You talked about moral victory. Can you explain how your morality contributes to the way you see the value of winning? Sure. I think there's absolutely such a thing as a moral victory and sometimes people that are trying to manipulate you or trying to get you to buy something will tell you differently and you know there is there it goes in two directions.

For instance let's say you're a blue belt and you compete against you know a real black belt and there's plenty of people running around black belts that are not particularly at this point but you know let's say for instance you're a blue belt and you compete against a real black belt the likelihood of you winning is almost zero.

However if you go out there and you try hard and you do your best and again whether you come off the mat you know a winner which would be very fortunate and unlikely but or you come off the mat you know on the other side of things if you went after it and you tried and you you know let's say you had some nerves but you kept that in check and you fought hard you didn't let it get the better of you you know that would be in my opinion a moral victory and and there would be nothing wrong for recognizing it as such.

Now that's not the same thing as an actual physical victory but there's nothing wrong with saying let's say your your opponents 260 pounds and you're 120 and you tie they get the decision hey you know I mean remember that happened to me at the quarterfinal or not the quarterfinal rather in the the third round at the absolute in the worlds in 2008 you know and you know it was against a heavyweight or super heavyweight and ended up 0-0 and I wasn't happy about losing by any stretch of the imagination but looking back I'm like okay well you know generally speaking if you end up level considering that I have all of the resources you don't that is you know you definitely performed a little bit better than I did now at the end of the day you know wins and losses do matter and you do want to try to make sure that I'm not shooting for the moral victory I'm shooting for the actual victory but every now and then it's very very important to keep in mind that you know am I just asking myself am I conducting myself in a way that I respect that hopefully other people of value or respect and also a way that I believe is going to produce actual victory and actual positive results in a long run as well I think it's important to recognize that because sometimes you'll see people get very frustrated let's say for instance if I box against people that are much more experienced than me all the time you know I'm not going to win that anyone that tells you differently has is either not training with people that are very good or be they have no idea what they're talking about but what I can say is hey did I do a little bit better today and better doesn't mean that I did I land more punches necessary was I more under control was I more able to kind of keep my keep my focus and execute what I wanted to execute and if the answer to that is yes you know I'm moving in the right direction so as far as I'm concerned there's all sorts of different types of moral victory but it would be the the same thing as you know let's say for instance you know Fedor slaps your mother you got to hit him you have to he's going to kick the shit out of you almost certainly but you have to hit him it would not be it would be a technical like well I didn't get hurt so that's a win if you ran away but that would be the opposite of the moral victory in that case trying your best and losing would still be I would say the honorable thing to do so what you're saying is sometimes you have to pay the price for a moral victory absolutely but the reality is is that martial arts it doesn't just teach us about how to beat someone up or technique or this or that that's really not the core of the martial arts the core of the martial arts is heart discipline dedication focus and if you have those things they'll always be people better than you and they'll always be people lesser than you but that's not the only metric by which you can judge performance or judge a person