The Joe Rogan Experience - #735 - Peter Boghossian

Episode Date: December 14, 2015

Peter Boghossian is a philosophy instructor, activist, author, speaker, and atheism advocate. He is a full-time faculty member at Portland State University.

We good? Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Peter Boghossian. Hello. Thanks for having me. Thanks for doing it. Appreciate it, man. I'm doing really good. I think I found out about you through Sam Harris. I'm not sure. But you're also friends with my friend Rory Singer. Oh, Rory's a great guy.

Great guy. Great guy. And he got excited when he found out that you were coming on. Rory, of course, martial artist, former UFC fighter. Right. He's tapped me many times. I'm sure he tapped me many times, too. So you work at University of Portland State? Portland State, yeah.

Work at Portland State, teach philosophy there. And you're also a guy who is, you're described as an atheism advocate, like not just an atheist, but someone who actively promotes, hey, you should probably try this. I promote critical thinking and reason and rationality. And the two go together? Yeah. And I think that naturally leads to atheism if people are honest with themselves. And you mentioned Rory. I've been a longtime martial artist my whole life, actually. think that naturally leads to atheism if people are honest with themselves and i'm you know you mentioned rory uh i've been a long time martial arts my whole life actually really what did you start off with the fantasy based martial arts the bullshit like which ones uh i did everything i

mean i did i tried kempo i tried i i literally tried all if you were to put all of the martial arts together that don't work and put them in one suite I tried them all of them well Kempo's got some good striking techniques they just don't have an overall comprehensive system to deal with grappling yeah I tried Jeet Kune Do I tried Taekwondo

I tried Tai Chi so I tried them all actually one of my turning points was when Ron Van Cleef, who was in the original UFCs, early UFCs. Yeah, he was in like UFC 3 or 4 or something like that. Early on. And he was like in his 50s. Yeah, he was older. He's still in very good shape.

He like competed in a tournament, a karate tournament, I think deep into his 60s. Yeah, I trained with Ron and I trained with this guy, Sheehan Hector Santiago, who was quite something. And I trained with them for years in New York City. And when Ron Van Cleef got taken down and just... Dominated. That was a huge moment for me. Then that started me on this whole other path. And then I trained with Greg Jackson from New Mexico.

Were you in New Mexico? Yeah. Were you living there? Well, I started in New York City before the UFCs came along, and I trained there. And then I trained in New Mexico. And now I train with Matt Thornton from Straight Blast, who's John Kanaugh's coach, who's obviously Conor McGregor and Nelson's coach. That's a great lineage, man. So you saw Ron Van Cleef get dominated by Hoist Gracie fairly easily. It was kind of interesting to watch, like a guy who is this really well-respected in the karate world. Total legend.

And just get smoked like a beginner. Yeah, and I saw those guys, like I saw Hector Santiago fight in real life, and he is a very dangerous person. You saw him fight like in a street fight? Yeah, so I used to live in the Lower East Side between A and B. And so all of this, this was just part of my experience.

And I thought a lot of this stuff was real and it just turned out to be fantasy. It just turned out to be make-believe. Well, I think that's an interesting parallel. When we were talking before the podcast, we were talking about critical thinking in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and martial arts in general. general and there are a lot of people that have very distorted ideas of many things not just of their ability to handle themselves physically but just of the world in general and i think martial arts sort of highlights a lot of that critical those critical thinking issues yeah and i think that's that's one of the reasons i'm so excited to come on this podcast today is because i think you're ideally situated to have a have that me. Because Brazilian jiu-jitsu specifically, aliveness training, training against resisting

opponents, we don't talk about, this is a huge area that nobody is talking about. We can understand all of reason and rationality through jiu-jitsu, through corrective mechanisms, through aligning your beliefs with reality. I mean, little things from testing ideas yourself, not having to take it on faith. I was talking to, I was talking to, I guess the name eludes me now. I think that there's something, Chris Howder.

I think, he's a super good guy. Great guy. Yeah, yeah. There's something in the process. So you've been tapped thousands of times. Sure, probably if I counted them all up. Yeah, I've been tapped thousands of times. There's something about the type of person who would either, if you frame it in terms of subjecting yourself to that, yourself to that, there's something about that that fundamentally differentiates us, if you will,

from people in fantasy-based martial arts. It develops a kind of character. It develops a kind of attitude when you place yourself in situations and get tapped. It's a type of corrective mechanism. Jiu-jitsu is a corrective mechanism. It can help you align your beliefs with reality. And I'd love to explore that with you today and talk about what that means. Just in the case that some people might not know what that means, what it means by tap is submit. When you do jiu-jitsu, I believe it or not, I've talked to, I just assume that people know what we're talking about. But I've talked to people who go, okay, what is jiu-jitsu? Like, what are you doing? Submission grappling, which is jiu-jitsu like what are you doing what submission grappling which is uh jiu-jitsu is one style of it but it's all about using leverage and technique

against joints or chokes against arteries like choke holds to cut off the blood to your brain or neck cranks and when you train jiu-jitsu as opposed to other martial arts other than wrestling which i I consider a martial art, you can go full speed on that, you go 100%. And that's the difference between those martial arts and striking-based martial arts where you really shouldn't go 100% because you only have so many punches your head can take before your body just stops working.

That's just a fact. You could train sparring hard for a certain amount of years, but your mind is going to turn into mush. There's just no doubt about it. We know that for a fact. People do jiu-jitsu into their 60s and 70s. Oh, yeah. Well, Anthony Bourdain didn't even start until he was 58,

and he's obsessed. He trains every day. He goes sometimes twice a day he'll take a private in the morning and then he'll train in a group class after that he's a maniac but the difference being like you absolutely know what works and doesn't work and you absolutely know how good people are so if we rolled you can't fake it yeah if we rolled 20 times and you tapped me 18 of those 20 times you know and someone and someone said, how good's Peter?

I'm like, he taps me most of the time. And then we know, you know. We would know the opposite in that case, but yeah. Well, you know what I'm saying. We know. It's clear. Yeah, and so you can't fake it. There's no pretending.

There's no bullshit. There's no like, you know, bowing rituals and masters and all this nonsense. following rituals and masters and all this nonsense. All of those structures, I think, are put in place to conceal the underlying paucity of the effectiveness of the techniques. And people come up with this. So the other thing about that that I think is so important is that all of these combat-based martial arts, I've been waiting for this conversation for a long time. All of those combat, these combat-based martial arts,

let's take a look at, you mentioned wrestling. We know it works. We know, there are some things we just know that they work. We know the kickboxing works. We also know that it's head trauma for kickboxing. We know that Muay Thai, which is, in my opinion, an insane activity, but we know that it works. We know that Western boxing works.

We know that jujitsu works. So the reason that we know we can test these things, we can take people and hopefully later on, we'll talk about the difference between Brazilian jujitsu and Japanese jujitsu, right? Same techniques, different pedagogy, different training method. That's a $2 word for training method. We can take that. We can adjudicate these things because we take two people of equal weight and we stick them in a cage and we have some very basic rules. And also for your listeners who aren't familiar, MMA gloves are very thin. I think people who don't understand MMA, they think that they're kind of like boxing gloves. They're very, very thin gloves. They don't afford much protection at all. They really let the person punch you harder. So they don't have to worry about breaking their hand. But as far as like cushion to your brain,

or your head. Yeah, they're not a cushioning. Yeah. So we can look, we can judge what works. And one of the ways that we do that is two people, same size, put them in a cage, and we see what works. The other thing is that when you train against a resisting opponent, and I think this is the key, you can figure out what's real. Like that's a mechanism. It's a corrective mechanism. It's a way for you to discern make believe land and reality, bullshit, reality, you know, what, what works and what doesn't work. And once we start introducing that in systems, like, look, let's say that I said to you, hey, I've come up with this technique. I know this is going to sound crazy, but it's incredibly effective.

And you say, what is it? And I say, it's a pinky blitzkrieg. I get a lot like that. You can use it. Okay. And so I say this. You just come attacking with pinkies. Yeah.

I say, you know, but it's a certain, you know, stance. And I do this. Right. You know, come Bantus stance. And you I say this. You just come attacking with pinkies. Yeah. I say, you know, but it's a certain stance and I do this. Right. Come bantus stance. And you say, really? And so you call up, unbeknownst to me, you call up, you know, like I heard her show your buddies with Eddie Bravo, right? You call up and say, look, we got this guy in here. He says that he has this technique, pinky blitzkrieg.

I'm going to send them over there, put them up against your good purple belt, get it on video, and we'll see what happens. So it's a way to test it. Now, if that works, you'd be like, holy shit, like I can't, this is awesome. Like nobody ever thought of the pinky blitzkrieg. It's incredible. But what you've done there is that's a core component of critical thinking. It's a willingness to revise your beliefs. It may sound like bullshit, but you're completely open to the possibility if this works against a resisting opponent, right? So let's say that I tap out his,

tap out his, uh, purple belts and you say, all right, well, brown belt at some point, it would be so absurd that you'd think that Eddie and I were in on it, right? I don't know the guy. I've never rolled with him, never met him. So you call someone else, but, and then you can test it. So you can watch it. Eventually you can test it with your friends. So this idea of testability and people can figure out things for themselves. They don't have to go on the history of tradition or, you know, some guy punched a bull in the head or there was a blind nun walking through this and she killed all these guys That's what we always had to deal with that was the history of martial arts was always Masayama killed a bull Exactly, we always hear about Masayama. Who's this was he Kyo Kishin or I think he's Kyo Kishin, right?

So his lineage I don't I don't remember but he was a famous Japanese guy who apparently had killed a bull right punch Which and then that that that that comes down as legend so when people are said well you know how do you know this works why should you do it well this guy killed a bull yeah well did you see the bull did you see it you know so it's a it's a fable and the fable takes on a life of its own and the the genius about the ultimate fighting challenge was then you had a way to test ideas. You can literally watch these things unfold against people in the early ones, people of different weight classes. They had the sumo wrestler and the kickboxing guy.

But not only that, it was an opportunity for you to figure out what was real right and there's something that's incredibly appealing to that like think about think about kata right what a fucking waste of time like not only is it a waste of time in terms of let's say what kata is it's like you want to go yeah so it's well they're forms and what a form is it's like a pattern of movement that you that everyone does you get one when you get your white belt you practice that you get really good at it you do it for a test you get your yellow belt and in a lot of traditional martial arts that is part of how you test right you know I I got my black belt in taekwondo and I had to remember all those right goofy moves

and they never came into play ever when I competed they were there were none I got my black belt in Taekwondo, and I had to remember all those goofy moves. And they never came into play ever when I competed. They were sort of nonsense. It was a waste of time. Yeah. And as soon as I did get my black belt, I forgot all of them. Yeah. I barely remembered them.

It's a waste of time, but I'd argue it's even worse than a waste of time. If it were just a waste of time, then, you know, you could have been staring at a wall, but you thought that you were doing something to help you achieve a goal. And the goal was to win a fight. So you thought you were engaged in activity that the whole, there's no resisting opponent. So when there's no resisting opponent, it's not, it's not testable. You can't bring the tools of science to it. So you thought you were engaging in activity that brought you closer to your desired objectives, but it didn't. Here's the argument against that, though.

What it does do is it helps your precision movement. precision movement and you could argue that learning how to execute these patterns in a very beautiful way shows control and it shows precision movement they aren't the problem with it is that there's some of those movements that are completely ineffective like double knife hand block or thrusts knife hand thrusts there's movements that are they're not applicable to mma yeah but the concept behind it is actually something that a lot of really good mixed martial artists like carlos khan did or even conor mcgregor are doing they're doing a lot of like movement training and um although i don't think kata is the best way to achieve those kind of goals yeah i think that there's something to be said for not just martial arts techniques,

but other things as well. Like yoga, I think is extremely effective in enhancing your ability to control and manage your body in movements. It gives you weird strength. So we're on the same page. So think about it. I'd offer a constructive way to think about it like this. So what you just said said I don't know anything about basketball So I'm gonna just use basketball example. There's a ball and a net and black eyes That's the court so people so so some white guys when when you think about basketball What you just described was a guy on a court practicing a layup over and over again I think a layup is like when you bounce it and you shoot it. You don't know the layup?

How dare you? I don't know anything about basketball. You run up to the net thing and you throw the ball in that hole and everybody gets crazy. Okay, but think about, don't think about, so I think thinking about kata like a layup in terms of precision is the wrong way to look

at it. Think about kata as a layup without a basketball. Think about the practice of basketball, the practice, quote-unquote, of basketball, without a basketball. Right. Okay, here's the problem with that. What about shadowboxing? Shadowboxing is extremely effective.

And shadowboxing, in a sense, is a form of kata. Shadowboxing, including not just boxing, but kicking and punching and kneeing, is a long-accepted, excellent form of training and visualization. Yeah, so one of the things that shadowboxing, you can warm up with shadowboxing. When I warm up in jits, and just to be up front, I suck. I've been doing it for a long time, but I'm not very good. What belt are you in? I love it.

Blue belt. How long have you been doing it? I'd tell you I've been bashed since 1999. How dare you? How come you're still a blue belt? How often do you do it? Well, only once a week if I'm lucky. Oh, okay.

You've got to go Anthony Bourdain style. You've got to get obsessed. Yeah, I just don't have a lot of opportunities. Like, I have a family that I push forward. week if i'm lucky oh okay so you gotta go anthony bourdain style you gotta get obsessed yeah i just don't have a lot of opportunities like i have a family that i push forward i have a work career and i have there you have a life a life yeah um fucking people with their lives yeah so you know i'm not i'm not speaking about it from any kind of like you know i'm an expert in this right i understand what you're saying yeah but i think what's interesting about this is the philosophical implications. And so like, like when I warm up, I like to warm up with another body to slow roll. You know, I like to just, because then I have an opponent. If you're

practicing something over and over again, the problem with that is there's no corrective mechanism. You could be doing the technique incorrectly. And then when you actually go to execute it, you've had a body memory for that technique that hasn't, that's been, that's taken you away from your goal. Do you mean with striking? Do you mean shadow boxing? Well, you used the example of shadow boxing. So you're saying with shadow boxing that you need another body in order for it to be effective?

No, I'm saying that like, so let's say that you shadow box a hammer punch. Okay. So stuff that doesn't work, likeata things like double knife hands yeah even if you if you even if you if you uh shadow box jabs and crosses and uppercuts and stuff even if you do that if you could not be doing it correctly and then you'd be practicing the wrong thing over and over again. Right. And that will take you away from your goal. That's why you need, you have to have some kind of a resisting opponent. Resisting opponents are the corrective mechanisms for everything. And just as they're the corrective mechanisms in the physical domain, they're the corrective mechanisms in the cognitive and intellectual domains as well.

That's why prayer is so insidious. It's because people think that they're doing something that's in their own well-being. They're doing something that's good, but they're just talking to themselves. But there is some aspects, and I would agree with you. I don't know if I would, I don't like labels. I have a real hard time with labels, even labels for things that I think are good things. Like I think that some people get a lot out of prayer and not necessarily because they're praying to a non-existent deity or they really truly believe that if they wish for a new car, it's going to come to them. But I think that the mind, when focused on positive thinking and focused on love and focused on

the tenets of Christianity, like of godly behavior and compassion and all these different things, and you truly are looking out for your fellow man and wanting to be a good person, all those things. I think there is merit in that. I think you can certainly find benefit in that as a tool for mental management. I mean, does that mean there's a guy in the clouds with a harp and all that jazz? Of course not. But I think that it's, in a sense, like Tai Chi.

I mean, if a guy thinks that he's going to take Tai Chi only and get into the UFC, it's hilarious. He's going to get fucked up. But if a guy in the UFC, like Conor McGregor, for instance, who's so concentrated on movement, really gets involved in Tai Chi, I think he would probably get at least some benefit out of it. Because in that slow moving, this like rhythmic pattern, what you're doing is you're exercising your body in an unusual way and expanding the possibilities of your interactions with opponents, expanding what your body can

and can't do. And I think yoga does that. I think there's a lot of different things that do that. So we need, there are about 20 really interesting things that you just said. I think we need to kind of unpack those a little bit. So if you talk about, so take a look at prayer and what people think that they just said. I think we need to kind of unpack those a little bit. So if you talk about, so take a look at prayer and what people think that they're doing. And then let's, this is why you're the perfect person to talk to this about. Then compare that to a martial art that's

bullshit. Like Tai Chi is a good example. So people think that they're going towards a certain end winning fights. I don't know about now anymore, but certainly when I— I think there's some people that teach Tai Chi and even practice Tai Chi that are just doing it for their health. Yeah, my dad is one of those people. So he has zero ambitions to win a fight with anybody. He's in his late 70s. So if somebody says that, I have no problem with that at all. And I think it's true. And

certainly motion would be better than non-motion. And the problem is exactly the same problem with religion. When people are making objective claims, they're making claims about the nature of reality. And I want to know what's true. And we don't even, the problem is that people, every time you talk about faith or religion or have you, people shut down or they have barriers. we don't even, the problem is that people, every time you talk about faith or religion or have you, people shut down or they have barriers. We don't need to talk about that. All we need to do is talk about jujitsu. That's why this is so perfect. Because with jujitsu, you can figure things out yourself with, you can figure out what works, right? The pinky blitz you can figure out what doesn't work. You can figure out what you're capable of if if i tap you if if you tap me out 20 times i'm under no illusions that the 21st time i mean i could get

lucky you know like i could get lucky against rory i could get lucky against matt thornton it's always possible i could get it's highly unlikely but i could get lucky the problem is that if you look at get lucky. The problem is that if you look at the way that people engage these rituals in their lives, what these people are doing is they think it's taking them towards an end. It's exactly identical to fantasy-based martial arts. They think it's taking them towards an end. It's not. Right. I think also a parallel, like in fantasy based martial arts, the benefits of it. Like I was like I said, I did Taekwondo for a long time and I got really good at it and I competed a lot. And I was essentially in a cult. I mean, Taekwondo, although it's a beneficial cult and it helped me a lot and it in a lot of ways and made me the person that I am today because in training and doing really difficult things and competing and overcoming nerves and fear and all that stuff there's a lot of benefit in it but then um I had a distorted

perception of reality because of it and that distorted perception of reality was shattered once I started boxing exactly and I realized like oh God, I was getting just punched in the face. I thought I knew how to fight when really I just knew how to do Taekwondo. Right. And then I had to learn all the other aspects of martial arts. Like, one of the most sobering moments of my life was when I trained at Carlson Gracie's on Hawthorne in Hollywood in 1996. And this is before Vitor Belfort made his debut in the UFC. And I had this long, extensive history of competing in Taekwondo tournaments,

and I had kickboxed, and I'd done quite a bit of boxing training, and I wrestled in high school. I thought I was a pretty good martial artist. And I just got fucking mauled. Like, I had never exercised. Like, I had no idea what I was pretty good martial artist, and I just got fucking Mauled like I had never exercised like I had no idea what I was doing And I just remember the feeling of helplessness and the guy who one of the bunch people mauled me But one of the guys that mauled me I'll never forget is this Brazilian kid He was a purple belt who was basically my size He wasn't any bigger than me, and he wasn't like some super mario sperry black belt guy yeah

he was just some guy just beat the fuck out of me i mean he almost disdainfully and he was a nice guy but i mean when he was training he was training really hard and he didn't give me any slack i was just getting wrecked and i remember thinking wow what a stupid illusion i was under yeah and and and so in a sense i think it's i, I guess that's a question we could talk about, but I don't know, is it incumbent upon us to help people out of these traditional martial arts? Like, I did, I had a very similar experience. I trained in stick and knife fighting for years.

That's why my hands have all these cuts. Yeah, a screamer. That's why my hands have all these cuts and are all mad. You trained with real knives? Real knives and sticks, yeah. I did this stuff with the Dog Brothers, and Dan Medina was my coach for years. I got a black belt and stick at knife fighting.

Think about black belts and stick at knife fighting. Well, I mean, if you're in a place where the bullets are all gone and no one knows how to make a gun, and bows and arrows haven't been invented. That's where I was going to go with this. Where I was going to go with this is I, so I thought I was, like you, I thought I was a pretty good martial artist. Right. And then I fought a guy, fought actually Greg Jackson, with sticks and just beat the shit out of me.

And I mean, I had a stick and I'd been training with a stick for like years at that point. And it was just a huge wake up call for me. You guys fought like in a competition? We fought in like a fight fight. And I had only on a fight fight like you were mad at each other no well like a you know like a party's arm to the submission i mean we were like i was not so it was a competition well no it was at his old place and this is when i started training with him and we i think we put put on very light hockey gear, and I was just going to beat the shit out of him.

You thought? Yeah, well, that was my goal. Because he said, this was before I learned about aliveness training and resisting opponents. Aliveness? Yeah, so that's like Matt Thornton's meme, and it's a combination of, that's a whole other discussion. It's like timing energy and motion, resisting opponents, ways to figure out what's true and what works.

And this gets back to our discussion about shadowboxing and about training other ways. I had trained with a stick and I had learned all these kind of basically this kata things. But I also trained against a willing opponent like when you watch these stick demos the key to to look for is what the uk does the feeder you know it's not what the guy does uk i think this is a japanese word for like the guy who's feeding in you know like oh okay so the guy who's i do this and then right the guy people most of the people are listening to this it's like probably 90 even though though a lot are watching it so what you're demonstrating for those who listening is like there's these live these drills that you do or

someone will pretend to throw a punch yes another person will step aside and do their counter-attack and it looks awesome so the UK guy is a guy we in Taekwondo we used to call it the one steps the other one steps yeah and. Yeah. And it's a great example of a fantasy-based martial art because it brings you further from reality. It makes you think you can do something that you simply cannot do. So what you need to do in those circumstances is you need to watch the feeder, the person who's giving the reverse punch. It's like a punch that comes off of your – I'm trying to be conscious of your readers now. A punch that comes off of your ribs and goes out and they almost never hit somebody. Like if you watch the Steven Seagal when he got his black belt, there's a famous black and white video that's out there.

Jamie can link to it, I guess. It looks awesome. But it's bullshit. It's all choreographed. Right. Aikido. Yeah. It looks awesome, but it's bullshit. It's all choreographed. Right, Aikido. Yeah, so the key deliverable, I think, in this, one of those in this conversation is that

whether it's shadowboxing or whether it's kata or whether it's taking a knife and doing a drill, when I used to do those train with sticks, I was really, really good, but I always knew the angle. So it was fantasy-based. If you took the angle out of it, I would just get beaten to death I mean peeps I'm what do you mean by angle so like in derobio or screamer there are 12 angles it goes 90 it goes like 75 degrees 75 degrees the other way baseball swing

reverse baseball swing stab overhand stab attack to the knees attack to the other knees. So when you do those, when you train, you know, guys just do the numbers. One, two, three, and, you know, you get so good at it. I mean, it's pretty crazy. I can show you stuff here. You know, it's like if I know the angle, it looks awesome. Right.

I've seen guys do it. It looks pretty badass. But it's bullshit. It's bullshit. It's fantasy-based martial arts because the opponent isn't resisting. Right. You have to have a resisting opponent. But here's the deliverable for this conversation, I think, is that if you train in a certain way, absent a corrective mechanism, but you think that corrective mechanism is an actual corrective mechanism. In other words, you think you're training in a way that will bring you closer to reality,

but you're becoming further from reality. What that does is that's devastating because you need that corrective mechanism. You need to bring your thoughts in alignment with reality. And that was the great thing about the UFCs is because now we have all these people and we can see what works. So think about the guys, you know, I listened to your show with Eddie Bravo, I think, and he said, you know, he was just practicing the rear naked on his leg.

Well, that's not going to work because there's no corrective mechanism. I don't think you understand what he's saying. Well, maybe I wasn't. He was exercising his squeeze on his leg He still does it and it's because one of the things about jujitsu about finishing a technique is how hard can you squeeze? How long can you squeeze? So what Eddie does is he'll do this like well for watching TV together. He'll do it He puts his knee up before watching fights He'll put his knee up like this and he'll rear naked choke his own knee and just squeeze it and what he's doing

is he's working on his squeeze and it's not thinking that that's going to make him get to that position where he can squeeze someone better well or against a live resisting opponent he's it's an exercise okay so that's cool so if if the idea then is that we'll work on your squeeze then that's different from thinking that if I train. What if you practice? Think about like practicing shadow boxing to use your example. And your hook is always wide or you stand here. And then when you get into a fight, you deal with a resisting opponent and you do that.

So you would have gone down a path to make you worse in the action. But that's assuming that you're doing it incorrectly if you train correctly and you learn the techniques correctly and then you apply them in your shadow boxing correctly it's going to benefit you okay so that's the question the question is and i mean the the great thing about this conversation is that we can test this stuff, right? I mean, this is the ultimate, we have, we have people we have. So for that, we need to look at the, the only big word I think we need here today is pedagogy, like the training method. It's a big word for training method. We don't even need pedagogy to say training method. So we look at the training method and what I think you would need for that is, well, I guess here's my question to you.

What I think you would need for that is, well, I guess here's my question to you. Would it be better in your mind to train shadow boxing or to do some light boxing with guys, with a focus mitt over there, guys holding up focus mitts at the same speed that you were shadow boxing? This is where I think the conversation is going awry. Okay. It's not that it's better. All those things have their merits. Shadow boxing has its merit.

Yoga has its merit. Yoga is not going to teach you how to be a better fighter. But if you learn all the techniques of jujitsu and you incorporate yoga into your training, it will likely elevate your jujitsu. I have absolutely no question that that's true. And I think that that goes along with shadowboxing, especially if you're a striker. If you're a striker and you don't shadowbox, I think you're doing yourself a disservice. I think there is a benefit to visualization and to movement and to there's things that happen when you throw combinations in the air as far as your dexterity, especially with kicking, and your ability to even do combinations without any resistance or without anybody trying to counter you.

There's benefit in stringing together those reps, those repetitions. Yeah, okay. So I think there is a benefit in that. Those repetitions. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I think there is a benefit of that. And I think, so sometimes if I, if I go in to straight blast and there's nobody on the

mat, there's nobody to roll with. Sometimes what I'll do is I'll just go through the motions. Like I'll do rolls or I'll do go over my back shoulder or I'll just, you know, fall down. There's merit, there's merit to that in that I think I already know how to do it. I mean, I'm sure that I could improve on it without any question at all. So, like, your example of yoga is a really good one. I think it's certainly true that you can use muscles in yoga that you don't in another activity. And I think that those have benefits to MMA. In fact, I'm sure they have

benefits to a lot of other things. So not just the flexibility aspect and the body maintenance, there's a lot of good things to it. Yeah, I don't do it myself. I probably should. But if I would, I'd just spend that hour doing jujitsu to be blunt with you. But I think that you can get things out of yoga and get things out of these other activities. But youitsu to be blunt with you but i think that you can get things out of yoga and get things out of these other activities but you have to be conscious about the reason why you're doing these things and the way to get better ultimately like yeah so you could shadow box at a certain level and again i guess i think we can think about it in terms of the layup example again it's not necessarily the the ball is the corrective mechanism with the layup.

The person is the corrective mechanism in the fight. And as long as somebody knows what they're doing and they're training in a certain way, it's not necessarily that shadowboxing will take one away from one's goal if it's being practiced correctly. I think kata would take one away from one's goal. But I think that the whole project like if you think about and then that's why I think the shadowboxing is such a good example

of this What is it that did Okay, so when someone shadowboxes the point is to warm up that accomplishes that you could do that with squats too, right? Someone or you know, you could do that anyone of a number of you're looking at me like you're lost no no just okay we're cool we're fine i'm just listening that was all in your head man yeah it's probably i got that look like what are you talking about no no i'm just listening yeah well if you think i'm if you think I'm off track, let me know. You might be a little off track in that I think you think there's very little benefit in a lot of these activities that I think aren't primary activities.

I think, yeah, if you wanted to break it down to what is the only— See, there's just this broad range of things you could do to improve all sorts of athletic endeavors. Like there's a lot of people that don't believe you should do any strength and conditioning training. You should just do technique and you should just do sparring. There's a lot of people that go that route. And then there's other people that think that's absolutely foolish. You should primarily, especially once you learn the skills you should if you're competing you should focus Primarily on strength and conditioning because really it's just about burning your body out and reaching an incredibly high level of cardio

So that when you compete, you know, all these techniques are ready You will now have a gas tank that's superior to your opponents and that will lead to victory Like there's a lot of modalities and there's a lot of schools of thought. Can we talk about that for a sec? Can we talk about that for a sec? Sure. So it's interesting to me, I see guys who come in who are just super strong. And I think to a certain extent, we need to be careful because strength, and again, I'm not speaking from experience so much, I'm speaking just conceptually. I think there's a tendency for strong guys or big guys to over-rely upon their strength and their size. Small man jiu-jitsu is the best jiu-jitsu.

Yeah, exactly. That's why I tell people if they're thinking about learning jiu-jitsu, learn from a little person. Because little guys, you know, like a Hoyler Gracie or even Eddie Bravo, before he started lifting weights, Eddie's quite a bit bigger now. But Eddie was always like, you know, 150 pounds, 140 pounds. So when he was rolling, he would always be rolling with big guys and he had to rely on perfect technique. Whereas a guy like Frank Mir, who's a very large man, has a lot of physical strength and they rely on that. Yeah. And I think, well, you tell me what you think. Do you think that if somebody goes in strong and they focus on that, often that that can come at the expense of learning techniques? Yes, it can.

But here's the problem. The concept of strength and conditioning, a lot of people think, oh, well, you're doing squats and deadlifts. Yeah. A good example is a guy I've had on this podcast before. His name is Nick Kersan. He trains Rafael Dos Anjos. He trains Ruslan Provodnikov, who's a famous boxer, a lot of world-class athletes, Joe Schilling, who's Glory, the t-shirt I'm wearing, one of their best fighters,

excellent kickboxer, world champion. What he's doing is his strength and conditioning program, he trained under Marv Marinovich, and Nick does a lot of plyometric exercises, a lot of sprinting, a lot of box jumps, and all these really unorthodox techniques. And the idea is to improve your ability to execute things, improve your ability to close the distance, improve your ability to get out of the way, improve your ability to maintain a high workload through the rounds.

You know, like if you can only throw, let's say say 50 kicks in a round before you get exhausted And if you can improve that through strength strength and conditioning make it 75 or 80 you're gonna have a significant advantage over the paints that you can push on your opponent and That is in his opinion and many other people's opinion This is this is a really open debate right now in the world of martial arts because it has not been solved This is a really open debate right now in the world of martial arts because it has not been solved because it relies on so many variables. It relies on the athlete themselves, their mental fortitude, their dedication to their craft. How good is their technique in the first place before they embark on a strength and conditioning program? There's so many variables.

I think to unbox all this and to make it a little bit easier for people that are going what the fuck are they talking about? What we're saying is there's a lot of people that have distorted ideas about reality itself and a method for Exposing that kind of thinking which is like this sort of Dogmatic religious thinking, which it's ultimately accepted by all the people around you, but never, never critically judged.

Yeah. A really good method is jujitsu. And the, the meaning, the reason why jujitsu is such a good method is because jujitsu is one of the few martial arts that you could practice at any age and you could apply tech and you could also watch those techniques being applied by other people and when you know jujitsu like yesterday i went to the eddie bravo invitational which was at the orphan theater in downtown la some of the best jujitsu fighters in the world were going at

it uh and it was really amazing to watch it It was awesome. And it was a crowd filled with thousands of people who were fans of jiu-jitsu and practitioners. So it was a really educated crowd. And what was cool about that is we all understood. Like when a guy got to a position like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And the crowd would cheer when someone would get out of a heel hook. Or they would cheer when a guy would be able to tap a guy with a rear naked choke and we were watching all these things play out

so there was lessons for me as Someone who's not competing is sitting in the audience because I've spent so much time doing jiu-jitsu I was watching this sort of these interactions take place in a very logical Truth-seeking it's a truth-seeking community. Yes, exactly. I mean, when the techniques work, the techniques work. And by the way, what's interesting is Brazilian jiu-jitsu, as it was first created or first sort of established,

came from Japanese jiu-jitsu and Elio Gracie and Carlos Gracie, who were probably two of the most important people ever in the history of martial arts. Carlos Gracie, who were probably two of the most important people ever in the history of martial arts, they, they sort of manipulated those techniques and improved upon them and made the art more about the submissions than it was about the stand up and the bringing the fight to the ground. And in doing so, they established a series of techniques. And, you know, we refer to those techniques as the basics there are some people in that world that think that the basics are all you need and they don't accept the new techniques and it's really fascinating because that's essentially how jiu-jitsu became effective

in the first place is because the new techniques that were established by carlos and ilio gracie and all these different movements like the guard, like learning how to do triangles off your back and all these different things, which people had no idea in the early UFCs. Like when Hoyce Gracie tapped out Dan Severin, everybody was like, what the fuck is he doing? He's got his legs wrapped around his neck and his arm. What is this?

And then Dan's about to go out and he taps and everybody's like, whoa, this is crazy. Well, those were, in our world, completely new techniques. Well, there's a lot of new techniques that are constantly being established now by these young, innovative practitioners that some of the old guard are ignoring. And the real question is, is that smart? Do you just need the basics? And it's a hot debate right now but again this hot debate can be proven that's exactly what i was going to say yes that's exactly right and if as a result of this being proven somebody doesn't change their mind so the core piece that what's really important is belief revision right critical

thinking is all about i made a mistake i was wrong i thought this you know what, I made a mistake, I was wrong, I thought this, you know what, I made a mistake. And so if they don't do that, then they're somehow deficient in that attitudinal disposition of critical rationality. But it would seem to me, if it could be demonstrated, people who want to seek the truth, in this case, they want to win against a resisting opponent. Some would. Some would accept the data. But many haven't. And my good friend Eddie Bravo is a perfect example of that. I went with Eddie to Brazil in 2003 and he competed in the world championships and he beat Gustavo Dantes, who was a world champion at the time, he tapped him in his first fight

and then after that he fought Hoyler Gracie, who is one of the greatest Brazilian jiu-jitsu competitors of all time. Hoyler Gracie is a national hero. They closed the other mats off. They put a spotlight on the main event. And they thought that Hoyler was going to wreck this young kid. He wasn't even a black belt at the time. Eddie was a brown belt, okay? And Eddie, with his unorthodox techniques that people had laughed at, tapped Hoyler Gracie in front of everybody.

And he got him with a triangle, but the setup was his rubber guard setup. with his unorthodox techniques that people had laughed at, tapped Hoyler Gracie in front of everybody. And he got him with a triangle, but the setup was his rubber guard setup. He has all these crazy guard setups, and his game has advanced light years since then. But the point being that people mocked him for that. It didn't help that he went to his next fight. He fought Leo Vieira, and he popped his rib early in the fight and got dominated in that fight and almost got tapped. But there was also a giant emotional letdown

because you couldn't believe he just tapped Hoyler Gracie. And now he's moving on and he's fighting Leo Vieira, who's another monster Brazilian jiu-jitsu artist. But here's the point. For the longest time, people, there was two schools of thought. There was the old guard that just did not accept him.

They openly mocked him. And, you know They really criticized his whole movement and his his techniques what champions easy produce all this this doesn't really work on real fighters Until he had a rematch with Hoyler many years later and just wrecked him I mean it was it was worse than the first time because Hoyler didn't tap but he got his knee destroyed I mean if you watch that video didn't tap but he got his knee destroyed i mean if you watch that video horla just deals with the fact that his knee is getting ripped apart while eddie is mangling it but it was never a moment where eddie was in trouble he dictated the entire match and we played the fight on uh on the tv on

on the podcast and had eddie explain what he was doing and even when it looked like horla was improving the position, Eddie was like, no, I let him do that so I could do this, and then I would adjust. And he was like, explain. I pulled him back on top of me because I knew if I did that, I would be able to move his arm higher up on my shoulder, then I rolled him back onto his back, and then I can get deeper in on it.

And when he was explaining that, it was even more humiliating because you've got this guy, Horler Gracie, who's a multiple-time world champion, who just did not learn these new techniques. Feels like he's got these old techniques, and that's it. So this is the application of it in action. That's exactly right. And if you don't learn it, and if you're not willing to revise your beliefs, and if you're not willing to test this and accept the conclusion, Yeah. You know, you might think something's common sense. Common sense is irrelevant. Right.

Which relevance is what works. Yeah, these new techniques that are constantly being innovated, they're constantly changing. Like, it's almost impossible to stay up on all of it unless it's a monster part of your life and you're absorbing them every day. Like, the leg lock game is this new element that over the last few years has really come into play in a major way thanks to a bunch of guys, John Donaher, Eddie Cummins, Gary Tonin,

who won the Eddie Bravo Invitational yesterday. These really high-level practitioners and instructors are constantly adding new improvements to approaches and techniques. So it's all applicable. It's all you can watch it happen in real time. And even as someone who's not competing like me sitting in the audience, I understand the positions and the movements. So when I see all this new stuff and I see all these new approaches,

it's like, wow, this game just continues to grow and evolve. Yeah, and what amazes me is when I watch kids' classes, kids are doing the craziest stuff. I mean, they really have stood on the shoulders of giants, and they're doing stuff that's just so advanced. And I look at that now, and I think, wow, it's like speed would be the great thing. How quickly these techniques and this game has been advanced in a very, very short period of time. There has literally been in my lifetime a revolution in the martial arts. Yeah, it really has. I've been saying this for a while, but short period of time, there has literally been in my lifetime a revolution in the martial arts. Yeah, it really has.

I've been saying this for a while, but I'll say it again. The UFC has changed martial arts so radically that there's been more improvement since 1993. There's been more evolution than there have been in the last 10,000 years. That's real. That's 100% true. You go back and watch martial arts from 1993 and watch the UFC today, it's a completely different realm. It's fascinating. The difference

is, of course, when you talk about jujitsu being applicable, it's applicable inside jujitsu. The problem is when you get someone who's a really good wrestler, who's an awesome kickboxer, and you can't use your jujitsu, you're still going to get fucked up. Like a guy like Chuck Liddell, who you're not going to take down, and he's going to knock you dead. He's a great wrestler. I mean, he's a perfect anti-jiu-jitsu guy. Okay, but even that, look at that. I gave five things that work.

Boxing and wrestling were two of the five. They train against resisting opponents. Right. So it's no surprise then, and maybe sometimes- But he comes from a Kempo background, you know. I mean, you listed that as one of the martial arts that don't really work, but that's the martial art that Chuck Liddell learned for striking under John Hackelman. Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, that's another example. People can, like I saw, I can't, so you're much more versed in the specifics than I am, but I saw a-

Too versed. A Gunnar Nelson fight in which he did a, I think it was a back roundhouse to someone's head. Back roundhouse? A hook kick? No, he did a, I thought he did a roundhouse to someone's head. Okay. He trained in traditional karate for years. Huh?

Yes. Yeah, he's a brown belt in karate. Yeah, and so it's not that these techniques can't be integrated or that they don't work. Part of the problem is that they're sold as systems. You know, it's like instead of picking and choosing. So if everybody trained against resisting opponents, it's not clear to me that there would be any styles. Styles would fade away.

Right. And then that highlights the problem that we brought up earlier that you really can't resist. You can't train 100% resisting with kickboxing if you want to be a healthy member of society. You're going to get fucking brain damage. I mean, I'm pretty sure I have brain damage, and I stopped really getting hit in the head when I was 22.

I mean, I really haven't been hit in the head that much since then, but for sure something's fucked up in there. Yeah, I was watching a guy hit the pads about a brown belt a couple weeks ago, and I just thought to myself, I mean, the whole thing was moving. And I thought to myself, like, wow, like if that guy ever hit me. Oh, yeah. I mean, that would be it. I mean, it would just be over. And I watch people kick the heavy bag sometimes.

Have you ever seen Melvin Manhoef kick the pads? Jesus Christ. kick the heavy bag sometimes have you ever seen melvin manhoef kick the pads jesus christ pull up melvin manhoef trains with uh um i forgot his uh trainer's name mike mike's gym in uh i forget how to say his last passenger passenger i forget how to say it because he's their dog they're uh dutch they're from holland but uh there's a video there's a bunch of videos of melvin but melvin kicking the pads with him it's just it's goddamn terrifying yeah because he's a super fucking athlete and he's training with this really aggressive muay thai trainer or kickboxing trainer mike's gym is famous for like guys like badr hari and and um and manhoof that are just fucking ferocious aggressive competitors and manhoof is particularly

famous for having just unbelievable knockout power he knocked out mark hunt he weighed 185 pounds he knocked out mark hunt when mark punt was probably 300 pounds yeah and so imagine some of those guys or people in their lineage fighting here it is what fighting these guys who do katas there's not pads though you gotta focus pads see see if you can find one with him yeah that says that's just uh my see if you could find um melvin manhoef that's him though that's melvin but they're just sparring there which most of the time they they go hard but uh they usually don't go too hard to the head yeah that's the Holland

style so imagine those guys fighting these guys who are in make-believe land oh yeah fantasy fantasy land right we've had we've played videos many times and recently one or here's Hills Melvin so you get some volume on that jam Dude. Sounds not synced for some reason, but you get the picture of it. He's a fucking destroyer. That switch kick to the body, good lord. When you watch this guy in real life, it's even more stunning because you really can feel the impact when he's kicking the pads.

Yeah, so the other thing about that is that guy knows what he can do and he can't do. Yeah, 100%. And a lot of these young kids, they see a movie with a guy who's beating up five guys with knives and bats and stuff. It's total make-believe land. Yeah. And it immerses people in a culture of make-believe. Yeah, I agree. No, I couldn't of make-believe. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I agree No, I couldn't agree more and I was in that culture. Yeah, I used to teach it I taught it at Boston University. It was like a huge part of my life and

The wake-up call that I got was It was a really stunning thing to just and it was it's it was a long stunning thing to just to and it was it's it was a long progression it wasn't just one wake-up call it was like one wake-up call and then another one and then deeper and deeper and deeper and then the ufc comes along you're like oh fuck you know oh this is this and then you get this understanding like i live my life under this uh illusion yeah and the other thing that's interesting to me about that is those are culturally reinforced, right? There are these rituals, there's the bowing, the master, the other people that you're friends that you come to do these things with. All of that reinforces the delusion. It's very similar to religions, the way that religions

focus with the difference being that people in religions, people who have faith, they think there are better people as a consequence of them having faith. Whereas very few people in the delusional martial arts think that. They think they're good fighters. But, oh, the techniques are too dangerous to test or, you know, we can't do this. If we did this, we'd kill you. But those cultures of delusion keep people trapped in thinking about things that remove them from reality yeah there's definitely some of that but i think there's some good to the idea of respecting a dojo as a place where you when you walk into it like one of the

things stupid but it's true when i was a kid i used to have the keys to the the it was a dojang because it was taekwondo is the Korean word well I even when no one was there I would bow when I would walk in when I would go to work out in the middle of the night like I would go there I had keys so I would I would train sometimes I'd show up at midnight I go there and lock the door and go in myself and then when I stepped in the training area i would always bow and i was like almost like an ocd thing like i wouldn't not do it because i in my mind when i like i had been trained and taught that when i entered that room i had to bow and even with there's fucking no one there man i'm by myself and i always bowed like one time my girlfriend my girlfriend was a freak in high school. She wanted to fuck in the gym

and I was like, we can't. Can't do it. I'm like, I won't do it. We can't do it here. And she's like, come on.

I'm like, nope. This is not happening. That was a lost opportunity for you. Not really. I fucked the shit out of her. I fucked her all the time.

We were like little fucking rabbits. But it was, there was the one place where I wouldn't do it. I was like, we can't. We can't do it here. This is sacred ground for me.

So I guess here's my problem with that besides the lost opportunity. But it wasn't a lost opportunity. For me, it was an execution of discipline of my mind. It was very hard for a 17-year-old boy to not have sex with this hot, I think she was 16, 16-year-old girl who wanted a bang in this karate or taekwondo gym. It's like, for me, it was like,

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

and, you know, my stepdad was a little distant. There was all this stuff going on, right? There was all these things that just didn't feel right, didn't make me feel good. And then this one thing came along that made me feel good. This one thing came along that I had gotten really proficient at really quickly and was absolutely obsessed with and I was doing it all Day all day and those there was my whole focus of my life sex other than the girl no no I'm sure I wasn't good at that. Uh sure. It's probably terrible, but

Point being like I wasn't willing to sacrifice that like The ideals and the tenets of that. It's interesting, isn't it? Yeah. Were you the same today, do you think? Do you have that notion of sacred with regard to these things? I don't have that notion of sacred when it comes to a space, but I do in terms of my approach to things. If I'm focused on something, I don't allow myself to get distracted if something is critical.

Something's like really important to focus on and I decide this is what I'm doing now. Now I'm doing this, you know? And so when- Like, if I may, I don't want to be overly personal, but like your marriage, you decided to do it, you're focusing on it,

so it's taken a kind of a- Well, see, marriage is a contract, okay? Relationships, yes. Like the way you engage with someone, like if you care about someone, here's a good way, not just relationships as far as like sexual relationships, but friendships.

If you care about someone and you, you really enjoy being with them and they're one of the most important people in your life. Like when you interact with them, I think you should interact with them under that provision or with that thought in mind with that with that intention with what i missed you the intention that you care about them very deeply these are important people in your life authentically you want to relate authentically yeah yeah like you don't you don't ever want like i don't i would

never like like really good friends i would never yell at them and, you know, call them a piece of shit. I never want you in my life or say crazy things to people that sometimes people say to each other. Hurtful. Hurtful things, yeah. You know, it doesn't mean don't be critical. It doesn't mean don't correct someone if you see them doing something, if you see your friends doing something stupid. But I don't think that's a good example.

I think because marriage is not something that like, it's like something you're trying to do. You know, marriage is like or even relationships, friendships are just there. Those are those are their interactions. Relationships are it's different. Like it should be fun and enjoyable and all that good stuff. What I'm talking about is a discipline. Yeah. Well, what I was trying to tease out from you is that when you were 17,

you had this idea of the dojo being a sacred place. Yeah. And you talked about what that meant to you, and I'm curious if there's anything that you hold sacred now. That's a good question. Like that? Not, no. I've definitely changed my ideas That's a good question. Like that? No.

I've definitely changed my ideas about what that even was at the time. I think what that was, that need for that sacred space in this intense concentration and purity of that environment, was really like my ticket out. My ticket out of this life that was really unfulfilling out my ticket out of this life. That was really unfulfilled maybe to manhood Yeah, that definitely to sovereignty personal sovereignty to to realize that It's not that I It's not that I was a loser. It's just that I wasn't a winner and I had to figure out how to be one It wasn't wasn't all my failures what I was is now and all those failures and all those mistakes and bad feelings that I had those are

really just lessons and that now that I have this new focus and this new thing and it's shown massive positive results I will honor that and that's what it was to me. The new focus being what? Martial arts, fighting, competing, Taekwondo. So that space, the dojo, the dojang, represented a sacred place for me because it represented this new ticket. And I wasn't about to cash that in for some pussy. Holla.

You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I do. That was my thoughts. Now, my, I i mean if there's anything i would think that the world like life itself is that environment life itself is that that dojang life itself is that thing so you don't ever want to you don't want to. You don't want to commit crimes against people. You don't want to do things to hurt people. All those terrible things that we see out in the world, if the world was your dojang, if the world was your church, if the world was your sacred place, you would never want to commit bad acts in your sacred place.

That's lovely. I wish we could figure out a way to help people adopt those values. I wish we could come up with some way, especially when we see what's going on in the Middle East and we see what's going on in the world, we see the way we're treating our environment or climate. I wish there were some way to make that real and palatable to people so that we would start being more authentic and more sincere with someone. And I think what you said about, it's not about criticism the way I look at it. I think it's about forthright speech. You can be forthright in your speech with somebody and not be an asshole, not be a jerk. I think those kinds of relationships, for me, Aristotle talks about that too. But for me, I think that the most meaningful relationships are those people with whom I can be authentic and be myself and be real.

And those are kind of, I don't like the word sacred though. It's, I guess that's the one kind of nitpick I have. Cause you attach that to religion. Well, because I attach it to the inability to revise something. Right. I attach it to the utmost respect. Yeah. So if we replaced a sacred for respect, I think we'd be right.

But it's just, it's just noises. It's one of the things I don't like about labels like I like Intent and intent like my idea of sacred is not like God like it's not like a some it's not a deity this unnamed Unknown word that's been passed down from person to person. It's based on personal experience It's based on a real thing So when I say sacred like my love my love for my children is sacred. You know, like I say it in that way. Ditto.

I don't say it like in terms of like harps and the clouds and all that kind of jazz. And when we were talking about like don't be an asshole to people you care about, like it doesn't mean, it certainly doesn't mean I'm some sort of a perfect person. It certainly doesn't mean that I have been an asshole. And then sometimes when you're responding to someone else being retarded or someone being ridiculous, you can be an asshole because you don't have the patience for it anymore. Because you don't have the at the moment, you don't have the temperament to maturity. Yeah. What?

Yeah. It could be maturity. It could be you're overwhelmed. There's a lot of variables. So like if someone hears this and says, you know, oh, well, man, I've been an asshole lately. Maybe I'm a bad person. Like, no, it's just recognizing those moments where you probably could have handled something better and continuing to improve. And then also this idea is this is a really important one because people have this idea that somehow I'm 30 years old. I shouldn't be doing this anymore. I'm 50 years old

I should have learned by now. That's all bullshit throw that away toss that shit aside You like these ideas of numbers that people have in their head that by a certain age you should stop You are alive And if you are alive and if you are thinking all those numbers that you keep attaching Well, you know when einstein was 30 here shut the up stop doing that that that is a waste of your time and stop saying to yourself i should be better by now i'm such a total non-helping thought what you need to think of is life you're living you're alive right now and if you've made a mistake and you're still continuing

to learn and grow that's all just data yeah and i think part bundled with that is gratitude you know yeah gratitude is giant we don't say a prayer in my household but we go around every night we have seven people living with us and we say what we're grateful for and what are you running a commune what are you doing uh we have it's a lot we have, it's a long story. We have a woman from China there. It's a long story. Jesus Christ. What does she do? Wink, wink.

No, no, no. Getting sex slaves in from boats? What are you doing, man? What she doesn't do. We have another woman who lives over there. Yeah, that cargo container. Bring it over here. My buddy lives in the garage over there.

Pay no attention to the banging. No, but we go around, we talk about what they're grateful for. Everyone's grateful. And I think that there's something, it's an, it's an opportunity to be authentic at that time, but it's also like, I think verbalizing those things are important. So it's not just the negative. Oh, I shouldn't be doing this, but it's the positive. Look, as a general, as a general rule of thumb, if you ever have any doubts about it, just

be kind to people. It also, it's a, it's great when you reinforce it with your friends like verbalizing it like uh i'm i'm a big fan of telling i tell my friends i love them all the time like me and my friend like my wife jokes around about it like she goes i don't know any men that tell their friends they love them all the time but all my friends do we all tell each other we love each other you know i love you brother and we hang up the phone i'm doing with all my friends and you know we're always hugging and always saying i appreciate you. You know, I think that's really important I got a very tight-knit group of friends that I care about very much and they're all Very they're very motivated and they're healthy and the you know, they're not without flaws

But they're there they got shit going on and it empowers me. Yeah, I mean it up. So here's why Here's why that's important. Because you got the tattoos, you got the build, you've been in the ring, you're friends with whoever you're friends with. And I think that whether you like it or not, you're in a position, particularly with young people to look up to you. And that is exactly the kind of behavior that we want to see modeled. It's not emotionally immature for a guy to cry at a tragic event. I tell my friends I love them. I tell people, I tell my buddy over there, I'm incredibly grateful for the opportunity to stay at his house, etc. And I think that that kind of, we live in a culture that's suppressed these, particularly males, this ability for men to communicate in authentic way also to experience emotion like this idea of somehow or another being stoic

has virtue to it especially in the form in the face of tragedy or even joy like i sometimes i cry more for happy moments sometimes than I do for sad moments. But I'll cry at fucking cartoons, man. I almost cried a ton of times. I'm not crying at cartoons, but yeah. It's interesting. I think that that journey from you as a 17-year-old to now, I mean, there's some really core lessons for people out there struggling with maybe issues of sexuality or issues of feeling they hate the world or they're not good enough or

they're they're self-esteem issues are they and i think that acceptance yeah acceptance and you know that's what we all want yeah we all want to be loved and yeah look so i'm i'm 49 it's like i'd much rather be people say about me hey you know, Pete's a really good guy. Then Pete's a really smart guy. It's like I want I want to, you know, I want to embody those virtues. But but more than that, I think that the story that you told there, it's it's something that's accessible to people and it's a type of thing that we need to do we need to figure out how to move our culture towards these more humane ways of dealing with people and my own opinion is that we don't need superstitions to do that you're a perfect example of that right we don't need people making objective claims about reincarnating in times through bodies like the Dalai Lama. Wait a minute. You don't think the Dalai Lama is a reincarnated saint?

Are you serious? You got nervous there for a moment. I thought you were going to believe that. I'm like, wow, this is going to be a long conversation. Dude, don't you see my Buddha? It's right there, bro. I got another Buddha right there. See, that's the funny thing.

I'll call bullshit on that in class, and everybody will freak out. Whereas if I say Jesus walking on water, and I deconstruct. But if you start talking about Buddhism, people are like, whoa. Whoa, bullshit, man. How could you say that? How dare you, dude? Dalai Lama is so cool. He's friends with Steven Seagal.

Yeah, well, you actually saw them years ago together doing their little thing. It all gets connected. Yeah, well, you actually saw them years ago together doing their little thing that all gets connected. Yeah, all right No, I I had a psychedelic trip that I saw a bunch of golden buddhas. That's what LSD about no DMT Oh, wow, it was that that like literally that guy like in that position, but there was fractals like millions of them Infinite numbers of them was very strange So that's what that little this guy made it for me i wish i remembered this homeboy's name i'll find it somewhere and i'll throw it up on instagram i think it's on my instagram picture right i don't know i'll find

it but um yeah all of those things all those things are not necessary it's uh i think we are necessary like all these uh the false beliefs and all the the thing what they are is like scaffolding i feel like they're scaffolding for like evolution and i think that that's ultimately the benefit that religion does provide is in in these insane beliefs in the sky gods and all these different things and we show reverence to these uh these deities and they have these rules that we must follow otherwise we'll be punished in those rules there becomes order and then the order becomes society and that's that's something that people always like to fall back on like we are a judeo-christian founded society and our judeo-christian ethics

like i saw some woman who was arguing about mus terrorists. And that was like one of the big things that this is, this, this country was founded on Judeo Christian ethics. So what monkeys were founded on eating bananas and we're not monkeys anymore. You know, it's like, it's such a stupid fucking, like just because something's founded on something that's illogical doesn't mean you should have reverence for that illogical thing. It's perfectly stated. doesn't mean you should have reverence for that illogical thing. It's perfectly stated. That's part of the problem, I think, with once we make ideas sacred. Yes.

And they become much more difficult, if not impossible, to revise. Like George Bush saying, which is actually, I invite your viewers or listeners to listen to this, he's prayed about the war in Iraq. He knows what God wants him to do. So the moment you do that, it becomes irrevisible. I used to have a bit about that, where George Bush was like, you know, that he's prayed about the war in Iraq and, you know, God bless the troops. Imagine if he said, instead of that, we have found Satan. He is in Afghanistan and we're moving tanks into that area. Everybody

would be like, whoa, what the fuck did you just say? That's the draw. That's the line that we draw. Or Hindu, he prayed to Vishnu or something. No, but I mean, you're not allowed to say that you know the devil. You're not allowed to say the devil's real. You never hear the president bring up the devil. They'll bring up God. God bless the troops. They'll never say Satan is at work.

And Satan is in the hearts and minds of these enemies. They never say that because it's so preposterous that we're slowly, as evolution, as thinking evolves and changes. I know evolution is the wrong word for that. But as it improves and expands, we are no longer accepting the idea of Satan. Like culturally, culturally Satan was an accepted thing hundreds of years ago. It was parallel. Like if you looked at the mentions of Satan and the mentions of God, they were right up there together.

You're blaming Satan on the bad things and you're praising God for the good things. That's no longer the case. Now we just cling to these absurd notions of this one that's watching us all the time. And you've got to sort of peripherally mention it and casually reference it without going into detail. And you're allowed to do that because it makes people think, well, you're on the same page as me. You're a God-fearing Christian man like myself. I'm a God-fearing Christian man myself as well. God bless you. God bless you as well.

You know? But if you go, Satan is looking out for you. Satan is watching you right now. Satan is just letting the air out of your tires. Like, you go, well, that guy's a fucking idiot. You know? Like, we've moved past Satan. But we haven't moved past God.

Past God. Exactly right. Or the idea of God. I mean, if there is some all-knowing entity that is controlling everything and is filled with love and has a grand plan for the universe, they have yet to show themselves. So this is all just a concept and an idea with no basis in fact. And as we have found more facts about the nature of reality and the world itself,

it seems more and more Preposterous with every day every day the scientists come up with these new equations that show the the way the universe could have possibly be been formed and the every day that These fucking guys at the CERN laboratory They the large hadron collider are discovering these what were at one time theoretical particles, showing them to be true and their calculations to be correct. We have a deeper and deeper understanding of the universe. But we think now, we love to think that right now that we're filled with knowledge and we

love to look at ourselves now and look at the past as, well. They didn't know back then, but we know now. But if we looked in the past, they would have the same ideas. They would look back at those poor monkey people with the bananas and they'd go, those fucking dummies, they didn't even know houses yet. We will one day look back at 2015 like, what a bunch of fools. What a bunch of ridiculous people that were still, they had this incredibly complicated society and this wonderful access to information, but yet they were still shackled down by ideology and killing each other over religion and ancient superstitions that dictated their behaviors. Like what a weird time to be in. They'll look at, they'll look at us now in 2015 they'll say

what a strange time this this adolescent period of of enlightenment where they're just still they're still concentrating on stupid shit and the fucking president of the united states can openly talk about god and every and no and no one goes what is god what are you saying like what are you saying do you think jesus came back from saying like what are you saying do you think Jesus came back from the dead what do you think do you think someone walked on water do you believe in the literal translation are you an Old Testament guy or a New Testament guy well the New Testament well the New Testament was made by Constantine was a fucking Roman Emperor who wasn't even Christian he didn't even believe it he was he was he

was he was he became a Christian on his fucking deathbed. Like that's when he became a Christian. Like all these people that are like really into the new Testament. And like, I'll talk about old Testament shit and people get mad at me on Twitter. They'll send me this fucking hate text. You understand motherfucker what the difference is between the old Testament, the new Testament, because the new Testament is utter horseshit. It's created by a bishop and a fucking emperor. That's a fact. That's like established religious fact.

Like everyone knows where it came from. And not only that, it was written hundreds of years after the death of Jesus. So what are you talking about? Because if you're talking about the old stuff, you've got to go deep. Go to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Go to the fucking most ridiculous aspects of that and tell me you're basing your life on that? Because that's even more preposterous.

They found them in clay pots in Qumran written on animal skins. These people thought the world was flat and the sun was 17 miles away. And we're gonna... They did. They really did. And we're gonna...

This is how we're gonna live our lives? This is it. This is all the facts we need. Fuck the Large Hadron Collider. Fuck CERN. You know, fuck Stephen Hawking. Fuck quantum physics. Fuck Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Fuck those dudes with their telescopes. No, we're going to base it on leather skins and charcoal ink. Right. Like, really? That's the conversation we're having when we're talking about ideological religions. That was a thing of beauty, by the way. Well, thanks. That was a thing of beauty.

Well, it is! And people think, well, you're an atheist, you're an asshole, you're... What do you believe in? I had a guy yell at me at a comedy club once, because I did this bit about Scientology, I did this bit about Scientology, about watching a Scientology documentary with my mom who made me go to Catholic school, and how my mom thinks Scientology is ridiculous. I'm like, what the fuck?

Exactly. And this guy is like, yo, what do you believe in? What do you believe in? Like, do I have to believe in something? Do I have to believe, I believe in everything that's been proven, I believe that this is made out of wood. And when I'm proven wrong, Right, you change your mind. back to the jujitsu thing again

Yeah, but when you also think about it What an unbelievable arrogance to think that you know the will of the creator of the universe You know what he wants you to do. You know where he wants you to put your genitals I mean like you said in philosophy it's called the problem of induction or looking at the past the past past resembling the past and We will look back. There's absolutely no question in my mind that you're correct. And we will say, wow, you believe this.

This was how could we possibly have believed this? But what's interesting to me is we know that that will happen. Like we know that that will happen. And it's an opportunity for us to reflect and say, wow, are we being arrogant right now? Are we thinking we know things? Are we pretending to know things when we being arrogant right now? Are we thinking we know things? Are we pretending to know things when we don't know them? And I think that a lot of that God talk is a type of arrogance. I think it's a type of people, I don't know, wanting to assert how moral they are so they

reap advantages like the president or, I mean, I think it's a very complicated social and even political problem, but it's also a type of arrogance. It is definitely a type of arrogance. And it's also a way that people establish the moral high ground. They establish a dominant social position over you. And people love to do that. They love to do that with their pious attitude. What they're doing is by them accepting these religious tenants, they are somehow are superior to you. And some people don't do that. And, you know, I shared a hunting camp with this guy. I don't need to name his name. He's a wonderful guy who's a, an elk hunter. And this guy would get up in the morning every day before everybody. And we've got up fucking early, you know, we would leave the camp by 6.00 AM. So this guy was

up. I would get up to take a shower at like 5 a.m. And this dude was up reading the Bible. And he never talked about it. And he never talked about like God or Jesus or any of the rules. But to him, it was a way that he explored these ideas and how he related to the world. And in application, this guy was a fantastic yeah absolutely he was a wonderful guy like he was he was kind and it was like when you had conversations with him he was generous and it was very friendly and he was curious and he would you know ask like these

really um introspective questions like he was a good guy and And I think that's what matters. I think it matters less whether or not someone is an atheist or not, or Hindu. And I think what matters is how we treat other people. I think what matters is if we're kind to people, if we listen to people, if we do our best to engage them honestly and authentically. And often we get too caught up in, well, what is someone's religion? Especially now with the Republicans going berserk with this whole- Muslim thing, yeah. I mean, it's just disgraceful. Well, you know, did you see that video?

It's a fantastic video that's just been put out recently. I think by some guys in Holland where they were, because it's in another language. Oh, the Bible. Yeah, I saw that. They put a cover of, they put the quran's cover on the bible and they read passages to people on the street and they asked them what do they think about this and you know they were like well you know this is ridiculous and this is outrageous and it was all from the bible yeah like like hilarious hilarious shit that a lot of people don't know

is in the bible and but when you even bring this up, people already, you're questioning their beliefs. They start foaming at the mouth and fuming and that fuck, I can feel my phone get heavy from hate tweets right now. It's just coming in. You're fucking questioning my view of reality and it makes me uncomfortable when I go to work. Right. But isn't that the exact same issue with someone doing a fantasy based martial art? Oh a hundred percent

Yeah, I've had conversations with people where they're fucking furious at me because I don't believe in their death touch I've had conversations people they like, you know you are arrogant and your belief in martial arts and you're in a position of Influence because of your you know You work for the UFC and what you're doing is you're you're Fucking up because you're you're not telling the truth about certain. I'll cut stop right Stop abandon it, but you but you if you're like me who like I said I was Martial arts and that the dojang was so sacred to me. I wouldn't have sex with my girlfriend there

That represents like such an important part of their life it's just so lucky for me that it happened during my formative period where i was exposed to reality at a young age where i had to accept it i was like oh jesus you know i i had to accept that these techniques don't really work all the time some of them work but you have to learn all the other stuff for them to work at all yeah i i wonder about again so few people have written about this. I wonder about the experience that you had of that and I had of that. We were in the same boat, realizing over time that these things just didn't work and we had wasted our time.

And I wonder how similar that is to someone's escape from a faith. You know, like- A hundred percent. Yeah. People that have escaped from cults. how similar that is to someone's escape from a faith you know like 100 percent yeah people that have escaped from cults like i've had folks on that have uh used to be in cults uh kurt metzger is a perfect example is a hilarious stand-up comedian a friend of mine and you know he was in um jehovah's witness is that what yeah i think so and um he uh you know he won't accept any stupid shit now. Because he's like, no, when it comes to the regressive left and some of these ideologies where you have to look at something in a certain way and you can't look at it in any other way, it's like a dogma.

And he's like, no, no, no, I've seen this before. I know what this is. What you're doing is you're saying you have to think a certain way. That's bullshit. That's bullshit. It can be discussed like you you can discuss certain aspects of people's behavior or gender identity or gender pronouns or in fact not only can it be discussed but it has to be discussed it should be we have to have arenas and a lot of people have been writing about this lately i wrote about in my book and i tweeted about it if we have if we're not allowed an opportunity to have a conversation then extremists will

step in with the answers like Trump is a great example so we have to create spaces talking about spaces there's probably another offshoot of the conversation space the regressive left right we need to create opportunities for people to for sincere inquirers to engage things and right now we don't have that and again i i can bring it back to jujitsu i mean you could just think about what would happen if you know this is a technique you do this blah blah blah it's sacred we don't question it then you'd never get to the truth you deny people the opportunities that they need to figure out things for themselves yeah Yeah. A hundred percent.

A hundred percent. And I think martial arts is an excellent vehicle for that. One of the things that was explained to me when I was really young that really did sink in, my instructor was a disciple of General Chae Hyung-yi, who was the founder of Taekwondo. He was, you know, he taught it to troops, and he was one of the guys who really honed the techniques for maximum power and efficiency and leverage. They had this idea that martial arts was a vehicle

for developing human potential. And I read that when I was like 15, and I've always used that phrase because I think that's a, uh, such a massive, uh, yeah. What do you mean by such a massive? What? Well, it's, it's, it's so clear when you, when you understand that when you go through life, life is filled with questions, adversity, puzzles, different things you have to figure out, the questions you have to ask of yourself, examining your own behavior, objective reasoning. There's all these different variables that come into play when it comes to life.

And I think those are highlighted in the realm of martial arts because if you can land a kick and you knock someone out then that that happened that worked you were in the ultimate like especially the ultimate fighting championships the perfect example that but there's no higher level of problem-solving than problem-solving with dire physical consequences because your emotions are on the line, your fears, your anxiety. There's so, there's so many fight or flight mechanisms in place. There's self doubt. There's, you know, how much discipline did you truly execute in training?

Did you give everything you had? Did you reach your full potential? Most people go through life without even coming close to their full potential. And they live life in this, this weird fog of uncertainty and of regret and of, of, of just this feeling that they're not accomplishing what they want to, that they're not achieving their full potential. And that martial arts is a vehicle for developing potential because through the very difficult training and through pushing yourself when you don't think you can and through this overwhelming desire for comfort where you don't want to get out of bed where you don't want to do the

training where you would rather just blow it off and don't go to class by forcing yourself to do that it it Engages the muscles of discipline the inner muscles. Yeah, and it also you understand about Accomplishing goals and about about reality. Okay, so facing things that is just so important again It's jujitsu right now when you defeat somebody Like if you you you work really hard and you tap someone out defeat somebody like if you you you work really hard and you tap someone out you get a sense of you get a little i'll speak for myself i i feel good like wow like i worked for this i tried hard you know sure i work on my baseball bat choke now and i feel pretty good so that activity your hard

work brought you to a point in which you would tap somebody out. And as a consequence of that, you feel self-esteem. What we have done is we have inverted the system. We tried to teach self-esteem absent any accomplishments. That's not the way it works. Self-esteem is a byproduct of hard work of something that you have done as a direct result of an accomplishment. So every, every few years they give Americans, they give kids all around the world to test. I read this in Martin Gross's, The Conspiracy of Ignorance many years ago. Excuse me. And the test is like, Hey, all these people in the world, you know, the Koreans, the industrialized world, the Japanese, German, et cetera, they took this. How do you think you did in relation to them?

Americans consistently score in the bottom quartile in terms of their math and science, how well they did comparatively. But they score extraordinarily high, number one, almost always in terms of self-esteem. We have taught the wrong things. We've focused on the wrong things. Our school systems have been oriented toward the wrong things and and I think again you can just bring that back to jiu-jitsu and look at it look at that you don't you you couldn't possibly you could teach someone all the self see you walk in they get a white belt you teach them to feel good about themselves do this do this to this but does it work

yeah yeah no it's you could get a lot of the lessons from martial arts out of a lot of difficult endeavors. I just don't think you get the problem-solving aspect. It's such a high level. Some people find that in rock climbing because it's scary. And in accomplishing that and getting through that, you learn about yourself. You learn about your ability to overcome adversity and yeah to face your fears but i just think that martial arts it is a more intense version of it because there's all this connected to combat and to this the physical challenge of overcoming another human being and it's one of our biggest fears one of our biggest fears other than falling

off of a mountain is uh being dominated by another human being getting your ass kicked in conflict where we have this long history of war i mean i was talking to i heard that podcast the jocko yeah the seal guy yeah yeah that's a great podcast he's an awesome guy but we were talking about the conversation that i had with my friend duncan trussell where i said that and it was kind of a revelation for the both of us, human history is a history of the wars. When we talk about human history, it's like the stuff that happened in between the wars and some inventions, but it's mostly the wars.

That's most of the history, whether it's World War I or World War II or Vietnam, or there's all these different conflicts that that happen and those are the bulk of our history when we when we consider the eras in the past when we consider the the ages of the different things that happened we consider like gingus khan and napoleon alexander the great and all these different things that happen we're considering war yeah i'll i'll go off in a little tangent if you don't mind it makes me think i've been thinking about talking to my buddy over there about life and the universe and this thing called the fermi paradox where is everybody and i wonder if that the fermi paradox

being well you know amount of life that must be out there yeah you know like why haven't we been contacted yet i i consider that to be just an extraordinarily interesting question. Yeah. But I wonder if what you just said, that our history has been a history of war. I wonder if inherent in every species that has evolved, they've had a similar history of war. Because they've been subject to different evolutionary mechanisms and pressures and such, you know, like different atmospheres or whatever. But I wonder if it's conflict over resources, conflict over, you know, whatever, maybe they have another gender or something.

I wonder if that's just intrinsic in the nature of life. I think it is. I think what's intrinsic in the nature of life is that sort of problem solving and that nature wants to find the best method of achieving a goal. And so the methods that are ineffective die off. And that's why 90% of the living species that have been on this planet are extinct. They no longer exist because they weren't effective enough to keep reproducing. And you can say, no, a lot of them because people wipe them out.

People are evil and people are horrible. People are the dominant species. It's what species do. I mean, many animals have wiped out animals. You know, there's a real issue right now with wild pigs and ground-nesting birds, because wild pigs being an invasive species, they're dealing with these birds that nest on the ground that didn't have these animals hunting them. Or you shouldn't even say hunting.

They're eating their eggs. So that's just an ineffective way. Adapt or die. Yeah, it's an ineffective way to take care of your eggs. Can't leave them on the ground in a place where these fucking pigs are rooting up everything and eating everything in front of them. Go ahead. No, it's okay. No, if they don't adapt, then there'll be no more species. Yes, absolutely. And you know, people say,

oh, it's so evil, it's so awful. Would you want a world filled with only the spotted owl? No. Okay, well, if the spotted owl dies off, it's because it sucked. I'm sorry. I'm not saying we should kill the spotted owl, but the motherfucker didn't make it, okay okay and the other owls are still here and eagles are still here and got by the way you wouldn't want a world filled with all eagles either and there's a

competition between eagles and salmon if the eagles eat all the salmon we're going to be pissed at the eagles yeah you know i mean if the eagles make the salmon extinct we're going to be like what the fuck eagles right it's you know it's funny so you're talking about this and uh in the back of my head i mean you're absolutely right in the back of my head i'm thinking wow like the so we're having a conversation right you and i are talking like if i started to talk about that some of that stuff in class that's when you get the whole trigger warning safe spaces and stuff again like people freak out but look this is really important i mean you're talking about species you're talking about survival you're talking about taking care of the planet and you know how do we weigh the concerns of the spotted owl against the loggers i mean you're talking

about some really important things and the recourse to oh i'm offended or i can't think but makes me upset makes me think that maybe soon universities won't be the place. I mean, we'll have to have these discussions out of the universities, which would really be great for you in your show, but it's terrible for the society. It's terrible for the university. It's terrible. Universities, in a sense, have ceased to have these sorts of conversations.

When you watch those children scream at that professor at Yale, and then you find out that that guy was disciplined yeah and like what were they fired or they stepped down they were sorry yeah I think they resigned yeah we're fucked you but I think I think liberals are eating themselves I think the left is literally aggressive I think there's a difference yeah well yeah that's a good point because liberals in terms of social change and progress and acceptance of various different people, I think that's wonderful. It's great. But I think that this regressive left with this very rigid ideology of what you can and can't say and the behaviors in which they engage in enforcing these things, I think it's preposterous.

in enforcing these things, I think it's preposterous. And I think that ultimately what's going to happen is you're not going to have these kind of structures, these places where people go, and you're going to be learning things online. Yeah, and it's going to be a lot worse before it gets better. And the hard thing is that many of your listeners are not in academia, and when we tell these stories, people, they think this guy's just making this. Well, you are in academia. And when we tell these stories, people, they think,

this guy's just making this. Well, you are in academia. So explain it from a first-person perspective. So I'll give you an example. Okay. So I had an individual in class, and the individual is not even part of the class. Now, right in the syllabus,

I put in this entire class is a trigger warning. Like the whole thing, A to Z. You had to write that? I put it in. You wrote trigger warning? Right in the syllabus, the whole thing. I love the fact that you even used trigger warning. Right? Trigger warning is so fucking stupid. Right in the whole thing. Well, see, here's what happens, because I was actually just brought up in charges again. And if you don't do that, then people can say, well, you didn't warn me. Well, actually, I did. I warned you the first day.

Not only is it in the syllabus. I'll say it in the syllabus. It's bold in caps in the syllabus in increased font. So everybody knows. This entire class is a trigger warning. Yep. The whole thing. The whole thing.

Okay. And, you know, when I went to the dean or whatever, and he's questioning about things, and I said, you know, hey, it's in the thing. He said, well, can you see how people could be offended by this stuff? And I'm like, of course. People could be offended by everything. They could be offended by anything. We were talking about the woman who's offended because Darth Vader was black.

That's on NMSNBC that Dave Rubin tweeted today, which is one of the dumbest fucking things I've ever seen in my life. She's saying that Star Wars is racist because Darth Vader's black. Meanwhile, Darth Vader's not black. They took the mask off, you dumb cunt. It's a white guy under there. Fucking idiot. I'm not going to say I can trump that, but let me give you a couple examples. Luke Skywalker's his son too, and that's another white guy, you fucking idiot. So here's one. So this woman is in the class and I give a class at the end of the class. She says,

I've never seen so many microaggressions in, I think it was, what was the class? Uh, knowledge, values, and rationality. We use Sam Harris's book,

the moral landscape in that class. And we talk about, well, we talk about heavy things. You know, we talked about ISIS. We talked about cultural relativism. We talked about,

is there a way to make a cross cultural job? I mean, you know, we're talking about things that frankly people in college should be talking about. Right. Because they vote. They're citizens in a democracy. And they need to engage these issues. And college professors are petrified.

They're just – and in a sense, I understand that because it's a theft of one's time. My case, I don't care because I have no opportunity. I was told point blank that you'll never get promoted. You could publish 10 books from Harvard and we won't promote you. So once I found that out, I said, well, I can talk about whatever I want. So why did they tell you that? Let me finish. So it was really interesting to me. So she gets up and she said, I've never been so microaggressed. The guy's racist. This and this is someone that again was not even in the class was not even in the class okay and you know I I thought wow like what my first was like is this person totally

insane or did I say something that was really horrible what were the micro aggressions that she was citing oh well I focused in the racist part so I said well what did I say what did I say Because if I said something that was racist, I really do want to know because I don't want to be that kind of person. So that's their belief revision thing again. Right. Okay. So she said, you use the example of Star Trek in a class. And you were shocked when the woman when when she pointed the woman, she didn't know. She's right. I was shocked. I was genuinely, I was almost flabbergasted that she never heard of Star Trek. Like, I understand not watching it, but she never heard of it. And then I used the example of Marilyn Manson. She said that you assumed that she participated in white culture. So that's racist? Okay, now, so, yeah, so for her. Marilyn Manson is white culture? Yeah's racist okay now i so at yeah so for maryland manson is white culture

yeah okay so he's a white guy so now we can really drill down on this and think about this we need to find a forum black fans of maryland manson i'm sure it's out there go to reddit so now we can really unpack this insanity okay so so So she tells people that everybody should file a complaint against me, and I said, okay, well, you know, well, let's, if you, look, anybody is free to file a complaint, you have the number. I said, would you like, we'll put it all right on the board. You want to have a conversation with me? She said, no, you're too far gone.

You're too far gone because you, like, start, or you mentioned Star Trek. Too far. Well, I don't know. See, that's the thing. It's like the horse and Allison run one lane. It runs off furiously in all directions. That's a fascinating thing that people do, though. They say, well, I can't discuss it with you.

You're too far gone. That's a symptom of safe spaces trigger warnings. Satan's in your mind, Peter Boghossian. I cannot speak to you. I will not get infected by your horrible ideas, which come from Satan. You are too far gone. Repent.

Repent, Peter. So here's, I mean, this is what she's saying. It is very similar. It's parallel. It's very similar on the left to what she's saying. So here's what's interesting. Was she black, by the way? Because it would be awesome if she was white.

No, she was Hispanic. Damn it. So one of the things that she was, or maybe not, I don't know. She said her name was like, she rolled her R's. I don't remember what. How dare you, racist. My name is Inigo Montoya. The first thing I said to her is, literally when she told me her name, I said, I'm sorry if I can't pronounce.

Ricardo Mandelbaum. OK, so here's what's interesting about that. OK, so obviously she's been inculcated. She is incapable. And I don't want to pick on her because in a sense, she's just a victim. Right. She's a victim of this malicious ideology that's running across campuses now. She's a victim of this malicious ideology that's running across campuses now. But people like that are not capable of engaging in entertaining ideas because they have this, the university protects them. They can say they've been aggressed. They can say they've been kind of violated, if you will, like cognitively, intellectually violated. But what's really interesting about that, two things. One, she thinks that she can arbitrate everybody else's

reality. So she thinks, I can understand if I say something and he's offended by it, or I say, you know, Taekwondo and so on. But she thinks that the regressive thinks that they arbitrate people's reality and they know what other people should be offended by, which is amazing. But here's the really interesting part. I love Star Trek. I'll show you my daughter in a sec off screen. I love Star Trek. Is she a Cleon?

No, but she's Asian. So that has nothing to do with Star Trek? It has everything to do with this. There's a big pause. It has everything. The pause was an emphasis. It has everything to do with it because the woman I was shocked

hadn't heard of Star Trek was Asian. You said she was Spanish. No, who hadn't heard of Star Trek. It's a different woman? No, yeah, there were two women. One was the woman who said she's never been so offended in her whole life. Right. And the other woman, when I met... She said she hadn't heard of it because it was

white culture? Two different people you're talking about? Yeah,'t articulated so that there's a woman in the class i use a star trek example she hasn't heard of it i'm stunned i'm like i can't believe it and i use a marilyn manson example she hasn't heard of it i'm shocked then the other woman the regressive oh the one who's watching yeah the one who's watching the regressive leftist says you're a racist. Something to that effect. I don't remember exact words. Okay, now I understand.

I was so confused. I thought you were talking about all these interactions. I thought the woman who was the regressive also hadn't heard about Star Trek. Yeah, then that's a problem with my articulation, not your understanding. I apologize. So, okay, so what was really interesting to me about that is that she identified that person on the basis of her race. Not me. She was assuming, she made, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

When you're a regressive leftist, every single thing you think of is race, gender, oppression, intersectionality, which is parenthetically, I have never heard any... Intersectionality? Any time you hear... Sex-sectionality? What is that? Any time you hear someone use that word, you can automatically assume they're an aggressive leftist and the next thing out of their mouth

will be some kind of smear campaign. There's a hilarious video of Steven Crowder going up to people and asking them what their preferred gender pronouns are. I almost retweeted that, but I thought, you know what? You're going to get in trouble. I got to get in trouble. I got to get in trouble.

I got to get in trouble. I got to get in trouble. I know, but that's what it is. They have really infested the highest levels of academia. And it's funny, these diversity offices, they report directly to the president. Like, they are offices in search of tasks. But back to this example. So she was the one who identified the person on the basis of their race.

She identified me on the basis of their race. Of your race. Yeah. Right. Because somehow there's a thing called white culture. She knows what it is. She's offended on someone else's behalf. I'm a white, cisgendered, heterosexual.

Do you use cisgendered? Do you use that term? Well, okay do you use cisgendered use that term uh well we're okay are you being forced to use that term is that real okay it's not a question of being how's that work it's not a question of being forced to use it but but but that's not a real term like that's not in any dictionary the whole thing is bullshit the whole whole thing is nonsense. But cisgender is hilarious. And the idea being that you shouldn't have to say transgender because transgender should be normal. It's normal to want to be transgender. It's so normal that by saying transgender, you're making it abnormal. So we should say cisgender for people who aren't transgender.

Meaning if you are a male and you identify as being a male, you are a cisgendered male. That's right. You're a fucking male. Like, we're adding all... Here's the thing about... Adding all this extra shit to define things that are already defined

by the original word, we don't need... You're doing it to prop up transgender. Like, that's the idea. To make it so it's even. We'll put cis with regular gender, trans with... Right. So now, okay, that was another great explanation.

So now why do these people do this? Well, that's a long story, but one value that's responsible for that is radical egalitarianism. Everything has to be radical. Everybody has to be equal. Yes. Interesting, though, how... And then they have these diversity initiatives and diversity requirements. We need more faculty of color. And I actually think that that can be a good thing in some circumstances. kind of a way. They mean it in terms of skin color. They don't mean it in terms of ideological diversity. They're not out there hiring, you know, Republicans and libertarians or conservatives. But the other thing that's interesting is that, you know, I think it was on Sam's podcast with

Douglas Murray. He said, we're going to be talking about pronouns are the big thing now. We're going to be talking about pronouns while these people are sneaking nukes in our cities. It is a failure to morally triage. It is a system-wide failure that's trickled down to individuals within the system to make it almost impossible for them to make discerning judgments about things. And so we have this consequence now of an entire generation of students who's being trained not only to suspend moral judgments, but to think they're better people as being a result. And it's also beautiful that this is all coming from academia, because if you think about what a university is in academia, like a lot of people that are in academia went to college,

went on to grad school, got their master's and their PhD, started teaching, never entered the real world, stayed in the sheltered environment, and now they're dictating this sort of behavior and thinking. It's like a dojo in which everybody's training with everybody else in the dojo, right? Exactly. I told you, it's all martial art. The whole thing can be seen through that lens. And then this radical ideology coming in this area and wanting to

redefine reality absolutely in this area they're not they're not going out into the real world and experiencing the congo and all these crazy fucked up parts of the world and understanding like you're dealing with like an inherent problem with the human race like you can't redefine it by changing pronouns and cisgender it really is the most insidious form of cultural myopia like they think they have latched on to some timeless they're just making shit up they think they've latched on to some universal truth about reality and now they have this moral and and I think that the the moral underlying moral impulses that they have are pretty good ones. You know, you don't treat people differently on the basis of their race and gender.

You'd be basically a cool person. You don't be a dick, in other words. I think that those are very laudable. But they're being a dick and enforcing it. They're not enforcing it with kindness and compassion and understanding and trying to promote this, like, positive thing. No, they're shaming and doxing and attacking. So that's the other piece that we need to understand here. The other piece is the tactics and the techniques,

and these people have really done a number on me, or they've attempted to. They mistake me for someone who gives a shit. I really don't care. But the other thing is, these people are just the most mean-spirited, nasty, vituperative Dude, to per tiv damn you ever heard that one. No, Google that Google that Google that the to high spell vi tu

Prt it Ive vituperative. It means like you know a nasty name-calling son of a bitch. I'm gonna call someone that one day Wow the to per tiv.ative i like it there you go bitter reviews there you go i like it that's a good one bitter abusive vituperative fuck i like it but it's the you can these people are also characterized by the strategies they use with when they're engaging people the smear tactics if you say anything if you question or you challenge your racist, you're a bigot You're a homophobe. But what that does is that shuts down the conversation. That's the end of the conversation. So they have Marginalized it really is not only if they marginalized you it's this rise of the victim culture Like every like victims are esteemed now

Well, if I can i think i can find parallels when i was talking about again with with martial arts is that like the dojo to me was sacred because this was something that was transforming me and changing me from a loser to someone who had like a possible outcome that was positive i had potential i had a path out i think a lot of these people they come from environments where maybe their parents were fucked up or racist or dumb or they didn't like their life or they've been raped or some kind of physical trauma yes that's a good point um had horrible experiences with bad people or you know and you know maybe abused in high school bullied fucked with and now they found some culture where they're being not just

accepted but It's it's invigorating to them like and then we're gonna change this world and we're gonna make things awesome for people and we're gonna You know we're gonna make what you ask people what their preferred gender pronouns are this is so important We really need to get on this and they're they're living in this environment and again you're dealing with like really young people like like I was when I was young and I was looking at this this stage of my life is this transformative journey that I was on and I was just wholeheartedly dedicated to it maybe that's what they're doing you know this is their transformative journey yeah I think that's right and

but they're in I was again on. But they're imposing it on others. Yeah, they're imposing it. They're using the mechanisms of the university to impose those things. I think that's right. But the very things that we need, reason and rationality are liberatory. They can liberate us. They can emancipate us. You know, again, jujitsu is like that.

You can test ideas. You can, you know, it's like, it that you can test ideas you can you know it's like it's a son of a bitch to have a guy i had a guy on me he's like 300 pounds and he's like knee riding me and then skull riding me i mean it's just not a very pleasant experience those both sound very gay knee riding and skull riding that's a microaggression it is micro um so okay i wanted to get back to that that protest because I don't think we completely finished it. I was going to finish this up. Okay.

Go ahead. Finish this up. Well, give me which protest. This woman that was saying all this stuff about you that you're racist and that you're like – Yeah. Okay. So I used the word hurtful before. So one of the reasons that's really hurtful to me is because my daughter's Asian, right?

And now it's the age of Twitter and- That's like saying, I'm not racist, I have black friends. No, no, it's different. I know you're kidding, but just think about it for a second. You know, like my daughter grows up and this person in my class said, oh, you know, he's like, hates Asians or whatever. I wasn't even thinking of Asians. I was like a guy who likes Star Trek, right? So, you know, those things tend to have a life of their own. And then it's like, oh, Boghossian, he's the guy who hates Asians, right? He's the guy, whereas, no, I'm just the guy who, and the most important, is that reason is liberatory. We can emancipate ourselves through reason and rationality. But the only way to do that, the way that reason acts as a lubricant, is in social discourse.

Like, we need to be able to have conversations. It's non-negotiable. Free speech is not a negotiation. I 100% agree. negotiable. Free speech is not a negotiation. And so these people, they want to disinvite people if they don't agree with them, as opposed to having, you know, an alternative speaker for their point of view or debate. I'm not a fan of debates, but you know, or debate. But what they want to do is they want to shut down the discourse. But let's take that at a deeper level and take a look at that. Part of the problem with that is that I firmly believe,

and I think I have evidence for this, overwhelming evidence actually, this is a long pedigree in Western intellectual thought, we can derive our values. We can sit down and I can talk to you and we can figure out, look at the black statue there or the Hendrix there, we can figure out why we shouldn't discriminate against people on the basis of their skin color. But the only way that we can do that, it's not, Matt, it doesn't come from a want, is that you need to be able to ask questions, right? So we can figure things out in discourse, in dialogue. That's how we figure things out. And these people want to shut down discourse. But if they do that, then they become their own enemies.

They're the worst type of ideologue because they have beliefs, but they haven't derived those beliefs. So then those beliefs are then sacred, right? Yes, yes, yes. And the only way they're taking away the one thing that we need to figure stuff out. It's like in jiu-jitsu, they're taking away the resisting opponent. In this case, they're taking away the dialectic, the dialogue, free speech, open inquiry, the ability to say things on campuses without being smeared as a racist or a homophobe or a bigot. Right. You're 100% right.

You're 100 percent right. You're 100 percent right. You couldn't be more right about that aspect of this whole dilemma that they are trying to stop the debate, because I think part of them knows what they're doing is ridiculous. Just like the Qigong master that wants to shoot you across the room. That's the question. They kind of know. They've got to know. See, that's the question, right? So that is what I've really been thinking about. Do they know that their ideologies are bankrupt? Do they know? I mean, and again, I'm thinking about guys at the top like Reza Aslan, Glenn Greenwald, Cenk from the Young Turks. Like when you have to make shit up and lie, it makes me think that you're not genuine about your beliefs that you're not authentic like i would just mention to someone the other day i have no problem talking to someone who tells me with total sincerity hey you know what i believe there was a talking snake like i

can have a conversation with that guy he's sincere sincere. That person's sincere. They're saying, this is what I believe. But the regressives, you can't. It's almost impossible. The one thing you need, you can't have a conversation because if you ask a question, you're smeared. You become a whole smear campaign. So, I mean, it's incredibly frustrating on an individual level, but then when they have institutional support of this stuff, then when they have woven their tentacles into academia, into, you know, very high positions, and it talk about. You know, there is. And if you want to figure something, if you can figure out the relationship, I mean, this would be epic. You figure out why. I love my freedom of language with you here on the show.

You figure out why feminists are in bed with Islamists. And then we got something. Islamists, and then we got something. Because this, to me, is one of the most bizarre, fascinating, disturbing, grotesque. I mean, if there were ever a group who actively, I mean, it's even worse than the foreign Baltic states and the Soviet Union, the only military alliance in history, their primary objective was to attack themselves. This is even worse than that. I mean, these people, you could not possibly find a group of people who are more antithetical than the most rudimentary feminist values than the Islamists. It is not possible. Never has it existed. But yet these people are in bed with each other. And it happens over and over again. I mean, this whole situation where you're laughing. It's awesome.

It's true. It's just, it's the poetry of the bizarre. Yeah, it is. It's some bizarre folly. It's very strange. It's very strange, but they're brown. And you can't say anything bad about brown people. But you can openly mock Christians. Yeah, that's right. You can't say anything bad about brown people. That's part of it. But you can openly mock Christians. Yeah, that's right.

You can mock Christians. There's something about a skin color that trumps other things. Think about that for a second. These people, the only people who care, this isn't my line, I read this somewhere, but the only people who care about race are racists and regressive leftists. These people are looking, the regressive left really are the new racists. They're really looking at everything in terms of race. And sex.

And I think there's a lot of sexism. And sex. There's a lot of sexism in the regressive left because they don't really like men. And there's a lot of anti-masculine ideology that gets perpetrated on people. The point where you're thinking like you're supposed to be more soft gendered. Gender is supposed to be a fluid thing. You're not supposed to be

overtly masculine. That's nonsense. How come you can be overtly feminine once you become transgender? How come you, if a woman wants to wear a push-up bra,

have her tits poking out and a short skirt and high heels and a lot of makeup and do her hair up that girl's giving into the patriarchy but if a transgender does it you go girl if a transgender man all of a sudden adopts those yeah so it's traditionally feminine views it's hypocrisy but it's even worse than hypocrisy because if it just stopped there it would be something

but it's this idea that these people they think that they can dictate to other people how they should live. Yeah. When you see a guy who's a power lifter, okay, some big fucking giant, like, you know that Game of Thrones? Oh, the mountain guy. Yeah, the mountain guy. I met that guy. I didn't say hi to him. I saw him.

He was at the UFC this past weekend. He's a fucking gigantic man. He's huge. He has a cool thing with Conor McGregor, too. Yeah, yeah. It's awesome. He obviously likes being fucking huge. He enjoys picking shit up and moving it around.

He enjoys breaking records. What do I give a fuck? Why would I care? He seems like a nice guy. Like, the idea that this... And even if he's an asshole. Well, here's the thing. He doesn't seem to be.

My point is, like, there's no... He's not doing anything terrible. Like, but you would look at that and decide that this person living their life in this way is negative. That he's masculine and he's a part of the problem and rape culture and all this. He's just picking big shit up and moving it around and flexing. Who gives a fuck? The most innocuous thing right that one could do but why is it i mean why is it because he's overtly masculine why is that bad like what if he just was put the same amount of energy into swimming right and this guy just like to swim across the fucking ocean would you freak out about that no it's like it's

this feeling that this guy is becoming this thing that you find oppressive, even if he's not doing anything. Yeah. So so so there are ideologues. We got that. And they subscribe to ideas that are just not in accordance with reality. And I think and I'm not using the term regressive here. I think general liberals in general tend to believe that if we can change social systems somehow. And and and I I think that there's a lot of truth in this. Steven Pinker kind of in the blank slate deconstructs some of these ideas. But liberals kind of think if you could only change the institutions in society, then things would by definition be more fair and more equal.

We're all born blank slates and all of know, it's all of these disparities and inequalities come about as a result of problems within the system, you know, inequalities within the system. And there's, look, unless you're really an ideologue on the right, you would be hard-pressed to say, you know, why shouldn't we try to do our best to create systems of justice that are more fair? I'm a big fan of John Rawls. Absolutely. Any reasonable person would say that. But these people, they don't believe in differences.

They think that the differences between men and women are not biological. They think that they're cultural artifacts. They think that, you know, and I don't know if you want to get the whole race thing, but the race thing is another thing, but they think that race is only skin deep. It's a social construct, you know, rather than saying, well, why do Jewish women get Tay-Sachs syndrome? Why do black people get more sickle cell anemia? But again, you know, I noticed my hesitancy in discussing these things because I know that any time you bring this up, this is an opportunity for people to smear you, tell you you're a bigot, a racist, a homophobe. discredited or they look at me because I'm situated in the body that I am for the sexuality I had no choice over whatsoever, and they use that as an opportunity to discredit my speech.

I mean, the whole thing is just, it is literally, if you could say, well, let's make a list of all the things that we can write down to make it impossible to solve our problems. These people, they have the list. I mean, they have the gold standard for the list. Yeah, it's a very good point. I mean, I think one of the most important aspects of this is what you said about silencing debate, and that debate and discussion is the only way we figure things out. And I don't know, I met you today. I know you because of your work. I know you because of your associations with friends of mine like Sam Harris but I I don't know your thinking until I talk to you and when I talk to you I go oh okay I see how he sees that or he sees things in a different way and it's hard for people to do that because we have this rigid set of ideas that we have in our head and we would

like to reinforce those on everybody because it makes life simpler right well if you think the way I think and I think the way you think, it's perfect. Right. So that's when we bring jujitsu in again, right? So that's why the problem is when we hang out with people who only believe like we do, it's called a filter bubble. And it's a book about it called The Big Sort. We tend to be more confident in the beliefs that we have, right? But what we should be doing is we should be going to different gyms, right? You should be going to your buddy, 10th Planet. You should be going and checking out different things

because you need to test these ideas to see if they work. In the same way, we should be listening to ideas. It's a problem if you're a liberal and you only listen to liberal stuff or an atheist and you only listen. You really need to listen to, challenge, and engage yourself by opening yourself up to these experiences and starting with the possibility that you could be wrong. So if you're a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and you walk into someone's school and the blue belts are routinely tapping you, you've got to do some thinking. You've got to be honest with yourself. And it doesn't matter how much time you've put into it.

It doesn't matter what your commitment is. What matters is what works. Yeah, that's it. That's it. And that is a beautiful thing about high-level problem-solving in martial arts, that if it works, it works. And it's hard to do that when it comes to ideas like compassion and justice and getting along and how you should treat people and how people should be accepted. And there's things

about diversity and about equality that I think we all agree with. I mean, I think you shouldn't be judged by your sexuality or what you look like or where you were born or you know fill in the blank nationalism seems to be kind of fucking silly to me I think you should judge people on how you behave and how you interact with each other and like do I enjoy talking to this person and guess what you might enjoy talking to me but somebody else might fucking think I'm a moron they They might not like talking to me, and that's their prerogative, too. You don't have to, just because you, like Peter Boghossian, just because you enjoy people doesn't mean I have to enjoy them.

You know, I have friends that have friends I can't fucking stand. You know, and I'll be around them like, oh, Christ, why are you hanging around with this guy? He gives me headaches. I got to get out of here. That's okay, too. with this guy he gives me headaches i gotta get out of here yeah and the older that's okay too yeah the older i get the the more i i just want to spend my time with people i really want to spend and not obligations can't fix people i've tried so hard to get along with people that are unmotivated or lazy or they have constant problems in their life they don't look at themselves objectively and you talk to them about things that happen in their life and they have a fucking myriad of excuses, it's overwhelming.

If you have those people in your life, they will overwhelm you with their issues and you will never get anything done. And so my take is try until you can't try and then get the fuck out of there. Yeah, and you're already doing what you're doing and it's that you're modeling those behaviors. You know, when I was just talking to my buddy the other day, he's upset that all the aggressives are attacking him. And I just said, just I'll publish everybody. That's the currency in academia.

Like, what do you care? Like, just publish. And explain your thoughts in a way that will inspire debate and inspire thought. Explain your thoughts in a blog in a way where people can read it and like it and share it with friends. And that's one of the beautiful things about today is that you have this ability that's never literally unparalleled access to other human beings.

It's never been like this where you could just write something. You put it on Facebook. You could be a carpenter in kansas and you write something beautiful on facebook and it'll be shared across the world within minutes yeah i'll add one more thing to that and don't treat people if you've been treated negatively by people don't stoop to that it's hard right it's hard for people. Yeah. My mentor, this is somewhat of a non-sequitur, but my mentor told me this really fascinating story.

No. No, the Pope. No. The one that they just got rid of, right? The child molester Pope? He told me, he was 97, he's a survivor of Buchenwald. Yeah, he's a really amazing guy. He's got a film about his life,

and he went back and liberated the same concentration camp. He told me this story about chickens that was very profound in my life. Basically, I think he was on the study. If not, then... But it doesn't make a difference. Basically, they wanted to see if they could reverse the pecking order among chickens.

And there's something that's a literal pecking order in that if you put chickens in a coop, seven chickens, chicken one will peck chicken two. Chicken one will peck chickens two through seven, but never be picked. Chicken two will not peck chicken one, but will peck chicken three. So the same thing all the way down.

Chicken seven gets pecked by all the chickens and pecks nobody. So they wanted to see if they could reverse the pecking order. And I think that this story has profound implications for all of life. And so what they did was they put a little collar, they put little collars on all the chickens. And when the chicken raised his head as if it was going to peck another chicken, they zapped it. Now here's the question to to you and I got it wrong when he asked me do you think it was easier to make chicken one chicken seven or chicken seven chicken one chicken seven chicken one see that's what I said that's wrong

really and here's the reasoning for that chicken seven has been has been plucked not plucked packed packed packed thanks hascked, pecked, thanks, has been pecked its whole life. It's, it's, it's all only going to get pecked. It only takes one shock. And I'll tell you another very quick story. It only takes one shock of chicken one to make a chicken seven instantly. Really? Yeah. Because it's never experienced that. That's why, for example, in the criminal justice system, harsh punishments don't work. They just don don't and that's borne out by overwhelming empirical evidence but I think a theoretical background for that is the chicken story that's why like my he was telling me that when his son he never yelled at his son his funny

story looking at you with all the tattoos and his son wanted to get a tattoo and he slammed his hand down and he said no and he screamed and his son was so shocked it was like such a shocking thing because he had never raised his voice he'd always been chicken one you know he'd always been but when you really start to think about the implications of that of what kindness will do of what of why being there's your word again, vituperative, nasty, harsh to people. The best way to change moral attitudes is through rapport. The best way to help people. And if you read the Christian books, they talk about this interesting book called Tactics. The main thing is, you know, develop relationships with people. They're friendly, they're kind, they're trustworthy,

you have communities with people, and that gets, they're kind, they're trustworthy. You have communities with people. And that gets them involved in their community and thus their faith-based. Same thing with jujitsu. I have some great guys. I was just hanging out with the other day who do jujitsu. Jujitsu is also interesting, just parenthetically, because you have such a trust of the people you work out with.

I mean, you have a bond. A buddy of mine is a prosecutor for the state. And you know how you have to say, hey, I know this guy. Well, he knew another guy who's also a friend of mine and they did jujitsu together. And he told the judge and the lawyer and they said they don't have a problem with it.

Neither one of those people do jujitsu, right? Because there's no freaking way that I would let someone do jujitsu sit on a Jury with somebody else who's either the prosecutor the defender because those people trust each other Because you have to trust each other when you do jiu-jitsu or people will break your arms They'll choke they could also a part of a very tight-knit and unusual community Absolutely, you have this bond with each other that I don't think people understand. You're practicing killing each other. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, you're practicing breaking each other's arms. Yeah, so I think that that chicken story, and I told that because often we think that the best response to be when we're being mistreated or we perceive an injustice or unfairness is to lash out. And a type of emotional maturity is just to not lash out. to lash out and a type of emotional maturity is just to not lash out you know maybe a really good strategy which i've adopted instead of it's certainly much easier than than attempting to do the emotional work of being kind and compassionate is to just ignore people you don't have to meet their nastiness with nastiness you just walk away well that's a good approach if you can pull it off sometimes people get pissed off pissed off, so you're like, fuck this guy! But I think that also is what I call the battery effect,

and it's also a good aspect of jiu-jitsu. I think human beings have a certain amount of energy that they store up in their body, because I think our bodies are... We have this ancient structure that's been passed on from generation to generation, thousands and thousands of years of human beings. And for the most part, up until really recently, you were constantly engaged in physical activity and conflict.

And your body is designed for that. And I believe your body has a certain amount of requirements for the expenditure of energy. And when you don't meet those requirements, your battery overflows. And I think that's what road rage is and I think that's what? Irrational responses and I know personally from my own experience in my own shortcomings when I have had Irrational responses is because I have not maintained my body correctly and I have not taken care of that battery And then when it comes up, especially when you're someone like me, it's even more consequential because I've done it my whole life. So my whole life has been about exploding, punching, kicking, just all kettlebells, jujitsu. It's all this.

And in doing that, if I get it out of my system, I'm tranquil. Everything's calm. But when I don't get out of my system, my body's like, I think this is an opportunity to go fucking crazy. Let's do it. You got all this extra, you know what I mean? But when I don't get out of my systems, but my body's like I think this is an opportunity to go fucking crazy You got this extra, you know, I mean, it's like your body's like come on bitch like it's it's stored up you've got too much juice in your battery and Jujitsu people for the most part are some of the most mellow calm and relaxed people outside of it They also have the benefit of knowing that the average person literally has no idea how to

defend themselves. We know this because we have been personally humiliated as an average person going into jujitsu. And then you become a practitioner and you become fairly proficient. And then you understand your limitations, but you also understand much more deeply the limitations of the average person. Absolutely. Now you happen to have it from my perspective, an encyclopedic knowledge of martial arts and lineages and people in my experience, the people I've met, like, like,

uh, you know, um, I'm trying to think of, uh, um, John Cavanaugh would be a good example. He's a very,

very, have you ever rolled with John? No, he's very good. Like he's extraordinarily good. I'm sure he is. Yeah. He's a great guy. Yeah. He's very good. He's extraordinarily good. I'm sure he is. He's a great guy.

He's a super good guy. The people you meet who are just the most dangerous, deadly people, they got nothing to prove. They seem to be the nicest people to me. You ever met Marcel Garcia? No. He's the sweetest of sweeties. He's just like a smiling, happy assassin. When you're around him, he's so nice. He's just such a nice guy.

And yeah, when you're around him. My friend Eddie Bravo is the fucking nicest guy ever. He's always nice. Yeah, and then I went out to a bar a little while ago and a guy had a black belt around his waist as a belt and he was playing pool. And I thought to myself, this guy has some issues. Was it dangling?

Yeah, it's like how you tie a belt around a gi. He was tied around his pants like that. So the two ends were dangling like a black belt would be? So he wanted to let everybody know that he's a black belt. You just buy a black belt. That's the other thing I tell people. You can get a black belt from online. You buy them, and then they come, and then you put it on.

You don't have to earn it. It's like a sacred forging ground of black belts We could do a fantasy martial art just pay money, but you don't even have to fucking do a fantasy martial art You could just be a regular guy order a black belt. I mean you literally can there was a video really recently I mean it still does happen to this day of some guy showing up at a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu school He puts on a gi. I think he had wrestling shoes on and a black belt. And he showed up at this gym and he started working out with people.

And then the instructor realized immediately that this guy was on a black belt. And humiliated him and punished him and tell him to take the belt off and get the fuck out of here. And he was screaming at him. See, that's the beauty about jiu- jujitsu too, is you can't pretend. Cannot pretend. Yeah. You can pretend in some martial arts. I mean, there's guys that invent moves that they think like,

this is one of my favorite videos is these guys in Harlem. That is not videos. There's a series of them who practice some sort of fake Kung Fu. And like one guy will be like, he'll throw a punch, and then the other guy will go, well, someone does that to me. What I'm going to do is, and they don't say it like this. They say it in a very urban way. Like, no, no, no, no, no, that shit ain't going to work,

because I'm going to step over here, and I'm going to attack with a chicken wing, and then I got a monkey paw, and they invent all this stuff. I'm going to attack your ribs from this position. And then the other guy is also in on it, because they're also practicing bullshit choreographs like oh yeah Yeah, yeah, I see how that would work. I see how that would work. What's hilarious is sometimes these guys actually have fights And when they have fights it becomes like two kids in a fucking schoolyard It becomes a brawl on the ground. Yeah, they clawing at each other, and they can't do anything. There's no kung fu.

There's no monkey paw. There's no attack the ribs with your knife point fingers and all this stupid shit. But you watch these guys do it. And me, as a person who studied martial arts my whole life, I know I don't practice kung fu, but I know what is actually kung fu and what is some shit that someone's making up they're just practicing and making things up well they could go to even a kung fu dojo and try and and and pretend that that stuff's real and the kung fu guy would go like what are you talking about like this you're inventing things don't you feel bad for those guys at some level yes i do

i do i think that a lot of those guys if they're just found the correct path Would benefit greatly if they just found a real martial arts school. Okay, so here's what I think part of it is I think that they engage and I'm really interested to hear what you think about this I think that they engage in a willingness to self deceive a hundred percent. Yeah, a hundred percent Yeah, And they, it's mutual. It's with both people. Like they,

they, you know, it reinforces each other. You see it in religion too, though. You see that in religion. God finds a way. Yes,

he does. God does find a way. Meanwhile, they just leave and smoke crack and suck some dude's dick. People are crazy. I mean, that's what they do. They, they pretend,

they pretend and they love to, one of the things that people love about Christians like Christians love about Christians is like well. I'm a Christian. I'm a Christian to You're saying I know yes tribalism and also I know that at least in the moment you are gonna engage in some very predictable behavior You're gonna engage in your God feeling fear and Christian man So you're gonna behave like a God fearing Christian man, and you're gonna engage in your God feeling fear and Christian man, so you're gonna behave like a God fearing Christian man You're gonna say things. I know where you're coming from you're not some fucking weirdo

Buddhist Zen dude who likes to do peyote no you're you're real clear you know what I mean I mean, so it's real clear you like country music. Are you Luke Bryan fan bait too? Well of course you got a pickup truck of course. I got a fan? Me too, of course. You got a pickup truck? Of course. I got a belt buckle. I got a big belt buckle too. You know, what about your boots? Look at my boots. I got cowboy boots. You know, it's like we engage in these really predictable patterns and people find comfort in those patterns. Yeah. And we tend to like people who are like ourselves. Yes. Yes. It's very much a tribalism thing. And it's also very much, it reinforces your own, like if you have a lack of willingness or ability or whatever it is to question the reality that you have been shown, that you have subscribed to,

if you have, if you're not willing to question it and you find someone else who's also not willing to question it, there's some comfort in that. And if you reassure each other, there's some comfort. No, that's absolutely right. And that's why it's so important for people to be honest with themselves and how do how do we promote those values of people of self-honesty I mean how do we this way I think that's exactly right stations I think this is the way you do it and especially conversations like this that will be heard by more than a million people yeah and that's that's the way you do it and I mean I'm not saying that's what I'm doing bro I'm fixing the world but I'm not saying, that's what I'm doing, bro.

I'm just fixing the world. But I'm saying humans talking to each other through social media, through various methods. I'll just throw this out now. I wonder if, you know, everyone's like, oh, you know, what comes after postmodernism? I wonder if this comes after postmodernism. I mean, I wonder if these truth-telling conversations

come after postmodernism. Well, I certainly think there's a great benefit to talking to people and having people be honest and even in an uncomfortable way where when you listen to it, it makes you think, Oh, like there's lights that go on in my head. When I hear someone say something, maybe, maybe they'll be vulnerable or maybe there'll be like introspective and almost a painful way. When I hear it, there's lights that go on in my head while I go wow okay I'm getting some real shit from this person and I'll find in myself These moments that relate to what this guy's saying and I try to see themselves from this point of view as opposed to a newscaster

when someone is Today in Los Angeles we found out the hard way what happens when you don't obey the law. There's no reality. There's no human in there. This is a strip club DJ coming up on the main stage. It's Lexus.

$14 kamikazes. Order now. It's like, these are patterns that are not real that people subscribe to and adopt and then perpetrate. And they do it over and over again in the business world. Hello, Jim. How's the family? Is everything good?

These patterns are like they protect you from having to be vulnerable and real. By adopting these predetermined patterns of behavior that we all are comfortable with and we all know, as a God-fearing Christian man, I'm a God-fearing Christian man myself, so I understand where you're coming from there, sir. Just give me a handshake right now. I know we're on the same page. What they're doing is they're removing the possibility of vulnerability and of reality. And authenticity.

Yes, authenticity is the perfect word. And that makes me sad for them. It really does. It's a type of tragedy. Well, you get sad at the shit that I don't get sad at. Well, I do. I get sad at cartoons. Well, I don't get sad at cartoons, but I do feel the impetus to help people like that.

Like, I do feel that it's important that people are laboring under beliefs about reality, like, again, fantasy-based martial arts that just simply aren't true. And they're wasting their time. But unlike fantasy martial arts, these people vote, right? And these people affect decisions. They directly affect my life.

Yes. Yes. Yeah, especially social issues. It becomes a real problem. You know, it becomes a real problem when you start blocking people's access to certain medical procedures and Deciding what can and can be done based on I mean look at what was happening during the Bush administration When it comes to when it came to stem cell research, right?

I mean it was fucking shackled and stopped because everyone they're gonna sell babies They're gonna they're gonna kill babies and just get the stem cells from the embryos and it's Satan I mean stem cells from skin you fuck and meanwhile the rest of the world has like advanced and progressed the Iranians Yeah, I mean it's just we got fucked by religious ideology got in the way of medical innovation Yeah, and it's you see I think part of this is, I've been thinking about this a lot. I think part of this, a way that we can at least dent this problem is by promoting the value of honesty. Because if we promote the value of honesty, then with that comes the willingness to revise people's beliefs. And we have to make it okay to say, I don't know.

Like, I'm totally cool with you sitting here and you talk about all these guys. I don't know all that stuff. I think that's one of the beautiful things about this new age of information is that it is impossible now, clearly, to know everything. No one can know everything. So it's okay to say, I don't know now. Where it used to be a sign of you were poorly motivated or poorly educated or what? I mean, I'm not very educated. I went to college for three

years. I barely paid attention and I only did it because I didn't want people to think I was a loser. I barely made it out of high school. But since that time, I've read a lot of shit. I've watched a lot of documentaries. I've had a lot of fascinating conversations with people and I've read a lot of shit. I've watched a lot of documentaries. I've had a lot of fascinating conversations with people, and I've accumulated some information. So am I educated? Not really, but yeah. I'm educated on certain things about life. I would say maybe not formally, but you're certainly educated.

But where is formality now? When you have formal education, like what's going on with your school? That's a great question. All schools. All schools. All schools. What is it now? Because that's not education. formal education like what's going on with your school great question not all schools all schools all schools what is it now because that's not education you're you're you're being indoctrinated into this ridiculous ideology if you're participating in that kind of shit it's worse than it's anti-education it's like kata yeah you're it's in a lot of ways in a lot of ways

it is um it is just like religion yeah and and that's what my friend Kurt Metzger was saying about these social justice warriors. He's like, no, no, I've seen this. I grew up in a fucking cult. I know what this is. You're telling me I can't think about it any other way, and that's bullshit. And his reaction to it is very,

he gets angry at it, you know? And he's not like a violent guy, but he's like, this is fucking bullshit. I know what it is. This is bullshit. You're making me think a certain way i'm not doing it yeah and in the bigger picture of things you know america has been this is a somewhat of a controversial statement but but we're not the great superpower we used to be but the one thing that we speak for yourself the one thing we've always had is we've had strong institutions and strong universities. And now we're seeing those being undermined, at least in the humanities in general,

and even to a certain extent in the sciences. And I don't know. The sciences, really? In what way? See, that's why I said I think, because I don't really know, because I'm not in the sciences, so I can't really speak to that. But just anecdotally from what I've heard of people, but again, I can't speak to that. You know, I was thinking about... But anecdotally, can you come up with specific examples?

That's where I haven't heard it interfered with, except for the idea of promoting more women in science and there's somehow or another some sexism involved in science. Well, that's what I was thinking. So here's the problem with that. Why are there no diversity requirements with sports teams? Right, like football teams? How come they don't need to have a certain amount of women? Because they want to win. Well, also, they don't want women to get killed. Right.

But that's different because it's physical. Okay, well, why aren't they saying, well, we need so many Puerto Ricans here? There aren't diversity requirements aren't diversity requirements so here's a word for exogenous it's like an X I know that okay cool cool so because because they want to win in other words they're telling you this is important to us anytime you impose a value on a system that is that is winning is the value and that's a marketplace, right? That's a competition. That's a free market. Anytime you say, well, you know, you also need diversity,

then you're making it more difficult to win. Meritocracy is like that. Like, you want people in a system to have, in academia, I can tell you what those are. You need to be well-published. Your works need to be cited by others. You need to have, we have all these metrics. They're pretty straightforward and you either live up to the metrics or you don't. But now this is why I was talking about the sciences. When you try to put people in positions who are not qualified for those positions, you undermine the meritocracy. So when you're trying to put

people, if you say, well, there's not enough women here, we need to find more women. There are not enough African-American, well, enough, it's trickier, but there are very few African-Americans who study philosophy. If you're an African-American with a PhD in philosophy, man, you are, you're gold. That is awesome. So an Africanican with a phd for philosophy can kind of write their own ticket yeah yeah well that's because so is that a good thing because they want to promote more african americans get involved in philosophy and then perhaps that will sort of engage more people now pursuing that now this is now this is a really interesting conversation that we should have this is the kind of thing, at this point in academia,

we have to shut down the discourse because someone's going to be offended. But I think that's an important question, because your question is basically, it's a kind of utilitarian calculus. Like, okay, let's say that we have, what is the, first of all, you have to look at the evidence. Regressives don't like evidence very much, but we have to look at the evidence. What is the evidence? If there more African-Americans in philosophy? Can they mentor more African-American students, et cetera?

Of course, I would think that we would want that. That would be a good thing. That would be something that would be wonderful. The question is, does that mean that we would hire a candidate who would not be hired if that candidate had a different skin color? Like that whole thing undermines the meritocracy. But the moment that you start talking about putting a diversity requirement on, for example, my discipline philosophy, in essence, I think what you're saying is it's not important. Your discipline isn't important because we don't do that when the outcome really matters. We don't do that with brain surgery. We don't do that with sports teams. Right. So we're not looking for the best candidates.

What we're looking for is to bring people into these disciplines that may not have had the opportunity and that might be bad for the overall discipline. Yeah, it's bad for the overall institution. It's bad for the discipline. Because you're not finding the best people. But the idea is that you're trying to promote these disciplines in places where people aren't as, words not as common, not represented, but also they don't have the same advantages yeah they don't have privileges so they're under privileges another word we talk about so so

they're underrepresented so we want more people in the discipline in as long as look that's not bad in and of itself but we need to have a conversation about what that means see part of the problem with regressives is they look at outcomes instead of opportunities. We need to construct systems to give everybody, regardless of their skin color, their ethnicity, an equal opportunity and an education of the first rate. And what we're seeing instead is systems being created to orchestrate or engineer outcomes. Produce this many black, African, whatever it you know african whatever it is or hispanic whatever it is the first of all that's a bad way to think about it it's a horrible way

to think about it but the other problem is in meritocracy matters we need we need to if anything should be institutionalized it should be systems that are race blind. Systems that don't. Look, think about it. You could also think about it like this. Think about the black guy who is in philosophy, who's incredibly smart and qualified. I have a student of mine, Matt Hernandez. The kid is freaking genius.

Like, truly one in a million. Like, much smarter than I am. He's published stuff. I mean, the kid's awesome. He's Hispanic. He's going to get his PhD in philosophy, got a full ride, a full scholarship. The crime, the shame is that when Matt gets in, people would say, well, he just got it because he's Hispanic. No, actually, no.

He got it. Well, who's going to say that, though? Well, no one's going to say it. They're going to think it? Well, that's the problem. The problem is that we can't have a conversation to ask people if they're thinking about it, because if they say yes, they'll be smeared as a racist. Okay, so then how do you address the issue with inequality inside of these marginalized communities? That's a great question.

Look, this is what I think we need to do. Great question. Look, this is what I think we need to do. When you look at surveys of if people so I think that these lines are primarily upon class drawn upon class, which is something else no one wants to talk about instead of race. It just so happens that fewer African-Americans are frame it the other way. More African-Americans are born to poverty than than white. That's just a fact. We can also talk about something that's really interesting about criminogenic factors or risk predictors. They're not what you think for people who would be violent criminals. They're just not what you think at all. But people try to make that a racial issue. But when you look at these systems, when you look at these school systems, for example, I just totally lost my train of thought. I started thinking about race and Jimi Hendrix's photo back there.

Oh, sorry. You were talking about trying to get more addressing the issue of inequality. So what we need to do is, well, we need to start thinking about opportunities. Well, the other thing is we need to think long term and not short term. We need to look at the problem and be honest. And there are some structural issues with our electorate and the way that we've established politics in this country of offices of four years and then eight years renewable. We need to have a longer term vision and a look at what this wants to be uh right now we face a problem and that we're not adequately educating poor people in our country and the majority of those happen to be black

and this is an enormous problem this is going to come back to haunt us. But the solution to that problem is not diversity initiatives. Here's the other reason why that's bad. It's not even a band-aid. It's worse. It's because people then say, well, look, this philosophy department, this department has so many minorities, things must be going well. Actually, no, they're not going well. It was an artificial solution that was put in, and the underlying structural inequality and economic disparity hasn't been addressed. That's a great way to put it. And what about all the poor people that live in West Virginia or Kentucky? There's families have been generations and generations of coal miners. I mean, just because other white people have made it into universities and made it into certain institutions, you're being racist

if you think that those people shouldn't get an equal shot at things as well. Yeah. And so the way we fix it is, again, this is John Rawls' idea, public education of the first rate. However, every time I would say that, people would say two things. They'd play identity politics. You're just white. You're saying that because you're white.

That gives them, that's their ticket to discredit what I'm saying that's the that's why people they use that as an excuse to not listen to your arguments it's really it's perverted I mean it's it's it's really despicable so so so they use that they use that idea as an excuse so you've just said that but the other thing that it does, I mean, if you really start to think about what kind of a society do we want to move to? What what are the limits of our institutions? What what role should the meritocracy play? Should you disrupt that if there are racial inequalities or imbalances? These are questions we have to address. People in a democracy have to address this. And you cannot have fear of talking about this because someone's going to call you a racist. You just can't. So if you want to

put a proposal forward that says or an idea, well, I don't think, you know, hiring should be this way. You need to have that conversation. But there's one other issue. There's one other the tactic that the regressive left use. And that's the idea of privilege. They love that word, privilege. Oh, well, you don't even see your privilege. Privilege is yet another thing that's used. And look, I think the impetus for that is good. The danger here is that because these people are so nasty, so mean-spirited, and so generally insane that we discard everything that they're saying. We throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Now, we need to be conscious and careful that we don't do that. We need to acknowledge that they're saying some important things. They're, you know, racial treatment of people on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, not discriminating against someone because they don't feel comfortable in a male body or female. Or a guy, Mark Fisher I roll with, is gay and has this gay judicious thing. These things are important. These things matter. These things are things that we have to talk about.

And if I have privilege, I want to be conscious of that. And if I'm treating someone in a way that's unjust or if it's unkind, I want to know about that. That's not the guy I want to be, you know. So how do we talk about these things? How do we engage these? Well, here's how you don't talk about them. You don't talk about them by constantly smearing people with privilege, saying, you have privilege, Portland State, my university. They had an event where minority students could speak about all these things, but students who were, I can't remember the exact phrasing, not of color, were invited to listen.

Think about that. They were invited to listen. They have institutionalized racism. That's what that is. It is. It's certainly racism in that sense. But isn't it an opportunity for people that have been marginalized to express themselves in a platform that maybe a lot of people that have been marginalized haven't had the opportunity? Absolutely. Isn't there room for people of a specific race to speak

about some issues that maybe they would understand intimately that you or I wouldn't because we're white folks? There's no question at all that that's true. And you know what? So is it bad though to have someone have the opportunity to like, let's only, let's allow African-Americans to speak and let's allow these white folks to listen to what they have to say. And then maybe you have another conference or maybe a debate or maybe a conversation where you allow someone to have a retort. So the first problem with that is if you frame it in terms of an opportunity, then if I say, yes, it's bad, then it'd be like I'm denying people an opportunity. So I don't think that's the best way to frame it. Right.

You and me. it's bad, then it'd be like I'm denying people an opportunity. So I don't think that's the best way to frame it. Right. The problem with that, one, I asked my buddy who's an appellate court judge and he said one, he said he thinks it's unwise or his son actually said this. He didn't say this. His son is a, is a, uh, uh, on the, he clerks for some Supreme court. I don't even know what he, but somebody, he has his lawyer board board certified, etc. Or a pass the bar, excuse me. Part of the problem is that if you do that, so I was amazed that that was legal. I'm not a lawyer. I don't pretend to be a lawyer, but he said it's actually legal. The problem is that you then need to hold then white people or whoever any other group can hold and say, look, blacks can't speak, basically. So we can get in and we can talk about how great it is.

Good luck with that so you're right so you're so it's not right so you you're creating an opportunity for people who are genuine racists to undermine the whole system but the other thing is like i think it's important you can totally do that and say look we're going to have people for two hours speak about their experiences of oppression i think that's great and i think that they should do that and I think we need to be more sensitive. And I think we need to correct any structural inequalities or remove biases that we have for people. And I'm sure I still have some. I don't know of any. I try to remove them. I'm sure I still have them. But the idea is that shouldn't people of any race then be allowed to ask people questions about those experiences? Shouldn't we then say, oh, you've had this experience of, you know, gang jiu-jitsu again, or whatever it is, or being black in the academy, or being like, you said this, like, I don't understand, explain that to

me. Explain that to all I know. So you're shutting down possibilities for people who don't understand those. That's the way we understand things. We come to understand through asking questions like, you know, oh, well, why do you do the rearnegadrug list? Why? Oh, because if you don't, the guy will pull your arm off. So you put in the back of his head. So like we need environments that encourage genuine inquirers in questions. And here's the problem. So that someone could say, well, what if someone goes in there and starts shouting racial epithets or horrible things? Okay. Well, they're a bad person.

Well, they're horrible. They're a vile person. But that should be clear to everybody. And the only way that's going to be clear to everybody is if you allow open thinking and open speech and allow people to express themselves. And you accumulate all that data and you get an understanding of what is okay and what's not okay. What's hurtful, what's not hurtful. Yeah, and if you're constantly in an environment where you don't even, you know, the monkey hear no evil, you can't even hear a bad idea. When someone does something legitimately horrible, what would the reaction be? Your threshold will constantly be decreasing if you're not hearing ideas.

Right. decreasing if you're not hearing ideas. Right. Right. If you're not hearing ideas that run contrary or, you know, challenging, then your threshold for what you find offensive will constantly lower. So then anything will offend you. I had Thaddeus Russell on, who's a great guy, and he teaches at Occidental. And we were talking about that issue where there was a young man and a young woman who

got together and they got drunk and they had sex and the girl decided that either she decided or friends convinced her into it that she had been raped even though she had sent him a bunch of text messages saying are you coming over bring condoms told their friends I'm getting laid lol and he had gotten to her they were both intoxicated but because he's a man, he was kicked off the campus. He was kicked out of school. They're suing.

There's a big lawsuit. She stayed. They both had sex. There was no force. There was no lies. There was no... No one held anyone down. No one did anything against anyone's will,

but they decided that he had committed sexual assault because they were both drunk and they could not consent. Which is fucking insane and, ready? Sexist. Yeah, that's right. It's sexist. It's sexist towards men. And it disempowers women. Yes, it does.

It also, it's ridiculous because how come you are responsible for your own actions in every other realm? If you drive a car and you're drunk, you can't say, well, hey, I was drunk. I'm not responsible for plowing into that fucking school bus full of kids. You can't say that. But if you say, hey, I was drunk, I'm not responsible for my consent to have sex with this man, that's preposterous. We all know that alcohol limits your inhibitions. It lowers your inhibitions and it makes you do things that you might regret. limits your inhibitions. It lowers your inhibitions and it makes you do things you might regret.

But there's a big thing amongst people online that are trying to say this and pass it on. Regret does not equal rape. People make mistakes. We've all made mistakes. Everyone's made mistakes. And if you drink, you're going to make more mistakes. That's just a fact. But it doesn't mean that the person you made a mistake with is a fucking rapist now. They've also made a mistake. And maybe not. Maybe you guys made a mistake. And maybe not. Maybe you guys just had sex. And maybe you're around a bunch of fucking nutty people who are trying to convince you that anytime you have sex and you're drunk, you've been raped. And there is a lot of that going on. Yeah, right.

So I was going to say that's a cultural problem. Now look at it from the view of the administrator, right? So from the view of the administrator, students, they'll ask for his job. And those guys have couch jobs, man. They have cush jobs. 300,000, they get parking spaces and everything. I mean, they have... Parking spaces are big?

Parking spaces are huge. Yes, the sign. Mr. Wilson, your spot is ready. Let me sweep it. Pull in your Tesla. Yeah, so... Oh, Tesla. So those guys...

So those administrative guys is a microaggression. How dare you microaggress me? So those folks. I prefer Z. Yeah. Oh, which is a funny story. There's a story at the university about this. So, again, I have no problem calling somebody, you know, he who looks like a she or whatever.

You want to hear a couple quick stories? Sure. So I had a, I take attendance. Long story why I take attendance. Just run with it. So I get this very attractive young woman comes up to me at the end of class. I'm kind of discombobulated. I got all this shit in my head.

And she hands me this note. And so you can get out of it if you have a jury duty, military orders, doctor's note, excuse from my boss's boss, the dean or whatever. So that way, just in case I'm audited, right? If I'm audited, I can say, or if I say, hey, why did this person get off of this? But I didn't do anything. And then next thing you know, she's paying me. I'm sleeping with her. Who knows? It's just so much easier for me. So I'm reading this note, and it said, would you please excuse Mr. So-and-so from this thing and his system, whatever it was. And I'm looking at this, and I'm like, who's Mr. So-and-so?

And I look and say, is it a friend? I didn't have any idea why she's handing me this note. She said, oh no, I'm Mr. So-and-so. And it took me a second and it took me a moment. I had to like process that. I didn't say anything about it.

I'm like, oh, that's great. Because if I do, you know, if people do demand something and they'll say, well, look, this person gave you, this is not a mister.

I'm like, you have a problem with that? I mean mean i can pull the same regressive card that they can you you're being homophobic you're being transphobic or whatever it is so so people have been choosing their own pronouns but the craziest thing that happened to a colleague of mine is he was told that and again i call anybody any pronoun you want. You want to be called Z, I got no, I got biggest shit to worry about. Z-H-E-E, please. I'm problem. I want three E's.

I'll spell it out for you every time. So this person wanted to be called, I can't remember what the days were, but certain days, Z, he, she, and he made a mistake. My colleague made a mistake mistake and all hell broke loose what was the mistake he called her a she on the wrong day like that yeah and and she said you know okay don't do that again evidently he did that again or something i don't know so now and now whatever happened to people just being fucking crazy? Isn't that an option?

Is that possible? You know, I was listening to a Radiolab podcast, and they were interviewing this guy who, a guy sometimes, sometimes he's a girl, sometimes goes back and forth, and his gender's fluid. And in the middle of the conversation, he's like, I just switched. I'm a guy now.

I just switched. I just felt it. It was immediate. I'm listening to this, and I'm going, it's like, I just switched. I'm a guy now. I just switched. I just felt it. It was immediate. I'm listening to this, and I'm going, well, this is a fucking idiot. Clearly. Clearly. This is obviously a nutty person that has a very loose, slippery, mineral oil grip on reality.

It's like, whoop! Just flies right out of their fingers, and they want you to give in to this slippery reality and Focus on them constantly now me. Now machine It's another way to divert attention from anything that's going on and focus it on them and something completely trivial Like that they decide they're a female they decide they're a male. What the fuck are you talking about? Yeah, I don't even I don't even care if it's... It's pointless. People feel different different times of the day.

If you feel different sexually, if you're pansexual, you're just thinking too much and projecting that off on other people. If you really think that you become transgender or cisgender and all like it switches back and forth all throughout the day, you're probably fucking crazy. Was it you who tweeted the link about the guy who is a six year old girl or eight year old girl?

Yes. He's a 52 year old man and he's a father and he has decided that now he's a six year old girl. I love it. He should be a six year old fox. I'm going to be a fox. No-old girl. Right. I love it. He should be a six-year-old fox. I'm going to be a fox. No, I'm an owl. I'm an eagle.

I identify with trees. I'm just going to stand here. Don't judge me. So instead of... I have a hat with apples hanging from it. Don't disrespect. This is real. So I think that's part of the problem with not being able to morally triage.

It's part of the problem with not being able to. Morally triage is a great way to describe it, too. That's a great way to describe it. So instead of saying, okay, look, this guy, whatever's going on, his her life person, Z, whatever, fine, great, run with it. It's just not worth my time. If a guy wants to be a sexual girl, you go for it. I think we have a problem with Mr. and Mrs. and all that shit. How about's just not it's not worth my time yeah if a guy wants to be a trivial girl you go far I think we have a problem with mr. and mrs. and all that shit how about we just abandon it your name's Peter my name's Joe you make a

fucking noise that means it's like my issue with this whole Caitlyn Jenner thing was like you have to call her Caitlyn now it's a she caller Caitlyn I've been calling this fucking person this one noise that I make with my mouth my whole life. In the Diane Sawyer interview, he said he and he said Bruce. I'm sticking with that. You can't keep making new noises that I have to make with my face that make you feel better about yourself. Because if that's all it takes for you to feel better about yourself is people call you a new noise, that's ridiculous. If I decide tomorrow my new name is Sheila, I want everybody to call me Sheila.

You just laughed. That's a microaggression. How dare you? It is a microaggression. Why? Joe is a boring-ass fucking stupid name. And I got stuck with that boring-ass stupid name. This is how boring-ass stupid.

My dad's name is Joe. My grandfather's name is Joe. My grandmother's name is Josephine. Bunch of fucking unoriginal, uncreative fucks in my family so what it's just a noise that you make with your face when you say hey Joe to me and my friend Joey is right behind me and I don't know which Joe I have to look oh no you've microaggressed me again because I don't know which Joe you're referring to this is a noise that you make that represents you who gives a shit who is it that was some noises

they're feminine it's some noises they're feminine there was some noises that are ambiguous right you know like it's pat remember that remember that fucking show where you couldn't figure out what gender she was there's women named shelly there's men named shelly fuck what do we do jean there's jeans that are girls and jeans that are guys so okay so confusing so you see how crazy that is? It is confusing, but here's what makes it worse. What makes it worse is that if you make a mistake, there's a rule to punish you. Yes. Like right now, you're operating freely.

You have no rules. People in academia, they're paranoid. They're paranoid about making a mistake. Of course. I mean, that's just the way it is. I mean, when you have a bunch of people that are hypersensitive and that are trying to enforce these ridiculous ideas on people, and they're trying to pound these things down, they're looking for these moments where they can solidify this. These moments where they can point at you.

These moments, I call them green lights. I call them green lights because they might not be upset. They might not really be upset, but they have a green light to act upset. Yeah. That's their battery.

You know, my overflow battery, that's their battery. That's right. I found one. And they have community support because now the victim is the highest level.

Yeah. And they're all social retards. And that's the other part of the problem. And I say retards, like, you know, it's a politically incorrect word. Retarded means slowed. Yeah. And that is socially retarded to like operate this way. It's, it's, it slows everything down.

It's, it's awkward. It's confusing. It's not necessary. What's necessary is friendship, kindness, compassion, open-mindedness. Same page. And those things don't exist when you are pointing fingers at people and shaming them over innocuous things. Right. Like, oh, you called her a she on Thursday.

Right. You fuck she's he on Thursday. Right. Like, come on, man. This is nonsense. And the other thing is that acts against their own interest. Yes. That creates adversary relationships because then you're like, oh, instead of the K-Man,

you know, could you just- They make them socially spoiled. I mean, that's what you're doing. That's exactly what you're doing. Yeah. Yeah. We're out of time. All right.

Cool. We just fucking hammered it out for three hours. I don't think we changed a goddamn thing about the world. Was that a three hour thing? Yes, we did. We just did three hours. Thank you, Peter. I really appreciate it.

Yes, we did. We just did three hours. Thank you, Peter. I really appreciate it. If people want to find you on Twitter, it's Peter Boghossian, B-O-G-H-O-S-S-I-A-N. He's probably going to be fired from his job at Portland State University after this podcast, so please open up a Patreon page and ask for requests like all those social justice freaks.

Anything else? Thank you. Thank you, brother. Appreciate it. Let's do this again. This is a lot of fun. Thanks. All right.

Peter Bregosian, ladies and gentlemen, we'll be back at 2 p.m. with the fighter and the kid, Brian Callen and Brendan Shaw. We're going to have a UFC 194 recap. Holla. Woo. Thank you.