your tie is possible,

03:19:40.240 | but it is a poor choice.

03:19:42.120 | There are many other ways to strangle people

03:19:43.920 | that are far more efficient.

03:19:45.160 | If I strangle by your tie, I'm literally in front of you.

03:19:49.320 | That means as I go to apply the stranglehold,

03:19:52.400 | I can easily be eye gouged, et cetera, et cetera.

03:19:54.240 | If you're gonna strangle people in the street,

03:19:56.160 | do it from behind and there's just much better ways

03:19:59.220 | to do it than that.

03:20:00.060 | - Hear that Joe Rogan?

03:20:01.120 | - With regards to the snap down question,

03:20:04.860 | that is more a problem.

03:20:07.300 | I always recommend if you are going to work as a bouncer

03:20:09.740 | with a tie, wear a clip-on tie

03:20:12.820 | so it just comes off immediately.

03:20:14.460 | If you don't like clip-ons, then you can use a bow tie.

03:20:17.780 | I used to work for years in hip hop clubs

03:20:22.220 | with members of the Nation of Islam security team

03:20:26.320 | that were known, they had various factions,

03:20:28.600 | but the one I worked with were the X-Men

03:20:30.680 | and they would always wear bow ties,

03:20:32.280 | which of course can't be grabbed.

03:20:34.040 | Now, the bow tie was a recognizable part of their brand

03:20:39.040 | as security guards, so everyone knew

03:20:42.280 | that that's what they wore.

03:20:43.880 | If I wore a bow tie in a security situation,

03:20:46.960 | people would probably think that I was some kind

03:20:48.600 | of Nancy boy and want to fight with me,

03:20:52.420 | so I couldn't wear one.

03:20:53.820 | So I would always wear a tie which you should become familiar

03:20:58.180 | with Mr. Freedman, that's the Texas Bolo tie,

03:21:02.860 | which is a kind of shoestring tie,

03:21:04.980 | which is very, very thin, almost like shoestring

03:21:07.060 | and rather short and just has a simple pendant

03:21:09.540 | in the middle.

03:21:11.140 | This is perfect if you need to wear a tie

03:21:13.260 | in a situation where you believe there's a high likelihood

03:21:16.220 | of you being grabbed by--

03:21:17.940 | - Because it can't be grabbed.

03:21:18.900 | - Yeah, there's nothing to grab.

03:21:19.860 | It's literally like string.

03:21:20.940 | Like if you pulled it, it would just slip through your hand.

03:21:24.340 | That tie that you're wearing now,

03:21:26.780 | that would give me tremendous control of your head

03:21:29.460 | and I could easily turn it into a hockey fight situation

03:21:32.820 | where your head was being pulled down out of balance

03:21:35.380 | and you would have a hard time recovering.

03:21:37.480 | So strangulation, not really a problem.

03:21:41.800 | Getting pulled down, possible problem.

03:21:44.960 | Solutions, clip-on tie, bow tie,

03:21:48.480 | or if you don't wanna look like a Nancy boy,

03:21:50.720 | wear a Bolo tie.

03:21:54.200 | - Beautiful, so you disagree with Joe Rogan

03:21:55.880 | and agree with George St. Pierre, I love it.

03:21:58.280 | I feel like this is an instruction we put together

03:22:01.360 | on street fighting and the tie.

03:22:06.260 | Speaking of Joe Rogan, let me ask the following question.

03:22:11.560 | He's currently doing a podcast with Gordon Ryan

03:22:14.920 | and probably going to try to convince him and you,

03:22:20.880 | as he's already been doing, to move to Austin.

03:22:23.160 | What are the chances of the Donahue Death Squad

03:22:27.600 | coming to Austin and opening a school in Austin

03:22:30.960 | and making Austin home so I can attend the classes there?

03:22:34.700 | - I would definitely have to think about that.

03:22:37.880 | I do know that I personally love New York,

03:22:42.880 | but every single person in the squad despised New York

03:22:48.920 | and wanted to leave for a long time.

03:22:51.280 | - What was the nature of your love for New York, by the way?

03:22:57.120 | - It was truly an international city.

03:22:59.760 | I'm a big believer in the idea of breadth of experience.

03:23:03.920 | And if you want, breadth of experience

03:23:07.520 | usually requires extensive travel,

03:23:09.800 | but training people means you have to be in a fixed location

03:23:14.240 | working according to a schedule.

03:23:16.600 | And that pushed, those two push in different directions.

03:23:21.600 | New York was the compromise where everyone

03:23:24.340 | from around the world came there.

03:23:26.480 | So you had breadth of experience of world culture,

03:23:29.240 | but at the same time you had a fixed location.

03:23:31.400 | So you could run a training program

03:23:32.840 | that produced world champions.

03:23:34.460 | So it was the ideal compromise.

03:23:37.080 | It was a fascinating thing to teach classes

03:23:40.560 | of over 120 people where literally the entire world

03:23:43.560 | was represented on the map and go outside

03:23:46.640 | and see the same thing.

03:23:48.840 | It was truly the world's leading international city.

03:23:53.840 | It was like the world's unofficial capital,

03:23:58.680 | fascinating place to live.

03:24:00.680 | So I loved it, but the squad hated it.

03:24:03.080 | For them it was like an expensive,

03:24:05.000 | things they never actually lived in Manhattan.

03:24:08.800 | They always lived in New Jersey or Long Island,

03:24:10.920 | had to commute in.

03:24:11.760 | So all they ever saw was the bridges and the tunnels,

03:24:14.060 | the expensive daily parking fees.

03:24:16.680 | They only saw the worst of New York.

03:24:18.880 | And despite my pleas for them to move into Manhattan,

03:24:22.640 | they never did.

03:24:23.700 | And so they hated it.

03:24:25.680 | 'Cause when all you see of New York

03:24:27.400 | is the bridges and the tunnels and the parking garage,

03:24:31.200 | that's not a pleasant thing.

03:24:32.840 | So I understand where they're coming from.

03:24:35.440 | So then when COVID broke out,

03:24:37.920 | they wanted to move to Puerto Rico and work there.

03:24:44.800 | Now, Puerto Rico is a beautiful alternative to New York.

03:24:49.400 | It's in many ways, has many advantages over New York.

03:24:52.760 | It's physically beautiful.

03:24:54.080 | The people are wonderful.

03:24:56.240 | It's just a wonderful place to spend time.

03:25:02.780 | - Freedom, low taxes, all those kinds of things

03:25:06.340 | that Puerto Rico stands for.

03:25:08.180 | - It's Texas on the other hand.

03:25:10.260 | I know everyone in the squad--

03:25:11.100 | - It's a compromise, right?

03:25:12.180 | Texas is a compromise between those two.

03:25:14.220 | - Actually, I must say that everyone on the squad,

03:25:17.060 | myself included, loves Texas.

03:25:19.360 | There's no question about that.

03:25:21.820 | I know Gordon loves it.

03:25:24.260 | Gary, Craig, Nikki, everyone who comes here just loves Texas.

03:25:29.260 | That is incontestable.

03:25:32.360 | Of course, in Texas, there's many great cities.

03:25:37.200 | Austin has always been one of my favorites.

03:25:41.080 | I love Dallas, I love Austin.

03:25:43.280 | And it has the advantages of better infrastructure

03:25:49.760 | as a place to train.

03:25:53.000 | It has a much higher population density

03:25:55.480 | so that you could get a larger number

03:25:57.600 | of prospective students and form a larger squad.

03:26:01.020 | It would definitely be a fantastic place to open up a gym.

03:26:06.020 | I couldn't give an answer off the top of my head.

03:26:09.860 | It would be a big move if we did make that move.

03:26:12.420 | But the basic idea would be very agreeable

03:26:18.380 | to everyone on the team, I will say that.

03:26:20.740 | - Well, I'll just have to call my Russian connections

03:26:25.320 | to threaten the right kind of people.

03:26:28.300 | I definitely would love the way you approach training,

03:26:32.420 | the way you approach the martial arts

03:26:34.100 | is something that I deeply admire

03:26:38.580 | as a scholar of these arts.

03:26:40.180 | So it would be amazing if you do come here,

03:26:42.460 | but either way, it'd be amazing to train together.

03:26:45.780 | Let me ask a big, ridiculous question.

03:26:47.960 | What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?

03:26:53.120 | We talked about at the beginning of the conversation

03:26:55.780 | about death and the fear of it.

03:26:59.040 | The other big question we ask about life is its meaning.

03:27:04.300 | Do you think there's a meaning to our existence here

03:27:07.060 | on this little spinning ball?

03:27:09.740 | - That's, you've thrown some powerful questions.

03:27:13.580 | That's the most powerful.

03:27:21.420 | For most of human existence,

03:27:23.180 | the meaning of life was very, very simple, survival.

03:27:29.240 | The only thing that humans cared about was just surviving,

03:27:35.460 | because it was so damn difficult

03:27:38.340 | for the early years of human existence on this earth.

03:27:40.940 | If you look at ourselves as biological agents,

03:27:48.860 | everything about our body is set up for one mission,

03:27:52.060 | and that is survival.

03:27:53.140 | Every reflex we have, every element of our structure

03:27:58.860 | is just built up on the battle to survive.

03:28:01.380 | And then humans did something remarkable.

03:28:05.400 | They elevated themselves through the use of technology

03:28:13.080 | and social structure to the top of the food chain

03:28:18.580 | so that they went from extremely vulnerable.

03:28:23.580 | If you take a naked human being alone

03:28:27.100 | and put them in the Serengeti Plains in Africa,

03:28:29.460 | they're in some deep shit, okay?

03:28:32.420 | If you look at a human being as a survival organism

03:28:36.020 | just by itself, naked,

03:28:37.660 | they are among the most feeble at that task

03:28:42.860 | in the entire animal kingdom.

03:28:44.880 | (inhales)

03:28:47.040 | You compare us with predatory animals.

03:28:52.480 | We are weak and soft and easily killed.

03:28:57.240 | But if you take that same human and put them in a group

03:29:03.840 | and you give them basic technology,

03:29:07.580 | steel, a spear, a knife,

03:29:14.320 | he goes from the bottom of the food chain

03:29:16.360 | to pretty much at the top.

03:29:19.020 | And so humanity found itself in a crisis

03:29:25.880 | that emerged out of its own success.

03:29:28.640 | For most of its history,

03:29:30.560 | their only interest was the battle to survive,

03:29:32.420 | and they did it.

03:29:33.520 | I don't know how they did it, but they did it.

03:29:34.880 | They got through ice ages, droughts, famines,

03:29:38.180 | disease, everything, and they found a way

03:29:40.900 | to get to the top of the food chain.

03:29:43.700 | And that's where it all got interesting.

03:29:47.740 | 'Cause an organism whose only interest was in survival

03:29:51.620 | had for the first time in their history

03:29:54.020 | a more or less guaranteed survival.

03:29:56.840 | And so the big question now is, now what?

03:30:03.540 | We survived.

03:30:04.780 | There's no more danger.

03:30:06.280 | The average human being finds himself in a world now

03:30:09.540 | where there's almost zero danger from predatory animals,

03:30:14.180 | where getting a meal is the easiest thing ever,

03:30:18.740 | where getting to and from work is not problematic at all,

03:30:23.600 | where the majority of infectious diseases,

03:30:27.900 | medical complaints can be resolved

03:30:31.300 | in a hospital fairly easily.

03:30:33.160 | And so they start casting their mind around,

03:30:38.300 | okay, what do I do now?

03:30:40.380 | And so the minute mankind's existence

03:30:47.020 | became more or less guaranteed,

03:30:48.940 | the problem shift from survival to meaning.

03:30:55.140 | And we found ourselves grappling with a whole new issue

03:31:00.800 | that had never occurred to our ancient forefathers,

03:31:03.360 | but which now becomes one of the centerpieces

03:31:07.580 | of our modern lives.

03:31:09.000 | - I mean, when you look at your own life,

03:31:12.740 | when you look back, you think, I did a hell of a good job.

03:31:17.740 | You know, Hunter S. Thompson has this line

03:31:20.620 | that I often think about,

03:31:21.860 | "That life should not be a journey to the grave

03:31:25.260 | with the intention of arriving safely

03:31:27.980 | in a pretty and well-preserved body,

03:31:30.920 | but rather to skid in roadside in a cloud of smoke,

03:31:35.300 | thoroughly used up, totally worn out,

03:31:37.420 | and loudly proclaiming, 'Wow, what a ride.'"

03:31:40.520 | (John laughs)

03:31:41.780 | That's which is the complete opposite of survival.

03:31:44.960 | Well, not complete opposite of survival,

03:31:47.820 | but basically embracing danger, embracing risk, going big,

03:31:52.820 | just living life to the fullest.

03:31:55.160 | So within that context,

03:31:58.140 | what would make you proud of a life well-lived?

03:32:04.060 | When you look back, you, John Donahart,

03:32:05.820 | looking back at your life.

03:32:07.740 | - First, I will address that question,

03:32:09.700 | but let's first look at why Hunter Thompson could say that,

03:32:13.860 | because his life was more or less guaranteed and safe.

03:32:17.180 | If you look at animals in the animal kingdom,

03:32:20.060 | the pattern of their life is very simple.

03:32:22.120 | They take the least risk possible to secure their existence.

03:32:25.980 | Lions are powerful creatures, but when they go hunting,

03:32:29.840 | they typically go for the weakest animals they can kill

03:32:32.820 | in order to eat, 'cause they don't wanna take the risk

03:32:34.820 | of injuring themselves, knowing that if they do, they die.

03:32:38.540 | So the brute reality is the only people

03:32:41.100 | who can talk about having casual danger in their lives

03:32:46.100 | are those whose lives are guaranteed.

03:32:48.820 | - In a fascinating small tangent,

03:32:51.500 | Hunter Thompson took his own life.

03:32:53.400 | So that seems like a deeply human thing, the suicide.

03:32:58.100 | - Yes.

03:32:58.940 | That's a fascinating question in itself.

03:33:02.620 | If you look at the number of suicides per year,

03:33:07.020 | it's a shocking, shocking statistic

03:33:09.060 | that gets almost no recognition.

03:33:11.140 | And yes, uniquely human.

03:33:12.740 | You don't, very, very few animals you see killing themselves

03:33:16.860 | because their whole thing is just survival,

03:33:18.860 | and that humans, paradoxically,

03:33:20.700 | when survival is more or less guaranteed,

03:33:22.620 | are killing themselves in vast numbers.

03:33:24.700 | It's usually linked back to the idea of meaning,

03:33:28.180 | because it's so hard.

03:33:30.540 | It was hard to win the battle for survival,

03:33:34.680 | but it's 10 times harder to win the battle for meaning.

03:33:37.620 | When I think about it, first off,

03:33:45.580 | I'll say right from the bat,

03:33:46.660 | there's never going to be an agreed-upon sense of meaning.

03:33:51.660 | As I said, there was one thing

03:33:55.300 | that our physical bodies agreed upon,

03:33:57.900 | and which is hardwired biologically into us,

03:34:00.660 | and that's survival.

03:34:01.780 | But once we got to a more or less guaranteed survival,

03:34:05.060 | then all bets were off.

03:34:06.060 | At that point, you just have to start

03:34:09.460 | listing your own criteria.

03:34:10.860 | And what one person will describe as a meaningful life,

03:34:13.380 | another person will decry as meaningless or wasted.

03:34:17.580 | There's something terrible about the idea

03:34:24.820 | that we're sitting around, waiting for meaning

03:34:27.500 | to show up on our doorstep.

03:34:29.260 | But what I find the best people do

03:34:31.020 | is they take charge of it,

03:34:32.100 | and they look at their lives in a form of authorship,

03:34:36.940 | where they see their life as a tale to be written,

03:34:41.460 | and they do their best to write that tale

03:34:44.340 | and put as much control over the direction of the story

03:34:48.760 | as they can.

03:34:49.700 | In the end, we all have to just try and write our own story.

03:34:57.140 | We all have our own interests.

03:34:59.060 | I try to bring in the sense that,

03:35:03.900 | even though I'm an atheist,

03:35:05.860 | I don't believe that we go on to live after this.

03:35:10.060 | I believe that there's a possibility

03:35:12.340 | of a God and an afterlife.

03:35:13.900 | I don't say it's impossible,

03:35:15.540 | but in order for me to believe that they exist,

03:35:18.460 | I'd have to see better evidence than I see currently.

03:35:21.260 | Nonetheless, I do believe that there is a great value

03:35:26.860 | in the idea of living for something bigger than yourself.

03:35:31.200 | The moment you see yourself as the be-all

03:35:34.540 | and end-all of your existence,

03:35:36.440 | you're in for a meaningless life,

03:35:38.220 | and nothing will ever satisfy you.

03:35:40.260 | You can have all the money in the world,

03:35:41.620 | you can have all the power in the world,

03:35:42.860 | you'll be empty inside.

03:35:44.180 | I do believe that humans have a deep and abiding need

03:35:49.940 | to follow the interests of a group

03:35:53.940 | bigger than themselves as an individual.

03:35:56.580 | Is it ideal?

03:35:58.480 | No.

03:35:59.320 | Is it an answer to the meaning of life?

03:36:00.940 | Nope, because eventually that group will itself die out.

03:36:03.580 | So there's a sense in which it just plays

03:36:06.660 | a kind of delaying game.

03:36:07.940 | But I do believe that in order to live a happy life,

03:36:15.700 | meaning is a central part of that,

03:36:19.300 | and the deepest sense of meaning,

03:36:21.100 | not a fully complete answer,

03:36:23.860 | but a better answer than most people give

03:36:25.540 | is to find something which hopefully does very little harm

03:36:30.540 | to the people around you and mostly benefits them,

03:36:34.740 | which enables you to become part of a community

03:36:38.460 | and to live, as I said,

03:36:42.020 | for something larger than you as an individual.

03:36:44.880 | If there is such a thing as a perfect conversation,

03:36:50.100 | it would be a conversation on death, meaning, and robots.

03:36:55.100 | With the great John Donahuer, John, I've been a fan.

03:37:00.580 | It's a huge honor that you would waste all your time today.

03:37:04.540 | Thank you so much for talking today.

03:37:05.700 | - My pleasure, thank you, Lex.

03:37:08.020 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

03:37:09.540 | with John Donahuer, and thank you to Onnit,

03:37:12.620 | Simply Safe, Indeed, and Linode.

03:37:15.740 | Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

03:37:19.200 | And now, let me leave you some words

03:37:21.340 | from John Donahuer himself.

03:37:23.540 | In fighting and competition, the objective is victory.

03:37:27.820 | In training, the objective is skill development.

03:37:31.260 | Do not confuse them.

03:37:33.060 | As such, one of the best ways to train

03:37:35.140 | is to identify the strengths of your various partners

03:37:38.580 | and regularly expose yourself to those strengths.

03:37:41.580 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

03:37:45.240 | (upbeat music)

03:37:47.820 | (upbeat music)

03:37:50.400 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

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

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