The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #735 - Peter Boghossian

00:00:06.000 We're good?

00:00:08.000 Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Peter Boghossian.

00:00:10.000 Hello.

00:00:11.000 Thanks for having me.

00:00:11.000 Thanks for doing it.

00:00:12.000 Appreciate it, man.

00:00:13.000 I'm doing really good.

00:00:13.000 I think I found out about you through Sam Harris.

00:00:16.000 I'm not sure.

00:00:17.000 But you're also friends with my friend Rory Singer.

00:00:19.000 Oh, Rory's a great guy.

00:00:21.000 Great guy.

00:00:21.000 And he got excited when he found out that you were coming on.

00:00:24.000 Rory, of course, martial artist, former UFC fighter.

00:00:27.000 Right.

00:00:28.000 He's tapped me many times.

00:00:30.000 I'm sure he tapped me many times, too.

00:00:32.000 So you work at...

00:00:37.000 University of Portland State?

00:00:38.000 Portland State, yeah.

00:00:39.000 Worked at Portland State, teach philosophy there.

00:00:41.000 And you're also a guy who is...

00:00:44.000 You're described as an atheism advocate.

00:00:48.000 Like, not just an atheist, but someone who actively promotes, hey, you should probably try this.

00:00:54.000 I promote critical thinking and reason and rationality.

00:00:57.000 And the two go together?

00:00:59.000 Yeah, and I think that naturally leads to atheism if people are honest with themselves.

00:01:04.000 And, you know, you mentioned Rory.

00:01:06.000 I've been a longtime martial artist my whole life actually.

00:01:09.000 Really?

00:01:09.000 What did you start off with?

00:01:11.000 The fantasy-based martial arts, the bullshit. 0.99

00:01:13.000 Like which ones? 0.99

00:01:16.000 I did everything.

00:01:17.000 I mean, I tried Kempo, I tried...

00:01:20.000 I literally tried...

00:01:22.000 If you were to put all of the martial arts together that don't work and put them in one suite, I tried them.

00:01:29.000 All of them?

00:01:30.000 Well, Kempo's got some good striking techniques.

00:01:33.000 They just don't have an overall comprehensive system to deal with grappling.

00:01:37.000 Yeah, I tried Jeet Kune Do, I tried Taekwondo, I tried Tai Chi, so I tried them all, and then I actually, one of my turning points was when Ron Van Cleef, who was in the original UFCs, early UFCs.

00:01:51.000 Yeah, he was in like UFC 3 or 4 or something like that.

00:01:56.000 Really early on.

00:01:56.000 And he was like in his 50s.

00:01:58.000 Yeah, he was older.

00:01:59.000 He's still in very good shape.

00:02:01.000 He, like, competed in a tournament, a karate tournament, I think, deep into his 60s.

00:02:07.000 Yeah, I trained with Ron and I trained with this guy, Sheehan Hector Santiago, who was quite something.

00:02:13.000 And I trained with them for years in New York City.

00:02:16.000 And when Ron Van Cleef got taken down and just...

00:02:19.000 Dominated.

00:02:20.000 That was a huge moment for me.

00:02:22.000 Then that started me on this whole other path.

00:02:25.000 And then I trained with Greg Jackson from New Mexico.

00:02:28.000 Were you in New Mexico?

00:02:29.000 Yeah.

00:02:30.000 Were you living there?

00:02:31.000 Well, I started in New York City before the UFCs came along, and I trained there, and then I trained in New Mexico, and now I train with Matt Thornton from Straight Blast, who's John Kavanaugh's coach, who's obviously Conor McGregor in Nelson's.

00:02:48.000 That's a great lineage, man.

00:02:50.000 So you saw Ron Van Cleef get dominated by Hoist Gracie. 0.66

00:02:55.000 Yeah.

00:02:56.000 Like, fairly easily.

00:02:57.000 It was kind of interesting to watch, like a guy who is this...

00:03:01.000 Legend.

00:03:02.000 ...really well-respected in the karate world.

00:03:04.000 Total legend.

00:03:04.000 And just get smoked like a beginner.

00:03:07.000 Yeah, and I saw those guys, like I saw Hector Santiago fight in real life, and he is a very dangerous person.

00:03:15.000 You saw him fight like in a street fight?

00:03:16.000 Yeah, so I used to live in the Lower East Side between A and B. So all of this, this was just part of my...

00:03:25.000 My experience and I thought a lot of this stuff was real and it just turned out to be fantasy.

00:03:29.000 It just turned out to be make-believe, you know?

00:03:31.000 Well, I think that's an interesting parallel.

00:03:33.000 When we were talking before the podcast, we were talking about critical thinking in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and martial arts in general.

00:03:40.000 And there are a lot of people that have very distorted ideas of many things, not just of their ability to handle themselves physically, but Just of the world in general.

00:03:50.000 And I think martial arts sort of highlights a lot of those critical thinking issues.

00:03:56.000 Yeah, and I think that's one of the reasons I was so excited to come on this podcast today, is because I think you're ideally situated to have that conversation with me.

00:04:06.000 Jiu Jitsu Brazilian Jiu Jitsu specifically aliveness training training against resisting opponents We don't talk about this is a huge area that nobody is talking about we can understand all of reason and rationality Through Jiu Jitsu through corrective mechanisms through aligning your beliefs with reality I mean little things from you know testing ideas yourself not having to take it on faith I was talking to one I was talking to...

00:04:35.000 I guess his name eludes me now.

00:04:38.000 I think that there's something...

00:04:40.000 Chris Howder.

00:04:41.000 Okay.

00:04:42.000 He's a super good guy.

00:04:43.000 Great guy.

00:04:43.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:04:44.000 There's something in the process...

00:04:46.000 So you've been tapped thousands of times.

00:04:49.000 Sure, probably if I counted them all up.

00:04:51.000 Yeah, I've been tapped thousands of times.

00:04:53.000 There's something about the type of person who would either, if you frame it in terms of subjecting yourself to that, there's something about that that fundamentally differentiates us, if you will, from people in fantasy-based martial arts.

00:05:10.000 It develops a kind of character, it develops a kind of attitude when you place yourself in situations and get tapped.

00:05:19.000 It's a type of corrective mechanism.

00:05:22.000 Jiu-jitsu is a corrective mechanism.

00:05:23.000 It can help you align your beliefs with reality.

00:05:26.000 And I'd love to explore that with you today and talk about what that means.

00:05:30.000 Just in the case that some people might not know what that means, what I mean by tap is submit.

00:05:34.000 When you do jiu-jitsu, believe it or not, I just assume that people know what we're talking about, but I've talked to people and go, okay, what is jiu-jitsu?

00:05:43.000 What are you doing?

00:05:45.000 Submission grappling which is jujitsu is one style of it, but it's all about using leverage and technique against joints or chokes against arteries like choke holds to Cut off the blood to your brain or neck cranks and when you train jujitsu as opposed to other martial arts Other than wrestling which I consider martial art you can go full speed on that you go you go a hundred percent and that's the difference between those martial arts and striking based martial arts where

00:06:15.000 you really shouldn't go a hundred percent because You only have so many punches your head can take before your body just stops working.

00:06:23.000 That's just a fact You could train sparring hard for you know a certain amount of years, but You're gonna you're gonna your mind is gonna turn into mush.

00:06:33.000 There's just no doubt about it We know that for a fact people do jujitsu into their 60s.

00:06:37.000 Yeah.

00:06:37.000 Oh, yeah Well, Anthony Bourdain didn't even start until he was 58 and he's obsessed He trains every day.

00:06:44.000 He goes sometimes twice a day He'll take a private in the morning and then he'll train in a group class after that.

00:06:49.000 He's a maniac But the difference being like you absolutely know what works and doesn't work, and you absolutely know how good people are.

00:06:58.000 So if we rolled...

00:06:59.000 You can't fake it.

00:07:00.000 Yeah, if we rolled 20 times and you tapped me 18 of those 20 times, you know, and someone said, how good's Peter?

00:07:05.000 I'm like, he taps me most of the time.

00:07:07.000 And then we know, you know?

00:07:08.000 We would know the opposite in that case, but yeah.

00:07:11.000 Well, you know what I'm saying.

00:07:12.000 We know.

00:07:13.000 It's clear.

00:07:13.000 Yeah, and so you can't fake it.

00:07:16.000 There's no pretending. 0.86

00:07:17.000 There's no bullshit. 0.88

00:07:18.000 There are no, like, you know, bowing rituals and masters and all this nonsense.

00:07:22.000 All of those structures, I think, are put in place to conceal the underlying paucity of the effectiveness of the techniques.

00:07:30.000 And people come up with this...

00:07:32.000 So the other thing about that that I think is so important is that all of these combat-based martial arts...

00:07:40.000 I've been waiting for this conversation for a long time.

00:07:43.000 All of those combat, these combat-based martial arts, let's take a look at, you mentioned wrestling.

00:07:50.000 We know it works.

00:07:50.000 We know, there are some things we just know that they work.

00:07:53.000 We know that kickboxing works.

00:07:55.000 We also know that it's head trauma for kickboxing.

00:07:57.000 We know that Muay Thai, which is, in my opinion, an insane activity, but we know that it works. 1.00

00:08:02.000 We know that Western boxing works.

00:08:04.000 We know that jujitsu works.

00:08:06.000 So the reason that we can test these things, we can take people and hopefully later on we'll talk about the difference between Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Japanese Jiu Jitsu, right?

00:08:16.000 Same techniques, different pedagogy, different training method.

00:08:19.000 That's a $2 word for training method.

00:08:22.000 We can take that.

00:08:22.000 We can adjudicate these things because we take two people of equal weight and we stick them in a cage and we have some very basic rules.

00:08:29.000 And also for your listeners who aren't familiar, MMA gloves are very thin.

00:08:33.000 You know, I think people who don't understand MMA, they think that they're kind of like boxing gloves.

00:08:38.000 They're very, very thin gloves.

00:08:40.000 They don't afford much protection at all.

00:08:43.000 They really let the person punch you harder so they don't have to worry about breaking their hand.

00:08:46.000 But as far as like cushion to your brain or your head...

00:08:50.000 Yeah, they're not a cushioning...

00:08:51.000 Yeah.

00:08:52.000 So we can judge what works and one of the ways that we do that is two people, same size, put them in a cage and we see what works.

00:09:01.000 The other thing is that when you train against a resisting opponent, and I think this is the key, You can figure out what's real.

00:09:11.000 Like, that's a mechanism.

00:09:12.000 It's a corrective mechanism.

00:09:13.000 It's a way for you to discern make-believe land and reality. 0.99

00:09:19.000 Bullshit, reality, you know, what works and what doesn't work.

00:09:23.000 And once we start introducing that in systems, like, look, let's say that I said to you, hey, I've come up with this technique. 0.98

00:09:32.000 I know this is going to sound crazy, but it's incredibly effective.

00:09:34.000 And you say, what is it?

00:09:35.000 And I say, it's...

00:09:37.000 A pinky blitzkrieg. 0.85

00:09:38.000 Okay.

00:09:40.000 And so I do this.

00:09:41.000 You just come attacking with pinkies. 1.00

00:09:43.000 Yeah.

00:09:43.000 I say, you know, but it's a certain, you know, stance and I do this.

00:09:46.000 Right.

00:09:46.000 And you say, really?

00:09:49.000 And so you call up, unbeknownst to me, you call up, you know, like I heard a show, your buddies with Eddie Bravo, right?

00:09:56.000 You call up and say, look, we got this guy in here.

00:09:59.000 He says that he has this technique, pinky blitzkrieg. 0.83

00:10:02.000 I'm gonna send them over there put them up against your good purple belt get it on video and we'll see what happens So it's a it's a way to test it now now if that works You'd be like holy shit like I can't this is awesome. 0.92

00:10:15.000 Like we nobody ever thought of the pinky blitzkrieg. 0.87

00:10:17.000 It's incredible But what you've done there is you that's a core component of critical thinking it's a willingness to revise your beliefs and It may sound like bullshit, but you're completely open to the possibility if this works against a resisting opponent, 0.51

00:10:34.000 right?

00:10:34.000 So let's say that I tap out his purple belts and he's like, all right, well, brown belt.

00:10:41.000 At some point, it would be so absurd that you'd think that Eddie and I were in on it, right?

00:10:45.000 I don't know the guy.

00:10:46.000 I've never rolled with him, never met him.

00:10:47.000 So you'd call someone else.

00:10:49.000 But...

00:10:50.000 And then you can test it.

00:10:51.000 So you can watch it.

00:10:51.000 Eventually you can test it with, you know, your friends.

00:10:53.000 So this idea of testability and people can figure out things for themselves.

00:10:57.000 They don't have to go on the history of tradition or, you know, some guy punched a bull in the head or there was a blind nun walking through this and she killed all these guys. 0.91

00:11:05.000 That's what we always had to deal with.

00:11:06.000 That was the history of martial arts was always Masoyama killed a bull with a punch.

00:11:11.000 Exactly.

00:11:11.000 We always hear about Masayama, who was this, was he Kyokushin?

00:11:15.000 I think he was Kyokushin, right?

00:11:16.000 Is that his lineage?

00:11:17.000 I don't remember.

00:11:19.000 But he was a famous Japanese guy who apparently had killed a bull with a punch.

00:11:24.000 And then that comes down as legend.

00:11:27.000 So when people have said, well, you know, how do you know this works?

00:11:30.000 Why should you do it?

00:11:30.000 Well, this guy killed a bull.

00:11:32.000 Well, did you see the bull?

00:11:34.000 Did you see it?

00:11:35.000 So it's a fable.

00:11:37.000 And the fable takes on a life of its own.

00:11:40.000 And the genius about the Ultimate Fighting Challenge was then you had a way to test ideas, right?

00:11:48.000 You can literally watch these things unfold against people in the early ones, you know, people of different weight classes.

00:11:56.000 They had the sumo wrestler and the kickboxing guy.

00:12:01.000 But not only that, it was an opportunity for you to figure out what was real.

00:12:06.000 And there's something that's incredibly appealing to that.

00:12:10.000 Think about kata. 1.00

00:12:13.000 What a fucking waste of time. 1.00

00:12:16.000 Not only is it a waste of time in terms of, let's say what kata is. 1.00

00:12:23.000 You want to go?

00:12:23.000 Yeah, well they're forms, and what a form is, it's like a pattern of movement that everyone does.

00:12:29.000 You get one when you get your white belt, you practice that, you get really good at it, you do it for a test, you get your yellow belt.

00:12:35.000 And in a lot of traditional martial arts, that is part of how you test.

00:12:39.000 I got my black belt in Taekwondo, and I had to remember all those goofy moves.

00:12:45.000 And they never came into play ever when I competed. 0.55

00:12:48.000 They were sort of nonsense.

00:12:50.000 It was a waste of time.

00:12:51.000 And as soon as I did get my black belt, I forgot all of them.

00:12:55.000 I barely remembered them.

00:12:57.000 It's a waste of time, but I'd argue it's even worse than a waste of time.

00:13:02.000 If it were just a waste of time then you know you could have been staring at a wall But you thought that you were doing something to help you achieve a goal and the goal was to win a fight So you thought you were engaged in activity that the whole There's no resisting opponent.

00:13:19.000 So when there's no resisting opponent, it's not a it's not testable You can't bring the tools of science to write so So you thought you were engaging in activity that brought you closer to your desired objectives, but it didn't.

00:13:34.000 Here's the argument against that though.

00:13:36.000 What it does do is it helps your precision movement.

00:13:41.000 And you could argue that learning how to execute these patterns in a very beautiful way shows control and it shows precision movement.

00:13:52.000 The problem with it is that there's some of those movements that are completely ineffective like double knife hand block or thrusts, knife hand thrusts.

00:14:01.000 There's movements that are not applicable to MMA. But the concept behind it is actually something that a lot of really good mixed martial artists like Carlos Kahn did or even Conor McGregor are doing.

00:14:13.000 They're doing a lot of like movement training.

00:14:16.000 And although I don't think kata is the best way to achieve those kind of goals, I think that there is something to be said for not just Martial arts techniques, but other things is like yoga I think is extremely effective in enhancing your ability to To control and manage your body in movements.

00:14:36.000 All right, she's a weird strength. 0.86

00:14:38.000 So we're on the same page.

00:14:39.000 So Think about it.

00:14:41.000 I'd offer a constructive way to think about it like this.

00:14:43.000 So what you just said, I don't know anything about basketball.

00:14:47.000 So I'm going to just use basketball as an example.

00:14:49.000 There's a ball and a net and black guys. 1.00

00:14:52.000 That's a big court. 0.79

00:14:53.000 Tall people.

00:14:54.000 Some white guys.

00:14:56.000 When you think about basketball, what you just described was a guy on a court practicing a layup over and over again.

00:15:03.000 I think a layup is like when you bounce it and you shoot it.

00:15:05.000 You don't know the layup?

00:15:06.000 How dare you?

00:15:06.000 I don't know anything about basketball.

00:15:08.000 You run up to the net thing and you throw the ball in that hole and everybody gets crazy.

00:15:13.000 Okay, but think about, don't think about, so I think thinking about kata like a layup in terms of precision is the wrong way to look at it.

00:15:22.000 Think about kata as a layup without a basketball. 1.00

00:15:28.000 Think about the practice of basketball, the practice, quote-unquote, of basketball without a basketball.

00:15:34.000 Right.

00:15:35.000 Okay, here's the problem with that.

00:15:36.000 What about shadowboxing?

00:15:37.000 Shadowboxing is extremely effective.

00:15:39.000 And shadowboxing, in a sense, is a form of kata.

00:15:43.000 Shadowboxing, including not just boxing, but kicking and punching and kneeing, is a long accepted, excellent form of training and visualization.

00:15:54.000 Yeah, so one of the things that shadow boxing, you can warm up with shadow boxing. 0.78

00:15:59.000 Like, when I warm up in jits, and just to be upfront, I suck.

00:16:05.000 I've been doing it for a long time, but I'm not very good. 0.64

00:16:08.000 Blue belt are you?

00:16:08.000 I love it.

00:16:09.000 Blue belt.

00:16:10.000 How long have you been doing it? 0.99

00:16:11.000 I'm not, I tell you I've been bastard. 0.99

00:16:13.000 Tell me. 0.98

00:16:13.000 Since 1999. How dare you? 0.98

00:16:15.000 How come you're still a blue belt?

00:16:18.000 How often do you do it?

00:16:19.000 Well, only once a week if I'm lucky.

00:16:21.000 Oh, okay.

00:16:21.000 You gotta go Anthony Bourdain style.

00:16:23.000 You gotta get obsessed.

00:16:24.000 Yeah, I just don't have a lot of opportunities.

00:16:26.000 Like, I have a family that I push forward.

00:16:28.000 I have a work career, and I have a life.

00:16:30.000 I dare you have a life.

00:16:31.000 A life, yeah. 1.00

00:16:33.000 Fucking people with their lives. 0.99

00:16:35.000 Yeah, so, you know, I'm not speaking about it from any kind of, like, you know, I'm an expert in this. 1.00

00:16:40.000 I understand what you're saying.

00:16:41.000 Yeah, but I think what's interesting about this is the philosophical implications.

00:16:46.000 And so, like, when I warm up, I like to warm up with another body to slow roll, you know?

00:16:50.000 I like to just, because then I have an opponent.

00:16:53.000 If you're practicing something over and over again, the problem with that is there's no corrective mechanism.

00:16:58.000 You could be doing the technique incorrectly.

00:17:01.000 And then when you actually go to execute it, you've had a body memory for that technique that's taken you away from your goal.

00:17:09.000 Do you mean with striking?

00:17:11.000 Do you mean shadowboxing?

00:17:12.000 Well, you used the example of shadowboxing.

00:17:14.000 So you're saying with shadowboxing that you need another body in order for it to be effective?

00:17:19.000 No, I'm saying that, like, so let's say that you shadow box a hammer punch, right?

00:17:23.000 Okay, so stuff that doesn't work, like kata things, like double knife hands.

00:17:27.000 Yeah, or even if you shadow box jabs and crosses and uppercuts and stuff, even if you do that, you could not be doing it correctly and then you'd be practicing the wrong thing over and over again.

00:17:43.000 Right.

00:17:44.000 That will take you away from your goal.

00:17:46.000 That's why you have to have some kind of a resisting opponent.

00:17:49.000 Resisting opponents are the corrective mechanisms for everything.

00:17:53.000 And just as they're the corrective mechanisms in the physical domain, they're the corrective mechanisms in the cognitive and intellectual domains as well.

00:18:01.000 That's why prayer is so insidious.

00:18:03.000 It's because people think that they're They're doing something that's in their own well-being.

00:18:08.000 They're doing something that's good, but they're just talking to themselves Mm-hmm, but there is some aspects and I would agree with I don't know if I would I don't like labels I have a real hard time with labels even labels for things that I think are good things like I think that Some people get a lot out of prayer,

00:18:30.000 and not necessarily because they're praying to a non-existent deity, or they really truly believe that if they wish for a new car, it's gonna come to them.

00:18:39.000 But I think that the mind, when focused on positive thinking, And and and focused on love and focused on that the tenants of Christianity like of Godly behavior and compassion and all these different things and look You truly are looking out for your fellow man and wanting to be a good person all those things I think there is merit in that I think you can you can you can certainly find benefit in that as a tool for mental management I mean does that mean there's a guy in the clouds

00:19:09.000 with a harp and all that jazz and Of course not.

00:19:12.000 But I think that it's, in a sense, like Tai Chi.

00:19:15.000 I mean, if a guy thinks that he's going to take Tai Chi only and get into the UFC, it's hilarious. 0.99

00:19:22.000 He's going to get fucked up. 0.68

00:19:23.000 But if a guy in the UFC, like Conor McGregor, for instance, who's so concentrated on movement, really gets involved in Tai Chi, I think he would probably get at least some benefit out of it. 0.99

00:19:34.000 Because in that slow-moving...

00:19:38.000 This, like, rhythmic pattern, what you're doing is you're exercising your body in an unusual way and expanding the possibilities of your interactions with opponents, expanding what your body can and can't do.

00:19:53.000 I think yoga does that. 0.94

00:19:55.000 I think there's a lot of different things that do that.

00:19:57.000 Okay, so we need, there are about 20 really interesting things that you just said.

00:20:01.000 I think we need to kind of unpack those a little bit.

00:20:04.000 So if you talk about...

00:20:06.000 So take a look at prayer and what people think that they're doing.

00:20:10.000 And then let's...

00:20:11.000 This is why you're the perfect person to talk to this about. 1.00

00:20:16.000 Then compare that to a martial art that's bullshit. 0.99

00:20:19.000 Right. 0.99

00:20:20.000 Like Tai Chi is a good example.

00:20:21.000 Okay.

00:20:22.000 So people think that they're going towards a certain end winning fights.

00:20:27.000 It's certainly...

00:20:27.000 I don't know about now anymore, but certainly when I... I think there's some people that teach Tai Chi and even practice Tai Chi that are just doing it for their health.

00:20:34.000 Yeah, my dad is one of those people.

00:20:35.000 So he has zero ambitions to win a fight with anybody.

00:20:39.000 He's in his late 70s.

00:20:40.000 So if somebody says that, I have no problem with that at all.

00:20:45.000 And I think it's true, and certainly motion would be better than non-motion.

00:20:49.000 And the problem is exactly the same problem with religion when people are making objective claims.

00:20:55.000 They're making claims about the nature of reality.

00:20:57.000 Right.

00:20:59.000 I want to know what's true.

00:21:01.000 The problem is that people, every time you talk about faith or religion or what have you, people shut down or they have barriers.

00:21:08.000 We don't need to talk about that.

00:21:09.000 All we need to do is talk about jiu-jitsu.

00:21:11.000 That's why this is so perfect.

00:21:13.000 Because with jiu-jitsu, you can figure things out yourself.

00:21:17.000 You can figure out what works, right?

00:21:19.000 The pinky blitzkrieg. 0.92

00:21:20.000 You can figure out what doesn't work.

00:21:22.000 You can figure out what you're capable of.

00:21:23.000 If I tap you, if you tap me out 20 times, I'm under no illusions that the 21st time, I mean, I could get lucky.

00:21:32.000 I could get lucky against Rory.

00:21:33.000 I could get lucky against Matt Thornton.

00:21:34.000 It's always possible.

00:21:35.000 I could get...

00:21:37.000 It's highly unlikely, but I could get lucky.

00:21:40.000 The problem is that if you look at the way that people engage these rituals in their lives, what these people are doing is they think it's taking them towards an end.

00:21:52.000 It's exactly identical to fantasy based martial arts.

00:21:56.000 They think it's taking them towards an end.

00:21:59.000 It's not.

00:22:00.000 Right.

00:22:00.000 I think also a parallel, like in fantasy-based martial arts, the benefits of it, like I was, like I said, I did Taekwondo for a long time, and I got really good at it, and I competed a lot, and I was essentially in a cult.

00:22:17.000 I mean, Taekwondo, although it's a beneficial cult and it helped me a lot and in a lot of ways it made me the person that I am today because in training and doing really difficult things and competing and overcoming nerves and fear and all that stuff, there's a lot of benefit in it.

00:22:33.000 But then I had a distorted perception of reality because of it.

00:22:37.000 And that distorted perception of reality was shattered once I started boxing.

00:22:41.000 Exactly.

00:22:42.000 And I realized like, oh my god, I was getting just punched in the face.

00:22:45.000 I thought I knew how to fight when really I just knew how to do Taekwondo.

00:22:48.000 Right.

00:22:48.000 And then I had to learn all the other aspects of martial arts.

00:22:51.000 Like one of the most sobering moments of my life.

00:22:54.000 I trained at Carlson Gracie's on Hawthorne in Hollywood in 1996. And this is before Vitor Belfort made his debut in the UFC. And I had this long,

00:23:10.000 extensive career.

00:23:10.000 History of competing in Taekwondo tournaments and I had kickboxed and I'd done quite a bit of boxing training and I wrestled in high school I thought I was a pretty good martial artist and I just got fucking mauled like I had never exercised like I had no idea what I was doing and I just remember the feeling of helplessness and the guy who one of the bunch of people mauled me but one of the guys that mauled me I'll never forget is this Brazilian kid who was a purple belt who was basically my size He wasn't

00:23:40.000 any bigger than me, and he wasn't like some super Mario Sperry black belt guy. 0.85

00:23:45.000 He was just some guy who just beat the fuck out of me.

00:23:48.000 I mean, almost disdainfully, and he was a nice guy, but I mean, when he was training, he was training really hard, and he didn't give me any slack. 0.96

00:23:54.000 I was just getting wrecked. 0.99

00:23:56.000 And I remember thinking, wow, what a stupid illusion I was under. 0.97

00:24:00.000 Yeah, and so, in a sense, I think it's... 0.95

00:24:05.000 I mean, I guess that's a question we could talk about, but is it incumbent upon us to help people out of these traditional martial arts?

00:24:12.000 I had a very similar experience.

00:24:14.000 I trained in stick and knife fighting for years.

00:24:17.000 That's why my hands have all these cuts.

00:24:22.000 You train with real knives?

00:24:23.000 Real knives and sticks, yeah.

00:24:24.000 I did this stuff with the Dog Brothers and Dan Medina was my coach for years.

00:24:27.000 I got a black belt in stick and knife fighting.

00:24:29.000 And, you know, I'm thinking about black belts and stick in a knife. 1.00

00:24:33.000 Yeah. 0.86

00:24:33.000 Okay. 0.86

00:24:34.000 Well, I mean, if you're in a place where the bullets are all gone and no one knows how to make a gun, bows and arrows haven't been invented.

00:24:40.000 That's where I was going to go with this.

00:24:42.000 Where I was going to go with this is I, so I thought I was, like you, I thought I was a pretty good martial artist.

00:24:47.000 Right.

00:24:47.000 And then I fought a guy, fought actually Greg Jackson, who With sticks and just beat the shit out of me.

00:24:57.000 I mean, I had a stick and I've been training with a stick for like years at that point and it was just a huge wake-up call for me.

00:25:03.000 You guys fought like in a competition?

00:25:05.000 We fought in like a fight fight and he had only on...

00:25:09.000 A fight fight?

00:25:10.000 Like you were mad at each other?

00:25:11.000 No, well like a, you know, like a party's arm to the submission.

00:25:15.000 I mean, we were like, I was not...

00:25:17.000 So it was a competition?

00:25:18.000 Well, no, it was at his old place.

00:25:21.000 And this is when I started training with him.

00:25:22.000 And I think we put on very light hockey gear. 0.99

00:25:26.000 And I was just going to beat the shit out of him. 0.99

00:25:28.000 I was just going to... 0.99

00:25:29.000 Yeah, well, that was my goal.

00:25:31.000 Because he said...

00:25:32.000 This was before I learned about aliveness training and resisting...

00:25:36.000 Aliveness?

00:25:37.000 Yeah, so that's like Matt Thornton's meme.

00:25:40.000 And it's a combination of, that's a whole other discussion.

00:25:44.000 It's like timing energy and motion, resisting opponents, ways to figure out what's true and what works.

00:25:53.000 This gets back to our discussion about shadowboxing and about training other ways.

00:25:57.000 I had trained with a stick, and I had learned all these kind of basically these kata things, but I also trained against a willing opponent.

00:26:05.000 Like, when you watch these stick demos, the key to look for is what the UK does, the feeder, you know?

00:26:11.000 It's not what the guy does.

00:26:12.000 UK? I think this is a Japanese word for, like, the guy who's feeding in, you know, like... 0.98

00:26:17.000 If I'm going to go like this, I do this, and then I go...

00:26:21.000 Most of the people are listening to this.

00:26:23.000 It's probably 90%, even though a lot are watching it.

00:26:27.000 So what you're demonstrating for those who are listening is there's these drills that you do where someone will pretend to throw a punch, and another person will step aside and do their counterattack.

00:26:38.000 And it looks awesome.

00:26:39.000 So the UK guy is a guy.

00:26:41.000 In Taekwondo, we used to call it the One Steps.

00:26:43.000 Yeah, the One Steps.

00:26:44.000 And it's a great example of a fantasy-based martial art.

00:26:48.000 Because it brings you further from reality.

00:26:51.000 It makes you think you can do something that you simply cannot do.

00:26:55.000 So what you need to do in those circumstances is you need to watch the feeder.

00:27:00.000 The person who's giving the reverse punch.

00:27:01.000 It's like a punch that comes off of your...

00:27:03.000 I'm trying to be conscious of your readers now.

00:27:05.000 A punch that comes off of your ribs and goes out and...

00:27:08.000 They almost never hit somebody.

00:27:10.000 Like if you watch the Steven Seagal when he got his black belt, there's a famous black and white video that's out there.

00:27:17.000 Jamie can link to it, I guess.

00:27:19.000 It looks awesome. 1.00

00:27:21.000 But it's bullshit. 1.00

00:27:22.000 It's all choreographed. 1.00

00:27:23.000 Right, Aikido.

00:27:25.000 Yeah, so also the the key deliverable I think in this call one of those in this conversation is that Whether it's shadow boxing or whether it's kata or whether it's taking a knife and doing a drill when I used to do those train with sticks I was really really good,

00:27:41.000 but I always knew the angle So it was fantasy based if you took the angle out of it.

00:27:46.000 I would just get beaten to death I mean people what do you mean by angle?

00:27:49.000 So, like in De Robio or Screamer, there are 12 angles. 0.84

00:27:52.000 It goes like 75 degrees, 75 degrees the other way, baseball swing, reverse baseball swing, stab, overhand stab, attack to the knees, attack to the other knees.

00:28:04.000 So when you do those, when you train, you know, guys just do the numbers.

00:28:11.000 One, two, three, and, you know, you get so good at it.

00:28:14.000 I mean, it's pretty crazy.

00:28:15.000 I can show you stuff here.

00:28:16.000 You know, it's like, if I know the angle, it looks awesome.

00:28:19.000 I've seen guys do it.

00:28:20.000 It looks pretty badass. 1.00

00:28:21.000 But it's bullshit. 1.00

00:28:23.000 It's bullshit. 1.00

00:28:24.000 It's fantasy-based martial arts because the opponent isn't resisting. 1.00

00:28:27.000 You have to have a resisting opponent.

00:28:29.000 But here's the deliverable for this conversation, I think, is that if you train in a certain way, absent a corrective mechanism, but you think that corrective mechanism is an actual corrective mechanism.

00:28:42.000 In other words, you think you're training in a way that will bring you closer to reality, but you're becoming further from reality.

00:28:48.000 What that does is that's devastating because you need that corrective mechanism.

00:28:56.000 You need to bring your thoughts in alignment with reality.

00:29:00.000 And that was the great thing about the UFCs is because now we have all these people and we can see what works.

00:29:06.000 So think about the guys, you know, I listened to your show with Eddie Bravo, I think, and he said he was just practicing the The rear naked on his leg.

00:29:17.000 Well, that's not going to work because there's no corrective mechanism.

00:29:20.000 I don't think you understand what you're saying.

00:29:22.000 Well, maybe I wasn't.

00:29:23.000 He was exercising his squeeze on his leg.

00:29:25.000 He still does it.

00:29:26.000 And it's because one of the things about jiu-jitsu, about finishing a technique...

00:29:30.000 Is how hard can you squeeze?

00:29:32.000 How long can you squeeze?

00:29:33.000 So what Eddie does is he'll do this like if we're watching TV together, he'll do it.

00:29:37.000 He puts his knee up.

00:29:38.000 If we're watching fights, he'll put his knee up like this and he'll rear naked choke his own knee and just squeeze it.

00:29:44.000 And what he's doing is he's working on his squeeze.

00:29:47.000 And it's not thinking that that's going to make him get to that position where he can squeeze someone better.

00:29:54.000 Or against a live, resisting opponent.

00:29:56.000 It's an exercise.

00:29:58.000 Okay, so that's cool.

00:29:59.000 So if the idea then is that we'll work on your squeeze, then that's different from thinking that if I train...

00:30:07.000 What if you practice, think about like practicing shadowboxing, to use your example, and your hook is always wide or you can stand here.

00:30:16.000 And then when you get into a fight, you deal with a resisting opponent and you do that.

00:30:20.000 So you would have gone down a path to make you worse in the action.

00:30:24.000 But that's assuming that you're doing it incorrectly.

00:30:26.000 If you train correctly and you learn the techniques correctly and then you apply them in your shadowboxing correctly, it's going to benefit you.

00:30:34.000 Okay, so that's the question.

00:30:36.000 The question is, and I mean, the great thing about this conversation is that we can test this stuff, right?

00:30:42.000 I mean, this is the ultimate, we have people, we have, so for that we need to look at, the only big word I think we need here today is pedagogy, like the training method.

00:30:53.000 It's a big word for training method.

00:30:55.000 We don't even need pedagogy, just say training method.

00:30:56.000 So we look at the training method.

00:30:59.000 What I think you would need for that is, well here, I guess here's my question to you.

00:31:04.000 Would it be better in your mind to train shadow boxing or to do some light boxing with guys with your focus mitt over there, guys holding up focus mitts at the same speed that you were shadow boxing?

00:31:19.000 This is where I think the conversation is going awry.

00:31:22.000 It's not that it's better.

00:31:25.000 All those things have their merits.

00:31:27.000 Shadow boxing has its merit.

00:31:29.000 Yoga has its merit.

00:31:30.000 Yoga is not going to teach you how to be a better fighter.

00:31:32.000 But if you learn all the techniques of jujitsu and you incorporate yoga into your training, it will likely elevate your jujitsu.

00:31:40.000 I have absolutely no question that that's true.

00:31:43.000 And I think that that goes along with shadowboxing, especially if you're a striker.

00:31:47.000 If you're a striker and you don't shadowbox, I think you're doing yourself a disservice.

00:31:51.000 I think there is a benefit to visualization and to movement and to...

00:31:57.000 There's things that happen when you throw combinations in the air as far as your dexterity, especially with kicking.

00:32:06.000 And your ability to even do combinations without any resistance or without anybody trying to counter you, there's benefit in stringing together those reps, those repetitions.

00:32:21.000 Yeah, okay.

00:32:22.000 So I think there is a benefit than that.

00:32:24.000 And I think, so sometimes if I go in to straight blast and there's nobody on the mat, there's nobody to roll with, sometimes what I'll do is I'll just go through the motions.

00:32:33.000 Like I'll do rolls or I'll go over my back shoulder or I'll just, you know, fall down.

00:32:40.000 There's merit to that in that I think I already know how to do it.

00:32:46.000 I'm sure that I could improve on it without any question at all.

00:32:53.000 Your example of yoga is a really good one.

00:32:56.000 I think it's certainly true that you can use muscles in yoga that you don't in another activity.

00:33:02.000 And I think that those have benefits to MMA. In fact, I'm sure they have benefits to a lot of other things.

00:33:09.000 Not just the flexibility aspect and the body maintenance.

00:33:12.000 There's a lot of good things to it.

00:33:14.000 Yeah, I don't do it myself.

00:33:16.000 I Probably should but if I would I just spend that hour doing jujitsu to be blunt with you But I think that you can get things out of yoga and get things out of these other activities but you have to be conscious about the reason why you're doing these things and The way to get better ultimately like yeah,

00:33:34.000 so you could shadow box at a certain level And again, I guess, I think we can think about it in terms of the layup example again.

00:33:43.000 It's not necessarily, the ball is the corrective mechanism with the layup.

00:33:47.000 The person is the corrective mechanism in the fight.

00:33:50.000 And as long as somebody knows what they're doing and they're training in a certain way, it's not necessarily that shadowboxing will take one away from one's goal, if it's being practiced correctly.

00:34:00.000 I think Kata would take one away from one's goal. 0.60

00:34:03.000 But I think that the whole project like if you think about and that's why I think the shadow boxing is such a good example of this What is it that...

00:34:14.000 Okay, so when someone shadowboxes, the point is to warm up, that accomplishes that.

00:34:20.000 You could do that with squats too, right?

00:34:22.000 Or, you know, you could do that in any whatever number of, you're looking at me like you're lost.

00:34:26.000 No, no, just listening.

00:34:28.000 Oh, okay.

00:34:28.000 That'd be cool.

00:34:31.000 We're fine, I'm just listening.

00:34:34.000 That was all in your head, man.

00:34:35.000 Yeah, it's probably...

00:34:37.000 I got that look like, what are you talking about?

00:34:40.000 No, no, I'm just listening.

00:34:42.000 Yeah, well, if you think I'm off track, let me know.

00:34:46.000 You might be a little off track in that I think you think there's very little benefit in a lot of these activities that I think aren't primary activities.

00:34:56.000 I think, yeah, if you wanted to break it down to what is the only...

00:35:01.000 There's a broad range of things you could do to improve all sorts of athletic endeavors.

00:35:07.000 Like, there's a lot of people that don't believe you should do any strength and conditioning training.

00:35:11.000 You should just do technique, and you should just do sparring.

00:35:15.000 There's a lot of people that go that route. 0.98

00:35:17.000 And then there's other people that think that's absolutely foolish.

00:35:20.000 You should primarily, especially once you learn the skills, If you're competing, you should focus primarily on strength and conditioning because really it's just about burning your body out and reaching an incredibly high level of cardio so that when you compete, you know all these techniques already,

00:35:36.000 you will now have a gas tank that's superior to your opponents and that will lead to victory.

00:35:41.000 There's a lot of modalities and there's a lot of schools of thought.

00:35:44.000 Can we talk about that for a sec?

00:35:45.000 Can we talk about that for a sec?

00:35:47.000 Sure.

00:35:47.000 So it's interesting to me, I see guys who come in who are just super strong.

00:35:54.000 And I think to a certain extent, we need to be careful because strength, and again, I'm not speaking from experience so much, I'm speaking just conceptually.

00:36:04.000 I think there's a tendency for strong guys or big guys to over rely upon their strengths and their size.

00:36:10.000 Small man jiu-jitsu is the best jiu-jitsu.

00:36:12.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:36:12.000 That's why I tell people if they're thinking about learning jiu-jitsu, learn from a little person.

00:36:16.000 Because little guys, you know, like a Hoyler Gracie or even Eddie Bravo, before he started lifting weights, Eddie's Yeah.

00:36:32.000 Yeah.

00:36:38.000 Yeah, and I think, well, you tell me what you think.

00:36:41.000 Do you think that if somebody goes in strong and they focus on that, often that that can come at the expense of learning techniques?

00:36:48.000 Yes, it can.

00:36:49.000 But here's the problem.

00:36:50.000 The concept of strength and conditioning, a lot of people think, oh, well, you're doing squats and deadlifts.

00:36:54.000 Yeah.

00:36:55.000 A good example is a guy I've had on this podcast before.

00:36:58.000 His name is Nick Kurson.

00:36:59.000 He trains Rafael Dos Anjos.

00:37:01.000 He trains Ruslan Provodnikov, who's a famous boxer.

00:37:04.000 A lot of world-class athletes.

00:37:06.000 Joe Schilling, whose glory t-shirt I'm wearing, one of their best fighters.

00:37:10.000 Excellent kickboxer, world champion.

00:37:12.000 What he's doing is his strength and conditioning program.

00:37:15.000 He trained under Marv Marinovich.

00:37:17.000 And Nick does a lot of plyometric exercises, a lot of sprinting, a lot of box jumps, and all these really unorthodox techniques.

00:37:26.000 And the idea is to improve your ability to execute things.

00:37:30.000 Improve your ability to close the distance.

00:37:32.000 Improve your ability to get out of the way.

00:37:35.000 Improve your ability to maintain a high workload through the rounds.

00:37:40.000 If you can only throw, let's say, 50 kicks in a round before you get exhausted, and if you can improve that through strength and conditioning, make it 75 or 80, you're going to have a significant advantage over the pace that you can push on your opponent.

00:37:54.000 And that is, in his opinion, and many other people's opinion, and this is...

00:38:00.000 This is a really open debate right now in the world of martial arts because it has not been solved because it relies on so many variables.

00:38:07.000 It relies on the athlete themselves, their mental fortitude, their dedication to their craft, how good is their technique in the first place before they embark on a strength and conditioning program.

00:38:18.000 There's so many variables. 0.94

00:38:20.000 I think to unbox all this and to make it a little bit easier for people that are going, what the fuck are they talking about?

00:38:26.000 What we're saying is there's a lot of people that have distorted ideas about reality itself and a method for exposing that kind of thinking which is like this sort of Dogmatic religious thinking,

00:38:44.000 which is ultimately accepted by all the people around you, but never critically judged.

00:38:53.000 A really good method is jujitsu.

00:38:57.000 And the reason why jujitsu is such a good method is because jujitsu is one of the few martial arts that you could practice at any age.

00:39:05.000 And you could also watch those techniques being applied by other people.

00:39:11.000 Yesterday I went to the Eddie Bravo Invitational, which was at the Orpheon Theater in downtown LA. Some of the best jiu-jitsu fighters in the world were going at it, and it was really amazing to watch.

00:39:23.000 It was awesome.

00:39:24.000 It was a crowd filled with thousands of people who are fans of jiu-jitsu and practitioners So it was a really educated crowd and what was cool about that is we all understood like when a guy got to a position like oh And you know the crowd would cheer when someone would get out of a heel hook or they would cheer when a guy would be able to Tap a guy with a rear naked choke and we were watching all these things play out so there was lessons for me and As someone who's not competing and sitting in the audience,

00:39:53.000 because I've spent so much time doing Jiu-Jitsu, I was watching these interactions take place in a very logical and trackable...

00:40:04.000 Truth-seeking.

00:40:04.000 It's a truth-seeking community.

00:40:05.000 Yes, exactly.

00:40:06.000 When the techniques work, the techniques work.

00:40:09.000 By the way, what's interesting is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, as it was first created or first sort of established, It came from Japanese Jiu Jitsu and Elio Gracie and Carlos Gracie who were probably two of the most important people ever in the history of martial arts.

00:40:25.000 They sort of manipulated those techniques and improved upon them and made the art more about the submissions than it was about the stand-up and the bringing the fight to the ground.

00:40:38.000 And in doing so they established a series of techniques and you know we refer to those techniques as the basics.

00:40:45.000 There are some people in that world that think that the basics are all you need.

00:40:49.000 And they don't accept the new techniques.

00:40:52.000 And it's really fascinating because that's essentially how jujitsu became effective in the first place.

00:40:58.000 It's because the new techniques that were established by Carlos and Elio Gracie and all these different movements, like the guard, like learning how to do triangles off your back, all these different things, which people had no idea in the early UFCs.

00:41:10.000 Hoist Gracie tapped out Dan Severin. 0.98

00:41:12.000 Everybody's like, what the fuck is he doing? 1.00

00:41:13.000 He's got his legs wrapped around his neck and his arm. 1.00

00:41:16.000 What is this?

00:41:16.000 And then Dan's about to go out and he taps and everybody's like, whoa, this is crazy.

00:41:21.000 Well, those were, in our world, completely new techniques.

00:41:25.000 Well, there's a lot of new techniques that are constantly being established now.

00:41:29.000 By these young, innovative practitioners that some of the old guard are ignoring.

00:41:35.000 And the real question is, is that smart?

00:41:38.000 Do you just need the basics?

00:41:41.000 It's a hot debate right now.

00:41:43.000 But again, this hot debate can be proven.

00:41:45.000 That's exactly what I was going to say.

00:41:46.000 That's exactly right.

00:41:47.000 And if, as a result of this being proven, somebody doesn't change their mind, So, the core piece, what's really important is belief revision.

00:41:59.000 Critical thinking is all about, I made a mistake, I was wrong, I thought this, you know what, I made a mistake.

00:42:05.000 And so, if they don't do that, then they're somehow deficient in that attitude and disposition of critical rationality.

00:42:14.000 But it would seem to me, if it could be demonstrated, people who want to seek the truth, in this case, they want to win against a resisting opponent.

00:42:22.000 Some would.

00:42:24.000 Some would accept the data.

00:42:25.000 But many haven't.

00:42:26.000 And my good friend Eddie Bravo is a perfect example of that.

00:42:29.000 I went with Eddie de Brazil in 2003, and he competed in the world championships, and he beat Gustavo Dantes, who was a world champion at the time.

00:42:38.000 He tapped him in his first fight, and then after that, he fought Hoyler Gracie, who is one of the greatest Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu competitors of all time.

00:42:46.000 Hoyler Gracie is a national hero.

00:42:49.000 They closed the other mats off, they put a spotlight on the main event, and they thought that Hoyler was gonna wreck this young kid.

00:42:56.000 It wasn't even a black belt at the time.

00:42:57.000 Eddie was a brown belt, okay? 0.70

00:42:59.000 And Eddie, with his unorthodox techniques that people had laughed at, tapped Hoyler Gracie in front of everybody.

00:43:05.000 And he got him with a triangle, but the setup was his rubber guard setup.

00:43:08.000 He has all these crazy guard setups and, you know, his game has advanced light years since then.

00:43:12.000 But the point being that people mocked him for that.

00:43:15.000 It didn't help that he went to his next fight.

00:43:17.000 He fought Leo Vieira and he popped his rib early in the fight and got dominated in that fight and almost got tapped.

00:43:23.000 But there was also a giant emotional letdown because you couldn't believe he just tapped Hoyler Gracie.

00:43:28.000 And now he's moving on, and he's fighting Leo Vieira, who's another monster Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu artist.

00:43:35.000 But here's the point.

00:43:35.000 For the longest time, people, there was two schools of thought.

00:43:40.000 There was the old guard that just did not accept him.

00:43:42.000 They openly mocked him.

00:43:44.000 And, you know, they really criticized his whole movement and his techniques, what champions did he produce, all this.

00:43:50.000 This doesn't really work on Real Fighters.

00:43:52.000 Until he had a rematch with Hoyler many years later, and just wrecked him.

00:43:56.000 I mean, it was worse than the first time because Hoyler didn't tap, but he got his knee destroyed.

00:44:02.000 I mean, if you watch that video, Hoyler just deals with the fact that his knee is getting ripped apart while Eddie is mangling it.

00:44:08.000 But it was never a moment where Eddie was in trouble.

00:44:12.000 He dictated the entire match, and we played the fight on the TV, on the podcast, and had Eddie explain what he was doing.

00:44:21.000 And even when it looked like Hoyler was improving the position, And he was like, no, I let him do that so I could do this, and then I would adjust.

00:44:29.000 And he was like explaining.

00:44:30.000 I pulled him back on top of me, because I knew if I did that, I would be able to move his arm higher up on my shoulder, then I rolled him back onto his back, and then I can get deeper in on it.

00:44:40.000 And when he was explaining that, it was even more humiliating.

00:44:43.000 Because you've got this guy, Hurley Gracie, who's a multiple-time world champion, who just did not learn these new techniques.

00:44:50.000 Feels like he's got these old techniques, and that's it.

00:44:53.000 So this is the application of it in action.

00:44:55.000 That's exactly right.

00:44:55.000 And if you don't learn it, and if you're not willing to revise your beliefs, and if you're not willing to test this and accept the conclusion, you might think something's common sense.

00:45:06.000 Common sense is irrelevant, which relevance is what works.

00:45:10.000 Yeah, these new techniques that are constantly being innovated, they're constantly changing, like it's almost impossible to stay up on all of it unless it's a monster part of your life and you're absorbing them every day.

00:45:21.000 Like the leg lock game is this new...

00:45:23.000 Element that over the last like few years has really come into play in a major way thanks to a bunch of guys John Donaher, Eddie Cummins, Gary Tonin who won the Eddie Bravo Invitational yesterday.

00:45:35.000 These like really high-level practitioners and instructors are Constantly adding new improvements to approaches and techniques so it's all applicable It's all you can watch it happen in real time and even as someone who's not competing like me sitting in the audience I understand the positions and the movements So when I see all this new stuff and I see all these new approaches is like wow this game just continues to grow and evolve Yeah,

00:46:00.000 and what amazes me is when I watch kids' classes, kids are doing the craziest stuff.

00:46:05.000 I mean, they really have stood on the shoulders of giants.

00:46:08.000 And they're doing stuff that's just so advanced.

00:46:10.000 And I look at that now and I think, wow, it's like speed would be the great thing.

00:46:15.000 How quickly these techniques and this game has been advanced.

00:46:20.000 In a very, very short period of time, there has literally been in my lifetime a revolution in the martial arts.

00:46:25.000 Yeah, it really has.

00:46:26.000 I've been saying this for a while, but I'll say it again.

00:46:29.000 The UFC has changed martial arts so radically that there's been more improvement since 1993. There's been more evolution than there have been in the last 10,000 years.

00:46:41.000 That's real.

00:46:42.000 That's 100% true.

00:46:43.000 You go back and watch martial arts from 1993 and watch the UFC today, it's a completely different realm.

00:46:50.000 It's fascinating.

00:46:51.000 The difference is, of course, when you talk about jiu-jitsu being applicable, it's applicable inside jiu-jitsu. 0.97

00:46:59.000 The problem is when you get someone who's a really good wrestler who's an awesome kickboxer and you can't use your jiu-jitsu, you're still going to get fucked up. 0.95

00:47:06.000 Like a guy like Chuck Liddell, who you're not going to take down and he's going to knock you dead. 0.64

00:47:11.000 He's a great wrestler.

00:47:12.000 He's a perfect anti-jiu-jitsu guy.

00:47:14.000 Okay, but even that, look at that, I gave five things that work.

00:47:18.000 Boxing and wrestling were two of the five.

00:47:20.000 They train against resisting opponents.

00:47:22.000 So it's no surprise then, and maybe sometimes...

00:47:26.000 But he comes from a Kempo background, you know. 0.99

00:47:27.000 I mean, you listed that as one of the martial arts that don't really work, but that's the martial art that Chuck Liddell learned for striking under John Hackleman.

00:47:35.000 Yeah, okay.

00:47:36.000 So, I mean, that's another example.

00:47:37.000 People can, like I saw, I can't, so you're much more versed in the specifics than I am, but I saw a...

00:47:43.000 A two-versed.

00:47:44.000 A Gunnar Nelson fight in which he did a, I think it was a back roundhouse to someone's head.

00:47:50.000 A back roundhouse?

00:47:51.000 A hook kick?

00:47:52.000 No, he did a, I thought he did a roundhouse to someone's head.

00:47:57.000 Okay.

00:47:58.000 He trained in traditional karate for years, huh?

00:48:01.000 Yes, yeah, he's a brown belt in karate.

00:48:03.000 Yeah, and so it's not that these techniques can't be integrated or that they don't work.

00:48:08.000 Part of the problem is that they're sold as systems.

00:48:10.000 You know, it's like instead of picking and choosing...

00:48:13.000 So if everybody trained against resisting opponents, it's not clear to me that there would be any styles.

00:48:18.000 Styles would fade away.

00:48:20.000 Right, but then that highlights the problem that we brought up earlier that you really can't resist.

00:48:25.000 You can't train 100% resisting with kickboxing if you want to be a healthy member of society. 0.99

00:48:32.000 You're gonna get fucking brain damage. 0.98

00:48:34.000 I mean, I'm pretty sure I have brain damage and I stopped really getting hit in the head when I was 22. I mean, I really haven't been hit in the head that much since then, but I'm for sure something's fucked up in there. 1.00

00:48:44.000 Yeah, I was watching a guy hit the pads about a brown belt a couple weeks ago, and I just thought to myself, I mean, the whole thing was moving, and I thought to myself, like, wow. 1.00

00:48:53.000 Like, if that guy ever hit me, I mean, that would be it.

00:48:56.000 I mean, it would just be over, and I watch people kick the heavy bag sometimes.

00:49:01.000 Have you ever seen Melvin Manhoof kick the pads?

00:49:03.000 No.

00:49:03.000 Jesus Christ pull up Melvin manhoof trains with I forget his trainer's name Mike Mike's gym and I forget how to say his last passing year passing year I forget how to say it cuz he's their daughter Dutch they're from Holland But there's a bunch of videos of Melvin,

00:49:23.000 but Melvin kicking the pads with him. 0.90

00:49:25.000 It's just goddamn terrifying. 0.95

00:49:28.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:49:28.000 Because he's a super fucking athlete and he's training with this really aggressive Muay Thai trainer or kickboxing trainer. 0.99

00:49:35.000 Mike's gym is famous for like Guys like Badr Hari and Manhoof that are just fucking ferocious, aggressive competitors. 0.99

00:49:45.000 And Manhoof is particularly famous for having just unbelievable knockout power. 0.77

00:49:50.000 He knocked out Mark Hunt.

00:49:51.000 He weighed 185 pounds.

00:49:52.000 He knocked out Mark Hunt when Mark Hunt was probably 300 pounds.

00:49:56.000 Yeah, and so imagine some of those guys or people in their lineage Fighting these guys who do katas.

00:50:03.000 This is not pads though.

00:50:04.000 You gotta focus pads.

00:50:06.000 See if you can find one with him.

00:50:09.000 Yeah, that's just see if you could find Melvin Manhoof.

00:50:14.000 That's him though.

00:50:15.000 That's Melvin, but they're just sparring there.

00:50:18.000 Which most of the time they go hard, but they usually don't go too hard to the head.

00:50:24.000 That's the Holland style.

00:50:25.000 So imagine those guys fighting these guys who are in make-believe land. 1.00

00:50:29.000 Oh, yeah, you get fucked up quick. 0.99

00:50:30.000 Fantasy land, right? 0.99

00:50:31.000 We've played videos many times and recently won.

00:50:35.000 Here's Melvin.

00:50:38.000 So you get some volume on that, Jamie.

00:50:43.000 Dude.

00:50:48.000 Sound's not synced for some reason, but you get the picture of it. 1.00

00:50:53.000 He's a fucking destroyer. 1.00

00:50:55.000 That switch kick to the body, good lord. 1.00

00:51:00.000 When you watch this guy in real life, it's even more stunning because you really can feel the impact when he's kicking the pads.

00:51:09.000 Yeah, so the other thing about that is that guy knows what he can do and he can't do.

00:51:13.000 Yeah, 100%.

00:51:14.000 And a lot of these young kids, they see a movie with a guy who's beaten up five guys with knives and bats and stuff.

00:51:20.000 It's total make-believe land.

00:51:22.000 Yeah.

00:51:22.000 And it immerses people in a culture of make-believe.

00:51:25.000 Yeah, I agree.

00:51:26.000 No, I couldn't agree more.

00:51:28.000 And I was in that culture.

00:51:29.000 Yeah, I was too.

00:51:30.000 I used to teach it.

00:51:31.000 I taught at Boston University.

00:51:32.000 I mean, it's like a huge part of my life.

00:51:35.000 And the wake-up call that I got was...

00:51:38.000 It was a really stunning thing to just...

00:51:41.000 And it was a long...

00:51:45.000 Progression.

00:51:45.000 It wasn't just one wake-up call.

00:51:47.000 It was like one wake-up call and then another one and then deeper and deeper and deeper and then the UFC comes along and you're like, oh, fuck. 0.99

00:51:54.000 You know, oh, this is this and then you get this understanding like I live my life under this illusion. 0.97

00:52:01.000 Yeah, and the other thing that's interesting to me about that is those are culturally reinforced, right?

00:52:07.000 There are these rituals, there's the bowing, the master, there are other people that you're friends that you come to do these things with.

00:52:13.000 All of that reinforces the delusion.

00:52:16.000 It's very similar to...

00:52:19.000 To religions, the way that religions focus, with the difference being that people in religions, people who have faith, they think there are better people as a consequence of them having faith.

00:52:29.000 Whereas very few people in the delusional martial arts think that.

00:52:33.000 They think they're good fighters, but, oh, the techniques are too dangerous to test, or, you know, we can't do this. 0.99

00:52:39.000 If we did this, we'd kill you.

00:52:42.000 But those cultures of delusion keep people trapped in thinking about things that remove them from reality. 1.00

00:52:50.000 Yeah, there's definitely some of that, but I think there's some good to the idea of respecting a dojo as a place where you, when you walk into it, like one of the things, stupid, but it's true. 0.92

00:53:04.000 When I was a kid, I used to have keys to the dojo.

00:53:07.000 It was a dojang, because Taekwondo is the Korean word.

00:53:11.000 Even when no one was there, I would bow when I would walk in.

00:53:15.000 I would go to work out in the middle of the night.

00:53:17.000 I would go there.

00:53:18.000 I had keys.

00:53:19.000 I would train sometimes.

00:53:20.000 I'd show up at midnight.

00:53:22.000 I'd go there and lock the door and go in myself.

00:53:24.000 When I stepped into the training area, I would always bow.

00:53:27.000 It was almost like an OCD thing.

00:53:29.000 I wouldn't not do it.

00:53:30.000 In my mind, I had been trained and taught that when I entered that room, I had to bow. 0.99

00:53:37.000 There's fucking no one there, man. 0.99

00:53:39.000 I'm by myself. 0.99

00:53:40.000 I always bowed.

00:53:41.000 Like one time my girlfriend, my girlfriend was a freak in high school. 0.99

00:53:43.000 She wanted to fuck in the gym and I was like, we can't. 1.00

00:53:47.000 Can't do it. 1.00

00:53:48.000 I'm like, I won't do it.

00:53:49.000 We can't do it here.

00:53:50.000 And she's like, come on.

00:53:51.000 I'm like, nope.

00:53:52.000 This is not happening.

00:53:53.000 That was a lost opportunity for you.

00:53:55.000 Not really. 1.00

00:53:56.000 I fucked the shit out of her. 1.00

00:53:57.000 I fucked her all the time. 1.00

00:53:58.000 We were like little fucking rabbits. 1.00

00:54:00.000 But there was the one place where I wouldn't do it. 1.00

00:54:04.000 I was like, we can't.

00:54:05.000 We can't do it here.

00:54:06.000 Like this is...

00:54:07.000 This is a sacred ground for me.

00:54:09.000 So, I guess here's my problem with that, besides the lost opportunity.

00:54:12.000 But it wasn't a lost opportunity.

00:54:14.000 For me, it was an execution of discipline, of my mind. 0.88

00:54:17.000 Like, it was very hard for a 17-year-old boy to not have sex with this hot, I think she was 16, 16-year-old girl who wanted a bang in this karate or taekwondo gym. 0.60

00:54:30.000 For me, it was like, what martial arts meant to me at the time Was it was the first thing that I had ever done that made me feel like I wasn't a loser So my whole life I'd been insecure and we had moved around a lot when I was a kid I didn't really have a whole lot of friends and I never felt like I fit in and I always felt You know,

00:54:50.000 I didn't know my dad and you know, my stepdad is a little distant There was all this stuff going on, right?

00:54:55.000 There's all these things that just didn't feel right didn't didn't make me feel good And then this one thing came along that made me feel good.

00:55:04.000 This one thing came along that I had gotten really proficient at really quickly and was absolutely obsessed with.

00:55:09.000 And I was doing it all day.

00:55:10.000 All day.

00:55:11.000 And that was my whole focus of my life. 0.74

00:55:14.000 Sex? 0.57

00:55:14.000 Other than the girl. 0.57

00:55:15.000 No.

00:55:16.000 I'm sure I wasn't good at that.

00:55:18.000 I'm sure it was probably terrible.

00:55:20.000 The point being like I wasn't willing to sacrifice that like the ideals.

00:55:24.000 It's interesting isn't it?

00:55:25.000 Were you the same today do you think?

00:55:28.000 I mean do you have that notion of sacred with regard to these things?

00:55:31.000 I don't have that notion of sacred when it comes to like a space but I do in terms of like my approach to things Like, if I'm focused on something, like, I don't allow myself to get distracted if something is critical.

00:55:46.000 Something's, like, really important to focus on, and I decide, this is what I'm doing now, now I'm doing this, you know?

00:55:52.000 Like, if I may, I don't want to be overly personal, but, like, your marriage.

00:55:57.000 You've decided to do it, you're focusing on it, so it's taken a kind of a...

00:56:01.000 Well, see, marriage is a contract, okay?

00:56:03.000 Relationships, yes.

00:56:05.000 Like, the way you engage with someone, like, if you care about someone, here's a good way, not just relationships as far as, like, sexual relationships, but friendships.

00:56:13.000 If you care about someone and you really enjoy being with them and they're one of the most important people in your life, like, when you interact with them, I think you should interact with them under that...

00:56:25.000 Provision or with that thought in mind with that with that intention with what?

00:56:30.000 I missed you the intention that you care about them very deeply These are important people in your life.

00:56:34.000 Authentically.

00:56:34.000 You won't ever authentically.

00:56:36.000 Yeah, yeah Like you don't you don't ever want like I don't I would never like like really good friends.

00:56:41.000 I would never yell at them and You know call them a piece of shit I never want you in my life or say say crazy things to people that sometimes people say to hurtful hurtful things Yeah It doesn't mean don't be critical. 0.97

00:56:54.000 It doesn't mean don't correct someone if you see your friend doing something stupid. 0.99

00:57:01.000 I don't think that's a good example.

00:57:03.000 I think because marriage is not something that like it's like something you're trying to do You know marriage is like or even relationships friendships are just there.

00:57:14.000 Those are those are their interactions Relationships are it's different like it should be fun and enjoyable and all that good stuff What I'm talking about is a discipline.

00:57:23.000 Yeah, what I was trying to tease out from you is that when you were 17 You had this idea of the dojo being a sacred place.

00:57:29.000 Yeah You talked about what that meant to you and I'm curious if there's anything that you hold sacred now That's a good question like that No.

00:57:45.000 I've definitely changed my ideas about what that even was at the time.

00:57:50.000 I think what that was, that need for that sacred space and this like intense concentration and purity of that environment, was really like my...

00:58:02.000 My ticket out.

00:58:04.000 My ticket out of this life that was really unfulfilling.

00:58:07.000 Maybe to manhood?

00:58:08.000 Yeah, that definitely.

00:58:09.000 To sovereignty, personal sovereignty.

00:58:12.000 To realize that it's not that I was a loser, it's just that I wasn't a winner.

00:58:21.000 And I had to figure out how to be one.

00:58:23.000 It wasn't all my failures.

00:58:26.000 What I was is now.

00:58:28.000 And all those failures and all those mistakes and bad feelings that I had, those were really just lessons.

00:58:34.000 And that now that I have this new focus and this new thing and has shown massive positive results, I will honor that.

00:58:43.000 And that's what it was to me.

00:58:45.000 The new focus being what?

00:58:46.000 Martial arts, fighting, competing, taekwondo.

00:58:49.000 So that space, the dojo, the dojang, represented a sacred place for me because it represented this new ticket. 1.00

00:58:58.000 I wasn't about to cash that in for some pussy. 1.00

00:59:00.000 Holla! 1.00

00:59:01.000 You know I'm saying like that was my thoughts Matt now my I mean if there's anything I would think that The world like life itself is that environment life itself is that that dojang life itself is that thing so You don't ever want to You don't want to steal you don't want to commit crimes against people you don't want to do things to hurt people all those those those Those terrible things that we see

00:59:31.000 out in the world, if the world was your dojang, if the world was your church, if the world was your sacred place, you would never want to commit bad acts in your sacred place.

00:59:44.000 That's lovely.

00:59:45.000 I wish we could figure out a way to...

00:59:51.000 To help people adopt those values.

00:59:53.000 I wish we could come up with some way, especially when we see what's going on in the Middle East and we see what's going on in the world, we see the way we're treating our environment, our climate. 0.65

01:00:02.000 I wish there were some way to make that real and palatable to people.

01:00:07.000 So that we would start being more authentic and more sincere with someone.

01:00:12.000 And I think what you said, it's not about criticism the way I look at it.

01:00:18.000 I think it's about forthright speech. 1.00

01:00:19.000 You can be forthright in your speech with somebody and not be an asshole, not be a jerk. 0.99

01:00:27.000 I think those kinds of relationships, for me, Aristotle talks about that too.

01:00:32.000 But for me, I think that the most meaningful relationships are those People with whom I can be authentic and be myself and be real and those are kind of I don't like the word sacred though It's I guess that's the one kind of nitpick I have Because you attach that to religion well because I attach it to the inability to revise something right I attach it to the utmost respect Yeah,

01:00:57.000 so if we replaced a sacred for respect, I think we'd be on the same page.

01:01:02.000 Right, but it's just noises.

01:01:03.000 It's one of the things I don't like about labels.

01:01:06.000 Like, I like intent.

01:01:08.000 Like, my idea of sacred is not like God.

01:01:11.000 Like, it's not like some...

01:01:13.000 It's not a deity, this unnamed, unknown word that's been passed down from person to person.

01:01:18.000 It's based on personal experience.

01:01:19.000 It's based on a real thing.

01:01:21.000 So when I say sacred, my love for my children is sacred.

01:01:25.000 I say it in that way.

01:01:27.000 Ditto.

01:01:27.000 I don't say it in terms of harps and the clouds and all that kind of jazz.

01:01:32.000 And when we were talking about don't be an asshole to people you care about, Doesn't mean, it certainly doesn't mean I'm some sort of a perfect person. 0.99

01:01:41.000 It doesn't mean that I haven't been an asshole. 1.00

01:01:43.000 And then sometimes when you're responding to someone else being retarded or someone being ridiculous, you can be an asshole because you don't have the patience for it anymore. 1.00

01:01:51.000 Because you don't have the, at the moment, you don't have the temperament to... 1.00

01:01:56.000 The maturity.

01:01:56.000 Yeah, it could be maturity.

01:01:58.000 It could be...

01:02:00.000 You're overwhelmed.

01:02:01.000 There's a lot of variables. 1.00

01:02:02.000 So if someone hears this and says, you know, oh, well, man, I've been an asshole lately. 0.99

01:02:08.000 Maybe I'm a bad person. 0.98

01:02:10.000 It's just recognizing those moments where you probably could have handled something better and continuing to improve.

01:02:17.000 And then also this idea, this is a really important one, because people have this idea that somehow I'm 30 years old.

01:02:23.000 I shouldn't be doing this anymore.

01:02:25.000 I'm 50 years old.

01:02:26.000 I should have learned by now. 1.00

01:02:27.000 That's all bullshit. 1.00

01:02:28.000 Throw that away. 1.00

01:02:29.000 Toss that shit aside. 1.00

01:02:32.000 These ideas of numbers that people have in their head that by a certain age you should stop. 1.00

01:02:37.000 You are alive. 1.00

01:02:39.000 And if you are alive and if you are thinking, all those numbers that you keep attaching, well, you know, when Einstein was 30, shut the fuck up. 1.00

01:02:47.000 Stop doing that. 1.00

01:02:48.000 That is a waste of your time.

01:02:49.000 And stop saying to yourself, I should be better by now.

01:02:53.000 I'm such a total non-helping thought.

01:02:58.000 What you need to think of is life.

01:03:00.000 You're living, you're alive right now, and if you've made a mistake and you're still continuing to learn and grow, that's all just data.

01:03:07.000 Yeah, and I think bundled with that is gratitude.

01:03:10.000 Yeah, gratitude's giant.

01:03:12.000 We don't say a prayer in my household, but we go around every night, we have seven people living with us, and we say what we're grateful for.

01:03:19.000 What are you running a commune?

01:03:20.000 What are you doing?

01:03:21.000 We have a long story.

01:03:24.000 We have a woman from China there. 0.87

01:03:25.000 It's a long story.

01:03:26.000 Jesus Christ.

01:03:26.000 What does she do?

01:03:28.000 Wink, wink.

01:03:29.000 No, no. 0.99

01:03:32.000 Getting sex slaves in from boats? 1.00

01:03:33.000 What are you doing, man? 0.99

01:03:34.000 We have another woman who lives in the garage over there. 1.00

01:03:38.000 Pay no attention to the banging.

01:03:40.000 No, but I, you know, we go around, we talk about what they're grateful for, everyone's grateful, and I think that there's something, it's an opportunity to be authentic at that time, but it's also, like, I think verbalizing those things are important.

01:03:52.000 So it's not just the negative, oh, I shouldn't be doing this, but it's the positive.

01:03:55.000 Look, as a general rule of thumb, if you ever have any doubts about it, just be kind to people.

01:04:00.000 Also, it's great when you reinforce it with your friends, verbalizing it.

01:04:05.000 I'm a big fan.

01:04:08.000 I tell my friends I love them all the time.

01:04:10.000 My wife jokes around about it.

01:04:13.000 She goes, I don't know any men that tell their friends they love them all the time, but all my friends do.

01:04:18.000 We all tell each other we love each other.

01:04:19.000 I love you, brother, and we hang up the phone.

01:04:22.000 Do it with all my friends.

01:04:23.000 And, you know, we're always hugging and always saying, I appreciate you.

01:04:28.000 You know, I think it's really important. 0.93

01:04:29.000 I have a very tight-knit group of friends that I care about very much, and they're all very motivated, and they're healthy, and, you know, they're not without flaws, but they've got shit going on, and it empowers me. 0.51

01:04:43.000 Yeah, so here's why that's important.

01:04:47.000 Because you got the tattoos, you got the build, you've been in the ring, you're friends with whoever you're friends with, and I think that whether you like it or not, you're in a position, particularly with young people, to look up to you.

01:05:02.000 And that is exactly the kind of behavior that we want to see modeled.

01:05:06.000 It's not emotionally immature for a guy to cry at a tragic event.

01:05:10.000 I tell my friends I love them.

01:05:11.000 I tell people, I tell my buddy over there, I'm incredibly grateful for the opportunity to stay his house, etc.

01:05:17.000 And I think that that kind of, we live in a culture that's suppressed these, particularly males, this ability for men to communicate in an authentic way.

01:05:27.000 Also to experience emotion, like this idea of somehow or another being stoic has virtue to it, especially in the face of tragedy or even joy.

01:05:39.000 Like I sometimes cry more for happy moments sometimes than I do for sad moments. 0.99

01:05:45.000 But I'll cry at fucking cartoons, man. 0.99

01:05:48.000 I almost cried a ton of times. 0.99

01:05:52.000 I'm not crying at cartoons, but yeah.

01:05:56.000 It's interesting.

01:05:57.000 I think that that journey from you as a 17-year-old to now...

01:06:01.000 I mean, there's some really core lessons for people out there struggling with maybe issues of sexuality or issues of feeling they hate the world or they're not good enough or their self-esteem issues.

01:06:15.000 Acceptance.

01:06:16.000 Yeah, acceptance.

01:06:17.000 That's what we all want.

01:06:18.000 We all want to be loved.

01:06:21.000 I'm 49. I'd much rather people say about me, hey, Pete's a really good guy than Pete's a really smart guy.

01:06:32.000 You know, I want to embody those virtues.

01:06:35.000 But more than that, I think that the story that you told there, it's something that's accessible to people, and it's a type of thing that we need to do.

01:06:47.000 We need to figure out how to move our culture towards these more humane ways of dealing with people.

01:06:53.000 And my own opinion is that we don't need superstitions to do that.

01:06:58.000 You're a perfect example of that, right?

01:06:59.000 We don't need...

01:07:01.000 People making objective claims about reincarnating in times through bodies like the Dalai Lama or...

01:07:06.000 Wait a minute, you don't think the Dalai Lama is a reincarnated saint?

01:07:09.000 Are you serious?

01:07:13.000 You got nervous there for a moment.

01:07:15.000 I thought you were going to believe that.

01:07:16.000 I'm like, wow, this is going to be a long conversation.

01:07:18.000 Dude, don't you see my Buddha?

01:07:20.000 It's right there, bro.

01:07:21.000 I've got another Buddha right there.

01:07:22.000 See, that's the funny thing. 0.97

01:07:23.000 I'll call bullshit on that in class and everybody will freak out. 0.97

01:07:27.000 Whereas if I say Jesus walking on water and I deacon's... 0.99

01:07:30.000 But if you start talking about Buddhism, people are like, whoa. 1.00

01:07:33.000 Whoa, bullshit, man. 0.99

01:07:34.000 How could you say that? 1.00

01:07:35.000 How dare you, dude?

01:07:36.000 The Dalai Lama is so cool.

01:07:38.000 He's friends with Steven Seagal.

01:07:40.000 Yeah, well, you actually saw them years ago together doing their little thing.

01:07:43.000 It all gets connected.

01:07:45.000 Yeah, right.

01:07:46.000 No, I had a psychedelic trip that I saw a bunch of golden Buddhas.

01:07:51.000 LSD? No, DMT. Oh, wow.

01:07:54.000 It was literally that guy in that position, but there was fractals, millions of them, infinite numbers of them.

01:08:03.000 It was very strange.

01:08:06.000 This guy made it for me.

01:08:07.000 I wish I remembered this homeboy's name.

01:08:09.000 I'll find it somewhere.

01:08:10.000 I'll throw it up on Instagram.

01:08:12.000 I think it's on my Instagram picture, right?

01:08:14.000 I don't know.

01:08:15.000 I'll find it.

01:08:16.000 But yeah, all of those things.

01:08:19.000 All those things are not necessary.

01:08:21.000 I think we are necessary.

01:08:24.000 Like all these, the false beliefs and all the things, what they are is like scaffolding, I feel like.

01:08:30.000 They're scaffolding for evolution.

01:08:32.000 And I think that that's ultimately the benefit that...

01:08:36.000 Religion does provide is in in these insane beliefs in the sky gods and all these different things and we show reverence to these These deities and they have these rules and we must follow otherwise we'll be punished in those rules There becomes order and in the order becomes society and that's that's something that people always like to fall back on like we are a Judeo-Christian Sound founded society and our Judeo-Christian ethics like I saw some woman who was arguing about Muslim terrorists and that was like one of the big things that this is a This

01:09:06.000 country was founded on Judeo-Christian ethics.

01:09:09.000 So what?

01:09:10.000 Monkeys were founded on eating bananas, and we're not monkeys anymore. 1.00

01:09:14.000 You know, it's like, it's such a stupid fucking, like, just because something's founded on something that's illogical doesn't mean you should have reverence for that illogical thing. 1.00

01:09:24.000 That's perfectly stated. 0.99

01:09:24.000 That's part of the problem, I think, with once we make ideas sacred. 0.99

01:09:28.000 Yes.

01:09:29.000 And they become much more difficult, if not impossible, to revise.

01:09:33.000 Like George Bush saying, which is actually, I invite your viewers or listeners to listen to this, he's prayed about the war in Iraq.

01:09:40.000 He knows what God wants him to do.

01:09:42.000 So the moment you do that, it becomes irrevisible.

01:09:44.000 I used to have a bit about that, where George Bush was like, you know...

01:09:49.000 That he's prayed about the world in Iraq, and God bless the troops.

01:09:52.000 Imagine if he said, instead of that, we have found Satan, he is in Afghanistan, and we're moving tanks into that area. 0.99

01:09:59.000 Everybody would be like, whoa, what the fuck did you just say? 0.99

01:10:02.000 That's the draw. 1.00

01:10:04.000 That's the line that we draw.

01:10:06.000 You're not allowed to say.

01:10:08.000 He prayed to Vishnu or something.

01:10:10.000 No, but I mean, you're not allowed to say that you know the devil.

01:10:13.000 Yeah.

01:10:14.000 You're not allowed to say the devil's real.

01:10:15.000 You never hear the president bring up the devil.

01:10:18.000 They'll bring up God.

01:10:19.000 God bless the troops.

01:10:20.000 They'll never say, Satan is at work.

01:10:23.000 And Satan is in the hearts and minds of these enemies.

01:10:28.000 They never say that.

01:10:29.000 Because it's so preposterous that we're slowly, as evolution, as thinking...

01:10:37.000 I know evolution is the wrong word for that, but as it improves and expands, we are no longer accepting the idea of Satan.

01:10:46.000 Culturally, Satan was an accepted thing hundreds of years ago.

01:10:51.000 It was parallel.

01:10:53.000 Like, if you looked at the mentions of Satan and the mentions of God, they were right up there together.

01:10:57.000 You're blaming Satan on the bad things, and you're praising God for the good things.

01:11:01.000 That's no longer the case.

01:11:02.000 Now we just cling to these absurd notions of this one that's watching us all the time, and you've got to sort of peripherally mention it and casually reference it without going into detail, and you're allowed to do that because it makes people think,

01:11:18.000 well, you're on the same page as me.

01:11:19.000 You're a God-fearing Christian man like myself.

01:11:22.000 I'm a God-fearing Christian man myself as well.

01:11:24.000 God bless you.

01:11:25.000 God bless you as well.

01:11:27.000 But if you go, Satan is looking out for you.

01:11:29.000 Satan is watching you right now.

01:11:30.000 Satan is just letting the air out of your tires. 1.00

01:11:33.000 You go, well, that guy's a fucking idiot. 1.00

01:11:36.000 We've moved past Satan, but we haven't moved past God. 1.00

01:11:40.000 Exactly right.

01:11:40.000 Or the idea of God.

01:11:42.000 Even if there is some all-knowing entity that is controlling everything and is filled with love and has a grand plan for the universe, they have yet to show themselves.

01:11:53.000 So this is all just a concept and an idea with no basis in fact and as we have Found more facts about the nature of reality in the world itself It seems more and more preposterous with every day every day the scientists come up with these new equations that show the Way the universe could have possibly be been formed and that every day that these fucking guys at the CERN laboratory the large hadron collider

01:12:24.000 Are discovering these what were at one time theoretical particles, showing them to be true, and their calculations to be correct.

01:12:32.000 We have a deeper and deeper understanding of the universe.

01:12:36.000 But we think now, we love to think that right now that we're filled with knowledge, and we love to look at ourselves now and look at the past as, well, they didn't know back then, but we know now.

01:12:46.000 But if we looked in the past, they would have the same ideas. 0.98

01:12:49.000 They would look back at those poor monkey people with the bananas and they go, those fucking dummies, they didn't even know houses yet. 1.00

01:12:55.000 We will one day look back at 2015, like what a bunch of fools. 0.99

01:13:01.000 What a bunch of ridiculous people that were still, they had this incredibly complicated society and this wonderful access to information, but yet they were still shackled down by ideology and killing each other over religion and ancient superstitions that That dictated their behaviors, 0.97

01:13:20.000 like what a weird time to be in, they'll look at. 1.00

01:13:24.000 They'll look at us now in 2015, they'll say, what a strange time, this adolescent period of enlightenment, where they're still concentrating on stupid shit, and the fucking president of the United States can openly talk about God, 1.00

01:13:40.000 and no one goes, what is God? 1.00

01:13:43.000 What are you saying?

01:13:44.000 What are you saying?

01:13:45.000 Do you think Jesus came back from the dead?

01:13:46.000 What do you think?

01:13:47.000 Do you think someone walked on water?

01:13:49.000 Do you believe in a literal translation?

01:13:50.000 Are you an Old Testament guy or a New Testament guy?

01:13:53.000 Well, the New Testament. 0.99

01:13:54.000 The New Testament was made by Constantine, who was a fucking Roman emperor who wasn't even Christian. 0.99

01:14:00.000 He didn't even believe it. 1.00

01:14:02.000 He became a Christian on his fucking deathbed. 1.00

01:14:07.000 Like, that's when he became a Christian. 1.00

01:14:09.000 Like, all these people that are, like, really into the New Testament. 0.99

01:14:11.000 And, like, I'll talk about Old Testament shit, and people will get mad at me on Twitter. 1.00

01:14:15.000 They'll send me this fucking hate text. 1.00

01:14:16.000 You understand, motherfucker, what the difference is between the Old Testament and the New Testament. 1.00

01:14:20.000 Because the New Testament is utter horseshit. 1.00

01:14:22.000 It's created by a bishop and a fucking emperor. 1.00

01:14:25.000 That's a fact. 1.00

01:14:26.000 That's like established religious fact.

01:14:30.000 Like, everyone knows where it came from.

01:14:32.000 And not only that, it was written hundreds of years after the death of Jesus.

01:14:35.000 So what are you talking about?

01:14:36.000 Because if you're talking about the old stuff, you gotta go deep.

01:14:39.000 Go to the Dead Sea Scrolls. 1.00

01:14:41.000 Go to the fucking... 1.00

01:14:43.000 Go to the most ridiculous aspects of that and tell me, you basing your life on that? 1.00

01:14:48.000 Because that's even more preposterous. 0.98

01:14:50.000 They found them in clay pots in Qumran, written on animal skins.

01:14:54.000 These people thought the world was flat and the sun was 17 miles away.

01:14:57.000 And we're gonna...

01:14:59.000 They did.

01:15:00.000 They really did.

01:15:02.000 This is how we're gonna live our lives?

01:15:03.000 This is it.

01:15:04.000 This is all the facts we need. 1.00

01:15:06.000 Fuck the Large Hadron Collider. 1.00

01:15:07.000 Fuck CERN. Fuck Stephen Hawking. 1.00

01:15:11.000 Fuck quantum physics. 1.00

01:15:12.000 Fuck Neil deGrasse Tyson. 1.00

01:15:13.000 Fuck those dudes with their telescopes. 1.00

01:15:15.000 No, we're gonna base it on leather skins and charcoal ink. 1.00

01:15:20.000 Right.

01:15:20.000 Like, really?

01:15:22.000 That's the conversation we're having when we're talking about ideological religions.

01:15:27.000 That was a thing of beauty, by the way.

01:15:29.000 Well, thanks.

01:15:29.000 That was a thing of beauty.

01:15:31.000 That's what it is! 1.00

01:15:32.000 And people think, well, you're an atheist, you're an asshole, you're... 1.00

01:15:35.000 What do you believe in? 1.00

01:15:36.000 I had a guy yell at me at a comedy club once, because I did this bit about Scientology.

01:15:41.000 I did this bit about Scientology, about watching a Scientology documentary with my mom, who made me go to Catholic school. 0.82

01:15:47.000 And how my mom thinks Scientology is ridiculous. 1.00

01:15:50.000 I'm like, what the fuck? 1.00

01:15:51.000 And this guy is like, yo, what do you believe in? 1.00

01:15:54.000 What do you believe in?

01:15:56.000 Like, do I have to believe in something?

01:15:57.000 Do I have to believe?

01:15:58.000 I believe in everything that's been proven.

01:16:00.000 I believe that this is made out of wood.

01:16:01.000 And when I'm proven wrong, Right.

01:16:04.000 You change your mind.

01:16:05.000 Back to the jujitsu thing again.

01:16:06.000 Yeah.

01:16:07.000 But when you also think about it, what an unbelievable arrogance to think that you know the will of the creator of the universe.

01:16:13.000 You know what he wants you to do. 0.98

01:16:14.000 You know where he wants you to put your genitals. 1.00

01:16:16.000 I mean, like you said, in philosophy it's called the problem of induction or looking at the past, the past, past, resembling the past.

01:16:23.000 And we will look back.

01:16:25.000 There's absolutely no question in my mind that you're correct.

01:16:28.000 And we will say, wow, you believe this.

01:16:30.000 How could we possibly have believed this?

01:16:32.000 But what's interesting to me is we know that that will happen.

01:16:35.000 Like, we know that that will happen.

01:16:37.000 And it's an opportunity for us to reflect and say, wow, are we being arrogant right now?

01:16:42.000 Are we thinking we know things?

01:16:44.000 Are we pretending to know things when we don't know them?

01:16:46.000 And I think that a lot of that God talk is a type of arrogance.

01:16:52.000 I think it's a type of people, I don't know, wanting to assert how moral they are so they reap advantages like the president or...

01:17:01.000 I mean, I think it's a very complicated social and even political problem.

01:17:05.000 But it's also a type of arrogance.

01:17:10.000 It is definitely a type of arrogance, and it's also a way that people establish the moral high ground.

01:17:14.000 They establish a dominant social position over you.

01:17:18.000 And people love to do that.

01:17:19.000 They love to do that with their pious attitude.

01:17:21.000 What they're doing is, by them accepting these religious tenets, they are somehow superior to you.

01:17:28.000 And some people don't do that.

01:17:29.000 You know, I shared a hunting camp with this guy.

01:17:32.000 I don't need to name his name.

01:17:33.000 He's a wonderful guy who's an elk hunter.

01:17:36.000 And this guy would get up in the morning every day before everybody. 0.98

01:17:39.000 And we got up fucking early. 0.96

01:17:41.000 You know, we would leave the camp by 6 a.m. 0.98

01:17:43.000 So this guy was up.

01:17:44.000 I would get up to take a shower at like 5 a.m.

01:17:46.000 And this dude was up reading the Bible.

01:17:49.000 And he never talked about it.

01:17:50.000 And he never talked about, like...

01:17:53.000 God or Jesus or any of the rules.

01:17:55.000 But to him, it was a way that he explored these ideas and how he related to the world.

01:18:02.000 And in application, this guy was a fantastic human being.

01:18:06.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:18:06.000 He was a wonderful guy.

01:18:08.000 He was kind and when you had conversations with him, he was generous and he was very friendly and he was curious.

01:18:16.000 And he would ask these really introspective questions like, He was a good guy.

01:18:22.000 And I think that's what matters.

01:18:23.000 I think it matters less whether or not someone is an atheist or not, or a Hindu.

01:18:28.000 And I think what matters is how we treat other people.

01:18:31.000 I think what matters is if we're kind to people, if we listen to people, if we do our best to engage them honestly and authentically.

01:18:38.000 And often we get too caught up in, well, what is someone's religion?

01:18:42.000 Especially now with the Republicans going berserk with this whole...

01:18:46.000 Muslim thing, yeah. 0.99

01:18:47.000 I mean, it's just disgraceful. 0.99

01:18:49.000 Well, you know, did you see that video?

01:18:51.000 It's a fantastic video that's just been put out recently.

01:18:54.000 I think by some guys in Holland, where they were, because it's in another language.

01:19:00.000 Oh, the Bible, yeah, yeah, I saw that.

01:19:02.000 They put a cover of, they put the Quran's cover on the Bible, and they read passages to people in the street, and they asked them, what do they think about this?

01:19:11.000 And, you know, they were like, well, you know, this is ridiculous, and this is outrageous, and it was all from the Bible. 0.85

01:19:16.000 Yeah. 0.69

01:19:16.000 Like, like... 0.69

01:19:18.000 Hilarious, hilarious shit that a lot of people don't know is in the Bible. 0.99

01:19:23.000 When you even bring this up, people already, you're questioning their beliefs. 0.99

01:19:27.000 They start foaming at the mouth and fuming.

01:19:30.000 I can feel my phone get heavy from hate tweets right now.

01:19:35.000 It's just coming in. 0.99

01:19:37.000 You're fucking questioning my view of reality and it makes me uncomfortable when I go to work! 0.98

01:19:41.000 Right, but isn't that the exact same issue with someone doing a fantasy-based martial arts? 0.99

01:19:46.000 Oh, 100%. 0.87

01:19:47.000 I've had conversations with people where they're fucking furious at me because I don't believe in their death touch. 0.96

01:19:53.000 I've had conversations with people where they're like, you know, you are arrogant, and your belief in martial arts, and you're in a position of influence because of your work for the UFC, and what you're doing is you're fucking up because you're not telling the truth about certain... 0.99

01:20:08.000 Stop. 0.99

01:20:11.000 Stop.

01:20:11.000 Abandon it.

01:20:12.000 But if you're like me, who, like I said, martial arts and the dojang was so sacred to me, I wouldn't even have sex with my girlfriend there.

01:20:22.000 That represents such an important part of their life.

01:20:25.000 It's just so lucky for me that it happened during my formative period, where I was exposed to reality at a young age, where I had to accept it.

01:20:33.000 I was like, oh, Jesus.

01:20:35.000 I had to accept that these techniques don't really work all the time.

01:20:39.000 Some of them work, but you have to learn all the other stuff for them to work at all.

01:20:43.000 Yeah, I wonder about, again, so few people have written about this, I wonder about the experience that you had of that, and I had of that, we were in the same boat, realizing over time that these things just didn't work and we had wasted our time,

01:20:59.000 and I wonder how similar that is to someone's escape from a faith.

01:21:04.000 100%.

01:21:05.000 Yeah.

01:21:05.000 People that have escaped from cults.

01:21:07.000 I've had folks on that have used to be in cults.

01:21:10.000 Kurt Metzger is a perfect example.

01:21:12.000 He's a hilarious stand-up comedian, a friend of mine.

01:21:14.000 And he was in Jehovah's Witness?

01:21:18.000 Is that what he is?

01:21:18.000 Yeah, I think so.

01:21:19.000 And he won't accept any stupid shit now. 1.00

01:21:24.000 Because he's like, no, when it comes to the regressive left and some of these ideologies where you have to look at something in a certain way and you can't look at it in any other way, it's like a dogma. 1.00

01:21:36.000 And he's like, no, no, no, I've seen this before.

01:21:37.000 I know what this is.

01:21:38.000 What you're doing is you're saying you have to think a certain way. 1.00

01:21:41.000 That's bullshit. 0.99

01:21:42.000 It can be discussed. 0.99

01:21:44.000 You can discuss certain aspects of people's behavior or gender identity or gender pronouns or...

01:21:52.000 In fact, not only can it be discussed, but it has to be discussed.

01:21:55.000 It should be.

01:21:55.000 We have to have arenas.

01:21:57.000 And a lot of people have been writing about this lately.

01:22:00.000 I wrote about it in my book and I tweeted about it.

01:22:03.000 If we're not allowed an opportunity to have a conversation, then extremists will step in with the answers.

01:22:10.000 Like Trump is a great example.

01:22:11.000 So we have to create spaces.

01:22:14.000 Talking about spaces, this is probably another offshoot of the conversation.

01:22:17.000 Safe space.

01:22:18.000 The regressive left, right? 1.00

01:22:19.000 We need to create...

01:22:21.000 Opportunities for people, for sincere inquirers to engage things.

01:22:25.000 And right now, we don't have that.

01:22:27.000 And again, I can bring it back to jujitsu.

01:22:30.000 I mean, you could just think about what would happen if, you know, this is a technique.

01:22:33.000 You do this, blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:22:35.000 It's sacred.

01:22:35.000 We don't question it.

01:22:37.000 Then you'd never get to the truth.

01:22:38.000 You'd deny people the opportunities that they need to figure out things for themselves.

01:22:43.000 Yeah, a hundred percent a hundred percent and I think martial arts is an excellent vehicle for that though one of the things that was Explained to me when I was really young that really did sink in my instructor I was a disciple of General Chae Hyung Yi,

01:23:02.000 who was the founder of Taekwondo.

01:23:03.000 He taught it to troops, and he was one of the guys who really honed the techniques for maximum power and efficiency and leverage.

01:23:16.000 They had this idea that martial arts was a vehicle for developing human potential, and I read that when I was like 15, and I've always used that phrase, because I think that's such a massive...

01:23:30.000 Yeah, what do you mean by such a massive what?

01:23:32.000 Well, it's so clear.

01:23:36.000 When you understand that...

01:23:40.000 When you go through life, life is filled with...

01:23:44.000 Questions, adversity, puzzles, different things you have to figure out, the questions you have to ask of yourself, examining your own behavior, objective reasoning.

01:23:53.000 There's all these different variables that come into play when it comes to life.

01:23:56.000 And I think those are highlighted in the realm of martial arts because if you can land a kick and you knock someone out, then that happened.

01:24:06.000 That worked.

01:24:07.000 You were in the ultimate...

01:24:09.000 Especially the Ultimate Fighting Championship is a perfect example of that, but there's no higher level of problem solving than problem solving with dire physical consequences.

01:24:21.000 Because your emotions are on the line, your fears, your anxiety, there's so many fight or flight mechanisms in place.

01:24:31.000 There's self-doubt.

01:24:33.000 There's, you know, how much discipline did you truly execute in training?

01:24:37.000 Did you give everything you had?

01:24:39.000 Did you reach your full potential?

01:24:41.000 Most people go through life without even coming close to their full potential and they live life in this this weird fog of uncertainty and of regret and of Just this feeling that they're not accomplishing what they want to,

01:24:58.000 that they're not achieving their full potential and that martial arts is a vehicle for developing potential because through the very difficult training and through pushing yourself when you don't think you can and through this Overwhelming desire for comfort where you don't want to get out of bed,

01:25:17.000 where you don't want to do the training, where you would rather just blow it off and don't go to class.

01:25:22.000 By forcing yourself to do that, it engages the muscles of discipline.

01:25:28.000 The inner muscles.

01:25:29.000 Yeah, and it also, you understand about accomplishing goals and about reality, about facing things.

01:25:36.000 So that is just so important.

01:25:37.000 So again, it's jiu-jitsu, right?

01:25:39.000 So when you defeat somebody, like if you work really hard and you tap someone out, you get a sense of, you get a little, I'll speak for myself.

01:25:49.000 I feel good.

01:25:50.000 Like, wow, I worked for this.

01:25:52.000 I tried hard.

01:25:54.000 I work on my baseball bat choke now and I feel pretty good.

01:25:57.000 So, that activity, your hard work brought you to a point in which you would tap somebody out and as a consequence of that, you feel self-esteem.

01:26:11.000 What we have done is we have inverted the system.

01:26:14.000 We tried to teach self-esteem absent any accomplishments.

01:26:19.000 That's not the way it works.

01:26:20.000 Self-esteem is a byproduct of hard work, of something that you have done as a direct result of an accomplishment.

01:26:27.000 So every few years they give Americans, they give kids all around the world a test.

01:26:31.000 I read this in Martin Gross' The Conspiracy of Ignorance many years ago.

01:26:36.000 Excuse me.

01:26:36.000 And the test is like, hey, all these people in the world, you know, the Koreans, the industrialized world, the Japanese, Germans, etc., they took this.

01:26:43.000 How do you think you did in relation to them?

01:26:46.000 Americans consistently score in the bottom quartile in terms of their math and science, how well they did comparatively. 0.99

01:26:53.000 But they score extraordinarily high, number one, almost always in terms of self-esteem.

01:26:58.000 We have taught the wrong things.

01:27:00.000 We've focused on the wrong things.

01:27:02.000 Our school systems have been oriented toward the wrong things.

01:27:06.000 And I think, again, you can just bring that back to jujitsu and look at it.

01:27:10.000 You couldn't possibly...

01:27:12.000 You could teach someone all the selfs that you walk in, they get a white belt, you teach them to feel good about themselves, do this, do this, do this, but does it work?

01:27:19.000 Yeah.

01:27:21.000 You could get a lot of the lessons from martial arts out of a lot of difficult endeavors.

01:27:28.000 I just don't think you get the problem-solving aspect at such a high level.

01:27:33.000 Some people find that in rock climbing because it's scary.

01:27:37.000 And in accomplishing that and then getting through that, you learn about yourself.

01:27:43.000 You learn about your ability to overcome adversity and to face your fears.

01:27:47.000 But I just think that martial arts is a more intense version of it because there's all this connected to combat and to the physical challenge of overcoming another human being.

01:27:59.000 And it's one of our biggest fears. 0.96

01:28:01.000 One of our biggest fears, other than falling off of a mountain, is being dominated by another human being, getting your ass kicked in conflict, where we have this long history of war. 0.99

01:28:10.000 I mean, I was talking to... 0.99

01:28:12.000 I heard that podcast.

01:28:13.000 Jocko?

01:28:14.000 Yeah, the SEAL guy?

01:28:15.000 Yeah.

01:28:16.000 That's a great podcast.

01:28:17.000 He's an awesome guy.

01:28:18.000 But we were talking about the conversation that I had with my friend Duncan Trussell, where I said that, and it was kind of a revelation for the both of us, human history is a history of the wars.

01:28:29.000 When we talk about human history, it's like the stuff that happened in between the wars and some inventions, but it's mostly the wars.

01:28:36.000 That's most of the history.

01:28:38.000 Whether it's World War I or World War II or Vietnam, there's all these different conflicts that happen, and those are the bulk of our history.

01:28:48.000 When we consider the eras in the past, When we consider the ages of the different things that happened, we consider Genghis Khan and Napoleon, Alexander the Great, and all these different things that happened.

01:29:00.000 We're considering war. 0.94

01:29:02.000 Yeah, I'll go off on a little tangent, if you don't mind.

01:29:05.000 It makes me think...

01:29:06.000 I've been thinking about talking to my buddy over there about life and the universe and this thing called the Fermi Paradox, where is everybody?

01:29:13.000 And I wonder if that...

01:29:15.000 The Fermi Paradox being the amount of life that must be out there.

01:29:19.000 Yeah, like why haven't we been contacted yet?

01:29:22.000 I consider that to be just an extraordinarily interesting question.

01:29:25.000 But I wonder if what you just said, that our history has been a history of war, I wonder if, inherent in every species that has evolved, they've had a similar history of war.

01:29:39.000 Because they've been subject to different evolutionary mechanisms and pressures and such, different atmospheres.

01:29:45.000 But I wonder if it's conflict over resources, conflict over...

01:29:51.000 Whatever, maybe they have another gender or something. 0.90

01:29:53.000 I wonder if that's just intrinsic in the nature of life.

01:29:58.000 I think it is.

01:29:59.000 I think what's intrinsic in the nature of life is that sort of problem solving and that nature wants to find the best Method of achieving a goal and so the methods that are ineffective die off and that's why 90% of the living species that have been on this planet are extinct They no longer exist because they weren't effective enough to be to keep reproducing and And you can say,

01:30:24.000 no, a lot of them because people wipe them out.

01:30:26.000 People are evil and people are horrible. 0.97

01:30:29.000 People are the dominant species. 0.97

01:30:30.000 It's what species do.

01:30:32.000 I mean, many animals have wiped out animals.

01:30:35.000 You know, there's a real issue right now with wild pigs and ground nesting birds because wild pigs being an invasive species, they're dealing with these birds that nest on the ground that didn't have these animals hunting them.

01:30:48.000 Or you shouldn't even say hunting.

01:30:50.000 They're eating their eggs.

01:30:52.000 So that's just an ineffective way. 0.99

01:30:55.000 Adapt or die.

01:30:56.000 Yeah, it's an ineffective way to take care of your eggs. 1.00

01:30:59.000 Can't leave them on the ground in a place where these fucking pigs are rooting up everything and eating everything in front of them. 1.00

01:31:06.000 Go ahead. 1.00

01:31:07.000 No, it's okay.

01:31:07.000 You know, if they don't adapt, then there'll be no more species.

01:31:10.000 Yes, absolutely.

01:31:10.000 They're gone.

01:31:10.000 And, you know, people say, oh, it's so evil, it's so awful.

01:31:13.000 Would you want a world filled with only the spotted owl?

01:31:17.000 Hmm.

01:31:18.000 No. 0.98

01:31:19.000 Okay, well, if the spotted owl dies off, it's because it sucked. 0.93

01:31:21.000 All right?

01:31:22.000 I'm sorry. 1.00

01:31:23.000 I'm not saying we should kill the spotted owl, but the motherfucker didn't make it. 1.00

01:31:26.000 Okay? 1.00

01:31:27.000 And the other owls are still here, and eagles are still here.

01:31:29.000 And, by the way, you wouldn't want a world filled with all eagles, either.

01:31:32.000 And there's a competition between eagles and salmon.

01:31:34.000 If the eagles eat all the salmon, we're going to be pissed at the eagles. 1.00

01:31:37.000 You know, I mean if the Eagles make the salmon extinct, we're gonna be like, what the fuck, Eagles? 0.99

01:31:42.000 You know, it's funny, so you're talking about this, and in the back of my head, I mean, you're absolutely right. 0.99

01:31:49.000 In the back of my head, I'm thinking, wow, like, so we're having a conversation, right?

01:31:54.000 You and I are talking.

01:31:54.000 Like, if I started to talk about that, some of that stuff in class, that's when you get the whole trigger warning safe spaces and stuff again, like...

01:32:01.000 People freak out.

01:32:02.000 But look, This is really important.

01:32:04.000 I mean, you're talking about species.

01:32:05.000 You're talking about survival.

01:32:07.000 You're talking about taking care of the planet.

01:32:10.000 And, you know, how do we weigh the concerns of the spotted owl against the loggers?

01:32:14.000 I mean, you're talking about some really important things.

01:32:16.000 And the recourse to, oh, I'm offended or I can't think of what makes me upset, makes me think that maybe...

01:32:23.000 Soon, universities won't be the place.

01:32:25.000 I mean, we'll have to have these discussions out of the universities, which would really be, it's great for you in your show, but it's terrible for the society, it's terrible for the university, it's terrible.

01:32:35.000 Universities, in a sense, have ceased to have these sorts of conversations.

01:32:38.000 When you watch those children scream at that professor at Yale, and then you find out that that guy was disciplined, and like, weren't they fired?

01:32:47.000 Or they stepped down?

01:32:48.000 They resigned?

01:32:49.000 Yeah, I think they resigned, yeah. 1.00

01:32:51.000 We're fucked. 1.00

01:32:52.000 I think liberals are eating themselves. 1.00

01:32:55.000 I think the left is literally...

01:32:57.000 The regressive left. 0.99

01:32:57.000 I think there's a difference. 0.99

01:32:58.000 Yeah, that's a good point, because liberals in terms of...

01:33:04.000 Social change and progress and you know acceptance of various different people I think that's wonderful.

01:33:10.000 It's great But I think that this regressive left with this very rigid ideology of what you can and can't say and the the behaviors in which they they engage in enforcing these things I think it's preposterous and I think that ultimately what's going to happen is you're not going to have these kind of Structures these these these places where people go and you're going to be learning things online and Yeah, 0.82

01:33:34.000 and it's going to be a lot worse before it gets better.

01:33:37.000 And the hard thing is that many of your listeners are not in academia.

01:33:41.000 And when we tell these stories, people, they think that this guy's just making this.

01:33:46.000 Well, you are in academia.

01:33:47.000 So explain it from a first person perspective.

01:33:52.000 So I'll give you an example.

01:33:54.000 Okay.

01:33:54.000 So I had an individual in class, and the individual is not even part of the class.

01:34:00.000 Now, right in the syllabus, I put in this entire class as a trigger warning.

01:34:04.000 Like, the whole thing.

01:34:05.000 A to Z. You had to write that?

01:34:06.000 I put it in.

01:34:08.000 You wrote trigger warning?

01:34:09.000 Yeah, right in the syllabus.

01:34:10.000 Wow.

01:34:11.000 The whole thing.

01:34:11.000 I love the fact that you even used trigger warning.

01:34:13.000 Right? 1.00

01:34:14.000 Trigger warning is so fucking stupid. 1.00

01:34:15.000 Right in the whole thing. 0.99

01:34:16.000 Well, see, here's what happens, because I was actually just brought up in charges again, and if you don't do that, then, you know, people can say, well, you didn't warn me.

01:34:25.000 Well, actually, I did.

01:34:26.000 I warned you the first day.

01:34:28.000 See, not only is it in the syllabus, it's bold in caps, in the syllabus, in increased font.

01:34:34.000 So everybody knows...

01:34:35.000 This entire class is a trigger warning?

01:34:37.000 Yep.

01:34:38.000 The whole thing.

01:34:39.000 The whole thing.

01:34:40.000 Okay.

01:34:40.000 And you know, when I went to the dean or whatever, and he's questioning about things, and I said, you know, hey, it's in the thing.

01:34:46.000 And he said, well, can you see how people could be offended by this stuff?

01:34:49.000 And I'm like, of course.

01:34:50.000 People could be offended by everything.

01:34:51.000 They could be offended by everything.

01:34:52.000 We were talking about the woman who's offended because Darth Vader was black.

01:34:55.000 Right.

01:34:56.000 That's on NMSNBC that Dave Rubin tweeted today. 1.00

01:34:58.000 Which is one of the dumbest fucking things I've ever seen in my life. 0.99

01:35:01.000 She's saying that Star Wars is racist because Darth Vader's black. 1.00

01:35:04.000 Meanwhile, Darth Vader's not black. 1.00

01:35:05.000 They took the mask off, you dumb cunt. 1.00

01:35:08.000 It's a white guy under there. 1.00

01:35:09.000 Fucking idiot. 1.00

01:35:11.000 I'm not going to say I can trump that, but let me give you a couple examples. 1.00

01:35:14.000 Well, Luke Skywalker's his son, too, and that's another white guy, you fucking idiot. 1.00

01:35:17.000 So here's one. 1.00

01:35:18.000 So this woman is in the class, and I give a class. 1.00

01:35:22.000 At the end of the class, she says, I've never seen so many microaggressions in, I think it was nine minutes.

01:35:29.000 What was the class?

01:35:30.000 Knowledge, values, and rationality.

01:35:32.000 We use Sam Harris's book, The Moral Landscape, in that class.

01:35:35.000 And we talk about, well, we talk about heavy things.

01:35:38.000 You know, we talked about ISIS. We talked about cultural relativism.

01:35:42.000 We talked about, is there a way to make a cross-cultural job?

01:35:44.000 I mean, we're talking about things that, frankly, people in college should be talking about.

01:35:48.000 Because they vote, they're citizens in a democracy, and they need to engage these issues.

01:35:53.000 And college professors are petrified.

01:35:55.000 They're just, and in a sense, I understand that because it's a theft of one's time.

01:36:00.000 My case, I don't care because I have no opportunity.

01:36:03.000 I was told point blank that you'll never get promoted.

01:36:06.000 You could publish 10 books from Harvard and we won't promote you.

01:36:09.000 So once I found that out, I said, well, I can talk about whatever I want.

01:36:11.000 Why did they tell you that?

01:36:13.000 Well, let me finish the story.

01:36:16.000 So it was really interesting to me.

01:36:19.000 So she gets up and she said, I've never been so microaggressed.

01:36:22.000 The guy's racist.

01:36:24.000 This is someone that, again, was not even participating in your class. 0.94

01:36:27.000 Was not even in the class.

01:36:29.000 And, you know, I thought, wow, like, what?

01:36:33.000 My first, it was like, Is this person totally insane or did I say something that was really horrible?

01:36:38.000 What were the microaggressions that she was citing? 0.69

01:36:40.000 Oh, well, I focused in the racist part.

01:36:42.000 So I said, well, what did I say?

01:36:45.000 What did I say?

01:36:46.000 Because if I said something that was racist, I really do want to know because I don't want to be that kind of person.

01:36:50.000 So that's their belief revision thing again, right?

01:36:52.000 Okay.

01:36:53.000 So she said, you use the example of Star Trek in a class.

01:36:59.000 And you were shocked when she pointed at the woman she didn't know.

01:37:03.000 She was right.

01:37:03.000 I was shocked.

01:37:04.000 I was genuinely...

01:37:05.000 I was almost flabbergasted that she never heard of Star Trek.

01:37:08.000 Like, I understand not watching it, but she never heard of it.

01:37:11.000 And then I used the example of Marilyn Manson.

01:37:15.000 She said that you assumed that she participated in white culture.

01:37:22.000 So that's racist?

01:37:24.000 Okay, so for her...

01:37:27.000 Marilyn Manson is white culture?

01:37:28.000 Yeah, okay. 0.89

01:37:29.000 Because he's a white guy.

01:37:30.000 So now we can really drill down on this and think about this.

01:37:33.000 We need to find a forum.

01:37:34.000 Black fans of Marilyn Manson.

01:37:35.000 I'm sure it's out there.

01:37:36.000 Go to Reddit.

01:37:37.000 I'm sure Reddit has a forum.

01:37:38.000 So now we can really unpack this insanity.

01:37:42.000 Okay.

01:37:42.000 So she tells people that everybody should file a complaint against me, and I said, okay, well, let's...

01:37:49.000 If you, look, anybody is free to file a complaint, do you have the number?

01:37:53.000 I said, would you like, we'll put it all right on the board.

01:37:55.000 You want to have a conversation with me?

01:37:57.000 She said, no, you're too far gone.

01:37:58.000 You're too far gone because you mentioned Star Trek.

01:38:02.000 Well, I don't know.

01:38:03.000 See, that's the thing.

01:38:03.000 It's like the horse and Alice in Wonderland.

01:38:06.000 It runs off furiously in all directions.

01:38:07.000 That's a fascinating thing that people do, though.

01:38:09.000 They say, I can't discuss it with you.

01:38:11.000 You're too far gone.

01:38:12.000 That's a symptom of safe spaces trigger warnings.

01:38:17.000 Satan's in your mind, Peter Boghossian. 0.96

01:38:20.000 I cannot speak to you. 0.96

01:38:22.000 I will not get infected by your horrible ideas, which come from Satan. 0.96

01:38:28.000 You are too far gone. 0.98

01:38:30.000 Repent!

01:38:30.000 Repent, Peter!

01:38:32.000 So here's...

01:38:33.000 That's what she's saying.

01:38:34.000 It is very similar.

01:38:36.000 It's parallel.

01:38:37.000 It's very similar on the left to what she's saying.

01:38:40.000 So here's what's interesting.

01:38:41.000 Was she black, by the way? 0.99

01:38:42.000 Because it would be awesome if she was white. 0.99

01:38:44.000 No, she was Hispanic. 1.00

01:38:47.000 Damn it. 1.00

01:38:49.000 So one of the things that she was, or maybe not, I don't know, she said her name was like, she rolled her arse, I don't remember which. 1.00

01:38:55.000 How dare you, racist. 0.99

01:38:58.000 My name is Nego Montoya. 0.94

01:39:00.000 The first thing I said to her was, literally when she told me her name, I said, I'm sorry if I can't pronounce it.

01:39:05.000 Ricardo Mandelban.

01:39:08.000 Okay, so here's what's interesting about that.

01:39:10.000 Okay.

01:39:11.000 So, obviously, she's been inculcated.

01:39:14.000 She is incapable, and I don't want to pick on her because, in a sense, she's just a victim, right?

01:39:20.000 She's a victim of this malicious ideology that's running across campuses now. 1.00

01:39:25.000 But people like that are not capable of engaging and entertaining ideas because they have this, the university protects them They can say they've been aggressed.

01:39:37.000 They can say they've been kind of violated, if you will, like cognitively, intellectually violated.

01:39:44.000 But what's really interesting about that, two things.

01:39:47.000 One, she thinks that she can arbitrate everybody else's reality. 0.96

01:39:51.000 So she thinks, I can understand if I say something and he's offended by it, or I say, you know, Taekwondo and so on.

01:39:56.000 But she thinks that The regressives think that they arbitrate people's reality and they know what other people should be offended by, which is amazing.

01:40:05.000 But here's the really interesting part.

01:40:07.000 I love Star Trek.

01:40:09.000 I'll show you my daughter in a sec off screen.

01:40:11.000 I love Star Trek.

01:40:13.000 Is she Cleon?

01:40:14.000 No, but she's Asian. 1.00

01:40:17.000 Is that everything you know with Star Trek?

01:40:18.000 It has everything to do with this.

01:40:20.000 There's a big pause.

01:40:20.000 It has everything.

01:40:22.000 The pause was an emphasis.

01:40:24.000 It has everything to do with it because the woman I was shocked hadn't heard of Star Trek was Asian. 0.87

01:40:30.000 You said she was Spanish? 0.97

01:40:31.000 No, who hadn't heard of Star Trek.

01:40:33.000 It's a different woman? 1.00

01:40:34.000 No, yeah, there were two women. 0.99

01:40:35.000 One was the woman who said she's never been so offended in her whole life.

01:40:39.000 And the other one, when she's... 0.87

01:40:40.000 She said she hadn't heard of it because it was white culture?

01:40:45.000 Two different people you're talking about?

01:40:46.000 Yeah, I haven't articulated it.

01:40:48.000 There's a woman in the class. 0.98

01:40:49.000 I use a Star Trek example.

01:40:51.000 She hasn't heard of it.

01:40:52.000 I'm stunned.

01:40:53.000 I'm like, I can't believe it.

01:40:54.000 And I use a Marilyn Manson example.

01:40:55.000 She hasn't heard of it.

01:40:56.000 I'm shocked.

01:40:58.000 Then the other woman, the regressive... 1.00

01:40:59.000 Oh, the one who's watching.

01:41:01.000 Yeah, the one who's watching. 0.99

01:41:02.000 The regressive leftist says, you're a racist.

01:41:06.000 Something that I don't remember exact words. 0.77

01:41:07.000 Okay, now I understand.

01:41:08.000 I was so confused.

01:41:09.000 I thought you were talking about all these interactions.

01:41:12.000 I thought the woman who was the regressive also hadn't heard about Star Trek. 1.00

01:41:15.000 Yeah, then that's a problem with my articulation, not your understanding.

01:41:18.000 Okay.

01:41:18.000 Let's just apologize.

01:41:22.000 So, what was really interesting to me about that is that she identified that person on the basis of her race.

01:41:29.000 Not me.

01:41:30.000 She was assuming...

01:41:32.000 When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

01:41:36.000 When you're a regressive leftist, every single thing you think of is race, gender, oppression, intersectionality, which is parenthetically...

01:41:44.000 Intersectionality?

01:41:46.000 Any time you use your sectionality?

01:41:49.000 What is that?

01:41:49.000 Any time you hear someone use that word you can automatically assume they're an aggressive leftist and the next thing out of your mouth their mouths will be some kind of smear campaign.

01:41:57.000 There's a hilarious video of Steven Crowder going up to people and asking them what their preferred gender pronouns are.

01:42:03.000 I saw that!

01:42:04.000 I almost retweeted that, but I thought you know what?

01:42:06.000 You're gonna get in trouble.

01:42:08.000 I know, but that's what it is.

01:42:10.000 They have really infested the highest levels of academia.

01:42:14.000 And it's funny, these diversity offices, they report directly to the president.

01:42:19.000 They are offices in search of tasks.

01:42:22.000 But back to this example.

01:42:23.000 So she was the one who identified the person on the basis of their race.

01:42:27.000 She identified me on the basis of their race.

01:42:30.000 Of your race. 0.60

01:42:31.000 Yeah.

01:42:31.000 Right.

01:42:32.000 Because somehow there's this thing called white culture.

01:42:36.000 She knows what it is.

01:42:38.000 She's offended on someone else's behalf.

01:42:40.000 I'm a white, cisgendered, heterosexual...

01:42:44.000 Do you use cisgendered?

01:42:45.000 Use that term?

01:42:47.000 Well, we're...

01:42:48.000 Okay.

01:42:48.000 Are you being forced to use that term?

01:42:50.000 Is that real?

01:42:50.000 Okay.

01:42:51.000 It's not a question of being...

01:42:53.000 How's that work?

01:42:54.000 It's not a question of being forced to use it, but...

01:42:58.000 But that's not a real term.

01:42:59.000 That's not in any dictionaries. 1.00

01:43:01.000 Dude, the whole thing is bullshit. 1.00

01:43:02.000 The whole thing is nonsense. 1.00

01:43:04.000 But cisgender is hilarious. 0.98

01:43:05.000 And the idea being that you shouldn't have to say transgender because transgender should be normal.

01:43:10.000 It's normal to want to be transgender.

01:43:14.000 It's so normal that by saying transgender, you're making it abnormal.

01:43:18.000 So we should say cisgender.

01:43:19.000 Cisgender for people who aren't transgender, meaning if you are a male and you identify as being a male, you are a cisgendered male.

01:43:28.000 That's right. 1.00

01:43:29.000 You're fucking male. 1.00

01:43:30.000 Like, we're adding all, here's the thing about, like, adding all this extra shit to define things that are already defined by the original word, we don't need, you're doing it to prop up transgender. 1.00

01:43:43.000 Like, that's the idea. 0.96

01:43:44.000 To make it so it's even.

01:43:45.000 We'll put cis Yes. 0.91

01:43:46.000 Right.

01:43:47.000 Regular gender. 1.00

01:43:48.000 Okay.

01:43:48.000 Trans with...

01:43:49.000 Right.

01:43:49.000 So now...

01:43:50.000 Okay.

01:43:51.000 That was another great explanation.

01:43:53.000 So now why do these people do this?

01:43:55.000 Well, that's a long story, but one value that's responsible for that is radical egalitarianism.

01:44:01.000 Everything has to be radical.

01:44:02.000 Everybody has to be equal.

01:44:03.000 Yes.

01:44:04.000 Interesting, though, how...

01:44:05.000 And then they have these diversity initiatives and diversity requirements.

01:44:09.000 We need more faculty of color.

01:44:10.000 And I actually think that can be a good thing in some circumstances.

01:44:15.000 So, but what they mean is they mean diversity in the most narrow, bigoted kind of a way.

01:44:21.000 They mean it in terms of skin color.

01:44:22.000 They don't mean in terms of ideological diversity.

01:44:24.000 They're not out there hiring, you know, Republicans and libertarians or conservatives.

01:44:30.000 But the other thing that's interesting is that You know, I think it was on Sam's podcast with Douglas Murray, he said, we're going to be talking about pronouns are the big thing now.

01:44:39.000 We're going to be talking about pronouns while these people are sneaking nukes in our cities. 0.74

01:44:43.000 It is a failure to morally triage.

01:44:46.000 It is a system-wide failure that's trickled down to individuals within the system to make it almost impossible for them to make discerning judgments about things.

01:44:59.000 And so we have this consequence now of an entire generation of students who's being trained not only to suspend moral judgments, but to think they're better people as being a result.

01:45:11.000 And it's also beautiful that this is all coming from academia, because if you think about what a university is in academia, like a lot of people that are in academia, went to college, Went on to grad school, got their masters and their PhD, started teaching, never entered the real world, stayed in a sheltered environment,

01:45:27.000 and now they're dictating this sort of behavior and thinking.

01:45:30.000 It's like a dojo in which everybody's training with everybody else in the dojo, right?

01:45:37.000 Exactly.

01:45:37.000 I told you, it's all martial arts.

01:45:39.000 The whole thing can be done.

01:45:39.000 We see it through that lens.

01:45:40.000 And then this radical ideology coming in this area and wanting to redefine reality in this area, they're not going out into the real world and experiencing the Congo and all these crazy Fucked up parts of the world and understanding like you're dealing with like an inherent problem with the human race like you can't redefine it by Changing pronouns and cisgender. 0.56

01:46:06.000 It really is the most insidious form of cultural myopia like they think they have latched on to some timeless.

01:46:15.000 They're just making shit up and They think they've latched onto some universal truth about reality, and now they have this moral—and I think that the underlying moral impulses that they have are pretty good ones. 0.68

01:46:28.000 You don't treat people differently on the basis of their race in general. 0.99

01:46:30.000 You'd be basically a cool person. 0.95

01:46:32.000 You don't be a dick, in other words. 0.93

01:46:33.000 I think that those are very laudable. 0.99

01:46:35.000 But they're being a dick and enforcing it. 0.94

01:46:36.000 They're not enforcing it with kindness and compassion and understanding and trying to promote this positive thing. 0.99

01:46:43.000 No, they're shaming and doxing and attacking.

01:46:46.000 So that's the other piece that we need to understand here.

01:46:49.000 The other piece is the tactics and the techniques.

01:46:51.000 And these people have really done a number on me.

01:46:54.000 Or they've attempted to. 0.99

01:46:55.000 They mistake me for someone who gives a shit. 0.99

01:46:57.000 I really don't care. 1.00

01:46:58.000 But the other thing is, these people are... 0.97

01:47:02.000 Just the most mean-spirited, nasty, vituperative. 0.93

01:47:07.000 Vituperative? 1.00

01:47:07.000 Damn. 1.00

01:47:08.000 You ever heard that one? 1.00

01:47:09.000 No.

01:47:10.000 What's that word?

01:47:10.000 Google that.

01:47:11.000 Google that.

01:47:11.000 How do you spell it?

01:47:13.000 V-I-T-U-P-R-I-T-I-T-I-V-E. Vituperative. 1.00

01:47:16.000 It means like, you know, a nasty name calling son of a bitch. 1.00

01:47:19.000 I'm going to call someone that. 1.00

01:47:20.000 One day.

01:47:22.000 Wow, vituperative.

01:47:23.000 I like it.

01:47:24.000 There you go. 1.00

01:47:25.000 Bitter, abusive, vituperative fuck. 1.00

01:47:31.000 I like it. 1.00

01:47:32.000 But these people are also characterized by the strategies they use when they're engaging people.

01:47:40.000 The smear tactics.

01:47:42.000 If you say anything, if you question or you challenge, you're a racist. 1.00

01:47:45.000 You're a bigot. 1.00

01:47:46.000 You're a homophobe. 0.99

01:47:47.000 But what that does is that shuts down the conversation.

01:47:51.000 That's the end of the conversation.

01:47:53.000 So they have...

01:47:55.000 It really is, not only if they marginalize you, it's this rise of the victim culture.

01:48:00.000 Like victims are esteemed now.

01:48:02.000 Everyone wants to be a victim.

01:48:03.000 I think I can find parallels when I was talking about, again with martial arts, is that like the dojo to me was sacred because this was something that was transforming me and changing me from a loser to someone who had like a possible Or

01:48:34.000 they've been raped or something?

01:48:35.000 Some kind of physical trauma? 0.92

01:48:36.000 Yes, that's a good point. 0.96

01:48:37.000 Had horrible experiences with bad people, or, you know, maybe abused in high school, bullied, fucked with, and now they've found some culture where they're being not just accepted, but it's invigorating to them. 0.75

01:48:52.000 Like, we're gonna change this world, and we're gonna make things awesome for people, and we're gonna, you know, we're gonna make... 0.83

01:48:58.000 Ask people what their preferred gender pronouns are.

01:49:01.000 This is so important.

01:49:02.000 We really need to get on this.

01:49:03.000 And they're living in this environment, and again, you're dealing with really young people, like I was when I was young, and I was looking at this stage of my life as this transformative journey that I was on, and I was wholeheartedly dedicated to it.

01:49:18.000 Maybe that's what they're doing.

01:49:20.000 This is their transformative journey.

01:49:22.000 Yeah, I think that's right, and...

01:49:24.000 But they're imposing it on others.

01:49:27.000 Yeah, they're imposing it.

01:49:28.000 They're using the mechanisms of the university to impose those things.

01:49:33.000 I think that's right, but the very things that we need, reason and rationality are liberatory.

01:49:38.000 They can liberate us.

01:49:39.000 They can emancipate us.

01:49:41.000 You know, again, jiu-jitsu is like that.

01:49:43.000 You can test ideas. 0.99

01:49:44.000 You can, you know, it's like, it's a son of a bitch to have a guy. 1.00

01:49:47.000 I had a guy on him, he's like 300 pounds, and he's like knee-riding me and then skull-riding me. 0.95

01:49:51.000 I mean, it's just not a very pleasant experience. 0.96

01:49:53.000 Those both sound very gay. 0.99

01:49:55.000 Knee-riding and skull-riding. 0.99

01:49:57.000 That's a micro-aggression.

01:49:58.000 It is a micro-aggression.

01:50:00.000 So I wanted to get back to that protest, because I don't think we completely finished it.

01:50:06.000 I was going to finish the thought, but give me which protest.

01:50:10.000 This woman that was saying all this stuff about you, that you're racist and that you're... 1.00

01:50:14.000 Yeah, okay, so I used the word hurtful before.

01:50:18.000 So one of the reasons that's really hurtful to me is because my daughter's Asian, right? 1.00

01:50:23.000 And now it's the age of Twitter and...

01:50:25.000 That's like saying, I'm not racist, I have black friends.

01:50:28.000 Microaggression.

01:50:29.000 No, it's different.

01:50:29.000 I'm kidding.

01:50:30.000 I know you're kidding, but just think about it for a second.

01:50:34.000 You know, like, my daughter grows up, and this person in my class said, oh, you know, he hates Asians or whatever.

01:50:39.000 Right.

01:50:39.000 I wasn't even thinking of Asians.

01:50:41.000 I was a guy who liked Star Trek, right?

01:50:43.000 So...

01:50:44.000 You know, those things tend to have a life of their own, and then it's like, oh, Boghossian, he's the guy who hates Asians, right?

01:50:51.000 He's the guy, whereas, no, I'm just the guy who, and this is the earlier point I was going to make, the very thing that these regressives One of the things that they don't understand, perhaps the most important, is that reason is liberatory.

01:51:06.000 We can emancipate ourselves through reason and rationality.

01:51:09.000 But the only way to do that, the way that reason acts as a lubricant, is in social discourse.

01:51:15.000 We need to be able to have conversations.

01:51:18.000 It's non-negotiable.

01:51:20.000 Free speech is not a negotiation.

01:51:22.000 I 100% agree.

01:51:24.000 And so these people, they want to disinvite people if they don't agree with them as opposed to having, you know, an alternative speaker for their point of view or debate.

01:51:33.000 I'm not a fan of debates, but, you know, or debate.

01:51:35.000 But what they want to do is they want to shut down the discourse.

01:51:38.000 But let's take that at a deeper level and take a look at that.

01:51:41.000 Part of the problem with that is Is that I Firmly believe and I think I have evidence for this overwhelming evidence actually is a Pedigree and long pedigree in Western intellectual thought we can derive our values We can sit down and I can talk to you and we can figure out look at the black statue there are Hendricks there we can figure out Why we shouldn't discriminate against people on the basis of their skin color.

01:52:08.000 But the only way that we can do that, it doesn't come from a wand, is that you need to be able to ask questions, right?

01:52:17.000 So we can figure things out in discourse and dialogue.

01:52:20.000 That's how we figure things out.

01:52:22.000 And these people want to shut down discourse. 0.85

01:52:24.000 But if they do that, then they become their own enemies.

01:52:28.000 They're the worst type of ideologue because they have beliefs, but they haven't derived those beliefs.

01:52:34.000 So then those beliefs are then sacred, right?

01:52:37.000 Yes, yes, yes.

01:52:38.000 And the only way, they're taking away the one thing that we need to figure stuff out.

01:52:46.000 It's like, in jujitsu, they're taking away the resisting opponent.

01:52:50.000 In this case, they're taking away the dialectic, the dialogue, free speech, open inquiry, the ability to say things on campuses without being smeared as a racist or a homophobe or a bigot.

01:53:00.000 Right.

01:53:00.000 You're 100% right.

01:53:01.000 You're 100% right.

01:53:02.000 You couldn't be more right about that aspect of this whole dilemma. 0.95

01:53:07.000 That they are trying to stop the debate because I think part of them knows what they're doing is ridiculous. 0.94

01:53:13.000 Just like the Chi Gong master that wants to shoot you across the room. 1.00

01:53:17.000 That's the question.

01:53:17.000 They kind of know.

01:53:19.000 They've got to know.

01:53:19.000 See, that's the question, right?

01:53:22.000 So that is what I've really been thinking about.

01:53:25.000 Do they know that their ideologies are bankrupt?

01:53:29.000 Do they know?

01:53:30.000 I mean, and again, I'm thinking about guys at the top, like Reza Aslan, Glenn Greenwald, Cenk from the Young Turks. 0.97

01:53:38.000 Like, when you have to make shit up and lie, it makes me think that you're not genuine about your beliefs, that you're not authentic. 0.88

01:53:47.000 Like, I just mentioned to someone the other day, I have no problem Talking to someone who tells me with total sincerity, hey, you know what? 0.99

01:53:57.000 I believe there was a talking snake.

01:53:59.000 Like, I can have a conversation with that guy.

01:54:01.000 He's sincere.

01:54:02.000 That woman, that person's sincere.

01:54:04.000 They're saying, this is what I believe.

01:54:07.000 But the regressives, you can't, it's almost impossible.

01:54:11.000 The one thing you need, you can't have a conversation because if you ask a question, you're smeared.

01:54:16.000 You become a whole smear campaign.

01:54:19.000 So...

01:54:20.000 It's incredibly frustrating on an individual level, but then when they have institutional support of this stuff, then when they have woven their tentacles into academia, into, you know, very high positions,

01:54:35.000 and it's across the United States, Western Europe, and again, remember, there is a hierarchy of things you can't talk about.

01:54:42.000 You know there is and if you you want to figure something if you can figure out the relationship You mean this would be epic you figure out why?

01:54:53.000 I love my freedom of language with you here on the show you figure out why feminists are in bed with Islamists and then we got something because this to me is one of the most bizarre fascinating disturbing Grotesque I mean,

01:55:11.000 if there were ever a group who actively...

01:55:14.000 I mean, it's even worse than the former Baltic states and the Soviet Union, the only military alliance in history, their primary objective was to attack themselves. 0.91

01:55:21.000 This is even worse than that.

01:55:23.000 I mean, these people, you could not possibly find a group of people who are more antithetical to the most rudimentary feminist values than the Islamists. 0.98

01:55:34.000 It is not possible.

01:55:35.000 Never has it existed.

01:55:37.000 But yet these people are in bed with each other.

01:55:39.000 And it happens over and over again.

01:55:42.000 I mean this whole situation where you're laughing.

01:55:44.000 It's awesome.

01:55:45.000 It's true.

01:55:46.000 It's the poetry of the bizarre.

01:55:49.000 Yeah, it is.

01:55:51.000 It's some bizarre folly.

01:55:55.000 It's very strange.

01:55:56.000 It's very strange, but they're brown.

01:55:58.000 And you can't say anything bad about brown people. 0.96

01:56:01.000 But you can openly mock Christians. 0.96

01:56:04.000 Yeah, that's right. 0.98

01:56:05.000 You can mock Christians. 1.00

01:56:07.000 There's something about a skin color that trumps other things. 1.00

01:56:12.000 Think about that for a second. 0.89

01:56:14.000 These people, the only people who care, this isn't my line, I read this somewhere, but the only people who care about race are racists and regressive leftists. 0.85

01:56:25.000 The regressive left really are the new racists. 0.98

01:56:28.000 They're really looking at everything in terms of race. 0.86

01:56:31.000 And sex. 0.55

01:56:31.000 And I think there's a lot of sexism in the regressive left because they don't really like men. 0.55

01:56:36.000 And there's a lot of anti-masculine ideology that gets perpetrated on people The point where you're thinking, like, you're supposed to be more soft-gendered.

01:56:46.000 Gender's supposed to be a fluid thing. 1.00

01:56:48.000 Like, you're not supposed to be overtly masculine. 0.89

01:56:50.000 That's nonsense. 0.95

01:56:51.000 How come you can be overtly feminine once you become transgender? 0.99

01:56:55.000 How come you, if a woman wants to wear, like, a push-up bra, have her tits poking out, and a short skirt, and high heels, and a lot of makeup, and do her hair up, that girl's giving in to the patriarchy. 1.00

01:57:07.000 But, if a transgender does it, you go, girl. 1.00

01:57:10.000 If a transgender man all of a sudden adopts those traditionally feminine views. 0.99

01:57:15.000 It's hypocrisy, but it's even worse than hypocrisy. 0.96

01:57:19.000 Because if it just stopped there, it would be something.

01:57:21.000 But it's this idea that these people, they think that they can dictate to other people how they should live. 0.62

01:57:27.000 Yeah, when you see a guy who's a power lifter, okay, some big fucking giant, like, you know that Game of Thrones? 0.93

01:57:35.000 Oh, the mountain guy. 0.86

01:57:35.000 Yeah, the mountain guy. 0.86

01:57:36.000 I met that guy.

01:57:37.000 I didn't say hi to him.

01:57:38.000 I saw him.

01:57:38.000 He was at the UFC this past weekend.

01:57:40.000 He's a fucking gigantic man. 1.00

01:57:42.000 He's huge. 0.99

01:57:43.000 He's a cool thing with Conor McGregor, too.

01:57:45.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:57:45.000 It's awesome.

01:57:46.000 He obviously likes being fucking huge. 0.99

01:57:48.000 He enjoys picking shit up and moving it around. 1.00

01:57:51.000 He enjoys breaking records. 1.00

01:57:53.000 What do I give a fuck? 1.00

01:57:55.000 Why would I care? 0.99

01:57:56.000 He seems like a nice guy.

01:57:57.000 Like, the idea that this... 1.00

01:57:58.000 And even if he's an asshole. 1.00

01:57:59.000 Well, here's the thing. 1.00

01:58:01.000 He doesn't seem to be.

01:58:03.000 My point is, like, there's no...

01:58:05.000 He's not doing anything terrible.

01:58:08.000 But you would look at that and decide that this person living their life in this way is negative.

01:58:15.000 That he's masculine and he's a part of the problem and rape culture and all this... 0.99

01:58:20.000 He's just picking big shit up and moving it around and flexing. 0.99

01:58:24.000 The most innocuous thing that one could do. 0.99

01:58:27.000 Why is it because he's overtly masculine?

01:58:31.000 Why is that bad? 0.99

01:58:31.000 What if he just put the same amount of energy into swimming and this guy just like to swim across the fucking ocean? 0.99

01:58:37.000 Would you freak out about that? 0.85

01:58:39.000 No, it's like this feeling that this guy is becoming this thing that you find oppressive even if he's not doing anything.

01:58:46.000 So there are ideologues.

01:58:49.000 We got that.

01:58:50.000 And they subscribe to ideas that are just not in accordance with reality.

01:58:56.000 And I think, and I'm not using the term regressive here, I think liberals in general tend to believe that if we can change social systems somehow, and I think that there's a lot of truth in this, Steven Pinker kind of, in the blank slate,

01:59:12.000 deconstructs some of these ideas, but liberals kind of think if you could only change the institutions in society, then things would, by definition, be more fair and more equal.

01:59:20.000 We're all born blank slates, and all of these disparities and inequalities come about as a result of problems within the system, inequalities within the system.

01:59:33.000 Unless you're really an ideologue on the right, you would be hard-pressed to say, why shouldn't we try to do our best to create systems of justice that are more fair?

01:59:45.000 I'm a big fan of John Rawls.

01:59:47.000 Absolutely.

01:59:48.000 Any reasonable person would say that.

01:59:50.000 But these people, they don't believe in differences between They think that the differences between men and women are not biological.

02:00:02.000 They think that they're cultural artifacts.

02:00:04.000 They think that, you know, and I don't know if you want to get the whole race thing, but the race thing is another thing, but they think that race is only skin deep.

02:00:11.000 It's a social construct, you know, rather than saying, well, why do Jewish women get Tay-Sachs syndrome?

02:00:16.000 Why do black people get more sickle cell anemia? 0.93

02:00:19.000 But again, you know, I noticed my hesitancy in discussing these things because I know that anytime you bring this up, this is an opportunity for people to smear you, tell you you're a bigot, a racist, a homophobe. 0.96

02:00:32.000 And it's also the pinnacle of identity politics.

02:00:37.000 Where the things that I say are discredited or they look at me because I'm situated in the body that I am for the sexuality I had no choice over whatsoever and they use that as an opportunity to discredit my speech.

02:00:51.000 I mean the whole thing is just, it is literally, if you could say, well let's make a list of all the things that we can write down to make it impossible to solve our problems.

02:01:01.000 These people, they have the list.

02:01:03.000 I mean they have the gold standard for the list.

02:01:06.000 Yeah, it's a very good point.

02:01:08.000 I mean, I think one of the most important aspects of this is what you said about silencing debate.

02:01:15.000 And that debate and discussion is the only way we figure things out.

02:01:19.000 And I don't know...

02:01:20.000 I met you today.

02:01:21.000 I know you because of your work.

02:01:23.000 I know you because of your associations with friends of mine, like Sam Harris.

02:01:26.000 But I don't know your thinking until I talk to you.

02:01:31.000 And when I talk to you, I go, oh, okay, I see how he sees that.

02:01:34.000 Or he sees things in a different way.

02:01:36.000 And it's hard for people to do that because we have this rigid set of ideas that we have in our head and we would like to reinforce those on everybody because it makes life simpler.

02:01:43.000 Well, if you think the way I think and I think the way you think, it's perfect.

02:01:46.000 Right.

02:01:46.000 So that's when we bring jujitsu in again, right?

02:01:49.000 So that's why the problem is when we hang out with people who only believe like we do.

02:01:54.000 It's called a filter bubble.

02:01:57.000 It's a book about it called The Big Sort.

02:02:00.000 We tend to be more confident in the beliefs that we have.

02:02:03.000 But what we should be doing is we should be going to different gyms.

02:02:07.000 You should be going to your buddy Tenth Planet.

02:02:10.000 You should be going and checking out different things because you need to test these ideas to see if they work.

02:02:17.000 In the same way, we should be listening to ideas.

02:02:20.000 It's a problem if you're a liberal and you only listen to liberal stuff.

02:02:24.000 Or an atheist and you only listen. 0.93

02:02:25.000 You really need to listen to, challenge, and engage yourself by opening yourself up to these experiences and starting with the possibility that you could be wrong.

02:02:34.000 So if you're a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and you walk into someone's school and the blue belts are routinely tapping you, you've got to do some thinking.

02:02:43.000 You've got to be honest with yourself.

02:02:45.000 And it doesn't matter how much time you've put into it.

02:02:47.000 It doesn't matter what your commitment is.

02:02:49.000 What matters is what works.

02:02:51.000 Yeah, that's it.

02:02:52.000 That's it.

02:02:53.000 And that is a beautiful thing about high-level problem-solving in martial arts.

02:02:59.000 That if it works, it works.

02:03:01.000 And it's hard to do that when it comes to ideas like compassion and justice and getting along and how you should treat people and how people should be accepted.

02:03:12.000 There's things about...

02:03:15.000 Diversity and about equality that I think we all agree with.

02:03:20.000 I mean, I think you shouldn't be judged by your sexuality or what you look like or where you were born or, you know, fill in the blank. 0.98

02:03:29.000 Nationalism seems to be kind of fucking silly to me. 0.99

02:03:32.000 Yeah. 0.98

02:03:32.000 I think you should judge people on how you behave, and how you interact with each other, and like, do I enjoy talking to this person? 0.98

02:03:39.000 And guess what? 1.00

02:03:40.000 You might enjoy talking to me, but somebody else might fucking think I'm a moron. 0.99

02:03:44.000 They might not like talking to me, and that's their prerogative too. 0.98

02:03:47.000 You don't have to, just because you, like Peter Boghossian, just because you enjoy people doesn't mean I have to enjoy them. 0.97

02:03:53.000 You know, I have friends that have friends I can't fucking stand.

02:03:57.000 You know, and I'll be around like, oh Christ, why are you hanging around with this guy? 0.99

02:04:00.000 He gives me headaches.

02:04:01.000 I gotta get out of here.

02:04:02.000 That's okay, too.

02:04:03.000 Yeah, the older I get, the more I just want to spend my time with people.

02:04:07.000 I really want to spend, and not obligations.

02:04:10.000 Can't fix people. 0.98

02:04:11.000 I've tried so fucking hard to get along with people that are unmotivated, or lazy, or they have constant problems in their life, they don't look at themselves objectively, and you talk to them about things that happen in their life, and they have a fucking myriad of excuses. 0.95

02:04:26.000 It's overwhelming, and if you have those people in your life, they will overwhelm you with their issues, and you will never get anything done. 0.99

02:04:34.000 And so, my take is, try until you can't try, and then get the fuck out of there. 0.91

02:04:40.000 Yeah, and you're already doing, what you're doing is that you're modeling those behaviors. 0.97

02:04:44.000 You know, when I was just talking to my buddy the other day, he's upset that all the aggressives are attacking him.

02:04:50.000 And I just said, just I'll publish everybody.

02:04:53.000 That's the currency in academia.

02:04:55.000 Like, what do you care?

02:04:56.000 Like, just publish.

02:04:57.000 And explain your thoughts in a way that will inspire debate and inspire thought.

02:05:02.000 Explain your thoughts in a blog in a way where people can read it and like it and share it with friends.

02:05:09.000 And that's one of the beautiful things about today is that you have this ability that's never...

02:05:16.000 Literally unparalleled access to other human beings.

02:05:19.000 It's never been like this where you could just write something you put it on Facebook you could be a Carpenter in Kansas and you write something beautiful on Facebook and it'll be shared across the world within minutes Yeah, I'll add one more thing to that and don't treat people if you've been treated negatively by people don't stoop to that.

02:05:40.000 It's hard, right?

02:05:41.000 It's hard for people Yeah, my mentor, this is somewhat of a non sequitur, but my mentor told me this really fascinating story.

02:05:50.000 The Dalai Lama?

02:05:50.000 No, no, the Pope.

02:05:53.000 The one that they just got rid of, right? 0.98

02:05:55.000 The child molester Pope?

02:05:57.000 He told me, he was 97, he's a survivor of Buchenwald.

02:06:02.000 Yeah, he's a really amazing guy.

02:06:04.000 Jesus.

02:06:04.000 He's a film about his life and he went back and liberated the same concentration camp.

02:06:09.000 He told me the story about chickens that was very profound in my life.

02:06:13.000 Basically, I think he was on the study, if not, but it does make a difference.

02:06:18.000 Basically, they wanted to see if they could reverse the pecking order among chickens.

02:06:22.000 And there's something that's a literal pecking order in that if you put chickens in a coop, seven chickens, chicken one will peck chicken two.

02:06:31.000 Chicken one will peck chickens two through seven, but never be picked.

02:06:34.000 Chicken two will not peck chicken one, but will peck chicken three.

02:06:39.000 So the same thing all the way down.

02:06:40.000 Chicken seven gets pecked by all the chickens and pecks nobody.

02:06:44.000 So they wanted to see if they could reverse the pecking order.

02:06:47.000 And I think that this story has profound implications for all of life.

02:06:51.000 And so what they did was they put a little collar.

02:06:53.000 They put little collars on all the chickens.

02:06:56.000 And when the chicken raised his head as if it was going to peck another chicken, they zapped it.

02:07:01.000 Now here's the question to you, and I got it wrong when he asked me.

02:07:06.000 Do you think it was easier to make chicken one, chicken seven, or chicken seven, chicken one?

02:07:11.000 Chicken 7, Chicken 1. See, that's what I said.

02:07:13.000 That's wrong.

02:07:14.000 Really?

02:07:14.000 And here's the reasoning for that.

02:07:16.000 Chicken 7 has been, has been, um, plucked, uh, not plucked.

02:07:22.000 Pucked?

02:07:23.000 Pecked?

02:07:23.000 Pecked, pecked, thanks.

02:07:24.000 Has been pecked its whole life.

02:07:26.000 It's, it's It's only going to get pecked.

02:07:29.000 It only takes one shock.

02:07:31.000 And I'll tell you another very quick story.

02:07:32.000 It only takes one shock of chicken one to make a chicken seven instantly.

02:07:37.000 Really?

02:07:38.000 Yeah, because it's never experienced that.

02:07:40.000 That's why, for example, in the criminal justice system, harsh punishments don't work.

02:07:45.000 They just don't.

02:07:46.000 And that's borne out by overwhelming empirical evidence.

02:07:48.000 But I think the theoretical background for that is the chicken story.

02:07:52.000 That's why, like, my...

02:07:53.000 He was telling me that when his son...

02:07:55.000 He never yelled at his son.

02:07:56.000 This is a funny story, looking at you with all the tattoos.

02:07:58.000 And his son wanted to get a tattoo.

02:08:00.000 And he slammed his hand down!

02:08:02.000 And he said, no!

02:08:03.000 And he screamed and his son was so shocked.

02:08:06.000 It was like such a shocking thing because he had never raised his voice.

02:08:10.000 He'd always been chicken one. 0.72

02:08:11.000 You know, he'd always been.

02:08:13.000 But when you really start to think about the implications of that, of what kindness will do, of what, of why being, There's your word again.

02:08:24.000 Vituperative, nasty, harsh to people.

02:08:27.000 The best way to change moral attitudes is through rapport.

02:08:30.000 The best way to help people.

02:08:31.000 And if you read the Christian books, they talk about this interesting book called Tactics.

02:08:37.000 The main thing is, you know, develop relationships with people.

02:08:41.000 They're friendly.

02:08:42.000 They're kind.

02:08:43.000 They're trustworthy.

02:08:44.000 You have communities with people.

02:08:46.000 And that gets them involved in their community and thus their faith-based business.

02:08:50.000 Same thing with jujitsu.

02:08:51.000 I have like some great guys.

02:08:52.000 I was just hanging out the other day who do jujitsu.

02:08:55.000 Jujitsu is also interesting, just parenthetically, because you have such a trust of the people you work out with.

02:09:02.000 I mean, you have a bond.

02:09:03.000 A buddy of mine is a prosecutor for the state and you know how you have to Say, hey, I know this guy.

02:09:09.000 Well, he knew another guy who's also a friend of mine, and they did jujitsu together, and he told the judge and the lawyer, and they said they don't have a problem with it.

02:09:17.000 Neither one of those people do jujitsu, right?

02:09:20.000 Because there's no freaking way that I would let someone do jujitsu sit on a Jury with somebody else who's either the prosecutor the defender because those people trust each other Because you have to trust each other when you do jiu-jitsu or people will break your arms They'll choke.

02:09:35.000 They could kill you.

02:09:36.000 You're also a part of a very tight-knit and unusual community.

02:09:39.000 Absolutely.

02:09:39.000 You have this bond with each other that I don't think people understand You're practicing killing each other.

02:09:44.000 Yeah, that's right.

02:09:45.000 Yeah, you're practicing breaking each other's arms Yeah, so I think that that that chicken story and I told that because often we think that the best response to be When we're being mistreated or we perceive an injustice or unfairness is to lash out.

02:10:00.000 And a type of emotional maturity is just to not lash out.

02:10:05.000 You know, maybe a really good strategy, which I've adopted, it's certainly much easier than attempting to do the emotional work of being kind and compassionate, is to just ignore people.

02:10:15.000 You don't have to meet their nastiness with nastiness.

02:10:19.000 You just walk away.

02:10:20.000 Well, that's a good approach if you can pull it off.

02:10:22.000 Sometimes people get pissed off, though. 1.00

02:10:24.000 You're like, fuck this guy! 0.99

02:10:26.000 I think that also is what I call the battery effect, and it's also a good aspect of jiu-jitsu. 0.99

02:10:32.000 I think human beings have a certain amount of energy that they store up in their body, because I think we have our bodies are...

02:10:39.000 We have this ancient structure that's been passed on from generation to generation, thousands and thousands of years of human beings.

02:10:47.000 And for the most part, up until really recently, you were constantly engaged in physical activity and conflict.

02:10:54.000 And your body is designed for that.

02:10:56.000 And I believe your body has a certain...

02:10:58.000 Amount of requirements for the expenditure of energy and when you don't meet those requirements your battery overflows and I think that's what road rage is and I think that's what Irrational responses and I know personally from my own experience in my own shortcomings when I have had irrational responses is because I have not maintained my body correctly and I have not taken care of that battery and And then when it comes up,

02:11:21.000 especially when you're someone like me, it's even more consequential because I've done it my whole life.

02:11:26.000 So my whole life has been about exploding, punching, kicking, wah, wah, wah, just all the kettlebells, wah, jujitsu, wah.

02:11:33.000 It's all this, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.

02:11:35.000 And in doing that, if I get it out of my system, I'm tranquil.

02:11:39.000 Everything's calm. 0.98

02:11:40.000 But when I don't get out of my system, my body's like, I think this is an opportunity to go fucking crazy! 0.98

02:11:44.000 Let's do it! 0.90

02:11:45.000 You got all this extra, you know what I mean? 1.00

02:11:47.000 It's like your body's like, come on, bitch! 1.00

02:11:49.000 Like, it's stored up. 1.00

02:11:51.000 You've got too much juice in your battery.

02:11:53.000 And jujitsu people, for the most part, are some of the most mellow, calm, and relaxed people outside of it.

02:12:00.000 They also have the benefit of knowing that the average person literally has no idea how to defend themselves.

02:12:06.000 We know this because we have been personally humiliated as an average person going into Jiu Jitsu.

02:12:12.000 And then you become a practitioner and you become fairly proficient.

02:12:16.000 And then you understand your limitations, but you also understand much more deeply the limitations of the average person.

02:12:21.000 Absolutely.

02:12:21.000 Now, you happen to have an...

02:12:23.000 From my perspective, an encyclopedic knowledge of martial arts and lineages and people.

02:12:28.000 In my experience, the people I've met, like, you know, I'm trying to think of...

02:12:36.000 John Kavanagh would be a good example.

02:12:39.000 He's a very, very...

02:12:40.000 Have you ever rolled with John?

02:12:41.000 No.

02:12:41.000 He's very good.

02:12:42.000 Like, he's extraordinarily good.

02:12:44.000 I'm sure he is.

02:12:44.000 He's a great guy.

02:12:45.000 Yeah, he's a super good guy.

02:12:47.000 The people you meet who are just the most dangerous, deadly people...

02:12:51.000 They got nothing to prove.

02:12:53.000 They seem to be the nicest people to me.

02:12:55.000 You ever met Marcel Garcia?

02:12:56.000 No.

02:12:57.000 He's the sweetest of sweeties.

02:12:59.000 He's just like a smiling, happy assassin.

02:13:02.000 When you're around him, he's so nice.

02:13:04.000 He's just such a nice guy.

02:13:06.000 Yeah, when you're around him. 0.95

02:13:07.000 My friend Eddie Bravo is the fucking nicest guy ever. 0.94

02:13:09.000 He's always nice. 0.95

02:13:11.000 I went out to a bar a little while ago, and a guy had a black belt around his waist as a belt, and he was playing pool.

02:13:20.000 And I thought to myself, this guy has some issues.

02:13:23.000 Was it dangling?

02:13:25.000 You know how you tie a belt around a gi? 1.00

02:13:27.000 He was tied around his pants like that.

02:13:29.000 So like the two ends were dangling like a black belt would be? 0.92

02:13:32.000 So he wanted to let everybody know that he's a black belt.

02:13:35.000 You know, you just buy a black belt.

02:13:36.000 That's the other thing I tell people.

02:13:37.000 Like, you can get a black belt from, like, online.

02:13:40.000 You buy them, and then they come, and then you put it on.

02:13:43.000 Like, you don't have to earn, it's not like, it's like a sacred forging ground of black belts where there's only one way to get it. 0.98

02:13:49.000 Or you could do a fantasy martial art.

02:13:50.000 Just pay a lot of money. 0.98

02:13:50.000 But you don't even have to fucking do a fantasy martial art. 0.98

02:13:53.000 You could just be a regular guy and order a black belt. 0.98

02:13:56.000 I mean, you literally can.

02:13:57.000 There was a video really recently.

02:13:59.000 I mean, it still does happen to this day of some guy showing up at a Brazilian jiu-jitsu school.

02:14:04.000 He puts on a gi.

02:14:05.000 I think he had wrestling shoes on and a black belt.

02:14:08.000 And he showed up at this gym and he started working out with people.

02:14:12.000 And then the instructor realized immediately that this guy was not a black belt.

02:14:16.000 Right. 0.98

02:14:17.000 And humiliated him and punished him and tell him to take the belt off and get the fuck out of here, and he was screaming at him, but... 0.97

02:14:23.000 See, that's the beauty about jiu-jitsu, too, is you can't pretend. 0.97

02:14:26.000 Cannot pretend.

02:14:27.000 Yeah, you can pretend in some martial arts.

02:14:29.000 I mean, there's guys that invent moves that they think, like, one of my favorite videos is these guys in Harlem.

02:14:37.000 It's not videos is a series of them who practice some sort of fake kung-fu and like one guy will Will be like he'll throw a punch and then the other guy will go well someone does that to me What I'm gonna do is I'm and they don't say it like this they say it in a very urban way like No, 0.72

02:14:55.000 no, no, no, no, that shit ain't gonna work cuz I'm gonna step over here and I'm attack with a chicken wing and then I got a I got a monkey paw and they invent all this stuff I'm attack your ribs from this position and then there guys also in on it because they're also practicing bullshit Choreograph like oh, yeah. 0.76

02:15:09.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:15:09.000 I see how that would work. 0.99

02:15:10.000 I see how that would work What's hilarious is sometimes these guys actually have fights And when they have fights, it becomes like two kids in a fucking schoolyard. 0.96

02:15:20.000 It becomes a brawl on the ground. 0.94

02:15:22.000 They wind up clawing at each other and they can't do anything.

02:15:26.000 There's no kung fu. 0.97

02:15:27.000 There's no monkey paw. 0.99

02:15:28.000 There's no attack the ribs with your knife point fingers and all this stupid shit, but you watch these guys do it and me as a person who studied martial arts my whole life, I know I don't practice kung fu, but I know what is actually kung fu and what is some shit that someone's making up. 0.99

02:15:45.000 They're just practicing and making things up. 0.99

02:15:47.000 Well, they could go to even a kung fu dojo and pretend that that stuff's real, and the kung fu guy would go, like, what are you talking about? 0.89

02:15:56.000 You're inventing things.

02:15:58.000 Don't you feel bad for those guys at some level?

02:16:00.000 Yes, I do.

02:16:01.000 I do.

02:16:01.000 I think that a lot of those guys, if they had just found the correct path, Would benefit greatly if they just found a real martial arts school.

02:16:10.000 Okay, so here's what I think part of it is.

02:16:13.000 I think that they engage and I'm really interested to hear what you think about this.

02:16:18.000 I think that they engage in a willingness to self deceive.

02:16:21.000 Oh, 100%.

02:16:22.000 Yeah, 100%.

02:16:23.000 Yeah, and they it's mutual.

02:16:25.000 It's with both people like they Yeah.

02:16:28.000 It reinforces each other.

02:16:30.000 You see it in religion, too, though.

02:16:31.000 You see that in religion.

02:16:33.000 God finds a way.

02:16:34.000 Yes, he does.

02:16:35.000 God does find a way. 1.00

02:16:36.000 Meanwhile, they just leave and smoke crack and suck some dude's dick. 1.00

02:16:39.000 People are crazy. 1.00

02:16:40.000 I mean, that's what they do. 1.00

02:16:41.000 They pretend.

02:16:42.000 They pretend, and they love to...

02:16:44.000 One of the things that people love about Christians, like Christians love about Christians, is like, well, I'm a Christian.

02:16:49.000 Well, I'm a Christian, too.

02:16:50.000 Right.

02:16:50.000 You're saying what I know, yes, tribalism and also I know that at least in the moment you are gonna engage in some very predictable behavior.

02:16:59.000 You're gonna engage in, you're a God-fearing Christian man, so you're gonna behave like a God-fearing Christian man. 0.85

02:17:06.000 You're gonna say things.

02:17:07.000 I know where you're coming from. 0.99

02:17:09.000 You're not some fucking weirdo Buddhist Zen dude who likes to do peyote. 0.99

02:17:14.000 No, you're real clear. 0.99

02:17:16.000 You know what I mean?

02:17:17.000 It's real clear.

02:17:18.000 You like country music?

02:17:19.000 Are you a Luke Bryan fan?

02:17:20.000 Me too, of course.

02:17:21.000 You got a pickup truck?

02:17:22.000 Of course.

02:17:23.000 I got a belt buckle.

02:17:24.000 I got a big belt buckle too!

02:17:25.000 You know, what about your boots?

02:17:26.000 Look at my boots!

02:17:26.000 I got cowboy boots!

02:17:27.000 You know, it's like we engage in these really predictable patterns and people find comfort in those patterns.

02:17:33.000 Yeah, and we tend to like people who are like ourselves.

02:17:36.000 Yes, yes.

02:17:37.000 It's very much a tribalism thing.

02:17:38.000 And it's also very much, it reinforces your own, like if you have a lack of Willingness or ability or whatever it is to question the reality that you've been Shown that you have subscribed to if you've if you're not willing to question it Yeah,

02:17:55.000 you find someone else who's also not willing to question it There's some comfort in that and if you reassure each other there's some come no, that's absolutely right and that's why it's so important for people to be honest with themselves and How do we promote those values of people of self-honesty?

02:18:12.000 This way.

02:18:14.000 I think that's exactly right.

02:18:15.000 Conversations.

02:18:16.000 I think this is the way you do it.

02:18:17.000 And especially conversations like this that will be heard by more than a million people.

02:18:21.000 Yeah.

02:18:22.000 And that's the way you do it.

02:18:23.000 And I mean, I'm not saying, that's what I'm doing, bro.

02:18:25.000 I'm fixing the world.

02:18:26.000 But I'm saying humans talking to each other through social media, through various methods.

02:18:31.000 I'll just throw this out now.

02:18:32.000 I wonder if, you know, everyone's like, oh, you know, what comes...

02:18:34.000 After postmodernism, I wonder if this comes after postmodernism.

02:18:37.000 I mean, I wonder if these truth-telling conversations come after postmodernism.

02:18:42.000 Well, I certainly think there's a great benefit to talking to people and having people be honest, and even in an uncomfortable way, where when you listen to it, it makes you think, oh, like, there's lights that go on in my head when I hear someone say something.

02:18:57.000 Maybe they'll be vulnerable, or maybe they'll be, like, introspective in almost a painful way.

02:19:02.000 When I hear it, there's lights that go on in my head where I go, wow, okay, I'm getting some real shit from this person, and I'll find in myself these moments that relate to what this guy's saying, and I try to see themselves from this point of view as opposed to a newscaster.

02:19:17.000 When someone is... 0.94

02:19:19.000 Today in Los Angeles, we found out the hard way what happens when you don't obey the law.

02:19:26.000 There's no reality.

02:19:28.000 There's no human in there.

02:19:32.000 This is a strip club DJ. Coming up on the main stage, it's Lexus!

02:19:39.000 $14 kamikazes!

02:19:41.000 Order now!

02:19:41.000 You know what I mean?

02:19:42.000 It's like...

02:19:42.000 These are patterns that are not real that people will subscribe to and adopt and then perpetrate.

02:19:49.000 And they do it over and over again in the business world.

02:19:52.000 Hello, Jim!

02:19:53.000 How's the family?

02:19:54.000 Is everything good?

02:19:55.000 These patterns are like they protect you from having to be vulnerable and real.

02:20:01.000 By adopting these predetermined patterns of behavior that we all are comfortable with and we all know, as a God-fearing Christian man, I'm a God-fearing Christian man myself, so I understand where you're coming from there, sir.

02:20:14.000 Just give me a handshake right now.

02:20:15.000 I know we're on the same page.

02:20:16.000 What they're doing is they're removing the possibility of vulnerability, of reality.

02:20:24.000 And authenticity.

02:20:25.000 Yes, authenticity is the perfect word.

02:20:27.000 And that makes me sad for them.

02:20:30.000 It really does.

02:20:30.000 It's a type of tragedy.

02:20:32.000 Well, you get sad at shit that I don't get sad at. 0.99

02:20:34.000 Well, I do. 0.99

02:20:35.000 I get sad at cartoons.

02:20:36.000 Well, I don't get sad at cartoons, but I do feel the impetus to help people like that.

02:20:41.000 Like, I do feel that it's important that people are laboring under beliefs about reality, like, again, fantasy-based martial arts, that just simply aren't true.

02:20:50.000 And they're wasting their time.

02:20:51.000 But unlike fantasy martial arts, these people vote, right?

02:20:54.000 And these people affect decisions.

02:20:57.000 They directly affect my life.

02:20:59.000 Yes.

02:21:00.000 Yes.

02:21:00.000 Yeah, especially social issues.

02:21:02.000 It becomes a real problem, you know?

02:21:04.000 It becomes a real problem when you start blocking people's access to certain medical procedures and deciding what can and can be done based on...

02:21:12.000 I mean, look at what was happening during the Bush administration when it came to stem cell research.

02:21:18.000 Right. 0.99

02:21:18.000 I mean, it was fucking shackled and stopped because everybody, they're gonna sell babies! 0.99

02:21:23.000 They're gonna kill babies and just get the stem cells from the embryos and it's Satan! 1.00

02:21:30.000 I mean, you can stem cells from skin, you fuck. 1.00

02:21:32.000 And meanwhile, the rest of the world has, like, advanced in progress. 1.00

02:21:36.000 The Iranians and the South Koreans, yeah.

02:21:38.000 I mean, it's just... 0.99

02:21:39.000 We got fucked by religious ideology, got in the way of medical innovation. 0.98

02:21:43.000 Yeah, and it's... 0.99

02:21:44.000 I think part of this is...

02:21:47.000 I've been thinking about this a lot.

02:21:48.000 I think part of this, a way that we can at least dent this problem is by promoting the value of honesty.

02:21:57.000 Because if we promote the value of honesty, then with that comes the willingness to revise people's beliefs.

02:22:03.000 And we have to make it okay to say, I don't know.

02:22:06.000 I'm totally cool with you sitting here and you talk about all these guys.

02:22:08.000 I don't know all that stuff.

02:22:10.000 I think that's one of the beautiful things about this new age of information, is that it is impossible now, clearly, to know everything.

02:22:18.000 No one can know everything.

02:22:20.000 So, it's okay to say, I don't know now.

02:22:23.000 Where it used to be a sign of you were poorly motivated or poorly educated.

02:22:28.000 I mean, I'm not very educated.

02:22:30.000 I went to college for three years.

02:22:32.000 I barely paid attention. 0.77

02:22:33.000 And I only did it because I didn't want people to think I was a loser.

02:22:36.000 I barely made it out of high school. 1.00

02:22:38.000 But since that time, I've read a lot of shit. 0.99

02:22:41.000 I've watched a lot of documentaries. 0.98

02:22:42.000 I've had a lot of fascinating conversations with people.

02:22:45.000 And I've accumulated some information.

02:22:47.000 So am I educated?

02:22:48.000 Not really, but yeah.

02:22:50.000 But I'm educated on certain things about life.

02:22:53.000 You say maybe not formally, but you're certainly educated.

02:22:55.000 Where is formality now?

02:22:59.000 When you have formal education, like what's going on with your school?

02:23:02.000 That's a great question.

02:23:03.000 What is it now?

02:23:04.000 All schools.

02:23:05.000 All schools.

02:23:05.000 What is it now?

02:23:06.000 Because that's not education. 1.00

02:23:08.000 You're being indoctrinated into this ridiculous ideology if you're participating in that kind of shit. 1.00

02:23:15.000 It's worse than education. 1.00

02:23:16.000 It's anti-education.

02:23:17.000 It's like kata. 0.64

02:23:18.000 Yeah, it's in a lot of ways.

02:23:20.000 In a lot of ways.

02:23:21.000 It is just like religion. 0.74

02:23:24.000 And that's what my friend Kurt Metzger was saying about these social justice warriors.

02:23:28.000 He's like, no, no, I've seen this. 1.00

02:23:31.000 I grew up in a fucking cult. 1.00

02:23:33.000 I know what this is. 1.00

02:23:34.000 You're telling me I can't think about it any other way, and that's bullshit. 0.99

02:23:37.000 And his reaction to it is very... 0.99

02:23:39.000 He gets angry at it, you know? 1.00

02:23:41.000 And he's not like a violent guy, but he's like, this is fucking bullshit. 1.00

02:23:44.000 I know what it is. 1.00

02:23:45.000 This is bullshit. 1.00

02:23:46.000 You're making me think a certain way. 1.00

02:23:47.000 I'm not doing it.

02:23:48.000 Yeah, and in the bigger picture of things, you know, America has been...

02:23:52.000 This is somewhat of a controversial statement, but we're not the great superpower we used to be.

02:23:57.000 But the one thing that we... 1.00

02:23:59.000 Speak for yourself, fuck it! 0.99

02:24:00.000 The one thing we've always had is we've had strong institutions and strong universities, and now we're seeing those being undermined, at least in the humanities in general, and even to a certain extent in the sciences. 0.99

02:24:13.000 The sciences, really?

02:24:14.000 In what way?

02:24:15.000 See, that's why I said I think, because I don't really know, because I'm not in the sciences, so I can't really speak to that.

02:24:21.000 But just anecdotally, from what I've heard of people, but again, I can't speak to that.

02:24:25.000 You know, I was thinking about...

02:24:27.000 But anecdotally, can you come up with specific examples?

02:24:30.000 That's where I haven't heard it interfered with, except for the idea of promoting more women in science, and there's somehow or another some sexism involved in science.

02:24:39.000 Well, that's what I was thinking.

02:24:40.000 So here's the problem with that.

02:24:42.000 Why are there no diversity requirements with sports teams?

02:24:48.000 Right, like football teams?

02:24:49.000 How come they don't need to have a certain amount of women? 1.00

02:24:51.000 Because they want to win.

02:24:53.000 Well, also, they don't want women to get killed. 0.99

02:24:55.000 Right.

02:24:56.000 But that's different, because it's physical...

02:24:58.000 Okay, well, why aren't they saying, well, we need so many Puerto Ricans here?

02:25:02.000 Or we need so many...

02:25:03.000 There aren't diversity requirements.

02:25:05.000 So, here's a word for it.

02:25:07.000 Exogenous.

02:25:07.000 It's like an ex...

02:25:08.000 I know that word.

02:25:08.000 Okay, cool, cool.

02:25:12.000 Because they want to win.

02:25:14.000 In other words, they're telling you, this is important to us.

02:25:17.000 Anytime you impose a value on a system that is...

02:25:22.000 Winning is the value, and that's a marketplace, right?

02:25:26.000 That's a competition, that's a free market.

02:25:28.000 Any time you say, well, you know, you also need diversity, then you're making it more difficult to win.

02:25:36.000 A meritocracy is like that.

02:25:38.000 You want people in a system In academia, I can tell you what those are.

02:25:43.000 You need to be well published.

02:25:45.000 Your works need to be cited by others.

02:25:47.000 We have all these metrics.

02:25:48.000 They're pretty straightforward, and you either live up to the metrics or you don't.

02:25:52.000 But now, this is why I was talking about the sciences, when you try to put people in positions who are not qualified for those positions, you undermine the meritocracy.

02:26:04.000 So when you're trying to put people, if you say, well, there's not enough women here, we need to find more women. 1.00

02:26:09.000 There are not enough African-Americans, well, enough, it's a trickier, but there are very few African-Americans who study philosophy.

02:26:15.000 If you're an African-American with a PhD in philosophy, man, you are your gold.

02:26:20.000 That is awesome.

02:26:21.000 So an African-American with a PhD for philosophy can kind of write their own ticket? 0.84

02:26:25.000 Yeah.

02:26:28.000 Is that a good thing?

02:26:29.000 Because they want to promote more African Americans, get involved in philosophy, and then perhaps that will sort of engage more people into pursuing that?

02:26:38.000 Now this is a really interesting conversation that we should have.

02:26:42.000 This is the kind of thing, at this point, In academia, we have to shut down the discourse because someone's going to be offended.

02:26:49.000 But I think that's an important question, because your question is basically, it's a kind of utilitarian calculus.

02:26:55.000 Like, okay, let's say that we have...

02:26:58.000 What is the...

02:26:59.000 First of all, you have to look at the evidence.

02:27:01.000 Regressives don't like evidence very much, but we have to look at the evidence.

02:27:03.000 What is the evidence if there are more African Americans in philosophy, Can they mentor more African-American students, etc.?

02:27:11.000 Of course, I would think that we would want that.

02:27:14.000 That would be a good thing.

02:27:15.000 That would be something that would be Wonderful.

02:27:19.000 The question is, does that mean that we would hire a candidate who would not be hired if that candidate had a different skin color?

02:27:30.000 Right.

02:27:31.000 Like, that whole thing undermines the meritocracy.

02:27:34.000 But the moment that you start talking about putting a diversity requirement on, for example, my discipline, philosophy, in essence, I think what you're saying is, it's not important.

02:27:44.000 Your discipline isn't important.

02:27:46.000 Because we don't do that when the outcome really matters.

02:27:49.000 We don't do that with brain surgery.

02:27:51.000 We don't do that with sports teams.

02:27:53.000 Right.

02:27:53.000 So we're not looking for the best candidates.

02:27:56.000 What we're looking for is to bring people into these disciplines that may not have had the opportunity and that might be bad for the overall discipline.

02:28:10.000 Yeah, it's bad for the overall institution.

02:28:12.000 It's bad for the discipline.

02:28:13.000 Because you're not finding the best people.

02:28:15.000 But the idea is that you're trying to promote these disciplines in places where people aren't as...

02:28:22.000 Unrepresented.

02:28:23.000 Not represented, but also they don't have the same advantages.

02:28:27.000 They don't have privileges.

02:28:28.000 They don't have good education.

02:28:29.000 Privilege is another word we're talking about.

02:28:30.000 So they're underrepresented, so we want more people in the discipline.

02:28:34.000 As long as...

02:28:35.000 Look, that's not bad in and of itself...

02:28:39.000 But we need to have a conversation about what that means.

02:28:41.000 See, part of the problem with regressives is they look at outcomes instead of opportunities.

02:28:47.000 We need to construct systems to give everybody, regardless of their skin color, their ethnicity, an equal opportunity and an education of the first rate.

02:28:56.000 And what we're seeing instead is systems being created to orchestrate or engineer outcomes.

02:29:02.000 Produce this many black, you know, African, whatever it is, or Hispanic, whatever it is. 0.99

02:29:07.000 The First of all, that's a bad way to think about it. 0.98

02:29:10.000 It's a horrible way to think about it.

02:29:12.000 But the other problem is, meritocracy matters.

02:29:18.000 If anything should be institutionalized, it should be systems that are raced blind.

02:29:26.000 Systems that don't...

02:29:27.000 Look, think about it.

02:29:29.000 You could also think about it like this.

02:29:30.000 Think about the black guy who is in philosophy, who's incredibly smart and qualified.

02:29:34.000 I have a student of mine, Matt Hernandez. 0.98

02:29:36.000 The kid is freaking genius.

02:29:38.000 Like, truly one in a million. 0.98

02:29:40.000 Like, much smarter than I am.

02:29:43.000 He's published stuff.

02:29:44.000 I mean, the kid's awesome.

02:29:46.000 He's Hispanic.

02:29:47.000 He's going to get his PhD in philosophy.

02:29:48.000 He got a full ride, a full scholarship.

02:29:52.000 The crime, the shame is that when Matt gets in, people would say, well, he just got it because he's Hispanic.

02:29:58.000 No, actually, no.

02:29:59.000 Well, who's going to say that, though?

02:30:01.000 Well, no one's going to say it.

02:30:02.000 They're going to think it?

02:30:04.000 Well, that's the problem.

02:30:05.000 The problem is that we can't have a conversation to ask people if they're thinking about it because if they say yes, they'll be smeared as a racist.

02:30:11.000 Okay, so then how do you address the issue with inequality inside of these marginalized communities?

02:30:19.000 That's a great question.

02:30:22.000 Look, this is what I think we need to do.

02:30:24.000 When you look at surveys of So I think that these lines are primarily drawn upon class, which is something else no one wants to talk about, instead of race.

02:30:36.000 It just so happens that fewer African Americans, or you could frame it the other way, more African Americans are born to poverty than white folks.

02:30:45.000 That's just a fact.

02:30:48.000 We can also talk about something that's really interesting about criminogenic factors or risk predictors.

02:30:53.000 They're not what you think for people who would be violent criminals.

02:30:56.000 They're just not what you think at all.

02:30:58.000 But people try to make that a racial issue.

02:31:00.000 But when you look at these systems, when you look at these school systems, for example, I just totally lost my train of thought.

02:31:10.000 I started thinking about race and Jimi Hendrix's photo back there.

02:31:13.000 Oh, sorry.

02:31:14.000 You were talking about trying to get more addressing the issue of inequality.

02:31:21.000 So what we need to do is, well, we need to start thinking about opportunities.

02:31:27.000 Well, the other thing is we need to think long-term and not short-term.

02:31:31.000 We need to look at the problem and be honest.

02:31:33.000 And there are some structural issues with our electorate and the way that we've established politics in this country of offices of four years and then eight years renewable.

02:31:42.000 We need to have a longer-term vision and a look at what this wants to be.

02:31:48.000 Right now, we face a problem in that we're not adequately educating poor people in our country, and the majority of those happen to be black.

02:31:57.000 And this is an enormous problem.

02:32:00.000 This is going to come back to haunt us.

02:32:03.000 But the solution to that problem is not diversity initiatives.

02:32:09.000 Here's the other reason why that's bad.

02:32:11.000 It's not even a band-aid.

02:32:13.000 It's worse.

02:32:14.000 It's because people then say, well, look, this philosophy department, this department has so many minorities, things must be going well.

02:32:19.000 Actually, no, they're not going well.

02:32:21.000 It was an artificial solution that was put in, and the underlying structural inequality and economic disparity hasn't been addressed.

02:32:28.000 That's a great way to put it.

02:32:30.000 And what about all the poor people that live in West Virginia or Kentucky?

02:32:33.000 Those families have been generations and generations of coal miners.

02:32:36.000 I mean, just because other white people have made it into universities and made it into certain institutions, you're being racist if you think that those people shouldn't get an equal shot at things as well.

02:32:49.000 And so the way we fix it is, again, this is John Rawls' idea, public education of the first rate.

02:32:53.000 However, every time I would say that, people would say two things.

02:32:57.000 They'd play identity politics.

02:32:58.000 You're just white. 0.98

02:32:59.000 You're saying that because you're white. 0.91

02:33:00.000 That gives them, that's their ticket to discredit what I'm saying.

02:33:05.000 That's why people, they use that as an excuse to not listen to your arguments.

02:33:10.000 It's really, it's perverted.

02:33:11.000 I mean, it's really despicable.

02:33:16.000 So they use that idea as an excuse.

02:33:19.000 So you've just said that.

02:33:21.000 But the other thing that it does, I mean, if you really start to think about what kind of a society do we want to move to?

02:33:30.000 What are the limits of our institutions?

02:33:32.000 What role should the meritocracy play?

02:33:35.000 Should you disrupt that if there are racial inequalities or imbalances?

02:33:39.000 These are questions we have to address.

02:33:42.000 People in a democracy have to address this.

02:33:44.000 And you cannot have fear of talking about this because someone's going to call you a racist.

02:33:50.000 You just can't.

02:33:51.000 So if you want to put a proposal forward that says, or an idea, well, I don't think, you know, hiring should be this way, you need to have that conversation.

02:33:58.000 But there's one other issue, there's one other tactic that the regressive left use, and that's the idea of privilege.

02:34:04.000 They love that word.

02:34:05.000 Privilege.

02:34:06.000 Oh well, you know, you don't even see your privilege.

02:34:09.000 Privilege is yet another thing that's used.

02:34:12.000 And look, I think the impetus for that is good. 0.85

02:34:16.000 The danger here is that because these people are so nasty, so mean-spirited, and so generally insane, that we discard everything that they're saying. 0.97

02:34:27.000 We throw the baby out with the bathwater. 0.61

02:34:29.000 Now we need to be conscious and careful that we don't do that.

02:34:32.000 We need to acknowledge that they're saying some important things.

02:34:36.000 They're, you know, racial treatment of people on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, not discriminating against someone because they don't feel comfortable in a male body or female.

02:34:47.000 Or a guy, Mark Fisher, I roll with, is a gay and has this gay jiu-jitsu thing.

02:34:51.000 These things are important.

02:34:53.000 These things matter.

02:34:54.000 These things are things that we have to talk about.

02:34:56.000 And if I have privilege, I want to be conscious of that.

02:35:00.000 And if I'm Treating someone in a way that's unjust or if it's unkind, I want to know about that.

02:35:06.000 That's not the guy I want to be.

02:35:08.000 So how do we talk about these things?

02:35:12.000 How do we engage these?

02:35:14.000 Well, here's how you don't talk about them.

02:35:17.000 You don't talk about them by constantly smearing people with privilege, saying, you have privilege in Portland State, my university.

02:35:24.000 They had an event where minority students could speak about all these things, but students who were, I can't remember the exact phrasing, not of color, were invited to listen.

02:35:37.000 Think about that.

02:35:38.000 They were invited to listen.

02:35:40.000 They have institutionalized racism.

02:35:44.000 That's what that is.

02:35:48.000 It is.

02:35:48.000 It's certainly racism in that sense, but isn't it an opportunity for people that have been marginalized to express themselves in a platform that maybe a lot of people that have been marginalized haven't had that opportunity?

02:36:01.000 Absolutely.

02:36:02.000 Isn't there room for people of a specific race to speak about some issues that maybe they would understand intimately that you or I wouldn't because we're white folks?

02:36:14.000 There's no question at all that that's true.

02:36:16.000 And you know what?

02:36:17.000 So is it bad, though, to have someone have the opportunity to, like, let's allow African Americans to speak and let's allow these white folks to listen to what they have to say.

02:36:26.000 And then maybe you have another conference or maybe a debate or maybe a conversation where you allow someone to have a retort.

02:36:34.000 So the first problem with that is if you frame it in terms of an opportunity, then if I say, yes, it's bad, then it'd be like I'm denying people an opportunity.

02:36:42.000 So I don't think that's the best way to frame it.

02:36:44.000 Right.

02:36:45.000 Excuse me.

02:36:46.000 The problem with that, one problem, I asked my buddy who's an appellate court judge, and he said he thinks it's unwise, or his son actually said this, he didn't say this, his son is on the, he clerks for some Supreme Court, I don't even know what he, but somebody, he's a lawyer,

02:37:02.000 board certified, etc.

02:37:03.000 Or past the bar, excuse me.

02:37:05.000 Part of the problem is that if you do that, so I was amazed that that was legal.

02:37:09.000 I'm not a lawyer.

02:37:10.000 I don't pretend to be a lawyer, but he said it's actually legal.

02:37:13.000 The problem is that you then need to hold then white people or whoever any other group can hold and say look blacks can't speak basically.

02:37:20.000 So we can get in and we can talk about how great it is.

02:37:23.000 Good luck with that.

02:37:23.000 So you're creating an opportunity for people who are genuine racists to undermine the whole system.

02:37:32.000 But the other thing is like I think it's important.

02:37:35.000 You can totally do that and say, look, we're going to have people for two hours speak about their experiences of oppression.

02:37:41.000 I think that's great.

02:37:43.000 And I think that they should do that.

02:37:44.000 And I think we need to be more sensitive.

02:37:46.000 And I think we need to correct any structural inequalities or remove biases that we have for people.

02:37:51.000 I'm sure I still have some.

02:37:53.000 I don't know of any.

02:37:54.000 I try to remove them.

02:37:55.000 I'm sure I still have them.

02:37:56.000 But the idea is that shouldn't people of any race then be allowed to ask people questions about those experiences?

02:38:03.000 Shouldn't we then say, oh, you've had this experience of gay and jiu-jitsu again, or whatever it is, or being black in the academy, or being... 0.57

02:38:09.000 Like, you said this, like, I don't understand. 0.65

02:38:12.000 Explain that to me.

02:38:13.000 Explain that to all I know.

02:38:14.000 So you're shutting down possibilities for people who don't understand those...

02:38:19.000 That's the way we understand things.

02:38:21.000 We come to understand through asking questions.

02:38:24.000 Like, you know, oh, well, why do you...

02:38:27.000 Oh, because if you don't, the guy will pull your arm off.

02:38:29.000 So you put it in the back of his head.

02:38:30.000 So, like, we need environments that encourage genuine inquirers in questions.

02:38:39.000 And here's the problem.

02:38:40.000 So someone could say, well, what if someone goes in there and starts shouting racial epitaphs or horrible things?

02:38:46.000 Okay. 0.68

02:38:46.000 Well, they're a bad person. 0.68

02:38:47.000 Well, they're horrible. 1.00

02:38:48.000 They're a vile person. 0.99

02:38:49.000 But that should be clear to everybody.

02:38:51.000 And the only way that's going to be clear to everybody is if you allow open thinking and open speech and allow people to express themselves and you accumulate all that data and you get an understanding of what is okay and what's not okay, what's hurtful, what's not hurtful.

02:39:04.000 And if you're constantly in an environment where you don't even, you know, the monkey hear no evil, you can't even hear a bad idea.

02:39:12.000 When someone does something legitimately horrible, what would the reaction be?

02:39:17.000 Your threshold will constantly be decreasing if you're not hearing ideas.

02:39:22.000 Right.

02:39:22.000 Right?

02:39:22.000 If you're not hearing ideas that run contrary or, you know, challenging, then your threshold for what you find offensive will constantly lower.

02:39:30.000 So then anything will offend you.

02:39:32.000 I had Thaddeus Russell on who's a great guy and he teaches at Occidental and we were talking about that issue where there was a young man and a young woman who got together and they got drunk and they had sex and the girl decided that Either she decided,

02:39:50.000 her friends convinced her into it, that she had been raped, even though she had sent him a bunch of text messages saying, are you coming over, bring condoms, told her friends I'm getting laid, lol.

02:40:00.000 And he had gotten to her, they were both intoxicated, but because he's a man, he was kicked off the campus.

02:40:07.000 He was kicked out of school.

02:40:09.000 They're suing, there's a big lawsuit.

02:40:11.000 She stayed. 0.88

02:40:12.000 They both had sex. 0.70

02:40:13.000 There was no force, there was no... 0.77

02:40:17.000 No lies.

02:40:18.000 There's no...

02:40:18.000 No one held anyone down.

02:40:20.000 No one did anything against anyone's will.

02:40:23.000 But they decided that he had committed sexual assault because they were both drunk and they could not consent. 0.99

02:40:29.000 Which is fucking insane and... 0.99

02:40:32.000 Ready? 0.99

02:40:33.000 Sexist.

02:40:34.000 Yeah, that's right.

02:40:34.000 It's sexist.

02:40:35.000 It's sexist towards men.

02:40:36.000 But that's something that's...

02:40:38.000 It disempowers women. 1.00

02:40:39.000 Yes, it does. 0.88

02:40:40.000 Also, it's ridiculous because how come you are responsible for your own actions in every other realm? 0.99

02:40:45.000 If you drive a car and you're drunk, you can't say, well, hey, I was drunk, I'm not responsible for plowing in that fucking school bus full of kids. 0.99

02:40:51.000 You can't say that. 1.00

02:40:52.000 But if you say, hey, I was drunk, I'm not responsible for my consent to have sex with this man, that's preposterous.

02:40:58.000 We all know that alcohol...

02:41:00.000 Limits your inhibitions.

02:41:01.000 It lowers your inhibitions, and it makes you do things you might regret.

02:41:04.000 But there's a big thing amongst people online that are trying to say this and pass it on.

02:41:10.000 Regret does not equal rape.

02:41:12.000 People make mistakes.

02:41:13.000 We've all made mistakes.

02:41:15.000 Everyone's made mistakes.

02:41:16.000 And if you drink, you're gonna make more mistakes.

02:41:17.000 That's just a fact. 1.00

02:41:18.000 But it doesn't mean that the person you made a mistake with is a fucking rapist now. 0.99

02:41:22.000 They've also made a mistake. 0.99

02:41:23.000 And maybe not. 0.99

02:41:24.000 Maybe you guys just had sex. 1.00

02:41:27.000 And maybe you're around a bunch of fucking nutty people who are trying to convince you that anytime you have sex and you're drunk, you've been raped. 1.00

02:41:33.000 And there is a lot of that going on. 1.00

02:41:34.000 Yeah, right.

02:41:35.000 So I was going to say that's a cultural problem.

02:41:36.000 Now look at it from the view of the administrator, right?

02:41:39.000 So from the view of the administrator...

02:41:42.000 Students, they'll ask for his job.

02:41:44.000 And those guys have couch jobs, man. 0.99

02:41:45.000 They have cush jobs. 0.90

02:41:46.000 $300,000.

02:41:47.000 They get parking spaces and everything.

02:41:48.000 I mean, they have...

02:41:49.000 Parking spaces are big?

02:41:50.000 Parking spaces are huge.

02:41:52.000 Yes, the sign.

02:41:53.000 Mr. Wilson, your spot is ready.

02:41:56.000 Let me sweep it.

02:41:58.000 Pull in your Tesla.

02:41:59.000 Tesla.

02:42:01.000 So those guys, so those administrative guys is a microaggression.

02:42:07.000 How dare you microaggress me? 0.98

02:42:09.000 So those folks...

02:42:10.000 I prefer Z. Yeah.

02:42:12.000 Oh, which is a funny story.

02:42:15.000 There's a story at the university about this.

02:42:19.000 So, again, I have no problem calling somebody, you know, he who looks like a she or whatever. 1.00

02:42:25.000 You want to hear a couple quick stories?

02:42:26.000 Sure.

02:42:28.000 So I take attendance.

02:42:30.000 Long story why I take attendance.

02:42:32.000 Just run with it.

02:42:33.000 So I get this very attractive young woman comes up to me at the end of class. 0.96

02:42:39.000 I'm kind of discombobulated. 0.99

02:42:40.000 I got all this shit in my head. 0.99

02:42:41.000 And she hands me this note. 0.99

02:42:44.000 And so you can get out of it if you have jury duty, military orders.

02:42:50.000 Doctor's note, excuse from my boss's boss, the dean or whatever.

02:42:54.000 So that way, just in case I'm audited, right?

02:42:56.000 If I'm audited, I can say, or if I say, hey, why did this person get off of this, but I didn't, you know, do anything, and then next thing you know, she's paying me, I'm sleeping with her, who knows?

02:43:05.000 It's just so much easier for me.

02:43:06.000 So I'm reading this note, and it said, would you please excuse Mr. So-and-so from this thing, and his system is, whatever it was.

02:43:16.000 And I'm looking at this, and I'm like, Who's Mr. So-and-so?

02:43:20.000 And I look and say, is it a friend?

02:43:23.000 I don't have any idea why she's handing me this note.

02:43:26.000 She said, oh no, I'm Mr. So-and-so.

02:43:29.000 And it took me a second, and it took me a moment.

02:43:32.000 I had to process that.

02:43:34.000 I didn't say anything about it.

02:43:36.000 I'm like, oh, that's great.

02:43:38.000 Because if I do, you know, if people do demand something and they'll say, well, look, this person gave you, this is not a mister.

02:43:45.000 I'm like, you have a problem with that?

02:43:46.000 I mean, I can pull the same regressive card that they can.

02:43:49.000 You're being homophobic.

02:43:50.000 You're being transphobic or whatever it is.

02:43:53.000 So people have been choosing their own pronouns, but the craziest thing that happened to a colleague of mine is he was told that, and again, I call anybody any pronoun you want. 0.99

02:44:05.000 You want to be called Z, I got no, I got biggest shit to worry about. 0.98

02:44:08.000 Z-H-E-E, please. 0.99

02:44:09.000 I want three E's.

02:44:11.000 I'll spell it out for you every time.

02:44:13.000 Z. So this person wanted to be called, I can't remember what the days were, but certain days, Z, he, she, and he made a mistake.

02:44:24.000 My colleague made a mistake.

02:44:26.000 And all hell broke loose.

02:44:28.000 What was the mistake?

02:44:29.000 He called her a she on the wrong day?

02:44:31.000 Something like that, yeah.

02:44:32.000 And she said, you know, okay, don't do that again.

02:44:34.000 Evidently he did that again or something.

02:44:36.000 I don't know.

02:44:36.000 So now...

02:44:38.000 And now... 0.99

02:44:44.000 What ever happened to people just being fucking crazy? 0.99

02:44:47.000 Isn't that an option? 0.99

02:44:48.000 Is that possible?

02:44:49.000 You know, I was listening to a Radiolab podcast, and they were interviewing this guy who, a guy, sometimes, sometimes he's a girl, sometimes goes back and forth, and his gender is fluid, and in the middle of the conversation's like, I just switched.

02:45:02.000 I'm a guy now.

02:45:03.000 I just switched.

02:45:04.000 I just felt it.

02:45:05.000 It was immediate. 1.00

02:45:06.000 I'm listening to this, and I'm going, well, this is a fucking idiot. 1.00

02:45:10.000 Clearly. 1.00

02:45:11.000 This is obviously a nutty person that has a very loose, slippery... 0.76

02:45:18.000 Mineral oil grip on reality. 0.83

02:45:20.000 It's like, whoop!

02:45:21.000 Just flies right out of their fingers.

02:45:22.000 And they want you to give in to this slippery reality and focus on them constantly.

02:45:30.000 Now I'm a he, now I'm a she. 0.99

02:45:31.000 It's another way to divert attention from anything that's going on and focus it on them and something completely trivial.

02:45:38.000 Like that they decide they're a female, they decide they're a male. 1.00

02:45:41.000 What the fuck are you talking about? 0.99

02:45:43.000 Yeah, and I don't even... 1.00

02:45:44.000 I don't even care if...

02:45:46.000 It's pointless.

02:45:48.000 People feel different at different times of the day.

02:45:50.000 If you feel different sexually, if you're pansexual, you're just thinking too much and projecting that off on other people. 1.00

02:46:01.000 If you really think that you become transgender, cisgender, and it switches back and forth all throughout the day, you're probably fucking crazy. 0.99

02:46:11.000 Was it you who tweeted the link about the guy who was a six-year-old girl or eight-year-old girl? 0.99

02:46:16.000 Yes.

02:46:16.000 He's a 52-year-old man, and he's a father, and he has decided that now he's a six-year-old girl.

02:46:22.000 I love it.

02:46:23.000 He should be a six-year-old fox.

02:46:25.000 I'm gonna be a fox.

02:46:27.000 No, I'm an owl.

02:46:28.000 I'm an eagle.

02:46:29.000 I identify with trees.

02:46:32.000 I'm just gonna stand here.

02:46:33.000 Don't judge me.

02:46:34.000 I have a hat with apples hanging from it.

02:46:41.000 Don't disrespect.

02:46:42.000 This is real.

02:46:42.000 So I think that's part of the problem with not being able to morally triage.

02:46:48.000 Morally triage is a great way to describe it, too. 0.98

02:46:51.000 That's a great way to describe it.

02:46:53.000 So instead of saying, okay, look, this guy, whatever's going on, her life, person, Z, whatever, fine, great, run with it.

02:47:00.000 It's just not worth my time.

02:47:03.000 If a guy wants to be a six-year-old girl, you go for it. 1.00

02:47:06.000 I think we have a problem with Mr. and Mrs. and all that shit. 1.00

02:47:08.000 How about we just abandon it? 0.99

02:47:10.000 Your name's Peter, my name's Joe. 0.97

02:47:11.000 You make a fuckin' noise that means, it's like my issue with this whole Caitlyn Jenner thing, was like, you have to call her Caitlyn now. 0.98

02:47:18.000 It's a she, call her Caitlyn. 1.00

02:47:20.000 I've been calling this fuckin' person this one noise that I make with my mouth my whole life. 0.98

02:47:26.000 In the Diane Sawyer interview, he said he, and he said Bruce. 0.99

02:47:30.000 I'm stickin' with that.

02:47:32.000 You can't keep making new noises that I have to make with my face that make you feel better about yourself. 0.96

02:47:37.000 Because if that's all it takes for you to feel better about yourself, is people call you a new noise, that's pretty ridiculous.

02:47:42.000 If I decide tomorrow my new name is Sheila, I want everybody to call me Sheila.

02:47:47.000 Well, you just laugh.

02:47:48.000 That's a microaggression.

02:47:49.000 It is a microaggression.

02:47:50.000 Why?

02:47:51.000 Why? 1.00

02:47:52.000 Joe is a boring-ass fucking stupid name. 1.00

02:47:55.000 And I got stuck with that boring-ass stupid name. 1.00

02:47:57.000 This is not boring-ass stupid. 1.00

02:47:58.000 My dad's name is Joe, my grandfather's name is Joe, my grandmother's name is Josephine. 1.00

02:48:03.000 Bunch of fucking unoriginal, uncreative fucks in my family. 1.00

02:48:06.000 So what? 1.00

02:48:07.000 It's just a noise that you make with your face.

02:48:10.000 When you say, hey, Joe, to me, and my friend Joey is right behind me, and I don't know which Joe, I have to look.

02:48:15.000 Oh, no.

02:48:16.000 You've microaggressed me again, because I don't know which Joe you're referring to.

02:48:19.000 It's a noise that you make that represents you. 1.00

02:48:22.000 Who gives a shit? 0.99

02:48:24.000 There's some noises that are feminine. 0.99

02:48:25.000 There's some noises that are ambiguous.

02:48:27.000 You know, like, It's Pat.

02:48:29.000 Remember that? 0.99

02:48:29.000 Remember that fucking show where you couldn't figure out what gender she was? 0.99

02:48:32.000 There's women named Shelly. 0.99

02:48:34.000 There's men named Shelly. 1.00

02:48:35.000 Fuck, what do we do? 1.00

02:48:36.000 Jean. 1.00

02:48:37.000 There's jeans that are girls and jeans that are guys. 0.97

02:48:40.000 It's so fucking confusing. 0.97

02:48:41.000 So you see how crazy that is? 0.97

02:48:43.000 It is confusing, but here's what makes it worse.

02:48:46.000 What makes it worse is that if you make a mistake, there's a rule to punish you.

02:48:52.000 Like right now, you're operating freely.

02:48:55.000 You have no rules.

02:48:56.000 People in academia, they're paranoid.

02:49:01.000 They're paranoid about making a mistake.

02:49:04.000 So, of course.

02:49:05.000 I mean, that's just the way it is.

02:49:07.000 I mean, when you have a bunch of people that are hypersensitive and that are trying to enforce these ridiculous ideas on people, and they're trying to pound these things down, they're looking for these moments where they can...

02:49:21.000 Solidify this.

02:49:22.000 These moments they could point at you.

02:49:24.000 These moments, well, I call them green lights.

02:49:26.000 I call them green lights.

02:49:28.000 Because they might not be upset.

02:49:29.000 They might not really be upset, but they have a green light to act upset.

02:49:33.000 Yeah.

02:49:33.000 That's their battery.

02:49:35.000 You know, my overflow battery.

02:49:36.000 That's their battery.

02:49:37.000 That's right.

02:49:37.000 I found one!

02:49:39.000 And they have community support because now the victim is the highest level. 0.97

02:49:43.000 And they're all social retards. 1.00

02:49:45.000 That's the other part of the problem. 0.95

02:49:46.000 And I say retards, that's a politically incorrect word.

02:49:51.000 Retarded means slowed. 1.00

02:49:53.000 And that is socially retarded. 1.00

02:49:56.000 To, like, operate this way. 0.87

02:49:57.000 It slows everything down.

02:49:59.000 It's awkward.

02:50:00.000 It's confusing.

02:50:01.000 It's not necessary.

02:50:03.000 What's necessary is friendship, kindness, compassion, open-mindedness.

02:50:08.000 Same page.

02:50:08.000 And those things don't exist when you are pointing fingers at people and shaming them over innocuous things.

02:50:14.000 Right.

02:50:14.000 Like, oh, you called her a she on Thursday.

02:50:17.000 Right. 1.00

02:50:17.000 You fucked she's he on Thursday. 1.00

02:50:19.000 Come on, man. 1.00

02:50:20.000 This is nonsense.

02:50:21.000 That acts against their own interests.

02:50:24.000 Yes.

02:50:24.000 That creates adversary relationships because then you're like, oh, instead of the K-Man, you know, could you just...

02:50:29.000 They make them socially spoiled.

02:50:30.000 I mean, that's what you're doing.

02:50:32.000 That's exactly what you're doing.

02:50:33.000 Yeah.

02:50:34.000 We're out of time.

02:50:34.000 Alright, cool.

02:50:35.000 We just fucking hammered it out for three hours. 0.99

02:50:37.000 I don't think we changed a goddamn thing about the world. 0.99

02:50:39.000 Was that a three hour thing? 0.97

02:50:40.000 Yes, we did.

02:50:40.000 We just did three hours.

02:50:42.000 Thank you, Peter.

02:50:43.000 I really appreciate it.

02:50:44.000 If people want to find you on Twitter, it's Peter Boghossian, B-O-G-H-O-S-S-I-A-N. He's probably going to be fired from his job at Portland State University after this podcast.

02:50:56.000 So please, you're going to open up a Patreon page and ask for requests.

02:51:00.000 Like all those social justice freaks. 0.82

02:51:03.000 Anything else?

02:51:04.000 Thank you.

02:51:04.000 Thank you, brother.

02:51:05.000 Appreciate it.

02:51:05.000 Let's do this again.

02:51:06.000 This was a lot of fun.

02:51:06.000 Thanks.

02:51:07.000 Appreciate it.

02:51:07.000 All right.

02:51:07.000 Peter Burgosian, ladies and gentlemen.

02:51:08.000 We'll be back at 2 p.m.

02:51:10.000 with the fighter and the kid, Brian Callen and Brendan Shaw.

02:51:13.000 We're going to have a UFC 194 recap.

02:51:16.000 Holla.

The Joe Rogan Experience - December 14, 2015

Joe Rogan Experience #735 - Peter Boghossian

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