John Danaher: The Path to Mastery in Jiu Jitsu, Grappling, Judo, and MMA | Lex Fridman Podcast #182

The following is a conversation with John Donagher, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest coaches and minds in the martial arts world, having coached many champions in Jiu jitsu, submission, grappling and mma, including Gordon Ryan, Gary Tonin, Nick Rodriguez, Craig Jones, Nikki Ryan, Chris weidman, and George St. Pierre. Quick mention of our sponsors Annette Simplisafe. Indeed and Linode. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that John is a scholar of not just Jiu jitsu, but judo, wrestling, Muay Thai boxing, mma, and outside of that, topics of history, psychology, philosophy, and even artificial intelligence. As you will hear in this conversation after this chat, I started to entertain the possibility of returning back to competition as a black belt, maybe even training with John and his team for a few weeks leading up to the competition. For a recreational practitioner such as myself, the value of training and competing in Jiu jitsu is that it is one of the best ways to get humbled. To me, keeping the ego in check is essential for a productive and happy life. This is the Lex Friedman podcast and here is my conversation with John Danaher.

Are you afraid of death? Let's start with an easy question.

There's no warmup. That's it. No warmup, no jumping jags. Let's break that down into two questions. I'm a human being, and like any human being, I'm biologically programmed to be terrified of death. Every physical element in our bodies is designed to keep us away from death. I'm no different from anyone else in that regard. If you throw me from the top of the Empire State Building, I'm going to scream all the way down to the concrete. If you wave a loaded firearm in my face, I'm going to flinch away in horror, the same way anyone else would. So in that first sense of are you afraid of death? My body is terrified of injury leading to death the same way any other human being would.

So when death is imminent, there's a.

Terror that I go through the same adrenaline dumps that you would go through. But on the other hand, you're also asking a much deeper question, which is presumably, are you afraid of non existence? What comes after your physical death? And that's the more interesting question. No, I should start right by saying from the start, I'm a materialist. I don't believe that we have an immortal soul. I don't believe there's a life after our physical death. In this sense, from someone who starts from that point of view, you have to understand that everyone has Two deaths. We always talk about our death as though there was only one. But we all have two deaths. There was a time before you were born, when you were dead. You weren't afraid of that period of non existence. You don't even think about it. So why would you be afraid of your second period? Non existence. You came from non existence. You're going to go back into it. You weren't afraid of the first. Why are you somehow afraid of the second? So it doesn't really make sense to me as to why people would be afraid of non existence. You dealt with it fine the first time, deal with it the second time.

But your mind didn't exist for the.

First death and it won't exist after you die either.

But it does exist now enough to comprehend that there's this thing that you know nothing about that's coming which is non existent.

Actually, you do know about it. Because you know what it was like before you were born. It was just nothing. Every time you go to sleep at night, you get a sneak preview of death. It's just this kind of nothing happens. You wake up in the morning, you're alive again.

But it's not about the sleeping, it's about the falling asleep. And every night when you fall asleep, you assume you're going to wake up here, you know you're not waking up. And the knowledge of that.

But there's a whole step from that to the idea of fearing it. I'm fully aware that there's going to be a time I don't wake up. But are you going to be afraid of it? Is there some mortal terror you have of this? No, you didn't have it before. You don't have it when you sleep. Going from the fact that you know you won't wake up to terror is two different things. That's an extra step. And at that point you're making a choice at that point.

What about what some people, in this context we might call like the third death, which is when everybody forgets the entirety of consciousness in the universe forgets that you've ever existed, that John Donaghar ever existed.

So it's almost like a cosmic death. It's like everything goes. Yeah.

Not, not just. I would say it's acknowledge the history books, forget about who you are.

Because the history books, this is inevitable by the way. We're all very, very small players in a very big game. And inevitably we're all going to go at some point.

Yeah, but doesn't do. You're.

It's. It's disappointing. Of course it's. But, but it's not even. It would be arrogance to say I'm disappointed in the idea that I will disappear. There's far greater things than me that will disappear. I mean, it's crushing to think that there's going to come a time when no one will ever hear Beethoven's symphonies again. That the mysteries of the pharaohs will be lost and no one will even comprehend that they once existed. Humanity has come up with so many amazing things over its existence. And to think that one day this is just all happening on a tiny speck in a distant corner of a very small galaxy among millions of galaxies, that this is all for nothing. Okay, I can understand there's a kind of dread that comes with this, but there's also a sense in which the moment you're born and the moment you can think about these things, you know, this is your inevitable fate.

Is it so inevitable? So if we look at, we're in Austin and there's a guy named Elon Musk and, and he's hoping, in fact, that is the drive behind many of his passions. Is the human beings becoming multi planetary species and expanding out, exploring and colonizing the solar system, the galaxy and maybe the rest of the universe. Is that something that fills you with.

Excitement as a project? It's very exciting, the whole idea. I mean, we all grew up with science fiction, the idea of exploration the same way human beings in earlier centuries were thrilled at the idea of discovering a new world, America or some other part of the world that they sail to and come back. But now instead of sailing oceans, you're sailing solar systems and ultimately even further. So of course that's exciting. But as far as relieving us from non existence, it's just playing a delaying game because ultimately even the universe itself, if the laws of thermodynamics are correct, will ultimately die.

Of course we might not understand most of the physics and how the universe functions. You said laws of thermodynamics, but maybe that's just a tiny little fraction of what the universe actually is. Maybe there's multiple dimensions, maybe there's multiple universes, maybe the entirety of this experience. You know, there's guys like Donald Hoffman that think that all of this is just an illusion that we don't like human cognition and perception constructs a whole. It's like a video game that we construct that's very distant from the actual reality. And maybe one day we'll understand that reality. Maybe it'll be like the Matrix kind of Thing. So there's a lot of different possibilities here. And there's also a philosopher named Ernest Becker. I don't know if you know, that is he wrote Denial of Death. And his idea, he disagrees with you, but he's dead now, is that he thinks that the terror of death, the terror of the knowledge that we're going to die is within all of us and is, in fact, the driver behind most of the creativity that we do exploring out into the universe. But also, you becoming one of the great scholars of the martial arts, the philosophers of fighting, is because you're actually terrified of death. And you want. You want to somehow permeate, like, your knowledge, your ideas, your essence to permeate human civilization so that even when your body dies, you live on.

I would agree with him insofar as death is the single greatest motivator for action. But going beyond that and saying that somehow terrifying, that's an extra step on his part. And not everyone's going to follow him on that step. I do believe that death is the single most important element in life that gives value to our days. If you think, for example, of a situation where a God came to you and gave you immortality, life would be very, very different for you. You're a talented research scientist. You work to a schedule. Why? Because ultimately, you know your life is finite and actually very finite, and could be even more so if fate plays its hand and you die an early death or what have you. We never know what's going to happen tomorrow. As such, we get work done as soon as we can. The moment you gain immortality, you can always put every project off. You can always say, I don't need to do this today because I can do it four centuries from now. And as you extend artificially a human life, the motivation to get things done here and now and work industriously and excel fades away, because you can always come back to the idea that you can do this in the future. And so what gives value to our days is ultimately death. And value. It's not the only form of the reason behind value, but a huge part of what we consider value is scarcity. And death gives us scarcity of days and is probably the single greatest motivator for almost every action we partake in.

It's kind of tragic and beautiful that what. What makes things amazing is that they end.

Yeah. I think it would actually be a terrible burden to be immortal. You would. Life would be, in many ways, very hollow and meaningless. I think people talk about death taking away the meaning of life. But I think immortality would have a very similar effect in a different direction.

So given this short life, we could think about jiu jitsu. We can think about any kind of pursuit. What do you think makes a great life? Is it the highest peak of achievement, you know, you think about, like an Olympic gold medal, the highest level of performance? Or is it the longevity of performance, of doing many amazing things and doing it for a long time? I think the latter is kind of what we talk about in at least American society. You know, we want people to be healthy, balanced, perform well for a long time. And then there's maybe like the gladiator ethic. Which is the highest peak is what defines.

You asked an initial question which what makes a great life? But then pointed towards two options, one of longevity versus degree of difficulty. There's got to be a lot more than that, surely. I mean, think about. First of all, we have to understand from the start that there's never going to be an agreed upon set of criteria for this is a great life from all perspective. If you look from the perspective of, say, Machiavelli, then Stalin lived a great life. He was highly successful at what he did. He started from nothing, so the degree of difficulty in what he did was extraordinarily high. He had massive impact upon world history. He oversaw the defeat of almost all of his major enemies. He lived to old age and died of natural causes. So from Machiavelli's point of view, he had a great life. If you ask a Ukrainian farmer in the 1930s whether he lived a great life, you get a very different answer. So everything's going to come from what perspective you begin with. You're going to look out at the world with a given point of view, and you're going to make your judgments. Was this a great life or was this a terrible life? Going back to your point, you were actually, I think, focusing the question on more in terms of great single performances versus longevity performances. Yes. Presumably this isn't really a question about what makes a great life then, because there's so much more than that to a great life.

I don't know. I'm going to push back on that. So I think the parallels are very much closer than you're making them seem, I think. Let's compare Stalin. Stalin is an example of somebody who held power, considered by many to be one of the most powerful men ever. He held power for 30 years. So that's what I'm referring to, longevity. And then there's a few people I wish my knowledge of History was better, but people who fought a few great battles and they did not maintain power.

But let's contrast, say for example, Alexander the Great, who died at 33 from probably unnatural causes, had around four to five truly defining battles in his life which responsible for the lion's share of his achievements, and burned very bright, but didn't burn long. Stalin, on the other hand, started from nothing, quietly, methodically worked his way through the revolutionary phase and gained increasing amounts of power and as he said, went all the way to the end of his career. Yeah, there's definitely something to be said for longevity, but as to which one is greater than the other, you can't give a definition or a set of criteria which will definitively say this is better than that.

But when you look.

Ultimately we look at Alexander as great, but in a different way, and we look at Stalin. I don't think many people would say Stalin was a great person, but from the Machiavellian point of view, he would say he was great also.

But when you think about beautiful creations done by human beings in the space of, say, martial arts, in the space of sport, what inspires you? The peak of performance.

I see where you're coming from. It's a great question. For me, it always comes down to degree of difficulty. But things are difficult in different ways. A single flawless performance in youth is still that wins a gold medal. Say, for example, Nade Cominici won the Olympic gold medal in gymnastics, the first person ever to get a perfect score. If she had disappeared after that, we would still remember that as an incredible moment. And the degree of difficulty to. To get a perfect score in Olympic gymnastics is just off the charts. And contrast that with someone who went to four Olympics and got four silver medals. I mean, they're both incredible achievements. They're just different. The attributes that lead to longevity typically tend to conflict with the attributes that bring a powerful single performance. One is all about focus on a particular event. The other is on spreading your resources over time. Both present tremendous difficulties. There's no need to say one is better than the other.

There's also just. For me personally, the stories of the. Of somebody who truly struggled are. Are the most powerful. I know a bunch of people don't necessarily agree because you said perfection. Perfection is kind of the antithesis of struggle. But I look at somebody, okay, in my own life, somebody I. I'm a fan. I'm a fan of everybody. I'm a huge fan of yours. I'm trying not to be nervous here, but somebody. I'm a Fan of. In the judo world is Travis Stevens.

He's a remarkable fellow, by the way.

Remarkable human being. Insane in the best kinds of ways. I think I started judo. I really started martial arts. I wrestled. If you consider those martial arts that's been in my blood. I'm Russian. But beyond that, the whole pajama thing, we wear the GI. I started by watching Travis in 2008 Olympics.

Was that accidental? Did you know Travis prior to watching?

No, no, I just tuned in.

Now, that's an unusual choice. It was just random. You just tuned in and you saw Travis Stevens.

I tuned into the Olympics and I was wondering what judo is. And then I. I started watch. We're. We're all proud of our countries and so on. So I started watching. He was, I think, the only American in the Olympics for judo. Maybe the. So the scala. Harrison was 2012. Rhonda was there too. So I watched Rhonda and Travis. But obviously, sort of I was. I was focused on somebody who also weighed the same as I did. So there was a kind of, I think 81kg. So there's a connection, but also there's an intensity to him. Like he would get, like, angry at his own failures and he would just refuse to quit. It's that kind of Dan Gable mentality. I just. That was inspiring to me that he's the underdog. And the way people talk about him, the commentators, that it was an unlikely person to do well. Right.

And I.

The. The fu attitude behind that, saying, no, I'm going to still win gold. Obviously he didn't do well in 2008, but that was. That. That was somehow inspiring. And I just remember he pulled me in. But then I started to see this sport, I guess you can call it, of effortlessly dominating your opponent in, like, throwing. Because I In, to me, wrestling was like a grind. You kind of control. You slowly just break your opponent. The idea that you could with like a foot sweep was fascinating to me. That when with. Just because of timing, you can take these, like monsters, giant, giant people, like incredible athletes, and just smash them with it. It just doesn't. There was no struggle to it. It was always like a look of surprise. Judo dominance in judo has a look like the other person is like, what. What just happened?

Yes.

This is very different from wrestling.

It's built into the. The rule structure too. The whole idea of an epon, of. Of a match being over, that creates a thrilling spectator sport because you can, as you say with Ashiwiser, the foot sweeps, you can take someone out who's heavily favored. And if you're not. Judo is the most unforgiving of all the grappling sports. You can. If you have a lapse of concentration for half a second, it's done, it's over. If those guys get a grip on each other, any one of them can throw the other. The idea, when you see someone like Nomura, who won three Olympic gold medals, to win across three Olympics, that's an incredible achievement. Given how many ways there are to lose in the standing position in judo and how unforgiving it is as a sport, it shows an incredible level of dominance.

And I think when I was. I was also introduced at that time to the idea. Jessica and judo, I think in jiu jitsu is the same. A lot of sports is probably the same is there's ways to win that include kind of. If I were to use a bad.

Term, stalling, which is like use strategy.

To slow down to destroy all the weapons your opponent has and just to wait it out. To sort of break your opponent by. Yeah. Shutting down all their weapons but not using any of your own.

Yes.

And now Travis was always going for. He's of course really good at gripping and couldn't do that whole game, but he was going for the big throws and he was almost getting frustrated by a lot of the opponents. I remember Ola Bischoff, I think.

Yes. Is from Germany.

From Germany. Very talented, very incredible. I know he's very good at doing big throws and he's incredible judoka, but he was also incredible at just frustrating his opponents with like gripping and strategy and so on. And I just remember feeling the pain of this person like Travis who went through just. He broke like every part of his body. He went through so many injuries. Just this person who dedicated his entire life to this moment in 2008 and then 2012 and 2016, just every. Gave everything. You could see it in his face that, you know, his weapons are being shut down and he's still pushing forward. He's still that both the frustration and the power. I mean the. The kind of throw he does is his. His main one, I think is the standing was called Sanagi. But that was. That was the other thing is like the techniques he used was the. These big throws that. There's something to me about the sagi. I fell in love with that throw. That's my. Become my main throw. Standing Sagi. That is like why.

Why do you favor the standing variation? Because of the amplitude. You get a more powerful. Yeah.

Power.

It's like, are you a Fan of Koga?

Yes, that's. So that's when I. Travis. So Koga and Travis opened up. My.

Travis uses the same gripping patterns for Sayanagi as Koga, all the same.

And the way he uses his hips and turns. And I remember like going to my judo club and other judo clubs and ask, and they were all saying, this is the wrong way to do it. The way Travis does it is the wrong way to do it. And I remember, like, I've always been.

Amazed by this, by the way. I don't mean to cut you off, but I could literally fill 20 hours of reproductions of people who will tell me that either my students or other great war champions are doing things wrong. And I'm looking at them and I'm like, who would I rather trust here in their judgment? Koga, who was one of the greatest throwers of all time, or you, a recreational guy who couldn't throw my grandmother.

Yes.

I'm supposed to take your word over his. Well, say, don't listen to what people say. I'm going to give you a piece of advice here. Watch what the best people do, okay? That's how you get superior athletic performance. I'm going to say that again. Don't listen to what people say. Watch what they do, particularly under the stress of high level competition, because that's when you see their real game, what they really do under pressure. And if you can emulate that, you're going to be very successful.

I guess what I was frustrated with, to your point is that the argument against Koga is what. He has a very specific body type and he figured out something that worked for him. Thus the statement is that might not be applicable to you or to the general public of judo players that want to succeed. That, by the way, at the shallow level, might be true. Might be true. The, the point is there might be a body of knowledge that's yet to be discovered and explored that Koga opened up that I wanted to understand why his technique worked. It made no sense to me that with a single foot, like the way you turn the hip, the single foot that steps in, why does that work? Because it was actually very difficult to make work for me as a white belt in the very beginning. It doesn't make sense. Like people just, they don't, they don't get loaded up onto your hip anyway. For people don't watch Koga highlights, watch Travis Stevens highlights. But the, the, the details of the technique don't make sense. But when mastered, it feels like there's something fundamental there that hasn't been explored yet. It's like Koga and Travis made me think that we don't know most of the body mechanics involved in dominance in judo. Like, we just kind of found a few pockets that work really well. The ichimada, there's these different throws. Osoto gari. I wonder if there's, like, totally cool new things that we haven't discovered and that sayanagi gave a little peek, because there's very few people that I'm aware of that do it the way Travis and Koga did.

May I ask you a question? Yes. The choice of standing seiyanagi. I should say this for your. For your listeners. They're probably thinking, what the hell are these two guys talking about? Seiyanagi is one of the more high percentage throws in the Olympic sport of judo. Probably Uchimada is probably number one. And variations of sayanagi would be in the top five for sure. The basic choice you have in modern competition is the more difficult standing seiyanagi, where you literally are up on your feet and you perform a shoulder throw that takes your opponent over from a full standing position. The most popular form of seiyanagi in modern competition by a landslide is not the standing version. It's a drop sanagi, where you go down to your knees. This means you have a much easier time getting underneath your opponent's center of gravity. The defining feature of any sanagi is getting underneath your opponent's center of gravity and lifting them. Seoi literally means to lift and carry. Why did you choose the more difficult version? What was your motivation? You know, you're a smart kid. You know right from the start that for every standing San AGI there's 20 drop Saanagis in modern competition, one is obviously more high percentage. One obviously works for a wider variety of body types. The number of people who are successful with standing san AGI is dramatically lower. And it appears to be a move which is completely absent in the heavyweight divisions and rarely seen in the lightweight divisions. Why? What was the motivation? Why did you willingly adopt the less high percentage over?

This would be very interesting percentage. I would love you to break it apart, because I apply the same kind of thinking to basically everything I mentioned to you offline. There's these Boston Dynamics Spot robots. When I first met Spot, I found love. I don't understand what exactly, but there's magic there, and I just got excited by it. And that. That fire burns. I want to work with these robots. I want to work with robots. I want to. I felt like there's something special there that I could build something interesting with, create something interesting with. And the same with, with the standing Sayanagi from Koga and Travis. I just fell in love with that technique. Just even watching, I didn't even know what the hell to do with it.

Was it aesthetic? It's the standing scene. AGI is more beautiful in execution.

There's no question in, in my own. Let's. We're talking about love here, right? In my own definition of aesthetic, yes. It's not just beauty because you could argue there's more elegant sort of. Uchimada is very beautiful and effortless. I love, I love something about the dominance of it. I love the idea in sport of two people that are the best in the world and one of them dominating the other. And to me, the standing say Nagi, you're lifted off your feet and especially when it's done perfectly and with really strong resistance from the other person, it results in a big slam. And that was like beautiful. To me, that's the Alexander Corellin, like big pickups. I love that.

It's interesting. You're correct insofar as you're not just going with aesthetic and the sense of beauty, but also. But you are making, as it were, value judgments about the throw. And that's fascinating to me because there's two elements to any grappling sport. I've always, I'm always insistent upon the idea that jiu Jitsu is both an art and a science. Okay. It has scientific elements insofar as it works according to the laws of physics and lever and fulcrum, et cetera, et cetera. But it also has an aesthetic element insofar as you're making choices with techniques, you're expressing who you are as a person. You have 10,000 different variations of moves you could use, but you're specifically choosing these. That's an element of choice and self expression on your part. And insofar as that is true, combat sports are not just a science, but they're also an art. So most combat sports have this sense which they have the features of both an art and a science. And it's not just about high percentage in, in your case, I mean, me personally, I'm obsessed with percentages. What, what are the ways that makes the science part. Yeah, but that's also choices involved. Yeah, yeah, but, but there is an undeniably aesthetic element to martial arts where you, as it were, express who you are as a person in terms of the techniques you're ultimately going to choose.

Does that get in the way? Do you allow yourself to enjoy the aesthetic beauty of a technique?

Of course, yeah. When I. When martial arts are done well, it's the most beautiful sport in the world. Okay. When it's done poorly, it's the ugliest. But. But a beautifully applied submission hold, a perfect throw, a superbly set up takedown are among the most difficult techniques they execute in all of sports. And when they're done well, they're magic to observe.

But do you prefer certain techniques over others because of their like for example, I'll tell you, for me, chokes of all sorts. With the gi, without the GI, probably with the GI's the most beautiful. To me personally, I. I value them above all others.

People mostly associate myself and my students with leg locking. They're usually rather surprised to learn that I actually value strangleholds far above leg locks. But not for aesthetic reasons, for effectiveness. We can talk about that later if you wish.

Well, let's step back.

Sorry, we drifted awfully far off topic then.

This is with. I think this is beautiful. We drifted along the river of life and martial arts. Can you explain the fundamentals of Jiu Jitsu?

Yes. If I couldn't, I wouldn't be much of a coach. Jiu Jitsu is an art and science which looks to use a combination of tactical and mechanical advantage to focus a very high percentage of my strength against a very low percentage of my opponent's strength and at a critical point on their body, such that if I were to exert my strength upon that critical point, they could no longer continue to fight.

Well, that's about weapons and defenses. But then, is there something more to be said about the set of tools that are that we're talking about?

That's where the art comes in. Because ultimately you have a set of choices. And those choices that you make will be an act of self expression on your part. Some will prefer this, some will prefer that. That's where you come in as an individual.

That's an overall definition of Jiu Jitsu, of being a set of choices that where you're using the things you're powerful in versus the things your opponent is weak in.

No, I was only talking about percentages of body strength. If I have, for example, let's say we have two athletes, Athlete A and Athlete B. Athlete A has 100 units of strength. However, we define that overall, athlete B has 50. Okay, so ostensibly athlete A is twice as strong as athlete B. But athlete B can maneuver his body into a set of positions focused around A critical point of his opponent's body where he can apply 40 units of strength out of his total of 50. His opponent can only defend with 20 units of strength out of his total Of 100. You have now completely reversed the strength discrepancy. Originally, athlete A was twice as strong as B. Now, on that one localized point, the knee, the elbow, the neck, B is now twice as strong as A. Under those circumstances, B should win.

I guess what I'm trying to get at, by the way, that's really beautifully said, is what you just said could be applied to other games, other battles. It could be applied to the game of chess. It could be applied to war.

Most obviously, in war, I think about, for example, the American strategic bombing campaign in World War II. The 8th Army Air Force was tasked with the idea of destroying German industry. Did they attack all of German industry? Of course not. That would be stupid. They attacked the ball bearing industry. Why? Because almost all of modern machines require ball bearings in order to operate. In order for the mechanical interfaces of machines to operate, you have to reduce friction. It's done through ball bearings. If you knocked out one tiny component of German industry, the ball bearing industry, the rest of it couldn't operate. So too with the human body, I didn't have to fight your whole body. I just have to fight your left knee. If I can break your left knee, the rest of your body is irrelevant to me.

But then isn't the art of Jiu jitsu, discovering the left knee, the discovering the weak points?

Yeah. A huge part of Jiu Jitsu is understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the human body. There's parts of the human body that are shockingly robust. And there are other parts that are shockingly vulnerable. The major joints and of course, the most vulnerable of all, the unprotected neck.

So if we take the. Something I'm not familiar with, but I was incredibly impressed by, is the body lock that I saw.

Nick Rodriguez.

Nick Rodriguez use last time a few weeks ago.

Yes.

But then I also got to hang out with Craig Jones, who showed.

Also has a very good body lock.

So that. That was. I don't know if this body lock applies to all positions, but I was seeing it from when Craig is on top of your opponent and trying to pass the guard, or passing the guard, use the body lock as a controlling position. The. The principle behind it is that it shuts down, as you've spoken about, it shuts down the weapons of a very strong opponent.

That's absolutely correct. In the case of guard position, what makes Guard position dangerous. What makes someone a powerful guard player is the movement of their hips forward and backward and side to side. Body locking is designed to shut down that movement and does a very fine job of it. You'll see all of my students excel at it. Gordon Ryan is probably the single best body lock, guard, passer I've ever seen. Nicky Ryan is outstanding with it. Nick Rodriguez is very good. Craig Jones is outstanding. All of my students use this for a very simple reason. Understand what is the central problem of shutting down a d dangerous guard player? It's his hips. That's what makes him a dangerous leg locker. You go up against a dangerous leg locker, body lock, guard, pass, single best way to shut down most of his entries. We're all strong and leg locked. So in our gym, you gotta control the hips as soon as possible. Otherwise it's gonna be a very difficult thing to avoid leg entanglements as you go to pass and across the board. My students excel in body lock, guard passing. They understand what's the most dangerous feature their opponent has the lateral movement of their hips. What's the single best way to stop that body lock and then work from there?

So if this asymmetry of power is fundamental to jiu jitsu, how do you discover that? How do you. How did you discover the body lock that As a. As one of many methodologies of achieving.

This asymmetry, it would be an overstatement to say we discovered the body lock. Body lock passing has been around longer than we've been around. But what I would say is that in a room full of dangerous leg lockers, you've got to have a way to shut down the hips. And so once we started using body locks, we saw that was one excellent way to get around that problem. As with all development, it comes from trial and error. You will often see people teach the technique to a certain level, and you see the teaching. You're like, there's a lot of inadequacies there. And that doesn't cover a lot of the problems that we're encountering. And so trial and error is the single most important part of the development.

Trial and error in.

In the training room, amongst ourselves, in.

In hard training or.

No, it never begins with hard training or everything. Techniques are born the same way. We're born weak and in need of nutrition. You have to, like this, build them up organically like children, and you start with minimal resistance and you make progress over time. When you first go to the gym, do you put £500 on the bench press and Try to bench press it. No, you'll be killed. You start off with the bar you build over time, and then one day, five years from now, perhaps you really are lifting £500. But only a fool would attempt that on their first attempt.

And they're born like children in your mind. First, like, there's a spark of an idea.

There's always a spark. It's like scientific development on a subject matter which is intrinsically simpler. There's a sense in which naive and overly simplistic assessments of scientific method may not work well at advanced levels of science, but they work damn well in the training room with Jiu Jitsu, where the subject matter is inherently simpler than it is in research science. And as a result, there'll be a spark. You'll see something like, there's possibilities there. Okay, let's puzzle this out. Let's work with this. And you run into a lot of failures. There's, you know, you've suddenly been, oh, man, if I put my hip this way, this works really well. Then suddenly you try inspiring. Get caught in a simple oma plata, and you're okay, that didn't work as well as I thought. And then you look to rectify things. If things go on promising research directions, you keep them. If not, you discard them.

Well, it's funny you say science, it feels more like art. There's somebody I really admire that talks about this kind of ideas. Johnny I from Apple. He's the lead designer. He recently left, but he was the designer behind most of the products we know and love from Apple.

When you say designer, be more precise. What exactly was he working on in Apple?

The iPhone.

Which parts of the iPhone did he.

Work on the entirety of it?

Was he a leader of a research team, or was he the person personally responsible for the development?

He's kind of, I would say, very similar to your position. He wasn't necessarily the last. The person executing the fine. The manufacturer.

Right, yeah, of course.

But there's the. He's somebody that's very hands on.

And.

And it's like, okay, so he worked obviously extremely close to Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs has this idea, we should have a computer that's as thin as a sheet of paper. And then you start to play with ideas of, like, what does that actually look like? The reason I bring it up is because he talked about. He had these ideas that he would not tell Steve because he talked about in the same exact language as you're saying is there's like a little baby that it's very fragile. It needs time to grow.

Absolutely.

And then Steve Jobs would often roll in, was too ruthless, too ruthless. He would destroy ideas because Jony, I've. And the team didn't have actually good responses to the criticism at first because when they're babies, you can't defend the baby. But you need a time to develop, you need to sleep on it, you need to rethink it, to dream things and all those kinds of things.

It's fascinating you say this, Lex, because this is actually the entire history of scientific development is literally the story of the juxtaposition between the need to protect and nurture new theories versus the need to rigorously test them with harsh testing that either verifies them or falsifies them. And learning to find a satisfactory compromise between those two is a very, very difficult thing. When you look at the history of science, you will see that there's some pretty damn chaotic moments anytime there's major theory change, where all kinds of apparently undesirable tricks are used to protect certain theories with ad hoc hypotheses, et cetera, et ceter. And ultimately only time and success over time will justify a theory. There's usually a period where when one theory goes in to replace another, there's something of a battle between competing groups of scientists, some of whom advocate theory A, some who advocate theory B. They often use seemingly unscrupulous methods to protect or attack another person's theory. They dig for proofs, and usually some period of time has to go by. Sometimes in some cases, it simply involved older scientists protecting an initial theory dying off and new scientists just replacing them with numbers. And this is a common, common theme. And the same applies in jiu jitsu so many times, especially when I first started working with leg locks, I would show things I had worked on to even world champion black belts, and they would try it once or twice and fail. Be like, ah, doesn't work. I'd be like, you tried it once on it, on another guy who's also a world champion who has a strong ability to resist it. And that's it. No more, it doesn't work. And then five years later, they would see my students finishing world champions with it, and in some cases finishing the very people who said that the technique would never work. I mean, if there was ever a refutation of a statement, that's a pretty clear example. And there has to be a sense in which you can't be too forgiving. You have to test hypotheses. But on the other hand, you can't be too Ruthless either. You have to look for promise. And my advice is start slow. Again, the analogy of lifting weights, you don't lift the heaviest weights on your first day. You build up, you work progressively over time. Now, you also have to have some common sense here. You can't be too forgiving to a technique. If it's repeatedly failing and good people have tried it and multiple good people have tried and it's just not working out, then okay, it's time to dismiss it. But don't be too quick.

You know, is this where your idea of training with lower belts quite a bit comes from?

Yeah.

I've actually just as a side comment, and maybe you can elaborate. I. The, the place, the gym, Balance Studios with Phil and Rick McLivies, where I got my black belt, where I grew up as a jiu jitsu person in Philadelphia. They have a huge number of black belts, but they have a huge number of all other ranks. And the way they picked sparring partners, people you train with, is very ad hoc. It's very loose.

It's very.

One of those places, one of those gyms where you can just kind of. You can train for like three, four hours and you could take a break or you could jump back in.

Very informal. Yeah.

And you can go to war with black belts, but then you can also play around with the purple and the blue belts and so on.

Excellent.

And that was really beneficial for growth. And, you know, you can pick which. Because everybody has a style and you can pick which style you really want to work on.

Right.

And then I came to Boston, Broadway Jiu Jitsu with John Clark, who I love, is a good friend, but, you know, it's a little bit more formal. And I found myself. It's a very interesting journey. I would be training with black belts the whole time, and it was a very different experience. I found myself exploring much less. I found myself learning much less. I mean, part of that is on me, but part of it was also realizing that, wow, there's a value to training with people that are much worse than you.

Yes.

Is there, is there a philosophy you could speak to on that?

Yeah, you probably know it already. You know from your studies in artificial intelligence that all human beings are naturally risk averse. This is a bias which is deeply seated in all of us. I'm sure you're well read on people like Tversky and et cetera, who talk about this all the time for your viewers. There are numerous psychological experiments that have shown that most people, to the point of irrationality, fear, loss, more than they are excited at the prospect of an equivalent gain. So, for example, if you have $100 in your wallet, you're more worried about the idea of losing the hundred dollars that you have now than you would be excited by the prospect of gaining $100 that I could potentially offer you. This comes out whenever you get black belt versus black belt confrontations or any kind of similar skill level. Whenever you get similar skill levels, the chances of defeat get very, very high. Interestingly, if you're a white belt and you're going against a black belt, you'll take risks. Why? Because there's no shame in losing to a black belt when you're a white belt. So you'll play more lightheartedly and you'll have a more fun role. But when you have very similar skill levels, you're going to come back to what the techniques that are most likely to get you a win. That number of techniques is usually pretty small. And if you're always battling with the same tough opponents every day, where if you make even a single error, it will cost you that match in sparring and you don't like losing, you're going to stay with a very small set of moves. You might get slightly better at their execution over time, but you as an individual will not grow. Growth as it does in organic life forms comes from small beginnings and builds over time. You can't take an untested, untried move and get it on a world champion black belt. It's going to get crushed. So it's not ready for that. It's like a, a lion cub being thrown out into the Serengeti plains. A lion cub is just too small and too ineffective. It's a lion, but it's a cub. And it's not until it grows into maturity that it can be a lion that can dominate the Serengeti plains. That's why I always encourage my students to play with a variety of belt types and spend the majority of their time with lesser belts for development purposes. When you're getting closer to a competition, you obviously want to change that. You want to be getting more a competitive sense of hard work. But you must learn to divide up your training cycles into non competition cycles where you're presumably working with people who are slightly lower in level than yourself and in some cases quite a bit lower than yourself. And then competition cycles where you're working with people much closer to your own skill level.

Is there something to be said about the, the flip side of that? Which is when you're training with people at the same skill level being, okay, losing to them.

Yes. You have to see training for what it is. Training is about skill development, not about winning or losing. You've got to. You've got to understand that you don't need to win every battle. You only need to win the battles that count. And the battles that count are in the World Championship finals. Okay? That's the one that counts. Think about that win. That's the one you're going to be remembered for. You're not going to be remembered for the battle you lost on Tuesday afternoon at 3pm in some nameless gym with some guy that played.