#165 – Josh Barnett: Philosophy of Violence, Power, and the Martial Arts

Josh Barnett is an MMA fighter, catch wrestler, and a scholar of violence. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Munk Pack: https://munkpack.com and use code LEX to get 20% off – LMNT: https://drinkLMNT.com/lex to get free sample pack – Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex and use code LEX to get special savings – Rev: https://rev.ai/lex to get 7-day free trial EPISODE LINKS: Josh’s Website: https://www.joshbarnett.com/ Josh’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoshLBarnett Josh’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshlbarnett Josh’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JoshBarnettOfficial Josh’s Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Barnett Josh’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyZmZwQESO8G0BOSHTpZcvg PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LexFridmanPage – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (08:29) – Nietzsche (13:47) – Good and Evil (28:59) – Joe Rogan library (30:57) – Catch wrestling (41:03) – Anarchy (59:32) – Hitler and Stalin (1:16:34) – Karl Gotch (1:24:59) – Mike Tyson (1:33:20) – Violent victory (1:41:29) – Fedor Emelionenko (1:43:50) – Greatest MMA fighters of all time (1:53:47) – Early UFCs (1:58:32) – Advice for young people (2:02:24) – The value of competition (2:05:02) – Blade Runner (2:15:54) – Meaning of life

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Josh Barnett, one of the greatest fighters and submission wrestlers in history, with an epic 25-year career that includes being the UFC heavyweight champion and countless other accolades. He also happens to be one of the most intelligent and brutally honest human beings in all of martial arts, and especially so about his appreciation of and fascination with violence. Quick mention of our sponsors, which feels ridiculous to say after that introduction. Monk Pack Low Carb Snacks, Element Electrolyte Drinks, Eight Sleep Self-C cooling mattress, and Rev transcription and captioning service. Click the sponsor links to get a discount to support this podcast.

• 0:44Lex Fridman?

  As a side note, let me say that I've been a fan of Josh Barnett for a long time. This conversation was indeed a long time coming, and I'm sure we'll talk many times again. For what it's worth, I'm a student of combat sports and admire when they're done at the highest level, either through masterful execution of skill or relentless dominance of pure guts. For context, I'm a black belt in jiu-jitsu and have competed in wrestling, submission grappling, jiu-jitsu, judo, and even catch wrestling, which is a variant of submission grappling that Josh is one of the great practitioners, scholars, and teachers of. I could probably talk for hours about what I've learned from my time on the mat, but if I were to say one thing, it is that the mat is honest.

• 1:28Lex Fridman?

  You can't run away from yourself when you step on the mat. It reveals your fears, the lies you might tell yourself, all the delusions you might have, or at least I had, that there's anything in this world that can be achieved except through blood, sweat, and tears. That honesty, taken to the highest levels, as is the case with Josh, creates the most special of human beings and definitely someone who is fascinating to talk to. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman. As usual, I do a few minutes of ads now, none in the middle. I'll try to make it more fun as time goes on, but if you skip, still check out the links

• 2:12Lex Fridman?

  in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. This episode is brought to you by Monk Pack Keto Granola Bars that contain just one gram of sugar, two grams of net carbs, and they're only 140 calories. I've been on all kinds of diets my whole life. I did, maybe in college, there was like a powerlifting phase where I would eat like four, five, maybe six meals a day. You know, protein and veggies, just small meals. That was like the, what I would call like the bro diet. And then I think when I started training jujitsu, especially hard, I discovered fasting, and that was a game changer. I think I realized that I have to become more and more a scholar of my own body as opposed to sort of consuming the nutrition

• 2:57Lex Fridman?

  science that's out there. So you have to use kind of the basic knowledge of nutrition science that people are talking about, all the different debates. You have to consume that as like a base starting point, but ultimately you have to become a scholar of your own body. And at least for me, throughout that, the number one priority is to not stress too much about it. So anyway, that's to give you a little bit of context of where I'm coming from with all this diet stuff.

• 3:24Lex Fridman?

  Okay, back to whatever I'm supposed to say in this ad read. Get 20% off your first purchase of any Monk Pack product by visiting munkpack.com and entering code, you guessed it, Lex at checkout. If you don't like it, they'll exchange your product or refund your money, guaranteed. That's munkpack.com and enter code Lex.

• 3:44Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by Element, electrolyte drink mix, spelled L M N T. Just like with my last name, they don't have an E in their name. To do low carb diets correctly, the number one thing you have to get right, in my opinion, is electrolytes, specifically sodium, potassium, magnesium. That's where these guys come in. They take care of it. I don't have to think about it. And it's kind of fascinating. So both on the fasting and the keto in general, how much of a difference electrolytes and like sodium, potassium, magnesium can make? You can really feel shitty. That's like the keto flu that they talk about. You feel terrible and almost in a matter of minutes,

• 4:25Lex Fridman?

  if you consume salt with water, you just feel much better. I'm sure other people have this experience, especially if you do like long distance running, that kind of thing. Electrolytes are magic. They can make the difference between sadness and happiness. Okay, Olympians use it, tech people use it. I swear by this stuff. Try it at drink element.com slash Lex. That's drink L M N T dot com slash Lex. This episode is sponsored by A Sleep and it's Pod Pro mattress. It controls temperature with an app. It's packed with sensors and can cool down to as low as 55 degrees on each side of the bed separately. You can also heat up to some ridiculous temperature, but I don't know why you would want to do that.

• 5:10Lex Fridman?

  I gotta be honest about power naps. They have been amazing recently. I've been basically doing this thing where I sleep for like six hours and then do a nap for maybe 30 minutes to an hour. There's no science to it. I just enjoy it like a big warm blanket with a cool bed. That's, that's like the definition of heaven. I also like that whole idea of making the things we rely on smarter and smarter, like a smart bed, which is what this is with a bunch of sensors. It's almost like, taken broadly, it's actually kind of expanding the compute surface of our lives. And so basically everything around us becomes a computer and it integrates. There's of course privacy, surveillance, all those kinds of questions there,

• 5:54Lex Fridman?

  but we can't run away from them. We have to face them. Just because things are difficult, doesn't mean we should like do the ostrich thing and hide from them. It's coming, let's embrace it, but let's be serious adults slash serious engineers about it. Eight Sleep has a PodPro cover, so you can just add it to your mattress without having to buy theirs. But theirs is pretty nice, I gotta tell you. It can track a bunch of metrics like heart rate variability, but the cooling alone is honestly worth the money. Go to eightsleep.com/lex to get special savings. That's eightsleep.com/lex. This show is also brought to you by Rev and rev.ai, which is by many metrics, the best speech-to-text AI engine in the world.

• 6:39Lex Fridman?

  Rev, in general, is a company that does captioning and transcription of audio by humans and by artificial intelligence. I've been hanging out on Clubhouse on occasion recently, and it's kind of interesting to think of this kind of technology being used in all kinds of contexts, like during meetings, for example, like Zoom meetings. But at Clubhouse, to be able to take a conversation, see, this is where like privacy comes into play with consent of the speakers, which of course journalists often ignore this kind of notion of consent and transcribe the conversations so they can be consumed and analyzed and thought about more broadly. One way to deal with cancel culture is to run away from it.

• 7:21Lex Fridman?

  The other way is to run into it and deal with our ridiculousness, with our hypocrisy, with all the mess of human nature. So I'm a big fan of technologies that allow us to go through the fire as opposed to run away from the fire. Rev has processed over 16 billion minutes of audio and video to date. Rev.ai is the API part of Rev that allows you to use speech-to-text programmatically as a service. You can check out how well Rev AI performs in a seven-day free trial at rev.ai/lex. You can tell English is my second language, although I can't speak Russian that well either. I'm hopelessly lost in this problem of human communication. So again, that's rev.ai/lex

• 8:04Lex Fridman?

  to tap into the world's most accurate speech AI. And now here's my conversation with Josh Barnett.

• 8:29Lex Fridman?

  Who were the philosophers and philosophical ideas that influenced you the most?

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Are we just jumping right in?

• 8:35Lex Fridman?

  We're right in.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  No, no, no foreplay on camera. All right. I had an interesting philosophical journey, at least I think it's interesting. And that was, I think, as far as organized philosophy, or maybe authentic, not the right word, but like, yeah, we'll say organized.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  I would say that Nietzsche is probably one of the people with the most influence on me. But I also feel like, to a degree, your personality will oftentimes dictate what philosophers that you can vibe with.

• 9:15Lex Fridman?

  So what ideas from Nietzsche? Was it the Ubermensch?

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Definitely the Ubermensch is huge to me because I see it as an extension of basically the religious concepts of God and higher ideals, but just put into a different secular context. And the idea also that the Ubermensch is striving and overcoming, you know, something that you're always working towards that very few will ever, it's not like the, the concept that you can just make them, it doesn't happen that way. And it's not based simply upon if you were, say, put through a genetic program and turned into a super soldier, like, that wouldn't make it, you know?

• 9:58Speaker 01

  That's like the very surface level and incorrect understanding what the Ubermensch is. The Ubermensch is the idea of this, this kind of human that transcends all the weaker, lower aspects of humans, which we're full of. But I also think that there's an element in Nietzsche's writing that suggests that it's not something you can even be in all the time, like it's even a temporary state because it's not something that we're capable of maintaining.

• 10:28Lex Fridman?

  It's something to strive for, like a morality, an image, ideal, a set of principles that we can connect to that doesn't rely on otherworldly, kind of out there things.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:42Lex Fridman?

  Deeply human.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  With Nietzsche, I feel like the concept of the Ubermensch.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Is something built on authenticity as well. Heidegger was like, design, right? So when you are authentic and Heidegger being a follower of Nietzsche's and highly influenced by him. With, I think that the Ubermensch is an example of authenticity in that it isn't about trying to be anything that you cannot be or to go against who you are. But to actually understand that, accept that, and then work with what you can work with and and and create from your lump of clay that is you. Because I can't become certain, there are certain things that are just not going to happen for me because it's not in my proclivity.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm never going to be, you know, five foot tall and 120 pounds. They mean that again, I guess, but uh, um, but I know, but as you get more in tune with who you are, as you start learning more about what unique things, or at least what that that combination that makes you that Gestalt part of yourself, what those things are and how you can use them. Then, you know, you can work towards being that, taking what that is and seeing if you can get to that point. Now, the likelihood is no, maybe probably never. I mean, but we can never achieve godhood yet. You know, religion is a constant, you know, striving and a look at a higher ideal concept.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Even if it's multiple gods or one god, it's still essentially all built around this concept. Like, I like the idea of Catholic's original sin. If you think of sin not as evil, but as, you know, missing the mark, the archer's term where it derives, or even like in Spanish, you know, without. So as being, if you accept that you are imperfect, if you accept that you you need to constantly strive even against yourself, because you you will figure out the best ways at which to submarine your own capabilities, submarine your own dreams and wishes and whatever, you will ruin them more than anything else. And you will tell yourself that you ruined them on purpose for a good reason. Or you'll say that you'll figure out a way to to put it on everything else but yourself.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  And so the idea of thinking of, well, as I'm starting off on this whole thing, I got a lot of work to do and that's just the way it is. And I got to figure out what areas those are going to be. And so, you know, I thought, oh, yeah, if I think of original sin actually can be, that can be kind of a clever idea, but it's also just accepting that. We're all uniquely strange and unequal in our own ways, but we have to figure out how that fits in.

• 13:25Lex Fridman?

  The word authenticity kind of connects to all of that. So striving to be your authentic self means figuring out exactly the shape of the flaws, the, the, the character of your like little demons that you get to play with and around them, finding a path to whatever the hell ideal versions of yourself you can carve and pretending like that's such a thing as even possible. The other idea about Nietzsche's, uh, and his idea of morality, he presents the argument that, uh, morality is a human illusion and that, uh, you know, there's not such a thing as good and evil. And these are all kind of constructs. Do you think there's such a thing as, uh, good and evil? That's connected to some objective reality?

• 14:07Speaker 01

  I think that there are some, I actually do believe that there are some universals. I'm not Kantian in any way, but I do think that there are some universals. And the thing that actually brought me to even the concept of that was Jung. So, you know, Jung's concept of collective unconsciousness. And then taking that thought and then applying it to looking through his history. And, uh, the most varied history you can find. Uh, so I would say probably religion is your earliest one to that you can get for, for written history or, uh, written examples of human behavior and psychology at its, at, at the furthest that we can look into it.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Uh, with, you know, from man's hand to whatever the medium is, cuneiform or whatever. But as you do that, and then let's say going from Mesopotamia to India to, you know, Europe to, and just going from all these places as disparate as they may seem, as many different cultures and ethnicities and religions and how the religions will, will vary quite a bit from monotheist to, you know, uh, mono, uh, polytheist and so on and so forth. But then just seeing how there's all the through lines and of course Campbell, he did this, uh, much earlier than, than me thinking about it, but, uh, I think that by.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Looking at things that way and starting to find the threads instead of always just looking at everything as being its own compartmentalized concept is if it only applies to this time, this people like getting overly Pomo about it is just a really idiotic postmodern.

• 15:43Lex Fridman?

  So you think that there is, just like Joseph Campbell, there's a thread that connects all of these stories, narratives that we constructed for ourselves as we evolve. And that thread is grounded in some kind of absolute ideas of maybe on the morality side, which is the trickiest one of good and evil.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Somewhat, yeah. I think that a lot of this stuff is just derived from a biological perspective. I feel like these things are innate within us.

• 16:09Lex Fridman?

  Do you think our innately humans are good like we?

• 16:12Speaker 01

  No, I don't. I feel like, I also feel like there's the issue of scale too. Like, like Nassim Taleb likes to talk about how he views his, the way he interacts with, with groups in terms of scale, you know, what is this thing about like at a, at the familiar level, I'm a, I'm a communist. And then at the civic level, I'm a, I'm a Republican or something. And at this other level, I'm, and then it goes on at the whitest level, he's a libertarian or something of that nature, you know?

• 16:42Lex Fridman?

  Like fundamentally, human interaction changes.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  On scale.

• 16:45Lex Fridman?

  On scale.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  And scale and also from, you know, subjective to the environment around them. So, and I don't even mean environment just in the sake of physical environment, nature, right? Like nature is constantly trying to murder you. Well, it's not really trying. It's just nature's being nature. The universe is the universe and at times it takes you out. It's just not with any particular compunction or prejudice. It's just, oops, you know, sorry, there's no more dodos. My bad.

• 17:16Lex Fridman?

  But don't you think the particular flavor of the complexity that is the human mind? Was created like, let me make an argument for that all people are fundamentally good.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 17:28Lex Fridman?

  Is, uh, there's an evolutionary advantage to being, to striving to cooperate, to add more love to the world of like compassion, empathy, all that kind of stuff. And that the very thing that created the human mind was this evolutionary advantage. What are the forces behind this evolutionary advantage?

• 17:50Speaker 01

  And scale? Yes. So when we're dealing with a small tribe, sure.

• 17:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  When you meet another tribe, maybe there's other factors that are going into that. Let's say you scale up and so your 150 has exceeded their 150. And like you start to get to a certain point where, um, you can't really be close enough to someone down the line of some of that next, like that 150 is 150, 150. And they just now all of a sudden become some, some guy, whatever. And when it comes to some guy at, once it starts hitting scale, I don't know that it's capable.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  People can be as, as magnanimous to a stranger as to the known.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  If they orient themselves to be secure enough, because it does come to security insecurity in one way or the other, either brought on by the unknown, brought on by an actual threat, brought on by even their own, as we would use the word insecurity in that their own insecurity within their own capabilities, their own belief in themselves. All these things, um, can change things from being compassionate and what have you to at least at the very least, maybe not evil, but self-interest driven to the point of.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Negative results for those that aren't, you know what I mean?

• 19:17Lex Fridman?

  Right. But another way to frame that is maybe it's less about scale and more about the amount of resources available. So if we're overflowing with resources in terms of

• 19:31Lex Fridman?

  security and safety, all the things you've mentioned. If we have more than enough resources, then the way we treat a stranger, the way we position ourselves towards that stranger might be in a way that allows us to be our real human selves as opposed to sort of our animal self. And therefore, it's mostly about how clever can we, descendants of apes, be in coming up with all cool kinds of technologies and ways to efficiently use the resources we have such that we're not constrained. And my hope is that we can, that human innovation will outpace the growth of our, the number of people that are starving for resources.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Yes, I think that there's a lot of rationality behind this argument and

• 20:23Speaker 01

  in some ways, I agree. And in a lot of ways, I see it as

• 20:29Speaker 01

  missing the point of how this experiment has been playing out across time. When you look at what, for one, it's like define resources. You know, what is a, what is a resource of as humans would define it, right? Or wealth even. And so you can say, well, you know, an iPhone's a resource, the internet's a resource, water obviously is a resource. But if we weigh them, what is more important to human beings? Water, internet, or iPhones? It's water, right? So if we look at resources, if we start with what do human beings need to live?

• 21:10Speaker 01

  I mean, actually live, not live here in this bullshit fantasy creation, extension of our own ingenuity and, you know, a prison of our own creation and also a paradise of our own creation. But this is not how human beings normally live. This is all built upon stuff on

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Built on concept, on idea and some and and some of it's built on just, well, this is the paradigm. So this is what you do. Human beings need food, they need water to survive. They need shelter from the elements and they need certain skills to perpetuate these things and be able to pass them down. So that they can, so that these things don't become, uh, you don't end up in this, this gap where you have to relearn things. Cause if, if it's lost, then that time before you can get it back again, is going to be a dark ages of sorts, you know? Or it's going to be highly detrimental to, to your group because not knowing how to fish, not knowing how to hunt, not knowing how to even

• 22:15Speaker 01

  clean and cook the game once you have it could be lethal.

• 22:20Lex Fridman?

  That's fascinating to think of that as a basic resource, the knowledge to attain the very low level things of water.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Right. And we'll figure it out. We did it once before and we've done it over and over and over and over again.

• 22:31Lex Fridman?

  It's just costly.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Yes, it has costs for sure. But when you think of how you look at the, well, we'll just deal with the first world of the West. You look at the, the, the path line, the pathway of, of Western civilization and its growth. And then you look at how technology injected into it over time, you know, how it magnifies, uh, things or how pushes things at, uh, orders of magnitude faster. And then the internet comes along and even faster, you know? And so you're watching industrial revolution to, what is it? The, uh, the capacitor and then so on. It goes further and further and as the internet and technology, especially on the electronic side of things,

• 23:19Speaker 01

  start increasing in capability, it massively outpaces even our necessity for it at times. It, it becomes, you know, plant obsolescence happens quicker and over and over and over again. And wealth increases, increases, increases, increases in terms of the things that we're able to acquire. Right? I mean, you, I've seen homeless people with smartphones, you know? So we're living in the most wealth laden, luxury laden age of all of humanity yet.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  What happens when we see calamity or people go on hard time? What are they, the things that they value? You know, what, what, what do people go to an argument about the cost of things that are luxury items generally? And not necessity items. You know, we get into fights about, um, you know, things that are, at the end of the day, not necessities to us. You know, people are so concerned about Netflix and, and the internet. And personally, I'm very concerned about the internet because I look at it as my own little personal library of Alexandria in my pocket. That's what I love about it and the ability to have a tool as effective as it is, even though I'm in a constant battle to not let that tool

• 24:34Speaker 01

  become a vice or to become something that, that actually brings me to a lower state.

• 24:41Lex Fridman?

  But are we, the question is over the, are we willing to murder each other over Netflix versus murder each other over water?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  We're willing to murder each other over water. That's a given.

• 24:53Lex Fridman?

  Right, but that's our animalistic selves of that.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Well, it's also a necessity for, it's animalistic, but it's also either you do it or you don't. Right? Like unless somebody's willing to share that water or if that water is of such a limited, uh, capability or such a limited amount, then you will have to murder to have that water.

• 25:13Lex Fridman?

  Netflix, the argument is the higher, we get up to this hierarchy of what we consider in Los Angeles resources.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Yes, we.

• 25:22Lex Fridman?

  We're less willing to be, to commit violence.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  We're less willing to commit violence that, oh, I would say over Netflix, but we are willing to commit violence over Netflix, over everything associated with Netflix, over televisions, over sneakers, over, over, um, you know, I mean, when we look at a good, I mean, the majority of the stuff that came with the riots, I mean, it was used car dealerships, uh, targets. I mean, and then you look and it's like, well, okay, what are people, what do they got, what are they so hell bent to get out of this whole thing? And I'm even talking about the ideological elements or anything like that, just like, okay, something's going on, boom, looting, whatever. We, you know.

• 26:03Lex Fridman?

  There's stuff.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  What, what are you gonna loot?

• 26:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  You know, you'll have AOC say, oh, people needing bread. I didn't see a single loaf of bread, you know, I saw televisions and shoes.

• 26:13Lex Fridman?

  Poetry, Josh.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  You know, but to me it is poetry in a sense because you get to see. Who we, how we actually are operating, you know, what are, where, what is becoming first principles to most people?

• 26:25Lex Fridman?

  But wait, but you could also argue that those riots were more like the madness of crowds, which is like-

• 26:30Speaker 01

  It's definitely a lot more than just that. I'm just saying that given a chance, it's like, okay, boom, the, the lights are off, the grid is down, we've, we've hacked into the whole system. Turned into an eighties movie and you have the ability to go get a hold of whatever it is that you think is most important. And what do we do? And I say we, as in, you know, including all of us, we grab a TV. We, we attack it. We, we, we break into a sneaker store on Melrose. We do, it's just like, ah, we still giant cause statues. Where the value of that is completely market driven. Like it's just a piece of polypropylene or whatever, but and you know, it's cool. I'm a big fan of art, but it's like,

• 27:15Speaker 01

  you know, I can't eat that. And at the end of the day, man, you're sitting there with your, with your, like, what'd you do today, honey? What'd you get? You know, man, we, we were able to, you know, oh, I got this, I got this designer art statue. Are, are you, are you gonna go, well, you can't really sell it on the, on like the art markets where people are really gonna pay for it. So are you gonna become an underground art dealer with your one piece of cause art?

• 27:37Lex Fridman?

  One interesting thing, just before I forget it, you mentioned the Library of Alexandria and your-

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Phone.

• 27:44Lex Fridman?

  Well, your phone, but also just thinking of your little world that you're creating for yourself on the internet. That's a really powerful way to actually phrase it. One of the things that, you've been on Joe Rogan several times.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Although everybody always comes to me, oh, that was so great. I didn't know, you, you're on, you've on Joe Rogan? I go, this is like my fifth time, dude.

• 28:02Lex Fridman?

  I've been a fan of yours for a long time from, from other avenues.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  This is a long time coming, actually. Everybody, you have no idea like how many times through messaging and missing each other over the years. This is ridiculous. This is a long time coming. You don't realize how special this is for us.

• 28:20Lex Fridman?

  This is, well, I'm also starstruck. We'll talk about this, but you symbolize something very important to me through my journey, through wrestling, through jujitsu, through judo, through just street fighting, through just combat. There's a, you're the, in some sense, the devil on my shoulder of like, of violence in a good, in the, in a-

• 28:43Lex Fridman?

  Devil gets a bad rap.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  He does, he does get a bad rap. I realize, you know, sitting encased in ice down at that low ass level, you know.

• 28:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 28:52Lex Fridman?

  But, you know, the angel side is more like the athletic, the sport, the science, the technical, the chess side of things. But on the Library of Alexander, let me ask, because you were on Joe Rogan, it does make me really sad, and I realize that I'm just probably being romantic, that his, most of his library of interviews that were on YouTube have now been taken down because he went to Spotify. And that was the first, I'm probably an idiot, but it was the first time I realized that this knowledge that we've been building up on the internet doesn't necessarily last forever.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  No, it doesn't, unless you preserve it. I mean, it's like all things. If you do not preserve them, if you do not make efforts, you know, so many of my, it just really brings to mind or off the top of my head, all my, so many friends of mine that are Jewish, you know, they're basically secular, but yet through even the secular aspect of just keeping the traditions alive, it's like, well, you could always pick a book and read about it, clearly. It's called the Torah. But if you don't put these things into action, if you don't make them a part of your consciousness, maybe even on the subconsciousness, just

• 30:12Speaker 01

  through repetition, they will die. They will become simply something that exists somewhere until you find it again. And Carl Gottsch used to say something, he would say that I don't invent moves, I just rediscover them. But yet, Gottsch and Billy Robinson also would understand that you, if someone's not carrying the torch, it'll go out. Now, that doesn't mean fire can't be rekindled, it just means that it, that torch no longer is lighting the way on this knowledge. And so it's important to be.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  An individual, even on an individual level, to be a repository for for aspects of knowledge.

• 30:57Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned Gach. You consider yourself a catch wrestler? So I've mentioned to you offline that I competed in a couple of catch wrestling tournaments. Can we go Wikipedia level at the very basic? You're the exactly right person to ask, what is catch wrestling? And what are its defining principles?

• 31:20Speaker 01

  I would say the easiest way for us to talk about and give an overview of what catch is, in the simplest terms, is think of collegiate wrestling with submissions. That is essentially what catch is. And it's not surprising because collegiate wrestling is actually derived from catch as catch can. It's just that over time, certain aspects were were removed from the competition structure. So that they became null elements, things that were discarded. But it's funny that you can take a high level amateur collegiate types,

• 32:02Speaker 01

  and you can show them a move and then add a little bit to it and go, oh, well, hey, that was just like what we already do here. But except, oh, I didn't know you could take it all the way to this point. Or, you know, things of that nature, especially even when it comes to professional wrestling, like teaching people like, no, that that I know you're just using this for in a show, but this is actually a real move and here's how it really feels.

• 32:24Lex Fridman?

  And so collegiate wrestling and wrestling in general, for people who are not aware, is basically two people start on their feet and they have to score. They're trying to take each other down and they have to, they score points along the way. You can end matches by pinning them, for example, on their back. I think one way to describe wrestling is it's very much about figuring out ways to establish control and leverage in these kind of.

• 32:54Lex Fridman?

  Tie ups, or there's different styles where you can do more from a distance to where it's more about the timing and all that kind of stuff. Ultimately, it's an art of like both upper body and lower body and you could choose the different puzzles that you solve there. You could be attacking the head, the arms, you could be attacking the legs. There's also a part of collegiate wrestling that's on the ground that has more, uh, what's called like a referee's position.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Right. The referee's position where you're on, uh, your hands and knees, basically. And so, uh,

• 33:26Lex Fridman?

  Do you, do you understand what that's supposed to simulate? Why is that one of the standard positions?

• 33:30Speaker 01

  It's one of the standard positions because one, it's one of the easiest ways to actually get up. Um, but two, it's because you cannot be on your back. If you're on your back, you're getting pinned and the back exposure or being pinned is pretty much the universal wrestling, uh, thing. One, taking the guy from their feet to the floor, uh, and two, pinning them as you go from like, was it, uh, Cornish wrestling, Turkish oil wrestling, Mongolian, sumo, uh, Indian, um, well, they'll call it Pelwani.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  It's also called Kushdi, um, jujitsu, judo, um, so many of them is like, there's a, is Sambo, even if it doesn't end the match, it's still like one of the most important aspects of the competition itself across.

• 34:25Lex Fridman?

  Also, but

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Every style.

• 34:27Lex Fridman?

  And this is where submission, like catch wrestling or, uh, submission wrestling or jujitsu feels different, which it seems like for most wrestling, for a lot of wrestling, the dominance is the, is the goal, uh, as opposed to submission.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 34:45Lex Fridman?

  Which I, I guess those are two are related, but dominating the position. So that's what pinning is. It's almost like breaking your opponent, like breaking, uh, through all of their defenses to where they're completely defenses and you could do anything with them that you want. Maybe that's a Wikipedia definition of dominance. I don't know.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  And then I mean, it sounds very much like a chain to a radiator.

• 35:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 35:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a thread that connects all of them. But submission feels different.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  I mean, It is actually different when you think about it across the landscape. I don't think radically different, but still slightly different in that if you think of wrestling as being derived from combat, right? So, well, it is combat sports, but more lethal combat. Getting somebody off their feet and onto their back is about as lethal a place for the person on bottom to be in general. I mean, don't come at me with your talks about your fucking worm guards and blah, blah, blah, and whatever spider, bear. Okay, get out of here with that. We're not talking about you in this highly regimented sporting environment. We're talking about general, you know, all the body hair, none of the waxing human beings.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  So getting someone on their back, okay. As you're trying to get up, you're getting hit with a rock or stabbed or what have you, set on fire, who knows? Generally, these conflicts are not just isolated to one on one. If it's four on two, your buddy that was with you back to back, now he's on his back. What do you think? Now it's going to be one on one while three go on one. So, and then you go, you elevate this to armored combat, right? And it's boom, put them on the ground. Oh, crap, it's hard to get up. Well, while you're struggling to get up, stab. You know, that's where jiu jitsu's concepts come from with all their leveraging and off balancing is, oh, man, if I end up in this situation in tight, close quarters combat,

• 36:46Speaker 01

  yes, we could fight it out with swords and knives and what have you, but it's way easier if the first thing I can do is foot sweep you on your back and then pull my knife and just go stick.

• 36:58Lex Fridman?

  Is there a thread that connects all of these different arts from not just arts, but from the very base violence of war, just like you said, that there's no rules, to the very regimented IBA, JF,

• 37:14Speaker 01

  I do.

• 37:14Lex Fridman?

  Jiu Jitsu tournaments and just you've kind of laid out some of it, but can you go all the way to the?

• 37:19Speaker 01

  So when you start off with absolute skills in the sense of absolute offense and defense in the taking or preserving of life, right? Full on at its purest form of self-defense and self-preservation. Okay. And then you extrapolate. Part of that in that all animals train in violence. All play usually degenerates into some sort of soft violence. So be it cats, when they're kittens and puppies and everything learns how to kill, how to fight. Um, not that, you know, just that dumb alpha meme stuff where the idea is that, oh, by being

• 38:04Speaker 01

  alpha, that means you run around like basically just being a bully and a shithead. No, actually, alpha wolves spend very little time fighting because if you were actually alpha, you don't get into fights. There's no need to. Um, and if you're probably getting into any large amount of fights, it's probably because you're being shitty at being an alpha and now people are tired of you being in charge. Um, and, and yet in the animal world, and it would be the same for human beings at that, that, that base beginning level of violence, there's a big risk. So I know that we live in this place with healthcare and where, or you might be in a place with nationalized health, whatever, right?

• 38:46Speaker 01

  There's, there's, there's Band-Aids, there's, there's, uh, uh, penicillin, there's all that kind of stuff. But that's not the normal way of things, you know?

• 38:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a channel that just hurts me every time. I, I used to follow and I had to unfollow it because it was too painful for me as a human being called Nature is Metal.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Ah, yes.

• 39:08Lex Fridman?

  On Instagram. It was, uh, sobering and then it was like, this is too sober.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  It's very sobering.

• 39:15Lex Fridman?

  So in there, the risk is at its highest level. There, the damage you take.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:21Lex Fridman?

  The winner walks away hurt.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Getting lamed and when you need every aspect of your physical and athletic faculties to survive because it, is it going to be the, the, this isn't the first and it's definitely not going to be the last, especially if you're the slowest one. You know, it's a, was it, was it, uh, is a lyric from a clutch song, uh, don't go for the fat ones, just go for the slow ones.

• 39:50Lex Fridman?

  Oh, man, but that the universal truth of the way nature works is you said it's not cruel. It's not cruel is just the way it is.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, watch animals get into fights on on any of these sort of documentary stuff. You'll see an intense, short, and then dispersal. Like, you'll see as soon as one feels like, oh, things have switched just enough to boom, the bear or whatever it is takes off. It's like, I'm not, I'm done with this. Because if you can get out of there with just some scars and what have you, okay. You lose an eye, nah, it's not as good. Uh, you really get hurt bad and get infected, you're done. You know, so it there's a a serious risk to be um that can come with these sort of things. Yet, I believe that we are inherently born for at least aspects of and use of violence.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  And so at the end of the day, we need these things not just to not just survive each other, but they're they're a part of being able to hunt and other things. But uh.

• 40:53Lex Fridman?

  So violence is a part of human nature.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Violence is a is a is like, it's an absolute. It is in every person. It is a part of every interaction. It is a part of every, every law, everything. And I'm not, by the way, not an ANCAP, so don't even, don't, don't hit your wagon to me on that one.

• 41:09Lex Fridman?

  ANCAP is anarchy capitalist.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Anarchist capitalist, yes. Not a, not an ANCAP.

• 41:14Lex Fridman?

  They have nice book, bookshops.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, they do. I mean, I'm not, I'm not gonna, you know, sit here and shit talk ANCAPs. Uh, although I also used to get into the conversations with, uh, with, uh, an ANCOM, uh, anarcho-communist, uh, a good friend of mine, and he would, he would bring up this stuff. And I'm like, yeah, cool, man, I'm down with anarchy. You ain't gonna like it. What do you mean? I go, cuz I'm gonna take, I'm gonna gather all kinds of people. I'm gonna make this, I'm gonna get the strongest together. I'm going to take your shit.

• 41:44Lex Fridman?

  Okay, can I ask you, on that topic, I've, um, a friend of mine now, uh, a fellow Russian, uh, Ukrainian, uh, Michael Malice.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Oh, I, yeah, I'm familiar with Michael Malice. I watched a little bit of your guys' uh, conversation.

• 42:00Lex Fridman?

  So this is really good to ask you because, uh.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  I like how he's in the white suit and you're in the the white and black.

• 42:09Lex Fridman?

  But he, he lives in New York City.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 42:11Lex Fridman?

  He is, uh, espouses ideas of anarchism.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 42:15Lex Fridman?

  And his idea, and this is different than sort of the Ayn Rand set of ideas, that there's a line between sort of capitalism that's backed by the state and just pure anarchism. And his idea that violence won't take over in an anarchism is one that feels to me not grounded in reality. I may be, I may be wrong. So is there some, so the idea with pure capitalism is that?

• 42:47Speaker 01

  You mean laissez faire, completely deregulated?

• 42:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, what it will agree, it'll end up in, one, it'll end up in, if you're anti-globalist, it's gonna be that. It's gonna be globalist 100% because it has no, pure capitalism has no consideration for, has no consideration for your native users or of any sort.

• 43:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, land doesn't matter. But the idea of governments is that the land, the little piece of land, geographically you're born on, means you're going to stick to whatever founding documents created that little land. So anarchism is against that. And the argument is you should be able to choose which ideas you live with. And the concern there is nobody, this geographical little land, the governments that organize on that land will not, do not need to protect you from the violence. And my sense is there does need to be an army, there does need to be police that help, however the form that police takes, but there needs to be a more centralized,

• 43:55Lex Fridman?

  not completely centralized, but more centralized safety net of to protect you from the violence.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Scale again, right? So if you want to have your anarchist utopia, well, we won't call it your anarchist creation here.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  At certain scale, I'm sure it's doable, you know.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  But as it scales, as the scale increases, it's completely untenable. And a state will emerge, a state will always emerge because because even people always think of states as as like people rubbing their hands and smoking cigars in back rooms. And just out of nowhere coming around and just like, oh, we're going to create this big centralized thing and just so we can tell everybody what to do and we can be in charge. I mean, I know that there are people like that that exist that they would like to do things of that nature and that they see the use of power as something to be used more for their their personal gains over first, which again, self-interest and human beings. But

• 45:01Speaker 01

  but eventually a state, people want, they want something to go like, okay, who's taking care of this and who's taking care of that and who and how do we create some sort of some sort of

• 45:14Speaker 01

  protocol for this, like, okay, well, when it's not Bob, when is Suzie, when is it whatever? I mean, like, how do we, you know, it's got to get done if we want this thing to become bigger, if we want our all of our plumbing to to work right, if we want, it's just, I'm sorry, a state's gonna happen. A state is also, when you think about it, is supposed to have consideration to tribe, right? So if people think that we're not tribes, well, you're not, you're not really thinking very deeply. We're all tribes of a sort. And everybody likes to use the word tribalism and this idea of of this antagonistic concept, but and while sure tribalism can be antagonistic, tribalism can also be

• 45:54Speaker 01

  a positive thing, or I could just say it just seems to be a natural thing. People, you know, they create their their groups of one sort or another. And so when you have, well, when you think about where when nation states really started to become a thing, and I don't mean even the more modern looking variants that we could think back of and say the 19th century or something like that. Even older than that. I mean, you think the Assyrians didn't have a state of some sort? Of course they did. They, how do you increase your your your your empire if you don't actually have a place to start from?

• 46:29Lex Fridman?

  To be a ruler. So you're saying like naturally, when you start talking, thinking about scale of humans, naturally states emerge.

• 46:38Lex Fridman?

  And can we try to make an argument for anarchism, which is

• 46:48Lex Fridman?

  so anarchy in a sense is in opposition to the unhelpful, unproductive, inefficient bureaucracies that eventually the states lead to.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Yes, and that's what we can see. I mean, I would say less anarchy, let more study James Burnham, you know, or well, any anybody that wants to talk about the managerial problem and the

• 47:17Lex Fridman?

  I see. So you have a sense, I hope, maybe let's think like, what is the path forward with the inefficient state? Is it revolution? Or is it to work within the system to constantly improve it?

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Man, I don't know that one. I mean, my general sense, and maybe this is the Nietzschean part of me, is that, yeah, it would take, maybe not even just, maybe not even defining it specifically as revolution. Maybe it would just take just total calamity to to get people to stop being shitty, to not stop being a lesser version of themselves, to stop thinking more about things from the paradigm that we exist in now, where we're giving so much value to stuff that isn't really all that valuable, where we're so concerned about likes. And I don't just mean like whether we get them or not, but that, oh, man, maybe we should take this off of our platform because this is too destabilizing to people. And it's

• 48:15Speaker 01

  like, because once you exceed Dunbar's number, I think it's actually, without having the right faculties, which would need to be developed, because this is dealing with, this is dealing with tech that brings things, ways of approaching being that we are not naturally programmed to be able to handle appropriately. So, and I think even even even more, it's even more detrimental to women than men, because I think women have a more natural proclivity

• 48:49Speaker 01

  towards group association and and more group oriented thinking and patterning. And now, and with also coupled with Seemingly more sensitivity towards, towards human states. So I feel like women, like the, the classic idea is like, oh, you know, women are psychic. You know, I have a sixth sense and what have you. And I think that's just a, a way of simplifying what I think is that women may be more in tune with picking up on the unsaid.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Like they might be better at, at, at seeing physical cues, inflection and tone, like different, like they may be far more sensitive of these things, which to me would make sense because dealing with children that can't communicate. So Generally more empathetic in all the full forms. Right now, okay. Now, whether it be a woman or a man, but especially with even the social push on this concept of empathy, which of course it gets to the point where it loses any meaning anymore. Like people use the word empathy absolutely incorrectly all the time and they don't even understand what you're really asking of people. But let's just take it as, as we're using empathy in the correct sense and you're taking

• 50:13Speaker 01

  on the emotional content of the thing itself. Now you open that up to thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands of people all across the world that you will never meet, that you will never know, that you're not even getting an actual true representation most of the time of who these people are. You're, you're meeting persona. And some of these personas are even deliberately created to elicit a response inauthentically. Are you referring to bots or? Could be bots or actual people. Bots are one thing, but I mean, there are literal people out there that will create something, create a GoFundMes for, for tragedies that never didn't really, or events that didn't happen, or any number of things.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Okay. I mean, burn their own house down and then say, you know, we were attacked and then it comes down, oh, you did it to yourself because you wanted money and empathy and this, that. And you wanted all this, this emotional wealth, let's say, this emotional coin as well as actual, if possible, you wanted to leverage it in some way. That's not the majority of people, but I would say a good amount of folks are thinking. Well, if I post this photo and I put this little blurb in there, I bet I can get this much cachet out of it in this sense. And I'm not even, and this isn't just a reference to like butt pics and stuff like that, because clearly, obviously, people understand that

• 51:41Speaker 01

  our inborn sexual nature is easy to manipulate. I mean, that's pretty, pretty obvious.

• 51:47Lex Fridman?

  But you're, you're saying this kind of new medium of communication on social media is, is unnatural.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  And it preys on us. And so as you, you want this, you know, you look at, you look at an anarchist kind of mindset, right? And so you're just like, there's no, there, there is no overarching state to, to create any kind of structure, right? And so if you have that unfettered capitalism aspect with it, and before I say anything particularly damning about unfettered capitalism, I'm a massive capitalist because I view capitalism essentially as, what it boils down to, I get these arguments with people too. They, they start giving me all these extra definitions about capitalism, like, no, no, this is obviously

• 52:36Speaker 01

  some sort of theory you're taking from other shit, but that doesn't describe capitalism. Capitalism is the ability for us to create whatever we want, you know, create our thoughts, ideas, physical things, and trade them freely amongst each other in ways that we find acceptable, right? You know, I'm not even using the word fair, because I might think it's fair to me. You might think, huh, well, I mean, that was actually, I think he, what he thought was unfair to him, and it's more fair to me. And then someone, a third observer goes, oh, man, you should have, you should not have paid that for that. You should have paid this. And it's like, well, you know what? It works for me without.

• 53:14Lex Fridman?

  Sufficiently acceptable that you, you both agreed to the transaction.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Correct. And, you know, but, but also at the, at the root of that is freedom, right? And as far as I can tell, I've been banging this around in my head, it's like, for every one unit of freedom, you need two units of accountability. And if you don't have that, what you end up with is.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  Human self-interest, we're not even gonna get into evil. Human self-interest sabotaging other things, even not in a sense to be malicious.

• 53:49Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so in terms of, let's put this as mathematically speaking, I love this. So anarchism is more like two units of freedom and one unit of accountability, or maybe zero units of accountability.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  Possibly, I mean, the anarchists tend to think like, no, everyone will be accountable. It's like, the fuck they will? When have you seen this happen in real life? You know, I mean, people aren't even accountable in their revolutions at the time. So you aren't looking at the way people really are. It's like Marx is like, yeah, the people are like this, they're like that, look at how capitalism does it. I mean, he of course assigns a lot of really ridiculous economic principles and practice, but and also assumes that everybody, you know, who makes any profit from anything is somehow stealing it and, you know, really assigns a negative moral aspect to them. And then it's like, oh yeah, but then eventually communism will happen to everyone, no one will act that way anymore. And you're like, whoa, hold on, you just said that people are all, are you saying it's all

• 54:46Speaker 01

  due to capitalism? Or it's, is it innate? It's just, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of, and it's like, hey, look at you, you're like a notorious, like antisemitic, angry, like, just absolute curmudgeon of a human being who seems to be really not all that fun to be around.

• 55:09Lex Fridman?

  Marx?

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then it's just like.

• 55:11Lex Fridman?

  So you have to think like, if there was one billion Marxists in the world, how would they behave?

• 55:16Speaker 01

  It would be absolute, they would hate each other so bad. And, you know, this isn't for me to even poison the well on Marx is like, oh, his personality sucks. There's lots of people whose personality sucks. That doesn't mean they can't make, I don't know that it's. What?

• 55:32Lex Fridman?

  You know what? Somebody argued-

• 55:33Speaker 01

  He's just a, he's a loner. I mean, I don't know if his personality sucked at all.

• 55:37Lex Fridman?

  Let me walk that back and that he was human. Say his personality sucked. He was sometimes contradictory,

• 55:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:44Lex Fridman?

  irrational. Sometimes he was quite sexist despite the emails I've gotten that, that,

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Despite the emails I've gotten.

• 55:55Lex Fridman?

  That told me that, that there's, there's people who's written to me that Nietzsche has been unfairly labeled a sexist in his discussion about women. I'm pretty sure there's a bunch of documents where he's just like,

• 56:11Lex Fridman?

  he's just a bitter guy.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  I, I will agree with you and Marx is as bitter as they come to, but you know what? Bitterness in and of itself doesn't make like, why, I, I hate Marxism comes from, you know, the, the whole, the entirety of the thing. And but-

• 56:30Lex Fridman?

  The dismissal of human nature.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  But, but I'm not going to say that Marxism or practical man, you can find any forbidden book and it could have something good in it.

• 56:42Lex Fridman?

  As Colonel's a good idea.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. And like, at the end of the day, you know, Marx is a human being.

• 56:48Lex Fridman?

  He's got a nice beard.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  He does. He had a hell of a beard. A decent portrait. I mean, he looks like the kind of guy like, I wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley, but thankfully I don't think he was much of a fighter.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  But in any case, I mean, not the anarchists are, are, they're more hot for like Max Sterner. People like to think that Nietzsche borrowed a lot from Sterner and my argument is, one, you don't have any real evidence for that. And two, bullshit. You know, I mean, anybody could, I, the fact that they have some overlapping thoughts doesn't make it lifted. Not to mention, go read a lot more philosophy and see how there's so many different things. Oh, this guy said it in 1722. Well, and then this guy says it again in 1922. Does that mean he read the other guy's stuff? Not necessarily. I mean, he's working from the same type of human

• 57:43Speaker 01

  physiological construct as anybody else. Like, of course it's possible that this guy could think the same thing. We, we think a lot of the same things, to be perfectly honest. I mean, Reading the Hagakure, going back to philosophy books, this was really impactful on me as a younger adult, because here's a book written in the 19th century about someone who lived through the 19th and 18th century at times, as a samurai, now a monk. And his objections to society at the time, the same objections one was having to society as I was reading it, like the same human behaviors, the same impetus for action that he found

• 58:24Speaker 01

  a problem, like, well, that's the same, that's the same shit now. Like, we're not, and this was the thing, and then I'm reading more religion, I go, oh, we're no different than anyone who wrote the Torah or older. We are the same thing with the same problems, with the same psychological issues, the same human behaviors, like, these things are not different.

• 58:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  And we haven't changed.

• 58:48Lex Fridman?

  Growing set of tools, though, to, to kill each other with, or to communicate together and all that kind of stuff, but underlying it, there's a human nature. Well, we're also trying to understand that human nature. I think we've, just like you said, learning how to fish, acquired more and more knowledge about that human nature. But it's been a very slow journey, slower than people realize.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:08Lex Fridman?

  In terms of understanding, uh, human nature. Let me ask, in terms of egoism, I'd be curious,

• 59:16Lex Fridman?

  uh, to get your sense about Ayn Rand and, um, her whole idea of virtue of like selfishness.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 59:23Lex Fridman?

  And her, because you mentioned that everybody has a kernel of truth. There, there's potential for a kernel of truth to be discovered in, in anything. For example, I've been recently reading Mein Kampf.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  Uh, you know what? That's the thing. Even, there's something in, there's probably things in Mein Kampf that are not the surface level read. If you get all hung up on, on all, probably all his crap about, uh, you know, his anger, anger at Jews and this and that, all this crap. It's like, okay, yeah, that, that's right on the surface.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  Try to get below that. Try to see, you know, how is he, how is he creating the Jews as a cope somehow? Like, how is he using, why, why are they his, his scapegoat? And I mean scapegoat in the, so Renny Gerard's concept of the scapegoat. I mean, in that sense, whereas Hitler uses, wants to make the, the Jews, the scapegoat for World War One.

• 1:00:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, for me, the starting point, similar with Ayn Rand, is like, Manconf is not a good place to search. Not just because Hitler is evil, but it's just not full of ideas.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  No, it is not. It has its significance due to a lot of.

• 1:00:38Lex Fridman?

  Historically speaking.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  But.

• 1:00:40Lex Fridman?

  The starting point for me with Hitler is like, to acknowledge that he is human. And to at least consider the possibility that any one of us could have been Hitler. So like, not.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  That's a Peterson kind of concept. Also, Jonathan Haidt has a thing about the difference between hate and disgust mechanisms and things like that. And so he used, he goes into the, looking at Hitler and his, through his, his diary entries and journals and stuff like that to look and see it more as the, the disgust mechanism, then also try and see like, if there's any evolutionary biological attachment to this, whatever. I mean, you're right, he is a human being. Any of us are, we're all human beings. It's not that.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  It's probably jarring for people to think, but we're, we're all, I guess, supposed, potentially capable of just being in, and all these evil people in the world think they're doing it for the sake of good.

• 1:01:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Which makes them the most dangerous.

• 1:01:45Lex Fridman?

  And there's some, there's differences in levels of insane. I think Hitler was way more insane than Stalin. I think Stalin legitimately thought he was being, doing good.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  I would say that's probably true. Stalin was just outright brutal. He had, he had his five year plan. He had all those other things.

• 1:02:06Lex Fridman?

  He's just had a much lower value for human life.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:02:09Lex Fridman?

  And so he was willing to take, make decisions about what he actually, as a, as a good executive, which he was of managing different bureaucracies and so on. He was willing to make decisions that resulted in mass human suffering. Where Hitler was, it seems like to me, what much moodier. So allowed emotions and moves to make decisions.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  We also have to consider the different trajectories and how, where and when they were making their decisions. And I mean, not by time specifically, but you know, Hitler engaged into this, this conflict across multiple continents. And then that, everything that comes with basically fighting the whole world.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  Stalin had his conflict and then he really mostly compartmentalized the rest of it. So he was dealing with his own internal instead of dealing with the internal and the external. So if Stalin was put under a world war scenario, I don't know, maybe he would have eventually lost his marbles too.

• 1:03:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I'm not, I'm not sure that you, that's, you're right there. The hunger for power was more internalized for Stalin. He wanted to control the land that already existed as opposed to wanting to colonize other land.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  He was as nationalistic as Hitler, but, and was as capable and willing for violent conflict as Hitler. For the aims of the state.

• 1:03:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  But he, he, he centered and internalized prior to then externalizing and moving outwards. Whereas even maybe prior to him, there was an interest to continually push communism in an aggressive sense. Following on the momentum from the, the what 1918 revolution and that.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  The halting of that through various aspects, I guess, in Germany, part of that was the National Socialist, like they, they came up and then they, they were the other ones to fight the communists. And so you had the two totalitarians going after it. But then in the rest of the world that was not dealing with totalitarian aspects, it was just, it wasn't gonna stick, especially in the West and other places. But Stalin, just, you know, casually thinking, it seemed like Stalin decided to go, all right, well, we're not gonna go just start launching right into more conflicts here. We're gonna, these dudes are going down. So that's cool for us because they hate us and we hate them. But now we're

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  gonna, we're gonna focus internally and then we're gonna work on growing at a slower rate and picking our battles a bit more specifically. And of course, there's, you know, you can get to the, even this is after Stalin, but you got the Besmanov type stuff, talking about subversion in, in cultural aspects.

• 1:05:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, there's, there's fascinating dynamics to propaganda throughout the whole period that that's.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a whole nother kernel. Yeah.

• 1:05:09Lex Fridman?

  Do you think Hitler could have been stopped? One of the things is kind of fascinating to look at is how many nations, both journalists and nations wanted, almost craved to take Hitler at his word that he wanted peace until it was too late. They almost wanted to be, delude themselves. I mean, the same is true with Stalin. People wanted to take Stalin at his word for.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  They still delude themselves.

• 1:05:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  We will delude, we, we will delude ourselves over any number of things. And until even after the fact where the history just says, hey, fuckface, you know, you, you cannot supplement your pseudo reality onto actual reality here. But yet, we deal with people in pseudo realities constantly. I mean, we will always find a way to, to change reality to suit our needs.

• 1:06:02Lex Fridman?

  Well, the nature of truth now, there's now multiple actual truth. It's kind of fascinating. There's multiples. Versions of history that people are telling, you know, the version, the version of the the Great Patriotic War in Russia, the World War II in Russia is very different today under Putin than the version that we're learning on the, in the United States and then different than the version in Europe. In the United States, the hero of the war is the United States. In Europe, there's a much more sad and solemn story of suffering and so on.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:06:35Lex Fridman?

  And in Russia, it's the Great Patriotic War.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was, it was a unifier of a sense and it, I mean, yeah, I mean, you can't argue that war and conflict that and or I just even reducing that to stressors, agitation, suffering, doesn't create human motivation. You know, we started this off, you brought up Frankel. I'm like, yeah, Frankel's dope. Man's search for meaning. Maslow's great. And, and I talked to you about how I started to think like, man, do the ability for human beings to, to, to live and or potentially flourish in the worst environments you can

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  think of is pretty incredible in and of itself. And that it's a crazy thought to think that without Frankel and Maslow ending up in concentration camps, do they write some of the most important books on philosophy in the 20th century? And that's insane on a lot of different levels, but.

• 1:07:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Suffering is a creative force. I mean, I don't, do you think we'll always have war?

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Yes, we will always have war in some form or another. We, we need quote unquote, air quotes, for those just listening, war to survive. We need war to flourish. We need at least.

• 1:08:00Lex Fridman?

  Can you explain the quote, the air quotes around war?

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  Well, because, uh, take.

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  Take, take, take.

• 1:08:07Lex Fridman?

  You see wars as violence?

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  No, wars are not violence.

• 1:08:09Lex Fridman?

  So like, so when we're talking.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Air quotes because while you know what us getting on the mat or just getting on these hardwood floors and wrestling around.

• 1:08:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  Is not literal war. It's war of a sorts, you know, work, you know, it is, it is a diluted form of war. American football is a diluted form of war. All this, these are diluted forms of war. Tennis is a diluted form of war. And I think the, one of the best explanations I ever got from this, and another person very impactful on my life and outlook and thinking about things Cormac McCarthy. And so in Blood Meridian, there's this fantastic speech about war given by the judge, which there's a ton of fantastic speeches on things given by the judge. Yeah. All that exists in creation without my knowledge does so without my consent. Okay. That's pretty heavy. That's, that's hard.

• 1:09:00Lex Fridman?

  Can you break that up? Can you say that again?

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Uh, all things that exist in creation, all things that exist without my knowledge do so without my consent.

• 1:09:11Lex Fridman?

  What, what does that mean to?

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  Well, I think from the judge's perspective, it's like, well, I didn't consent to, to that bird or that dog or this building or all this, like all of this, you know, I didn't create it. So it's done so without my consent. And if it's up to my consent, well, I'll design it how I want to. Another similar look into how the judges in that book is he would study everything, everywhere he went. And so he's collected this group of ne'er do wells from all over to go on these hunts against certain tribes in, in the Southwest and getting paid by the US government, the Mexican government.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  So he's on these Indian hunts and yet they're going to all these different places and.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  They would stay the night in a cave somewhere and he would find cave paintings. He would write them all down or he would find old pieces. There's an example of him, the narrator, explaining how watching the judge and how he drawing everything. He's got this notebook just full of things, drawings and writings. And how he found like a piece of armor from a conquistador or something way back in the day, a Spanish armor. He draws it into his, his book and then crushes it.

• 1:10:31Lex Fridman?

  And so that, so the reason we always have war in the societies is because there's these struggle of amongst people that want to be the designers.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  There's, there's that, but it's, I'm just saying that he's got this whole quote on war, like war is about, is, is play. War is a game and the difference is, is that what's at stake? So all things are a game of some sort and some, you're putting up for it or you're, what you're willing to put up for it determines whether or not you're going to participate or not. And, you know, all, all aspects of any game is war. And it's just, what, what does it stake? You know, if it's your life, it's a different story. If it's just a coin, it's another thing.

• 1:11:14Lex Fridman?

  A nice way to put it is humans play a game in this kind of pursuit of creating what, whatever the hell the reason is that we keep creating cooler and cooler things.

• 1:11:28Lex Fridman?

  That, that it seems to be the result of a game that we naturally play, we naturally crave. I don't know. I mean, that's been the struggle of philosophy is to understand what is the underlying force of all that? Is it the will to power?

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  I think will to power is a really great way of, of describing it.

• 1:11:45Lex Fridman?

  Do you want to be the winner of the game?

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  No, not just, no, I don't look at will to power as being the winner of the game. Well, I mean, if we're going to get philosophical, yes, you want to be the winner of the game. What does winning the game define how you win? Everybody's going to define that win differently. You know, you could define the win in the most base level, like, oh, I got all the things.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  Well, if you got all those things without the, the needing component of fulfillment, then you're going to be a very unhappy person with a whole lot of things.

• 1:12:13Lex Fridman?

  But there's a self referential aspect to where to me, the winner of the game is defined by the people playing the game. So if I'm playing a game.

• 1:12:24Lex Fridman?

  I want to win in the sense that most of the other people who are playing the game will say, yeah, that guy won by their, by our collective definition of win. If I just come up, listen, I'm sort of, if I come up with my.

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  That's a lot of, that's a lot of weight on the external on you.

• 1:12:39Lex Fridman?

  Right, but that's, that's how games seem to work.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  Somewhat.

• 1:12:44Lex Fridman?

  So I'm already a winner in my life by defining my own definition of success. I'm, I'm, I'm basically the best person in the world at doing, uh, uh, me.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  At being Lex.

• 1:12:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So like, and now I'm really happy with that. That's, that's a source of, uh.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, think about, games are also iterated, right? So you, you start off with your game.

• 1:13:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  And then your game with your immediates and then the game further than that, the game further than that. And then the game today and the game tomorrow and the game next week. And so it never ends. And if you try to keep thinking about it that way, no wonder people go crazy. But we, we don't want to think about things that way. We don't want to think about, uh, being towards death. We don't want to think about, um, whether or not I'm going anywhere after this, other than in the ground or what have you, like, we, you know.

• 1:13:31Lex Fridman?

  Well, all of these games are a sense of some distraction. This is where we brought up.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  Kind of, but I mean, it's, it's violence is that, um, we need to let this out. And so it, it is of our, kids need to wrestle and play, just like animals need to wrestle and play. We need to have forms of competition. We need to have ways to, to test ourselves, to create, uh, when, uh, what is it? Uh, when at peace, a man of war makes war with himself. And so we need to be able to competently go at war with ourselves and go at war with our neighbor and go at war with our neighbor's neighbor in a way that is repeatable at the very least.

• 1:14:10Lex Fridman?

  So one, one way of saying that there will always be war. I mean, that's my hopeful view is that most of the war conducted in the future will be, like you said, the man must go to war with himself.

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  That would be great.

• 1:14:23Lex Fridman?

  That, that's, that's what to me, love is, is like focusing on yourself and your own improvement, on your own creativity and towards others feeling, uh, sort of emphasizing cooperative behavior and compassion and.

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  Would be great.

• 1:14:40Lex Fridman?

  Empathy.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  It would be great, but I mean, you can have, well, I'll put it to you this way. If you have.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  A whole community of Randians and a whole community of AnComs. And they could all like, I don't know, Toast of London on Netflix. And they love Netflix and they love the internet and they love picking apart Moncomp with you. They love like, they like all these things, even the esoteric that they can, they can, they can get on with. But at the, at the fundamental root, they cannot help but go to war because they are literally oil and water.

• 1:15:22Lex Fridman?

  No, but see, but they would, the very labels they assign to themselves would need to dissipate.

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  Well, true. Well, then you would have to stop being whatever it is that you took on as your ideological or religious point, right?

• 1:15:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, I, there's some days I'm a AnCom, some days I'm an NCAP since, whatever the, an arch, an arch capital. I mean, there's, it depends on the, the hour, the minute of the day, you constantly changing moods and embracing that flow, the change of opinions, of ideas. As there's some days like, I'm actually cognizant of the fact, because I've been not getting my sleep. And after I get some sleep, I see, I'm so much more optimistic about the world. The less and less sleep I get, the more sad and cynical I get.

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  I can see that.

• 1:16:11Lex Fridman?

  Up and down.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  I, I don't even let my, well, okay, I try not to let, and most days it's never a problem. Any sort of like, what are the kids call it now, blackpilled way of thinking?

• 1:16:24Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  Be my, my, my over, my, the umbrella which I hang under.

• 1:16:29Lex Fridman?

  So we actually, to drag us back, can we talk about Carl Gotch and catch wrestling?

• 1:16:38Lex Fridman?

  Cause I do want to make sure I, I touch it. I mean, what, uh, who were?

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  Carl Gotch is, uh.

• 1:16:44Lex Fridman?

  Is he the greatest catch wrestler?

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  I don't know if he was the greatest catch wrestler ever. I don't, I don't, I mean, he's one of them for a myriad of, Carl Gotch. Billy Robinson, Gachan Robinson's trainer, Billy Riley.

• 1:17:02Lex Fridman?

  So who are these figures and what do they bring?

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  Mitsu Maeda, he's one of the greatest catch wrestlers ever because he's responsible for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

• 1:17:09Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  Along with Gustavo Gracie.

• 1:17:10Lex Fridman?

  Okay, there's so much of things I'd like to say here, but one of the things that catch wrestling seemed to espouse as a principle is that of violence. I just, the tournaments I competed at, the unfortunate thing, and we'll probably hopefully talk about it a little bit. They weren't disorganized and the level of competition was pretty low.

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:17:32Lex Fridman?

  People really sucked.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  Pretty typical.

• 1:17:35Lex Fridman?

  Is that typical? Okay.

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  Well, it's, I mean, think about local, run of the mill.

• 1:17:41Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  Jiu Jitsu tournament versus IBJJF created, you know, a vast difference. So.

• 1:17:46Lex Fridman?

  So I, you know, but there is a, to me as a human being, that like intellectually, philosophically, it was more interesting to go to catch wrestling tournament. It seemed more real and honest because of the way they communicated about violence and aggression.

• 1:18:03Speaker 01

  It is, it is often more honest. I think that.

• 1:18:06Lex Fridman?

  Who is that from? Does that originate from Gachan Robinson?

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  Well, it originates from all wrestling in that even Wade Chalice, not a, not a classically considered catch wrestler. Yet the reason why he has the world record for most amount of world champions pinned or the record for pins in the NCAA is because, well, of course, the idea is to put you on your back and pin you, but you're, there's no way you're going to let me do that. So how do I make it so that you want me to pin you? Well, it's by you put him in excruciating pain.

• 1:18:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  So at the end of the day, you're both there, you both want to win. Neither one wants to allow anything to the other.

• 1:18:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  So how do I, how do I get you to lose to me? I make it so unbearable for you that you decide losing is better than staying.

• 1:19:02Lex Fridman?

  So those are two, those two are so fascinating because so coming from Russia, I don't know if that's where I got it or if it's just my own predisposition. Is I always loved the. There's two ways to get you to want to pin yourself.

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:17Lex Fridman?

  One is to making it so painful not to pin yourself that you pin yourself or whatever. And the other is it's sort of like Bruce Lee, water flows. Make it so easy to pin yourself.

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:19:29Lex Fridman?

  So it's technique. It's like the elegance, the ease of movement. This is the Satya Brothers, uh, Vasya Satya, uh, like the, just the elegance, the efficiency.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  They're practically ballet watching those guys. You know, it's incredible. Satya Brothers are massive and, uh,

• 1:19:46Lex Fridman?

  So those are the two paths, right?

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  I'll also caveat a little bit that like, uh, if you're, if you're approaching this from a, a Russian perspective, Russians are quite truthful about things, uh, especially when it comes to something like combat. They just, this is how it is.

• 1:20:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  This is how it's going to be.

• 1:20:04Lex Fridman?

  It's honest.

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  Yes. And honesty is what I really like about, uh, catch wrestling because I find that we, given any opportunity for us to be dishonest for any number of reasons, we're gonna, especially if it's a dishonesty towards a positive, right? Like, oh, well, you know, it's all technique and it's all this and it's the gentle art and blah. Bro, I have rolled with ADCC world champions, you know, some of the best you have ever heard of. There ain't a lot of gentleness when it comes to like, oh yeah, they wanted to sweep you and you said no. And then you did said no again.

• 1:20:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  And then you said no and attacked their leg.

• 1:20:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  It ceases to be all that gentle because at the end of the day, these dudes are strong as hell. They're flexible. They're all, I mean, they're, they're, the difference between the athleticism and, and the, the ability to actually win is a pretty wide gap. The athleticism shows up, but then there's all that other extra. And part of that is meanness and, and pain and, uh, getting what you need out of it.

• 1:21:07Lex Fridman?

  But see, there is a philosophical difference in the way it's thought because.

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  I think some of it is just they just in denial like, oh, people will, they like to, people like to espouse a lot of things as theory. And then it's like, okay, let me watch.

• 1:21:21Lex Fridman?

  When they're

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  Oh, you're not doing anything about what you said right now. In fact, you're doing the opposite. You're you're literally hurting that guy because you your shit ain't working in the way that you'd like it to. So you're having to use strength. You're having to, it's one of my favorites like, oh, you're using too much strength. And it's like, well, hold on. Do we want people not to use strength at this point to understand more of mechanics? Or are you trying to tell people if they use strength at all, uh, that they're somehow bad at what they do? Cause you know, it's not my fault. You're not stronger than me.

• 1:21:51Lex Fridman?

  See, I'm speaking of something else that's, uh, that's

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  Well, I tend to think what it comes down to is like, strength is fine until you beat me with it. Then it sucks.

• 1:22:00Lex Fridman?

  But okay, so strength is another thing. I'm speaking, I'm thinking about more like anger.

• 1:22:06Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 1:22:08Lex Fridman?

  So like

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  A lot of angry guys in jujitsu. I know that.

• 1:22:11Lex Fridman?

  Really?

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:22:12Lex Fridman?

  Okay, okay. Well, but let's talk about, let's talk about

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  They're only human.

• 1:22:15Lex Fridman?

  The highest level of competitions. There's a book called Wrestling Tough.

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:19Lex Fridman?

  It's a really good book. There's, I've, I've encountered in my life, a few, uh, especially in wrestling, people who really tried to find a way to use anger, to get really angry at their opponent. Not like stupid anger, but just like

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  Intense, pointed, uh, anger, uh, distilled into something, uh, that you can use.

• 1:22:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:42Speaker 01

  Fuel.

• 1:22:42Lex Fridman?

  And like, I remember this story. I don't know where I read it. It might be wrestling tough, where a person was imagining that their opponent just raped their mother, raped their girlfriend or something like that to, to create this like method acting thing in their head to be like, to, to snap them out of this polite interaction of usual like athletic convention and like

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  You know, that's a design of necessity. So my anecdote for this was I was sitting with, uh, backstage before a fight, not my fight. And I'm, I'm working with this guy and this dude is, this is a, this is a world champion guy, uh, and he competed at the highest levels. Uh, and he, he looks at me and he goes,

• 1:23:30Speaker 01

  You know, do you ever get nervous before fights? I looked at him and I went, no, I don't. And he just looks at me, he's like, fuck, man, I'm so nervous. You know, how do you do it, man? You know, I wish I could be like you. And I said, you know what? That doesn't mean that what I'm doing is better. It's just what is necessary for me. It's the way I am. And I told him, so this anecdote goes into another anecdote. This is a Family Guy episode, I guess.

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  Where some, another famous, high level guy told me about this experience with a world champion boxer in Japan. And this guy would get insanely nervous and worked up and anxious before his matches. And he hated it and hated it and hated it. And so he wanted to get rid of that feeling. So he went to a hypnotist for a bunch of sessions and managed to, and he goes in and next fight, he's cool as a cucumber and doesn't perform and loses. And so what I said, going back to anecdote one, was, you know, whatever is necessary for you to get yourself in the best state of being right now to compete, whatever that may be.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  It could be absolute stress and fear. It could be anger, it could be calmness, it could be whatever. But there is a, but there is a, a, there's a state at which you need to be in to do your best.

• 1:24:56Lex Fridman?

  And you as the individual, you have to find that. Can you comment on Tyson, Mike Tyson?

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that thing?

• 1:25:04Lex Fridman?

  So first, so he, there's two things I want to know. So he's a, in terms of fear, there's a clip there, I think from a documentary where he talks about, he is like fully afraid as he walks up to the ring. And as he gets closer and closer and closer, he gets more confident until he gets in. And then he's a god or something like that. That coupled with his statement on Joe Rogan, that he gets aroused at the possibility of true, like of hurting somebody in the ring. So like, he gets aroused at the violence.

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:38Lex Fridman?

  I like it because it's coupled to your basically statement that we need to own, to find our own unique way of. Existing at our top level of performance and that perhaps is Mike Tyson. But do you think there's something more deeply universal to the Mike Tyson speaking to the fact that he's aroused at the possibility of violence?

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do, actually, although I don't think that it always equates to arousal for people. In fact, I would say in general, it doesn't.

• 1:26:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  Uh, I can say I've never had a boner in the ring. In fact, if anything, you know, old combat cock is like, we're not hanging around. We're leaving, we're going up.

• 1:26:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  We're taking off. We don't want anything to do with this.

• 1:26:17Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:26:17Speaker 01

  You have fun, come back to us when you have something warmer, softer, smells better.

• 1:26:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  But, um, the power, the feeling of aliveness, yeah, I could see it. It being, you know, back to the, even the concept of the Uber mensch. I feel like the states, the highest states of being I've ever been in were in the midst of conflict. I felt like that was the time, those are the, those are the moments in my life where I felt like I was at the highest level of, of being as a human in existence. But yet even being in that state was not, it was not something that you could interact with. People that weren't in that state with you, like they wouldn't get it. You would almost seem, and to be that way all the time, either A might drive you mad or B is you're not, you're something that's untenable to the rest of society. Like you can't function with everybody else.

• 1:27:07Speaker 01

  It will not work.

• 1:27:09Lex Fridman?

  It's just like you said with the Uber mensch, just like it's perhaps that ideal is not something you can hold for long. That's the very nature of it is.

• 1:27:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, there was an example in Les Spoke Zarathustra about a snake being down the person's throat and biting it and then having this maniacal laughter erupting. And, you know, to me it was, at least I read it as, yeah, okay, there's this insane moment that isn't forever, but that it is life and death and it is, and, and the overcoming it is the thing that all of a sudden gives you that tapping into the, your, your highest state. Right? This is, you know, man is a chasm, a tightrope between, uh, man and Uber mensch.

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  Well, I don't want to leave your thought about, uh, we'll, we'll, we'll call those things flourishes to, to the aspect of Tyson's interpretation or his, his, his expression of his feelings in combat. And so I gave this anecdote to the guy and I just, you know, at my first anecdote to that athlete I was working with. And I said, you know, this isn't, there isn't a superior way in this sense. There is the way that works for you. That may be something you can implement to other people if you find that person. Cause we all have different personalities and to me that's a, that is, that's an absolute. I don't want to, nobody, don't come at me with all your other fucking social sciences crap.

• 1:28:38Speaker 01

  No, we have distinct personalities, that, that personality, that, that, who you really are. And this, you know, again, Heidegger, Dasein, like being authentic. If you're, if you're authentic with who you are, goods and bads, you will know how to create what that is. And for me, violence and fighting and conflict was something that always felt normal to me. And I don't mean normal in like, I grew up in a war zone or abusive household or something like that. I just meant that, and I was a kid who was very joyful and inquisitive.

• 1:29:13Speaker 01

  And spent a lot of time around older people of all things. And also, while I don't think I have much capability towards engineering, my mom said that one of the first things as like a little baby, when she put me in my sister's old crib, instead of my sister who just milled about and was fine with it all. The first thing I did was I completely deconstructed it. I didn't break it. I figured out how to pull it apart.

• 1:29:36Lex Fridman?

  Curiosity about the world, and yet that wasn't in conflict with the idea of violence?

• 1:29:40Speaker 01

  No, not at all. And so being a very joyful and nice kid, but you know, kids are kids and, and if, if kids can find that you respond maybe more easily to agitation, they will agitate you. And if you should stand out in some way by being taller or bigger or something, or caring especially, they will agitate you. They don't really fully understand it either. And so I don't, I don't hold anything against like any of the kids that used to pick on me or whatever, especially at the youngest ages. Like, man, they don't know shit either. So.

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  But once that line was pushed, for me, it was, oh, well, I was, I was being cool. Now you're being uncool. Yeah. Well, then that gives me license for everything. And so boom, we would just go at it. Or kids that would try to initiate a fight. Okay. And being in that moment of just going, going to town with someone else, it just felt like this is. I, I belong here. Yeah, it was, it was never a problem for me. Like the, in fact, if anything, the over, what I had to understand was, well, not only did I learn the hard way that it doesn't matter. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what anybody else does.

• 1:30:58Speaker 01

  If your response in violence, even to their violence, if you're the winner, is often going to be penalized severely. You know, society, state apparatus, they don't want any of that. They want to be the only arbiter of violence in the world, always. But I learned a very difficult lesson with that, and it was really impactful in a negative way on me. But also I had to learn on an individual sense to, you need to manage violence too. Because, hey, if someone attacks you or starts a fight with you and you go at it, okay, beating them up is one thing, you know, you know, trying to grab a handful of broken glass

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  from the street and throw it in their face, maybe that's a bit much at seven. So you need to learn what, what level is necessary and you need to learn what comes with, with all, what's the responsibility of, of when you enact violence? I mean, you take on something when you, you have a responsibility for that. This is the extension of your actions. Um, so, uh, but as I got older and especially as I found sports and then combat sports, now this was a place for me to flourish. And to the point where I was more myself in that space than I was outside of it until time enough where I could learn to, to get this back together again.

• 1:32:28Speaker 01

  And I never say that I. That I'll merge the two or anything like that. No, all what happened, my, my, um, um, my journey from adolescence on to, uh, to manhood, a huge portion of it, besides the normal finding yourself, whatever, whatever. Actually, what it was, it was re getting back to who I always was.

• 1:32:55Lex Fridman?

  That curious kid, the kind kid.

• 1:32:57Speaker 01

  Getting back to the guy that I should have been allowed to become instead of what happened under the pressures of other things. Yeah. And the attempt for society and, and certain people within, you know, managerial positions to, to compress what that was into something that they found more suitable.

• 1:33:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but those pressures allow you to discover this little world, forbidden world in many ways of violence that you could explore. Through sport, you can explore it in, uh, it's more socially acceptable to explore it through sport.

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  For sure. And even, but even then, there's like, uh, at times it's socially unacceptable. So I beat Semshilt. I'm, he cut my right eyebrow. I cut him and busted his nose and he's bleeding all over me as I have an arm bar on top. I'm getting, you know, it's raining blood. Quote some Slayer, uh, from a lacerated Semshilt, bleeding in his horror, creating my structures. Now I shall rain in blood. But, uh, I win the fight. Arm bar, nasty one. I get on my feet and the first thing I do is I wipe all the blood off, onto my

• 1:34:14Speaker 01

  hands and I lick it and I do my thing. And all the MMA journalists freaked out. Dana Wise, like, man, I don't know about that. You know, we, you know, we don't want him doing, everybody had this huge problem. And then some folks would even contend, oh, you know, you're trying to do, like, no, no, no, this isn't planned. This isn't, you don't think of these things. This is in the, this is how I really feel. This is who I really am. And, you know.

• 1:34:41Speaker 01

  It was even kind of comical after the fact, you know, and BJ Penn was on the very card with me. Watching him at some point in his career, all of a sudden win fights and then do this licking the glove thing. And everyone thinks it's the coolest thing ever. And I'm like, hey, fuck faces. I did this in 2002 or one, 2001. And BJ Penn, actually back then was like, dude, you're a badass. You're a killer, you know? Where did that come from? Because that seems like a deeply human moment. I could say, I could just be, you know, goofy about it and call it orgiastic. Are we back to Mike Tyson? Yeah, but Tyson, but uh, no, no, it isn't. It's beyond that.

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  Is it a celebration of human nature? I've had some pretty decent orgasms in my life at this point. I'm 43. So, but no, none have ever compared to that. Like I said, it is a feeling of highest being to me. And I- That's your Ubermensch moment. This is, this is where I feel like the restrictions of general existence in society are gone. And I get to fully live in a state that feels more meaningful of the most meaning. You know, I think of it as life and death and

• 1:35:53Speaker 01

  it's just, it is the way I'm built and I don't have, I've never had any problem applying violence. Like it doesn't, I, I don't know where it comes from or how you would define it or whatever. If you want to stick me under in a psychologist's chair, but like I don't, there's a part of me that can just like, no, if I'm going to apply, I can apply violence to any level and be okay with it. And it doesn't, I don't lose sleep. It doesn't bother me. It's not a problem. It's, it was me learning how to fully understand violence, humans and the broader perspective that allowed me to think about things and like, well, what am I, what, what do I really want to accomplish with my actions in the world just on a whole?

• 1:36:37Speaker 01

  You know, not compartmentalizing my sporting career, even when I get in the ring,

• 1:36:45Speaker 01

  I don't have any mercy generally. And if I do, it's because I make a really deliberate-

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  Attempt to be in a state where I can have mercy. If I just go in there to fight with everything I got, there is zero.

• 1:36:59Lex Fridman?

  The natural state.

• 1:37:00Speaker 01

  There's nothing, there's nothing that will hold me back other than the referee. And that's that, you know, I, I know I agreed to, to be allowed to do and not to do, but, but within that, no, and I expect it to be done to me.

• 1:37:14Lex Fridman?

  But in terms of values, in terms of seeing what, to me, violence is, uh, is just yet another canvas that humans can, uh, paint beautifully on.

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  Clearly, I mean, uh, we have venerated the violent. Uh, there are communists that venerate the violent on their behalf. There are national socialists that venerate the violent there. And then if you remove it from an ideological perspective, we venerate the violent, uh, when they're a hero. We venerate the violent in our religion. Well, I mean, I guess some people venerate the violence of, of Yahweh and Sodom and Gomorrah, right? So, or do we say Jehovah? I don't know.

• 1:37:58Lex Fridman?

  Is there, you've already mentioned one, but is there a fight where you've achieved the highest of heights for your own personal being, just when you look within yourself that you're the proudest of? Or maybe was your most beautiful creation? Is there something that stands out?

• 1:38:15Speaker 01

  There, there are a few actually, uh, fighting Semi Shil and a rematch. Uh, well, the first one was pretty good too. Uh, but the rematch was I, I was suffering, I had suffered early prior, the week prior to, uh, food poisoning. And so while my abs are looking all right, uh, I, in the ring, didn't have the power that I expected to. And I was struggling in ways, uh, in some of the grappling with the submission stuff that I hadn't accounted for.

• 1:38:46Lex Fridman?

  Just exhaustion or mental exhaustion?

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  No, I mean, like just physical, just, I wasn't back up to a hundred percent in terms of this power output. And Semi was, well, he's always seven foot tall, but this time he was, the first time I fought him, he was two sixty, two fifty seven or two sixty something, something like that. This time he was like two ninety. And so he was a significantly bigger cat and he, he was, he's a big dude. And I just remember being.

• 1:39:17Speaker 01

  And up against the ropes with him, changing levels, trying to take him down. And he's fighting, he's hipping, and I just thought in my head, there's no fucking way I'm gonna lose this fight. There's no way you are not going to beat me. It's not gonna happen. And I arm barred him, the other arm. Even after the fact, he's like, I really wanted to get you for that. I wanted to get that match back. And then you fucking got my other arm, dick. I'm like, dude, I still love you, though.

• 1:39:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you know, and that. But the whole time you're like, so this has to do the dichotomy of you're feeling your worst.

• 1:39:49Speaker 01

  And having to overcome.

• 1:39:50Lex Fridman?

  You're like, literally mentally telling yourself, there's no way.

• 1:39:53Speaker 01

  There's no fucking way I'm gonna lose this fight. And then there's even my last bare knuckle match. And getting in the ring and fighting bare knuckle boxing for the first time. And just thinking, just being in a great state and just looking so forward to seeing. I mean, I called someone, I was talking to them the night before and I said, yeah, well, I, you know, I video called you because this face might not look like this when I see you next. And they're just like, oh, okay.

• 1:40:25Lex Fridman?

  That's not just like empty trash talk. That's, that's like a clarity of mind and the seriousness of all.

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  I go, I might die, I'm most, pretty high chance of being deformed some way. So, but fuck it. I don't really care.

• 1:40:39Lex Fridman?

  Do you think about, are you accepting your own death?

• 1:40:41Speaker 01

  Yes, 100%. Yeah, I, in fact, and that's, in a strange way, that's partially what makes it so elevated in terms of my sense of feeling by being able to

• 1:40:55Speaker 01

  have death at my side, it feels good. And to be there and to think that

• 1:41:03Speaker 01

  this could be the one, like, why not, you know? I'm not a religious person at all, even though I very much have to seem, seems to bang on the drum about the usefulness or the understanding the usefulness of religion for people.

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  But, you know, if, if, if I gotta do something, then yeah, put me in Valhalla, man. I don't want to be anywhere else. Nothing else seems like a good place for me to be. I wanna, I wanna fight all day long and feast all night, you know, it sounds great.

• 1:41:30Lex Fridman?

  I saw you throw your hat into the ring of Fedor Emelionenko.

• 1:41:34Speaker 01

  Yes. He got COVID, I guess. I hope he, I hope he overcomes it and comes out just as good, if not better.

• 1:41:40Lex Fridman?

  Epic with that. Did I understand correctly? That might be his last fight?

• 1:41:44Speaker 01

  Yes, that's my understanding. And it would be epic as hell. And it would be epic as hell because the, the person that I want to give my most to is a person that I respect, especially at this, this long, uh, this long, this, this, this long career of mine and getting at this, this, this twilight years.

• 1:42:03Lex Fridman?

  It's like two warriors.

• 1:42:04Speaker 01

  And, and, and that's the thing about even this going in there with the aspect of being with death and all that is that when that person is in there, they're my brother with me in this. And that so when you give me your best, even if I, even if I win dominant fashion, but if you show up and you're as authentic and being here as I am, then, then I love you. And I'm glad for you to be here and we're in this together. And, and at this point, you know, your loss or my loss or whatever

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  is no less deserving of veneration than the win. Like we're here in this. And so to be in the ring with Fjörer and to venerate him in win or defeat, to be in there with, with someone like that is to me,

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  it's so rare. So.

• 1:42:52Lex Fridman?

  It's incredible how the ultimate violence is coupled with like love or respect. And it's like, it's weird how this is, uh, how the competition in his violent form is also a, uh, veneration of just human connection.

• 1:43:13Speaker 01

  It's also the removal. I feel like it's the purest, one of the purest ways, purest, most honest places a person can exist. That line in Fight Club, you don't know really who you are until you've been in a fight. I mean, I believe that. And, uh, I've seen so many examples of people trying to portray themselves as one thing. And then in the ring, you see who they really are. Or even when they're trying to portray themselves as one thing and they're winning, the crowd at times will see who they really are and still hate them, you know? It's like, but I said all the good things. Bro, it don't work that way.

• 1:43:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but speaking of Fator, if we take you out of the picture, who are the greatest mixed martial arts fighters of all time?

• 1:43:56Speaker 01

  Uh, I, I feel.

• 1:43:58Lex Fridman?

  You out of the picture.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  As a cop out to some degree, I feel like we need a little bit more time. You know, so to, to, to see how, how this unfolds because you got to compare a lot of things and I, ah, did I, did I, I think I'm,

• 1:44:14Lex Fridman?

  Like centuries?

• 1:44:15Speaker 01

  I did an interview. I don't know about centuries, but that would help if we can keep accurate records and, and not allow uh, too much uh, bias to, to fall, to fall in too much propaganda.

• 1:44:24Lex Fridman?

  The victor's still the story, right?

• 1:44:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, but um, I made an argument, uh, I was in an, I, I get a, it was, it was a interview with an MMA outlet of some sort and I can't recall who it was, but oh, it was an argument about will the winner of Kane Velazquez versus Stipe Miocic be the greatest MMA heavyweight of all time? And I said, fucking no way. Oh no, it's Cormier and Miocic. That's what it was. I said, absolutely not, not even close. And I said, these guys need a bit more time to see how things go and also how things go for some of their opponents and like there's, there's more factors than just this one fight. It really is.

• 1:45:06Speaker 01

  And I go, and when you want to weigh these people, even if let's say we'll bring Alistair or uh, yeah, Alistair Overeem into the, into the equation. Okay. You judge him on what you know now, what he's done for you lately. Okay?

• 1:45:20Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  Which is a, a very myopic way of doing it.

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  What has he done over his career? K1 champion. Uh, he was a champion in uh, uh, Dream. Um, he's strike force, blah, blah, blah. His overall record, the entirety of all the, the different opponents he's fought. And I just sit back and I go, okay, he's not the UFC champ, but.

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  His accolades, his merits in some ways actually stand up higher than Cormier's and Miochik's.

• 1:45:57Lex Fridman?

  So what about the moments, do you give much value to the special moments, like the highest heights you rise to, not in terms of records or the strikes landed, but just creating a magical moment in a fight. It doesn't have to be even a championship fight, but just, you know, Conor McGregor is an example of somebody who creates a narrative, who creates a story, creates a drama and a special magic happens, even if it's like

• 1:46:24Speaker 01

  Myth is greater than reality and that is always the case.

• 1:46:27Lex Fridman?

  But do you?

• 1:46:28Speaker 01

  And so I understand that so very much and it takes an asshole like me to poo poo on your myth. At least get you, at the end of the day, you're not going to abandon your myth, but perhaps temper it with the facts and logic.

• 1:46:44Lex Fridman?

  So you're not a fan of myth?

• 1:46:46Speaker 01

  No, I'm an absolute massive fan of myth.

• 1:46:48Lex Fridman?

  But you prefer facts and logic.

• 1:46:50Speaker 01

  It's like when I, no, I mean, I like saying facts and logic because people, I also, I am not a materialist in that sense. I don't think that materialism can solve for everything. It's not enough. It's not, it's not robust enough. I'm sorry. If facts and logic and or reason, as the Enlightenment scholars all thought, including Marx, was enough for people, then we would never, we wouldn't have any religions. We wouldn't have, there would be no, we wouldn't have narratives and myths and all this kind of stuff. It would not, it just, I'm sorry, there is no, there's nothing about history that supports the idea that rationality will overcome all.

• 1:47:29Lex Fridman?

  There's something about Ben Shapiro's Facts Don't Care About Your Feelings that feels to be miss, feels to be missing something fundamental about human nature. It's not

• 1:47:40Lex Fridman?

  Clear to me exactly what is missing.

• 1:47:42Speaker 01

  To give old, old, old Ben a fair shake. And, uh, you know, I don't know Ben Shapiro. I don't really listen to Ben Shapiro, not against Ben Shapiro. I don't, I'm not here to say anything particularly bad about him. Although I will say at one time, Tom Arnold was seemingly trying to pick an actual fight with Ben Shapiro.

• 1:48:04Lex Fridman?

  In the ring.

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, somewhere. Yeah. And I just, and I actually responded like, and I tried to get him to clarify, say, hey, are you saying that you want to fight Ben Shapiro? That you're looking to actually, because I was waiting for him to say something and I can be like, okay. Well, it's one thing to want to get into a fight with someone. It's another thing to go pick on a little tiny, you know, guy like Ben, who's much smaller than you and doesn't train or whatever. But, you know, if it's not me, I can find someone your size and you can go fight him. You know, don't be a, basically, don't be a bully piece of shit.

• 1:48:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:36Speaker 01

  You know, which by the way, Tom Arnold, you are a mental midget. You are never going to be able to compete even with Ben Shapiro in an argument on any level about anything.

• 1:48:46Lex Fridman?

  Oh, intellectual argument.

• 1:48:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, intellectual argument. You could, maybe you can scream louder than him, but whatever.

• 1:48:51Lex Fridman?

  But nevertheless, in the discussion of greatness in fighting.

• 1:48:57Speaker 01

  I think you, you need to look at some of the, you need to look at some of the numbers.

• 1:49:01Lex Fridman?

  And there's the magic.

• 1:49:02Speaker 01

  There is some context also in that, where did Alistair Overeem fight? Oh, we fought in Pride, where you could soccer kick people and stomp their head and this and that. And so the, the, the, the game environment is actually different too.

• 1:49:15Lex Fridman?

  There's more uncertainty, there's more chaos in Pride, there's more.

• 1:49:18Speaker 01

  Go back a little further and go like, what about the guys that used to, like Dan Severn fought bare knuckle? Head butts, the whole nine.

• 1:49:26Lex Fridman?

  You beat Dan Severn, right?

• 1:49:27Speaker 01

  I did beat Dan Severn. That was, that was killing an idol, so to speak. Although I didn't really kill him because I still love him. You know, he's still an, I mean, he's still responsible for inspiration along this whole pathway. You know, it's, it's meeting, meeting your God and then. Putting a knife in it, I guess.

• 1:49:46Lex Fridman?

  Realizing they're human and then bringing them down to your level.

• 1:49:49Speaker 01

  Exactly, but also there's a, there's a huge misconception there and that is that I could bring, maybe I could bring Dan Severn down to my level, but I couldn't bring his mustache down to my level. It is, it is of mythic proportions and.

• 1:50:03Lex Fridman?

  Greater than yours. Your facial hair is greater than yours.

• 1:50:06Speaker 01

  My facial hair is, is, is creating its own legacy, but it is not Dan Severn mustache level or now Don Fry mustache. So Don Fry mustache, Dan Severn mustache, you know, now you have like Shia versus Sunni.

• 1:50:20Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:50:23Lex Fridman?

  You think there'll be Karl Marx, like painting of Josh Barnett one day with the beard and is that, is that basically what you're.

• 1:50:30Speaker 01

  I hope so. I'll, I will actually comb my hair, unlike Marx, but.

• 1:50:35Lex Fridman?

  Chaos is, has a charm to it.

• 1:50:38Speaker 01

  It does. It does. I mean, we all thought Doc Brown in Back of the Future was, was quite charming.

• 1:50:44Lex Fridman?

  You have to throw that into the calculation where they fought.

• 1:50:47Speaker 01

  Yes. And the rules that they fought under, you know, some guy like Eger Vovchangin won a 32 man tournament or something like that. I go, okay.

• 1:50:58Speaker 01

  Stipe and Daniel Cormier are awesome and they may, they will, they will for sure be revered as when they're, as for their careers, 100%. Can you say that they're particularly even better overall than Eger Vovchangin? Maybe one of them could have beat them. Maybe, maybe one of them wouldn't have. You know, maybe, maybe Eger would have fucking got them with the knuckles right away. Well, maybe if they fought them in pride, they wouldn't have won. Maybe if they fought them bare knuckle, they wouldn't have won. I don't know.

• 1:51:28Lex Fridman?

  And there's something about the chaos, like do you put Hoist Gracie in the top 10? You know, there's something about.

• 1:51:34Speaker 01

  Top 10 of all time in terms of. Competitors capable, um, I don't know. I'd have to think about that. Maybe not, but I put Royce Bracy as like pyramid level. Like, wow, dude, what a, what an amazing man. Yeah, he's so important. Absolutely incredibly important.

• 1:51:54Lex Fridman?

  But there's something about stepping into, uh, like fighting another human being under all the uncertainty that the early UFC's had. I mean, you don't know

• 1:52:03Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:52:04Lex Fridman?

  what is going to happen. And couple that with not much money.

• 1:52:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:52:09Lex Fridman?

  All of it.

• 1:52:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:52:10Lex Fridman?

  So that the purity of it too. There's something about money. I mean, I guess it's shit for that capitalist world, but that ruins the purity of the violence.

• 1:52:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, people given the opportunity for,

• 1:52:24Speaker 01

  yeah, yeah. Well, the bigger things get the more, I love the fact that, that fighting has opened up to such a degree that the career business side of it, cause I, I absolutely distinctly separate the two. The business side of it has opened up to give me far more possibilities, opened way more doors for me than I ever intended it to.

• 1:52:47Speaker 01

  Whereas the

• 1:52:50Speaker 01

  the athlete side of things has, if anything, just gotten substantially worse, I would say. And, uh, some of this can be, some of this is due to all the, the, the nature of all games will be learned, will be gamed, uh, without even the rules being broken. And once that's figured out, you need to make an adjustment. No adjustments have been made. So the game just appears to be the same game over and over and over and over and over again on ESPN plus on whatever, on whatever, on whatever. It doesn't really matter which night you watch. It's the same game constantly. And that's not because the,

• 1:53:31Speaker 01

  the, the athletes are worse or better. It's because they have had that game, uh, structure long enough that they figured out. What do you do to be to be the most successful at it? What is the highest percentage way of approaching it essentially? Even if you're not thinking of percentages?

• 1:53:48Lex Fridman?

  What were the, if we take a step back, it's really fascinating to think about the early UFC's. Did you fight Dan Severn in the UFC?

• 1:53:55Speaker 01

  I fought him in Super Brawl.

• 1:53:57Lex Fridman?

  Super Brawl, so that was in the early, early days, you're undefeated.

• 1:54:00Speaker 01

  Two thousand.

• 1:54:03Lex Fridman?

  What were those early days, let's say, of mixed martial arts like?

• 1:54:08Speaker 01

  Let me tell you the day of high adventure.

• 1:54:13Speaker 01

  Dun dun dun dun.

• 1:54:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:14Speaker 01

  Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun. Yeah, it is. It was so much fun and it made you feel absolutely like you were a part of

• 1:54:24Speaker 01

  a novel, a comic book. I mean, I, I would love to transcribe my experiences as what I consider a second generation MMA athlete.

• 1:54:35Speaker 01

  Except I'm way too sensitive to anybody's personal, any things that are not, not even to, you know, I'm not a gossipy person. I really do believe that like small people talk about others. Big people talk about ideas. So, um, but there's just some stories that just can't, you can't tell without telling the whole story. And there are so many amazing stories that could be told.

• 1:55:05Lex Fridman?

  People being at their best, people being at their worst.

• 1:55:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, the whole, the whole.

• 1:55:09Lex Fridman?

  Well, is there something you could speak to the chaos of the time?

• 1:55:14Speaker 01

  Oh, a hundred percent like, well, okay. So we at AMC got connected to somebody that was throwing an event in Nampa, Idaho. And we all piled into this and Matt Humes Subaru wagon and we jammed out and we left Kirkland and we headed over to Idaho, only to find out that there was nothing really put in place. It was absolute.

• 1:55:42Speaker 01

  Disrepair and chaos. They didn't have a ring. They didn't have this. It was such a bullshit adventure, but we were like, well, you know, there's hardly anywhere to fight. It's tough to find these opportunities. So, okay, well, how about this? Whoever is here to fight and is willing, all right, well, since there's no venue, there's no this, whatever. We all got gloves. We got mouthpieces. We'll just go to the park. So I'll still get paid.

• 1:56:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:13Speaker 01

  And so folks were kind of like, I don't know about that. The guy I was gonna fight was. He finally figured, they finally, he finally gets information on who I actually am. And I was undefeated at the time. I had, I think I had fought Superbrawl 13 and already won that tournament. And so he's like, yeah, I had no clue. I'm so glad we didn't fight. You would have murdered me. This is, you know, what a setup. And eventually Matt had to, had to strong arm the guy and get our money that we were supposed to all get and drive back. And because he, his whole position was, well, there ain't no fucking way. We drove all the way out here for free.

• 1:56:53Speaker 01

  This is on you. You fucked this up. Not my problem, but what is my problem is the lack of cash in my account. So fix it. You know, or me fighting my first organized fight against an AMC guy on 11 days notice through a connection to an old wrestling coach I had. And I just gathered up with all my old martial art, my old martial arts instructor that I had worked with. And we grappled in his apartment. We did tie pads in the park. I ran a couple of miles every day and then, all right, boom, show it up. Won my fight by front choke in two minutes. And then.

• 1:57:39Speaker 01

  Matt goes, okay, well, hey, you did really great. We'd like you to come back and fight again in the summer. What do you think? Okay, go back off to university. And then I think, hmm, well, that fight didn't go exactly as how I wanted it to. So I gotta find a way to get more experience. I would literally fight people in the university, like rec center on the old wrestling mats. As they know, I had a wrestling team. I would find anyone doing martial arts, anyone talking about getting into street fights, anyone, whatever, and just basically go, oh, you ever watch UFC? Yeah, yeah, that stuff's cool. What do you, what do you think? Oh, man, I'm super into it, man. That's badass. Rad. So would you, would you want to fight?

• 1:58:24Speaker 01

  I mean, it was way easier picking fights than it was, you know, getting a girlfriend.

• 1:58:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:29Speaker 01

  I just, you know, path least resistance.

• 1:58:32Lex Fridman?

  I think it might be useful for us to get some advice from you.

• 1:58:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:37Lex Fridman?

  Cause you've accomplished for, for the, the journey of a martial artist first. If you've accomplished some of the greatest accolades there is in the sport, if somebody who's starting out now, or like early on in their journey, what advice would you give on how to become a martial artist, catch wrestler, fighter?

• 1:59:00Speaker 01

  Uh, well, I mean, really what it comes down to is do it because you love it. Do it for that reason and that reason alone. Uh, most people that get into this and attempt to make any sort of professional inroads with it, you are not going to be the world champion.

• 1:59:19Speaker 01

  You probably will never even fight for a belt. And you're probably not going to net make money at this. So don't do it for those reasons. Do it for the reason of the passion. Do it for the reason to be the absolute best that you can be, whatever that ends up being. You might at best only be mediocre, but you won't even be mediocre if you don't do it like you really mean it. So.

• 1:59:43Lex Fridman?

  Passion look, where, where's the kernel of the passion? Would you say, is it in the learning process itself, the improvement?

• 1:59:49Speaker 01

  I think it really depends on the person, right? I mean, there's some people that really love the, the, the fact of. They feel like they're growing, right? So will to power, you know, you're growing, growing stronger, growing better. You know, the idea of eliminating weakness. So to which I'll quickly define weaknesses as just like things that weaken you, not like being physically weak. Sure, you could call that weakness, but maybe you're not meant to be a super strong guy. But choosing to be weak is really a different story, other than just like, we're all deficient in some way or another. So

• 2:00:30Speaker 01

  that's neither here nor there. It's a matter of what you decide to do with it. And that's different from your strength and weakness, at least the way I look at it. Like, strength is choosing, regardless of the difficulty, to make improvements, to strength is even choosing to acknowledge that you you do lack and accept it and then make a decision what to do with it.

• 2:00:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but there's also, there's a bunch of stuff that just like you said, it's what you're drawn to. There's an honesty to just grappling that it seems more real than anything else you can do.

• 2:01:00Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:01:00Lex Fridman?

  And that's the, that's where the passion and love can come.

• 2:01:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's being in an environment, hopefully, that is as true as possible. It would be, would be a starter. So it's hard to be

• 2:01:13Speaker 01

  a bullshit person when you're literally trying to tear each other's arms off.

• 2:01:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:18Speaker 01

  You know, as you really sort of see who somebody is. I also feel like you really, really get to see somebody who there are a couple of instances where you really see who people are on the mats in the bedroom. So

• 2:01:32Speaker 01

  even the aspect of self betterment,

• 2:01:39Speaker 01

  growth along a path. I mean, hell, that's part of the, the, the device of capture for martial arts as a business.

• 2:01:48Speaker 01

  Give you a belt, put a stripe on your belt. Each, each of these iterations costs 20 bucks. So.

• 2:01:55Lex Fridman?

  But there's a benefit to that, too. I, I really enjoyed the progression of belts.

• 2:02:00Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:02:01Lex Fridman?

  You know, a bit of it is OCD or whatever, but you're enjoying the recognition of your, your growth when you feel, when you're made to feel, when I think genuinely you do earn it.

• 2:02:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree.

• 2:02:12Lex Fridman?

  That process.

• 2:02:12Speaker 01

  I agree. I, it makes complete sense to me. It just, it's anything that is, is, has a goodness and its purity can also have a detriment and its perversion. So.

• 2:02:24Lex Fridman?

  And there's a value to competition. I've gotten some shit in the past for saying this. I've gotten the most value in giving everything I have to try to win and, and lose. So like I've gotten, I remember most of the matches I've lost and I think that's what I've gotten the most from the sport is losing.

• 2:02:47Speaker 01

  Think about it. I mean, if you really think about it. What, what makes you want to actually in detail, go over what happened? Oh, it's the time when you didn't get what you wanted.

• 2:03:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:01Speaker 01

  It's a time when you gave it everything you had and you came up short or failed miserably. Okay. So.

• 2:03:08Lex Fridman?

  Especially if you're embarrassed in some way.

• 2:03:10Speaker 01

  Right. And so that's usually the only time people, again, calamity is the impetus for them to actually turn around and go, who the fuck am I? What am I doing and why am I doing it?

• 2:03:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:20Speaker 01

  Instead of naturally going, hmm, okay, well, I won. Why? What was it the cause? And so I think part of my success is that when I win, I'm brutal. When I lose, I'm brutal and there is no in-between. So I remember losing.

• 2:03:40Speaker 01

  Uh, the rematch against Noguera. And I still feel like it was a bullshit call. Like, I feel like I won that fight. But my, my opinion is that, and this even came up. So one of the coaches in the back was like, oh, you did great. You know, don't feel bad, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I go, no, fuck that. I didn't finish him. I allowed the referees to make a judge, a decision that I think is incorrect and bad. But that came because I didn't take him out. You know, fuck that. No, no, he won. He's going to get more money. He's going to get more recognition. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I accept all this and it's not okay. And I need to, if I, when I get a chance to fight him again, I got to figure out how to way to like, take this guy out. I don't want to say forever. I'm not trying to put him six feet underground.

• 2:04:25Speaker 01

  Well, when I fight, yes, I am. But, but that, but the, the point being, I need to find a way to like, this is definitive. You don't get to say shit about it because I'm the only one who can stand right now. That's the way it's got to be. Anything less than that is not good enough. And even if I achieve that, then I got to figure out, okay, it's not a given. How did I get to this point? How did I make that happen? Was it simply been because of his own mistakes? Or was it because of my, my, my successful action?

• 2:04:59Lex Fridman?

  So it's always self critical.

• 2:05:00Speaker 01

  Always constantly.

• 2:05:02Lex Fridman?

  You, uh, love movies. I read this somewhere.

• 2:05:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:06Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned Blade Runner is a favorite.

• 2:05:07Speaker 01

  Number one of all time, the, the final cut. That's my go to.

• 2:05:10Lex Fridman?

  So you would say, uh, Blade Runner is the greatest movie of all time?

• 2:05:15Speaker 01

  It's one of the greatest movies of all time.

• 2:05:17Lex Fridman?

  What's, what's in the top?

• 2:05:19Speaker 01

  My, my top five, uh, Blade Runner, Final Cut.

• 2:05:23Lex Fridman?

  This is the original Blade Runner.

• 2:05:25Speaker 01

  And I used to own on tape, the original.

• 2:05:29Lex Fridman?

  DHS?

• 2:05:29Speaker 01

  Cut, yeah. And, uh, and I had the director's cut on DVD.

• 2:05:34Lex Fridman?

  Why Blade Runner, by the way?

• 2:05:36Speaker 01

  As a kid, I just thought it was so cool. There was something about it that really spoke to me. The whole cyberpunk landscapes and this guy chasing down rogue androids, replicants.

• 2:05:48Lex Fridman?

  Is it, is it just the entire cyberpunk universe? Or is it just robots as well?

• 2:05:55Speaker 01

  No, it's, I mean, the cyberpunk universe is part of it. On the, on the surface, I have a, I've always tended towards dark subject matter. Like things that are of the dark, so to speak, are things that I've always been gravitated towards. I think maybe part of it is that the things that are darker are more accepting and

• 2:06:18Speaker 01

  more upfront with death. And perhaps I think that maybe that is what was.

• 2:06:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, somehow more honest, perhaps.

• 2:06:26Speaker 01

  And there's also the aspect of rebelliousness usually, like there is, I was never one to want to just do what somebody told me to do. You know, I'm not sitting around trying to always be such a radical individual that I can't take orders. No, in fact, I'm more than willing to take orders from somebody that I feel is competent and has merit and reason behind what they're doing. And it makes like, okay, yeah, yeah, I'm a hundred percent for it. Not only will I can I take orders, I will help you achieve whatever it is if I think it's worthwhile. Even at my own expense, but to get to that point is a rarity.

• 2:07:11Speaker 01

  Like it's not, not a given. And so you can even imagine like being a grade school teacher and this kid doesn't respect you and he doesn't really think you're that smart.

• 2:07:20Speaker 01

  They don't really appreciate that, but.

• 2:07:22Lex Fridman?

  So cyberpunk is number one. What else?

• 2:07:24Speaker 01

  Cyberpunk is kind of number one. It's a, it's an environment I love, but at the same time, Conan the Barbarian by John Millius is one of my favorite films of all time.

• 2:07:33Speaker 01

  And, you know, that's such a pure film in a way, like the motivations are pure. They're very easy to follow, but not lacking in depth. You know, it's not. It's not just explosions and teal and orange. It's uh, it's, it's more on the human condition. And I love it. And it's shot incredibly well. It's got an incredible soundtrack. Yeah, I fucking love it. But with Blade Runner also in a deeper sense, you know, again, the human condition. You know, you start seeing like, what is, what is being, what is being human? You know, how does this relate to, well, if you can make it and you can tell it what to do, at what point is it like you should or you shouldn't?

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  You know, why do you get to determine what's alive and what's not? What's a life that should be allowed to live and what isn't? And what would be the strain of being Roy Batty? And seeing all these incredible moments that with his passing will no longer exist, especially if he hasn't had a chance to put that flame into another torch, so to speak. If he hasn't written them down, if he hasn't passed them down to somebody else. Gone like Tears in the Rain.

• 2:08:52Lex Fridman?

  Like Tears in the Rain, that scene is incredible. I mean, but it's funny because those two universes are very different, according to the Barbarian Cyberpunk, because there, that makes me curious about what else might be in the list.

• 2:09:04Speaker 01

  Uh, well, let me think, and it's a pretty.

• 2:09:07Lex Fridman?

  Do you like like the Godfather type of universe?

• 2:09:10Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I'm sure the God, I've never actually even watched the whole Godfather.

• 2:09:13Lex Fridman?

  No, but also like, was it Casino, Goodfellas?

• 2:09:16Speaker 01

  Goodfellas is a good movie, but no, that's not on my top. It's, it's a good flick, uh, but it doesn't really do it for me. Uh, I, if people really want to get into this a little more, I did make a hundred, a list of a hundred, a hundred of my favorite movies on my Facebook fan page.

• 2:09:30Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 2:09:31Speaker 01

  Uh, but, uh.

• 2:09:33Lex Fridman?

  Do you remember like some?

• 2:09:34Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, like Blazing Saddles is on there, Ridge of the Lost Ark, um, Valhalla Rising by Nicholas from Winding Refn, uh, Maniac by, uh, William Lustig. Uh, it's a nineteen eighty gnarly, video nasty horror movie about a serial killer, uh, who murders women and scalps them. Uh, and it's gnarly as hell and very brutal and very bleak and very, uh.

• 2:10:07Speaker 01

  I mean, it's the kind of thing that like a lot of people would have a real hard time watching. But, uh, one, again, I like things that are dark. But two, I thought the performances were fantastic in this film and they really got out. The, I think what the underlying thing was, and it was, you know, it was a guy who was basically just like run amok by the overbearing mother, uh, Jungian archetype. And it, she was, she imparted her insanity into him. And he, but yet there is this aspect you could see of him, of him wanting to try and actually be able to be in the world

• 2:10:43Speaker 01

  and have love and have, uh, feminine companionship to go with, with his masculine aspect. But he had no way of understanding how to really make that happen. And he had a complete negative connotation to the feminine. So it's his struggle with, and there's a little part in the, in the movie where he somehow comes across this model or something. And they actually, he starts to feel like maybe he might be able to actually have a relationship with somebody. And it goes somewhere, but, uh, yeah, even the Elijah Wood remake I felt was

• 2:11:26Speaker 01

  really well done and captured most of the essence of what the movie was about. But I still feel like the original by William Lustig, uh, is the best.

• 2:11:34Lex Fridman?

  What's the greatest, uh, love movie of all time?

• 2:11:39Speaker 01

  Greatest love movie of all time?

• 2:11:41Lex Fridman?

  So like something where love is, I mean, I suppose love underlies most of these movies, especially.

• 2:11:45Speaker 01

  Somewhere, I mean, hell, Takashi Miike's films are all about family of all things. As bonkers as those movies are, they, the general theme is family almost entirely in all of his films.

• 2:11:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's, there's very, I mean, even you can argue Blade Runner, yeah, there's, it's everywhere.

• 2:12:03Speaker 01

  Love film of all time, uh?

• 2:12:07Speaker 01

  That's, I mean, is Excalibur a film about love?

• 2:12:11Lex Fridman?

  Uh, what's Excalibur about?

• 2:12:13Speaker 01

  King Arthur. Excalibur is about, uh, Arthur, uh, becoming king of the Britons and his love of his, his country and his love of Guinevere. But eventually, yeah, it becomes more of, about, um, the, the necessity for the king to love, to, to hold, hold Excalibur to stay, to, to realize that while if you're the king, you can love your wife and you can love your best friend and they may fuck each other behind your back. And as they fall in love too, but at the end of the day, you're responsible, your, your love has to be to the, to, to the country and everyone else first and not your own personal, uh, wants.

• 2:12:58Speaker 01

  Which, you know, made, made a much more interesting story when you have, uh, Carmen Berena and, and, or, or, oh, oh, what is that one? It's, it's a German opera, but, uh, you know, and horses and slow mo and sword fights and an epic death scene between, uh, Arthur and his, his son.

• 2:13:19Lex Fridman?

  Okay. Now I definitely have to watch it and I haven't watched it and embarrassed.

• 2:13:21Speaker 01

  Uh, it's, uh, it is John Borman's second film in Hollywood, his first one being, uh, Point Blank with Lee Marvin, which is also on top, uh, one of the upper echelon movies on my list, uh, derived from a book by, called The Outfit by, uh, what is his name? Uh, I forget, but Darwin Cook, the comic illustrator, he did, Donald Westlake wrote. So Darwin Cook does, does an amazing comic book send up of Darwin Cook's novels and they are fucking incredible. So anyways, but, uh, the Point Blank with Lee Marvin, uh, you know, it's a man driven by

• 2:14:03Speaker 01

  purpose, revenge, but also by like really pure motivations. He wants his money. He was, he was betrayed. He, and he wants his, his cash because this is what he agreed to do the thing for. And this is, which also is part of the reason why I like No Country For Old Men so much, which I felt was a great, great, great movie, even better book. But, uh, I remember talking to my friend and I go, you know, Anton Chigurh is the most pure human being in that whole book. Well, that guy's the villain. I go, haha, is he evil?

• 2:14:37Speaker 01

  He's the one, he lies to no one. He does everything he says he will do. He always follows his word. And on the rare occasion, he allows fate to make a decision. As he figures like, well, whatever all led us to here will lead us one way or the other. And if we're at this crossroads, what? How is there any better or worse way than to do it over a coin flip? And so that whole scene where the guy is going. Well, what am I putting up? And he goes, everything. You've been putting it up every day of your life. And that's true. Everything we do is a decision, is a calling, is a choice. And then it bummed me out that they reduced the last interaction between Chigurh and what's his face's wife.

• 2:15:22Speaker 01

  And he finally finds her and she's like, you don't have to do this. And he's like, yes, I do. This is the way it is. You can think that your life could have turned out any sort of ways. You could have done this, you could have done that. But the reality is this is the way your life is. It's the way it was always going to be. You know, the fact that I'm here is the end of it. And that's that.

• 2:15:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's funny. If you're honest, this will dark movies reveal that the villains are the the purest of humans and can teach us the most like profound lessons. And that's certainly an example of it. What do you think the big ridiculous last philosophical question? What do you think is the the meaning of this whole thing we got going on of life and existence on earth? From your individual perspective, but the entirety of the human species.

• 2:16:07Speaker 01

  Life, uh, the universe and everything?

• 2:16:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Don't.

• 2:16:19Lex Fridman?

  We could just leave it at that.

• 2:16:20Speaker 01

  You knew exactly where I was going. I love it.

• 2:16:22Lex Fridman?

  Josh, I love you very much. You've been a huge inspiration.

• 2:16:25Speaker 01

  I have a friend who she said, do you know Lex Fridman? Have you gone on Lex's? And I go, yes, I know. I know Lex Fridman is, I've sadly been way too long in contact without making it happen for too long. And, uh, and yes, I will a hundred percent. I even cut a shirt at the beginning of the pandemic to make my own little mask at one point due to the Lex process.

• 2:16:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:49Speaker 01

  And, uh, I love it. I was like, I can't really hear you, but I'm demonstrating.

• 2:16:56Speaker 01

  Just see it through. But no, this has been a blast.

• 2:16:58Lex Fridman?

  And next time, next time, let's drink some of the war bringing whiskey.

• 2:17:03Speaker 01

  I will bring some war master. I wasn't sure if you were, if you imbibed at all in spirits.

• 2:17:10Lex Fridman?

  100%. It felt a little weird to do it early on in the morning, especially because I'm flying.

• 2:17:15Speaker 01

  Does it though? Does it? I mean, I've had some wonderful morning whiskey at times.

• 2:17:19Lex Fridman?

  It, now that you've mentioned it, it doesn't at all. So next time, let's make sure what Joe Oregon calls the adult beverages.

• 2:17:28Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:17:28Lex Fridman?

  Let's make sure we indulge.

• 2:17:30Speaker 01

  I have zero reservations for doing such a thing. I'm into it.

• 2:17:34Lex Fridman?

  Josh, thanks for talking today.

• 2:17:36Speaker 01

  My pleasure.

• 2:17:38Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Josh Barnett. And thank you to our sponsors. Monk Pack Low Carb Snacks, Element Electrolyte Drink, Eight Sleep Self Cooling Mattress, and Rev Transcription and Captioning Service. Click the sponsor links to get a discount at the support of this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Sun Tzu in The Art of War. The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.