Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Josh Barnett,
00:00:03 one of the greatest fighters
00:00:04 and submission wrestlers in history,
00:00:06 with an epic 25 year career
00:00:09 that includes being the UFC heavyweight champion
00:00:12 and countless other accolades.
00:00:14 He also happens to be one of the most intelligent
00:00:17 and brutally honest human beings in all of martial arts,
00:00:20 and especially so about his appreciation of
00:00:24 and fascination with violence.
00:00:27 Quick mention of our sponsors,
00:00:29 which feels ridiculous to say after that introduction.
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00:00:44 As a side note, let me say that I’ve been a fan
00:00:47 of Josh Barnett for a long time.
00:00:49 This conversation was indeed a long time coming,
00:00:52 and I’m sure we’ll talk many times again.
00:00:54 For what it’s worth, I’m a student of combat sports
00:00:57 and admire when they’re done at the highest level,
00:01:00 either through masterful execution of skill
00:01:02 or relentless dominance of pure guts.
00:01:05 For context, I’m a black belt in Jiu Jitsu
00:01:08 and have competed in wrestling, submission grappling,
00:01:10 Jiu Jitsu, Judo, and even catch wrestling,
00:01:13 which is a variant of submission grappling
00:01:15 that Josh is one of the great practitioners,
00:01:18 scholars and teachers of.
00:01:20 I could probably talk for hours
00:01:21 about what I’ve learned from my time on the mat,
00:01:24 but if I were to say one thing,
00:01:26 it is that the mat is honest.
00:01:28 You can’t run away from yourself when you step on the mat.
00:01:31 It reveals your fears, the lies you might tell yourself,
00:01:34 all the delusions you might have, or at least I had,
00:01:38 that there’s anything in this world that can be achieved
00:01:40 except through blood, sweat, and tears.
00:01:43 That honesty, taken to the highest levels,
00:01:46 as is the case with Josh,
00:01:47 creates the most special of human beings
00:01:50 and definitely someone who is fascinating to talk to.
00:01:53 If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
00:01:56 review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify,
00:01:59 support it on Patreon,
00:02:00 or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
00:02:03 And now, here’s my conversation with Josh Barnett.
00:02:07 Who were the philosophers and philosophical ideas
00:02:10 that influenced you the most?
00:02:11 Are we just jumping right in?
00:02:12 That’s it. We’re right in.
00:02:14 We’re not, no foreplay on camera, all right.
00:02:17 I had an interesting philosophical journey,
00:02:19 at least I think it’s interesting,
00:02:21 and that was, I think, as far as organized philosophy
00:02:27 or maybe, authentic’s not the right word,
00:02:31 but like, yeah, we’ll say organized.
00:02:35 I would say that Nietzsche is probably one of the people
00:02:40 with the most influence on me,
00:02:43 but I also feel like, to a degree,
00:02:46 your personality will oftentimes dictate
00:02:50 what philosophers that you can vibe with, yeah.
00:02:53 So what ideas from Nietzsche, was it the Ubermensch?
00:02:56 Definitely the Ubermensch is huge to me
00:02:58 because I see it as an extension
00:03:00 of basically the religious concepts of God
00:03:04 and higher ideals,
00:03:06 but just put into a different, a secular context.
00:03:09 And the idea also that the Ubermensch is striving
00:03:14 and overcoming something that you’re always working towards
00:03:17 that very few will ever,
00:03:20 it’s not like the concept that you can just make them.
00:03:25 It doesn’t happen that way.
00:03:26 And it’s not based simply upon if you were, say,
00:03:30 put through a genetic program
00:03:32 and turned into a super soldier,
00:03:34 like that wouldn’t make it.
00:03:36 That’s like the very surface level
00:03:40 and incorrect understanding of what the Ubermensch is.
00:03:42 The Ubermensch is the idea of this kind of human
00:03:46 that transcends all the weaker, lower aspects of humans,
00:03:52 which we’re full of.
00:03:53 But I also think that there’s an element in Nietzsche’s
00:03:55 writing that suggests that it’s not something
00:03:58 you can even be in all the time.
00:04:01 Like it’s even a temporary state
00:04:03 because it’s not something
00:04:04 that we’re capable of maintaining.
00:04:05 It’s something to strive for.
00:04:07 Like a morality, an image, an ideal, a set of principles
00:04:12 that we can connect to that doesn’t rely on
00:04:16 otherworldly kind of out there things.
00:04:19 It’s deeply human.
00:04:20 With Nietzsche, I feel like the concept of the Ubermensch
00:04:25 is something built on authenticity as well.
00:04:28 Heidegger was like Dasein, right?
00:04:30 So when you are authentic
00:04:32 and Heidegger being a follower of Nietzsche’s
00:04:35 and highly influenced by him,
00:04:38 I think that the Ubermensch is an example of authenticity
00:04:41 in that it isn’t about trying to be anything
00:04:45 that you cannot be or to go against who you are,
00:04:50 but to actually understand that, accept that,
00:04:52 and then work with what you can work with
00:04:54 and create from your lump of clay that is you.
00:05:00 Because I can’t become…
00:05:04 There’s certain things that are just not gonna happen
00:05:05 for me because it’s not in my proclivity.
00:05:07 I mean, I’m never gonna be five foot tall
00:05:09 and 120 pounds, I mean, that again, I guess.
00:05:14 But I know, as you get more in tune with who you are,
00:05:20 as you start learning more about what unique things
00:05:24 or at least what that combination that makes you,
00:05:27 that gestalt part of yourself,
00:05:29 what those things are and how you can use them,
00:05:32 then you can work towards being that,
00:05:35 taking what that is and seeing if you can
00:05:38 get to that point.
00:05:39 Now, the likelihood is, no, maybe, probably never.
00:05:42 I mean, but we can never achieve Godhood yet.
00:05:44 Religion is a constant striving
00:05:47 and a look at a higher ideal concept.
00:05:50 Even if it’s multiple gods or one God,
00:05:52 it’s still essentially all built around this concept.
00:05:56 I like the idea of Catholics original sin.
00:05:59 If you think of sin, not as evil,
00:06:01 but as missing the mark, the archer’s term where it derives,
00:06:04 or even like in Spanish,
00:06:07 you know, without.
00:06:09 So as being, if you accept that you are imperfect,
00:06:13 if you accept that you need to constantly strive
00:06:15 even against yourself,
00:06:16 because you will figure out the best ways
00:06:19 at which to submarine your own capabilities,
00:06:22 submarine your own dreams and wishes and whatever,
00:06:25 you will ruin them more than anything else.
00:06:27 And you will tell yourself that you ruined them on purpose
00:06:30 for a good reason, or you’ll say that you’ll figure out
00:06:32 a way to put it on everything else but yourself.
00:06:35 And so the idea of thinking of,
00:06:38 well, as I’m starting off on this whole thing,
00:06:41 I got a lot of work to do, and that’s just the way it is.
00:06:43 And I gotta figure out what areas those are gonna be.
00:06:45 And so, you know, I thought, oh yeah,
00:06:47 if I think of original sin actually can be,
00:06:50 that can be kind of a clever idea,
00:06:52 but it’s also just accepting that
00:06:56 we’re all uniquely strange and unequal in our own ways,
00:07:01 but we have to figure out how that fits in.
00:07:02 The word authenticity kind of connects to all of that.
00:07:05 So striving to be your authentic self means
00:07:08 figuring out exactly the shape of the flaws,
00:07:11 the character of your little demons that you get to play with
00:07:15 and around them finding a path to whatever the hell
00:07:20 ideal versions of yourself you can carve
00:07:22 and pretending like that’s such a thing as even possible.
00:07:25 The other idea about Nietzsche is on his idea of morality.
00:07:29 He presents the argument that morality is a human illusion
00:07:33 and that there’s not such a thing as good and evil,
00:07:37 and these are all kind of constructs.
00:07:39 Do you think there’s such a thing as good and evil
00:07:42 that’s connected to some objective reality?
00:07:44 I think that there are some,
00:07:47 I actually do believe that there are some universals.
00:07:49 I’m not Kantian in any way,
00:07:51 but I do think that there are some universals.
00:07:53 And the thing that actually brought me
00:07:54 to even the concept of that was Jung.
00:07:57 So Jung’s concept of collective unconsciousness
00:08:02 and then taking that thought
00:08:04 and then applying it to looking through history
00:08:08 and the most varied history you can find.
00:08:11 So I would say probably religion is your earliest one
00:08:15 that you can get for written history
00:08:17 or written examples of human behavior and psychology
00:08:22 at the furthest that we can look into it from man’s hand
00:08:29 to whatever the medium is, cuneiform or whatever.
00:08:32 But as you do that, and then let’s say going
00:08:34 from Mesopotamia to India to Europe
00:08:39 and just going from all these places,
00:08:41 as disparate as they may seem,
00:08:43 as many different cultures and ethnicities and religions
00:08:45 and how the religions will vary quite a bit
00:08:47 from monotheist to polytheist and so on and so forth.
00:08:53 But then just seeing how there’s all the through lines.
00:08:55 And of course, Campbell, he did this
00:08:58 much earlier than me thinking about it.
00:09:01 But I think that by looking at things that way
00:09:07 and starting to find the threads
00:09:08 instead of always just looking at everything
00:09:10 as being its own compartmentalized concept
00:09:12 as if it only applies to this time, this people,
00:09:16 like getting overly pomo about it
00:09:18 is just a really idiotic postmodern.
00:09:21 So you think that there is, just like with Joseph Campbell,
00:09:24 there’s a thread that connects all of these stories,
00:09:28 narratives that we constructed for ourselves as we evolve.
00:09:30 And that thread is grounded in some kind of absolute ideas
00:09:35 of maybe on the morality side,
00:09:37 which is the trickiest one of good and evil.
00:09:39 Somewhat, yeah, I think that a lot of this stuff
00:09:41 is just derived from a biological perspective.
00:09:44 I feel like these things are innate within us.
00:09:47 Do you think our innately humans are good?
00:09:50 No, I don’t.
00:09:52 I feel like, I also feel like there’s the issue of scale too.
00:09:56 Like Nassim Taleb likes to talk about how he views his,
00:10:01 the way he interacts with groups in terms of scale.
00:10:05 What is this thing about like at the familial level,
00:10:08 I’m a communist and then at the civic level,
00:10:12 I’m a Republican or something.
00:10:14 And at this other level,
00:10:16 and then it goes on at the widest level,
00:10:17 he’s a libertarian or something of that nature.
00:10:20 Like fundamentally human interaction changes.
00:10:22 On scale. On scale.
00:10:23 And scale and also from subjective
00:10:28 to the environment around them.
00:10:29 So, and I don’t even mean environment
00:10:31 just in the sake of physical environment, nature, right?
00:10:35 Like nature is constantly trying to murder you.
00:10:36 Well, it’s not really trying.
00:10:37 It’s just nature’s being nature.
00:10:39 The universe is the universe.
00:10:41 And at times it takes you out.
00:10:43 It’s just not with any particular compunction or prejudice.
00:10:49 It’s just, oops, you know, sorry, there’s no more dodos.
00:10:52 My bad.
00:10:53 But don’t you think the particular flavor
00:10:55 of the complexity that is the human mind was created,
00:11:00 like let me make an argument
00:11:02 for that all people are fundamentally good.
00:11:04 Okay.
00:11:05 Is there’s an evolutionary advantage
00:11:08 to being, to striving to cooperate,
00:11:13 to add more love to the world of like compassion, empathy,
00:11:16 all that kind of stuff.
00:11:18 And that the very thing that created the human mind
00:11:22 was this evolutionary advantage,
00:11:25 whatever the forces behind this evolutionary advantage.
00:11:28 And scale, yes.
00:11:29 So when we’re dealing with a small tribe, sure.
00:11:33 When you meet another tribe, maybe.
00:11:36 There’s other factors that are going into that.
00:11:38 Let’s say you scale up.
00:11:41 And so your 150 has exceeded their 150.
00:11:46 And like, you start to get to a certain point
00:11:48 where you can’t really be close enough
00:11:54 to someone down the line of some of that next,
00:11:56 like that 150 is 150, 150.
00:11:58 And they just now all of a sudden become some guy, whatever.
00:12:03 And when it comes to some guy, once it starts hitting scale,
00:12:08 I don’t know that it’s capable.
00:12:12 People can be as magnanimous to a stranger as to the known.
00:12:19 If they orient themselves to be secure enough,
00:12:23 because it does come to security, insecurity
00:12:25 in one way or the other, either brought on by the unknown,
00:12:28 brought on by an actual threat,
00:12:30 brought on by even their own,
00:12:32 as we would use the word insecurity in that
00:12:34 their own insecurity within their own capabilities,
00:12:36 their own belief in themselves,
00:12:38 all these things can change things
00:12:41 from being compassionate and what have you
00:12:44 to at least at the very least, maybe not evil,
00:12:47 but self interest driven to the point of a negative results
00:12:53 for those that aren’t, you know what I mean?
00:12:55 Right.
00:12:56 But another way to frame that is maybe it’s less about scale
00:13:00 and more about the amount of resources available.
00:13:02 So if we’re overflowing with resources
00:13:06 in terms of security and safety,
00:13:09 all the things you’ve mentioned,
00:13:13 if we have more than enough resources,
00:13:15 then the way we treat a stranger,
00:13:16 the way we position ourselves towards that stranger
00:13:19 might be in a way that allows us to be our real human selves
00:13:25 as opposed to sort of our animal self.
00:13:27 And therefore it’s mostly about
00:13:29 how clever can we descendants of Abe’s be
00:13:32 in coming up with all cool kinds of technologies
00:13:35 and ways to efficiently use the resources we have
00:13:39 such that we’re not constrained.
00:13:40 And my hope is that human innovation
00:13:46 will outpace the growth of our,
00:13:49 the number of people that are starving for resources.
00:13:52 Yes, I think that there’s a lot of rationality
00:13:56 behind this argument.
00:13:59 And in some ways I agree and in a lot of ways
00:14:04 I see it as missing the point
00:14:09 of how this experiment has been playing out across time.
00:14:13 When you look at what, for one, it’s like define resources.
00:14:18 What is a resource of as humans would define it, right?
00:14:25 Or wealth even.
00:14:26 And so you can say, well, an iPhone’s a resource,
00:14:31 the internet’s a resource, water obviously is a resource.
00:14:34 But if we weigh them, what is more important
00:14:38 to human beings, water, internet or iPhones?
00:14:41 It’s water, right?
00:14:42 So if we look at resources, if we start with
00:14:46 what do human beings need to live?
00:14:48 I mean, actually live, not live here
00:14:52 in this bullshit fantasy creation extension
00:14:56 of our own ingenuity and a prison of our own creation
00:14:59 and also a paradise of our own creation.
00:15:02 But this is not how human beings normally live.
00:15:04 This is all built upon stuff,
00:15:06 it’s built on concept, on idea and some of it’s built
00:15:12 on just, well, this is the paradigm so this is what you do.
00:15:15 Human beings need food, they need water to survive,
00:15:19 they need shelter from the elements
00:15:22 and they need certain skills to perpetuate these things
00:15:26 and be able to pass them down so that they can,
00:15:28 so that these things don’t become,
00:15:32 you don’t end up in this gap where you have
00:15:34 to relearn things because if it’s lost,
00:15:37 then that time before you can get it back again
00:15:41 is going to be dark ages of sorts
00:15:44 or it’s going to be highly detrimental to your group
00:15:48 because not knowing how to fish, not knowing how to hunt,
00:15:51 not knowing how to even clean and cook the game
00:15:55 once you have it could be lethal.
00:15:58 That’s fascinating to think of that as a basic resource,
00:16:00 the knowledge to attain the very low level things of water.
00:16:04 Right, and we’ll figure it out.
00:16:05 We did it once before and we’ve done it over
00:16:07 and over and over and over again.
00:16:09 It’s just costly.
00:16:11 Yes, it has costs for sure.
00:16:14 But when you think of how you look at the,
00:16:19 well, we’ll just deal with the first world of the West.
00:16:23 You look at the pathway of Western civilization
00:16:29 and its growth and then you look at how technology
00:16:32 injected into it over time,
00:16:34 how it magnifies things or pushes things
00:16:38 at orders of magnitude faster
00:16:41 and then the internet comes along and even faster.
00:16:43 So you’re watching industrial revolution to,
00:16:46 what is it, the capacitor and then so on.
00:16:50 It goes further and further.
00:16:51 And as the internet and technology,
00:16:54 especially on the electronic side of things,
00:16:56 start increasing in capability,
00:16:59 it massively outpaces even our necessity for it at times.
00:17:04 It becomes, you know, plant obsolescence happens quicker
00:17:08 and over and over and over again
00:17:10 and wealth increases, increases, increases, increases
00:17:13 in terms of the things that we’re able to acquire, right?
00:17:16 I mean, I’ve seen homeless people with smartphones,
00:17:19 you know, so we’re living in the most wealth laden,
00:17:23 luxury laden age of all of humanity yet.
00:17:29 What happens when we see calamity
00:17:32 or people go on hard time?
00:17:33 What are the things that they value?
00:17:36 You know, what do people go to an argument
00:17:38 about the cost of things that are luxury items generally
00:17:41 and not necessity items?
00:17:44 You know, we get into fights about things that are
00:17:50 at the end of the day, not necessities to us.
00:17:53 You know, people are so concerned about Netflix
00:17:55 and the internet and personally,
00:17:58 I’m very concerned about the internet
00:17:59 because I look at it as my own little personal library
00:18:02 of Alexandria in my pocket.
00:18:05 That’s what I love about it.
00:18:06 And the ability to have a tool as effective as it is,
00:18:09 even though I’m in a constant battle
00:18:10 to not let that tool become a vice
00:18:13 or to become something that actually
00:18:17 brings me to a lower state.
00:18:19 But are we willing, the question is over the,
00:18:21 are we willing to murder each other over Netflix
00:18:24 versus murder each other over water?
00:18:27 We’re willing to murder each other over water.
00:18:29 That’s a given.
00:18:30 Right, but that’s our animalistic selves.
00:18:33 Well, it’s also a necessity for, it’s animalistic,
00:18:35 but it’s also either you do it or you don’t, right?
00:18:38 Like unless somebody’s willing to share that water
00:18:40 or if that water is of such a limited capability
00:18:45 or such a limited amount,
00:18:47 then you will have to murder to have that water.
00:18:50 Netflix, the argument is the higher,
00:18:53 we get up to this hierarchy of what we consider
00:18:57 in Los Angeles resources,
00:19:00 we’re less willing to be, to commit violence.
00:19:02 We’re less willing to commit violence,
00:19:05 I would say over Netflix,
00:19:06 but we are willing to commit violence over Netflix,
00:19:07 over everything associated with Netflix,
00:19:09 over televisions, over sneakers,
00:19:11 over, you know, I mean, when we look at a good,
00:19:17 I mean, the majority of the stuff
00:19:20 that came with the riots,
00:19:21 I mean, it was used car dealerships, targets.
00:19:26 I mean, and then you look and it’s like, well, okay,
00:19:28 well, what are people, what do they gotta,
00:19:30 what are they so hell bent to get out of this whole thing?
00:19:34 And I’m even talking about the ideological elements
00:19:36 or anything like that.
00:19:37 Just like, okay, something’s going on,
00:19:38 boom, looting, whatever, you know,
00:19:41 what are you gonna loot?
00:19:42 You know, you’ll have AOC say, oh, people needing bread.
00:19:46 I didn’t see a single loaf of bread.
00:19:48 You know, I saw televisions and shoes and you know,
00:19:52 but to me, it is poetry in a sense,
00:19:54 because you get to see who we,
00:19:57 how we actually are operating, you know,
00:20:00 what is becoming first principles to most people.
00:20:03 But wait, wait, but you could also argue though,
00:20:05 those riots were more like the madness of crowds,
00:20:07 which is definitely a lot more than just that.
00:20:10 I’m just saying that given a chance, it’s like, okay, boom,
00:20:13 the lights are off, the grid is down.
00:20:15 We’ve hacked into the whole system,
00:20:18 turned into an 80s movie.
00:20:19 And you have the ability to go get ahold of whatever it is
00:20:24 that you think is most important.
00:20:26 And what do we do?
00:20:27 And I say, we, as in, you know, including all of us,
00:20:30 we grab a TV, we attack it.
00:20:32 We break into a sneaker store in Melrose.
00:20:35 We do, it’s just like, ah, we still giant cause statues
00:20:39 where the value of that is completely market driven.
00:20:43 Like it’s just a piece of polypropylene or whatever,
00:20:45 butyl and you know, it’s cool.
00:20:48 I’m a big fan of art, but it’s like,
00:20:53 you know, I can’t eat that.
00:20:54 And at the end of the day, man,
00:20:56 you’re sitting there with your, like,
00:20:57 what’d you do today, honey?
00:20:58 What’d you get?
00:20:59 You know, man, we were able to, you know,
00:21:01 oh, I got this, I got this designer art statue.
00:21:04 Are you going to go, well, you can’t really sell it
00:21:07 on the, on like the art markets
00:21:09 where people were really going to pay for it.
00:21:10 So are you going to become an underground art dealer
00:21:12 with your one piece of cause art?
00:21:15 One interesting thing you just said before I forget it,
00:21:17 you mentioned the library of Alexandria and your.
00:21:21 Phone.
00:21:22 Well, your phone, but also just thinking
00:21:25 of your little world that you’re creating
00:21:27 for yourself on the internet.
00:21:28 That’s a really powerful way to actually phrase it.
00:21:30 One of the things that you’ve been on Joe Rogan
00:21:33 several times.
00:21:34 Although everybody always comes to me and go,
00:21:35 oh, that was so great.
00:21:36 I didn’t know you, you’re on, you’ve on Joe Rogan.
00:21:38 I go, this is like my fifth time, dude.
00:21:40 I’ve been a fan of yours for a long time
00:21:42 from other avenues.
00:21:45 This is a long time coming actually.
00:21:46 Everybody, you have no idea.
00:21:48 Like how many times through messaging
00:21:51 and missing each other over the years.
00:21:54 This is ridiculous.
00:21:54 This is a long time coming.
00:21:56 You don’t realize how special this is for us.
00:21:58 This is, well, I’m also starstruck.
00:22:00 We’ll talk about this,
00:22:00 but you symbolize something very important to me
00:22:04 through my journey, through wrestling,
00:22:06 through Jiu Jitsu, through Judo,
00:22:08 through just street fighting, through just combat.
00:22:11 There’s a, you’re the, in some sense,
00:22:14 the devil on my shoulder of like, of violence.
00:22:17 In a good, in a, devil gets a bad rap.
00:22:22 He does get a bad rap.
00:22:23 I realize, you know, sitting encased in ice
00:22:25 down at that low ass level, you know.
00:22:28 Yeah.
00:22:29 But, you know, the angel side is more like the athletic,
00:22:32 the sport, the science, the technical,
00:22:35 the chess side of things.
00:22:36 So, but on the library, Alexander, let me ask,
00:22:41 because you were on Joe Rogan,
00:22:44 it does make me really sad.
00:22:46 And I realize that I’m just probably being romantic
00:22:48 that his, most of his library of interviews
00:22:53 that were on YouTube have now been taken down
00:22:56 because he went to Spotify.
00:22:58 And that was the first, I’m probably an idiot,
00:23:00 but it was the first time I realized
00:23:03 that this knowledge that we’ve been building up
00:23:05 on the internet doesn’t necessarily last forever.
00:23:08 No, it doesn’t, unless you preserve it.
00:23:10 I mean, it’s like all things.
00:23:11 If you do not preserve them, if you do not make efforts,
00:23:16 you know, so many of my, it just really brings
00:23:19 the minor off the top of my head.
00:23:20 All my, so many friends of mine that are Jewish,
00:23:25 you know, they’re basically secular.
00:23:27 But yet through even the secular aspect
00:23:31 of just keeping the traditions alive, it’s like,
00:23:33 well, you could always pick a book and read about it.
00:23:37 Clearly, it’s called the Torah.
00:23:39 But if you don’t put these things into action,
00:23:44 if you don’t make them a part of your consciousness,
00:23:48 maybe even on the subconsciousness,
00:23:50 just through repetition, they will die.
00:23:53 They will become simply something that exists somewhere
00:23:57 until you find it again.
00:23:58 And Carl Gotch used to say something,
00:24:02 he would say that I don’t invent moves,
00:24:03 I just rediscover them.
00:24:05 But yet Gotch and Billy Robinson also would understand
00:24:11 that you, if someone’s not carrying the torch,
00:24:15 it’ll go out.
00:24:16 Now that doesn’t mean fire can’t be rekindled.
00:24:18 It just means that it, that torch no longer
00:24:21 is lighting the way on this knowledge.
00:24:24 And so it’s important to be an individual,
00:24:29 even on an individual level,
00:24:31 to be a repository for aspects of knowledge.
00:24:35 You mentioned Gotch.
00:24:37 You consider yourself a catch wrestler.
00:24:44 So I’ve mentioned to you offline that I competed
00:24:47 in a couple of catch wrestling tournaments.
00:24:49 Can we go Wikipedia level at the very basic,
00:24:52 you’re the exactly right person to ask,
00:24:54 what is catch wrestling?
00:24:56 And what are its defining principles?
00:24:58 I would say the easiest way for us to talk about
00:25:02 and give an overview of what catch is
00:25:07 in the simplest terms is think of collegiate wrestling
00:25:12 with submissions.
00:25:13 That is essentially what catch is.
00:25:15 And it’s not surprising because collegiate wrestling
00:25:18 is actually derived from catch as catch can.
00:25:21 It’s just that over time certain aspects
00:25:23 were removed from the competition structure
00:25:29 so that they became null elements,
00:25:31 things that were discarded.
00:25:33 But it’s funny that you can take a high level
00:25:38 amateur collegiate types and you can show them a move
00:25:42 and then add a little bit to it and go,
00:25:44 oh, well, hey, that was just like what we already do here,
00:25:47 but except, oh, I didn’t know you could take it
00:25:49 all the way to this point.
00:25:50 Or things of that nature,
00:25:53 especially when it comes to professional wrestling,
00:25:55 teaching people like, no, I know you’re just using this
00:25:58 in a show, but this is actually a real move
00:26:00 and here’s how it really feels.
00:26:02 And so collegiate wrestling and wrestling in general
00:26:04 for people who are not aware is basically
00:26:07 two people start on their feet and they have to score,
00:26:10 they’re trying to take each other down
00:26:12 and they score points along the way.
00:26:15 You can end matches by pinning them,
00:26:18 for example, on their back.
00:26:20 I think one way to describe wrestling
00:26:23 is it’s very much about figuring out ways
00:26:27 to establish control and leverage
00:26:29 in these kind of tie ups,
00:26:33 or there’s different styles where you can do more
00:26:35 from a distance to where it’s more about the timing
00:26:38 and all that kind of stuff.
00:26:39 Ultimately, it’s an art of like both upper body
00:26:42 and lower body and you could choose the different puzzles
00:26:45 that you solve there.
00:26:46 You could be attacking the head, the arms,
00:26:49 you could be attacking the legs.
00:26:51 There’s also part of collegiate wrestling
00:26:53 that’s on the ground that has more,
00:26:56 what’s called like a referee’s position or whatever.
00:26:58 The referee’s position where you’re on your hands
00:27:01 and knees basically.
00:27:02 And so.
00:27:04 Do you understand what that’s supposed to simulate?
00:27:06 Why is that one of the standard positions?
00:27:08 It’s one of the standard positions because one,
00:27:10 it’s one of the easiest ways to actually get up,
00:27:13 but two, it’s because you cannot be on your back.
00:27:15 If you’re on your back, you’re getting pinned.
00:27:17 And back exposure or being pinned
00:27:22 is pretty much the universal wrestling thing.
00:27:26 One, taking the guy from their feet to the floor
00:27:30 and two, pinning them.
00:27:33 As you go from like, what is it?
00:27:37 Cornish wrestling, Turkish oil wrestling, Mongolian, Sumo,
00:27:43 Indian, well, they’ll call it Palwani.
00:27:46 It’s also called Kushti, Jiu Jitsu, Judo.
00:27:52 So many of them is like, there’s a,
00:27:54 you sombo, even if it doesn’t end the match,
00:27:58 it’s still like one of the most important aspects
00:28:00 of the competition itself, across almost every style.
00:28:05 And this is where submission, like catch wrestling
00:28:07 or submission wrestling or Jiu Jitsu feels different,
00:28:12 which it seems like for most wrestling,
00:28:14 for a lot of wrestling, the dominance is the goal,
00:28:20 as opposed to submission,
00:28:23 which I guess those are two are related,
00:28:25 but dominating the position.
00:28:27 So that’s what pinning is.
00:28:28 It’s almost like breaking your opponent,
00:28:32 like breaking through all of their defenses
00:28:36 to where they’re completely defenses
00:28:37 and you could do anything with them that you want.
00:28:39 Maybe that’s what could be a definition of dominance.
00:28:41 I don’t know.
00:28:42 I mean, it sounds very much like a chain to a radiator.
00:28:46 Yeah.
00:28:48 Yeah, there’s a threat that connects all runners,
00:28:52 but submission feels different.
00:28:55 It is actually different when you think about it
00:28:57 across the landscape.
00:28:58 I don’t think radically different,
00:29:00 but just still slightly different.
00:29:01 And that if you think of wrestling
00:29:03 as being derived from combat, right?
00:29:07 So, well, it is combat sports, but more lethal combat.
00:29:11 Getting somebody off their feet and onto their back
00:29:14 is about as lethal a place
00:29:15 for the person on bottom to be in general.
00:29:18 I mean, don’t come at me with your talks
00:29:22 about your fucking worm guards and blah, blah, blah,
00:29:25 and whatever spider, bear, okay, get out of here with that.
00:29:29 We’re not talking about you
00:29:30 in this highly regimented sporting environment.
00:29:34 We’re talking about general, all the body hair,
00:29:37 none of the waxing human beings.
00:29:39 So getting someone on their back,
00:29:44 okay, as you’re trying to get up,
00:29:46 you’re getting hit with a rock or stabbed
00:29:48 or what have you set on fire, who knows?
00:29:52 Generally, these conflicts are not just isolated
00:29:55 to one on one.
00:29:57 If it’s four on two,
00:29:58 your buddy that was with you back to back,
00:30:01 now he’s on his back.
00:30:03 What do you think?
00:30:04 And now it’s gonna be one on one while three go on one.
00:30:06 So, and then you elevate this to armored combat, right?
00:30:10 And it’s boom, put them on the ground.
00:30:12 Oh, crap, it’s hard to get up.
00:30:13 Well, while you’re struggling to get up, stab.
00:30:16 That’s where jujitsu’s concepts come from
00:30:18 with all their leveraging and off balancing is,
00:30:20 oh man, if I end up in this situation
00:30:23 in tight close quarters combat,
00:30:24 yes, we could fight it out with swords and knives
00:30:27 and what have you, but it’s way easier
00:30:29 if the first thing I can do is foot sweep you on your back
00:30:33 and then pull my knife and just go stick.
00:30:36 Is there a thread that connects all of these different arts
00:30:40 from not just arts, but from the very base violence of war,
00:30:45 just like you said that there’s no rules
00:30:47 to the very regimented IBJF.
00:30:52 I do.
00:30:53 Jiu Jitsu tournaments and just,
00:30:54 you’ve kind of laid out some of it,
00:30:55 but can you go all the way to the.
00:30:57 So when you start off with absolute skills
00:31:01 in the sense of absolute offense and defense
00:31:04 in the taking or preserving of life, right?
00:31:07 Full on at its purest form of self defense
00:31:13 and self preservation, okay?
00:31:15 And then you extrapolate part of that
00:31:18 in that all animals train in violence.
00:31:23 All play usually degenerates
00:31:25 into some sort of soft violence.
00:31:27 So be it cats when they’re kittens and puppies
00:31:30 and everything learns how to kill, how to fight.
00:31:34 Not that, you know, just that dumb alpha meme stuff
00:31:39 where the idea is that, oh, by being alpha,
00:31:42 that means you run around like basically just being a bully
00:31:44 and a shithead.
00:31:45 No, actually alpha wolves spend very little time fighting
00:31:50 because if you were actually alpha,
00:31:52 you don’t get into fights, there’s no need to.
00:31:55 And if you’re probably getting
00:31:58 into any large amount of fights,
00:32:00 it’s probably because you’re being shitty at being an alpha
00:32:02 and now people are tired of you being in charge.
00:32:06 And yet in the animal world,
00:32:08 and it would be the same for human beings
00:32:10 at that base beginning level of violence,
00:32:15 there’s a big risk.
00:32:17 So I know that we live in this place with healthcare
00:32:21 or you might be in a place with nationalized health,
00:32:23 whatever, right?
00:32:24 So there’s band aids, there’s penicillin,
00:32:30 there’s all that kind of stuff.
00:32:32 But that’s not the normal way of things, you know?
00:32:36 Yeah, there’s a channel that just hurts me every time.
00:32:40 I used to follow it and I had to unfollow it
00:32:42 because it was too painful for me as a human being
00:32:44 called Nature is Metal on Instagram.
00:32:47 It was sobering and then it was like, this is too sobering.
00:32:51 It’s very sobering.
00:32:52 So in there, the risk is at its highest level.
00:32:56 The damage you take, the winner walks away hurt.
00:33:02 Getting lamed when you need every aspect
00:33:06 of your physical and athletic faculties to survive
00:33:10 because this isn’t the first
00:33:13 and it’s definitely not gonna be the last,
00:33:15 especially if you’re the slowest one.
00:33:17 What is it, there’s a lyric from a clutch song.
00:33:23 Don’t go for the fat ones, just go for the slow ones.
00:33:26 Oh man, but that’s the universal truth
00:33:31 of the way nature works.
00:33:33 You said it’s not cruel, it’s not cruel,
00:33:35 it’s just the way it is.
00:33:36 Yeah, I mean, watch animals getting into fights
00:33:39 on any of these sort of documentary stuff.
00:33:41 You’ll see an intense short and then dispersal.
00:33:46 You’ll see as soon as one feels like things have switched
00:33:49 just enough to boom, the bear or whatever it is takes off.
00:33:51 It’s like, I’m done with this.
00:33:53 Because if you can get out of there with just some scars
00:33:56 and what have you, okay.
00:33:58 You lose an eye, nah, it’s not as good.
00:34:01 You really get hurt bad and get infected, you’re done.
00:34:04 So there’s a serious risk to be
00:34:09 that can come with these sort of things.
00:34:10 Yet, I believe that we are inherently born
00:34:16 for at least aspects of and use of violence.
00:34:19 And so at the end of the day, we need these things
00:34:23 not just to, not just survive each other,
00:34:26 but they’re a part of being able to hunt and other things.
00:34:31 So violence is a part of human nature.
00:34:33 Violence is, it’s an absolute.
00:34:36 It is in every person, it is a part of every interaction,
00:34:38 it is a part of every law, everything.
00:34:41 And I’m not, by the way, I’m not an ANCAP.
00:34:43 So don’t even, don’t hit your wagon to me on that one.
00:34:47 ANCAP is anarchic capitalist. Anarchic capitalist, yes.
00:34:50 Not an ANCAP.
00:34:52 They have nice book shops.
00:34:54 Yeah, they do.
00:34:55 I mean, I’m not gonna sit here and shit talk ANCAPs.
00:34:59 Although I also used to get into the conversations
00:35:01 with an ANCOM, anarcho communist, a good friend of mine.
00:35:06 And he would bring up this stuff and I’m like,
00:35:09 yeah, cool, man, I’m down with anarchy.
00:35:11 You ain’t gonna like it.
00:35:13 What do you mean?
00:35:14 I go, cause I’m gonna take all,
00:35:15 I’m gonna gather all kinds of people together.
00:35:17 I’m gonna make this, I’m gonna get the strongest together
00:35:19 and I’m going to take your shit.
00:35:20 Okay, can I ask you on that topic,
00:35:23 I have a friend of mine now,
00:35:27 a fellow Russian, Ukrainian, Michael Malice.
00:35:32 Oh, yeah, I’m familiar with Michael Malice.
00:35:34 I watched a little bit of your guy’s show.
00:35:35 I watched a little bit of your guy’s conversation.
00:35:38 So this is really good to ask you because…
00:35:42 I like how he’s in the white suit
00:35:44 and you’re in the white and black.
00:35:46 But he lives in New York City.
00:35:49 He espouses ideas of anarchism and his idea,
00:35:54 and this is different than sort of the Ayn Rand set of ideas
00:36:00 that there’s a line between sort of capitalism
00:36:02 that’s backed by the state and just pure anarchism.
00:36:06 And his idea that violence won’t take over in an anarchism
00:36:13 is one that feels to me not grounded in reality.
00:36:18 I may be wrong.
00:36:19 So is there some, so the idea with pure capitalism is that…
00:36:24 You mean laissez faire, completely deregulated?
00:36:27 Yeah.
00:36:28 Yeah, well, what it will agree, it’ll end up in one,
00:36:31 it’ll end up in, if you’re anti globalist,
00:36:34 it’s gonna be that.
00:36:35 It’s gonna be globalist 100% because it has no…
00:36:40 Pure capitalism has no consideration for your native users
00:36:47 or of any sort, like it doesn’t matter.
00:36:50 But the idea of governments is that the land,
00:36:53 the little piece of land geographically you’re born on
00:36:56 means you’re going to stick
00:36:57 to whatever founding documents created that little land.
00:37:01 So anarchism is against that.
00:37:04 And the argument is you should be able to choose
00:37:06 which ideas you live with.
00:37:08 And the concern there is nobody,
00:37:12 this geographical land, the governments
00:37:15 that organize on that land
00:37:19 do not need to protect you from the violence.
00:37:21 And my sense is there does need to be an army,
00:37:23 there does need to be police that help,
00:37:27 however the form that police takes.
00:37:29 But there needs to be a more centralized,
00:37:33 not completely centralized,
00:37:33 but more centralized safety net
00:37:38 to protect you from the violence.
00:37:39 Scale again, right?
00:37:40 So if you want to have your anarchist utopia,
00:37:44 well, we won’t call it utopia,
00:37:46 your anarchist creation here.
00:37:50 At certain scale, I’m sure it’s doable.
00:37:54 But as it scales, as the scale increases,
00:37:58 it’s completely untenable.
00:38:00 And a state will emerge.
00:38:02 A state will always emerge.
00:38:03 Because even people always think of states
00:38:05 as like people rubbing their hands
00:38:07 and smoking cigars in back rooms
00:38:09 and just out of nowhere coming around
00:38:11 and just like, oh, we’re going to create
00:38:12 this big centralized thing
00:38:13 and just so that we can tell everybody what to do
00:38:15 and we can be in charge.
00:38:17 I mean, I know that there are people like that that exist,
00:38:20 that they would like to do things of that nature
00:38:23 and that they see the use of power
00:38:26 as something to be used more for their personal gains
00:38:32 over first, which again, self interest in human beings.
00:38:36 But eventually a state, people want,
00:38:41 they want something to go like, okay,
00:38:44 who’s taking care of this?
00:38:45 And who’s taking care of that?
00:38:46 And how do we create some sort of protocol for this?
00:38:53 Like, okay, well, when it’s not Bob,
00:38:55 when is it Susie, when is it whatever?
00:38:56 I mean, like, how do we, it’s gotta get done
00:38:59 if we want this thing to become bigger,
00:39:01 if we want all of our plumbing to work right,
00:39:04 if we want, it’s just, I’m sorry, a state’s gonna happen.
00:39:06 A state is also, when you think about it,
00:39:10 it’s supposed to have consideration to tribe, right?
00:39:13 So if people think that we’re not tribes,
00:39:15 well, you’re not really thinking very deeply.
00:39:18 We’re all tribes of a sort.
00:39:20 And everybody likes to use the word tribalism
00:39:23 in this idea of this antagonistic concept.
00:39:28 And while sure, tribalism can be antagonistic,
00:39:30 tribalism can also be a positive thing,
00:39:33 or I could just say, it just seems to be a natural thing.
00:39:36 People, they create their groups of one sort or another.
00:39:40 And so when you have, well, when you think about
00:39:45 when nation states really started to become a thing,
00:39:47 and I don’t mean even the more modern looking variants
00:39:52 that we could think back up and say the 19th century
00:39:54 or something like that, even older than that.
00:39:57 I mean, you think the Assyrians
00:39:58 didn’t have a state of some sort?
00:40:00 Of course they did.
00:40:02 How do you increase your empire
00:40:05 if you don’t actually have a place to start from?
00:40:07 Just to be a ruler.
00:40:08 So you’re saying like naturally,
00:40:09 when you start talking and thinking about scale of humans,
00:40:13 naturally states emerge.
00:40:16 And so can we try to make an argument for anarchism,
00:40:20 which is, so anarchy in a sense is an opposition
00:40:29 to the unhelpful, unproductive, inefficient bureaucracies
00:40:34 that eventually the states lead to.
00:40:37 Yes, and that’s what we can see.
00:40:38 I mean, I would say less anarchy,
00:40:41 more study James Burnham, you know,
00:40:46 or, well, anybody that wants to talk
00:40:52 about the managerial problem and the managerial.
00:40:55 I see, so you have a sense, a hope,
00:40:58 maybe let’s think like what is the path forward
00:41:01 with the inefficient state?
00:41:04 Is it revolution or is it to work within the system
00:41:07 to constantly improve it, to manage better?
00:41:09 Man, I don’t know that one.
00:41:10 I mean, my general sense,
00:41:12 and maybe this is the Nietzschean part of me,
00:41:14 is that, yeah, it would take maybe not even just,
00:41:18 maybe not even defining it specifically as revolution.
00:41:22 Maybe it would just take just total calamity
00:41:24 to get people to stop being shitty,
00:41:28 to not stop being a lesser version of themselves,
00:41:30 to stop thinking more about things
00:41:34 from the paradigm that we exist in now,
00:41:37 where we’re giving so much value to stuff
00:41:39 that isn’t really all that valuable.
00:41:41 Where we’re so concerned about likes,
00:41:45 and I don’t just mean like whether we get them or not,
00:41:47 but that, oh man, maybe we should take this off
00:41:50 of our platform,
00:41:51 because this is too destabilizing to people.
00:41:53 Because once you exceed Dunbar’s number,
00:41:54 I think it’s actually,
00:41:56 without having the right faculties,
00:42:00 which would need to be developed,
00:42:03 because this is dealing with tech that brings things,
00:42:08 ways of approaching being that we are not
00:42:12 naturally programmed to be able to handle appropriately.
00:42:18 And I think it’s even more detrimental to women than men,
00:42:23 because I think women have a more natural proclivity
00:42:27 towards group association
00:42:32 and more group oriented thinking and patterning.
00:42:38 And now, and with also coupled with
00:42:42 seemingly more sensitivity towards human states.
00:42:49 So I feel like women, like the classic idea is like,
00:42:52 oh, you know, women are psychic,
00:42:53 you know, they have a sixth sense and what have you.
00:42:55 And I think that’s just a way of simplifying,
00:43:02 what I think is that women may be more in tune
00:43:05 with picking up on the unsaid.
00:43:07 Like they might be better at seeing physical cues,
00:43:12 inflection and tone, like different,
00:43:14 like they may be far more sensitive to these things,
00:43:16 which to me would make sense,
00:43:17 because dealing with children that can’t communicate.
00:43:22 So distinctively, right now, okay.
00:43:27 Now, whether it be a woman or a man,
00:43:29 but especially with even the social push
00:43:34 on this concept of empathy,
00:43:36 which of course it gets to the point
00:43:37 where it loses any meaning anymore.
00:43:39 Like people use the word empathy
00:43:41 absolutely incorrectly all the time.
00:43:42 And they don’t even understand
00:43:44 what you’re really asking of people.
00:43:47 But let’s just take it as we’re using empathy
00:43:49 in the correct sense.
00:43:50 And you’re taking on the emotional content
00:43:53 of the thing itself.
00:43:55 Now you open that up to thousands of people,
00:43:57 maybe hundreds of thousands of people all across the world
00:44:01 that you will never meet, that you will never know,
00:44:03 that you’re not even getting an actual true representation
00:44:06 most of the time of who these people are.
00:44:08 You’re meeting persona.
00:44:10 And some of these personas are even deliberately created
00:44:15 to elicit a response inauthentically.
00:44:20 Are you referring to bots or?
00:44:22 Could be bots or actual people.
00:44:24 Bots are one thing, but I mean,
00:44:25 there are literal people out there
00:44:27 that will create something, create GoFundMes
00:44:30 for tragedies that never didn’t really,
00:44:32 or events that didn’t happen or any number of things.
00:44:36 Okay, I mean, burn their own house down
00:44:38 and then say, you know, we were attacked.
00:44:40 And then it comes down, oh, you did it to yourself
00:44:42 because you wanted money and empathy and this, that.
00:44:45 And you wanted all this emotional wealth,
00:44:48 let’s say this emotional coin,
00:44:51 as well as actual if possible.
00:44:52 You wanted to leverage it in some way.
00:44:55 That’s not the majority of people,
00:44:57 but I would say a good amount of folks are thinking,
00:45:01 well, if I post this photo
00:45:05 and I put this little blurb in there,
00:45:07 I bet I can get this much cache out of it in this sense.
00:45:10 And I’m not even, and this isn’t just a reference
00:45:12 to like butt pics and stuff like that.
00:45:14 Because clearly, obviously people understand
00:45:17 that our inborn sexual nature is easy to manipulate.
00:45:23 I mean, that’s pretty obvious.
00:45:25 But you’re saying this kind of new medium
00:45:27 of communication on social media is unnatural.
00:45:32 And it preys on us.
00:45:33 And so as you want this, you know,
00:45:36 you look at an anarchist kind of mindset, right?
00:45:41 And so you’re just like, there’s no,
00:45:44 there is no overarching state to create
00:45:48 any kind of a structure, right?
00:45:51 And so if you have that unfettered capitalism aspect
00:45:55 with it, and before I say anything particularly damning
00:46:00 about unfettered capitalism, I’m a massive capitalist
00:46:03 because I view capitalism essentially as,
00:46:06 what it boils down to is I get these arguments to people too.
00:46:09 They start giving me all these extra definitions
00:46:11 about capitalism like, no, no,
00:46:13 this is obviously some sort of theory
00:46:15 you’re taking from other shit.
00:46:16 But that doesn’t describe capitalism.
00:46:17 Capitalism is the ability for us to create whatever we want
00:46:23 or, you know, create our thoughts, ideas, physical things
00:46:27 and trade them freely amongst each other
00:46:29 in ways that we find acceptable, right?
00:46:34 You know, I’m not even using the word fair
00:46:36 because I might think it’s fair to me.
00:46:39 You might think, huh, well, I mean, that was actually,
00:46:41 I think what he thought was unfair to him
00:46:43 and it’s more fair to me.
00:46:44 And then someone, a third observer goes,
00:46:46 oh man, you should not have paid that for that.
00:46:49 You should have paid this.
00:46:50 And it’s like, well, you know what?
00:46:50 It works for me without…
00:46:52 Sufficiently acceptable that you both agree
00:46:55 to the transaction.
00:46:56 Correct.
00:46:58 But also at the root of that is freedom, right?
00:47:01 And as far as I can tell,
00:47:03 I’ve been banging this around in my head,
00:47:06 it’s like for every one unit of freedom,
00:47:09 you need two units of accountability.
00:47:12 And if you don’t have that,
00:47:14 what you end up with is human self interest.
00:47:19 We’re not even gonna get into evil.
00:47:21 Human self interest, sabotaging other things,
00:47:24 even not in a sense to be malicious.
00:47:27 Okay, so in terms of,
00:47:28 let’s put this as mathematically speaking,
00:47:31 I love this.
00:47:32 So anarchism is more like two units of freedom
00:47:35 and one unit of accountability
00:47:37 or maybe zero units of accountability.
00:47:38 Possibly, I mean, the anarchists tend to think like,
00:47:40 no, everyone will be accountable.
00:47:42 It’s like, fuck they will.
00:47:44 When have you seen this happen in real life?
00:47:46 People aren’t even accountable
00:47:47 in their revolutions at the time.
00:47:49 So you aren’t looking at the way people really are.
00:47:56 Marx is like, yeah, the people are like this,
00:47:58 they’re like that.
00:47:59 Look at how capitalism does it.
00:48:00 I mean, he of course assigns a lot of really
00:48:03 ridiculous economic principles and practice,
00:48:06 but and also assumes that everybody
00:48:09 who makes any profit from anything is somehow stealing it
00:48:13 and really assigns a negative moral aspect to them.
00:48:15 And then it’s like, oh yeah,
00:48:16 but then eventually communism will happen.
00:48:19 No one will act that way anymore.
00:48:20 And you’re like, whoa, hold on.
00:48:21 You just said that people are all,
00:48:23 are you saying it’s all due to capitalism
00:48:25 or is it innate?
00:48:27 It’s just, it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of,
00:48:31 and it’s like, hey, look at you.
00:48:35 You’re like a notorious, like antisemitic, angry,
00:48:39 like just absolute curmudgeon of a human being
00:48:43 who seems to be really not all that fun to be around.
00:48:46 Marx?
00:48:47 Yeah, and then it’s just like.
00:48:48 So you have to think like,
00:48:49 if there was 1 billion Marx’s in the world,
00:48:52 how would they behave?
00:48:53 It would be absolute.
00:48:56 They would hate each other so bad.
00:48:58 And this isn’t, for me to even poison them well on Marx
00:49:01 is like, oh, his personality sucks.
00:49:03 Like there’s lots of people whose personality sucks.
00:49:05 That doesn’t mean they can’t make,
00:49:07 I don’t know that it’s never, what?
00:49:09 You know what, somebody argues.
00:49:10 He’s just a loner.
00:49:12 I mean, I don’t know that his personality sucked at all.
00:49:14 Let me walk that back and that he was human.
00:49:17 Say his personality sucked.
00:49:19 He was sometimes contradictory, irrational.
00:49:23 Sometimes he was quite sexist
00:49:27 despite the emails I’ve gotten.
00:49:29 That told me that there’s people who has written to me
00:49:37 that Nietzsche has been unfairly labeled as sexist
00:49:40 in his discussion about women.
00:49:43 I’m pretty sure there’s a bunch of documents
00:49:45 where he’s just like, he’s just a bitter guy.
00:49:51 I will agree with you.
00:49:52 And Marx is as bitter as they come to,
00:49:54 but bitterness in and of itself
00:49:58 doesn’t make, like why I hate Marxism
00:50:03 comes from the entirety of the thing.
00:50:08 But I’m not going to say that Marxism or practic…
00:50:15 Man, you can find any forbidden book
00:50:18 and it could have something good in it.
00:50:20 As colonel is a good idea.
00:50:21 Yeah, and like at the end of the day,
00:50:23 Marx is a human being.
00:50:25 He’s got a nice beard.
00:50:26 He does, he had a hell of a beard.
00:50:28 Yeah, a decent portrait.
00:50:29 I mean, he looks like the kind of guy like,
00:50:31 I wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley,
00:50:33 but thankfully I don’t think he was much of a fighter.
00:50:35 But in any case, I mean, not the anarchists
00:50:39 or they’re more hot for like Max Stirner.
00:50:44 People like to think that Nietzsche borrowed a lot
00:50:48 from Stirner and my argument is one,
00:50:50 you don’t have any real evidence for that
00:50:52 and two, bullshit, you know?
00:50:54 I mean, anybody could, the fact that they have
00:50:59 some overlapping thoughts doesn’t make it lifted.
00:51:03 Not to mention, go read a lot more philosophy
00:51:06 and see how there’s so many different things.
00:51:08 Oh, this guy said it in 1722.
00:51:12 Well, and then this guy says it again in 1922.
00:51:15 Does that mean he read the other guy’s stuff?
00:51:16 Not necessarily.
00:51:17 I mean, he’s working from the same type
00:51:19 of human physiological construct as anybody else.
00:51:23 Like, of course it’s possible
00:51:25 that this guy could think the same thing.
00:51:26 We think a lot of the same things, to be perfectly honest.
00:51:29 I mean, reading the Hagakure,
00:51:31 going back to philosophy books,
00:51:33 this was really impactful on me as a younger adult
00:51:36 because here’s a book written in the 19th century
00:51:39 about someone who lived through the 19th
00:51:41 and 18th century at times as a samurai, now a monk,
00:51:45 and his objections to society at the time,
00:51:48 the same objections one was having to society
00:51:51 as I was reading it.
00:51:53 Like, the same human behaviors,
00:51:55 the same impetus for action that he found a problem,
00:52:03 like, well, that’s the same shit now.
00:52:07 Like, we’re not, and this was the thing,
00:52:09 and then I’m reading more religion,
00:52:11 and I go, oh, we’re no different
00:52:13 than anyone who wrote the Torah or older.
00:52:16 We are the same thing with the same problems,
00:52:18 with the same psychological issues,
00:52:21 the same human behaviors.
00:52:22 Like, these things are not different,
00:52:24 and we haven’t changed.
00:52:26 Growing set of tools, though, to kill each other with
00:52:29 or to communicate together and all that kind of stuff,
00:52:31 but underlying it, there’s a human nature.
00:52:33 Well, we’re also trying to understand that human nature.
00:52:35 I think we’ve, just like you said,
00:52:37 learning how to fish,
00:52:38 acquired more and more knowledge about that human nature,
00:52:41 but it’s been a very slow journey,
00:52:44 slower than people realize
00:52:46 in terms of understanding human nature.
00:52:49 Let me ask, in terms of egoism,
00:52:51 to be curious, to get your sense about Ayn Rand
00:52:56 and her whole idea of virtue of selfishness and her,
00:53:01 because you mentioned that everybody has a kernel of truth.
00:53:06 There’s potential for a kernel of truth
00:53:08 to be discovered in anything.
00:53:10 For example, I’ve been recently reading Mein Kampf.
00:53:16 You know what, that’s the thing.
00:53:18 Even, there’s something in, there’s probably things
00:53:22 in Mein Kampf that are not the surface level read.
00:53:25 If you get all hung up on all,
00:53:27 probably all his crap about his anger at Jews
00:53:32 and this and that, all this crap,
00:53:34 it’s like, okay, yeah, that’s right on the surface.
00:53:37 Try to get below that.
00:53:38 Try to see, how is he creating the Jews as a cope somehow?
00:53:43 Like, how is he using, why are they his scapegoat,
00:53:46 and I mean scapegoat in the,
00:53:49 so René Girard’s concept of the scapegoat,
00:53:51 I mean it in that sense, whereas Hitler uses,
00:53:55 he wants to make the Jews the scapegoat for World War I.
00:54:00 You know what I mean?
00:54:01 For me, the starting point, similar with Ayn Rand,
00:54:03 is that Mein Kampf is not a good place to search,
00:54:08 not just because Hitler is evil,
00:54:09 but it’s just not full of ideas.
00:54:11 No, it is not.
00:54:13 It has its significance due to a lot of things.
00:54:16 Historically speaking.
00:54:17 The starting point for me with Hitler
00:54:19 is to acknowledge that he is human
00:54:23 and to at least consider the possibility
00:54:26 that any one of us could have been Hitler.
00:54:28 So like, not to make it.
00:54:29 Well, that’s a Peterson kind of concept.
00:54:31 Also, Jonathan Haidt has a thing
00:54:33 about the difference between hate and disgust mechanisms
00:54:38 and things like that, and so he goes into the,
00:54:41 looking at Hitler through his diary entries
00:54:45 and journals and stuff like that
00:54:46 to look and see it more as the disgust mechanism
00:54:50 than also trying to see if there’s any
00:54:52 evolutionary biological attachment to this, whatever.
00:54:56 I mean, you’re right, he is a human being.
00:54:59 Any of us, we’re all human beings.
00:55:02 It’s not that, it’s probably jarring for people to think,
00:55:07 but we’re all, I guess, supposedly potentially capable
00:55:12 of just being in, and all these evil people in the world
00:55:17 think they’re doing it for the sake of good,
00:55:20 which makes them the most dangerous.
00:55:22 And there’s some, there’s differences in levels of insane.
00:55:26 I think Hitler was way more insane than Stalin.
00:55:29 I think Stalin legitimately thought he was doing good.
00:55:33 I would say that’s probably true.
00:55:36 Stalin was just outright brutal.
00:55:40 Like he had his five year plan, he had all those other things.
00:55:44 He just had a much lower value for human life,
00:55:47 and so he was willing to take, make decisions
00:55:49 about what he actually, as a good executive,
00:55:54 which he was, of managing different bureaucracies and so on,
00:55:59 he was willing to make decisions
00:56:01 that resulted in mass human suffering,
00:56:04 where Hitler was, it seems like to me, much moodier.
00:56:09 So allowed emotions and moods to make decisions.
00:56:12 I think we also have to consider the different trajectories
00:56:16 and how, where, and when they were making their decisions.
00:56:19 And I mean, not by time specifically,
00:56:21 but Hitler engaged into this conflict
00:56:24 across multiple continents.
00:56:27 And then that, everything that comes
00:56:29 with basically fighting the whole world,
00:56:33 Stalin had his conflict,
00:56:36 and then he really mostly compartmentalized the rest of it.
00:56:41 So he was dealing with his own internal
00:56:43 instead of dealing with the internal and the external.
00:56:46 So if Stalin was put under a World War scenario,
00:56:48 I don’t know, maybe he would have
00:56:49 eventually lost his marbles too.
00:56:51 Yeah, I’m not sure that that’s, you’re right.
00:56:54 The hunger for power was more internalized for Stalin.
00:56:58 He wanted to control the land that already existed
00:57:00 as opposed to wanting to colonize other land.
00:57:02 He was as nationalistic as Hitler,
00:57:05 but, and was as capable and willing
00:57:10 for violent conflict as Hitler,
00:57:13 for the aims of the state.
00:57:17 But he centered and internalized
00:57:22 prior to then externalizing and moving outwards.
00:57:26 Whereas even maybe prior to him,
00:57:28 there was an interest to continually push communism
00:57:31 in an aggressive sense following on the momentum
00:57:34 from the 1918 revolution.
00:57:37 And that, the halting of that through various aspects,
00:57:43 I guess in Germany, part of that was the National Socialists.
00:57:47 Like they came up and then they were the other ones
00:57:49 to fight the communists,
00:57:50 and so you had the two totalitarians going after it.
00:57:54 But then in the rest of the world
00:57:55 that was not dealing with totalitarian aspects,
00:58:00 it was just, it wasn’t gonna stick,
00:58:02 especially in the West and other places.
00:58:04 But Stalin, just casually thinking,
00:58:09 it seemed like Stalin decided to go,
00:58:11 all right, well, we’re not gonna go
00:58:12 just start launching right into more conflicts here.
00:58:14 We’re gonna, these dudes are going down,
00:58:17 so that’s cool for us,
00:58:18 because they hate us and we hate them.
00:58:22 But now we’re gonna focus internally,
00:58:24 and then we’re gonna work on growing at a slower rate
00:58:28 and picking our battles a bit more specifically.
00:58:30 And of course there’s, you can get to the,
00:58:32 even this is after Stalin,
00:58:34 but you got the Bezmenov type stuff
00:58:36 talking about subversion in cultural aspects.
00:58:40 Yeah, I mean, there’s this fascinating dynamics
00:58:42 to propaganda throughout the whole period that’s.
00:58:45 Yeah, it’s a whole nother kernel, yeah.
00:58:47 Do you think Hitler could have been stopped?
00:58:49 One of the things that’s kind of fascinating to look at
00:58:53 is how many nations, both journalists and nations,
00:58:57 wanted, almost craved to take Hitler at his word
00:59:00 that he wanted peace until it was too late.
00:59:04 They almost wanted to delude themselves.
00:59:08 I mean, the same is true with the Stalin,
00:59:11 people wanted to take Stalin at his word for.
00:59:13 Oh, they still delude themselves.
00:59:14 Yeah.
00:59:15 We will delude ourselves over any number of things
00:59:19 until even after the fact where the history just says,
00:59:22 hey, fuck face, you know?
00:59:24 You cannot supplement your pseudo reality
00:59:27 onto actual reality here.
00:59:30 But yet, we deal with people in pseudo realities constantly.
00:59:34 I mean, we will always find a way
00:59:36 to change reality to suit our needs.
00:59:39 Well, the nature of truth now,
00:59:41 there’s now multiple actual truths.
00:59:42 It’s kind of fascinating.
00:59:43 There’s multiple versions of history
00:59:46 that people are telling.
00:59:47 You know, the version of the Great Patriotic War in Russia,
00:59:52 the World War II in Russia is very different today
00:59:55 under Putin than the version
00:59:57 that we’re learning in the United States
01:00:00 and then different than the version in Europe.
01:00:02 In the United States, the hero of the war
01:00:06 is the United States.
01:00:07 In Europe, there’s a much more sad and solemn story
01:00:11 of suffering and so on.
01:00:12 Sure.
01:00:13 In Russia, it’s the Great.
01:00:15 Patriotic War.
01:00:16 Yes.
01:00:17 It was a unifier of a sense.
01:00:19 And it, I mean, yeah, I mean,
01:00:23 you can’t argue that war and conflict that,
01:00:28 and or just even reducing that to stressors,
01:00:32 agitation, suffering doesn’t create human motivation.
01:00:36 You know, we started this off.
01:00:37 You brought up a Frankel.
01:00:38 I’m like, yeah, Frankel’s dope.
01:00:40 Man, it serves for meaning.
01:00:41 Maslow’s great.
01:00:43 And I talked to you about how I started to think like,
01:00:46 man, do the ability for human beings to live
01:00:51 and or potentially flourish
01:00:54 in the worst environments you can think of
01:00:57 is pretty incredible in and of itself.
01:00:59 And that it’s a crazy thought to think that
01:01:04 without Frankel and Maslow ending up in concentration camps,
01:01:10 do they write some of the most important books
01:01:13 on philosophy in the 20th century?
01:01:16 And that’s insane on a lot of different levels.
01:01:20 But, yeah, suffering is a creative force.
01:01:22 I mean, I don’t, do you think we’ll always have war?
01:01:25 Yes, we will always have war in some form or another.
01:01:28 We need, quote unquote, air quotes,
01:01:32 for those just listening, war to survive.
01:01:36 We need war to flourish.
01:01:37 We need at least.
01:01:38 Can you explain the quote, the air quotes around the war?
01:01:40 Well, because take, take, take, take the.
01:01:45 You see wars as violence?
01:01:46 No, wars are not violence.
01:01:47 So like, so when we’re talking.
01:01:48 No, air quotes because while us getting on the mat
01:01:52 or just getting on these hardwood floors
01:01:53 and wrestling around is not literal war,
01:01:57 it’s war of a sorts.
01:01:59 It is a diluted form of war.
01:02:01 American football is a diluted form of war.
01:02:03 All this, these are diluted forms of war.
01:02:05 Tennis is a diluted form of war.
01:02:09 And I think one of the best explanations I ever got
01:02:12 from this, and another person very impactful
01:02:16 on my life and outlook and thinking about things,
01:02:19 Cormac McCarthy.
01:02:20 And so in Blood Meridian, there’s this fantastic speech
01:02:24 about war given by the judge,
01:02:26 which there’s a ton of fantastic speeches
01:02:28 on things given by the judge, yeah.
01:02:31 All that exists in creation without my knowledge
01:02:33 does so without my consent.
01:02:34 Okay, that’s pretty heavy.
01:02:36 That’s, that’s hard.
01:02:38 Go ahead, can you break that up?
01:02:39 Can you say that again?
01:02:40 All things that exist in creation,
01:02:43 all things that exist without my knowledge
01:02:45 do so without my consent.
01:02:49 What does that mean?
01:02:50 Well, I think from the judge’s perspective,
01:02:53 it’s like, well, I didn’t consent to that bird
01:02:56 or that dog or this building or all this,
01:02:59 like all of this, you know, I didn’t create it,
01:03:02 so it’s done so without my consent.
01:03:03 And if it’s up to my consent,
01:03:05 well, I’ll design it how I want to.
01:03:08 There’s another similar look into how the judge is
01:03:11 in that book is he would study everything
01:03:16 everywhere he went.
01:03:17 And so he’s collected this group of nary do wells
01:03:21 from all over to go on these hunts
01:03:25 against certain tribes in the Southwest
01:03:29 and getting paid by the US government,
01:03:31 the Mexican government.
01:03:32 So he’s on these Indian hunts
01:03:36 and yet they’re going to all these different places
01:03:39 and they would stay the night in a cave somewhere
01:03:43 and he would find cave paintings,
01:03:44 he would write them all down,
01:03:46 or he would find old pieces.
01:03:47 There’s an example of him, the narrator,
01:03:50 explaining how watching the judge and how he drawing,
01:03:53 I mean, he’s got this notebook just full of things,
01:03:56 drawings and writings,
01:03:58 and how he found like a piece of armor
01:04:02 from a conquistador or something way back in the day,
01:04:04 Spanish armor, and he draws it into his book
01:04:06 and then crushes it.
01:04:07 And so the reason we’ll always have war
01:04:12 in this society is because there’s this struggle
01:04:16 amongst people that want to be the designers.
01:04:18 There’s that, but I’m just saying
01:04:21 that he’s got this whole quote on war,
01:04:23 like war is play, war is a game,
01:04:27 and the difference is is that what’s at stake.
01:04:30 So all things are a game of some sort
01:04:33 and you’re putting up for it
01:04:35 or what you’re willing to put up for it
01:04:36 determines whether or not you’re going to participate or not.
01:04:40 And all aspects of any game is war
01:04:45 and it’s just, what is at stake?
01:04:48 If it’s your life, it’s a different story.
01:04:49 If it’s just a coin, it’s another thing.
01:04:52 A nice way to put it is if humans play a game
01:04:56 in this kind of pursuit of creating,
01:05:01 whatever the hell the reason is
01:05:02 that we keep creating cooler and cooler things,
01:05:07 it seems to be the result of a game
01:05:08 that we naturally play, we naturally crave.
01:05:11 I don’t know, I mean, that’s been the struggle of philosophy
01:05:14 is to understand what is the underlying force of all that.
01:05:17 Is it the will to power?
01:05:19 I think will to power is a really great way
01:05:21 of describing it.
01:05:23 Do you want to be the winner of the game?
01:05:25 No, not just, no, I don’t look at will to power
01:05:27 as being the winner of the game.
01:05:29 Well, I mean, if we’re going to get philosophical,
01:05:31 yes, you want to be the winner of the game.
01:05:33 What does winning the game define how you win?
01:05:36 Everybody’s going to define that win differently.
01:05:38 You could define the win in the most base level
01:05:40 like, oh, I got all the things.
01:05:44 Well, if you got all those things
01:05:45 without the needing component of fulfillment,
01:05:48 then you’re going to be a very unhappy person
01:05:50 with a whole lot of things.
01:05:51 But there’s a self referential aspect to where, to me,
01:05:54 the winner of the game is defined
01:05:56 by the people playing the game.
01:05:58 So if I’m playing a game, I want to win in the sense
01:06:04 that most of the other people who are playing the game
01:06:06 will say, yeah, that guy won.
01:06:08 By our collective definition, if I just come up,
01:06:12 listen, I’m sort of, if I come up with my own.
01:06:14 That’s a lot of weight on the external on you.
01:06:17 Right, but that’s how games seem to work.
01:06:21 Somewhat.
01:06:21 So I’m already a winner in my life
01:06:24 by defining my own definition of success.
01:06:26 I’m basically the best person in the world at doing me.
01:06:32 At being Lex.
01:06:32 Yeah, so like, and I’m really happy with that.
01:06:35 That’s a source of happiness.
01:06:37 Well, I mean, think about it.
01:06:38 Games are also iterated, right?
01:06:40 So you start off with your game
01:06:42 and then your game with your immediates
01:06:45 and then the game further than that
01:06:46 and the game further than that
01:06:47 and then the game today and the game tomorrow
01:06:49 and the game next week.
01:06:50 And so it never ends.
01:06:52 And if you try to keep thinking about it that way,
01:06:54 no wonder people go crazy.
01:06:56 But we don’t want to think about things that way.
01:06:59 We don’t want to think about being towards death.
01:07:01 We don’t want to think about whether or not
01:07:04 I’m going anywhere after this
01:07:06 other than in the ground or what have you.
01:07:08 Like, you know.
01:07:09 All of these games are a sense of some distraction.
01:07:12 This is where we brought up.
01:07:12 Kind of, but I mean, it’s violence is that
01:07:15 we need to let this out.
01:07:18 And so it is of our, kids need to wrestle and play
01:07:23 just like animals need to wrestle and play.
01:07:25 We need to have forms of competition.
01:07:27 We need to have ways to test ourselves,
01:07:29 to create when, what is it?
01:07:34 When at peace a man of war makes war with himself.
01:07:36 And so we need to be able to competently
01:07:39 go at war with ourselves and go at war with our neighbor
01:07:42 and go at war with our neighbor’s neighbor
01:07:44 in a way that is repeatable at the very least.
01:07:47 So one way of saying that there will always be war,
01:07:50 I mean, that’s my hopeful view
01:07:54 is that most of the war conducted in the future
01:07:56 will be, like you said,
01:07:57 the man must go to war with himself.
01:08:00 That would be great.
01:08:01 That’s what to me love is,
01:08:04 is like focusing on yourself and your own improvement
01:08:07 and your own creativity and towards others feeling,
01:08:13 sort of emphasizing cooperative behavior
01:08:15 and compassion and empathy.
01:08:19 It would be great.
01:08:20 But I mean, you can have, well, I’ll put it to you this way.
01:08:23 If you have a whole community of Randians
01:08:29 and a whole community of Ancoms,
01:08:32 and they could all like, I don’t know,
01:08:37 toast of London on Netflix,
01:08:39 and they love Netflix and they love the internet
01:08:41 and they love picking apart Mon Comp with you.
01:08:46 They love like, they like all these things,
01:08:49 even the esoteric that they can get on with.
01:08:52 But at the fundamental root,
01:08:55 they cannot help but go to war
01:08:57 because they are literally oil and water.
01:08:59 No, but see, but they would,
01:09:01 the very labels they assign to themselves
01:09:05 would need to dissipate.
01:09:07 Well, this is true.
01:09:08 Well, then you would have to stop being
01:09:09 whatever it is that you took on
01:09:11 as your ideological or religious point, right?
01:09:14 Yeah, I mean, there’s some days I’m Ancom,
01:09:18 some days I’m Ancaps and whatever the anarchic capital.
01:09:24 I mean, it depends on the hour, the minute of the day,
01:09:28 you constantly changing moods and embracing that flow,
01:09:31 the change of opinions, of ideas.
01:09:34 As there’s some days like,
01:09:35 I’m actually cognizant of the fact
01:09:37 because I’ve been not getting my sleep.
01:09:39 And after I get some sleep,
01:09:41 I see I’m so much more optimistic about the world.
01:09:44 The less and less sleep I get,
01:09:46 the more sad and cynical I get.
01:09:48 I can see that.
01:09:48 There’s an up and down constantly.
01:09:50 I don’t even let my, well, okay.
01:09:52 I try not to let.
01:09:54 And most days it’s never a problem.
01:09:56 Any sort of like, what the kids call it now,
01:10:00 blackpilled way of thinking,
01:10:02 be my over, the umbrella which I hang under.
01:10:07 So we actually, to drag us back,
01:10:11 can we talk about Carl Gotch and Cat Tressley?
01:10:14 Because I do want to make sure I touch it.
01:10:18 I mean, what, who were?
01:10:20 Carl Gotch is.
01:10:22 Is he the greatest catch wrestler?
01:10:23 I don’t know if he was the greatest catch wrestler ever.
01:10:26 I don’t, I mean, he’s one of them for a myriad of,
01:10:30 Carl Gotch, Billy Robinson.
01:10:35 Gotch and Robinson’s trainer, Billy Riley.
01:10:40 So who are these figures and what did they bring to you?
01:10:41 Joe Maeda, he’s one of the greatest catch wrestlers ever
01:10:44 because he’s responsible for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
01:10:47 Along with Cristal Gracie.
01:10:48 Okay, there’s so much of things I’d like to say here,
01:10:51 but one of the things that catch wrestling
01:10:54 seemed to espouse as a principle is that of violence.
01:10:57 I just, the tournaments I competed at,
01:11:01 the unfortunate thing,
01:11:03 and we’ll probably hopefully talk about it a little bit.
01:11:06 They were disorganized and the level of competition
01:11:09 was pretty low where people really sucked.
01:11:11 Pretty typical.
01:11:12 Is that typical, okay.
01:11:13 Well, it’s, I mean, think about local run of the mill
01:11:19 Jiu Jitsu tournament versus IBJJF created,
01:11:22 you know, a vast difference, so.
01:11:24 So I, you know, but there is, to me as a human being,
01:11:30 like intellectually, philosophically,
01:11:31 it was more interesting to go to catch wrestling tournament.
01:11:34 It seemed more real and honest
01:11:36 because of the way they communicate about violence
01:11:39 and aggression. I love that.
01:11:40 So it is often more honest.
01:11:44 I think that as.
01:11:44 Who is that from?
01:11:45 Does that originate from, gosh, is that really Rob said?
01:11:48 Well, I mean, it originates from all wrestling
01:11:50 in that even Wade Chalice,
01:11:52 not a classically considered catch wrestler,
01:11:59 yet the reason why he has the world record
01:12:02 for most amount of world champions pinned
01:12:05 or the record for pins in the NCAA is because,
01:12:09 well, of course the idea is to put you on your back
01:12:11 and pin you, but there’s no way you’re gonna let me do that.
01:12:15 So how do I make it so that you want me to pin you?
01:12:20 Well, it’s by you put them in excruciating pain.
01:12:22 So at the end of the day, you’re both there.
01:12:27 You both wanna win.
01:12:28 Neither one wants to allow anything to the other.
01:12:31 So how do I get you to lose to me?
01:12:36 Well, I make it so unbearable for you
01:12:38 that you decide losing is better than staying.
01:12:40 So those two are so fascinating
01:12:42 because so coming from Russia,
01:12:44 I don’t know if that’s where I got it
01:12:46 or if it’s just my own predisposition
01:12:49 is I always loved the,
01:12:52 there’s two ways to get you to want to pin yourself.
01:12:55 One is to making it so painful not to pin yourself
01:12:59 that you pin yourself or whatever.
01:13:00 And the other is, it’s sort of like a Bruce Lee,
01:13:03 water flows, make it so easy to pin yourself.
01:13:07 So it’s technique, it’s like the elegance,
01:13:09 the ease of movement.
01:13:11 This is the Satya brothers, Vasya, Satya,
01:13:15 like the, just the elegance, the efficiency.
01:13:19 Yeah, they’re practically like ballet watching those guys.
01:13:20 You know, it’s incredible.
01:13:21 Satya brothers are massive.
01:13:23 And I’ll also caveat a little bit that like,
01:13:27 if you’re approaching this from a Russian perspective,
01:13:31 Russians are quite truthful about things,
01:13:36 especially when it comes to something like combat.
01:13:38 They just, this is how it is.
01:13:40 And this is how it’s going to be.
01:13:42 It’s honest. Yes.
01:13:43 And honesty is what I really like about catch wrestling
01:13:46 because I find that we, given any opportunity
01:13:49 for us to be dishonest for any number of reasons,
01:13:52 we’re gonna, especially if it’s a dishonesty
01:13:56 towards a positive, right?
01:13:57 Like, oh, well, you know, it’s all technique
01:13:59 and it’s all this and it’s the gentle art and blah.
01:14:02 Bro, I have rolled with ADCC world champions,
01:14:06 you know, some of the best you have ever heard of.
01:14:09 There ain’t a lot of gentleness when it comes to like,
01:14:12 oh yeah, they wanted to sweep you and you said no.
01:14:15 And then you did, said no again.
01:14:17 And then you said no and attacked their leg.
01:14:19 Yeah.
01:14:20 It ceases to be all that gentle
01:14:21 because at the end of the day,
01:14:23 these dudes are strong as hell.
01:14:25 They’re flexible.
01:14:25 They’re all, I mean, they’re,
01:14:27 the difference between the athleticism
01:14:29 and the ability to actually win is a pretty wide gap.
01:14:35 The athleticism shows up,
01:14:37 but then there’s all that other extra
01:14:39 and part of that is meanness and pain
01:14:42 and getting what you need out of it.
01:14:45 But see, there is a philosophical difference
01:14:47 in the way it’s thought because.
01:14:50 I think some of it is just, they just in denial.
01:14:53 Like, oh, people will, they like to,
01:14:55 people like to espouse a lot of things as theory
01:14:57 and then it’s like, okay, let me watch.
01:14:59 When they’re, oh, you’re not doing anything
01:15:00 about what you said right now.
01:15:02 In fact, you’re doing the opposite.
01:15:03 You’re literally hurting that guy
01:15:05 because your shit ain’t working
01:15:09 in the way that you’d like it to.
01:15:10 So you’re having to use strength.
01:15:12 You’re having to, it’s one of my favorites,
01:15:13 like, oh, you’re using too much strength.
01:15:14 And it’s like, well, hold on.
01:15:16 Do we want people not to use strength at this point
01:15:18 to understand more of mechanics?
01:15:21 Or are you trying to tell people
01:15:22 if they use strength at all,
01:15:24 that they’re somehow bad at what they do?
01:15:26 Cause you know, it’s not my fault.
01:15:28 You’re not stronger than me.
01:15:29 But see, I’m speaking to something else that’s, that’s.
01:15:32 Well, I tend to think what it comes down to is like,
01:15:34 strength is fine until you beat me with it.
01:15:37 Then it sucks.
01:15:38 Okay, so strength is another thing.
01:15:41 I’m speaking, I’m thinking about more like anger.
01:15:44 Oh, sure.
01:15:45 Okay, so like.
01:15:46 I’ve seen a lot of angry guys in jiu jitsu, I know that.
01:15:48 Really?
01:15:49 Mm hmm.
01:15:50 Okay, okay, good, well, but let’s talk about,
01:15:51 let’s talk about the highest level of competitions.
01:15:55 There’s a book called Wrestling Tough.
01:15:56 Yeah.
01:15:57 It’s a really good book.
01:15:58 There’s, I’ve encountered in my life a few,
01:16:01 especially in wrestling,
01:16:02 people who really try to find a way to use anger,
01:16:08 to get really angry at their opponent.
01:16:10 Not like stupid anger, but just like.
01:16:12 Intense, pointed anger distilled into something
01:16:19 that you can use as fuel.
01:16:20 And like, I remember this story.
01:16:22 I don’t know where I read it.
01:16:23 Might be Wrestling Tough,
01:16:24 where a person was imagining that their opponent
01:16:28 just raped their mother, raped their girlfriend
01:16:31 or something like that,
01:16:32 to create this like method acting thing in their head
01:16:35 to be like, to snap them out of this polite interaction
01:16:38 of usual like athletic convention and like.
01:16:43 You know, that’s a design of necessity.
01:16:46 So my anecdote for this was,
01:16:50 I was sitting with backstage before a fight,
01:16:54 not my fight.
01:16:55 And I’m working with this guy and this dude is,
01:16:58 this is a world champion guy.
01:17:00 And he’s competed at the highest levels.
01:17:03 And he looks at me and he goes,
01:17:08 you know, do you ever get nervous before fights?
01:17:11 And I looked at him and I went, no, I don’t.
01:17:14 And he just looks at me and he’s like,
01:17:15 fuck man, I’m so nervous.
01:17:17 You know, how do you do it, man?
01:17:18 Or, you know, I wish it could be like you.
01:17:19 And I said, you know what?
01:17:21 That doesn’t mean that what I’m doing is better.
01:17:24 It’s just what is necessary for me.
01:17:26 It’s the way I am.
01:17:27 And I told him, so this anecdote goes into another anecdote.
01:17:31 This is a Family Guy episode, I guess.
01:17:33 So, where some, another famous high level guy told me
01:17:39 about this experience with a world champion boxer in Japan.
01:17:45 And this guy would get insanely nervous and worked up
01:17:49 and anxious before his matches.
01:17:51 And he hated it and hated it and hated it.
01:17:53 And so he wanted to get rid of that feeling.
01:17:56 So he went to a hypnotist for a bunch of sessions
01:17:58 and managed to, and he goes in and next fight,
01:18:02 he’s cool as a cucumber and doesn’t perform and loses.
01:18:06 And so what I said, going back to anecdote one,
01:18:10 was, you know, whatever is necessary for you
01:18:14 to get yourself in the best state of being right now
01:18:18 to compete, whatever that may be,
01:18:20 it could be absolute stress and fear,
01:18:23 it could be anger, it could be calmness,
01:18:25 it could be whatever.
01:18:26 But there is a, but there is a state
01:18:31 at which you need to be in to do your best.
01:18:34 And you as the individual, you have to find that.
01:18:36 Can you comment on Tyson, Mike Tyson?
01:18:40 Oh, yeah, that thing.
01:18:42 So first, so he, there’s two things I wanna,
01:18:45 so he’s a, in terms of fear, there’s a clip there,
01:18:48 I think from a documentary where he talks about
01:18:50 he is like fully afraid as he walks up to the ring
01:18:54 and as he gets closer and closer and closer,
01:18:56 he gets more confident until he gets in
01:18:58 and then he’s a god or something like that.
01:19:00 That coupled with his statement on Joe Rogan
01:19:05 that he gets aroused at the possibility of true,
01:19:10 like of hurting somebody in the ring.
01:19:12 So like he gets aroused at the violence.
01:19:16 I like it because it’s coupled to your basically statement
01:19:20 that we need to own, to find our own unique way
01:19:23 of existing at our top level of performance.
01:19:28 And that perhaps is Mike Tyson.
01:19:30 But do you think there’s something more deeply universal
01:19:33 to the Mike Tyson speaking to the fact
01:19:35 that he’s aroused at the possibility of violence?
01:19:37 Yeah, I do actually.
01:19:38 Although I don’t think that it always equates to arousal
01:19:41 for people, in fact, I would say in general, it doesn’t.
01:19:45 I can say I’ve never had a boner in the ring.
01:19:47 In fact, if anything, old combat cock is like,
01:19:50 we’re not hanging around, we’re leaving, we’re going up.
01:19:52 We’re taking off, we don’t want anything to do with this.
01:19:55 You have fun, come back to us when you have something
01:19:57 warmer, softer, smells better.
01:20:00 But the power, the feeling of aliveness,
01:20:04 yeah, I could see it.
01:20:07 Back to even the concept of the Ubermensch,
01:20:09 I feel like the states, the highest states of being
01:20:12 I’ve ever been in were in the midst of conflict.
01:20:15 I felt like that was the times,
01:20:17 those are the moments in my life where I felt like
01:20:20 I was at the highest level of being as a human in existence.
01:20:25 But yet, even being in that state was not,
01:20:28 it was not something that you could interact with
01:20:31 people that weren’t in that state with you.
01:20:33 They wouldn’t get it, you would almost seem,
01:20:34 and to be that way all the time,
01:20:36 either A, might drive you mad, or B, is you’re not,
01:20:40 you’re something that’s untenable to the rest of society.
01:20:43 You can’t function with everybody else.
01:20:45 It will not work.
01:20:46 It’s just like you said with the Ubermensch,
01:20:48 it’s like it’s perhaps that ideal
01:20:50 is not something you can hold for long.
01:20:52 That’s the very nature of it is.
01:20:53 Yeah, well, there was an example in The Spoke Zarathustra
01:20:56 about a snake being down the person’s throat
01:21:00 and biting it, and then having this maniacal laughter
01:21:06 erupting, and to me it was, at least I read it as,
01:21:12 yeah, okay, there’s this insane moment that isn’t forever,
01:21:16 but that it is life and death, and the overcoming it
01:21:21 is the thing that all of a sudden gives you
01:21:24 that tapping into your highest state, right?
01:21:27 This is, man is a chasm, a tightrope
01:21:32 between man and Ubermensch.
01:21:35 Well, I don’t wanna leave your thought about,
01:21:39 we’ll call those things flourishes
01:21:42 to the aspect of Tyson’s interpretation
01:21:47 or his expression of his feelings in combat,
01:21:51 and so I gave this anecdote to the guy,
01:21:53 and my first anecdote to that athlete I was working with,
01:21:57 and I said, you know, there isn’t a superior way
01:22:00 in this sense.
01:22:01 There is the way that works for you.
01:22:02 That may be something you can implement to other people
01:22:05 if you find that person,
01:22:06 because we all have different personalities,
01:22:08 and to me that’s an absolute.
01:22:11 I don’t wanna, don’t come at me
01:22:13 with all your other fucking social sciences crap.
01:22:16 No, we have distinct personalities.
01:22:18 That personality, who you really are,
01:22:21 and this, again, Heidegger, Dasein, being authentic.
01:22:25 If you’re authentic with who you are, goods and bads,
01:22:28 you will know how to create what that is,
01:22:30 and for me, violence and fighting and conflict
01:22:33 was something that always felt normal to me,
01:22:36 and I don’t mean normal in, like I grew up in a war zone
01:22:40 or an abusive household or something like that.
01:22:42 I just meant that, and I was a kid who was very
01:22:47 joyful and inquisitive,
01:22:50 and spent a lot of time around older people, of all things,
01:22:54 and also, while I don’t think I have much capability
01:22:58 toward engineering, my mom said that one of the first things
01:23:02 as like a little baby,
01:23:03 when she put me in my sister’s old crib,
01:23:06 instead of my sister who just milled about
01:23:08 and was fine with it all,
01:23:10 the first thing I did was I completely deconstructed it.
01:23:12 I didn’t break it.
01:23:12 I figured out how to pull it apart.
01:23:14 Curiosity about the world, and yet,
01:23:16 that wasn’t in conflict with the idea of violence?
01:23:18 No, not at all, and so being a very joyful and nice kid,
01:23:23 but kids are kids, and if kids can find that you respond
01:23:29 maybe more easily to agitation, they will agitate you,
01:23:34 and if you should stand out in some way
01:23:36 by being taller or bigger or something, or caring,
01:23:40 especially, they will agitate you.
01:23:42 They don’t really fully understand it either,
01:23:44 and so I don’t hold anything against any of the kids
01:23:47 that used to pick on me or whatever,
01:23:48 especially at the youngest ages.
01:23:50 Man, they don’t know shit either, so,
01:23:54 but once that line was pushed, for me it was,
01:23:57 oh, well, I was being cool.
01:24:00 Now you’re being uncool.
01:24:02 Well, then that gives me license for everything,
01:24:04 and so, boom, we would just go at it,
01:24:06 or kids that would try to initiate a fight,
01:24:07 and I was like, okay, and being in that moment
01:24:12 of just going to town with someone else,
01:24:14 it just felt like this is, this is.
01:24:18 I belong here.
01:24:19 Yeah, it was never a problem for me.
01:24:23 In fact, if anything, what I had to understand was,
01:24:27 well, not only did I learn the hard way,
01:24:29 that it doesn’t matter, at the end of the day,
01:24:32 it doesn’t really matter what anybody else does
01:24:36 if your response in violence, even to their violence,
01:24:41 if you’re the winner,
01:24:42 is often going to be penalized severely.
01:24:46 Society, state apparatus, they don’t want any of that.
01:24:51 They wanna be the only arbiter of violence
01:24:53 in the world, always.
01:24:55 But I learned a very difficult lesson with that,
01:24:58 and it was really impactful in a negative way on me,
01:25:01 but also I had to learn, on an individual sense,
01:25:05 to, you need to manage violence, too,
01:25:08 because, hey, if someone attacks you
01:25:11 or starts a fight with you and you go at it,
01:25:15 okay, beating them up is one thing,
01:25:18 trying to grab a handful of broken glass from the street
01:25:21 and throw it in their face,
01:25:22 maybe that’s a bit much at seven.
01:25:25 So you need to learn what level is necessary,
01:25:30 and you need to learn what comes with all,
01:25:33 what’s the responsibility of,
01:25:35 when you enact violence, I mean, you take on something
01:25:38 when you have a responsibility for that.
01:25:40 This is the extension of your actions.
01:25:45 But as I got older, and especially as I found sports,
01:25:49 and then combat sports,
01:25:51 now this was a place for me to flourish,
01:25:54 and to the point where I was more myself in that space
01:26:00 than I was outside of it until time enough
01:26:02 where I could learn to get this back together again.
01:26:05 And I never say that I’ll merge the two
01:26:09 or anything like that.
01:26:10 No, all what happened,
01:26:16 my journey from adolescence on to manhood,
01:26:22 a huge portion of it,
01:26:24 besides the normal finding yourself, whatever, whatever,
01:26:27 actually what it was was getting back to who I always was.
01:26:33 Getting back to the kid.
01:26:33 The curious kid, the kind kid.
01:26:35 Getting back to the guy
01:26:36 that I should have been allowed to become
01:26:38 instead of what happened under the pressures of other things.
01:26:44 And the attempt for society and certain people
01:26:50 within managerial positions to compress what that was
01:26:55 into something that they found more suitable.
01:26:58 Yeah, but those pressures allow you
01:26:59 to discover this little world, forbidden world,
01:27:02 in many ways, of violence that you could explore.
01:27:05 Through sport, you can explore it,
01:27:07 and it’s more socially acceptable to explore it through sport.
01:27:11 For sure.
01:27:12 But even then, at times, it’s socially unacceptable.
01:27:16 So I beat Sem Schilt.
01:27:21 He cut my right eyebrow.
01:27:24 I cut him and busted his nose,
01:27:25 and he’s bleeding all over me as I have an armbar on top.
01:27:28 I’m getting, you know, it’s raining blood.
01:27:31 Quote some slayer from a lacerated Sem Schilt,
01:27:35 bleeding in his horror, creating my structures.
01:27:38 Now I shall rain him blood.
01:27:39 But I win the fight, armbar, nasty one.
01:27:46 I get on my feet, and the first thing I do
01:27:48 is I wipe all the blood off onto my hands,
01:27:52 and I lick it, and I do my thing.
01:27:55 And all the MMA journalists freaked out.
01:27:59 Dana Wise, like, man, I don’t know about that.
01:28:01 You know, we don’t want him doing,
01:28:02 everybody had this huge problem.
01:28:04 And then some folks would even contend,
01:28:08 oh, you know, you’re trying to do,
01:28:10 like, no, no, no, this isn’t planned.
01:28:12 I don’t think of these things.
01:28:13 This is how I really feel.
01:28:14 This is who I really am.
01:28:16 And, you know, it was even kind of comical after the fact,
01:28:21 you know, and BJ Penn was on the very card with me,
01:28:24 watching him at some point in his career all of a sudden
01:28:27 win fights and then do this licking the glove thing,
01:28:29 and everyone thinks it’s the coolest thing ever.
01:28:31 And I’m like, hey, fuck faces.
01:28:33 I did this in 2002 or one, 2001,
01:28:38 and BJ Penn actually back then was like,
01:28:40 dude, you’re a badass, you’re a killer, you know?
01:28:43 Where did that come from?
01:28:45 Because that seems like a deeply human moment.
01:28:46 I could say, I could just be, you know, goofy about it
01:28:49 and call it orgiastic to align with Titan.
01:28:52 Are we back to Mike Tyson?
01:28:53 Yeah, but Tyson, but no, no, it isn’t, it’s beyond that.
01:29:00 Is it a celebration of human nature?
01:29:01 I’ve had some pretty decent orgasms
01:29:02 in my life at this point, I’m 43.
01:29:04 So, but no, none have ever compared to that.
01:29:06 Like I said, it is a feeling of highest being to me.
01:29:09 And I…
01:29:10 It’s your Ubermensch moment.
01:29:11 This is where I feel like the restrictions
01:29:15 of general existence in society are gone.
01:29:20 And I get to fully live in a state
01:29:23 that feels more meaningful, of the most meaning.
01:29:26 You know, I think of it as life and death.
01:29:28 And it’s just, it is the way I’m built.
01:29:32 And I don’t have, I’ve never had any problem
01:29:36 applying violence.
01:29:36 Like it doesn’t, I don’t know where it comes from
01:29:39 or how you would define it or whatever,
01:29:41 if you want to stick me under in a psychologist chair,
01:29:44 but like I don’t, there’s a part of me
01:29:47 that can just like, no, if I’m gonna apply,
01:29:49 I can apply violence to any level and be okay with it.
01:29:52 And it doesn’t, I don’t lose sleep.
01:29:54 It doesn’t bother me.
01:29:56 It’s not a problem.
01:29:57 It was me learning how to fully understand violence,
01:30:04 humans, and the broader perspective
01:30:07 that allowed me to think about things
01:30:08 and like, well, what do I really want to accomplish
01:30:12 with my actions in the world just on a whole?
01:30:15 You know, not compartmentalizing my sporting career.
01:30:18 Even when I get in the ring,
01:30:21 I don’t have any mercy generally.
01:30:24 And if I do, it’s because I make a really deliberate attempt
01:30:30 to be in a state where I can have mercy.
01:30:33 If I just go in there to fight with everything I got,
01:30:36 there is zero mercy.
01:30:37 The natural state of violence.
01:30:38 There’s nothing, there’s nothing that will hold me back
01:30:40 other than the referee and that’s that.
01:30:42 You know, I know I agreed to be allowed to do
01:30:45 and not to do, but within that, no.
01:30:49 And I expect it to be done to me.
01:30:51 But in terms of values, in terms of seeing what,
01:30:56 to me, violence is just yet another canvas
01:31:01 that humans can paint beautifully on.
01:31:04 Clearly, I mean, we have venerated the violent.
01:31:07 There are communists that venerate the violent
01:31:11 on their behalf.
01:31:12 There are national socialists
01:31:14 that venerate the violent there.
01:31:16 And then if you remove it from an ideological perspective,
01:31:19 we venerate the violent when they’re a hero.
01:31:23 We venerate the violent in our religion.
01:31:26 Well, I mean, I guess some people venerate the violence
01:31:29 of Yahweh and Sodom and Gomorrah, right?
01:31:32 So, or do we say Jehovah?
01:31:34 I don’t know.
01:31:35 Is there, you’ve already mentioned one,
01:31:38 but is there a fight where you’ve achieved
01:31:42 the highest of heights for your own personal being
01:31:46 just when you look within yourself
01:31:48 that you’re the proudest of,
01:31:49 or maybe it was your most beautiful creation?
01:31:51 Is there something that stands out?
01:31:52 Yeah, there are a few, actually.
01:31:54 Fighting Semishield and a rematch.
01:31:57 Well, the first one was pretty good, too.
01:31:58 But the rematch was, I was suffering,
01:32:01 I had suffered prior, the week prior,
01:32:04 to food poisoning.
01:32:07 And so while my abs are looking all right,
01:32:11 I, in the ring, didn’t have the power that I expected to.
01:32:17 And I was struggling in ways,
01:32:20 in some of the grappling with the submission stuff
01:32:22 that I hadn’t accounted for.
01:32:24 Just exhaustion or mental exhaustion?
01:32:26 No, I mean, just physical,
01:32:28 I wasn’t back up to 100% in terms of just power output.
01:32:32 And Semi was, well, he’s always seven foot tall.
01:32:36 But this time he was, the first time I fought him,
01:32:38 he was 260, or 257, or 260 something, something like that.
01:32:44 This time he was like 290.
01:32:46 And so he was a significantly bigger cat.
01:32:48 And he’s a big dude.
01:32:51 And I just remember being up against the ropes with him,
01:32:57 changing levels, trying to take him down.
01:33:00 And he’s fighting, and he’s hippin'.
01:33:01 And I just thought in my head,
01:33:03 there’s no fuckin way I’m gonna lose this fight.
01:33:05 There’s no way, you are not going to beat me.
01:33:07 It’s not gonna happen.
01:33:08 And I armbarred him, the other arm.
01:33:11 Even out of the fact he’s like,
01:33:12 man, I really wanted to get you for that,
01:33:13 I wanted to get that match back.
01:33:15 And then you fuckin got my other arm, dick.
01:33:16 And I’m like, eh, dude, I still love you though.
01:33:19 You know, and that.
01:33:20 But the whole time you’re like,
01:33:22 so this has to do with the dichotomy
01:33:24 of you’re feeling your worst.
01:33:27 And having to overcome.
01:33:28 You’re like literally mentally telling yourself
01:33:30 there’s no way.
01:33:31 There’s no fuckin way I’m gonna lose this fight.
01:33:32 And then there’s even my last bare knuckle match.
01:33:35 And getting in the ring and fighting bare knuckle boxing
01:33:39 for the first time.
01:33:41 And just thinking, just being in a great state.
01:33:45 And just looking so forward to seeing.
01:33:48 I mean, I called someone.
01:33:51 I was talking to them the night before.
01:33:52 And I said, yeah, well, I video called you
01:33:56 because this face might not look like this
01:33:58 when I see you next.
01:33:59 And they’re just like, ooh, uh, okay.
01:34:03 That’s not just like empty trash talk.
01:34:05 That’s like a clarity of mind and a seriousness about.
01:34:09 I go, I might die.
01:34:11 Most, pretty high chance of being deformed some way.
01:34:14 So, but fuck it.
01:34:16 I don’t really care.
01:34:16 Are you, do you think about,
01:34:17 are you accepting your own death?
01:34:19 Yes, 100%.
01:34:21 Yeah, I, in fact, and that’s, in a strange way,
01:34:24 that’s partially what makes it so elevated
01:34:26 in terms of my sense of feeling.
01:34:29 By being able to have death at my side, it feels good.
01:34:36 And to be there and to think that this could be the one,
01:34:42 like, why not, you know?
01:34:43 I’m not a religious person at all,
01:34:46 even though I very much have to seem,
01:34:48 it seems to bang on the drum about the usefulness
01:34:50 or understanding the usefulness of religion for people.
01:34:55 But, you know, if I gotta do something,
01:34:58 then yeah, put me in Valhalla, man.
01:34:59 I don’t wanna be anywhere else.
01:35:00 Nothing else seems like a good place for me to be.
01:35:02 I wanna fight all day long and feast all night.
01:35:06 You know, it sounds great.
01:35:07 I saw you throw your hat into the ring of Fader Emelianenko.
01:35:11 Yes.
01:35:13 He got COVID, I guess.
01:35:14 I hope he overcomes it and comes out just as good,
01:35:17 if not better.
01:35:18 Epic with that.
01:35:19 Did I understand correctly that might be his last fight?
01:35:21 Yes, that’s my understanding.
01:35:24 And it would be epic as hell.
01:35:25 And it would be epic as hell
01:35:26 because the person that I wanna give my most to
01:35:31 is a person that I respect,
01:35:32 especially at this long career of mine
01:35:38 and getting at this twilight years.
01:35:41 It’s like two warriors.
01:35:42 And that’s the thing about even this going in there
01:35:45 with the aspect of being with death and all that
01:35:47 is that when that person is in there,
01:35:51 they are my brother with me in this.
01:35:52 And so when you give me your best,
01:35:55 even if I win dominant fashion,
01:35:58 but if you show up and you’re as authentic
01:36:00 and being here as I am, then I love you.
01:36:03 And I’m glad for you to be here.
01:36:04 And we’re in this together.
01:36:05 And at this point, your loss or my loss or whatever
01:36:11 is no less deserving of veneration than the win.
01:36:14 Like we’re here in this.
01:36:15 And so to be in the ring with Führer
01:36:18 and to venerate him in win or defeat,
01:36:21 to be in there with someone like that is, to me,
01:36:28 it’s so rare, so.
01:36:30 It’s incredible how the ultimate violence
01:36:33 is coupled with love or respect.
01:36:37 And it’s weird how the competition in its violent form
01:36:45 is also a veneration of just human connection.
01:36:50 Human connection.
01:36:51 It’s also the removal.
01:36:52 I feel like it’s the purest, one of the purest ways,
01:36:55 purest, most honest places a person can exist.
01:36:59 That line in Fight Club, you don’t know really
01:37:00 who you are until you’ve been in a fight.
01:37:02 I mean, I believe that.
01:37:03 And I’ve seen so many examples of people
01:37:06 trying to portray themselves as one thing.
01:37:09 And then in the ring, you see who they really are.
01:37:12 Or even when they’re trying to portray themselves
01:37:15 as one thing and they’re winning,
01:37:18 the crowd, at times, will see who they really are
01:37:21 and still hate them, you know?
01:37:22 And it’s like, well, I said all the good things.
01:37:25 Bro, don’t work that way.
01:37:27 Yeah, but speaking of Führer,
01:37:29 if we take you out of the picture,
01:37:31 who are the greatest mixed martial arts fighters
01:37:33 of all time?
01:37:34 I feel.
01:37:36 You out of the picture.
01:37:38 As a cop out, to some degree,
01:37:40 I feel like we need a little bit more time, you know?
01:37:43 So, to see how this unfolds.
01:37:47 Because you gotta compare a lot of things.
01:37:48 And I, did I, I think I’m.
01:37:52 Like centuries?
01:37:53 I did an interview.
01:37:54 I don’t know about centuries.
01:37:55 But that would help if we can keep accurate records
01:37:57 and not allow too much bias to fall in.
01:38:01 Too much propaganda.
01:38:02 The victor’s still there, right?
01:38:03 Yeah, but I made an argument.
01:38:08 I was in, I get a, it was a interview
01:38:13 with an MMA outlet of some sort.
01:38:14 And I can’t recall who it was.
01:38:16 But, oh, it was an argument about
01:38:18 will the winner of Cain Velasquez versus Steve Amiocik
01:38:23 be the greatest MMA heavyweight of all time?
01:38:26 And I said, fucking no way.
01:38:29 Oh no, it was Cormier Amiocik.
01:38:31 That’s what it was.
01:38:32 I said, absolutely not.
01:38:33 Not even close.
01:38:35 And I said, these guys need a bit more time
01:38:37 to see how things go.
01:38:39 And also how things go for some of their opponents.
01:38:41 And like, there’s more factors than just this one fight.
01:38:43 It really is.
01:38:44 And I go, and when you wanna weigh these people,
01:38:47 even if let’s say, we’ll bring Alistair Overeem
01:38:50 into the end of the equation.
01:38:52 Okay, you judge him on what you know now,
01:38:56 what he’s done for you lately, okay?
01:38:58 Right.
01:38:59 Which is a very myopic way of doing it.
01:39:03 What has he done over his career?
01:39:04 K1 champion.
01:39:06 He was a champion in DREAM.
01:39:12 He, Strike Force, blah, blah, blah.
01:39:13 His overall record.
01:39:15 The entirety of all the different opponents he’s fought.
01:39:18 And I just sit back and I go, okay, he’s not the UFC champ.
01:39:22 But his accolades, his merits,
01:39:28 in some ways, actually stand up higher
01:39:32 than Cormier’s and Amiocik’s.
01:39:35 So what about the moments, do you give much value
01:39:38 to the special moments, like the highest heights
01:39:42 you rise to, not in terms of records or the strikes landed,
01:39:46 but just creating a magical moment in a fight?
01:39:50 It doesn’t have to be even a championship fight,
01:39:52 but just, Conor McGregor is an example
01:39:55 of somebody who creates a narrative,
01:39:57 who creates a story, who creates a drama,
01:39:59 and a special magic happens, even if it’s like, not with.
01:40:02 Myth is greater than reality.
01:40:04 And that is always the case.
01:40:05 But do you.
01:40:06 And so I understand that so very much,
01:40:08 and it takes an asshole like me to poo poo on your myth.
01:40:12 They at least get you, at the end of the day,
01:40:14 you’re not gonna abandon your myth,
01:40:16 but perhaps temper it with the facts and logic.
01:40:22 So you’re not a fan of myth?
01:40:24 No, I’m an absolute massive fan of myth.
01:40:26 But you prefer facts and logic.
01:40:28 It’s like when I, no, I mean.
01:40:30 I like saying facts and logic, because people,
01:40:33 I also, I am not a materialist in that sense.
01:40:36 I don’t think that materialism can solve for everything.
01:40:38 It’s not enough.
01:40:39 It’s not robust enough, I’m sorry.
01:40:41 If facts and logic and, or reason,
01:40:44 as the Enlightenment scholars all thought,
01:40:46 including Marx, was enough for people,
01:40:49 then we would never, we wouldn’t have any religions.
01:40:53 We wouldn’t have any, like there would be no,
01:40:55 we wouldn’t have narratives and myths
01:40:56 and all this kind of stuff.
01:40:58 It would not, it just, I’m sorry, there is no,
01:41:00 there’s nothing about history that supports the idea
01:41:04 that rationality will overcome all.
01:41:07 There’s something about Ben Shapiro’s facts
01:41:09 don’t care about your feelings,
01:41:10 that feels to be miss, feels to be missing
01:41:14 something fundamental about human nature.
01:41:16 It’s not clear to me exactly what is missing.
01:41:20 To give old Ben a fair shake.
01:41:24 And I don’t know Ben Shapiro.
01:41:27 I don’t really listen to Ben Shapiro,
01:41:29 not against Ben Shapiro.
01:41:30 I don’t, I’m not here to say anything
01:41:33 particularly bad about him.
01:41:35 Although I will say at one time,
01:41:37 Tom Arnold was seemingly trying to pick
01:41:39 an actionable fight with Ben Shapiro.
01:41:42 In the ring.
01:41:43 Or in the. Somewhere, yeah.
01:41:44 And I just, and I actually responded,
01:41:46 I like, and I tried to get him to clarify,
01:41:48 I said, hey, are you saying that you want to fight
01:41:50 Ben Shapiro, that you’re looking to actually,
01:41:52 because I was waiting for him to say something
01:41:54 and then I can be like, okay, well,
01:41:56 it’s one thing to want to get into a fight with someone.
01:41:58 It’s another thing to go pick on a little tiny,
01:42:01 you know, guy like Ben, who’s much smaller than you
01:42:04 and doesn’t train or whatever, but you know,
01:42:06 if it’s not me, I can find someone your size
01:42:08 and you can go fight him.
01:42:09 You know, don’t be a, basically,
01:42:11 don’t be a bully piece of shit.
01:42:13 Yeah. You know, which by the way,
01:42:15 Tom Arnold, you are a mental midget.
01:42:17 You are never going to be able to compete
01:42:20 even with Ben Shapiro in an argument
01:42:22 on any level about anything.
01:42:23 Oh, intellectual argument.
01:42:25 Yeah, intellectual argument.
01:42:26 Maybe you can scream louder than him, but whatever.
01:42:29 But nevertheless, in the discussion of greatness in fighting.
01:42:35 I think you need to look at some of the numbers.
01:42:37 You need to look at some of the numbers.
01:42:39 And there’s the magic.
01:42:40 There is some context also in that,
01:42:42 where did Alistair Overeem fight?
01:42:45 Oh, he fought in Pride, where you could soccer kick people
01:42:47 and stomp their head and this and that.
01:42:48 And so the game environment is actually different too.
01:42:53 There’s more uncertainty, there’s more chaos in Pride,
01:42:55 there’s more.
01:42:56 Go back a little further and go like,
01:42:58 what about the guys that used to,
01:43:00 like Dan Severn fought bare knuckle,
01:43:02 head butts, the whole nine.
01:43:04 You beat Dan Severn, right?
01:43:05 I did beat Dan Severn.
01:43:06 That was killing an idol, so to speak.
01:43:08 Although I didn’t really kill him because I still love him.
01:43:11 He’s still an, I mean, he’s still responsible
01:43:13 for inspiration along this whole pathway.
01:43:17 It’s meeting your God and then putting a knife in it,
01:43:21 I guess.
01:43:22 Realizing they’re human and then bringing them down
01:43:27 to your level.
01:43:27 Exactly, but also there’s a huge misconception there
01:43:31 and that is that I could bring,
01:43:33 maybe I could bring Dan Severn down to my level,
01:43:35 but I couldn’t bring his mustache down to my level.
01:43:38 It is of mythic proportions and…
01:43:41 Greater than yours.
01:43:42 Your facial hair is greater than yours.
01:43:44 My facial hair is creating its own legacy,
01:43:47 but it is not Dan Severn mustache level
01:43:50 or now Don Fry mustache.
01:43:52 So Don Fry mustache, Dan Severn mustache.
01:43:55 Now you have like Shia versus Sunni.
01:43:58 Right.
01:43:59 Yeah.
01:44:00 Yeah.
01:44:00 You think there’ll be a Karl Marx painting
01:44:04 of Josh Barnett one day with the beard
01:44:06 and is that basically what you’re trying to say?
01:44:08 I hope so.
01:44:09 I will actually comb my hair, unlike Marx, but…
01:44:13 Chaos has a charm to it.
01:44:16 It does, it does.
01:44:17 I mean, we all thought Doc Brown in Back to the Future
01:44:20 was quite charming.
01:44:22 You have to throw that into the calculation
01:44:23 where they fought.
01:44:24 Yes.
01:44:25 This is the interesting thing.
01:44:26 And the rules that they fought under.
01:44:27 Some guy like Eerov Chanchin won a 32 man tournament
01:44:32 or something like that.
01:44:33 I go, okay.
01:44:36 Steepa and Daniel Cormier are awesome
01:44:39 and they will for sure be revered for their careers.
01:44:44 100%.
01:44:48 Can you say that they’re particularly even better overall
01:44:52 than Eerov Chanchin?
01:44:53 Well, maybe one of them could have beat them.
01:44:55 Maybe one of them wouldn’t have.
01:44:57 Maybe Eerov would have got them
01:44:59 with the knuckles right away.
01:45:01 Well, maybe if they fought them in pride,
01:45:02 they wouldn’t have won.
01:45:03 Maybe if they fought them bare knuckle, they wouldn’t won.
01:45:05 I don’t know.
01:45:06 And there’s something about the chaos,
01:45:07 like do you put Royce Gracie in the top 10?
01:45:11 There’s something about…
01:45:12 Top 10 of all time in terms of competitors is capable.
01:45:19 I don’t know.
01:45:19 I’d have to think about that.
01:45:20 Maybe not, but I put Royce Gracie as like pyramid level.
01:45:24 Like, wow, dude, what an amazing man.
01:45:28 Yeah, he’s so important.
01:45:29 Absolutely, incredibly important.
01:45:32 But there’s something about stepping into,
01:45:36 like fighting another human being
01:45:37 under all the uncertainty that the early UFCs had.
01:45:40 I mean, you don’t know.
01:45:41 Yup.
01:45:42 What is going to happen?
01:45:43 And coupled that with not much money.
01:45:46 Yup.
01:45:47 All of it.
01:45:48 Yes.
01:45:49 So the purity of it too.
01:45:50 There’s something about money.
01:45:51 I mean, I guess it’s shit for that cat post world,
01:45:54 but that ruins the purity of the violence.
01:45:57 Yeah, people given the opportunity for…
01:46:02 Yeah, yeah.
01:46:03 The bigger things get, the more…
01:46:04 I love the fact that fighting has opened up
01:46:07 to such a degree that the career business side of it,
01:46:12 because I absolutely distinctly separate the two.
01:46:16 The business side of it has opened up
01:46:18 to give me far more possibilities,
01:46:20 opened way more doors for me than I ever intended it to.
01:46:24 Whereas the athlete side of things has,
01:46:29 if anything, just gotten substantially worse, I would say.
01:46:33 And some of this is due to the nature of all games
01:46:41 will be learned, will be gamed
01:46:45 without even the rules being broken.
01:46:47 And once that’s figured out, you need to make an adjustment.
01:46:51 No adjustments have been made.
01:46:53 So the game just appears to be the same game
01:46:56 over and over and over and over and over again
01:46:59 on ESPN+, on whatever, on whatever, on whatever.
01:47:02 It doesn’t really matter which night you watch.
01:47:04 It’s the same game constantly.
01:47:06 And that’s not because the athletes are worse or better.
01:47:12 It’s because they have had that game structure long enough
01:47:16 that they figured out what do you do
01:47:19 to be the most successful at it?
01:47:21 What is the highest percentage way of approaching it,
01:47:23 essentially, even if you’re not thinking of percentages?
01:47:26 What were the…
01:47:28 If we take a step back, it’s really fascinating
01:47:30 to think about the early UFCs.
01:47:31 Did you fight Dan Severn in the UFC?
01:47:33 I fought him in Super Brawl.
01:47:35 Super Brawl, so that was in the early, early days,
01:47:37 your undefeated… 2000.
01:47:41 What were those early days, let’s say,
01:47:43 of mixed martial arts like?
01:47:46 Let me tell you the day of high adventure.
01:47:49 Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun.
01:47:54 Yeah, it is.
01:47:55 It was so much fun.
01:47:56 And it made you feel absolutely like you were a part of a novel,
01:48:03 a comic book.
01:48:04 I mean, I would love to transcribe my experiences
01:48:08 as what I consider a second generation MMA athlete,
01:48:13 except I’m way too sensitive to anybody’s personal,
01:48:21 any things that are not even to…
01:48:25 I’m not a gossipy person.
01:48:26 I really do believe that small people talk about others.
01:48:29 Big people talk about ideas.
01:48:34 But there’s just some stories that you can’t tell
01:48:36 without telling the whole story.
01:48:38 And there are so many amazing stories that could be told.
01:48:43 People being at their best, people being at their worst.
01:48:45 Yeah, the whole niche of gossip.
01:48:48 Is there something you could speak to the chaos of the time?
01:48:51 Oh, 100%.
01:48:53 Well, okay, so we at AMC got connected to somebody
01:48:57 that was throwing an event in Nampa, Idaho,
01:49:00 and we all piled into this.
01:49:02 And Matt Humes, Subaru Wagon, and we jammed out.
01:49:07 And we left Kirkland and we headed over to Idaho,
01:49:10 only to find out that there was nothing really put in place.
01:49:15 Nothing really put in place, it was absolute disrepair and chaos.
01:49:23 They didn’t have a rain, they didn’t have this.
01:49:26 It was such a bullshit adventure.
01:49:28 But we were like, well, there’s hardly anywhere to fight.
01:49:34 It’s tough to find these opportunities.
01:49:36 So, okay, well, how about this?
01:49:39 Whoever is here to fight and is willing,
01:49:42 all right, well, since there’s no venue, there’s no this,
01:49:46 whatever, we all got gloves, we got mouthpieces,
01:49:48 we’ll just go to the park, as long as we still get paid.
01:49:51 And so folks were kind of like, I don’t know about that.
01:49:56 The guy I was gonna fight was, he finally gets information
01:50:01 on who I actually am, and I was undefeated at the time.
01:50:05 I think I had fought Super Brawl 13
01:50:09 and already won that tournament.
01:50:10 And so he’s like, yeah, I had no clue.
01:50:13 I’m so glad we didn’t fight, you would have murdered me.
01:50:16 What a setup.
01:50:18 And eventually Matt had to strong arm the guy
01:50:21 and get our money that we were supposed to all get
01:50:24 and drive back.
01:50:25 And because his whole position was,
01:50:27 well, there ain’t no fucking way,
01:50:28 we drove all the way out here for free.
01:50:31 This is on you, you fucked this up, not my problem.
01:50:35 But what is my problem is the lack of cash in my account.
01:50:38 So fix it, or me fighting my first organized fight
01:50:46 against an AMC guy on 11 days notice
01:50:51 through a connection to an old wrestling coach I had.
01:50:54 And I just gathered up with all my old martial arts instructor
01:50:59 that I had worked with and we grappled in his apartment.
01:51:04 We did tie pads in the park.
01:51:07 I ran a couple miles every day and then,
01:51:10 all right, boom, show it up.
01:51:12 Won my fight by front choke in two minutes.
01:51:14 And then Matt goes, okay, well, hey, you did really great.
01:51:19 We’d like you to come back and fight again in the summer.
01:51:21 What do you think?
01:51:22 Okay, go back off the university.
01:51:24 And then I think, hmm, well, that fight didn’t go exactly
01:51:28 as how I wanted it to.
01:51:29 So I gotta find a way to get more experience.
01:51:33 I would literally fight people in the university,
01:51:37 like rec center on the old wrestling mats,
01:51:40 as they didn’t know I had a wrestling team.
01:51:42 I would find anyone doing martial arts,
01:51:44 anyone talking about getting into street fights,
01:51:46 anyone, whatever, and just basically go,
01:51:48 oh, you ever watch UFC?
01:51:50 Yeah, yeah, that stuff’s cool.
01:51:51 What do you think?
01:51:52 Oh, man, I’m super into it, man, it’s badass.
01:51:55 Rad.
01:51:56 So would you wanna fight?
01:51:59 Would you wanna fight? I mean, it was way easier picking fights
01:52:04 than it was, you know, getting a girlfriend.
01:52:06 So I just, you know, path least resistance.
01:52:10 I think it might be useful for us
01:52:11 to get some advice from you.
01:52:14 Yeah, all right.
01:52:15 Because you’ve accomplished,
01:52:16 for the journey of a martial artist first,
01:52:21 if you accomplish some of the greatest accolades
01:52:23 there is in the sport, if somebody who’s starting out now,
01:52:27 or early on in their journey, what advice would you give
01:52:31 on how to become a martial artist, catch wrestler, a fighter?
01:52:38 Well, I mean, really what it comes down to
01:52:41 is do it because you love it.
01:52:43 Do it for that reason and that reason alone.
01:52:47 Most people that get into this
01:52:49 and attempt to make any sort of professional inroads with it,
01:52:53 you are not going to be the world champion.
01:52:55 You probably will never even fight for a belt
01:52:59 and you’re probably not going to net make money at this.
01:53:03 So don’t do it for those reasons.
01:53:06 Do it for the reason of the passion.
01:53:08 Do it for the reason to be the absolute best
01:53:10 that you can be, whatever that ends up being.
01:53:13 You might at best only be mediocre,
01:53:16 but you won’t even be mediocre if you don’t do it
01:53:18 like you really mean it.
01:53:20 So.
01:53:21 The passion, look, where is the kernel of the passion,
01:53:24 would you say, is it in the learning process itself,
01:53:26 the improvement?
01:53:27 I think it really depends on the person, right?
01:53:29 I mean, there’s some people that really love the fact of,
01:53:33 they feel like they’re growing, right?
01:53:36 Well to power, you’re growing, growing stronger,
01:53:38 growing better.
01:53:41 The idea of eliminating weakness.
01:53:44 So, to which I’ll quickly define weakness
01:53:48 as just like things that weaken you,
01:53:51 not like being physically weak.
01:53:53 Sure, you could call that weakness,
01:53:55 but maybe you’re not meant to be a super strong guy.
01:53:57 But choosing to be weak is really a different story
01:54:02 other than just like,
01:54:03 we’re all deficient in some way or another.
01:54:07 So that’s neither here nor there.
01:54:10 It’s a matter of what you decide to do with it.
01:54:12 And that’s different from strength and weakness,
01:54:13 at least the way I look at it.
01:54:14 Like strength is choosing,
01:54:16 regardless of the difficulty, to make improvements.
01:54:19 Strength is even choosing to acknowledge that you do lack.
01:54:23 And accept it and then make a decision what to do with it.
01:54:28 Yeah, but there’s also, there’s a bunch of stuff
01:54:30 that just like you said, it’s what you’re drawn to.
01:54:32 There’s an honesty to just grappling
01:54:34 that it seems more real than anything else you can do.
01:54:38 Sure, well and also.
01:54:39 And that’s where the passion and love can come from.
01:54:41 Yeah, I mean, being in an environment, hopefully,
01:54:43 that is as true as possible, would be a starter.
01:54:47 So, it’s hard to be a bullshit person
01:54:52 when you’re literally trying to tear each other’s arms off.
01:54:55 Yeah.
01:54:56 You know, you really sort of see who somebody is.
01:54:58 I also feel like you really get to see somebody who,
01:55:01 there are a couple instances where you really see
01:55:03 who people are on the mats and in the bedroom.
01:55:07 So, even the aspect of self betterment,
01:55:17 growth along a path.
01:55:19 I mean, hell, that’s part of the divisive capture
01:55:23 for martial arts as a business.
01:55:26 Give you a belt, put a stripe on your belt.
01:55:29 Each of these iterations cost 20 bucks.
01:55:32 So, you know.
01:55:33 But there’s a benefit to that too.
01:55:35 I really enjoyed the progression of belts.
01:55:38 Sure.
01:55:39 You know, a bit of it is OCD or whatever,
01:55:41 but you’re enjoying the recognition, your growth
01:55:44 when you feel, when you’re made to feel,
01:55:46 when I think genuinely you do earn it.
01:55:48 Yeah.
01:55:49 I agree.
01:55:50 I agree.
01:55:51 It makes complete sense to me.
01:55:52 It just, it’s anything that is, has a goodness
01:55:56 in its purity can also have a detriment in its perversion.
01:56:00 So.
01:56:01 And there’s a value to competition.
01:56:04 I’ve gotten some shit in the past for saying this.
01:56:06 I’ve gotten the most value in giving everything I have
01:56:12 to try to win and lose.
01:56:15 So like, I’ve gotten, I remember most of the matches
01:56:18 I’ve lost and I think that’s what I’ve gotten the most
01:56:23 from the sport is losing.
01:56:25 Think about it.
01:56:26 I mean, if you really think about it,
01:56:30 what makes you wanna actually, in detail,
01:56:34 go over what happened?
01:56:36 Oh, it’s the time when you didn’t get what you wanted.
01:56:39 Yeah.
01:56:39 It’s a time when you gave it everything you had
01:56:41 and you came up short.
01:56:42 Right.
01:56:43 Or failed miserably.
01:56:45 Okay, so.
01:56:46 Especially if you’re embarrassed in some way.
01:56:47 Right.
01:56:48 It’s usually the only time people, again, calamity,
01:56:52 is the impetus for them to actually turn around
01:56:54 and go, who the fuck am I?
01:56:55 What am I doing and why am I doing it?
01:56:57 Instead of naturally going, hmm, okay, well I won.
01:57:02 Why?
01:57:03 What was it the cause?
01:57:04 And so I think part of my success is that when I win,
01:57:08 I’m brutal.
01:57:09 When I lose, I’m brutal.
01:57:11 And there is no in between.
01:57:13 So I remember losing the rematch against Noguera.
01:57:22 And I still feel like it was a bullshit call.
01:57:24 I feel like I won that fight.
01:57:25 But my opinion is that, and this even came up,
01:57:30 so one of the coaches in the back was like,
01:57:32 oh, you did great, don’t feel bad, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:57:35 And I go, no, fuck that.
01:57:36 I didn’t finish him.
01:57:38 I allowed the referees to make a judge,
01:57:39 a decision that I think is incorrect and bad,
01:57:42 but that came because I didn’t take him out.
01:57:44 Fuck that, no, no.
01:57:46 He won, he’s gonna get more money,
01:57:48 he’s gonna get more recognition,
01:57:49 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:57:51 I accept all this and it’s not okay.
01:57:53 And I need to, when I get a chance to fight him again,
01:57:57 I gotta figure out how to take this guy out.
01:58:00 I don’t wanna say forever.
01:58:01 I’m not trying to put him six feet underground.
01:58:03 Well, when I fight, yes I am.
01:58:04 But the point being, I need to find a way to,
01:58:09 this is definitive.
01:58:10 You don’t get to say shit about it
01:58:12 because I’m the only one who can stand right now.
01:58:15 That’s the way it’s gotta be.
01:58:16 Anything less than that is not good enough.
01:58:19 And even if I achieve that, then I gotta figure out,
01:58:22 okay, it’s not a given.
01:58:25 How did I get to this point?
01:58:26 How did I make that happen?
01:58:28 Was it simply because of his own mistakes
01:58:32 or was it because of my successful action?
01:58:36 So it’s always self critical.
01:58:38 Always, constantly.
01:58:40 You love movies.
01:58:42 I read this somewhere.
01:58:44 You mentioned Blade Runner is a favorite.
01:58:45 Number one of all time, the final cut.
01:58:47 That’s my go to.
01:58:48 So you would say Blade Runner
01:58:51 is the greatest movie of all time.
01:58:52 It’s one of the greatest movies of all time.
01:58:54 And it is my number.
01:58:55 What’s in the top?
01:58:56 My top five, Blade Runner, final cut.
01:59:01 This is the original Blade Runner.
01:59:03 And I used to own, on tape, the original.
01:59:06 VHS?
01:59:07 The original cut, yeah.
01:59:08 And I had the director’s cut on DVD.
01:59:11 Why Blade Runner, by the way?
01:59:14 What connects you to it?
01:59:15 As a kid, I just thought it was so cool.
01:59:17 There was something about it that really spoke to me.
01:59:18 The whole cyberpunk landscapes
01:59:20 and this guy chasing down rogue androids, replicants,
01:59:26 and all this.
01:59:27 Is it just the entire cyberpunk universe
01:59:31 or is it just robots as well?
01:59:33 No, I mean, the cyberpunk universe is part of it.
01:59:37 On the surface, I’ve always tended towards
01:59:40 dark subject matter.
01:59:42 Things that are of the dark, so to speak,
01:59:45 are things that I’ve always been gravitated towards.
01:59:48 I think maybe part of it is that things that are darker
01:59:51 are more accepting and more upfront with death.
02:00:00 And perhaps, I think, maybe that is what was…
02:00:03 Yeah, somehow more honest, perhaps.
02:00:04 I mean, there’s also the aspect of rebelliousness, usually.
02:00:08 Like, I was never one to wanna just do
02:00:14 what somebody told me to do, you know?
02:00:17 I’m not sitting around trying to always be
02:00:22 such a radical individual that I can’t take orders.
02:00:25 No, in fact, I’m more than willing to take orders
02:00:28 from somebody that I feel is competent and has merit
02:00:32 and reason behind what they’re doing
02:00:34 and makes like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
02:00:36 I’m 100% for it.
02:00:37 Not only can I take orders,
02:00:38 I will help you achieve whatever it is
02:00:40 if I think it’s worthwhile, even at my own expense.
02:00:45 But to get to that point is a rarity.
02:00:49 Like, it’s just not a given.
02:00:51 And so you can even imagine being a grade school teacher
02:00:54 and this kid doesn’t respect you
02:00:55 and he doesn’t really think you’re that smart.
02:00:57 They don’t really appreciate that.
02:01:00 So cyberpunk is number one.
02:01:01 What else is there?
02:01:02 Cyberpunk is kind of number one.
02:01:03 It’s an environment I love, but at the same time,
02:01:05 Conan the Barbarian by John Milius
02:01:07 is one of my favorite films of all time.
02:01:11 And you know, that’s such a pure film in a way.
02:01:15 Like, the motivations are pure.
02:01:17 They’re very easy to follow, but not lacking in depth.
02:01:23 You know, it’s not just explosions and teal and orange.
02:01:28 It’s more on the human condition and I love it.
02:01:33 And it’s shot incredibly well.
02:01:36 It’s got an incredible soundtrack.
02:01:38 Yeah, I fucking love it.
02:01:39 But with Blade Runner also in a deeper sense,
02:01:41 you know, again, the human condition.
02:01:43 You know, you start seeing like, what is being?
02:01:45 What is being human?
02:01:47 You know, how does this relate to if you can make it
02:01:51 and you can tell it what to do,
02:01:52 at what point is it like you should or you shouldn’t?
02:01:56 You know, why do you get to determine what’s alive
02:01:58 and what’s not?
02:01:59 What’s a life that should be allowed to live and what isn’t?
02:02:02 And what would be the strain of being Roy Batty
02:02:09 and seeing all these incredible moments
02:02:12 that with his passing will no longer exist?
02:02:17 Especially if he hasn’t had a chance
02:02:18 to put that flame into another torch, so to speak.
02:02:22 If he hasn’t written them down,
02:02:23 if he hasn’t passed them down to somebody else.
02:02:28 Gone like tears in the rain.
02:02:30 Like tears in the rain, that scene is incredible.
02:02:33 But it’s funny, because those two universes
02:02:35 are very different, Conan and the Barbarian and Cyberpunk.
02:02:38 Is there, that makes me curious about
02:02:40 what else might be in the list at the top.
02:02:43 Well, let me think.
02:02:44 It’s a pretty.
02:02:45 Do you like the Godfather type of universe?
02:02:47 No, no, I mean, I’m sure the Godfather,
02:02:49 I’ve never actually even watched the whole Godfather.
02:02:51 No, but also like, was it Casino, Goodfellas?
02:02:54 Goodfellas is a good movie, but no, that’s not in my top.
02:02:56 It’s a good flick, but it doesn’t really do it for me.
02:03:01 If people really wanna get into this a little more,
02:03:03 I did make a list of 100 of my favorite movies
02:03:07 on my Facebook fan page.
02:03:08 Nice.
02:03:10 Do you remember what like, some of the top.
02:03:12 Oh yeah, like Blazing Saddles is on there,
02:03:14 Rage of the Lost Ark,
02:03:15 Valhalla Rising by Nicholas from Winding Refn,
02:03:22 Maniac by William Lustig.
02:03:25 It’s a 1980 gnarly video nasty horror movie
02:03:31 about a serial killer who murders women and scalps them.
02:03:38 And it’s gnarly as hell and very brutal and very bleak
02:03:41 and very, I mean, it’s the kind of thing
02:03:46 that like a lot of people would have
02:03:47 a real hard time watching.
02:03:49 But one, again, I like things that are dark,
02:03:53 but two, I thought the performances were fantastic
02:03:56 in this film and they really got out,
02:03:58 I think what the underlying thing was,
02:04:00 and it was a guy who was basically just like run amok
02:04:05 by the overbearing mother, Jungian archetype.
02:04:08 And it, she was, she imparted her insanity into him.
02:04:13 And he, but yet there is this aspect you could see
02:04:17 of him wanting to try and actually be able
02:04:19 to be in the world and have love
02:04:22 and have a feminine companionship
02:04:28 to go with his masculine aspect.
02:04:31 But he had no way of understanding
02:04:34 how to really make that happen.
02:04:36 And he had a complete negative connotation to the feminine.
02:04:40 So his struggle with, and there’s a little part
02:04:44 in the movie where he somehow comes across
02:04:48 this model or something, and they actually,
02:04:52 he starts to feel like maybe he might be able
02:04:56 to actually have a relationship with somebody
02:04:58 and it goes somewhere.
02:04:59 But yeah, even the Elijah Wood remake I felt was
02:05:04 really well done and captured most of the essence
02:05:06 of what the movie was about.
02:05:07 But I still feel like the original
02:05:09 by William Lustig is the best.
02:05:12 What’s the greatest love movie of all time?
02:05:16 Greatest love movie of all time.
02:05:18 So like something where love is, I mean,
02:05:20 I suppose love underlies most of these movies,
02:05:22 and especially like The Dark.
02:05:23 I mean hell, Takashi Miike’s films are all about family
02:05:27 of all things, as bonkers as those movies are.
02:05:30 They, the general theme is family almost entirely
02:05:34 in all of his films.
02:05:36 Yeah, there’s very, I mean, even you can argue later on.
02:05:39 Yeah, it’s everywhere.
02:05:41 Greatest love film of all time.
02:05:45 That’s, I mean, is Excalibur a film about love?
02:05:49 What’s Excalibur about?
02:05:51 King Arthur.
02:05:53 Excalibur is about Arthur becoming king of the Britains
02:05:57 and his love of his country and his love of Guinevere.
02:06:01 But eventually, yeah, it becomes more of about
02:06:06 the necessity for the king to love,
02:06:10 to hold Excalibur, to stay, to realize that while,
02:06:16 if you’re the king, you can love your wife
02:06:19 and you can love your best friend,
02:06:21 and they may fuck each other behind your back
02:06:25 and as they fall in love too.
02:06:27 But at the end of the day, your responsibility,
02:06:29 your love has to be to the country and everyone else first
02:06:33 and not your own personal wants,
02:06:36 which, you know, made a much more interesting story
02:06:40 when you have Carmen Berenna and oh, oh, what is that one?
02:06:46 It’s a German opera, but you know, and horses and slow mo
02:06:50 and sword fights and an epic death scene
02:06:53 between Arthur and his son.
02:06:56 Okay, now I definitely have to watch it
02:06:58 and Evan watched it and embarrassed me.
02:07:01 It is John Boorman’s second film in Hollywood,
02:07:05 his first one being Point Blank with Lee Marvin,
02:07:07 which is also on top, one of the upper echelon movies
02:07:10 on my list, derived from a book called The Outfit by,
02:07:19 what is his name?
02:07:21 I forget, but Darwin Cook, the comic illustrator,
02:07:25 Donald Westlake wrote, so Darwin Cook does an amazing
02:07:28 comic book send up of Darwin Cook’s novels
02:07:31 and they are fucking incredible.
02:07:33 So anyways, but the Point Blank with Lee Marvin,
02:07:38 you know, it’s a man driven by purpose, revenge,
02:07:43 but also by like really pure motivations.
02:07:46 He wants his money, he was betrayed and he wants his cash
02:07:52 because this is what he agreed to do the thing for
02:07:54 and this is, which also is part of the reason
02:07:56 why I like No Country for Old Men so much,
02:07:58 which I felt was a great movie, even better book,
02:08:02 but I remember talking to my friend and I go,
02:08:04 you know, Anton Chigurh is the most pure human being
02:08:08 in that whole book.
02:08:09 Well, that guy’s the villain.
02:08:11 I go, ha ha, is he evil?
02:08:14 He’s the one, he lies to no one.
02:08:17 He does everything he says he will do.
02:08:19 He always follows his word and on the rare occasion,
02:08:22 he allows fate to make a decision as he figures like,
02:08:25 well, whatever all led us to here will lead us
02:08:29 one way or the other and if we’re at this crossroads,
02:08:32 what, how is there any better or worse way
02:08:34 than to do it over a coin flip?
02:08:36 And so that whole scene where the guy’s going,
02:08:39 well, what am I putting up?
02:08:40 And he goes, everything, you’ve been putting it up
02:08:43 every day of your life and that’s true.
02:08:45 Everything we do is a decision, is a calling, is a choice.
02:08:50 And then it bummed me out that they reduced
02:08:55 the last interaction between Chigurh
02:08:57 and What’s His Face’s wife and he finally finds her
02:09:01 and she’s like, you don’t have to do this.
02:09:03 I mean, he’s like, yes, yes, I do.
02:09:05 This is the way it is.
02:09:06 You can think that your life could’ve turned out
02:09:08 any sort of way, you could’ve done this,
02:09:09 you could’ve done that, but the reality is
02:09:11 this is the way your life is
02:09:11 and it’s the way it was always going to be.
02:09:14 You know, the fact that I’m here is the end of it
02:09:17 and that’s that.
02:09:18 Yeah, it’s funny, if you’re honest, this with dark movies
02:09:21 reveal that the villains are the purest of humans
02:09:26 and can teach us the most profound lessons
02:09:30 and that’s certainly an example of it.
02:09:32 What do you think the big ridiculous
02:09:34 last philosophical question, what do you think
02:09:36 is the meaning of this whole thing we’ve got going on
02:09:39 of life and existence on Earth from your individual
02:09:42 perspective but the entirety of the human species?
02:09:45 Life, the universe and everything?
02:09:48 Yeah.
02:09:50 Don’t.
02:09:51 Oh.
02:09:56 We could just leave it at that.
02:09:58 You knew exactly where I was going.
02:09:59 I love it.
02:10:00 Josh, I love you very much.
02:10:01 You’ve been a huge inspiration.
02:10:03 I have a friend who she said,
02:10:07 do you know Lex Friedman?
02:10:08 Have you gone on Lex’s content?
02:10:09 And I go, yes, I know Lex Friedman is.
02:10:11 I’ve sadly been way too long in contact
02:10:15 without making it happen for too long
02:10:17 and yes, I will 100%, I even cut a shirt
02:10:21 at the beginning of the pandemic
02:10:23 to make my own little mask at one point
02:10:25 due to the Lex process and hello, I was like,
02:10:30 I can’t really hear you but I’m demonstrating.
02:10:33 Just let’s see it through but this has been a blast.
02:10:36 And next time, next time let’s drink
02:10:39 some of the Warbringer whiskey.
02:10:41 I will bring some Warmaster.
02:10:43 I wasn’t sure if you were, if you imbibed at all in spirits.
02:10:47 100%, it felt a little weird to do it early on
02:10:51 in the morning, especially because I’m flying out there.
02:10:54 Does it though?
02:10:54 I mean, I’ve had some wonderful morning whiskey at times.
02:10:57 It, now that you’ve mentioned it, it doesn’t at all.
02:11:00 So next time let’s make sure what Joe Organ calls
02:11:03 the adult beverages, let’s make sure we indulge.
02:11:08 I have zero reservations for doing such a thing.
02:11:11 I’m into it.
02:11:12 Josh, thanks for talking to me.
02:11:14 My pleasure.
02:11:15 Thanks for listening to this conversation
02:11:17 with Josh Barnett and thank you to our sponsors.
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02:11:32 and to support this podcast.
02:11:34 And now let me leave you with some words
02:11:36 from Sun Tzu in the art of war.
02:11:39 The Supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy
02:11:42 without fighting.
02:11:44 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.