In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I sit down with a man who is one of the most influential people in jiu-jitsu. His name is Marcello Cruz and he is a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. We talk about how he got into jiu jitsu, how he went from being a brown belt to being a Black Belt, and what it's like to train with a world-class black belt.
00:00:23.000You know, like I get excited when interesting people do Jiu-Jitsu because I think to the outsider to a lot of people that are, you know, They haven't been exposed to what it's like to train and what it's like to be around high-level Jiu-Jitsu people.
00:00:43.000They don't know the beauty of Jiu-Jitsu.
00:00:47.000I feel like Jiu-Jitsu is beautiful for people who practice it.
00:00:51.000You know, like you see, like Marcel is a great example, your coach.
00:00:54.000You know, Marcelo is probably one of the most beautiful guys to watch because he just takes advantage of these scrambles in this like really beautiful way, like fast and slippery.
00:01:07.000And when the opponents react, he reacts in the other way.
00:03:01.000And I was also cross-training with Lucas Lepri at the time.
00:03:04.000And I was, I needed, I was just ready to, and then I met Marcello, and I was, and he had moved from New York to Florida, and I was traveling to Florida to train with Marcello a bunch, and I, I wanted to be pushed all in.
00:03:17.000And Marcel and I got in really close, and then I, I just said to him, hey, man, you know, you want to come back to New York and open a school together.
00:04:10.000I mean, didn't just beat Chow Lin, won the entire division.
00:04:14.000and just looked like knowing anybody had ever seen.
00:04:18.000Just the scrambles, and his ability to arm drag and take the back, and then once he gets to your side, the ability to transition to the back.
00:04:51.000Right. It'd be fun to pull that up maybe at one point.
00:04:53.000Interesting. Like he never is, a core principle of his was to allow the opponent to move and spend as much training time as possible in transition.
00:05:03.000And while most jutsu guys, as you know, is they're both coming up ranks, egos are controlling, they're holding guys.
00:05:58.000Because the most important thing about any kind of combat sport in terms of striking sports is to be in a better position to land a shot and be in a better position to defend.
00:06:11.000So if you're fighting south paw to orthodox, you always want to make sure that if you're south paw, your foot is on the outside of your opponent's leg.
00:06:18.000That way your opponent has to kind of cross over, try to hit you, but you're in a position to hit them on the blind side.
00:06:24.000And the best ever at that is Vasily Lomachenko.
00:06:27.000Because Lomachenko, when he was young, his father made him stop boxing for two years and just study Ukrainian dance.
00:06:45.000Mm-hmm. It's all about movement and position with this guy.
00:06:50.000It's all about when you punch, he's going to make you react this way, and then he's going to go that way, and then he's going to spin sideways, and it'll be behind you.
00:07:05.000It's almost like he's got just a radar for like where their punches are coming from and knows exactly where to put his feet at all times.
00:07:16.000No matter what they do, he knows what they're going to do.
00:07:20.000But when you watch his footwork, it's the most extraordinary thing, because his ability to give you all sorts of different reads, like, incredible.
00:07:45.000He jumps in and out, and it's with perfect precision.
00:07:49.000Like a lot of times when guys do a lot of footwork and movement, there's points in that transition where they're off balance, where they can't really throw a punch, or their footwork is out of position, or they're leaning too far over on this side.
00:08:26.000It's just the way he's able to fool the best fighters in the world and just have a level of movement that they just don't really understand what to do with.
00:08:40.000Because everything is coming from different angles.
00:08:44.000It's never, I'm charging straightforward at you trying to destroy you.
00:08:56.000In anything, when you watch someone who's just unbelievably extraordinary and unique in their, whatever their discipline is, it's always fascinating to watch.
00:09:05.000This episode is brought to you by Intuit TurboTax.
00:09:08.000We're all just trying to level up, right?
00:09:11.000I'm always trying to push myself, whether it's training, learning something new, or just trying to be a better human.
00:09:17.000You put in work physically, mentally, and over time, you evolve.
00:10:13.000And for some people, there'll be no space in between.
00:10:14.000But if you spend your time playing in the transitional space between you build up frames like an illusionist.
00:10:21.000I know you, like, remember you spoke to Darren Brown back in the day.
00:10:24.000Yes. Like, you know, great illusionists, magicians, mind control guys, they have the ability to see in frames that we don't have the ability to see.
00:10:57.000It's like if you think about you're engaging with an illusionist who has done something, has spent hundreds of hours in a certain specific routine, and you're seeing it for the first time.
00:11:07.000They just have immense knowledge where you have known.
00:11:10.000They have more frames, and they can play in frames that you don't have, and it seems like...
00:11:16.000Well, that's where Eddie Bravo had a pretty significant contribution to Jiu-Jitsu because he was so creative in some of his attacks and some of the things that he developed, particularly off his back.
00:11:29.000Like the rubber guard variations, they were so systematic and so like...
00:11:35.000If you got good at it, it was surprising to anybody didn't understand what you were doing, because they didn't know these positions well.
00:11:42.000Yeah. So if you got, like, there's this kid named Jeremiah Vance, who's one of Eddie's best guard players, and there's a highlight reel of his submissions off of his back, his rubber guard submissions.
00:11:53.000And if you don't have a person that you train with, if you train in a traditional school and you don't understand these positions, you don't know how good someone can be at it, there's times where you don't think you're vulnerable, where you're incredibly vulnerable.
00:12:06.000Like, the difference between a really good guard player in M.M.A., like Paul Craig, for example, he submitted some of the best two world champions off of his back in the light heavyweight division, Jamal Hill and the current champion, Anka Lyev.
00:12:28.000In MMA, there's only a couple guys like Olivera, you gotta really watch your P's and Q's.
00:12:33.000There's a few guys that are just wicked off of their back, but no one's like Paul Craig.
00:12:37.000And so if you're just used to fighting regular guys off of their back, and you get in guard, And you get a little cocky, you extend an arm to try to land a punch, and then all of a sudden his legs are wrapped around your fucking neck.
00:12:57.000It's fascinating to watch the difference, which means like a really good guard player and someone is just a regular MMA fighter who knows how to do a triangle, but really doesn't have like the elaborate setups.
00:13:07.000Many ways, that's in a large scale what Hoyce was doing back in the day.
00:13:53.000I would imagine if there's any technique that's sort of ruined an athlete's career, the heel hook would probably be number one.
00:13:59.000Heel hook is why I started training jujitsu.
00:14:01.000Really? Yeah, because I was doing stand-up stuff and I was competing everywhere.
00:14:04.000I was doing Chinese martial arts and my teacher's son, Max Chen, who was a Sancho fighter and on the U.S. national team, really good stand-up fighter and he was studying UFC before I had even looked at it.
00:14:18.000And then he was studying, I think it was Frank Shamrock's double heel hook shit from way early days.
00:14:23.000And he was just like, let's just continue to the ground.
00:19:07.000a fake version of you on television or on a screen rather and did you have like a feeling like am i that person i'm not that person like i'm me this is not really me but it's about me yeah so the book came out when i was 11 years old my dad actually wrote the book He was a writer and he ended up just writing about the journey from me starting to play chess to winning my first national championship.
00:19:31.000And when the book came out, it felt like I read it and it felt true.
00:19:34.000I was a little pissed off because they didn't want people to know when I cried.
00:20:30.000He was beautiful and loving and helped me discover my love for chess.
00:20:36.000My first coaches were the hustlers in Washington Square Park and Bruce Penalphini together.
00:20:40.000And the way that was represented, I didn't like it.
00:20:41.000They also combined a bunch of characters in Washington's and Court Park, the hustles that combined them into one in a way that was them mathematically true but didn't feel...
00:20:50.000So like when you're a kid, you're a teenager, you see all the difference.
00:21:39.000But also what happened with the movie is that I love chess so deeply.
00:21:43.000It was my first form of self-expression.
00:21:46.000And up until the film came out, it was just sort of this pre-conscious, innocent form of of play, of battle, of, like, it was, it was my jih Tzu mats.
00:21:58.000And, and then it, the, the movie is what pulled me into self-consciousness for the first time.
00:22:03.000I started thinking about, instead of losing myself and thought, I started thinking about how I looked to groupies, to cameras, to the rest.
00:22:10.000And so, like, I moved from self-expression to self-consciousness, to being locked up, and then, you know, And I didn't ask for it.
00:22:18.000I didn't decide I want to have a movie.
00:22:21.000It was ultimately, I mean, I'm grateful for it.
00:22:23.000From my perspective now, the existential crisis that happened was awesome for me.
00:22:28.000It forced me to become more complicated as a human and integrate a sense of consciousness into my relationship to something.
00:22:35.000To my perspective on it now is that it was a beautiful journey.
00:22:38.000It made me grapple with a lot of shit.
00:22:40.000I didn't become reliant on a flower garden in order to have a deep relationship to an art.
00:22:46.000But at the time, I was very conflicted about it.
00:22:49.000And then when I graduated high school, I took off and left the U.S. for a couple years, lived in Slovenia with my girlfriend at the time, to get away from the spotlight, get away from the media, get away from all the shit that was connected to the movie.
00:23:01.000And that was when I started studying East Asian philosophy and meditating and started reading Jack Kerouac and existentialist literature and Trying to figure myself out, figure the world out, figure out how I related to these things in some empty space.
00:23:14.000What's a tremendous burden to place upon a young person to take their life, which is essentially anonymous, you know, to the general public, you know, known in the chess world, obviously, but in the general public, anonymous.
00:23:30.000And then all of a sudden, a movie star.
00:23:33.000And not a movie star in the sense that you're on the screen, but it's about you, which is probably even weirder.
00:23:39.000So you have these false expectations or false...
00:23:43.000false narratives of how your life played out and who the people and who the piece and so everywhere you've run into people they have a version of you that they've seen that's not real and they think they know you very intimately which is weird but they don't same i mean with you you're so public right everyone probably most people think they know who you are and what at least they know me from me talking yeah that's a really They don't know me.
00:24:05.000Imagine if, like, Mario Lopez played me in a movie.
00:25:07.000I already had a very strange life because, and I think like a foundational part of my psychology came from, so I started playing chess when I was six years old.
00:25:17.000By the time I was seven, I was the top-rated player for my age in the country.
00:25:20.000My first national championship, I got my ass kicked, which was tremendous.
00:25:23.000Last round I lost the last round of my first nationals I lost to the guy who later became my best friend for many, many years, David Arnett.
00:25:32.000And you say tremendous because was that like a jumping point for improvement for you?
00:25:37.000Because I didn't learn that I could win without getting my ass kicked first.
00:25:46.000I relate, the year from then to winning my nationals, my first nationals the next year was when I really developed a love for chess and I had to work very hard and I didn't associate winning the nationals with talent or a smooth trip or all the bullshit that people can connect when they have, when they're called the prodigy from the outside.
00:26:08.000It's not a term I ever related to myself at all, but like when these labels are put on from the outside and if you win too fast to Too young, you can just develop this relationship to, this brittle relationship to success and to training and to everything, right?
00:26:23.000You don't realize that getting your ass kicked is a huge part of the journey.
00:26:27.000That's a problem with very talented fighters as well.
00:26:30.000A lot of very talented martial artists, they never developed the discipline to truly become great.
00:26:35.000Because from the very beginning, they had, and whatever the advantage was, whether it's a speed advantage, a strength advantage.
00:26:43.000I mean, genetics plays such a large part in martial arts success.
00:26:49.000You know, if you have someone who's an elite mind, who is incredibly disciplined and also has great genetics, you get a Mike Tyson.
00:27:18.000But if you're a real prodigy, and there are people out there that are just extraordinary from the beginning, I find that if success comes too quickly, you don't develop the metal to really push through boundaries and reach new levels.
00:27:32.000Because the only way you get there is through, you have to, I think oftentimes training becomes, it becomes regimented, it becomes something you do.
00:27:42.000You see incremental growth and improvement.
00:28:11.000Yeah. And if you don't have those moments where you lose, I don't think you ever really achieve your true potential because you have to be challenged.
00:28:19.000And the best expression of challenge is total humiliating defeat.
00:28:23.000Absolutely. And so consistently the biggest losses, the most crushing losses are what lead to the biggest wins later.
00:28:30.000Yes. Sometimes many years later, but it, like that, and people often, I remember I was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition for a charity when, you know, in my 20s somewhere.
00:28:43.000This guy introduced his son, and he said his son hadn't lost a chess game in two years.
00:28:49.000And it's just like, I knew it was a fucking train wreck.
00:28:53.000I mean, the kid obviously just was only choosing people to play who he could beat, wouldn't compete up in tournaments, would only play down.
00:29:01.000And he was the only kid who didn't want to play against me in the simul.
00:29:04.000And so his life was protecting this perfect thing, right?
00:29:10.000So in my chess life, the interesting thing happened to my psychology is that I was the top-rated player from my age in the country from a young age, but I always played up.
00:29:19.000I always played against adults, except for nationals and worlds, I played up.
00:29:23.000And all of my rivals were targeting me because I was the top seed in youth events.
00:29:30.000But they're coaches and they were much stronger players than me.
00:29:33.000They were adult, international masters, grandmasters, and they could see all my weaknesses.
00:29:39.000And so if I ever made a mistake, the weakness was exploited until I took it on.
00:29:43.000And so I developed from really young age this relationship to training, which was if I didn't take on my weakness, I got my ass kicked and I felt pain.
00:29:53.000And so not taking on my weakness became outside of my conceptual scheme.
00:29:57.000So from age eight, I just, and it can be a blind spot, like today in life, like a criticism of me that something loved ones would have is that I'm just, I'm always, I love training.
00:30:09.000I love pushing my limits as a way of life in whatever I'm doing.
00:30:28.000But it's a big part of, like, my foundation in that was being eight years old and being targeted, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, my whole life.
00:30:38.000And it wasn't until recently that I realized that it was actually outside of my conceptual scheme not to take on the weakness because it was just connected to pain from such a young age as a competitor.
00:30:50.000If you have, like if you're playing chess, if you have an opening repertoire that's massive and you go into a game and there's one little place that there's a weakness and you don't want your opponent to go, he always fucking finds it.
00:31:33.000So don't even think about the other way.
00:31:35.000Right. But if it's kind of driving you, for me, I think it's healthier for me to recognize that pattern to myself and then roll with it as opposed to just not even see that it's there.
00:32:00.000In other words, it's an interesting thing when you become present to the fact that you have this youthful story running through everything you do.
00:32:13.000But it's good for it to be a choice as opposed to just driving you.
00:32:16.000It's definitely good for it to be a choice.
00:32:18.000It's always good for it to be a choice because sometimes life will, you know, there's a curve that you have to take and you have to put something aside for a bit or maybe forever and you have to be able to transition to something else.
00:32:29.000And if you can't do that, then you'll be stuck.
00:32:32.000Yeah. And you see a lot of that with martial arts people.
00:32:35.000You know, most of us at a certain point in time realize that injuries are not just inevitable, but at a certain point in time you go, maybe I should stop doing this.
00:32:45.000Because training, no matter what you do, training is all about you using your body as a weapon and someone using their body as a weapon.
00:32:55.000Whether it's martial arts like stand-up fighting or whether it's jiu-jitsu, it's the same thing.
00:33:40.000He's got all his discs fused, but he's still training.
00:33:42.000Yeah. Maybe Bob shouldn't be training.
00:33:44.000Like, maybe Bob's going to break something else now.
00:33:47.000Like, maybe it's time to move on to something else.
00:33:50.000And if you don't have this ability to constantly take on new projects and be excited by different things, you're going to have a shallow life.
00:33:58.000Like, life has so many challenges and so many fascinating things that dive into.
00:36:28.000And I was so madly in love and all in with Marcello and having that, like, I was at that part of the learning process, which is where I get good at the learning process, which is like toward the higher levels of something.
00:37:29.000And it ended up where we were doing half guard position sparring where I was holding half guard and he was doing this path twisting the spine.
00:37:37.000And it was so fucking stupid to do it.
00:37:40.000I mean, I was just holding half guard in a, in like, in position sparring.
00:37:44.000And I just felt it go, and then like, you know, it was, I couldn't.
00:38:05.000It was, and I remember, so how was the disc now?
00:38:08.000I couldn't lift up my child for the first three, four months of his life.
00:38:11.000And then I had this strange period where I couldn't, I could standing and walking was the toughest.
00:38:16.000But then I had this period, like if I would go into the corner store to get milk like three, four months later, I'd have to bike to the corner store and come back.
00:38:23.000And I can't explain this, but I had a period where I couldn't walk, but I could ski because of the angles.
00:38:30.000So Marcel and I were going to the mountains out around New York, just bombing down.
00:39:28.000You know, your point about, I remember I was studying back in the early 2000s studying Eddie's game, setting the rubber guard, studying all the twister stuff, just trying to wrap my head around it.
00:41:02.000Yep. And everything he does involves this incredible dexterity and flexibility.
00:41:09.000There's like a whole series of highlights.
00:41:10.000That's not even some of his best stuff, but he's able to do this to people that just don't know what he's doing.
00:41:17.000Like, they don't understand some of these transitions.
00:41:23.000Yeah. And this is just like one of the best expressions of the techniques that Eddie's developed.
00:41:29.000So, like, Jeremiah's fantastic at that, like, this particular technique of being able to isolate the alma plata and then secure a choke in the transition.
00:41:50.000I mean, he just hits this over and over and over on people.
00:41:52.000And so many times, and people go for an Oma Plata, people say, okay, worst case scenario, I might roll out of this and wind up on my back and side control.
00:43:26.000You can kind of be a specialist if you're a striker.
00:43:31.000Stryker, like, there's a few guys that can pull it off if they're really strong and they have good takedown defense.
00:43:35.000Like Pereira is the best example, right?
00:43:37.000Two-division world champion kickboxer comes over, dominates, becomes a two-division UFC champion as a striker.
00:43:44.000Because every fight starts standing up.
00:43:46.000But if you don't know how to strike, every fight starts standing up.
00:43:51.000So the beginning of the fight is always something you're not good at.
00:43:54.000And if you're getting tagged at the very beginning of the fight, and now you're in desperation mode, and all this person has to do, it's an enormous space they're fighting in, the octagon.
00:44:03.000And the cage of the octagon actually makes it easier to get up if someone takes you down.
00:44:07.000So there's a lot of elements that wouldn't even exist if you had a flat surface with no walls.
00:44:58.000When he gets a hold of you, you're in this complex web of transitions and techniques that if you're just a regular MMA fighter who trains Jiu-Jitsu three times a week, you're not going to know what he's doing.
00:48:18.000I think if I did it now, I would do much more weightlifting.
00:48:23.000But when I was rolling usually twice a week, six days a week, and...
00:48:29.000And I was, I would do cardio work in addition and then some like, some resistance work.
00:48:35.000But I didn't, I wasn't, like I'm doing a lot of work with the Boston Celtics now and I'm seeing how they're, for the last few years, and I see how they're a brilliant, their sports science team and their physical trainers are.
00:48:44.000And like, I don't think that I was, when I was training jihitsu, I was.
00:48:48.000at the level of, for example, the Boston Celtics in the resistance training that I was doing, it's supplemented.
00:51:04.000thousands of miles biking, one wheeling all over New York.
00:51:08.000But it was the early one, if you push past the pushback, It had this pushback thing, which would slow you down, but you could push past it and go faster, but if you pushed past the final pushback, it just bottomed out, wham!
00:51:18.000And he just went 23, 24 miles, there's a fwack, right?
00:51:22.000Over taxi cabs, under taxi cabs, through taxi cabs, everything.
00:51:25.000The one wheel is like when you're a kid, or sorry, the fixie.
00:52:59.000I mean, a efoil, you have a battery, it's heavy, and you've got electricity to learn how to, so you learn foil dynamics.
00:53:06.000Foiling, when you're high performance foiling in Big Surf, you're just on a, like, if you're towing in, you're on a three and a half foot board.
00:53:38.000If you think about the glassiest surf day possible, the frictionless feeling, it's more frictionless than that because you're above the water.
00:55:29.000But all these arts to me are connected.
00:55:31.000That's the strange thing about my art.
00:55:32.000Like chess, Chinese martial arts, jitsu, surfing, foiling.
00:55:36.000To me, the fascinating thing when you get toward the pinnacle of an art is that you start to experience, at least in my...
00:55:45.000from my perspective, that the apexes of these arts are much closer to one another than lower down in the mountain of the same art.
00:55:54.000So people who are virtuosos in various fields are often speaking a much more similar language than people who are at lower levels of the same art than they're training.
00:56:04.000Like when I think about chess, I related to chess through core principles, and those principles manifest in the martial arts.
00:56:13.000I remember that I had this, when I wrote my first book, the art of, or my second book, The Art of Learning, It was about my experience of crossing over my level from chess into the Chinese martial arts.
00:56:26.000And I had this really interesting experience where I was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition playing 40 games at once in a charity for Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
00:56:34.000But I was at that point, I've been training martial arts for two years, and I had not been, I had kind of moved, I was in the transition away from chess during that period.
00:56:42.000And I had this realization that I was winning these chess games, playing 40 games at once, but I was not playing chess.
00:56:48.000I was feeling flow, riding space left behind.
00:56:51.000I was riding the energetic wave of the game like I would if we were flowing on the mats.
00:58:01.000And I've tried to figure out why for a lot of years, because you think, like, if you're able to just be so excellent at something that's super hard, you could take out something that's relatively easier and become very good at it.
00:58:10.000And I think that the reason that people often can't cross level over from one thing to the other is that they learn it in a localized language.
00:58:17.000So you can learn chess in a way which is very specific to chess, like principles that are just chess principles.
00:58:23.000Or you can learn chess in a language which, connects to all of life.
00:58:43.000They're living a life of training as I know you value very much.
00:58:46.000But they're doing so in a language which connects to the rest of life.
00:58:50.000Then they're studying thematic interconnectedness while they're studying chess or jitsu or anything else.
00:58:58.000And then they're just learning the language of excellence.
00:59:02.000Yeah. And it's interesting because if you watch chess players teaching students, many of them don't do this.
00:59:09.000They teach it within like the confines of the chess board, like a prison.
00:59:13.000And if you learn chess that way, then it's like you're living on an island and the ocean around you is like prison walls, right?
00:59:20.000But if you study chess in a way that you're learning how each chess principle connects to every other art you could ever study, then this web of interconnectedness is forming in your mind.
00:59:32.000Then when you take on something else, you're able to cross the level over really naturally.
00:59:36.000In many ways, that's my, that's a big part of my life's work, is the study of that interconnectedness.
00:59:42.000Do you think that a huge, well, it had to be a huge factor for you that you were sort of forced to reevaluate the way you interface with life when you became famous because of the film at 15. So childhood chess player become very well recognized.
01:00:01.000Then all of a sudden this movie and now you have to kind of like grapple with things.
01:00:05.000And as you said, these challenges make you a more complex person.
01:00:09.000And then your ability to sort of push chess aside and try other things, do you think that's because of, it has to be a factor in your, this desire to explore other things?
01:00:25.000Because you're kind of thrust into this thing where your thing is now changed.
01:00:28.000Your thing is now not just flowing and learning and getting better and doing battle with chess.
01:00:34.000Now it's image and groupies and this bizarre thing that you're living up to and you don't like it and you want to escape it.
01:01:13.000I love the ass kicking and the kicking ass.
01:01:15.000I just loved the fucking battle of the thing.
01:01:18.000And then I fell in love for the first time when I was 15. The movie came out after that.
01:01:26.000And I started studying existentialist literature.
01:01:29.000I started reflecting on the absurdity of it all.
01:01:31.000I started to become present to the fact that these were just 64 squares and 32 pieces.
01:01:35.000Like I was spending my life studying this fucking box, wooden box, like the construct, the absurdity of being stuck in that construct became clear to me.
01:01:43.000And then I was becoming more and more self-conscious about how what I was doing was perceived by others.
01:01:53.000And in many ways, like, the journey, like, some people don't run into that for a long time.
01:01:58.000Like, there are some chess players that just become insanely strong without ever reflecting on the absurdity of the fact that they're just playing chess.
01:02:06.000Like that, the moment you become aware of the fact that you're immortal, that you can get your ass kick, that your arm can break, that you can die...
01:02:13.000Like, you get locked up by that knowledge.
01:02:14.000Right. And there's so many different forms that can take.
01:02:16.000Or the moment you, like, for example, Boston Celtics, like they, like you're hungering to win a world championship and then you win the NBA finals.
01:02:24.000Your relationship, your motivation changes, all the reasons you're doing it.
01:02:28.000are no longer valid in some ways because now you've accomplished the thing you always dreamed of and you have to discover.
01:02:33.000It's true in any form of competition or art in my experience is that there comes a moment where someone's consciousness becomes more complicated and they can't just return to the innocence they had before.
01:02:48.000that journey, which is a lot of what I did from like my late teenage years, leaving and studying philosophy and then moving into other fields and started relating to art in a way that was integrating that self-awareness, integrating that sense of mortality.
01:03:05.000It's like when I, a very powerful example of this was I die, I drown in a pool.
01:03:13.000I guess like nine, ten years ago, I was doing hypoxic breath work, Wimhoff training in a pool.
01:03:26.000Because you're flushing from your body, but CO2 is what gives you the urge to breathe.
01:03:31.000And so without carbon dioxide and you're being in your, you don't feel the urge to breathe.
01:03:35.000And so I'd been a lifetime free diver, spearfishing from when I was five, six years old, but I was never doing hypoxic breathwork before free diving.
01:03:41.000So if you're diving, 80, 90, 100 feet, You're not flushing the CO2 from your body before you do so.
01:03:46.000So you still have that sense for when you need to breathe.
01:03:51.000I was just swimming 50 meters, 50 meters back and forth underwater and then doing this hypoxic worth breathwork in between.
01:03:59.000And then I, my last recollection is being stretched out in bliss that those tingles through your body you get from, have you done Wimhoff training?
01:04:07.000Yeah, those, you know, those tingles, had those fucking tingles.
01:04:12.00030 minutes later, what happened was that I blacked out I was in the bottom of the pool for over four minutes after blacking out from shallow water blackout.
01:05:09.000And I spent that night in the hospital going through old chess variations trying to test my brain.
01:05:14.000As my brain ruined, like, do I remember things?
01:05:17.000Somehow my brain, maybe it's fucked up, but it seems like it'd be working pretty well.
01:05:22.000Wow. But like I can't, and that was also a big part of me realizing I had to spend my life in the ocean because I could feel the potential for some PTSD response.
01:05:33.000Like I could actually feel the potential trauma response like a cloud that was washing.
01:06:07.000My last memory is of just tingles and bliss and then waking up.
01:06:13.000And so if I hadn't been pulled out, there would have been no flash, no seeing my life passed before my eyes, no tunnel on the other side, nothing.
01:06:24.000You know what's really fucking wild, though, is that many years later, I was doing this, um, This guy, Brandon Powell, is a brilliant guy who's a top Wimhoff trainer and a trainer of trainers of his guys.
01:06:39.000And I was doing some retreats with teams of mine and we were doing some Wimhoff work.
01:06:44.000And he had this methodology of kind of accelerated hypoxic work where that he said, I'm not sure if it's true, but he said, released DMT in your body, inhibited the DMT inhibitors in your body.
01:06:56.000And I did these journeys with him twice through pure breathwork, no psychedelics.
01:07:00.000And I experienced these two times months apart, I experienced one time I experienced the center of my consciousness as where I, as my busted disc.
01:07:13.000And I experienced the world through like the electrical connections emerging from my L4L5.
01:07:18.000And the other one was the only memory I have of that, and I'm not sure if this is accurate or some kind of illusion, but I saw the drowning experience from above, the whole thing.
01:07:30.000I watched the 20 minutes that I was on the bottom of the pool and then up in 25 minutes and then on the pool deck and I saw the whole thing from above.
01:07:40.000But that was like years after it happened.
01:08:07.000And I'm living, and I live with a sense of gratitude and commitment.
01:08:13.000That's a big part of why we moved to the jungle with my family.
01:08:15.000It's like, I emerged from that with a commitment to living life as beautifully and deeply and truly as I possibly could and to not let anything slip.
01:08:27.000Isn't it fascinating that sometimes it, again, it's the same thing as loss propels you to a next level, even...
01:08:35.000the moment in life where you realize it all could just go away like that so fucking fast instantly no warning just gone no warning i've done so many stupid fucking things like in these extreme sports i've done you know for like so many times i almost died free diving or But that one was different, man. Because there was, like, I didn't, it was just a, the crazy thing was just a technical blind spot.
01:08:59.000I just didn't know this thing about carbon dioxide.
01:09:02.000I didn't know I was taking a risk in that moment.
01:09:24.000And most people who die from shallow water blackout are highly trained Navy SEALs because they're very good at inhibiting the urge to breathe, but you can get too good at it.
01:10:08.000And you see people that are surfers that just get drawn into its spell.
01:10:13.000And it just becomes a part of their life is to ride that energy and to feel it.
01:10:17.000And the addiction that they get from it, guys like Laird, now guys like you, I know so many people that they, like Jocko, he won't leave San Diego.
01:10:27.000He doesn't even want to be in California, yes, but San Diego is the ocean for him.
01:10:38.000Yeah. You just, and if you have any brittleness in your ego, she will kick your ass until you just blend.
01:10:45.000I know you're in favor of optimizing training and finding ways to learn things quicker.
01:10:54.000Would wave surf pools, those crazy ones like Kelly Slater style, wave surf pools where they have, that would give you like way more reps, right?
01:11:11.000The surf community is quite scarce in some ways because you can only surf in specific kinds of waves.
01:11:18.000And like if you're trying to make one turn, you might not see that section again for two years.
01:11:22.000You can't replicate conditions in the ocean.
01:11:24.000Yeah. Foiling, you can because you can pump a foil.
01:11:27.000You can drive it down and let it float back up and drive it down.
01:11:30.000Or you can whip yourself behind a jet ski into a certain kind of wave.
01:11:34.000So if I want to work on like a certain turn, I can get 40, 50 reps in a given day.
01:11:38.000While surfing pre-wave pool, You couldn't at all.
01:11:41.000So most great surfers are brilliant low rep learners.
01:11:47.000Because by necessity in the ocean, you don't get tons of reps.
01:11:50.000So in my observation, the greatest competitive surfers in the world are excellent at learning from one or two reps like Marcel Garcia is on the mats.
01:11:59.000I'm not naturally a great lower-up learner.
01:12:02.000Foiling is, one could say it's more technically complex than surfing because everything that surfing is, but also you have a foil which has lift dynamics and a tail, and you can change the foil shape, the tail shape.
01:12:17.000If you change the angle of attack on your tail by a quarter degree, it changes the whole feel of everything.
01:12:49.000But the interesting thing is that most surfers...
01:12:52.000of this generation aren't, um, they don't train in the same way that chess players do or jiu-jitsu fighters do because it's a low rap art that you can't replicate conditions in.
01:13:02.000So surfers aren't, Most surfers aren't constructed psychologically in a way that they will take advantage of wave pools the way a jiu-jitsu guy would.
01:13:55.000Especially in the early, think about like learning as a kid and then like everything you're exposed to that the ocean's always moving, always changing.
01:14:02.000But if you can like learn from one rep and burn it in, then that just...
01:14:09.000Well, in Jiu-Jitsu, for example, you can say, I'm going to drill this arm bar 40 times today, 40 times like this afternoon, hundreds of times, thousands of times over the next two weeks, right?
01:14:19.000So you can get as many reps as you need.
01:14:30.000I think it's, I think a lot about unlearning, right?
01:14:34.000So my life's work is in learning, and I think a lot about unlearning because so much of what high-level learning is is being unblocked, which is getting rid of the blocks, the egoic blocks, the false constructs we have, the fucking bullshit we put on everything we do.
01:15:29.000While if you watch people come to a surf, like a surf break who are like New Yorkers who travel down for five days and they've got all this gear, the gear is amazing.
01:15:37.000They've got like gloves and booties and knee guards and, Like, everything is covered.
01:15:42.000Whiteface. Everything is just like not a part of their body is designed to touch the ocean.
01:15:46.000They're trying to keep the ocean away.
01:15:48.000And they're like, they want to be super controlling about everything they learn.
01:15:51.000They're like, everything is so regimented in their minds.
01:15:54.000But they're trying to control their relationship with the ocean.
01:15:57.000But the way to learn on the ocean is to not control it, to embrace it, to listen to it, to observe it, to feel it, to like let it envelop you.
01:16:21.000And then that's when they get locked up.
01:16:23.000Yeah. The freedom of, I mean, to me, a lot of what, like, the beacon is, as adults, is being the post-conscious, Discovering the post-conscious freedom as a learner.
01:16:37.000Like, how can we learn without the egoic blocks, right?
01:16:40.000So if you're crossing over, like if you're a world-class striker and you're getting on the jih Tzu mats and you're getting your ass kicked.
01:16:46.000Or if you're a great jih Tzu fighter and you get onto an MMA gym and suddenly the guys can just beat the shit out of you.
01:16:50.000Like having or a great surfer switching over to foiling.
01:16:53.000Right? Or a great chess player moving into the martial art.
01:16:56.000Or if you're, like, training in some esoteric, you know, Chinese martial art like I was, and then you're moving into the jihitsu match.
01:17:01.000You might have some ego, but you're just tapping out to everybody all the time.
01:17:05.000Right? And, like, having the freedom to learn without egoic blocks is...
01:17:10.000And I actually think that culturally this is one of the most important things that we need to cultivate because we're living in a world now where the pace of technological disruption is accelerating so fast.
01:17:21.000And I know you've done a bunch of explorations on this with Tristan Harris and others in terms of what AI is bringing to society.
01:17:30.000It's been a big focus of mine for many, many years.
01:17:36.000I think that we are going to be living in a world where AI is better at everything than we are, right?
01:17:45.000So if you think about it in the context of chess, I grew up in the world of where chess was crossing over into the computer realm.
01:17:52.000So computers are first, like I began playing chess in the pre-computer era, computer chess era.
01:17:57.000Then computers entered, and I initially was very resistant and romantic to it.
01:18:02.000And I remember at 19, I started developing chess master, this computer chess program, and I developed this academy of mine for the next 10 years that followed teaching the human side of chess through computers.
01:18:13.000But when they first approached me, I didn't want to do it because I felt like it was going to disrupt.
01:18:17.000It was going to kill the beauty of human chess, the art of chess, which is so much about imperfection.
01:18:23.000And then, but like chess players, when I grew up, had to sit in the unknowing, in tolerance, they had to have a tolerance of cognitive distance.
01:18:31.000You might, and I might study a chess position and go three months without knowing what the solution is.
01:18:36.000So our psychology's had to be constructed so that we could sit in cognitive and emotional dissonance for long, long periods of time, days, weeks, months, sometimes years.
01:18:45.000Now chess players can click on a button and they've got a supercomputer right by their side.
01:18:51.000It's interesting to think about how different that is psychologically and the different kinds of people that that draws in.
01:18:56.000But... What happened then is that you had Deep Blue entered the game, like supercomputers, and then you had the movement of AI entering into chess.
01:19:04.000And we had AlphaGo and then Alpha Zero, which came out of DeepMind.
01:19:08.000So Demas Hasippus was the developer of DeepMind.
01:19:10.000He was a child to chess friend of mine.
01:19:12.000So Demis and I from age 11 on were good friends, and we had dialogue about the birth of DeepMind, which was this AI company he began, and then he developed AlphaGo and Alpha Zero.
01:19:22.000And to give a feel for what Alpha Zero did in chess, Alpha Zero was able to, without being taught anything about humans playing chess, no education of like the history of human chess playing.
01:19:33.000Within three hours of experimentation was stronger than any human or computer in history.
01:20:20.000So just like the absurdity of the fact, the gap between like a strong nine-year-old and the human world champion is the same ELORAP gap as between the world champion and the strongest AI.
01:20:30.000Wow. It's so hard for us to really wrap our heads around what that means.
01:20:35.000That means that everything, like chess players had a front row seat to that happening early.
01:20:40.000When I listen to some of your dialogues with these guys, and I could feel you and them trying to grapple with, like, how to communicate what it means to...
01:20:51.000to have these insanely powerful intelligences in the world.
01:20:56.000And I think that, like, if you can imagine, like, an art like chess, having millennia of development, people studying it like you train Jiu-Jitsu, right?
01:21:04.000So imagine people's training 10 hours a day for 30, 40 years, being the greatest human in the world at it.
01:21:10.000And then something can come in, and within three hours of experimentation, be much stronger than them.
01:21:13.000And imagine that's going to be in fucking everything.
01:22:44.000Imagine a million networked, 3,800 ELO-rated super-intelligences, utilizing everything that they can gather about you on social media to manipulate you to do whatever it wants or whoever is controlling it wants.
01:24:39.000Elon says his estimation says there's an 80 to 90% chance.
01:24:45.000it'll have a radically positive impact on society at large.
01:24:50.000That a 90% likelihood that it'll radically improve the quality of everyone's life.
01:24:59.000But then there's 20 or 10% that it will not and that will be imprisoned.
01:25:05.000This is like 10% possibility of the matrix, you know, 90% possibility of a technologically inspired utopia.
01:25:15.000My feeling about it is that, I mean, there are places where it's going to be incredibly, it's going to be beautiful.
01:25:19.000Like, just how computer chess raised the level of human chess games, chess players, right?
01:25:27.000And now AI chess has made chess players much, much stronger.
01:25:33.000And part of it is because great chess players are partially great because they have had, they're excellent at knowing we're not to look.
01:25:43.000Great chess players don't actually look at more, they look at less, but they look in the most potent directions.
01:25:48.000And what's fascinating is that AI entering the picture has forced really strong chess players to unlearn where they've been correct to learn not to look.
01:26:01.000So in other words, areas where they were well-trained not to look because humans couldn't play those positions.
01:26:08.000Right. And actually, those are the right positions to play.
01:26:10.000They're the objectively correct positions to play.
01:26:12.000But now humans studying with an AI can be much better at playing those positions.
01:26:16.000Right? And so, like, for example, I'm working on this fascinating project called Lila Science, which is focused on combining cutting-edge science, the best scientists in the world and cutting-edge AI to try to have huge breakthroughs in material science and life sciences.
01:26:33.000And now, that can only be done, in my opinion with just best, best, best in class safety practices.
01:26:39.000And in my view, that involves having a higher level AI running safety than you have running the actual science.
01:26:48.000When you say safety, like what are you referring to?
01:26:50.000Making sure that we don't do, that doesn't go wild, that you create things that get out there that could be terribly destructive.
01:26:59.000I think that the part of the AI race that's happening is that people are driven by ego and there's like a game theory of a race going on.
01:27:09.000And when you have a race, everyone's just running as fast as they can, but they're not, if they slow down to think about what's safe, they might fall behind in the race.
01:27:18.000And I believe ethically, if we're in the AI scene at all, then we must be developing safety practices that are making it responsible.
01:27:37.000And the consequences of losing the race are a grave.
01:27:42.000It's akin to the consequences of losing the Manhattan Project, of not coming to the bomb the first, not being the first to implement a bomb, which is really crazy to think.
01:27:56.000I think it's the Manhattan Project on steroids because I think it has the, if used in the wrong way, it has the possibility of completely imprisoning society.
01:28:08.000All you'd have to do is lock down resources, food, power, electricity, everything.
01:28:13.000And you put society at a complete halt.
01:28:17.000If you can figure out a way to completely disable grids and every car has a computer in it now, most cars are connected to Wi-Fi.
01:28:27.000Most new ones have at least an option to connect it.
01:28:29.000There's a way that someone can connect to your car.
01:28:40.000Who knows what could happen if that got hijacked?
01:28:43.000You know, there's a guy named Robert Epstein who spent a lot of time analyzing what the impact of curated searches can do to presidential elections, to public opinion on things, and that when you're getting a search, where you're using Google or some of these search engines, you're getting curated search results.
01:29:06.000If you look for specific political opinions, political positions, you will get a curated result that is oftentimes skewed in whatever ideology, towards whatever ideology, the people that programmed it are, you know, they're aligned with.
01:29:24.000So if you Google something about Donald Trump, you will have as many negative responses they could possibly throw to the front of the line.
01:29:33.000It will take you page after page after page to find what you're looking for, but you'll be confronted immediately with negative stuff.
01:29:40.000Now, if you're a person that's in the middle and maybe a person that's undecided in an electoral process, an electoral race, you can be swayed in a significant manner, and he estimates it's as high as 30 to 50 percent of the people that are on the fence that are...
01:30:00.000sort of undecided voters can be swayed by search result engines, which is kind of crazy.
01:30:05.000And that's just, you know, an algorithm.
01:30:08.000That's just something that they've divided.
01:30:10.000This is not like a purposeful changing of narratives in order to implement whatever strategy they think would be the best for them financially, whether it's a central bank digital currency or a social credit score system or something.
01:30:26.000where they could completely control behavior and have your behavior locked up to your bank account, locked up to your ability to make a living, your ability to travel.
01:30:36.000That's spooky stuff, because that's all AI.
01:30:39.000If AI can be, if someone figures out the best version of AI that can traverse these boundaries that we have with encryption and with grids and computer systems and just completely lock everything down, we're fucked.
01:30:56.000Yeah, that's why I don't, you know, when I hear people say things like that 80 to 90% positive, I feel like they're jumping to the destination.
01:31:06.000without thinking about the journey to it, because the journey to it is going to involve so much disruption, so much pain, so much chaos.
01:31:12.000And I think what you just said about grids and everything is true.
01:31:14.000I mean, you think about how many people had the ability to disrupt in that way 15 years ago, a handful of countries.
01:31:29.000And so how could it be 80 to 90% positive when there is just going to be limitless humans who have the ability to disrupt armed with 3,800 ELO rated coders that can do anything you want?
01:31:58.000I don't believe that that 80-90% thing is right.
01:32:02.000I think that there are areas like science where we could easily create materials that could have a massively positive impact on the climate.
01:32:10.000We could have life science breakthroughs that eliminate cancer, eliminate diseases.
01:32:14.000make the human lifespan hundreds of years.
01:32:16.000I think those things could happen, which is great.
01:32:18.000I also think that we could be manipulated into doing increasingly destructive things.
01:32:23.000And we could have horrific things happen like the grid.
01:32:29.000You know, there's a guy who's very brilliant in the espionage world years ago who said to me, he said to me, you know, he's someone who would know.
01:32:38.000And he said, you know, Josh, what you don't realize is...
01:32:44.000A strong AI, and this was years ago, armed with the information that the social media companies have about you, could convince 99% of Americans to move to Alaska or Antarctica or anywhere within two weeks, easily.
01:33:01.000Easily. I mean, just like, it's so hard to have the humility that we are the ant relative to the human.
01:34:27.000When I was flying here, I was listening to your conversation with Tristan Harris while the dude next to me was scrolling TikTok on the plane.
01:34:36.000And it was amazing listening to this dialogue here and watching him just like.
01:34:51.000Like, it can just guide you to anything you, but why don't we...
01:34:56.000This one thing I kind of disagreed with you on this talk where you were saying that you just don't think that humans are going to do anything about it until we're forced to.
01:35:40.000The small dopamine hit that you get from opening up reels just scrolling through and seeing people get knocked out and car accidents and big boobs, that is, for whatever reason, much more compelling than the idea of...
01:35:56.000Possessing autonomy and the idea of having the ability to completely remove yourself from the thing that everyone's addicted to, which is likes and engagement and getting an outrage, the algorithm showing you things over and over again that outrage you.
01:36:17.000It's so compelling to people, and we're so averse to being bored, that at any time when nothing's going on, you pick up your phone, you start scrolling.
01:36:25.000At any time, you just get nonsense, just fed into your head at any time.
01:36:29.000Think about like the first time that somebody experiences Jiu-Jitsu, right?
01:36:32.000They get on the mats and they realize they might have some hubris.
01:37:44.000What will life be like when we adapt to it?
01:37:47.000That's when things are going to get strange.
01:37:49.000I think the 80 to 90% improvement of life experience, I think what he's talking about, quality of life experience, I think what he's talking about is...
01:38:03.000It'll make allocation of resources much more efficient.
01:38:07.000It'll be much easier to get water and health services to third world countries.
01:38:13.000It'll be much easier to keep power on in places.
01:38:17.000It'll be much easier for people to get sanitation, medicine, things along those lines.
01:38:24.000And then starving, poverty, nutrition, all those things could probably work out in a far more efficient and a far more effective way.
01:38:59.000Because whoever is actually programming this thing, as we've seen with Google's AI disaster, when they program their AI to show you images of Nazis, and it showed you multicultural, multi-ethnic, multiracial Nazis.
01:39:16.000Like, instead of actual, like, what is it?
01:39:18.000No, Nazis with fucking dueling scars on their face, hard-looking, scary German dudes.
01:39:40.000Because if you start doing that with everything else, then we have a distorted version of reality itself by the most potent intelligence that we currently have at our disposal.
01:40:14.000And it's very difficult for adults to release their egoic addiction to what they do, to their habits, to what props up their identity.
01:40:25.000But I think that what we could do is take on thinking, take on learning, take on the art of decision-making, for example, with a beginner's mind.
01:40:37.000For the world that's coming, like you think about skating to where the puck is going, not to where it was or what used to be, right?
01:40:43.000So what does it mean to be a human in the world that we're a year or two or three away from, right?
01:40:48.000Where there's a super intelligence out there that can manipulate us, where so many jobs are lost.
01:42:23.000You can't be solving the problem that was important, like, in a fight a minute ago.
01:42:28.000Right. It's a different fucking problem than we have right now.
01:42:30.000Right. Or in a chess game an hour ago, or 10 minutes ago, or one minute ago, right?
01:42:33.000As a society, we need to be solving the problems that are and that are coming, not the ones that were 10 years ago that we're emotionally addicted to.
01:42:39.000Right. But humans don't fucking do that.
01:42:42.000Right. We tend to cling to our ideas, the decisions we made.
01:42:50.000I mean, I think that this question of identity is a really important one, whether it relates to a belief system, a decision you've made.
01:42:58.000Like, this idea of humans fighting tooth and nail to maintain our conceptual schemes is something like, you think about someone who has, like, what one might frame is like a fear of success, right?
01:43:08.000Like, that's a term people use, fear of success.
01:43:10.000The way I understand fear of success is that why do people undermine themselves when they are close to something that they want?
01:43:19.000Right? To a breakthrough that they earn.
01:43:20.000I think the reason is because if their conceptual scheme, if their identity is in not being the person who wins the big game, right, or who succeeds, it is more terrifying to succeed than it is to give up that old identity.
01:43:34.000That's a core driver of human psychology.
01:43:36.000Right? In competition, that's a lot of what we do, right?
01:43:38.000We plant identities in people, tells in people, little egoic addictions in people.
01:43:44.000And then we exploit the mind being stuck there because it's not dynamic.
01:44:23.000the way of life that allows us to do that.
01:44:28.000Right. And I have a lot of ideas about what that way of life looks like.
01:44:30.000I think if we don't do that, then we're going to be dinosaurs in a fucking world with the comic coming, and it's going to blow us the fuck up.
01:44:37.000So we need to create the ability to reinvent ourselves, to be creative, to adapt.
01:44:43.000So what do you think happens with all these people that lose their jobs?
01:44:46.000Because most people believe that some form of universal basic income, people who have studied this, believe that some form of universal basic income is inevitable and necessary.
01:44:59.000I worry about that psychologically because I worry about people being dependent upon checks from the state and not having agency and not having a personal sense of worth.
01:45:12.000You know, I think people identify with what they do.
01:45:15.000If someone's a great mechanic and they have a great relationship with the people that bring their cars to them and they They enjoy being able to fix things and help people.
01:45:40.000Some people get excited and some people, there's going to be people that take advantage of it in a very positive way.
01:45:45.000If there's a, if there's like a real living wage that you get from the government where you really don't have to worry about your housing anymore, you don't have to worry about your food.
01:45:55.000I mean, I think that would be, if you were an ambitious person, that would be amazing.
01:46:00.000So then you could dedicate yourself entirely to what you love, whatever that thing is, and just really dive into that and let that become your focus in life.
01:46:09.000And we're accustomed to believing that survival itself is the primary driving force, food and shelters, the primary driving force for this intelligent species of human beings.
01:46:26.000Why does that have to be your driving force?
01:46:28.000If we have unlimited resources, which assumingly will, assumingly we will with AI if it's implemented correctly, if we have unlimited resources in terms of your ability to never worry about being hungry, never worry about shelter.
01:46:44.000You would hope that what people would do then is pursue their dreams.
01:46:49.000But some people don't have fucking dreams.
01:46:51.000Some people, they've gone too far down this journey of life with a rigid mindset and a very limited perspective.
01:47:01.000And many will change, but many will not.
01:47:04.000And that's where it gets weird, because then you have a whole entire class of society, an enormous swath of human beings that are addicted to TikTok that now get checks, have no hobbies or interests, live off garbage food, and they're lost.
01:47:23.000Yeah. and they're being told, probably they're being manipulated, that someone's responsible for this, that these people need to be taken down and shut down, we need to return to our old way of life.
01:47:34.000You give them enormous potential for unrest.
01:47:38.000Well, I think that, like, In dialogue that I've had over the past 10 years or so with people who are AI optimists, there's this jump to the utopian future, right, where everything, like land of abundance, no more resource scarcity.
01:48:18.000So in chess, there's this interesting dynamic between strategy and tactics all the time, right?
01:48:23.000We need to liberate ourselves from, to be strategic and to think ahead, like think about what would be the ideal place to go, but then we also have to get the tactics right, the math right, to get there.
01:48:31.000We can't just hang our queen or hang our bishop or hang our rook on the path to our strategic dream, right?
01:48:37.000We need to integrate execution with strategic dreaming.
01:48:40.000Because often if we're thinking too much tactically, we can't see the long-term plan we want to utilize, right?
01:48:47.000Like the end result we want to move toward.
01:48:50.000And so when I think about this path of AI, I think there's going to be so much disruption along the way to that place of resource abundance and utopia.
01:48:59.000Even if that was a positive place, I think it's going to be a really messy path to get there.
01:49:03.000But for us to navigate the path, the question to me now is...
01:49:07.000What should we be doing as individuals, as a species, in order to allow us to navigate that path?
01:49:14.000Well, I think people certainly, if universal income becomes ubiquitous, we're certainly going to need some sort of guidance.
01:49:20.000We're certainly going to need something that guides people towards a feeling of relevancy.
01:49:34.000Any kind of training, anything where you're learning something.
01:49:37.000But again, it comes to this comfort thing.
01:49:40.000You and I have very similar paths in life and that we've sought things that are many people find uncomfortable and difficult.
01:49:49.000And I think there's great value in uncomfortable and difficult things and in the beginner's mindset and the learner's mindset because there's just you learn more about everything by learning about something.
01:50:01.000And I've lived my life like that and so have you.
01:50:03.000And there's many people out there that resonate with these ideas.
01:50:07.000And they also live their life like that and they get excited.
01:50:12.000And those are the people that are really worried about.
01:50:14.000The people that just want a good job, where there's nothing wrong with that.
01:50:17.000There's nothing wrong with wanting a good job in being able to take care of your family and having a place where you enjoy working and being able to go there every day.
01:50:24.000And when that's taken away from people and they have to kind of restructure the entire way they interface with reality.
01:50:36.000connection with the government now where the government is now your provider.
01:50:42.000It's not just for the people by the people.
01:50:45.000It's not representative of the people.
01:50:47.000It's now your provider, which is a very strange relationship to have.
01:50:52.000And we see it in welfare states, which I think social safety nets are very important.
01:50:57.000I think if we're going to be a compassionate society, we need to be able to take care of people that aren't doing well, because a lot of life is about fortune.
01:51:05.000And sometimes people run into horribly unfortunate situations, and there's massive potential in those people.
01:51:12.000And those people can realize that potential if they're helped.
01:51:17.000But I do think there's a certain psychological aspect to having the state take care of all your food and money and resources and housing that all of a sudden, who are you?
01:51:29.000And what do you do to give yourself meaning if you're not the type of person that seeks out difficult things and you're 45 or 47 years old or whatever you are?
01:51:42.000Like, there's going to be a lot of people like that.
01:51:45.000And throughout history, times, terrible times have been very cruel to people who weren't prepared.
01:51:53.000Yeah. And, you know, I worry about it almost like an intellectual famine.
01:51:58.000Yeah. you know, like a psychological famine, that people will be deprived of the thing that they have rested their hat upon, like their identity, who they are, what it means, their sense of purpose, that it will be pulled away from them.
01:52:15.000That scares a shit out of me, especially when I know how many people get addicted to drugs and how many people get addicted to all sorts of weird lifestyle choices to provide them with some dopamine or some rush or some, just something that makes them feel like they're alive.
01:52:31.000There's something so powerful about being grounded in...
01:52:37.000And a path to being grounded is being immersed in an art, like, for example, like chit-su or chess, where if you...
01:52:46.000Like, if you're on the jihitsu mats and you over-extend your arm and you get armbard, like, you're not going to say that's not my fault.
01:53:01.000Or if you're a chess player and you make a mistake and you lose, you...
01:53:06.000you if the people who say that's not my fault don't they fucking they're irrelevant very very quickly they just get blazed by and they're just like everyone else's race has passed and they're not in the race anymore and if you're if you think about a community for example of fighters let's think about jiu-jitsu as like a vision like the one of the things that separates people as they get deeper into an art is whether they want to take themselves on as a way of life, whether they're hungry to have their weaknesses revealed, right?
01:53:35.000You think about a school where, like, somebody, like you can, I always found it interesting to watch people when they're four or five rounds into sparring, like, do they look for the blue belt to rest with or do they look for the, like, like 240 pound fucking bruiser to beat the shit of them or the high level brown belt to exploit them or the black belt to like kick their ass, right? Who do they look for?
01:53:55.000Who does like the up and coming purple belt look for when like the young competitor?
01:54:00.000Is he looking for the egoic rest or the place to be exposed?
01:54:03.000Like the people who hunger for exposure to get better, right?
01:54:06.000It's like seeking accountability as a way of life.
01:54:09.000I think there's something really powerful to do that with decision making.
01:54:12.000Right? Because we're making decisions and we're making decisions in a higher and higher stakes world.
01:54:18.000And if we train at the art of decision making in something that's grounded in reality.
01:54:24.000Like, for example, the chess rating system is just a fucking thing.
01:54:29.000But I hear people, like, I know people who play chess online and then they're like, yeah, this is my rating, but I'm actually much stronger than that because of this and this.
01:54:45.000But there's something about, there's something so beautiful about an accurate feedback loop.
01:54:50.000Right, whether that can be with a coach, training with you, can be on the, just getting tapped out, getting your ass kicked, right, getting hit, losing, whatever it is.
01:54:58.000I think that there's something so powerful about people cultivating some way of life where they're grounded in some kind of feedback loop in their training life.
01:55:16.000I think that we can do this in decision-making.
01:55:18.000I mean, my view is that we're going to be making decisions as a species in an increasingly complex world where there is a superintelligence.
01:55:26.000So we need to track our decisions and we need to see objectively when they are good and when they're bad.
01:55:32.000Like just how you can studying tape as a basketball team or as a jiu-jitsu fighter or whatever.
01:55:36.000Like we need to create game tape in our decision-making.
01:55:39.000We have to stop deluding ourselves about the fact that we're actually better than everything shows we are.
01:55:48.000It gives them a nice little out in their accomplishments.
01:55:51.000It gives them a nice little excuse for why things haven't gone their way.
01:55:55.000Like if you make a decision, write down what the decision is and write down why you made the decision and then look back on it in a week or two or three and create like a spreadsheet, a log, or whatever the fuck you want to use of all of your decisions and why you made them and look back on them.
01:56:08.000And then if the reasons for making the decision no longer are valid but you're holding to the decision, which is what everyone does, Then don't do that.
01:56:19.000So when you work with people, and I know a big part of what you do is help organizations learn and how do you instill these ideas in people?
01:56:31.000Do you have a structure that you follow when you go to work with people?
01:57:31.000A lot of what I try to do is understand the entanglement of their brilliance and their eccentricity or their genius and their dysfunction.
01:57:37.000I think so quickly people try to come in, if you come in with some kind of formula for how things will be done, you're going to be slicing away the brilliance of individuals, right?
01:57:45.000Like all of our most brilliant creations are interwoven with the dysfunctional parts of our mind.
01:57:53.000Like most in the realm of like trainers or coaches of different fields, I think it's mostly bullshit because mostly armchair professors who don't understand what it actually means to be playing on that razor's edge of peak performance where you have to make a decision which is taking a risk that's right on the edge of something catastrophic, but that's the thread the needle solution.
01:58:14.000And so when I start working with someone, I try to get to know them very, very deeply.
01:58:18.000Their patterns are their patterns of success, their patterns of failure, where their genius and their dysfunction are entangled.
01:58:27.000I often go into what I call a cave process, which is trying to understand what their self-expression is, like going into the cave with them metaphorically, try to understand what their self-expression would be liberated from reactivity and inertia.
01:58:42.000So not reacting away from what they did before and not being subject to the inertia of what they did before.
01:58:46.000Mm-hmm. But just blue-skying what the ideal solution would be, what the most pure self-expression for them would be.
01:58:54.000So it's completely dependent upon the individual and their approach initially?
01:58:58.000Yeah. And not their approach, the individual and the patterns of their approach, right?
01:59:03.000Not that we would do things the way they did before, but I have a lot of humility.
01:59:06.000Like, I don't think that I know the way.
01:59:12.000The coaches who have been most damaging to me, for example, when I was in that same period when I was 15, 16 years old, I had a coach who was part of the Russian school of chess, who essentially had me move away from my self-expression, move away from my style.
01:59:27.000My style of chess play at that point my whole life had been creative, attacking, improvisational.
01:59:32.000I love to create chaos and find hidden harmonies in chaos.
01:59:36.000He urged me to stop playing that way, stop studying that style of play, play like these cold-blooded prophylactic chess players like Petrosian or Karpov.
01:59:45.000I played much more in the style, not the strength, but the style of like Gary Kasparov or Mikhail Tahl or Bobby Fisher, like players who were aggressive, who had a lot of like red blood flowing through their body.
02:00:06.000Is there a benefit to that just to expand your repertoire?
02:00:10.000Yes. There is absolutely a benefit to that.
02:00:12.000But there's also the movement of a young competitor away from their self-expression, a love from their love for the game, a love from their passion.
02:00:21.000Right? I think I had this, this brilliant man named Yuri Razavayev who was on the other pillar of the Russian school chess, who said this amazing thing to me.
02:00:27.000He said to me, Josh, you can learn Karpov through Kasparov.
02:00:32.000And I didn't understand what he meant for many, many years after that.
02:00:35.000And it was a little too late in my chest life to take that in.
02:00:37.000But what he was saying is that you can learn the great defensive chess by studying the defense of the great attackers.
02:00:43.000Why was it late in your career to take that in?
02:01:32.000Isn't it interesting when life takes you on these, or you go on your own journey, and you realize that decisions that you've made that have turned you in one way?
02:01:43.000Like, those are critical decisions if you think of the life that you're living now, is this optimal?
02:01:51.000If this is optimal, then yes, it's good.
02:01:56.000But if you had gotten that coaching when you were younger and it reignited your love of chess, then it would be good for the life that you currently have.
02:02:03.000Because you would say, well, you know, as a person who's just like so in love with chess, I'm so grateful that I ran into this person when I was 11 years old and they sent me in this correct path.
02:02:16.000I mean, for me, I love the life that I live.
02:02:20.000Like, I'm so grateful for the life that I've lived.
02:02:22.000And I was moved away from chess in many ways by this alienating experience of, of, um, that I just described.
02:02:32.000And then also the dynamics of the movie and everything.
02:02:34.000But I played just for eight years after the movie.
02:02:37.000And so my results were very good, but I was moving into this internal, I was in an existential crisis.
02:02:42.000Yeah. And then, but every, like, catastrophic injury or heartbreaking loss or losing a world championship in the, like, when you're a millimeter from winning the finals, like all of those losses that were so heartbreaking to me, every big loss I'm grateful for now and led to the biggest wins and led to the biggest insights and transitions and.
02:03:02.000And my life today, like the crises that I had in many ways have armed me to help people express themselves in their arts, right?
02:03:11.000And a lot of the reads that I made as a competitor, to go back to your question, like, I invert now.
02:03:16.000So like the things that, the way I would read chess players, find where their minds were stuck, find where their bias patterns were, like, find where their energy was stuck, find where they were like static.
02:03:25.000Right. Now, then I would exploit them, right?
02:03:29.000You find where someone's pattern is static and exploit it, right?
02:03:31.000Then what I do in training people is I find those, I have a very good nose for those because I spent my life as a competitor sniffing them out, feeling my way to them, but then I work on liberating them, releasing the obstruction.
02:03:43.000So a lot of what I do today in my work with brilliant performers is work on unleashing what I used to exploit.
02:04:18.000I don't believe that I know what they should do.
02:04:20.000And I believe that any coach who thinks that they know what someone else should do without listening to the self-expression of that person very, very deeply is just wrong and they should not be, they reject that coach.
02:04:31.000Well, you have to really understand someone psychologically to be able to coach them as well.
02:04:34.000Yeah. Because sometimes you don't know, like, what the hitch is until you run, you're like, oh, there it is.
02:04:41.000So this is your whole problem with your whole life.
02:04:43.000But the amazing thing is you find the hitch, but then you see, oh, that hitch is interwoven with your biggest, um, like I sent you that thing I wrote about Marcello, right?
02:04:54.000And like there was this incredible moment that I had with, with Marcello, um, Such an emotional moment.
02:05:04.000I describe him as like this great lower-up learner.
02:05:06.000And he's someone who uniquely in my life, I've never seen anyone better at learning from one experience, big or large, right?
02:05:15.000And then there was this moment we were sitting, I guess it was six years ago.
02:05:20.000We were sitting just talking about life and our journey and everything.
02:06:20.000And as he described this to me, it was an incredibly emotional scene where he was just weeping in his exploration, and his like just brother to brother talking to me about, like, he walks around with every wound he's experienced in life present all the fucking time.
02:06:38.000And so we think of like this brilliant low rep learner, the guy who has a superhuman ability to learn from one experience, but it, And it's a superpower, but also it ravages it all the fucking time.
02:06:53.000Yeah, but then you're also releasing the genius.
02:06:56.000That's the thing about people that are really amazing at something.
02:07:01.000The pain of losing is so devastating to them.
02:07:06.000Like, When you talk about genius and many, like people use Michael Jordan as an example, genius basketball player, but unbelievably competitive.
02:07:43.000I'll never forget this chess coach, Mark DeVretzky, who I was, he said to me this unbelievably hubristic thing when I was 15, 16 years old.
02:07:53.000He said to me, if he had had Bobby Fisher as a student as a seven-year-old, he could have made Fisher a much, much stronger chess player without any of the craziness.
02:08:43.000We have to very, like, slightly sand away the dysfunctional patterning while observing.
02:08:48.000Like, it's a very delicate process, right?
02:08:51.000You can't just fucking excise the tumor.
02:08:54.000well there's also a problem in when someone becomes very good at doing something and they have a very specific way they've become very good at doing something they assume that this is the way and that this is the way for everyone and that they can impose their way on other people and that what led them to become great in the first place is also that hubris that makes them think they could take Bobby Fisher and make them even better.
02:09:17.000Well, that's why great coaches, great fighters often aren't great coaches, right?
02:09:22.000Because most teachers teach the way they learned, which will alienate 70 or 80% of their students by definition.
02:09:29.000Great coaches can, well, great coaches for a large group need to be able to teach different ways for different kinds of learners.
02:09:36.000Yeah. Different modalities of learners.
02:09:43.000And you have to know, if you're teaching a chess class, I started teaching a group of kids chess when I was in my teens.
02:09:48.000I taught them from kindergarten through fifth grade, and we ended up winning in New York.
02:09:52.000It was a beautiful journey with kids at PS-116.
02:09:53.000And from moving the pieces to winning city, state, and national championships.
02:09:57.000And it was so interesting because I'd be like teaching...
02:10:00.000eight, ten kids at once, and I would be teaching, it was like giving a simultaneous exhibition.
02:10:05.000Like, each one had their own language.
02:10:07.000And it was, I was, like, so involved with this theme that I would be, it was exhausting.
02:10:11.000Because I was teaching 10 chess lessons at the same time to 10 kids.
02:10:14.000And I remember I had this moment, this heartbreaking moment where I had this one student named Ivan, who I, who I, like, just charismatic, intense, you know, we had a very close relationship.
02:11:33.000Yeah. That's what's fascinating about you is that you've gone from being this hyper competitor to teaching people or coaching people to find the very best version of themselves and how to acquire that.
02:11:50.000That's very rare that someone who gets really good at something also becomes really good at showing people how they can get better at things.
02:11:59.000Like that's a specific focus that you've had.
02:12:12.000Well, I took on this interesting challenge when I broke my back.
02:12:21.000But when I broke my back, I remember I said, okay, during this healing process, after the year and a half to two years of denial and training through it when I stopped, I tried to take on training people with the same passion and love that I had for training myself.
02:12:39.000I wanted to see if I could like love it as much.
02:12:44.000And then I got into the, you know, that's part of what moved me into discovering the ocean arts and being all in training.
02:12:49.000So a big part of my relationship with training other people is training myself as a way of life.
02:12:52.000Like I'm always, like I'm living at my limit in my, in the arena myself.
02:12:56.000The moment I think a coach like leaves.
02:12:59.000the arena where they're putting their own ego on the line all the time or their life on the line or whatever the fuck they're putting on the line, then they become static and they start to think they know the answer.
02:13:07.000It's like the fat, you know, martial arts instructor who's many years past training and is smoking a cigarette on the sideline telling people what to do and no longer is like actually dynamic than putting their...
02:13:20.000Yeah. So my relationship to training is something that I live all the time.
02:13:27.000Um... I think also becoming a dad was a big part of it, like the nurturing.
02:13:34.000And a lot of what I've done is invert, what I used to do to break people.
02:13:37.000Now I invert to heal them or to unleash them.
02:13:42.000Like being a father is about the most humbling thing I've ever.
02:13:46.000I thought I had ideas about education until I became a dad and then I realized I didn't know anything I had to start over.
02:13:54.000Yeah, and also the wound pattern, like I think understanding people's wound patterns is very important.
02:13:59.000And a lot of my wound pattern is in loving something very, very deeply, being alienated from it, and then finding a post-conscious relationship to it and a self-expression within it.
02:14:12.000And I think that helping people with that journey is...
02:14:31.000And, like, being deeply involved with the Boston Celtics, like, just the very top of the NBA world and my relationship with Joe Mazzulo, the head coach, and kind of coaching the coach is a modality that I've been Develop playing in for a long time.
02:14:42.000Helping the leader of an organization express themselves as the coach of their people is a big part of what I do and a couple other interesting investing in tech projects.
02:14:50.000And like just helping some, like it allows me to play in in fascinating realms and then studying the interconnectedness.
02:14:58.000I mean, a big part of my passion is thematic interconnectedness.
02:15:02.000Like how is what's happening with the Boston Celtics the same as what's happening in this cutting edge science program?
02:15:06.000The same as what's happening in this wildly interesting tech investing program.
02:15:11.000And how do those principles, those interconnecting fibers relate to culture more broadly and relate to me and what I'm doing every day on the water, boiling?
02:15:25.000Like, to me, I feel that I cannot believe how few people have studied Musashi deeply.
02:15:32.000Right? I mean, whether you're reading the novel about his life and then studying, like, Book of Five Rings, I think everyone should read like 10 times, maybe a day a page, 10 times over.
02:15:44.000You know, one of my favorite cadences of Musashi is in so many chapters of Book of Five Rings, how he comes back and says, like, essentially, these words are empty.
02:15:52.000You have to practice it as a way of life.
02:15:56.000And people just skip these things, but they don't realize.
02:15:58.000And everyone wants to be told what to fucking do, as opposed to understanding they have to work for the path to figure out what the fuck they should do.
02:16:08.000And you have to practice as a way of life.
02:16:53.000Yeah. But that's that, but there's something so beautiful about the truth-telling nature of living.
02:16:56.000Like, if you, you know, you know when you're on the, when you're in a jih Tzu team and you've got some, you watch someone who doesn't think they're competing for a while, but then they're suddenly, like, they're competing next week, how the repertoire compresses, like all the fat just flies off.
02:17:10.000There's something so beautiful about that process in the cadence.
02:17:13.000Yeah. And like, if we live putting ourselves in the flame, then we're not going to be bullshitting ourselves all the time because there's this truth-telling modality.
02:17:20.000Right. So the question is how can we, how can we as many of us as possible, live in some form that's true to us?
02:17:27.000Where we are, there's this grounded, truth-telling, accurate feedback loop in what we're doing.
02:17:33.000What we're practicing as a way of life.
02:17:34.000My fear is that there's so many of us, probably even people that are listening to this right now, that have never developed that aspect of their life.
02:17:43.000And it's very difficult to get started on that path once you've been on this path of complacency and comfort.
02:17:51.000It's very hard for people to sort of embrace this new way of thinking and interfacing with reality.
02:17:56.000But when things are hard, that's beautiful.
02:18:51.000You're not ripping it around hard enough, right?
02:18:53.000Like, everyone finds these, it's like one thing that happens with investors, right?
02:18:57.000They... they become successful and then they develop a mental model to replicate the success.
02:19:03.000So they figure out a mental model become a groove that they can follow.
02:19:06.000But then the groove becomes a rut they get stuck in and then it starts to collect water and it's stagnant water.
02:19:11.000And then they hold to an old mental model based on a success 10 years ago or 20 years ago and they're trapped in it for the rest of their lives.
02:19:17.000It happens again and again in every field, right?
02:19:20.000Some early success creates, you make a framework, you make a modality, you create a mental model, You replicate the success.
02:19:26.000It's not working, but you stick to it because your identity gets connected to that mental model.
02:19:29.000And you're not living with dynamic quality.
02:20:01.000When they start doing well, and then they align themselves with other people doing well, and it kind of changes the way they think and the way they behave because everything is dependent upon you being chosen for things.
02:20:12.000So your whole life is like wondering what your social status is and how you advance that and, hey, what do I have to say?
02:20:26.000Like if you're a basketball team and you've been dominating the game and you're up eight or ten in the fourth quarter, then you start to protect the lead.
02:20:32.000Yes. No, you didn't get the lead because you were protecting the fucking lead.
02:20:44.000I've heard of it, but I don't know exactly.
02:20:45.000If you're a football team and you have a 14-point lead in the fourth quarter or an eight-point leave in the fourth quarter, and you stop doing the dominant things that got you the lead, but you start protecting the lead.
02:20:57.000So your defense back, sit back, You start allowing 8 or 10 or 12-yard completions.
02:21:02.000It is now you're protecting the lead versus dominating the opponent.
02:21:05.000But then you let the opponent feel their strength, feel their greatness.
02:21:48.000And they can see how epic it is, but then they try once and they get their ass kicked.
02:21:53.000It doesn't matter how good a surfer you are, not talking about wave foiling on a high-performance gear.
02:21:58.000You're going to have two, three months of ass kicking as part of it.
02:22:01.000It doesn't matter how good you are as a surfer.
02:22:03.000But now you have to look like a beginner again.
02:22:08.000You have to go from being like the coolest guy in the lineup and if you're socialized to being the quote-unquote kook, being the guy who's just getting his ass kicked who's falling all the time.
02:22:16.000Right? And they don't want to do that.
02:22:17.000So their ego of the excellent surfer prevents them from learning this art.
02:22:21.000They want to learn because they're unwilling to look bad for a while in front of the people who they're used to looking good with.
02:23:53.000One of my favorite things to watch is people that are just absolutely engrossed in what they're doing and are fascinated by it and in love with it.
02:24:06.000It's like there's something out of watching people and learning from people that are really, really passionate about something that's so contagious.
02:24:20.000Maybe it's because I'm at this moment of life where I'm at, and I'm, like, integrating everything I've learned from different arts and bringing it into this one, and this one's manifesting all of it.
02:24:28.000But in terms of like the day-to-day experience of it, oh yeah, man, I'm a lunatic.
02:24:40.000I live right where the jungle meets the ocean.
02:24:43.000You were telling me before we wrap this up, you were telling me about a crocodile encounter.
02:24:48.000Oh yeah, that was before I started, um, before I started foiling, I was surfing.
02:24:55.000Um, and I, it was like 5 a.m. and I was, um, I was flying back to New York that day, so I went out for like a just pre-sunrise, right at sunrise surf, and I was on this glassy, like, head-high wave, and this gnarled log came up in front of me, this piece of fucking wood.
02:25:13.000And I saw it, and I hit it and jumped off.
02:25:36.000Whoa. I spent my life, like I spent a lot of, since I was six years old, I've been free diving, spearfishing with a Hawaiian swing, Hawaiian sling like bow and arrow underwater, deep, deep water diving.
02:25:45.000Like I spent tens of thousands of sharks, but this was so different.
02:25:50.000Like, crock energy, and I haven't, I don't know crocs, like I know sharks, I don't know crocs.
02:25:54.000Well, crocs are actively trying to eat you.
02:25:58.000Sharks, a lot, I mean, there's a lot of people that believe the sharks are attacking people because the people are where the sharks are and they don't want the people there.
02:26:05.000Yeah. You know, like when they're interfering with their hunting grounds and they attack people in that regard.
02:26:10.000I've heard people say that and I'm like, ooh, that kind of resonates.
02:27:10.000I think they are the waste management of the ocean and of the ground.
02:27:17.000They are there to make sure that anything that slips, anything that gets too close, anything that fucks up, it doesn't pay attention to the ripples in the water, that's a meal.
02:27:36.000It's like the ones that they spotted in the early journeys when they were talking about, like there's talks of 40, 40 foot plus crocodiles probably were real because crocodiles don't die of old age.
02:27:49.000They don't have like a 20 year lifespan.
02:27:53.000And if a crocodile lived before people had guns and, you know, they weren't on the menu.
02:28:00.000And you've got to imagine they could live hundreds of years.
02:28:03.000Hundreds of years eating deer and wildebeest and anything that fucked up, antelopes, anything that fucked up, anything they can get a hold of.
02:28:16.000enormous super predator dinosaurs that live amongst people.
02:28:20.000Yeah. I have a friend of mine who's a professional hunter, Jim Shockey, and he was flown to Africa because this particular village was being targeted by crocodiles.
02:28:32.000So they hired hunters to hunt these crocodiles.
02:28:36.000And while he was there, he said, everyone you would meet had a chunk taken out of them.
02:28:44.000And while he was there, one of the women in the village got taken.
02:28:48.000And they would set up these posts in the water so that the crocodiles couldn't get through to this one area where they would gather water and wash clothes and do things.
02:29:29.000I think it's going to be an incredibly, incredibly challenging time in history.
02:29:34.000And one that I don't think the brightest amongst us can truly predict the outcome.
02:29:40.000I want to make one other point, which is that I think that when we talk about like training as decision makers, it doesn't matter how good you are at something.
02:29:50.000It matters that you're on the road, you're on the journey.
02:29:52.000So let's just say people started to play chess.
02:29:54.000It doesn't matter how strong a chess player you are, if you're good or if you suck, that doesn't matter.
02:29:59.000If you're putting yourself in any arena that's objective and you're trying your hardest and you have a feedback loop, like the mats, like the jihitsu mats, whatever they are for you, And you look at the quality of your decisions and you jot down why and you are willing to change your mind and you take on that training as a way of life.
02:30:20.000Then you're on the road to like being grounded in a way that we're not today.
02:30:29.000And I think that being grounded in reality, in something, like feeling the earth beneath our feet in our process, is a big part of how we're going to be able to navigate a world where everything is being deconstructed all the time by a superior intelligence, because we're going to need to recreate ourselves.
02:30:42.000But we have to have, like, when you're deep into an art, like, think about you with your knowledge of MMA, like you have this intuition about where the truth is, right?