Making Sense with Sam Harris - #316 — Self-Defense: Reality and Fantasy

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

Sam Harris speaks with Matt Thornton about his new book, “The Gift of Violence: Practical Knowledge for Surviving and Thriving in a Dangerous World.” They discuss his background in martial arts, the reasons to train in combat sports, the UFC and the evolution of mixed martial arts, the fundamental principles of effective martial arts, the "street" vs "sport" fallacy, grappling vs striking, the persistence of fake martial arts, Bruce Lee’s legacy, male violence and emotional maturity, the male fear of humiliation, violence against women, the validity of instinct, the behavior of predators, weapons, avoiding violence, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

Well, I just did Megyn Kelly's podcast yesterday, and I like Megyn. She has always treated me extremely fairly, even though she has a very different audience that would incentivize her to treat me unfairly. That strikes me as a bit of a highwire act. So I was happy to talk to her, and you can see the results over on her channel. In any case,

Megan asked me about the recent incident with the Dalai Lama, which I suppose I should comment on here. You can hear what I said to her, but I'll just more or less repeat that here. I hadn't really thought to react to this, but it's understandable that people would be curious to know what I think. My history, obviously, with Buddhism and with Vajrayana Buddhism goes way back. I've met the Dalai Lama on a number of occasions and briefly functioned as a bodyguard for him for about a month when he toured France. So I traveled with him to, I don't know, about a dozen cities or more over the course of a month and got to see how he functioned with many different groups of people, and was never less than thoroughly impressed by him as a person. This was, I think, over 30 years ago at this point, but found him to be, as advertised,

just an extraordinarily present, compassionate, and wise man. I can't say he was really a teacher of mine. I never studied with him in any sense. I studied with several lamas who he considered teachers, Tilgo Kensi Rinpoche, Nyosho Ken Rinpoche, and perhaps others where I'm unaware of the connection. So, what to say about this recent incident? If you haven't heard, there's a video that has now widely been circulated and commented upon of the Dalai Lama teaching in front of an audience and being asked by a young Indian boy if he could hug him. And once that hug takes place, the Dalai Lama asks for a kiss on the cheek, and then a kiss on the mouth, and then he sticks his tongue out and asks the boy to suck his tongue, which the boy doesn't do. And this has been widely perceived as not only bewildering but totally inappropriate. I certainly understand

that reaction with an emphasis, I think, on the bewildering part. It's certainly not appropriate, but as I told Megan, I find it hard to believe that the Dalai Lama was trying to gratify a sexual urge with a child in front of hundreds of people. So in my view, the behavior would have even been more concerning had it occurred in private. But still, it was bizarre. It's true that Tibetans sometimes greet one another by sticking out their tongues, and I suppose there's something that could make sense of this as a joke. but from the video it really did seem that the Dalai Lama gave this boy ample opportunity to actually suck his tongue, which makes it hard to interpret as a joke. Anyway, I'm inclined to ascribe this to some form of brain damage

on the Dalai Lama's part. He is an 87-year-old man. Whether what's going on in his brain has simply made him less censored in front of an audience, and this is some window onto how he's behaved privately with kids, I don't know. But in any case, I'm not inclined to say anything to defend his behavior, except to say that if he does have some relevant form of brain damage, it would explain it. Otherwise, I have absolutely no idea what was going on there. And it's just quite unfortunate because the man had an absolutely stellar reputation. I guess it remains to be seen whether this will mar his legacy permanently. It doesn't take much more than a moment to change everyone's view of who you are as a person. And needless to say, that's worth keeping in mind.

Okay, and now for today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Matt Thornton. Matt has been teaching martial arts for more than 30 years, and he holds a fifth-degree black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. His organization, Straight Blast Gym, has more than 70 locations worldwide, and has produced champion MMA fighters, as well as world-class self-defense and law enforcement instructors. And he lives with his wife and five children in Portland, Oregon. and he lives with his wife and five children in Portland, Oregon. And Matt has long been one of my go-to authorities on all things related to martial arts and self-defense. As many of you know, I've touched this topic a few times on the podcast.

I've spoken to Gavin DeBecker and Jocko Willink and Scott Reitz about many topics related to self-defense and understanding violence. And now I have finally done it with Matt. We talk about his new book titled The Gift of Violence, Practical Knowledge for Surviving and Thriving in a Dangerous World. We discuss his background in martial arts, the reasons a person might want to train in combat sports, the UFC and the evolution of mixed martial arts, the fundamental principles of effective self-defense,

the street versus sport fallacy, grappling versus striking, the persistence of fake martial arts, Bruce Lee's legacy, male violence and emotional maturity, the male fear of humiliation, violence against women, the validity of our instincts when judging danger, the behavior of predators, weapons, avoiding violence, and other topics. Anyway, it was a pleasure to finally get Matt on the podcast. I hope you find our conversation useful. And now I bring you Matt Thornton. I am here with Matt Thornton. Matt, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me, Sam. You've long been my guru on all things related to martial arts and violence, Brazilian jiu-jitsu in particular, but really you and I have discussed everything related to self-defense.

And I remember urging you to write a book on this topic, and you have now done that. And congratulations, it's a wonderful book. The book is The Gift of Violence, Practical Knowledge for Surviving and Thriving in a Dangerous World. And it's really excellent. So just congratulations. I know it took you a long time to produce, and it was worth the effort. Well, thank you very much. It took me about 10 years, but I did get it done eventually. So let's just go through this systematically, because violence is a topic that I've touched a few times on the podcast. I've spoken to Jocko Willink, a Navy SEAL who has his own podcast, who many people will be familiar with. Scott Reitz and I spoke about firearms in particular.

I spoke to Henner Gracie about BJJ, and I guess I've probably had a few other conversations. But I'd like to take it from the top here and give people, insofar as it's possible, a comprehensive view of the topic of self-defense. Before we jump into the conversation proper, perhaps you can summarize your background here and how you come to know anything about this topic. Actually, your background is, in reading your book, I realized it started earlier than I recalled. I'm sure you told me about your childhood before, but I think I forgot the details. But your father was a police officer, right?

My father's a retired police officer, my mother was Jehovah's Witness, so there's a bit of contradiction going on that way. That produces all manner of conflict, I would imagine. Exactly. Okay, so give me your background as a martial artist and as somebody who understands interpersonal violence and then we'll hit the ground running. Well, I think like a lot of people, you know, I had some run-ins with bullying and things like that when I was little. I was the only child for the first 16 years of my life anyway, and my dad was a police officer. As I mentioned, my mom was very religious. So I had a kind of a contradiction in what I was being told, how to handle violent confrontations, how to handle

situations like this. I was being told different things at different times, which I found a bit confusing. And I eventually reached a point where I just started fighting back. And then I became fascinated right around the same time with what works in fights and what doesn't work in fights. And that question of what martial arts are going to be effective, what tactics or things are actually effective against a fully resisting opponent was always front and center in my mind. And so when I went into martial arts, I went into martial arts very specifically to try and answer that question. And I talk a little bit about it in the book, but I started with boxing and I boxed for a while,

and then I became an instructor in what they call Jeet Kune Do concepts, which is a kind of a cross-training makes martial arts sort of system where they were taking different pieces from different martial arts. I became pretty disillusioned with all martial arts and including that. But also that was Bruce Lee's system, right? Bruce Lee's concept. And the idea was, which was a quote he'd actually taken from Mount Saitong, but absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is specifically your own. So it's kind of a utilitarian approach to martial arts. At least that's how it was advertised. And I was attracted to that aspect of it. But after getting to become an instructor

and spend some time with those people for a couple of years, I started to get a little disillusioned and I saw a bit of hypocrisy. I saw them saying one thing to each other or, you know, amongst the coaches backstage, if you will, and then something completely different to the audience. And it was right around that time that I had a fortunate run-in with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. So I've told this story a bunch of times, but it's kind of funny. Fabio Santos was up here in Portland, and he was building sailboats, and he wasn't teaching Jiu-Jitsu. Nobody really knew what Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu was at the time.

And Horian— What year was this? This would have been very early 90s, so 91, 2, somewhere in there. Before the UFC, which was 93? Yes. So this was about a good year, I'd say, before the UFC. And Horian actually called up Fabio and said, I've got something big that's going to be happening, and I'm going to need you as an instructor here, so you should get in shape. And the big thing that he was going to have happen was UFC. And since they've been running that experiment in Brazil for decades, they kind of knew what the results would be. And Fabio's way of getting in

shape was to put an ad in a classified newspaper here offering to pay people $50 if they could come and try and beat him up. And so my buddy and I from the boxing gym showed up, predictable result of what would happen. He let me try and hit him, took me down, demonstrated jujitsu to me a few times. And then once he was clear, he could tell it was clear to me that what he was doing was working and there really wasn't anything I could do about it. He could see I was hooked. And from that moment forward, I fell in love with jujitsu. And not too long after that, I also got to meet Hickson, which was a big eye-opener as far as what the art was capable of.

So Hickson Gracie, who is often acknowledged to be the greatest jiu-jitsu athlete of all time. Yeah. I don't think there's any doubt about that. The people who've been around and the world champions from that day and era, they all have stories about Hickson. And these are guys that aren't apt to make up martial arts mythologies. They're not going to talk about getting tapped out if they weren't actually tapped out. And Hickson just has an amazing

level of skill. So I fell in love with it and I realized I needed to train it. And the people that I was training with at the JKD school weren't interested. They still had these ideas about how hard they would be to get taken down. Again, this was before the UFC. How you don't want to be on the ground in a fight, so why would you train to be on the ground in a fight and so forth. And so I actually opened up a very small school for the sole purpose of having training partners. I had no intention of becoming an instructor. And the gym just took off from there, fortunately. And this became your Straight Blast gym? Yes. Came SBG, Straight Blast gym. It was a tiny little school in Salem, Oregon that I shared with a judo black belt who was a friend of mine. We brought Hickson up once. Hickson gave me my blue belt and

told me at the time, I said, listen, I'm trying to train this every day. I have to teach what you show me so I can get training partners. He gave me permission at that time to teach what I know in my school, as long as I always called it Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And that's how it all started. And then a few years after that, Hickson became very famous fighting in Japan, became hard to reach, hard to train with. And around that time, I met a mutual friend of ours, Chris Howder. And Chris became my coach from purple, brown, and black and to this day. So Chris and I have been training together about 30 years. Nice, nice. And so how many gyms do you have now? Because you have created multiple SBG gyms,

right? Yeah. Yeah. One of the things I'm most proud of is when I went off to do it, all my peers in the martial arts at the time, my peers in the Jeet Kune Do community were telling me this was never going to work. And it's very kind of a cynical take on martial arts in the Jeet Kune Do community were telling me this was never going to work. It was very kind of a cynical take on martial arts in the sense that people don't really want to sweat. People don't want to get tapped out. People don't want to get hit. They want to click sticks together. They want to compare notes. They want to collect certificates. You're never going to make any money or be able to have a gym. And I assume that was true, but I needed to train. I wanted to train, so I did what I was planning on doing anyway. And of course, they all turned out to be wrong. And so I just happened to be the first school,

I think I was really the first MMA or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu school in Oregon. And so people just started to come to the gym and it grew from there exponentially. And then towards the end of the 90s, I produced a video set called Aliveness, which was about how to know what works in martial arts and what doesn't work, and what the determining factor is when you're talking about a functional martial art versus a fantasy-based martial art. And those videos became very popular as well. They sold a lot, and people from different parts of the country would contact me to tell me that they'd, you know, they'd been thinking the same

thing I'd been thinking that they did. They just hadn't put words to it and they were very appreciative of it. And that's kind of how the organization started. So I had, you know, people in the UK, Carl Tanswell, and then John Cavanaugh, of course, was Conor McGregor's coach, was one of my first black belts. And they kind of came to me from hearing about me through the Aliveness videos. And that's how the organization kind of grew. Now we probably have about 70 some odd locations with a dozen or so big schools that'll have between 500 and 1,000 members in each one. Amazing. Okay, so I want to get into the details of just how you think about martial arts specifically and violence generally, and I think we want to differentiate what you've already referred to as traditional and fantasy-based martial arts from proper mixed martial arts that are functional.

But before we get into the details, let's answer this basic question, which I think occurs at least subconsciously to many listeners, which is, why think about violence at all? The more civilized a society, the more privileged one is in that society, the less likely violence is a variable that anyone realistically has to worry about. And it's the measure of progress, really, in a society that a legitimate concern for violence diminishes, more or less to the point of vanishing. Why think about violence? Yeah, that's a good question. I've actually thought about that quite a bit. Everything you said is true, of course, as we become more and more civilized and our communities grow and we have law enforcement and we have all the, you know, the enlightenment

and all the modern things that have helped create a better society, then the violence curve drops. But still to this day, I don't think a lot of people realize, but there's about four times as many people that are killed in interpersonal violence every year as are killed by all the wars. You know, there's always an exception here and there, but generally speaking, it's about half a million people a year are killed worldwide from violence. And that's never going to completely go away. And so there's that aspect of it that is there, and that I do believe it's better for people to take personal responsibility for their own safety and well-being rather than completely farm it out to a third party, which may or may not be there

if you need them. So there's that aspect of it, just very practical aspect of it. But there's another piece to it too, in that violence is so intrinsic to our nature as human animals, as part of who we are. And I don't think anything good comes from repressing those instincts or thinking, you know, those things are somehow below us. I think really what we want to do is we want to have a healthy relationship to that topic. And a healthy relationship to that topic is not going to turn violence into a fetish and romanticize it on one extreme, but it's also not going to demonize or try and repress

violence as something evil. And instead, it's just going to look at violence as what it is and try and have a healthy relationship to the topic. So if we ever do have to defend ourselves or engage in it, we'll be prepared. But also, I think it's just a healthier way to live your life. I think there's so many people, probably some of your listeners today that are listening to this, that have tried something like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and very quickly kind of fallen in love with the art. And they're not in love with the art because they're thinking about hurting people. They're in love with the art because the pushing, pulling, struggling physical contact that you have with another human being is so visceral for us and I think in many ways necessary. And so I don't think it's necessarily a healthy thing to separate ourselves from that part of ourself. And one of the things that good combat athletics, functional martial arts,

martial arts that are sports essentially, give people is they help put them back in touch with all of that, that whole aspect of who we are. And so that we can start to have, I think, a healthier relationship to the topic and not have a phobic one. Yeah. I mean, one answer to this question that I've experienced personally is just that it changes you to train in preparation for violence and to understand violence. And it changes you, in my experience, in really wholly good ways. I mean, it gives you confidence where confidence is possible. It gives you a wise circumspection where you might not have had it before, right? So it's like it's an antidote to certain kinds of dangerous delusions

that genuinely do increase your risk of encountering violence and being on the wrong end of it. And so in this training, whether it's in an effective martial art like Brazilian jiu-jitsu or with firearms or whatever side of this problem one engages, it's kind of owning some part of that potential force continuum for oneself. in the world in contexts that have nothing to do with self-defense or personal risk. I mean, you have an understanding of things that matters and changes just the way you feel with other people and in different circumstances. Yeah, 100%. I think that that's kind of a universal finding that people have. And I think that that's one of the reasons people start to fall in love with combat sports or an art like jujitsu. One of the things we say at SBG is one of our goals is to make good people more dangerous to bad people. But one of the things I talk about in the book is one of the nice side benefits of making good people more dangerous to bad people is it also makes better people. And it's just the humbling process of

having to deal with failure over and over again. Failure is an essential part of this process. So somebody that's not going to open themselves up to be vulnerable to that kind of failure, you literally can't get good at the art. It's necessary to have to tap and submit thousands of times and also handle and learn how to deal with tapping and beating other people thousands of times. And the myriad of lessons we get of interpersonal communication and things that are appropriate or not appropriate, being comfortable in uncomfortable situations, all of that really starts to come into play. And there's nothing really, it's not a conversation I

would have as a coach at my gym. There's nothing I need to really do to facilitate that for people other than create a healthy, safe mat where people can come in, they can be vulnerable, they know they're not going to get hurt, and then that's enough. And that and the process of doing the art, all these other things we're talking about come into play. And, you know, there's nothing I don't need to give a lecture about it. I don't need to talk to people about it. It just happens organically that way. Well, we should talk more about what makes Brazilian jiu-jitsu so interesting from the point of view of training for self-defense. But before we do, let's distinguish what you call the fantasy-based

martial arts, and this overlaps impressively with what are often thought of as traditional martial arts, and the functional combat sports approach to self-defense or martial arts. What's now generally understood as mixed martial arts or MMA and what you see in the UFC. Perhaps we should start with what the UFC did to the conversation about what works and what doesn't. Because in my memory, before the UFC happened, it was all pretty hypothetical. I mean, everyone was just imagining that the art they were training in was super effective and would, it's sort of like asking what would win in a fight, a lion or a tiger, right? Well, until you have something like the Roman Colosseum where you throw those two animals

together, it's all speculation. And the UFC became a kind of science experiment where all these different martial arts were hurled at one another, and we could see what worked in which context. And then there was a kind of an iterative evolution there where there was a kind of cross-training that happened where everyone started grabbing the skills that worked, whatever their provenance, and we got something like a generic form of mixed martial arts where it was understood what skills were fundamental and foundational at each range. Perhaps you can just describe what happened there. Sure. So now mixed martial arts is its own sport, and the young fighters that we have that train in Ireland or Oregon or wherever,

they come into one of our gyms and they want to go down that path as fighters. They're going to be training stand-up clinching ground. They're going to be training what we call mixed martial arts from day one as a kind of a unified whole. And that's what it's become. It's become its own sport. But when the UFC first started, that's not what it was about. Horian started it as, as you said, kind of a science experiment. And the idea was to pit different styles of martial arts against each other, which is one of the reasons why I think to this day, watching the first three or four UFCs are still some of the funnest because you're going to see a Kung Fu guy go against a karate guy

or whatever. And you're matching people up almost like you were talking about trying to match up different animals. And there were no weight classes. No weight classes. No rounds. Yeah, no gloves. Some of those things I would like to see them go back to, but no weight classes, no gloves,

no time limit, at least in the first couple UFCs, as far as I can remember. And the only real rules were you weren't supposed to attack the eyes or the groin. And Horian had engaged in this experiment. The Gracies had engaged in this experiment in Brazil for decades, so they knew what was going to happen. But I don't think anybody else in the United States was particularly prepared for that. And what you saw very quickly was there's a certain handful of martial arts that will work in that environment and will work in any environment because they're functional.

And so when we're talking about mixed martial arts, we're talking about boxing and Muay Thai, American wrestling, Greco-Roman wrestling, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, judo, sambo. And so you start to look at these different arts and you say, well, what do all these arts have in common that work in this environment? And what they all have in common is they're all sports. And because they're sports, the results matter. And because the results matter, they kept to some form of meritocratic competition. They have what I call an opponent process. And that is the key to whether a martial art works or doesn't work. And I call that aliveness. It's timing, energy, and motion.

And you can train in a fully alive way and not get hurt. And aliveness doesn't necessarily mean full contact sparring. Sparring is alive, but aliveness could be drilling. Aliveness could be working the technique. You usually will work the movement a few times and make sure somebody can mechanically do it. And then we'll put them into on a live drill where there's a sense of timing and there'll be a certain amount of failure. And from that process, they start to develop functional skill. And all combat sports have a variation of that process. The best coaches in MMA, especially in the beginning, were always the wrestling coaches because they brought that whole epistemology with them when they came into the cage. And they were much better teachers in many ways than some of the Brazilian jiu-jitsu coaches who really had taken a more of a traditional martial arts teaching method and applied it to Brazilian jiu-jitsu. The only difference was their rolling. And because they're rolling,

of course, they're getting that alive training and they're developing skill. But the wrestlers came with the drills, with the movement, with understanding how to train like an athlete. And so all the arts that you'll see in mixed martial arts now have their piece from various combat sports. And that was the real, I think, message of the UFC. And now it's evolved to where it is its own sport. It's very rare you're going to see Brazilian jiu-jitsu only person versus somebody that's primarily Muay Thai or something like that. Everybody that fights now has skills, stand-up, clinching ground. They all have pretty high levels of kickboxing.

They all have wrestling. They all have Brazilian jiu-jitsu on the ground. But it took some time for that evolution to occur. jiu-jitsu on the ground. But it took some time for that evolution to occur. And that was just a process of combat sports being exposed in the cage and then eventually merging into what we now call MMA. So what is the essential toolkit for stand-up clin, and ground? How would you summarize what everyone needs to know at this point to be a fully functional combat sports athlete? Yeah. I try and think of it as ranges and delivery systems as opposed to specific martial arts. So if we talk about stand-up, clinch, and ground, whatever you're working for stand-up, stand-up would be striking.

You're not necessarily grabbing each other, but you're exchanging blows. It's going to be some variation of boxing. It's going to have a kind of a boxing base. Could be France kickboxing, Savate, Muay Thai, American boxing, but the structure, the footwork, the body mechanics, that's what works when we're striking another human being. And once you put hands on them and you're standing and you're in a clinch, there's certain amount of fixed positions, underhook, overhook, two-on-one, you know, you list out about nine or 10 different positions you're going to find yourself in, single necktie,

double necktie. And various combat sports will specialize in various positions within the clinch, but having good clinch by definition means you can fight in that and use the delivery system of clinch and flow back and forth. Then once we hit the ground, you have to be prepared to be in literally any position you could fall on the ground with another human being. Brazilian jiu-jitsu prepares you for that, but so does Judo, so does wrestling. So there's a lot of arts that can work down there. But I try and think of it, just like we say, there's no such thing as Canadian geometry. I don't really think there's

such a thing as a Japanese choke. There's a best practice for cutting off the blood supply to somebody's head. And if you get very good at that, then by definition, you're going to be good at the choke. And if we talk about a hip throw, there's some very key details that make a good hip throw work. And in that, you'll see those details in Greco-Roman wrestling. You'll see those details in judo. You'll see them in sambo.

A hip throw is a hip throw. thing, you'll see those details in judo, you'll see them in sambo. A hip throw is a hip throw. So if you kind of take the cultural affectations away from it, the different uniforms, the different rule sets, and just kind of look at it in a very scientific way, then we can start to see stand-up clinch and ground as delivery systems. And there are certain arts that, you know, we're definitely going to pull from more than others. For example, Brazilian jiu-jitsu on the ground, some kind of kickboxing or boxing for standing. And in the clinch, it's usually Greco-Roman and Muay Thai or some variation of that now. And those are the arts we're going to pull from. But I like to look at it just from a purely objective kind of scientific sense of stand-up clinching ground in all the various positions as opposed to

individual style. And how would you differentiate all of that from martial arts that are pitched toward explicitly the self-defense market, right? These are not sports. They're very self-consciously not sports. Their techniques are often described as too dangerous to be fully tested because you can't train poking people in the eye or kicking them in the UFC. And then you have arts that market themselves as the best possible set of all of those two lethal techniques, right? And something like Krav Maga would fall into this category. An art I studied in my youth was very much this, ninjutsu. I have my own opinions on this topic that will certainly echo yours, but what do you see as problematic about that particular toolkit? So I call that the street versus sport fallacy. I talk a lot about that in the book. That was one of the other reasons why I decided to write the book, that particular fallacy drives me crazy, but you've heard for decades, for years now, well, what you guys do is for sport,

where there's one-on-one and there's no weapons involved. And what we do is we're training for the quote-unquote street. And people need to understand that there's no special street technique. So the example I give in the book, which is a simple one, is a headlock. Anybody who's been in a fight, if you've ever gotten a fight as a child or as a kid in school, you probably experienced either being in a headlock or putting somebody in a headlock and punching them in the head. It's a very natural thing for kids to do when they're fighting, or people in general.

And that's a fixed position that admits to best practices. And there are ways where you can shape your body by creating, connecting to the ground to build base, and then adjusting your posture, the shape of your skeleton in relation to the other person's skeleton, where you now have leverage. And you are going to win that confrontation pretty much every time. So if someone first comes into the gym, as an example, and they don't know this, and they get put in a headlock, they can certainly be stuck, especially if the other person's bigger and stronger. And after a couple years, by the time most students start to become

what we call blue belt, which is the first belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, a headlock becomes a fairly simple, easy thing to escape from, and usually means you're going to dominate that particular scenario pretty much every time. So you go from a position where you would very likely fail to you're going to dominate that altercation pretty much every time. And the reason why you're going to dominate that altercation is because you're going to have base of posture. So you're putting your body in a position where you have leverage before you start to apply pressure, just push and pull. Now, if we do that, that best practice is the best practice in a cage.

If you're fighting in UFC and you get caught in a cage, it's going to work there. If you're in a jujitsu tournament and you're fighting for points in a jujitsu tournament, you put in a headlock, it's going to be the same there. And if you get in a fight out in a parking lot and find yourself rolling around on the ground with somebody in a headlock, it's going to be the same there. And so there's no special street headlock technique. Tactics may change. Certainly the stakes of the engagement may change.

But the root skills you develop in the delivery system of stand-up, clinch, and ground, those you carry with you in every environment, in every situation. And someone who has several years of that kind of training, even if it's just primarily, we'll just call it sport in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and they focus mostly on a tournament jiu-jitsu, sport jiu-jitsu, against someone who doesn't have any of those skills, there's really no comparison. And you're not going to make up for that deficit by grabbing somebody in the groin or thinking you're going to stick your thumb in their eyeball or something like that. That's just not how fighting works. And so this idea that some martial arts are for sport and some martial arts for street

is basically a fallacy. You can train specifically 95% of the time for the street if you want to. For example, for law enforcement, you're going to have very specific type of training and things that you're going to focus on. But the root movements of the delivery system, being able to hold someone down and mount, being able to escape somebody sitting on your chest, being able to punch somebody in the face, being able to pick someone up and drop them, being able to keep someone from picking you up and dropping you on the asphalt,

those are universal. Those transcend environment. And so that's one of the main points I try and get across to people is not only is that kind of training so much healthier, the kind of combat athletics that we're talking about, I think it's mentally healthier and physically healthier and spiritually healthier. It's also more practical at the end of the day. So you seem to be alluding to what is uniquely powerful about grappling here. I can say as someone who started his martial arts career with what I would consider largely a fake martial art, I can say that the experience was one of engaging in all of these techniques that purported to be too dangerous to train fully, and in fact they

were. Again, you can't poke your training partner in the eye for real to see if it works. But even just ordinary striking-based martial arts, even valid ones, are limited in how fully you can train them because to repeatedly get hit in the head is synonymous with getting brain damage, right? So even boxing or Muay Thai or any of these other totally legitimate striking systems are things that you have to train judiciously. And so when you're training them in a way that is compatible with safety, it can become a bit of a pantomime of violence rather than real violence. Whereas with grappling, what is unique about it is that you really can train at 100%, right? Or something close to 100%, true 100% being the full-on emergency of a real self-defense

situation. And given that you can train it that way without getting injured, right? I mean, obviously you do get injured, you know, or one can often get injured training grappling as well, but it's not the same kind of injury that you get from striking because, you know, striking to be effective really is synonymous with injury. I mean, to hit someone in the head and to have that work as a way of submitting them, i.e. you knock them out, that is a concussion, right? That is synonymous with something bad happening to them neurologically. Whereas with grappling, putting someone in a position where they cannot move

and they cannot prevent you from choking them unconscious, i.e. actually killing them if you wanted to, or breaking their arm, and they just simply tap out, they need not have been injured at all. And yet you had the experience, depending on which side of that exchange you were on, you either had the experience of completely dominating someone despite their 100% effort to not be dominated, or you had the experience, more likely over and over again in the beginning, of being completely dominated and realizing that you would have been killed or gravely injured but for the fact that this was a training circumstance. And the ability to train at that level where you're making 100% effort against 100% resistance, that is what is so unique, at least in my experience, about grappling in general and Brazilian jiu-jitsu specifically, which is the one I focused on. Yeah. Yeah, a couple of things there. Just to circle back to the street versus sport delusion for a second. If someone said to me, Matt, I want to learn how to circle back to the street versus sport delusion for a second, if someone said to

me, Matt, I want to learn how to be able to throw hands in a fight, I want to be able to punch and slip punches, and I want to be able to actually strike in a fight for the street, primarily for self-defense, I would send them to a boxing gym because the last person you want to exchange blows with in the street is a boxer. So it is completely functional. But as you mentioned, all the combat sports are pretty tough on the body. And I think what we know now about traumatic brain injury, one of my great regrets is how hard we trained when I first started and how hard we went with a lot of the students. It was way more head contact than we should have used. And we don't do that anymore, but we kind of had to evolve into smarter practices for

that because obviously those concussions build up and we don't want to get brain damage. But jujitsu, unlike Muay Thai or unlike any of the other arts, even judo and wrestling can be pretty hard on the body because the constant takedowns. Jujitsu really is an art that you can train, like you said, 100% alive, fully functional, go pretty hard if you want to on a regular basis, and not get hurt. And then as that all circles back into being able to defend yourself in a fight, if you have to end an altercation, there's really only three ways that altercation is going to end.

The person's going to go away, you know, they're just going to run off for some reason, or it's going to get broken up, or you're going to run off for some reason, or it's going to get broken up, or you're going to have to knock them unconscious, or you control them in such a way that they can't move and potentially choke them. And of those three, the most reliable way to end that fight is to control their body and to choke them unconscious. Because no matter what substances they have flowing in their system, no matter how strong they are, no matter how big they are, once you cut off the flow of blood to their head, they're going to go to sleep. And so that is the most practical, most efficient, and really the beautiful part about jiu-jitsu. One of the things that makes Brazilian jiu-jitsu unique is its constant search for increased

efficiency. And so from just a purely practical standpoint, it also makes a lot of sense to focus on your grappling part. And as Jocko and other people have said before, if you can't run away from a situation, if you're not a police officer, if you're not protecting somebody else at the time, there's really no reason why you should be engaged in some kind of status-based dispute outside a bar or something like that situation, you could just leave. If you can't, that by definition means they're holding you, they're hanging on to you, they've got their arms around you, they're preventing your exit. And that's when

the skills of Brazilian jiu-jitsu just completely take over. Yeah. So we've given an overview of the training here and the differences between real and fake training, let's just linger on the fakeness for a second because it is somehow inscrutable that it persists even to this day, right? imagining that they're preparing themselves for real violence. And we know that that is delusional, depending, you know, if it's an art like Aikido, or I mean, we could cast a program on a long list of traditional arts here. It's not that they might not have a technique here and there that is serviceable, but in general, these traditional arts are, you know, theaters of delusion. And they're, you know, extreme cases. You and I these traditional arts are, you know, theaters of delusion. Right. And they're, you know, extreme cases.

You and I have sent each other, you know, hilarious videos over the years of the truly fake martial arts that are exposed as fake when some master, you know, some kung fu master or master of another flavor who's using energy to defeat his opponents without even touching them winds up getting embarrassed by getting repeatedly hit in the face by somebody who was non-compliant. And there are many videos of this kind. How is it that this persists? I mean, how does one maintain the delusion from the side of the teacher and from the side of the student long enough for this thing to just continue for a lifetime? Yeah. That's an interesting question. And one of the questions I get asked the most when I'm teaching seminars or doing interviews is

people ask me, why do these kind of fantasy-based martial arts continue to exist? And the thing I try and remind everybody is because something's been around a long time doesn't mean it's necessarily good for us. It just means it's good at replication. And so one of the reasons why when you wrote The End of Faith, that book really struck a chord with me is because what I was reading about the arguments that you would run up, religious arguments that you'd run into, and the way the argument proceeded, even kind of which argument they used first and what the natural follow-up was, they're identical to what we're talking about in traditional martial arts. So you're going to have, it's basically religion. You're going to have an origin story of some frail martial arts master who was blind or something like this and had to learn how to fight

and everything is based on appeal to authority. And this and had to learn how to fight. And everything is based on appeal to authority. And the master had to lay down these movements and some kind of secret pattern that gets passed down from generation to generation. And then you learn the pattern so that you can carry on the movements. But there's no aliveness. So it just becomes very, it's just a sclerotic pattern and which gets repeated. Why it persists, I think, is because of why people train. I don't think everybody trains. When I went back to the Jeet Kune Do school after I'd had my run-in with Hickson and I was trying to tell him, it's like, look, I just saw a guy tap a room full of judo black belts without using his hands. He

had his hands in his belt. He was just rolling with his legs and he was submitting them. This is amazing. This is everything I've always heard martial arts could be, but isn't. This is the real thing. And I was like, well, you don't want to be on the ground in a fight. How's he ever going to take you down? And so they had all these underlying excuses, but really at the core, they weren't training for the same reason I was training. I was training because I wanted to know what worked in a fight. And honestly, that's never really changed. That's been my core driving focus of what's true in martial arts. And they were not. And so if you're not motivated by that, you know, then some of these martial arts, some of the more ridiculous ones actually get more traction, which is one of the other things that's very interesting. I'll use Sistema as an example. It's ridiculous, fake Russian martial art, but where you'll see some

obese guy barely moving and pretending to knock people down. And you'll think to yourself, I know very smart, intelligent martial artists who also train in arts like Brazilian jiu-jitsu or boxing, and who can then still kind of get suckered by that kind of stuff. And it is so transparently ridiculous. But I actually think that the ridiculous kind of nature of it is part of what attracts them to it, because in a way, they're looking for a magic bullet. They want there to be some magic martial art that can allow a frail 85-year-old person to beat up two football players in a parking lot.

And they're deeply motivated by that. And then they'll start to chase after it. And as long as I think people have that inside them, there's going to be con artists who are going to whip up some fake martial art to sell. And the sad part about it too is because I see some of the younger kids, maybe kids that were bullied in school, get attracted to some of those martial arts because of the marketing. Because the marketing is always about learn how to defend yourself in the street. And I think it's a really unhealthy path for them to go down. And I know if you took that same young man and you put him in my school or any good Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu academy or mixed martial arts school, in two or three years, they would be completely transformed, you know, in a positive way about how they deal with people. So we have a solution for those problems, but it's not what those guys were offering.

Didn't, just to circle back on that, your experience in Jeet Kune Do, didn't Dan Inosano actually become a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt in the end? Yeah, I think he's a black belt under Higan Machado. Yeah. So he must have understood the utility there. Were you training with Dan or what Jeet Kune Do school did you go back to? We would bring him up so that when I... The school I initially taught at in Portland, Oregon was a Jeet Kune Do Academy.

And my partner in the school was an instructor under Dan Inosano. So Dan would come up a couple of times a year and I got an opportunity to spend time with him and see him in seminars. I just think that they have a misguided approach. So with the Jeet Kune Do community, you basically, I don't want to go on a tangent, but real quickly, they divided into kind of two groups. So the first group, what they call original, and their primary focus is teaching and doing exactly what Bruce Lee did, which is insane. So it's a 33-year-old movie star. He died when he was 33.

Movie star was only exposed to a certain amount of material at the time. And they want to take that and kind of codify it and make that an art. And so on one hand, you have a kind of a traditional martial art being made. And in the Jeet Kune Do concepts community, they had this kind of, like I said, utilitarian approach where they would pull from all these different arts, and there would be Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and there would be Muay Thai, and there would be boxing, but then they would have some ridiculous piece from C-Lot or from Systema or who knows what, and they weren't really discriminating.

And I would hear the instructors discriminate privately amongst each other when they would talk, but when they're in front of the group, when they're in front of the seminar, it was a different story. It was all arts have something good, you know, it just depends on the context. And that began to frustrate me because it seemed, you know, duplicitous. It reminds me of what happens in religion when you'll have somebody, if you're engaged in a debate with someone, and they'll start talking about how everything in Genesis is a metaphor, but then when you go and

sit in their congregation and listen to them preach, you realize the majority of the congregation of that same person takes Genesis to be a news report. So there's a disconnect between what they're privately saying and what they're publicly teaching. And so for me, I just couldn't, I also just, I can't fathom why when we have an art like jujitsu, I don't have enough time in the day to even get close to the amount of jujitsu training that I could be doing. Why would I want to

train something silly? It just doesn't make any sense to me. But those are the two camps. And so it was like an all-you-can-eat buffet, and a lot of it was junk food. And I think they thought that you could pull different techniques from different martial arts and create your own style. And I just don't think that's how fighting works. Instead, what you should be doing is looking for the fundamental movements of stand-up, clench, and ground. And through a process of a live training over the period of 10, 15, 20 years, each individual athlete develops his or her own style. And then the temptation is to teach your style, when in reality, what you need to do is turn

around and help other athletes go through that same journey so that they can develop their own style. And what we all share and have in common are the fundamentals of stand-up clinching ground, but each fighter will be completely unique and different. And to me, that's what reading the best possible interpretation into Bruce Lee's writing, to me, that's what he was actually seeking to do. And somewhere along the way, it just got lost. Well, let's talk for a little while about the difference for men and women in this theater of concern, because it seems that men and women encounter violence, if they encounter it at all, in very different ways and by a different logic. I mean, there are very few women who are challenged to, you know,

step outside on the street and get into a fistfight, you know, i.e. a duel with a stranger, you know, outside a bar. And men tend not, at least outside of a prison context, tend not to get raped, physically controlled, and sexually assaulted the way women do. So there's just differences here. Let's start with men and the kinds of ways in which they find themselves in physical conflict unnecessarily, that is avoidably. And I think you've used the word at least once so far, and it is relevant here, and it's the concept of maturity. How do you think about maturity psychologically and its relevance to keeping men safe? Yeah. So that's a big part of the book for me,

and that was something I started to see. When I decided to write the book, I went and looked at the data first and who attacks who and when and all that kind of stuff. And one unmistakable, I think, conclusion anybody who looks at the data has to draw from is that a great deal of interpersonal violence comes as a result of issues related to maturity. So, you know, it's not so much about, even if we talk about the shootings, just to talk about gang-related shootings or assaults in the street, it's not usually financial. It's young men battling it out with other young men over stupid

status-based disputes. This is the majority category in a plurality of reasons why violence is committed. When we're talking about the majority category, that is it. And I don't think a lot of people fully realize that, is basically you have fatherless young men hurting and engaging in conflict with other fatherless young men. And that is a big portion of what we have as problematic violence. With women, it's different. So the biggest threat to a woman

is going to be her significant other. Dating is very dangerous for women. So, you know, at least half of all the women that are killed over here in the United States are killed by these women. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs

and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.