Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
john donahue widely acknowledged
as one of the greatest coaches and minds
in the martial arts world
having coached many champions in jiu
jitsu submission grappling and
mma including gordon ryan gary tonin
nick rodriguez craig jones nikki ryan
chris weidman and george saint-pierre
quick mention of our sponsors onnet
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indeed and lynnode check them out in the
description to support this podcast
as a side note let me say that john is a
scholar of not just jiu jitsu
but judo wrestling muay thai boxing
mma and outside of that topics of
history psychology
philosophy and even artificial
intelligence
as you'll hear in this conversation
after this chat
i started to entertain the possibility
of returning back to competition as a
black belt
maybe even training with john and his
team for a few weeks
leading up to the competition for a
recreational practitioner such as myself
the value of training and competing in
jiu jitsu is that it is one of the best
ways to get humbled
to me keeping the ego in check is
essential
for a productive and happy life this
is the lex friedman podcast and here is
my conversation
with john donahue are you afraid of
death
let's start with an easy question
there's no warm-up that's
it they're jumping jacks
let's uh let's break that down into two
questions
um i'm a human being and like any human
being
i'm biologically programmed to be
terrified of death
every physical element in our bodies
is designed to keep us away from death
i'm no different from anyone else in
that regard
if you throw me from the top of the
entire state building
i'm gonna scream all the way down to the
concrete um if you wave a
loaded firearm in my face i'm gonna
flinch away in horror the same way
anyone else would um so
in that first sense of are you afraid of
death
uh my my body is
terrified of injury leading to death the
same way
in any other human being would so when
death is imminent
there's a terror that goes through the
same adrenaline dumps that you would go
through
um uh but on the other hand you're also
asking a much deeper question which is
presumably are you afraid of
non-existence what comes after
your physical death and that's the more
interesting question um
no uh i should start
right uh by by by scene from from the
start i
i'm a materialist i don't believe that
we have an immortal soul i don't believe
there's a life
after our physical death um in this
sense from someone who
starts from that point of view you have
to understand that
everyone has two deaths
we always talk about our death as though
there was only one
but we all have two deaths there was a
time before you were born
when you were dead
you weren't afraid of that period of
non-existence
you don't even think about it so why
would you be afraid
of your second period of non-existence
you came from non-existence
you're going to go back into it you
weren't afraid of the first
why are you somehow afraid of the second
so it doesn't really make sense to me
as to why people would be afraid of
non-existence you dealt with it fine the
first time
um deal with it the second time but your
mind didn't exist
for the first death and it won't exist
after you die either
but it does exist now enough to
comprehend that there's this
thing that you know nothing about that's
coming which is non-existent actually
you do know about it because you know
what it was like before you were born
there was just nothing
every every every time you go to sleep
at night you get a sneak preview of
death
it's just this kind of
nothing happens you wake up in the
morning you're alive again
but it's not about the sleeping it's
about the falling asleep
and every night when you fall asleep
you assume you're going to wake up here
you know
you're not waking up and the knowledge
is a whole step from that
to the idea of fearing it i'm fully
aware that there's going to be a
time i don't wake up but are you going
to be afraid of it is there some mortal
terror you have of this no you didn't
have it before
you don't have it when you sleep um
going from
the fact that you know you won't wake up
to terror is
two different things that's an extra
step and at that point you're making a
choice at that
at that point what about what some
people
in our in this context we might call
like the third death which
is when um
everybody forgets the entirety of
consciousness in the universe forgets
that you've ever existed that john
donahue
ever existed so it's almost like a
cosmic death it's like
everything goes yeah not not just
i would say it's like knowledge the
history books forget about who you are
because the history books this is
inevitable by the way we're all
very very small players in a very big
game and
inevitably we're all going to go at some
point
yeah but doesn't so you're it's it's
disappointing of course like
it's um but but it's not even it would
be arrogance to say
um i'm disappointed in the idea that i
will disappear but there's this far
greater things than me that will
disappear i mean it
it's crushing to think that
there's going to come a time when no one
will ever hear beethoven's symphonies
again that
the mysteries of the pharaohs will be
lost and no one will even comprehend
they once existed like
humanity has come up with so many
amazing things over
its existence and to think that one day
this is just all happening on a tiny
speck in a distant corner of a very
small
galaxy and among millions of galaxies
that
this is all for nothing okay i can
understand there's a kind of dread that
comes with this
um uh but there's also a sense in which
the moment you're born and the moment
you can think about these things you
know this is your
inevitable fate is it so inevitable so
if we
look at we're in austin and there's a
guy named elon musk
and he's hoping in fact that is the
drive behind many of his passions
is the human beings becoming
multi-planetary species
and expanding out exploring and
colonizing
the solar system the galaxy and maybe
the rest of the universe
is that something that fills you with
excitement uh it's
as a project it's very exciting i um
the whole i mean we all grew up with
science fiction the idea of exploration
the same way
uh human beings in earlier centuries
were thrilled with the idea of
discovering a new world you know america
or
some other part of the world that they
sailed to and come back
but now instead of sailing oceans you're
sailing solar systems and
ultimately even further um so of course
that's exciting
but as far as relieving us from
non-existence it's just
plain a delaying game because ultimately
even
the universe itself if the laws of
thermodynamics are correct will
ultimately die of course we might not
understand
most of the physics and how
the universe functions you said laws of
thermodynamics but maybe that's just a
tiny little
fraction of what the universe actually
is maybe there's multiple dimensions
maybe
maybe there's multiple universes maybe
the entirety of this experience
you know there's guys like donald
hoffman i think that all of this is just
an illusion that we don't
like human cognition and perception
constructs a whole it's like a video
game it would construct that's very
distant from the actual reality
and maybe one day we'll understand that
reality maybe it'll be like the matrix
kind of thing
so there's a lot of different
possibilities here and there's also
philosopher
named ernest becker i don't know if you
know that is he wrote
denial of death and his idea he
disagrees with you but he's dead now
is is that he thinks that the terror of
death
the terror of the knowledge that we're
going to die
is within all of us and is in fact the
driver behind
most of the creativity that we do
exploring out into the universe
but also you becoming one of the great
scholars of the martial arts the
philosophers
of fighting is because you're actually
terrified of death
and you want you want to somehow
permeate
like your knowledge your ideas your
essence to permeate
human civilization so that even when
your
body dies you live on
i would agree with him and so far as uh
death
is the single greatest motivator for
action
but going beyond that and saying it's
somehow terrifying
that's that's an extra step on his part
um and not everyone's going to follow
him on that step
i do believe that death is
the single most important element in
life
that gives value to our days if you
think for example of a situation where
a god came to you and gave you
immortality
life would be very very different for
you uh
you're a talented research scientist
you work to a schedule why because
ultimately you know your life is finite
and actually very finite
and could be even more so if fate plays
its hand and you
die an early death or what have you we
never know what's going to happen
tomorrow
as such we get work done
as soon as we can the moment you gain
immortality
you can always put every project off you
can always say
i don't need to do this today because i
can do it
four centuries from now and as you
extend
artificially a human life the motivation
to get things done here and now
and work industriously and and excel
fades away because you can always come
back to the idea that you can do this in
the future
and so what gives value to our days is
ultimately death and value
it's not the only form of the reason
behind value but a huge part of what we
consider value is scarcity and death
gives us scarcity of days
and is probably the single greatest
motivator for
almost every action we partake in it's
kind of tragic and
beautiful that what
what makes things amazing is that they
end
yeah i think it would actually be a
terrible burden to be
immortal you would um
life would be in many ways very hollow
and meaningless i think
people talk about death taking away the
meaning of life
but i think immortality would have a
very similar effect in a different
direction
so given this short life
we could think about jiu jitsu we can
think about any kind of pursuit
what do you think makes a great life
is it the highest
peak of achievement you know you think
about like an olympic gold medal
the highest level of performance or is
it
the longevity of performance of doing
many amazing
things and doing it for a long time i
think the latter
is kind of what we talk about in at
least american society
you know we want people to be healthy
balanced
perform well for a long time and then
there's
maybe like the gladiator
ethic which is the highest peak is what
defines
you asked an initial question which what
makes a great life
but then pointed towards two options
one of longevity versus are there a
degree of difficulty there's got to be a
lot more than that shortly
i mean think about um first of all
we have to understand from the start
there's never going to be an agreed-upon
set of criteria for this is a great life
from all perspective
uh if you look from the perspective of
say machiavelli
then stalin lived a great life he was
highly successful at what he did he
started from nothing so
the degree of difficulty and what he did
was extraordinarily high
he had massive impact upon world history
he oversaw the defeat of almost all of
his major enemies
he lived to old age and died of natural
causes
so from machiavelli's point of view he
had a great life
if you ask the ukrainian farmer in the
1930s whether he lived a great life you
get a very different answer
so everything's going to come from what
perspective you
you begin with this you're going to look
out at the world with a given point of
view and you're going to make your
judgments was this a great life or was
this a terrible life
um going back to your point you were
actually
i think focusing the question on on more
in terms of uh great single performances
versus longevity performances yes
presumably this isn't really a question
about uh
what makes a great life then because
there's so much more than
that to a great life i don't know i'm
going to push back on that so
i think their parallels are very much
closer than you're making them seem
i think let's compare stalin stalin is
an example
of somebody who held power considered by
many to be one of the most powerful men
ever he held power for 30 years
so that's what i'm referring to
longevity and then there's a few people
i have to i wish my knowledge of history
was better
but people who fought a few great
battles
and they did not maintain power but
that's this contrast here for example
alexander the great yes who died at 33
um from probably unnatural causes
um uh had around
four to five truly defining battles
in his life which uh
responsible for the for the lion's share
of of his achievements
and burned very bright but didn't burn
long
um stalin on the other hand started from
nothing and quietly methodically worked
his way
through the revolutionary phase and uh
gained increasing amounts of power
and as he said um went all the way to
the end of her
uh of his career um yeah there's there's
definitely something to be said for
for longevity um
but as to which one is greater than the
other you can't
give a a definition or um
a set of criteria which will
definitively say this is better than
that
but when you look ultimately we look at
alexander as great but in a different
way and we look at stalin
i didn't think many people would say sam
was a great person but from the
machiavellian point of view
he would say he was great also
but when you think about beautiful
creations
done by human beings in the space of
say martial arts in the space of sport
what inspires you the peak of
performance i i see where you're coming
from like
it's a great question um for me it
always comes down to
degree of difficulty but things are
difficult in different ways
okay um a single flawless
performance in youth is still
that wins a gold medal let's say for
example um
uh nadia komenichi won the olympic gold
medal in gymnastics the first person
ever to get a perfect score
um if she had disappeared after that we
would still remember that as
an incredible moment and the degree of
difficulty to
to get a perfect score in olympic
gymnastics is
just off the charts um and contrast that
with someone who went to
four olympics and got four silver medals
i mean they're both
incredible achievements they're just
different
the the attributes that lead to
longevity um
typically tend to conflict with the
attributes that bring
a powerful single performance one is all
about
focus on on a particular event the other
is
uh on spreading your resources over time
both that present tremendous
difficulties
there's no need to say one is better
than the other there's also just
for me personally the stories of the
of somebody who truly struggled are
are the most powerful i know a bunch of
people don't necessarily agree because
you said perfection
perfection is kind of the antithesis of
struggle
but i look at somebody okay my own life
somebody i
i'm a fan oh i'm a fan of everybody i'm
a huge fan of yours i'm trying not to be
nervous here but
uh somebody i'm a fan of in the judo
world is travis stevens
he's a remarkable fella by the way a
remarkable human being
insane in the best kinds of ways i think
i started judo i
i really started martial arts i have
wrestled if you consider those martial
arts that's
my that's been in my blood i'm russian
so
but beyond that you know the the whole
pajama thing we wear the ghee
i started by watching travis in 2008
olympics
was that accidental did you know travis
prior to watching no no
i just tuned in now that's an unusual
choice it was just random you just tuned
in and you saw travis stevens
i tuned into the olympics and i was
wondering what judo is
and then s i started watch
we're we're all proud of our countries
and so on so i started watching
he was i think the only american
in the olympics for judo uh maybe the
so this kayla harrison was 2012. and
ronda was there too so i watched rhonda
and travis
but obviously sort of i was i was
focused on somebody who also weighed the
same as i did so there was a kind of
i think 81 kilograms so there's a
connection
but also there's an intensity to him
like he would get
like angry at his own failures and he
would just refuse to quit
it's that kind of dan gable mentality i
just
that was inspiring to me that he's the
underdog and the way people talk about
him
the commentators that it was an unlikely
person to do well
right and i they the fu attitude
behind that saying no i'm gonna still
win gold
obviously he didn't do well in 2008 but
that
was the that was somehow inspiring and
i just remember he pulled me in but then
i started to see this
sport i guess you can call it
of effortlessly
dominating your opponent and like
throwing
because i in to me wrestling was like a
grind
you kind of control you slowly just
break your opponent
the idea that you could with like a foot
sweep
was fascinating to me that just because
of timing
you can take these like monsters giant
people
like incredible athletes and just smash
them
with it it just doesn't there was no
struggle to it it was always like a look
of surprise judo
dominance in judo has a look like the
other person is like what
what just happened yes this is very
different from wrestling it's built into
the rule structure too the whole idea of
an epon of a
match being over in an instant and um
that creates a a thrilling spectator
sport because
you can as you say with usherwise or the
footsweeps
you can take someone out who's heavily
favored
and if you're not judo is the most
unforgiving of all the grappling sports
you can if you have a lapse of
concentration for half a second
it's done it's over um if those guys get
a grip on each other
any one of them can throw the other the
the idea
you know uh when you see someone like um
nomura who won three olympic gold medals
to
to win across three olympics and that's
an incredible achievement given
how many ways there are to lose in the
standing position in judo and how
unforgiving it is as a sport it shows an
incredible level of dominance
i think when i was i was also introduced
at that time
to the idea jessica judo i think in
jiu-jitsu is the same
a lot of sports is probably the same is
there's ways to win that include
kind of um if i were to use a bad
term stalling which is like use strategy
to slow down
to destroy all the weapons your opponent
has and just to wait it out
to sort of break your opponent by
yeah shutting down all their weapons but
not using any of your own
yes and now travis was always going for
he's off of course really good at
gripping and con to that whole game but
he was going for the big throws
and he was almost getting frustrated uh
by
a lot of the opponents i remember uh
ola bishop i think yes uh from germany
from germany very talented
very incredible i know he's very good at
doing big throws and he's incredible
judoka but
he was also incredible at just
frustrating his opponents with like
gripping and strategy and so on
and i just remember feeling the pain of
this person
like travis who went through just he
broke like every part of his body he
went through so many injuries
just this person who dedicated his
entire life
to this moment in 2008 and then 2012 and
in 2016 just ever gave everything you
could see it on his face
that you know his weapons are being shut
down
and he's still pushing forward he's
still with that both the frustration
and the power i mean the the the kind of
throw he does
is the his his main one i think is the
standing
was called tsunagi keep on saying i can
hit pause
that was that was the other thing is
like the techniques he used
was the these big throws that
there's something to me about the
synagogue i fell in love with that throw
uh that's my become my main throw
standing sanagi
that is like why do why do you favor the
standing variation because of the
amplitude
you get a more powerful yeah power
it's like are you a fan of koga yes
that's so that's why
travis so koga and travis opened up
my uh travis uses the same gripping
patterns for saying i guess
all the same and the way he uses his
hips and turns
and i remember like going to my judo
club and other judo clubs and
ask and they're all saying this is the
wrong way to do it
the way travis does is the wrong way to
do it and i remember like i've always
been amazed by this by the way
i don't mean to cut you off but i i
could literally
fill 20 hours of reproductions of people
who will tell me that
either my students or other great world
champions
um are doing things wrong yeah and
i'm i'm looking at them and i'm like
who would i rather trust here in in
their judgment
koga who was one of the greatest
throwers
of all time or you
[Laughter]
a recreational guy who couldn't throw my
grandmother yes
um uh i'm supposed to take your word
over his well say don't listen to what
people say
i'm going to give you a piece of advice
here watch what the best people
do okay that's how you get
superior athletic performance i'm going
to say that again
don't listen to what people say watch
what they do
particularly under the stress of high
level competition because that's when
you see their real game
what they really do under pressure okay
and if you can emulate that
you're going to be very successful i
guess what i was frustrated with
to your point is that the argument
against koga is
what he has a very specific body type
and he figured out something that worked
for him
thus the statement is that might not be
applicable to you or to the general
public of
of uh judo players that want to succeed
that by the way at the shallow level
might be true might be true the point is
there might be a body of knowledge
that's yet to be discovered and explored
that koga opened up that i wanted to
understand
why his technique worked
it made no sense to me that with a
single foot like the way you turn the
hip
the single foot that steps in why does
that work
because it was actually very difficult
to make work uh for me as a
white belt in the very beginning it
doesn't make sense
like people just they don't they don't
get loaded up onto your hip
anyway for people don't watch koga
highlights watch travis stevens
highlights
but the the the details of the technique
don't make sense
but when mastered that it feels like
there's something fundamental there that
hasn't been explored yet
it's like koga and travis made me think
that we don't know most of the body
mechanics involved
in dominance in judo like we just kind
of found a few pockets
that work really well the ichimoda
there's these different throws
also i wonder if there's like totally
cool new things that we haven't
discovered
and that's saying i gave a little peek
because there's very few people
that i'm aware of that do it the way
travis and koga did
may i ask you a question yes um
the choice of standing sanagi um i i
should
uh say this for you for your listeners
they're probably thinking what the hell
are these two guys talking about
um uh sanagi is one of the more high
percentage throws in the olympic sport
of judah
um probably uh
uchimata is probably number one and
variations of sanagi would be
in the top five for sure um the basic
choice you have
in modern competition is the more
difficult standing
where you literally are up on your feet
and you perform
a shoulder throw that takes your
opponent over from a full
standing position the most popular form
of synagi and modern competition by a
landslide is not the standing version
it's a drop saying argue where you go
down to your knees um
this means you have a much easier time
getting underneath your opponent's
center of gravity the defining feature
of any synagogue
is getting underneath your opponent's
center of gravity and lifting them that
ceo
literally means to to lift and carry
why did you choose the more difficult
version what was your motivation
you know you're a smart kid you know
right from the start
that for every standing sanagi there's
20 drops and argues in modern
competition one is obviously more high
percentage
one obviously works for a wider variety
of body types
uh the number of people who are
successful with standing sanagi is
dramatically lower
and it appears to be a move which is
completely absent in the heavyweight
divisions
and rarely seen in the lightweight
divisions
why what was the motivation why did you
willingly adopt the less high percentage
over the this would be very interesting
percentage i i
i i would love you to break it apart
because um
i apply the same kind of thinking to
basically everything i mentioned you
offline there's these boston dynamics
spot robots when i first met spot i
found love
i don't understand what exactly but
there's magic there and i just got
excited by it
and that met that fire burns i want to
work these robots i want to work with
robots
i want to i felt like there's something
special there that
i could build something interesting with
create something interesting with
and the same with with the same standing
sanagi
from koga and travis i just fell in love
with that technique just even watching i
didn't even know what the hell to do
with it
was it aesthetic it's the standing scene
i guess more beautiful in execution
there's no
engine in in my own
let's we're talking about love here
right in my own
definition of aesthetic yes it's not
just beauty because you could argue
there's more elegance sort of ichimata
is very beautiful and effortless
i love i love something about the
dominance of it
i love the idea in sport
of two people that are the best in the
world
and one of them dominating the other
and uh to me the standing say nagi
you're lifted off your feet
and especially when it's done perfectly
and with really strong resistance from
the other
person it results in a big slam
and that was like beautiful to me that's
the uh alexander carell and like
big pickups i love that it's interesting
though
it's you're correct and so far as you
you're not just going with
aesthetic and the sense of beauty but
also
but you are making uh as it were value
judgments
yes about the throw and that's
fascinating to me
um because there's two
elements to any grappling sport i've
always i'm always
um insistent upon the idea that jujitsu
is both an art
and a science okay it has scientific
elements insofar as it
works according to the laws of physics
and lever and fulcrum et cetera et
cetera
um but it also has
an aesthetic element and so far as
you're making choices
with technique you're expressing who you
are as a person you have
10 000 different variations of moves you
could use but you're specifically
choosing these
that's an element of choice and
self-expression on your part and insofar
as that is true
combat sports are not just a size but
they're also an art
so most combat sports have this sense
which they
have the features of both an art and a
science and
um it's not just about
high percentage in in your case i mean
me personally i'm obsessed with
percentages what what are the ways to
make signs yeah
but that's also choices involved yeah
but um but there is an
undeniably aesthetic element
to martial arts where you as it were
express
who you are as a person in terms of the
techniques you're ultimately going to
choose
does that get in the way do you allow
yourself to enjoy the aesthetic beauty
of a technique
of course yeah when i when martial arts
have done well
it's the most beautiful sport in the
world okay when it's done poorly it's
the ugliest
but but
a beautifully applied submission holder
perfect throw a
a superbly set up takedown are among the
most difficult
techniques to execute in all of sports
and when they're done well they're magic
to observe
but do you uh prefer certain techniques
over others because of their
like for example i'll tell you for me
chokes
of all sorts with the ghee without the
ghee probably with the geese the most
beautiful to me personally
i i value them above all others um
people mostly associate myself and my
students with leg locking
they're usually rather surprised to
learn that i actually value
strangleholds far above
leg logs um but
not for aesthetic reasons for
effectiveness we can talk about that
later a few wish
well let's step back sorry we drifted
awfully far off topic man
this is with i think this is beautiful
uh
we're drifting along the river of uh
life and martial arts
can you explain the fundamentals of jiu
jitsu yes
if i couldn't i wouldn't be much of a
coach um
jiu-jitsu is an art and science
which looks to use a combination of
tactical
and mechanical advantage to focus
a very high percentage of my strength
against a very
low percentage of my opponent's strength
at a critical point
on their body such that if i were to
exert my strength upon that critical
point
they could no longer continue to fight
well that's about weapons and defenses
but then is there something more to be
said about the set of tools
that are that we're talking about that's
where the art comes in
because ultimately you have a set of
choices and those choices that you make
will be an act of self-expression on
your part
some will prefer this some will prefer
that
that's where you come in as an
individual that's an overall definition
of jiu jitsu
of being a set of choices
that where you're
using the things you're powerful in
versus
the things your opponent is weak in no
i was only talking about percentages of
body strength if i have
for example let's say um we have two
athletes athlete a and athlete b
athlete a has 100 units of strength
however we define that overall
athlete b has 50. okay so ostensibly
athlete a is twice as strong as athlete
b
but athlete b can maneuver his body
into a set of positions focused around a
critical point
of his opponent's body where he can
apply
40 units of strength out of his total of
50.
his opponent can only defend with 20
units of strength out of his total
of 100 you have now completely reversed
the strength discrepancy originally
athlete a was twice as strong as b
now on that one localized point the knee
the elbow the neck
b is now twice as strong as a under
those circumstances
b should win i guess what i'm trying to
get at by the way that's really
beautifully said
is what you just said could be applied
to
other games other battles it could be
applied to the game of chess
uh it could be applied to war most
obviously in war
i think about for example um
the american strategic bombing campaign
in world war ii
the eighth army air force was tasked
with the idea of destroying german
industry
did they attack all of german industry
of course not
that would be stupid they attacked the
ball bearing industry
why because almost all
of modern machines require ball bearings
in order to operate
in order for the mechanical interfaces
of machines to operate you have to
reduce friction it's done through ball
bearings
if you knocked out one tiny component
of german industry the ball bearing
industry the rest of it
couldn't operate so too with the human
body i didn't have to fight your whole
body
i just have to fight your left knee if i
can break your left knee the rest of
your body is irrelevant to me
but then isn't the art of jiu jitsu
discovering the the left knee
the discovering the weak points
you know a huge part of jiu-jitsu is
understanding the weak strengths and
weaknesses of the human body
there's parts of the human body that are
shockingly robust
and there are other parts that are
shockingly vulnerable the major joints
and of course the most vulnerable of all
the unprotected neck
so if we take the something i'm not
familiar with but i was incredibly
impressed by is the body lock
that i saw um
nick rodriguez nick rodriguez used last
time a few weeks ago
but then i also got to hang out with
craig jones who
also has a very good body loan so that
that was uh i don't know if this body
lock applies to all positions but i was
seeing it from when craig is uh
on top of your opponent
and trying to pass the go or passing the
guard use the body lock as a controlling
position
the the principle behind it is that it
shuts down
as you've spoken about it shuts down
the weapons of a very strong opponent
that's absolutely correct in the case of
um
guard possession what makes god position
dangerous what makes someone a powerful
guard player
is the movement of their hips forward
and backward and side to side
body locking is designed to shut down
that movement
and does a very fine job of it you'll
see all of my students accelerate gordon
ryan is probably the single best body
dog guard passer i've ever seen
nikki ryan is outstanding with it nick
rodriguez is very good
craig jones is outstanding all of my
students use this for a very simple
reason
understand what is the central problem
of shutting down a
dangerous guard player it's his hips
that's what makes him a dangerous leg
locker you go up against a dangerous leg
lock him
body lock guard pass single best way to
shut down
most of his entries um
we're all strong in leglogs so in our
gym
you gotta control the hips as soon as
possible these can otherwise can be a
very difficult thing to avoid
leg entanglements as you go to parts and
across the board my students excel in in
uh
in body lock guard passing they
understand what's the most dangerous
feature their opponent has the lateral
movement of their hips
what's the single best way to stop that
body lock and then
work from there so if this asymmetry of
power
is fundamental to jiu jitsu how do you
discover that how do you
how did you discover the body life that
as a
as one of many methodologies of
achieving this asymmetry
um it would be an overstatement to say
we discovered the body line right body
law passing has been around
longer than we've been around um but
what i would say is that
in a room full of dangerous leg lockers
you've got to have a way to shut down
the hips
and so once we started using body locks
we saw that was one
excellent way to get around that problem
as with all development it comes from
trial and error
you will often see people teach the
technique to a certain level and
you see the teaching you know there's a
lot of inadequacies there
and that doesn't cover a lot of the
problems that we're encountering
and so trial and error is the single
most important part of the development
trial and error in um in the training
room amongst ourselves
in in hard training or no it never
begins with hard training
or everything techniques are born the
same way we're born
weak and in need of nutrition
uh you have to like this build them up
organically like children
and you start with minimal resistance
and you make progress over time
when you first go to the gym do you put
500 pounds on the bench press and try to
bench press it no you'll be killed
you start off with the bar you build
over time and then one day
five years from now perhaps you really
are lifting 500 pounds
but only a four would attempt that on
their first attempt
and they're born like children in your
mind first like
uh there's a spark of another one it's
like scientific development
on a subject matter which is
intrinsically simpler
okay there's a sense in which
naive and overly simplistic assessments
of scientific method
may not work well at advanced levels of
science but they work damn well in the
training room with jiu-jitsu
whether the subject matter is inherently
simpler than it is in research science
and as a result
there'll be a spark you'll see something
right and there's possibilities there
okay
let's let's puzzle this out let's work
with this
and uh you run into a lot of failures
this
you know you've suddenly been oh man if
i put my hip this way this works really
well then suddenly you try and spare and
you get caught in a simple alma plata
and you know okay that didn't work as
well as i thought
and then you look to rectify things if
things go on promising research
directions you keep them
if not you discard them well it's funny
you say science
it feels like more like art there's
somebody i really admire
that talks about this kind of ideas
johnny i from apple
he's the lead designer he recently left
but he was the designer
behind most of the products we know and
loved from apple
and when you say designer be more
precise what exactly was he
was he working on in apple the iphone
which which parts of the iphone did he
would like the
entirety of it was he a leader of a
research
team or was he the person personally
responsible for their development
he's kind of i would say
very similar to your position
he wasn't necessarily the last the
person executing the fine
the manufacturer right yeah of course
but there's the
uh he's somebody that's very hands-on
and it's it's like okay so he worked
obviously extremely close to steve jobs
steve jobs has this idea
we should have a computer that's as thin
as a sheet of paper
and then you start to play with ideas of
like what does that actually look like
the reason i bring it up is because he
talked about
he had these ideas that he would not
tell steve
because he he talked about in the same
exact language as
you're saying is there's like like a
little baby
that it's very fragile
it it needs time to grow absolutely and
then steve jobs would
often roll in was too ruthless you're
too ruthless
this is he would destroy ideas because
uh
johnny ive and the team
didn't have actually good responses to
the criticism at first
because when they're babies you can't
defend the baby
uh but you needed time to develop you
need to sleep on it you need to rethink
it to do dream
things and all those kinds of things
it's fascinating you say this lex
because this is
actually the entire history of
scientific development is
literally the story of the juxtaposition
between the need
to protect and nurture new theories
versus the need to rigorously test them
with
with harsh testing that either verifies
them or falsifies them
and learning to find a satisfactory
compromise between those two
is a very very difficult thing when you
look at the
history of science you will see that
there's some pretty damn chaotic moments
anytime there's major theory change
where
all kinds of apparently um
uh undesirable tricks they use to
protect
certain theories with ad hoc hypotheses
etc etc
and uh and ultimately
only time and
success over time will justify a theory
there's usually a period where
when one theory goes in to replace
another there's
something of a battle between competing
uh groups of scientists some of whom
advocate theory a some who advocate
theory b
they often use seemingly
unscrupulous methods to protect or
attack another person's theory they dig
for proofs
and usually some period of time has to
go by
sometimes in some cases it simply
involved older scientists protecting an
initial theory dying off
and new scientists just
replacing them with numbers and
this is a common common theme and the
same applies in jujitsu you know
so many times especially when i first
started working with leglocks i would
show
things i had worked on to
even world champion black belts they
would try it once or twice
and fail be like it doesn't work and
we're like
you tried it once on it on another guy
who's also a world champion who
has a strong ability to resist it and
that's it no more it doesn't work and
then
uh five years later they would see my
students
finishing world champions with it and in
some cases finishing the very people
who said that the technique would never
work
i mean if there was ever a refutation of
a statement that that's a pretty clear
example
um and there has to be a sense in which
you you can't be too forgiving you have
to test hypotheses
but on the other hand you can't be too
ruthless either you have to
look for uh promise and and uh
my advice is start slow like again
the analogy of lifting weights you don't
lift the heaviest weights on your first
day you build up
you work progressively over time um
now you also have to have some common
sense here you can't be too forgiving to
a technique if it's repeatedly failing
then and good people have tried it and
multiple good people have tried and it's
just not working out then okay
it's time to dismiss it but don't be too
quick you know
is this where your idea of uh training
with lower
belts yeah quite a bit comes from yeah
i've actually just as a side comment and
maybe you can
elaborate i the the place
the gym uh balance studios with the phil
and rick mcglarees where i got my black
belt where i grew up as a jiu jitsu
person in philadelphia
they have a huge number of black belts
but they have a huge number of
all other ranks and the way they picked
sparring partners people you train with
is very ad hoc
it's very loose it's very one of those
places one of those gyms where you can
just kind of
you can train for like three four hours
and it's great
you could take a break or you could jump
back in very informal yeah and you can
go to war with black belts but then you
can also
play around with the purple and the blue
belts and so on excellent
and that was really beneficial for
growth and you know you can pick
which because everybody has a style you
can pick which style you really want to
work on right
and then i came to um uh boston broadway
jiu jitsu
with john clark who i love he's a good
friend but
you know the it's a little bit more
formal
and i found myself it's a very
interesting journey if i would be
training with black belts the whole time
and uh it was a very different
experience
i found myself exploring much less i
found myself
learning much less i mean part of that
is on my on me
but part of it was also realizing that
uh wow there's a value to training with
people that are much worse than you
yes is there is there a philosophy you
could speak to on that yeah
um you probably know it already um you
know from your studies and artificial
intelligence that
all human beings are naturally
risk-averse this is a
bias which is deeply seated in
in all of us i'm sure you're you're well
read on people like duversky and etc
who talk about this all the time for
your viewers
uh there are numerous psychological
experiments that have shown that most
people
to the point of irrationality fear loss
more than they are excited at the
prospect of an equivalent gain
so for example if you have a hundred
dollars in your wallet
you're more worried about the idea of
losing the hundred dollars that you have
now then you would be excited by the
prospect of gaining a hundred dollars
that i could potentially offer you um
this comes out whenever you get black
belt versus black belt confrontations or
any kind of
similar um skill level whenever you get
similar skill levels
the chances of defeat get very very high
interestingly if you're a white belt and
you're going against a black belt you'll
take risks why
because there's no shame in losing to a
black belt when you're a white ball so
you'll
you'll play more light-heartedly and
you'll you'll have a more fun role
but when you have very similar skill
levels
you're going to come back to what the
techniques
that are most likely to get you a win
that number of techniques is usually
pretty small
and if you're always battling with the
same tough opponents
every day where if you make even a
single error
it will cost you that match in sparring
and you don't like losing
you're going to stay with a very small
set of moves
you might get slightly better at their
execution over time
but you as an individual will not grow
growth
as it does in organic life forms
comes from small beginnings and builds
over time
you can't take an untested untried move
and get it on a world champion black
belt it's going to get crushed so it's
not ready for that
it's like a a lion cub being thrown out
into the serengeti plains
the lion cub is just too small and too
ineffective it's a lion
but it's a cub and it's not until it
grows into maturity that it can be a
line that can dominate the serengeti
plains
why i always encourage my students to
play with a variety of belt types
um and spend the majority of their time
with lesser belts for development
purposes when you're getting closer to a
competition you obviously want to change
that
you want to be getting more a
competitive sense of
of hard work but you must learn to
divide up your training cycles
into non-competition cycles
where you're presumably working with
people who are
slightly lower in leveling yourself and
in some cases quite a bit lower than
yourself
and then competition cycles where you're
working with people much
closer to your own skill level is there
something to be said
about the the flip side of that which is
um
when you're training with people at the
same skill level
being okay losing to them yes you have
to see
training for what it is training is
about skill development
not about winning or losing you've got
to you've got to understand
that you don't need to win every battle
you only need to win the battles that
count and the
the battles that count are in the world
championship finals okay
that's the one that counts think about
that win
okay that's the one you're going to be
remembered for you're not going to be
remembered for the battle you lost on
tuesday afternoon at 3 p.m and some
nameless gym with some guys that
no one cares about no one's going to
remember that you're going to be
remembered for your peak performances
not your everyday performances focus
your everyday performances on skill
development
so that your peak performances you can
focus on winning
you know i just this is not a therapy
session
but if i could just speak
every session is a therapy session
there is still an
ape thing in there of course you think i
don't feel it
you think everyone in the room doesn't
feel it because
for example you haven't never seen me
roll
uh you know when there's people you know
i've seen the look in people's eyes when
they see me
train and they i could see maybe it's me
projecting but they think i thought you
were supposed to be good
i thought you're supposed to be a black
belt like
that look they're like i'm gonna give
you some therapy
okay
do you know how many people have come up
to me
over the years who have visited
the training halls that i work in and
they come up to me and go man
i rolled with gary tonan i did really
well with him
like like really well really wrong i'm
like oh that's very very good very
impressive
and then i see them talking to their
friends like man
i tapped out gary toner
and i'm i'm sitting there going
yeah and you can see that they're just
like wow
dude i'm i'm way better than i thought i
was
gary tonin all of my students
um i pushed him in the direction of of
giving up bad positions so that they
practice working getting out of critical
situations is a huge part of our
training program
but gary tonan takes that to a level
that just no one else
even gets close it's it's just amazing
like he will put himself
in impossible situations where
it's a fully locked strangle
a hundred percent on with both his arms
behind his back
and he'll try to work out from there
yeah and
seven times out of ten he does but three
times out of ten he gets caught
he i'm a huge advocate of handicapped
training
where you handicap yourself to work on
skills
he's took that to heart to a level that
few people i believe can match i just
wonder what his psychology is like
because
it goes back to what we talked about
four legs you have to understand
its skill development don't take it
personally
um i understand i hear where you're
coming from we've all got what you call
the ape
reflex where we want to be dominant okay
we all do like
because there's thousands of white belts
out there that have tabbed gary tonin
yeah and they're walking around and
they're people saying online dude i tap
gary tonan
like gary tonan's like one of the best
in the world so i'm one of the best in
the world
and um uh does gary get upset about this
no of course not because gary knows that
when it counts on stage he's going to be
going
100 with a set of skills that very few
people can match
um he can go into an ebi overtime
at the 205 pound weight division against
an adcc champion
starting in a full arm lock position and
effortlessly get out with no problems in
seconds
because he's been in that situation 25
000 times
with varying degrees of skill opponents
and there's just no panic no fear
he's just doing what he's done so many
thousands of times
and that's a fine fine example of a guy
who didn't give a damn what happened in
the training room
but when it counted on the stage in
front of the cameras
it it kicked in yeah he's he's an
incredible inspiration actually uh
this he's a practitioner something
you've recently
talked quite a bit about which is uh the
power of escaping
sort of bad positions uh i think
you've talked about it which is really
interesting framing is uh
escaping bad positions is one of the
best ways
if not the best way to demonstrate
dominance psychologically over your
opponent
that anything they throw at you
like their weapons are useless against
you um
there's a little bit of legs friedman
kicking through on this question
your obsession with dominance is um uh
it's a therapy session it's a therapy
session
i'm coming from a wrestling perspective
i think it's not just lex friedman i
think it's dan gable i think it's
dominant the gary tonan ethic
it just goes against everything
wrestling is about you
never put yourself in a bad position and
the fact this it's uh philosophically i
don't know what to do with it it's a
total reframing
of showing dominance
by escaping any bad position
yeah let's talk about the idea of what
what what is the value of escapes
why do i put this in as as the first
skill
that every jdc student must master
um believe it or not uh
when i talked about how it
pertains to dominance that's its
smallest
value its greatest value has nothing to
do with dominance
it has to do with confidence
you can train someone and teach them
technique
until you're blue in the face but at
some point
the athlete in question has to go out
there on the stage
and pull the trigger when the time is
right
what's going to give you that ability to