The Joe Rogan Experience - JRE MMA Show #32 with Firas Zahabi

Episode Date: June 19, 2018

Joe sits down with the head coach of Tristar Gym, Firas Zahabi.

three two one boom i don't want to start off like this is a commercial dude but this fucking thing you have this tim tam thing this is incredible it's sick huh i've never i've seen some of these different ones online people using them thera things, I don't know what they call them, Theragun, I think, but this fucking thing is amazing. This is the most powerful one. It has the highest travel, and it's the best price. So, I mean, it's...

Out of all the different ones of these things online? Yeah, this is the best one. So, what this is, folks, we took the battery out. I'll pop the battery back in real quick. I'll pop it in real quick. Go for it. That's how impressed I am by this thing so i've had this nagging muscle in my hip and then like instantaneously this fucking thing you hold it folks and you get it like right on the spot for me it's like right here i go And it just loosens that motherfucker up.

Like this is so much more powerful than any of those massagers that you get like from a store. Exactly. There's no massager more powerful than this one on the market. Like this is not for mom and dad. You know, this is for the guy doing, you know, playing soccer, football, MMA, CrossFit. Like that's for the hardcore athletes. And you invented this? I started the company. I started the company.

I started the company. I bought one of those DMS. I don't know if you ever heard of those. It's called Deep Muscle Stimulator. You were talking about that before and I said, save this, save this. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So what is that? It's the Deep Muscle Stimulator.

It's like a stainless steel, high-powered massager that you have to plug in. It cost me three grand. I bought it. It had a really bad sciatica for two years like i almost stopped training like i almost had to take a like i've got a problem with that right now really sciatica okay this is gonna help you out big time comes and goes big time because i had i mean i was i was so bad i couldn't sleep like i could not sleep because i was just yours go all the way i get mine in my calf sometimes really and i'm lucky it goes all the way down to the calf for some weird

reason me it went down to the hamstring, and it stopped there. I was able to stop the problem there. But they say you can go all the way down to the calf. That's getting bad. I'm going to get my calf right now. Motherfucker. So I bought that DMS. There it is.

That's the DMS. Great machine. Great machine, but it overheats. It costs three grand. And what does that piston do? Does it hammer you? Yeah, but it overheats. It costs three grand. And what does that piston do? Does it hammer you? Yeah, it hammers you. Just like this?

Yeah, but it has a lesser travel. This one has a greater travel. So that one, the DMS is a little bit too vibration. It's not as much travel. It's not as much percussion. Percussion is what you're looking for. And so when I got together with a company from the U.S., Disrupt, we put together the TimTam.Tech company.

We went to China. We checked out a hundred different type of guns. We got this one going. This was the best one. Dude, this fucking thing is incredible. It's incredible. I hate to sound like you paid me to do an endorsement. He didn't, folks.

This fucking thing, these should be flying off the charts they shouldn't even need drones they should just be flying themselves seriously you know what the thing is that deep muscle stimulators we have to share it in the gym this is you buy your own personal gun you know and because the deep muscle stimulator it's 3 000 bucks you know to lend it out or how much is one of these four it's 400 bucks five year warranty that's a fucking bargain it's a bargain anybody who trains really hard. That's a fucking bargain. It's a bargain. For anybody who trains really hard, that's a bargain. It's a massage for life.

It's your health, you know? Ooh, that's nice, man. It's like a sawzall. Exactly. It's like you took a sawzall and you put like a little rubber ball on the end of it. It's amazing. We tried so many other type of machines,

but they're all overheat, weak. They're not efficient. The most efficient has already been created. So we just retooled it. We just rechanged it. We made it so that you can use it on the human body. There's some modifications made, but that's it. I mean, it's pretty simple.

It's the most efficient type of design they have. Yeah, it's really hard to find someone who can massage you correctly. It's very hard to find someone who's good. Exactly. Someone who can really break up the tissue. Exactly. It's very hard to find someone who's good. Exactly. Someone who could really break up the tissue.

But even if you do, like what this thing can do, this thing is like vibrating you and shaking everything loose. I have a cone tip I got to send you. It goes even deeper. So if you can handle deep tissue, I'm going to send you a bunch of them. Okay. Yeah, you're going to love it. We have also cold tip, hot tip. Oh, so you freeze them?

You can freeze them because that helps kill the pain. tip hot tip it's uh so you freeze them uh you can freeze them because that helps kill the pain so if you have an acute acute injury like or and after like a week or two and you want to start working on it the the cold of the tip helps numb the pain it helps manage pain a little more and the hot tip helps loosen up the muscle a little further i mostly use the cone tip the cone tips for those who have you know their experience with massage you're you're able to go deep tissue and uh for some people it hurts for me it's it's it's perfect so you find like where the scar tissue is exactly break it up exactly the surface area on the cone tip is obviously smaller so it goes even in deeper and and uh and unlocks that muscle real quick so

for me i don't have the time for foam rolling you know that's the the main reason why i i wanted a product like this because foam rolling takes forever to break to really loosen up a muscle and i'm in the gym all day do i want to stay you know in the gym another hour rolling up and down on a foam roller i think you got to do something though right yeah exactly you kind of have to do something if you're training hard and you want to train for life do you use those uh well we don't have one in the room but you reuse those um what are they called supernova supernova crossball balls yeah but it's larger yeah it's like a it's like a big blue one i love that thing it's rogue makes it that fucker gets in there but this is even better than that

this is this thing is incredible man i like the ball for uh my back when i do my back i feel i can lie down on it i can get the pressure i want but when i use when i do my legs i use the tim time yeah when i go on the road i bring that ball with me and i'll put it on the ground in a hotel room and i bridge on it and i just like hit like certain spots and it's amazing pop everything loose yeah you need a lot of body weight sometimes i put a kettlebell on my chest and you get even deeper and uh you could really unlock a muscle like this i mean you could really get in there and really unlock it for people who train they know you know when you get that nagging tight muscle in your neck, in your shoulder, your shoulder blades, and then you're on the mat, you do a quick

movement, you know? Yes. That's scary. Dude, I did it once in the shower. I had something going on in my neck, I guess, and I didn't realize how bad it was. And I turned in the shower to get something and it popped. Ah! And then for like days, I was locked up.

I've had that done also, but it's all about keeping the muscles loose. Yeah. Good posture. You know, Kelly Starr wrote a book. You had him on this show. Yeah, he's great. He's a really amazing guy. He's great.

He really changed my life, honestly. I'm telling you, reading his book, Supple Leopard, everybody who knows me, follows me, they know I always talk about this book. You know, he said something so important. He said, look, it comes down to two things. Good alignment and loose muscles. You got to two things good alignment and loose muscles you got to keep your body aligned and loose muscles and i just followed those two principles i mean his book is really really excellent and um when i saw his when i read his book that's when i

i reached out to him to work with george because i don't know if you've ever seen when george does a backflip and he lands his knees always kind of come in together have you ever seen like watch him do a backflip that's called i was reading his book and i saw that's the vulgus fault he calls that the vulgus fault when you're when you do a squat and your knees come close to one another and he's like that can cause acl tears and i'm like i know a guy with two acl tears and he does that all the time i see him do that all the time it's something i've always noticed about george his knees always bow in when we do lifts when we do jumps when we do hurdles i mean i've watched george jump up and down literally thousands of times and i saw his knees bowing all the time and he's like well then i reached out to him i said hey could you help me correct george's there it is that's the

fault and he's like sure and ever since then george's knees have been uh a lot better and we still use to fix it well what he does it's a technical skill it's's a skill. So he has a few different exercises to help you correct it. So you put a band around your knees and you kind of push out on the band. But really what we do is we'll make George do a lift or a jump, film it, send it to Kelly, and he'll tell us how aligned we are and what directions to go. So he kind of coaches us on how to avoid this fault. However, really, at the end of the day, it's about keeping your knees turned to the outside. I used to walk up the stairs and have knees in my pain in my knee.

You ever have that when you walk upstairs? No, I used to have pain in my knee walking up the stairs and I was from stairs just from walking upstairs and I didn't know why. And then I read his book and he's like, look, when you walk up a step, you got to keep your toes straight and turn your knee out.

I was like, really? And I started doing that. My pain was gone immediately. Keep your toes straight, straight, like toes, turn your knee out and turn your knee out. I was like, really? And I started doing that. My pain was gone immediately. Keep your toes straight. Straight. Like toes forward and turn your knee out. Turn your knee to the outside.

So he says, look, this is your ACL. See this here? This is your ACL. Cross your ACL. Right. Okay, that's the ACL. You put it in your kneecap. That's your knee.

When you turn your knee to the outside, look, it tightens it up. Oh, okay. That takes away all the slack so what happens when you're going up the when you're going up the stairs your your your acl is just jiggling around and getting sheared but when you tighten it up you go up you're secured so he calls it creating torque he's a brilliant book man he's a brilliant guy so even when you run hills you should do that absolutely you should always be aligned whenever your body's under pressure or stress whether you're wrestling or whatnot you should always have torque so like look grab your shirt like this okay grab your shirt okay he gives an example in the book excellent example so now grab the the shirt and twist it here create torque now look you have a much more

uh a stable grip you know a judica is always going to grab the lapels and twist them right so when you grab the bar let's say you're going to do a bench press. Maybe, you know, it's not the best exercise or not, but the principle is still at work. When you grab the bar, you should be torquing the bar. Almost. When you're doing push-ups, your hands are on the mat and you're torquing. Even though your hands are not turning, literally, you're just torquing. When you do that, you feel that all the slack is eaten up. There's no more slack.

There's no more trampoline effect. There's no more jiggling. Everything's tight. The system is tight. And it's very, very important that the system be tight and that the weight be on the muscles. So if you're properly aligned when you're doing a maneuver, the weight is on the bone, not on the tendons. So if you put your weight like this on your fingers, you'll see that the bone is carrying

the weight. If you bend your bones here, if you're unaligned and you start putting pressure, now you see your muscles are starting to work overtime. Right, right. So when I'm carrying weight, I need to have it on my bones and or my muscles, never on the tendons and ligaments. They say that with backpackers. You know what backpackers do? No. They keep their legs as stiff as possible and they take short steps.

Guys who are mountaineer guys, they don't take big high steps. They kind of keep their legs stiff and they walk with their skeleton. They try to let their skeleton carry. You see me? I'm sitting on this chair. This chair has no muscles, but it's holding me up because of the structure. Structure is a type of strength. If you take an egg and you try to squeeze it in a certain way,

you can't break it. You know, you ever seen that experiment? Why? Because you're actually trying to crush a cylinder. To crush a cylinder, it takes a tremendous amount of force. However, to break a stick in half takes a very little amount of force. Why? It has a lot to do with the structure.

If you're trying to compress matter on itself, it won't. It will take a tremendous amount of force to do that. Tremendous amount of power. However, if you want to separate the material by bending it at the middle, it's very easy. But to compress it, to compress material on itself, it takes a tremendous amount of energy. Right.

So anytime you're going outside of your alignment, you're allowing things to compress. Yeah. That's why it makes so much sense to keep your legs straight when you're hiking. It's like a horse that sleeps, right? He's sleeping. If he aligns his legs perfectly straight, he's using structure to hold him up instead of muscular strength.

So, I mean, I remember you had him on the show and you guys had a very interesting conversation. And he was talking about front squatting will make you have a great guard. But I think you guys misunderstood each other, actually. Because you were like, no, front squatting has nothing to do with having a great guard. And I agree with both of you. But I think you guys were not talking about the exact same thing. He's talking about having the mobility to squat down really low in the front squat will help your guard. Not necessarily having a big lift.

He wasn't talking about lifting 300 pounds in a front squat is going to make you a great guard player. That's irrelevant. I think what he was talking about is having incredible mobility in your hips you ever see a child pick up something off the floor like a newborn baby he's gonna get into this perfect perfect squat well if you if you look at guard players the best guard players always have incredible flexibility in their hips right because i always tell people the higher you can bring your hips to your chest the harder it is for me to pass your guard like if you're one of those guys

where your knee's like this you know you're trying to re-guard and your knee's this far the space for me to pass your guard is huge but if you can bring this foot behind your head and your hips

it's the window the space that I need to cross to get to side control is so small yeah Eddie has excuse me

one of his students is named Sean Bollinger and he has crazy flexibility. I've seen him. Crazy. He could do double lotus, and he could literally take his legs and put them behind his head. I mean, he could just pull his legs back.

How many great guard players have you seen who can do that? A lot of guys. Yeah, like Ryan Hall, for instance. Yeah, Keenan. I mean, they have this flexibility to them. Passing the guards becomes very, very difficult. It's almost impossible. It's almost impossible. It's like they just spin a little bit and you're back in something

again. You're tied up and then you add in leg locks and you're kind of fucked. Exactly. Because they're spinning to your leg while you're trying to pass their guard. Yeah. Hip flexibility is so paramount in Jiu-Jitsu. For bottom game especially. And it's so devastating when you have a hip injury. Hip injuries and, you know, I know guys who have had hip game especially and it's so devastating when you have a hip injury

hip injuries and you know i know guys who have had hip replacements and it's like boy you know then you're you're so severely limited in what you can do afterwards you gotta never let it get there in my opinion according to kelly he says your joints can last you 120 years like if you take care of them he says there's two percent catastrophe meaning you got hit by a bus okay that's something we can't we can't do anything about 98 of the time is because you didn't take care of your joints you haven't you haven't properly used them and you let muscles get tight for too long over a long period of time so for me personally i feel like when i was 20 i feel better now than when i was 25 because at 25 i was really beat up 26 27 i was really like

hey my knees my back my neck you know training every day twice a day it was grueling but after i went through that system i came back out fresh and now whenever i have a little tweak or anything like that i take care of it immediately i kill it i don't let any tweak creep up go go any further right and uh i feel much more energy like when i when i keep that the body healthy and, I feel a lot more energy. I feel better. My mood is better. It's the balance between being tough and being mentally strong enough to push through training when you're not feeling your best and knowing that you're fucking up your vehicle. Exactly.

Knowing that you're fucking up your body. Very true. Very true. There's a balance. It's hard for fighters in particular because they want to be tough. So you got some weird little thing in your leg like, whatever, I'm just going to work through it. Very true. There's a balance. that thing in your leg is all fucked up. And then next thing you know, you go to a doctor, you have an MCL tear. Oh, fuck. Yeah. And then with that tightness,

it gets worse after 48 hours. You have DOMS, delayed onset muscle soreness. And then you're in the shower, you turn your neck, boom, something pops. Yeah. Yeah.

What do you do in terms of, do you take curcumin? That's how you say it, right? Curcumin. Turmeric. Anti-inflammatory, you know, herbs and things along those lines. I know that there was, Rhonda Patrick just put something up about, I think you say, I think you call it curcumin. Circumin or curcumin?

Anyway, it's turmeric. It's the active ingredient in turmeric. And she just put something up on her Twitter page a couple of days ago about how important this stuff is. And to make sure that you have bioavailable. It improves memory and mood as well. Well, I have to try it. I haven't tried it. Yeah, it's just turmeric.

Really? Yeah, and that stuff is fantastic for inflammation. People that have soreness and nag know like nagging injuries and nagging inflammation having that as a part of your daily diet is fantastic along with fish oil fish oil is really good for that you know of course and then watching your diet and making sure you're low and inflammatory foods like sugar and alcohol right and you know that's huge really it's amazing how much of a difference it makes if you have any sort of uh back injury or inflammation i talked to this lady who was a therapist a few years back and she was

saying you know you should really try going gluten-free if you have issues with your uh with your back i was like listen this wacky bitch that's what i was thinking all i was thinking is like oh she's talking woo woo crystals nonsense and i was like wait a minute really gluten she's like you'd be amazed at how many people um when and now that i've thought about it more and with all i know talking to various nutritionists and actual clinical researchers i think it's as much gluten as it is just just sugar refined carbohydrates and refined carbohydrates and sugars and all these different things just create inflammation.

There's just no way around it, especially the levels that normal Americans eat them in. Oh, boy. Now you're talking about... We're the worst. Yeah, it's a tremendous amount of sugar. Yeah. Like, you don't know it until you get off sugar.

And then you go see everybody who's eating the standard amount of sugar and you're like, it blows your mind. You don't need that much sugar. There's no way. It's just way too much. And you feel sick eating that much sugar again. It's mind-boggling. Like a jug of Gatorade that a lot of dudes drink after practice.

I couldn't get that down. I mean, have you ever seen those? They have those things where they show you online. They have like, this is the amount of sugar that's in a can of coke this is the amount of sugar that's in a 24 ounce bottle of gatorade it's fucking crazy it's incredible it's a pile of sugar it's unbelievable it's like a fistful of sugar but it's addictive yeah it gets the customer coming back yeah it's the customer coming back you need that next sugar high you need more sugar the next time around you need another

dose of sugar and i think i think your sugar you should get it from whole foods mostly you know it's released in your system naturally slowly yeah there it is right there look at that wow that big gulp is like a it's like a kilo wow it looks like like you're bringing coke across the border that's just poisonous that's fucking amazing amazing. That's so much sugar. That's impressive. What does it say? 17 grams? What does it say, Jamie?

37? 17 tablespoons. 17 teaspoons. 32 tablespoons for that. This is 18. Tablespoons. Jesus Christ. That's so much.

That's so much sugar. That's so much sugar. Chocolate milk has seven. Chocolate milk? Wow. Chocolate milk is supposed to be good after you train, though. It's white milk, too. Or maybe that's old news.

I don't know. George used to do that. Yeah, George used to do that. But I'll tell you something. George is a freak of nature when it comes to diet. Yeah. He's very blessed. Okay.

I think, look, this is just my observation, but I think some people, when they eat carbs, they spike their insulin. Okay. And they can get fat off if they eat too much carbs. And some people eat a tremendous amount of carbs and they never get fat. And we all have a friend who eats a lot of junk food and is ripped. There are not many in the world, okay? But they exist.

We've all met a person like that. George is one of those guys. Like if he eats McDonald's for a week or he eats vegetables for a week it doesn't matter he's gonna be lean either way now he'll be leaner on vegetables but even on McDonald's he's gonna be lean he's never been fat in his entire career his entire life I should say so I mean get a little heavier when he stopped training look cuz he took some photos for the UFC he looked a little heavier bulky I would say would you say that he's chubby no no I saw him

at the beach i wouldn't be like this guy's shredded that guy's jacked this guy's jacked he should when it's george you hold him to the highest of standards you know if i ate the way he eats i would be fat wow let's put it that way how many people told me hey i've been hanging out with george for a week i got fat i gained 10 pounds i'm like yeah that's george man that's george don't eat like he eats you won eats it won't work and he has his whole theories and philosophies about why he's lean it's like dude

no you're just you're just born this way he doesn't get it I've trained thousands of people okay he's trained himself like he thinks that what he did

is gonna work for everyone and I love George he's a super intelligent guy but I tell him George he's very gifted when it comes to food and he does a lot of things

like now he's doing a lot of fasting and he's getting even lean things like now he's doing a lot of fasting And he's getting even leaner. Yeah But it would be a long time for George's fat. You see that there's this there's various body types You know you do you have ectomorph mesomorph endomorph and we're we're we're on the continuum of these three George is on the ectomorph side and in a strong sign of ectomorph is a small waist And George has a very mesomorph. no mesomorph is because he's very muscular he is i would say between ectomorph and muscles but here sorry go ahead george was very

skinny and scrawny when he was young so he went crazy on the weights he turned his weakness into a strength he did so much weight weight training and and exercise because he wanted to bulk up so he's a bulk ectomorph now he's not aomorph. Now, he's not a perfect ectomorph. He's not a 100% ectomorph. I would say he's between ectomorph and mesomorph. But endomorph, the other end of the spectrum, you eat a little bit of carbohydrates, you get fat. You lift a little bit of muscles,

your muscles explode in size. George wasn't like that. George is a bit on the other side of the spectrum. So a real mesomorph would be like Melvin Manhoof. Yeah, like that. Just jacked. I think I'm kind of no no no that's more Endomorph no endomorph is fat. Yeah, but you could also be very muscular and more. Yeah, you could be very muscular I thought endomorph is like like people that have a really hard time Not being overweight you can gain fat and muscle really quickly. As an endomorph?

Yeah, but ectomorphs, from what I've read, I might be wrong. Neither one of us are biologists. Exactly. There's a problem with this conversation. I always thought ectomorph was really skinny, endomorph was, they tend to lean towards being overweight, and then mesomorph was someone who's like really like a Francis Ngannou. Or Brock Lesnar, like super muscular, thick, like just look like they like naturally would pack a lot of muscle. I'm sure you could pull up a chart if you can.

All these pictures just show both of them. From what I've read, see the mesomorph is kind of in the middle. Ectomorph is a lean and hard pack on muscle. Ectomorph looks like a skinny dork and mesomorph looks like he's super jacked and endomorph looks like, well, endomorph, see, and endomorph looks like well endomorph see but endomorph does not look fat in that picture he doesn't have to be fat that's the thing see now here here's let me tell you something ladies go for it when you look at those three pictures i go with endomorph all day exactly those three pictures we love the endomorphs if that's what

an endomorph is let's take the endomorph yeah because them ectomorphs they need a lot of naps and they're always tired. And those mesomorphs, they want to choke you. The mesomorphs always want to fucking strangle you. But endomorphs, that's a woman. You can have a ripped endomorph. Anybody can be ripped. That guy's an endomorph?

That's Pratt, maybe. Think about it. An endomorph is like a short, stocky Hulk. He could be fat, and he could also be packed with muscle. Like Kelvin. Kelvin Gastelum. Kevin Gastelum. I would put him on the anamorph side.

Yes, definitely. Because he's never really totally ripped. Well, Dolce, when he had him and he was getting him down to a real 170, he really had him pretty ripped at one point in time. Just really low body fat. That's the thing. You can get ripped. It's just not as easy to get there.

Anybody can get ripped. But an ectomorph, so think about a basketball player. One of the signs they say is small waist. The waist and shoulders are quite similar. Now, George has a V going. He has very broad shoulders, which is great. He's perfectly built for fighting. That allows him for reach and his double leg

because he's got incredible legs. It's like he's wearing built for fighting that allows him for reach and his double leg because he's got incredible like it's like he's wearing shoulder pads almost and you know he's blessed with many many uh uh genetic gifts for fighting no doubt about it and endomorphs are naturally excuse me ectomorphs are naturally predisposed to endurance sports so you'll see a lot of marathon runners or whatnot they're tall and lanky they're not not short, bulky, Mike Tyson type look athletes. That's a real mesomorph, right? That's a real, I would say endomorph. Endomorph.

Because he's so short. Short and stocky and bulky. He could put on a lot of muscle or a lot of fat. Now I ask you, is he a little bit, I don't want to say he's fat, but he's put on some fat since he's retired or whatnot, right? I don't know how much he works out anymore. Exactly. But an ectomorph, even when they stop working out,

they're less likely to pack on fat. They might have a little belly, you know, but it's not as pronounced as an endomorph. An endomorph will pack on fat and muscle real quickly. And they gravitate more towards power sports. So they can explode, but they have less cardio. Whereas the ectomorph is, like you'll see a lot of running backs.

They're short, stocky. They're endomorph, man. They have to explode for three, four seconds. Is there a best body for fighting? Or is there, do you just adapt your style to whatever body you have? I think there's a best body for basketball, a best body for football.

Well, it depends what position you're playing. But fighting, everybody has a fight in their DNA. So all styles, excuse me, all body types can fight. And that's what's so amazing. You get a Paul Harris. He's an endomorph, man. But he found a way to fight that makes sense for him. That's why I always tell people, you got to fight according to your body type.

And people think that's crazy. No, Muhammad Ali fought a certain way because he has certain attributes. He had a certain personality. Even your personality is very important. If he tried to fight like Tyson, it would backfire. If Tyson tried to fight like Muhammad Ali, it would backfire. I think everybody has to start with the basics. And then after three, four years of training, even maybe up to five years,

now you got to specialize for what your temperament is what your body type is how what your personality is because not everybody wants to get it done in round one and not everybody's the type of person is going to take it to the cards and not everybody has a reach and speed to jab in and out a lot of people think oh i'm just going to jab in and out like ali dude you have the attributes that ali has he was born with certain attributes. And everybody's born with an attribute for fighting, in my opinion. Everybody got this far because they can fight. Nobody got here this far without having some innate ability to fight, you know, to defend themselves. So all our body types can defend themselves, but you have to discover what works best for that body type.

Right. Tyson's a body type. Right. Tyson's a perfect example. Exactly. They thought he couldn't make it in the pros. They thought, oh, he's going to get killed in the pros. Right.

There's never been a short guy. When, when Ali was dancing around, people were like, no, that's not going to work. He's going to get tired. He goes through the heavyweights.

Heavyweights shouldn't bounce around. And Ali used to spar a lot with lightweights. He sparred six rounds with lightweights, then six rounds with a heavyweight. Why? Because he would play tag with the lightweight.'s just about speed and movement you move twice as much with a lightweight what is your thoughts on on hard sparring because when you see the ties in the way they spar there's some there's a great benefit in that i mean there's a great benefit in

that barely hitting each other yeah i do that i do tremendous amount of that you know one thing when people spar with me, they're like, man, you move so like, you know, people are like, it's so seamless the way you move. And I, I do thousands of hours of live rolling and sparring.

But a lot of those hours, I would say 80% of them is very light because I know the terrain. I just want to go through the sequences as many times as I can. And when I'm really, really warmed up, then I'll go hard. You know, I'll start talking smack a bit in the gym and I'll like, Oh, come on, let's see what you got. Now I'll, I'll tell the guy when up, then I'll go hard. I'll start talking smack a bit in the gym.

And I'll be like, come on, let's see what you got. I'll tell the guy when it's time to go really hard. And we're having fun with it. For me, having fun is really, really important. Now, that's training for longevity. But if you have a fight, I think you need to do six weeks of hard sparring. Why? Because the speed of the fight is very particular.

We need to get to fight speed. The actual speed of the fight. Because you might get caught sleeping if you haven't done that. Now, if you have a tremendous amount of fight experience, you need less of that. So, for instance, a Thai who's been fighting since he's eight years old,

he can tune up just on the pads and go fight. Why? He's been doing it since the day he can walk, you know, almost. Like, you look at a Mayweather. I can get Mayweather ready with just a little bit work. Put him in there. He's going to be the world champion.

Why? It's hardwired. If you look at a baby's brain, a baby's brain is not wrinkled like an adult's brain. It's wrinkled to a small degree. As he goes through his experiences, especially in the first three years of his life, his brain literally gets hardwired and wrinkled.

And it gets less and less wrinkled over time. And when you're hardwired to do something, the likelihood of you needing to tune up is very minimal. For instance, I remember looking at the biography of Mayweather and he was saying when he would go to picnics with his family, his father would bring boxing gloves and he would box with his cousins. They literally would be punching each other. So for him, he's been doing it so long. The more experienced you are, the less hard sparring you need. The more seasoned you are,

the less hard sparring you need. You know what fighting is. You just need a little tune up at the end. So if you look at George, George is a great example. He's super skilled and he's super healthy. Some guys get to the high skill level, but they're broken up.

Their body's broken. Their knee is broken. They can barely, they barely have three, four fights left in them. Do you want to get really, really good and then be broken? When you got there,

you finally, you know, you've been cultivating these skills for 15 years. You get there. You get those skills that you wanted. Oh, I can't use them. Why?

The machine is broken. You know, I'm 38. I feel like when I was 20, personally. Because I spar, 80% of my sparring is very flow and relaxed. Like I use a lot of, I train a lot with purple belts, blue belts and purple belts. Why? Because they kind of hurt me if they tried.

I just toy with them until I'm warmed up. I'm flowing. I'm not really working hard. I'm just flowing. I'm just doing my combinations. And then when I really want to have a good challenge, I'll take one of my elite guys, one of my pros, and I'll do one or two rounds with them. I won't burn my machine out.

Imagine driving your car in the red line all the time. Yeah, yeah. Now, that's a great way of looking at it. When you guys get ready for a fight, like say if you get George ready for a fight, how much time do you spend on working on his recovery from the workouts? Do you bust out the Tim Tam machine and ice things down? Like, how aware of you are you guys of, like, do you have a regimented program of how to recover from exercise? Yeah.

Recovery is everything. So it's stress plus recovery equals adaptation. Stress plus stress equals detraining an injury. A good trainer, a good trainer, he understands super compensation, right? You have stress, you have recovery, and then you have a new level of skill or ability. If you don't go through the recovery phase, you will not reap the rewards of your training. There has to be a recovery phase. Not every athlete has a level of recovery that they can achieve. So as you get more experience as an athlete,

your body can, as you become, as you're more and more fit, I should say, your body can recover from more stress. So I have to gauge how good my student is. It has to be challenging but manageable. If I make it too challenging, I'm redlining him. He's going to break. His knee's going to pop. He's going to be unmotivated.

If it's too easy, he's going to be bored. I have to find the right amount of stimulus. So when I'm in the practice room, if I see George is just mauling guys and destroying them, I have to scale the workout so that it's harder. But I don't want to scale it so high that I injure him and break him or that he made it out of practice by a hair

and that he's not motivated to do another camp. We reach those high intensity levels periodically throughout the year and they have to be done in a certain way that it's fun. You know George was like, he was on your show and he was saying I'll try to kill him in the practice room.

Now, it's true, he's right. But I do it so rarely. I do it so periodically and I make it a joke. That's why, like, what he was trying to say is I brought in the guys in the room

and I was watching them spar with George and they don't want to touch his face. This is when he was like a mega star, like he was the champ and nobody wants to try

to double leg him. Nobody wants to try to hurt him because they're like, I'm not going to come here in his house and try to show him. There's a respect thing.

There's a, there's a, they're starstruck, you know, these young kids. So I would bring them in and I'd be like, listen guys,

I'd give a speech. The first guy to double leg him, the first guy to put him out, I would put like a $5,000 reward. To knock him out? To hurt. If you knock George out, I'll give you 5,000 bucks.

Jesus Christ. If you put George on his back, if you put George on his back, if you take him down put him on his back i'll stop the whole practice and praise you for 20 minutes in front of everybody in the gym and and students don't get praised by me very often so george would be like oh my god these guys they're coming after me and he would get riled up and i would do this periodically rarely right we're talking about world title fight you know stuff's on the line and i need these guys to actually show me where George is missing something. Because when you have this perfect practice and you win all the time, what do you work on?

Well, nothing went wrong. There's nothing to fix. So, I mean, there are times where we really redline him. Have you ever had anybody knock him out in practice and take that money? He's been dropped once in practice pretty badly. And it's a funny story, but the money wasn't on the line that time. There was no prize for that.

One time he got dropped in practice and I wanted to stop, I wanted to pull the plug. It was for a world title fight. He was fighting Dan Hardy two weeks before his fight. I was sure he was concussed. And I said, George, I'm pulling the round. It was one more round. He said to me, coach, let me finish the round.

I'm okay. Let me finish the next round. And I felt that if I pulled him, I would have killed his confidence. I would have killed his confidence totally. So I said, okay, you could do the next round. And I told the other guy he was sparring with, don't line a single glove, like I whispered to him.

Not a single glove on him. Just take a mauling. And George went in the next round, not knowing that the other guy is not sparring with, don't line a single glove, like I whispered it to him. Not a single glove on him. Just take a mauling. And George went in the next round not knowing that the other guy's not allowed to hit him at all. And he just crushes the guy, right? He just mauls him and gets up. And I was really, really grateful for, the other guy was a pro.

And I was very, very grateful that he took the beating that we asked him to. Right. And George after was like, man, i know it went bad in round four but round five was amazing i was on fire in round five you weren't you were you were sneaky shit he's like i uh that was round four was not it was just a fluke you know like this this this is what i'm gonna look like round five you know i'm like yeah yeah he's like and it's a good thing it's friday you know because i have the day off tomorrow i'm like george today's saturday

he's like wow he was shocked and he was like today's saturday i'm like, and it's a good thing it's Friday, you know, because I have the day off tomorrow. I'm like, George, today's Saturday. He's like, he was shocked. And he was like, today's Saturday. I'm like, yeah. And the UFC was there filming.

So I had to like, look guys, that footage can never air. You know, that footage has got to disappear. You know, they're like, yeah, don't worry.

You know, we understand the fights on the line. He was fighting down already two weeks later. That's why that fight, he was doing a lot of wrestling because we didn't want to like, even chance.

I was sure he had a concussion when he went in that fight. Now pulling the plug on that fight, a lot of people would be like, hey, you put his health on the line. You're right. But it's so much pressure. First of all, George has nothing to do with UFC. We kept it from UFC. We told them. We told the camera guys, bury this.

Don't report it. George would never want to back out of that fight. It was two weeks from now. Everybody's coming to watch this fight. Like this, this fight, you know, it's been, it's been on, what do you call it? The primetime? It's been like three weeks they're filming, you know, like this is happening. This fight is happening no matter what, you know, the George is in that mindset.

And, but he went there honestly, like, you know, after he got dropped pretty badly. Wow. Yeah. That's, you know, Forrest Griffin got knocked out twice before his fight with Anderson Silva. Oh, man. Twice. And apparently one of them was real bad. Really?

Yeah. That's so dangerous. I think he was sparring with Vanderlei. And apparently you don't spar with Vanderlei. No. It's just fights. Yeah. I mean, he's old school shoot the box, especially back then.

Oh, my God. Yeah. Forrest won't really talk about it too much because he doesn't want it to be perceived yeah i mean he's old school shoot the box especially back then oh my god yeah forrest won't really talk about it too much because you know he doesn't want it to be perceived as an excuse but he uh i mean how many times have fighters done that many many fighters have done that countless yeah to the point where like i just let the fighter decide now unless i really feel like it's it's urgent which is rare that I've actually had to intervene because at the end of the day, when are you 100%? It really rarely happens. There's always something.

Right. But the thing about getting knocked out is that if you get knocked out two weeks ago, your odds of getting knocked out are significantly higher. I know. I know, man. It's crazy. And Dan Hardy is a really good striker. Oh, my God.

That left hook, if it would have touched George, George would have been out like a light. He's got a crazy left hook. Plus, George was hurt two weeks before. Yeah. Thank God it worked out well. Yeah, it worked out great. Yeah, the balancing act of being a trainer is not something that I envy.

No, it's tough. It's tough because I care for these guys, honestly. Yeah, I'm sure you do. It has nothing to do with the business or the money. I couldn't care less. i could not care less but i know that that guy he's on a one-way track so if i'm telling him no hit the brakes and he's saying we're going that that break in harmony is going to create a friction and create a doubt in the fighter right you know are you all in are you all in you know because if you're not all in

you're going to scare your fighter right there's there's that to consider as well yeah um when you look at the crop of up-and-coming talent i mean this is such a crazy time for mma i think when you look at these new guys like uh zabit is one of my favorite guys to watch because he's there's this new crop of guys that can do everything. And they're so high level by the time you see them. Like the first fight I saw of Zabit inside the Octagon, you know, I've seen him on video before. But seeing him live, you're like, holy shit. He's amazing. But he's not just amazing.

It's like this is this next level. Like there's another level. Like we've seen these elite, and everyone's great at jiu-jitsu. Everyone's got great takedown defense. Everyone knows how to strike. But then you're seeing this new flavor. There's like this, okay, the frequency's now higher. And it just seems to me that every year or so, there's these new guys that jump through, and you're going, okay, okay well now the frequency is quite

a bit higher than it was before it's seamless yeah the transitions are more and more seamless which is amazing yeah you're saying they're processing it faster yeah and as they're doing the takedown like the matrix is flowing into an armbar before the takedown is even finished yeah and you're like the next generation is watching that and they've adopted that now so they're going to flow into a transition. It's getting more and more seamless. Their computers are computing faster and faster information. They're thinking what they're going to do on the ground before it hits the ground.

It is incredible. And they know what can be done now. They've seen it all. The possibilities. Yeah, so they have this database in their mind of accomplishments that have already been achieved by other fighters. They've been awakened. Yeah, it's fucking crazy, man. When you stop and think about when you first got

involved in the sport and then look at the level the fighters are at now, there's not really a commensurate sport in terms of like modern mainstream sports where people have achieved such an incredibly high level of proficiency that so far exceeds where it was a decade ago or two decades ago. There's really no comparison.

The growth rate is ridiculous. It's fucking amazing. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the growth rate in this sport is incredible. And this is the sport that has the most amount of variables in terms of combat sports. The most amount of variables in terms of combat sports the most amount of variables in terms of what what a fighter can do to you there are more uh ways to win than any other combat sport obviously yeah and that's why i find it see the more you limit us an athlete the more it's about torque so for instance if you look at sprinting if i were to race hussein bolt

and i had all the best trainers, the best sprint coaches, and Hussein Bolt had the most mediocre sprint coaches, and we race when we're both 20 years old in our prime, who's going to win? You. I appreciate that. It's a joke question, right? He's going to win, right? For sure.

Put us in MMA. We're the same weight class, same height. Everything's the same. I have the best coaches. He has the worst coaches. Who's going to win? You're going to fuck him up. I'm going to kill him.

Yeah. Because coaching now has a greater influence. You know, sprinters say, sprint coaches say, we can make you faster. We cannot make you fast. You have to be born fast and we can shave off a few milliseconds. Yeah. In MMA, we can make you, I can take a regular Joe and get him all the way up to UFC.

I can't make him UFC champion. I won't say I can make him UFC champion. To be UFC champion, you need a talent. Right. Okay. There's a talent there to be in the 1%. But to get you to UFC, because there are so many possibilities, there are so many ways to trick your opponent, there are so many ways to turn the tables on him the torque no longer matters or torque is less significant so if we're talking

about football where i'm only allowed to do these certain maneuvers trickery is put to the side you're not allowed to trick me but in mma you're allowed to trick me any which way you want there are very few little rules okay but outside of these these uh barred rules these barred maneuvers you can trick me any which way you want so what happens is you take your opponent into a maze you take your opponent into a world where torque doesn't matter so much and that's why the more restrictive sport is let's say for instance boxing boxing is more restrictive than muay thai so the guys with torque are going to do better in boxing than they will necessarily in muay thai because in muay thai can use more trickery i could be a little dweeb and just beat you with clinching or

I could beat you with a trick kick or I could beat you with a back a back kick now for instance a back kick anybody can generate knockout power with a back kick however with a right cross or left hook not everybody's going to have that bone crushing power however if you teach somebody how to throw a proper back kick which you know because you got the best back kick in the game you could teach a regular Joe in a few years how to generate knockout power. So now he has that element on the table. So because MMA is so, you know, there's so few rules, we have a greater environment for the intellect to shine. You said something once to one of your

fighters in between rounds and it really stood out you said i want you to overwhelm his mind with possibilities like you're you're overwhelming him you're making him think about all the potential variables that are coming his way right like that is a great way to put it we talk about um variety so everybody's looking for a pattern if i I do jab, jab, cross, and I do it three, four times, the fourth time you're going to see it. It's going to be slower to you. Why? Because your body is going to, your brain is, again, this is all hypothetical. This is just my personal experience. I'm basing this on my own personal experience. When somebody does something to me a second or third time, I see it personally. I feel like I'm perceiving it slower.

And I have a window to counter you. However, when I spar with George, George is the trickiest guy, I'll tell you why. Because he has so many tricks, he has so many attacks that he rarely ever shows you the same trick twice. And he's the master at adapting. So if you do a trick on him once

and you try it again, he's going to shut you down. So look at all his rematches. When heatched BJ Penn when he rematched Matt Hughes every time they rematch it was progressively worse the third time he fought Matt Hughes was even easier don't try the same trick on George twice you're going to get crushed and I think that's why me as a martial artist I developed like a lot of variety of skill because every week I'd have to come up with a new trick or George is going to shut that down so after 10 years I started becoming like a trickster you know what other magic trick can I get away with one time because next week I'd have to come up with a new trick or George is going to shut that down. So after 10 years, I started becoming like a trickster. You know, what other magic trick can I get away with one time? Because next week I need a new trick because it won't work on him again. He's going to get wise to it.

He's a master at – it might work once on him. The second time, you're going to get shut down. Well, I feel like that was a factor in Dominic Cruz losing to Cody Garbrandt. Exactly. Because those alpha male guys had seen that trick so many times. They're like, okay, we can, like, apparently Justin Buchholz can imitate Dominic Cruz in training, like that weird herky-jerky movement with the hands down.

Exactly. He's a weird one, man. He's one of the weirdest, out of all the fighters I've ever watched fight, Dominic might be the weirdest. I agree. Because you look at him and he's, first of all, he's such a, he's a great guy.

A very smart guy. But he's crazy in the weird ways. Like, one of the things that he says is like, ah, I'm just not very flexible.

Like, what are you, why are you even saying that? Like, that doesn't even make any sense to me. Like, why not get more flexible?

It's like, it's not like saying like, oh, I'm too short. Well, you can't grow, so you're fucked. You're never going to play basketball. Saying I'm not flexible enough is the dumbest thing

to ever say. It's so much more dumb than I'm not strong enough. If you gain weight from muscle, you might not be in that weight class anymore. You got a real problem there. But I'm not flexible enough. You got zero problem. You just have to stretch.

Yeah. But he doesn't stretch. Right. Like, we were talking about jujitsu techniques. He's like, oh, I can't play that high guard shit. I don't have any flexibility. I'm like, oh, okay. What are you saying?

Like, that doesn't make any sense. And, like, head kicks and things along those lines. He's, like, very stiff in his legs with throwing kicks. I's that's an easy fix that's an easy fix why wouldn't you fix that that's a good question but but also the mindset of a champion in this same guy who just just ah fuck it i'm not flexible like i don't even understand how those things live together in the same mind. If I was training him, I would make him head kick. Like, that's what I would insist on.

Head kicks have to be there. Because he doesn't knock guys out with his hands. So the head kick has to always be a possibility, always a threat. And then you will knock out guys with your hands. Because they'll have their high guard up, because they don't want that kick. And then the uppercut will come,

the body shot will come, the back kick will come. I'll make him back kick for sure. Like, if you don't have power in your hands, you need to back kick. You need to head kick. Those are two weapons that can always knock a guy out. So you don't back kick, you don't head kick. You never score knockouts. Right.

Yeah, that's a good point, man. Did you see this Stephen Thompson thing with Darren Till where he wants them to outlaw that side kick to the knee? No, I didn't see that. Well, apparently his knee got really fucked up in the Darren Till fight. What do you think about that side kick to the knee? No, I didn't see that. Well, apparently his knee got really fucked up in the Darren Till fight. What do you think about that sidekick to the knee that everyone's doing? Not even the oblique kick, just a front leg sidekick to the knee,

the same way Yoel Romero used it on Robert Whitaker, fucked up his knee in the first fight, and then Whitaker used it on Romero right away in the second fight to fuck up his knee. I think it's a legitimate kick. Yeah, I think so too. it's a legitimate kick. Yeah. It's a legitimate 100% kick. It allows the smaller, weaker guy

to hurt the bigger, stronger guy. Well, and in the case of Darren Till, it allows the bigger, stronger guy to hurt the other big, strong guy. Of course. If it works for the smaller guy, it works for the bigger guy. Yeah.

Right? It's just a legit, I think so too. It's a legit technique you have to prepare for. Yeah, exactly. You're standing in a way that, you see, when somebody's standing legit technique you have to prepare for. Yeah, exactly. You're standing in a way that,

you see when somebody's standing sideways, they're harder to punch. They're easier to kick. So you're saying, look, I want to stand in this way where I'm harder to punch, but I don't want you to kick me. So if I stand square, I'm more susceptible to back kick,

more susceptible to punches, but less susceptible to leg kicks or the oblique kick or the side kick to the knee or whatnot. Now, I'm not saying to you, don't punch me because i'm more vulnerable this way so whatever your vulnerability is you chose that vulnerability by standing sideways why don't the thais stand sideways because they know they're going to get chopped to the leg right they're always fighting good kickers they're always fighting amazing kickers when you go to thailand the guy may be a good puncher but he's for sure a great kicker. Like you're not going to run into a guy who doesn't know how to kick.

They all know how to kick knee and elbow, and some of them know how to punch really, really well also. So they stand in a way, Muay Thai has developed in a way that's very anti-kick, anti-knee, anti-elbow. And it's not as defensive to the punches. So if I want to avoid punches, I'll stand more bladed. Let's say I'm fighting like a BJ Penn who's very heavy handed and more of a puncher. He doesn't kick much.

Well, I'm going to stand bladed. Like you see with George, we made him drop one hand. Why? So he can use his jab from down to up, right? Because it's faster, has a greater reach, and it's harder to counter. Whereas if you would have stood more square in Muay Thai, it would have been useless because BJ doesn't kick. But then you'd be more open to punches so the way you're standing

the way a wonder boy is standing the antagonist to that the antidote to that is that kick so how could you stand that way just switch the way you're standing and now you're more open to punches but that's adaptation that's what fighting is about

it's rock, paper, scissors if I use rock I don't outlaw paper I don't say everybody hey nobody is allowed to use paper no but that's the antid That's what fighting is about. It's rock, paper, scissors. If I use rock, I don't outlaw paper. I don't say, hey, nobody is allowed to use paper. No, but that's the antidote to what you're doing. Yeah, and when the Thais fight, they have that very light front leg, which would prevent that front leg side kick to the knee. Exactly.

Because they're always very light. So if you kick their knee, it's just going to go backwards anyway. But to stand that way, they're standing that way at a cost, the punches. And also the cost, they don't have the ability to use that way, they're standing that way at a cost. Yes. The punches. And also the cost. They don't have the ability to use that movement, that front leg movement the way that Wonderboy does too. Wonderboy is the master of the front leg. He's the best at standing completely side kick. When he fought Johnny Hendricks, a good example, he threw a side kick to the body. Hendricks stood there and then he went to roundhouse kick

to the face with the same leg masterpiece and and hendrix you could see was like fuck like what is this guy doing yeah he's like thump okay back oh shit like he thought like yeah you got me with that but that's not a big deal and then pop he gets roundhouse kicked in the face that was a masterful performance yeah yeah it was one of his best for sure. It was incredible. Well, it just shows you the difference between a guy who is, you know, just trying to like kind of plot in with a limited movement and a guy like Wonderboy who's just one of the most difficult

guys to sort of pin down. Yeah, incredible. Yeah, his style is very unique and I'm fascinated with him and I'm really fascinated right now with Michael Venom Page. Been watching, do you see his pro boxing fights? No, I didn't see. Right now he's a can crusher.

I saw one, yeah. He's a can crusher. He's fighting these guys, and they're setting them up for these spectacular knockouts. But it's still that blitz point karate style that Raymond Daniels has, that a lot of these guys have. And Raymond's obviously adapted very well for kickboxing. I've chained with Raymond quite a bit. He's a beast. You got to get him on the show, man.

He's such a great guy. I would love to. Yeah, I have to connect you two. Okay. He's amazing. Yeah, we talked a little bit in the past about perhaps doing something on Twitter. He knocks guys out in about 90 seconds on a regular basis. And how does he do it?

He does it with the back kick. He's the master at finding a place for the back kick. You don't want to get hit with his back kick. Like I know you got an incredible back kick. I bet you it's more powerful than his. Okay. But I'll tell you one thing. He will fit that back kick.

Everywhere. Everywhere. And he'll do it in a way you won't see it coming. It's going to hurt so much more. Yeah. He rarely knocks guys out with his hands. He does surprise guys with his hands every so often. But that back kick, you don't want to be there.

Well, it seems like he's getting better with his hands. Yes. His hands are improving. He trains a lot. Yeah. He rarely knocks guys out with his hands. He does surprise guys with his hands every so often. But that back kick, you don't want to be there. Well, it seems like he's getting better with his hands. Yes. Yes. His hands are improving. But he trains a lot. Yeah. He trains a lot, that guy. I'm sure.

I mean, he's still at it. And he's what, 35, 36 now? I would say. Around there. That one, was it, what's his name? Ombang? Was that the guy he knocked out with that touch front leg side kick and then jumped up in the air and hit him with a spinning back kick to the face.

Woo! That was some video game shit. That's unbelievable. He just jumps up, top, pop, and then hits him with the second kick. That's a standard kick. Yes, it is. You know, for Raymond Daniels. But he does it the best I've ever seen, personally.

No, no one better. You know, you got to go back to like Rick the Jet Rufus. Oh, my. You know, when he fought that really classic fight where he fought that Thai fighter and he got his legs chopped out and everybody was like, oh, shit. People really got to understand the...

Muay Thai. Muay Thai. But he hit that guy with that same kick, that front leg side kick, and then spun in the air and hit him with a turning side kick in the face. Yeah. Yeah, man.

I love watching that point karate style, that blitz style. I love it. I love watching that enter into MMA because I used to spar with a lot of those guys, and it's fucking hard to deal with. Those guys that are really good at that fast sprint at you, blitz. And when you do that, and then you also have takedown defense and Muay Thai skills and jiu-jitsu, it's like, fuck, man, that's a lethal skill to have.

I love doing boxing muay thai karate taekwondo i love i love blending it all i believe all of it is right here boom play that play that back again i mean come on man this is fucking crazy shit the way he does it too he just hops up touches you with the front leg pangs and And the second one, and look, he looks down like he's in a fucking video game. I mean, that is crazy that this guy is pulling that off.

That was when he was in glory. Look at this. Tap. Boom! I mean, come on, man. Who the fuck does that? And he does that all the time, eh?

All the time! That's not like a one-off. No, no. He could do that all day. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of those karate guys that have that skill set. They can do like, you know, those breaking demonstrations where they hold up pads and

do 360 wheel kicks and break pads. I mean, there's some legitimate karate and traditional martial arts techniques that are finding their way into MMA. Absolutely. You just have to know how to use it. Yeah. And just because a karate guy got beat up by a grappler doesn't mean all the karate he's trained is not good.

Exactly. He needs to learn how to grapple. Exactly. He needs to learn how to stay on his feet. He needs to learn how to grapple. He needs to learn to set that kick up in a way. Because the thing is, if you're always fighting another karate guy

and then you fight a boxer, the boxer's behavior is just different. It's like what we were saying before. You have to get used to it. And then all of a sudden, you saw the same movie were saying before. You have to get used to it and then all of a sudden you saw the same movie a hundred times, you know how to deal with it.

It's like you watch the same movie over and over again. You start predicting what the scene is going to be. You're not caught by surprise. When you're caught by surprise, you're done.

You've never done jiu-jitsu before and I'm doing an arm bar, a basic arm bar, you're getting caught with it. That's why I believe you got to know everything out there but you got to specialize. Don't try to master everything. Know everything believe you got to know everything out there, but you got to specialize don't don't try to master everything

Mm-hmm know everything Like I like to know dars triangle heel hook, even though I'm not unnecessarily a dars guy But I want to know everything about dars. I don't want to drill it all day long I just want to know about it right because when you're trying to put your dars on I know what you're trying to do I'm familiar with what you're going for I can break out of it. You don't go for dars I do I do I do but I mean I not, I wouldn't say it's my best submission. I do do Darces. No doubt about it.

Well, you don't have the longest arms in the world. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Do you ever try a Japanese necktie? Yes. I don't use them that much, but I'm familiar with them. It's the solution for guys who don't have long arms.

Really? I have short arms too, but the Japanese necktie, I became a specialist at that. Really? Yeah. You get that clamp over the top of the neck, and then you drop down with the left shoulder, and you tuck the head into the forehead, and you hook one of the legs with your leg, and you crank that neck up. So you're pushing in with your chest and then cranking that. I'll have to try it.

It comes quick too. It's a nasty, nasty neck crank. I love it. It's just so good. And it's also nasty nasty neck crank i love it it's just so good and it's also it's it's there a lot it's one of those techniques that people they're not aware of the danger that that one position you know there's a few guys that are really good at it and you know whenever you feel that arm going underneath your neck you're like fuck i gotta get out of here because it's such an easy one to cinch up like the darts is hard. It's hard to cinch, to get all the way up.

For us. Yeah. I remember working with Marcelo. I got to train Marcelo Garcia. And we were doing just a one-on-one training session. And he was telling me he doesn't like darts. I was like, he doesn't teach darts, doesn't believe in darts. And I'm like, but your arms are short.

If you have this monstrously long guy, you want to tell him to do darts? No, no, no. Don't do darts. It's not good. It's not good submission because your arm's in the way. I'm like, dude, there's some guys with the most devastating darts. You don't want to be in their darts.

Tony Ferguson. Exactly. He doesn't like leg locks. He says, no, leg locks are no good. Oh, that's so crazy. Imagine if Paul Harris walks into your gym and you're like, no, don't do leg locks. It's like, dude, that's his game.

But he tapped out Rico Rodriguez with a heel hook in Abu Dhabi. He would tell you. I was there. It's not a good submission. It shouldn't have worked. Oh, that's hilarious. He was telling me he doesn't like his guys to wrestle. I'm like, why?

I'm like, when you fought Jake Shields, you did a single leg and you took him down. He's like, he shouldn't have fell. So Jake Shields shouldn't have fell, he said. But I'm like, your wrestling is good. He's like, no, no, no, you shouldn't wrestle a wrestler at all. What the fuck? And I was like, I get what you're trying to say say but there's a time and place where i'll wrestle a wrestler when i see a good vulnerability yeah and um i don't know he's very i think he's changed

over the years but when i was when i rolled with him he was like at the top you know you i wouldn't question him i wouldn't like you know who am i to who am i to tell him i don't agree you know like he doesn't like kimura he would tell me now don't do kimura too much muscle right that's what he said it's a power move yeah it's a power move yeah but when you look at his career all the things he doesn't like he's that's what he's been caught with like uh braulio caught him with the darts uh jacare caught him with the kimura yeah yeah um that's right braulio caught him with it didn't um who else caught him with the darts braulio caught him once or twice once i think um oh uh drysdale caught him with the darts. Yeah darts work real good. They do if you have the attributes. They're great

Yeah, why would he say he doesn't teach the dart? That's so crazy. I think he's got short arms and yeah, it doesn't work He doesn't like arm triangle says no forget the arm triangle. What yeah, I'm like dude That's never George's arm triangle like triangles and nasty are nasty yeah this is destructive well a guy like George is such a crusher he's got long arms too and he's heavy oh my he's just heavy

puts that weight on you he knows how to control and squish I will never let my arm get across my body because I know it's over there's two things you never want to give George

Kimura because he'll rip your arm off and two arm triangle yeah katakatami yeah there's there's Rafael Lovato. He's got a nasty fucking arm triangle.

He's competing in Bellator now. I'm always fascinated when I see super, super high-level jiu-jitsu guys that enter into MMA. Because I'm like, okay, well, for sure, these guys who are used to just training MMA, they are not going to know what the fuck hits them when a guy like Hodger Gracie grabs them or like a guy like Damian Maia. And we've seen it time and time again. There's a difference in the level.

And so the argument is always, should you be just, what's the best way to be? Is the best way to be an elite specialist at one particular thing, like a Raymond Daniels or a Wonderboy? Or is it to be a guy who can kind of do everything really well like George? So here's my perspective on that. That's such a great question.

I mean, that's the heart of training. You could flood your system. So what does that mean? When you flood your system, you're giving your student too many things to master. He's just really not good at anything. Right. Or you can bottleneck him you're giving him too few skills that people know what he does like for instance a classic example is chuck liddell he went on a terror for a while but he's still the same guy and after a while the next generation they understood what he does they understood the pockets where you're safe where you're in danger like mashida

is a great example early on he was such a mystery. Now we're like, okay, we get what he does. We've understood his patterns. Patterns are huge in fighting and in life, period. Human beings are pattern detecting machines. Whether they know it or not, whether they can verbalize it or not, we are pattern detecting machines. That's why I like sparring a lot because sparring, I've had a thousand people throw a right hand at me. When you throw your right hand, my mind, the subconscious is going to compare that right hand you're throwing to a thousand different right hands I saw. And it's going to say, it looks, matches this one the most. Again, this is my narrative and this is what I see. And this has personally been my experience, right?

When I train somebody who's new and you throw a punch at them, they flinch. Why? You've overwhelmed them with information. But after a while they see a punch and they're relaxed and they see it and it seems slow motion. Because at first it was too fast for them. It's too much to compute. So my students, what I do is I give them a small amount of technique. And when they get better, I give them a new technique. So I want them to get a certain level of competence with that technique. And my standard is it has to be instinctual.

If the technique is instinctual, I've taught it to you well. Meaning if you've done it live on the mat, on a regular basis, you execute on a regular basis, it's time for me now to give you another gem. Because if I don't give you another gem, I'm going to bottleneck your art.

You're going to become too predictable. But if I give you a gem too early, if I give you another technique too early, I'm flooding your system. I'm flooding your game. Your game is just diluted. It's just too weak. So with George,

we're always reinventing George for the next fight. We're always adding one new or two new gems, depending on how much time we have. But there's always an X factor. When you fight him, he's not going to do the same patterns we did the last fight. You could watch his tape.

That's why I told George, why is it harder to be champion than to become champion? Because when you're champion, everybody's watching you and studying your patterns. That's why I told George, why is it harder to be champion than to become champion? Because when you're champion, everybody's watching you and studying your patterns. It's a matter of time before your old news. So you got to reinvent yourself before the next fight. That's why I didn't want him fighting three times a year.

I told him to fight twice a year. And they were making comparative with Chuck. I got a lot of heat for that. They're like, Chuck fights three times a year. George should fight three times a year. We're like, we'll see how our careers go. I want a lot of heat for that. They're like, Chuck fights three times a year. George should fight three times a year. We're like, we'll see how our careers go. I want George to fight twice a year. Because to reinvent him takes six

months. We're going to do that twice a year. That way he'll be champion longer. I used to tell him when he became champion, I said, I want you to be champion for ten years. It happens in boxing. It's going to happen in MMA for the first time. There's going to be a champion for ten years. I used to tell him that when he first won the belt.

And he was like, really, how are we going to do that? We're going to cycle. We're going to do only training camps that last six months. You can only really do a training camp every six months if you want to hit a new level. It takes six months. Every fight, you're going to be at a new level and you're going to do something nobody knows. They haven't seen it before. How did you come up with these numbers?

What made you decide six months? I read one very influential book called The the new power program by michael cogan i don't know if you ever heard of it i have heard of the book i have not read it he says look there's two programs there's either he says look if you can do a training program shorter than six months you're either superman or you're done like he formulated it that way. He says, I never met Superman. A real training program is six months long. So that just always really influenced me. I think his book was really, really basic.

And this is one of the first books I read on training. And it really influenced me. He teaches in the book Periodization, but he dumbs it down really, really well. So if you read Tudor Pompas' book on periodization, it's just too much intellectual jargon. It's hard for a regular Joe, especially at the stage I was then, to read that book and understand what he's trying to say. Today I can understand it.

But Michael Kogan made it really simple for me. And he's like, look, if you want to train and reach a new level, it takes six months. This is the body's natural process. So it would be like trying to plant a seed and have an apple tree in three months. No, he says, no, the apple tree grows at a certain rate.

So the human body does things at a certain rate. There's no way around it. You need stress, you need recovery, then you have adaptation. Here's the cycles you have to go through to reach a new level. And it ends with a plyometric cycle. Now today, I don't really use that system anymore

because I found better ways over the years. It ends with a plyometric cycle. Yes. Why does it ends with a plyometric cycle now today i don't really use that system anymore because i found better ways over the years it ends with the plyometric cycle yes why does it end with the plyometric cycle you have to hit the speed of your sport so for instance let's say you do a lot of back squatting okay let's see do back squatting and your numbers on the back squat go up do you think that's going to make you a better fighter no no why so why do the squatting because it'll make you stronger okay but does it make you stronger on the field in the octagon it can make you stronger in certain positions in certain positions yes now i think michael cogan would say it can make you stronger in certain positions if you can apply that force over a certain time so power and strength are two different things

strength is can you lift that bar it weighs 500 pounds you can. Strength is, can you lift that bar? It weighs 500 pounds. You can lift it? Okay, good. Can you get that bar off the ground and locked out in 1.5 seconds? That's the question we want to ask for sports. How fast can you apply the force? That's power. Force over time, strength over time.

So when you want to shoot a double leg, you have to do it in the window. So that's why the plyometric phase is the last phase. It's very important that you need to take all that strength you cultivated and translate it to a level of speed so i need george to change level and explode in a fraction of a second so that's why i like things like sprinting track and field etc these are things done in a short period of time the ground contact the ground force reaction the time you spend on the ground applying force into the ground so when you want to apply force on a person, you first have to

apply the force in the ground. And then that reaction is applied into your opponent, right? So every action has obviously equal reaction. How fast can you apply that force into the ground? Now, squatters, if I take you and I make you squat, a slow squat down and up, I'm training you like a tow truck, right? Then I measure your vertical jump. Your vertical jump is going to have gone down after you've done six months of squatting. It's not going to have gone up.

Why? Because you're training like a tow truck. You're telling your body, look, I need to lift lots of heavy weights in a slow fashion. However, if I make you do plyometrics or I make you do Olympic lifting, you know, Olympic lifting is very fast. It's 1.5 second contraction on the hamstring, 1.5 second. And there's a certain point where it's 0.5 seconds. Then I make you test your vertical.

Now your vertical has gone up. So there's an element of speed. So Michael Kogan, at the end of the program, he does a four week or three three week phase of he calls it the link cycle where you're doing plyometrics this is very important that's fascinating i've never heard it put that way and i like that thought i like the thought process behind it i i think there's a there's a lot of people that are using a lot of plyometric drills now um and uh it's way more common when you see like training montages of guys hopping over hurdles but i really have to think that george was one of the first guys i ever saw do that stuff i used to tell him do you want to train like a tow truck or do you want to train like a ferrari which one you want to be

do you want if you look at damien maia he's like a tow truck yeah he's stiff even when he throws a punch he's very stiff yeah why because years of gi training is like yeah i've trained my body to make an isometric hold. And now your body behaves isometrically. Why are you asking it to do anything different? I never ask my body to do something in practice that I don't want it to do on fight night. So I do believe squatting is important. Squatting is important to develop a general strength.

So let's say, for instance, you're always doing plyometrics. You might have an overuse injury. Certain muscles are not being activated. You go on the squat rack, you do a few squats. And I believe you got to do squats, not too heavy, about 70% of your max and do it fast. You'll still get all the benefits. What about lowering it?

Lowering it how? Do you lower it fast or do you lower it slow? Lower it fast and up fast. Really? Yeah. So for instance, Fred Hatfield, he's probably said it best. He said, he's the first man to officially squat a thousand pounds. He said, look, throw a baseball, throw a paper. You take a paper, you crumple it up and you throw it.

It's too light for it to go anywhere. You throw it really hard because it's so light, it doesn't go anywhere. Take a bowling ball or bowling ball's too heavy. You throw it, it doesn't go anywhere. You take a baseball, that's the right amount of resistance. It's the right amount of weight. Now you're going to apply more force on that baseball. You're going to get more force out of it.

Why? It's in the Goldilocks range. So for instance, let's say, let's make it really simple. Okay, let's say you weigh zero pounds. I put you on a scale. You weigh zero pounds. You have a bar on your back. The bar weighs 100 pounds.

Okay, so we're looking at the scale now the scale says 100 pounds the bar is on your back let's take away your weight just to make it really simple you go down and up the scale is going to read 101 that's the minimum amount of power you have to put into that that that scale for it to come up so when you go down the scale is going to say 100, 100. As you come up, it's going to say 101. For it to have a positive trajectory, you have to apply 101 pounds upwards. Sorry, downwards, and then the reaction will be upwards. If I put that weight on my back, if I put 70 pounds,

if I take 70% of the weight, and I go up and down really fast on the scale, the scale is going to read 101 minimum. For me to, if I explode up really fast, it's going to read 101, 100, 203. Now I got the benefits of a maximum contraction. Let's say 100 pounds was a maximum you can lift. But I don't have the weight of 100 pounds on me. You know, somebody who really made this popular is Louis Simmons.

He learned it from the Russians. You know Louis Simmons? Have you had him on your show? Yes. He's a brilliant trainer. He's a fascinating guy. He's a brilliant human being. He's out of his fucking mind too.

He's out of his mind? We interviewed him in his gym. Really? Yeah, in Columbus. It was great. But he's a genius when it comes to lifting. He's a genius. He knows what he's talking about.

He read super training. I also read super training and super training is about lowering the rates to the right amount and doing a plyometric with it. You get the same benefits as using maximum weight but you don't get

the side effects. The soreness, the injury, the redlining. You don't get any of that. So the Russians found a great way to apply maximum force

on a bar but they also get speed. They're not training like tow trucks they're training like ferraris that's actually where i got the term from louis simmons he really like clarified it for me made it really simple so like what kind of like say if you could bench press uh 315 pounds what would you use use between 65 to 80 percent of that weight and then just do quick boom boom you'll get the same amount of resistance if you do it quickly as if you had maximum weight on it so he doesn't use maximum weight except for once a week and the

reason why he explains it is he says look you have proprioceptors in your system proprioceptors is like it's what tells you if your arm is up or down if your arm is bent to your chest if your arm if if i close your eyes and i lift your arm you'll be like you lifted my arm how do you know that proprioceptors he says if you if you put on a max, let's say you're working with 75 pounds and your maximum is 100. When you go to lift that day on a competition day, when you get 100 on your bones,

your body's gonna be like, hey, I've never felt that amount of weight. There's an arthrokinetic reflex. Shut the muscles down. We've never felt that weight. This is the narrative that he gives us. He says, because you've never felt that weight, your body is not going to allow you.

There's a safety mechanism in your body. He says, look, we're not used to this. Let's not take a chance. And he says, if you get your body used to that, the arthrokinetic reflex will quiet down and allow you to lift. There's an inner mechanism, a safety mechanism in the human body.

So he says, to bypass that, we do heavy weights once a week to numb that reflex. But the majority of the work is done with light, sorry, lighter and fast, 75%, let's say. What do you think of like Pavel Tatsulini's principles? The strong first principles of, like say if you could do 10 reps of something,

you don't do 10, you do five. That's exactly right, 100%. I've read all of Tatsulini's could do 10 reps of something you don't do 10 you do five that's exactly right 100 i've read all of tatsulin's uh works almost all of them he's brilliant trainer i agree with that 100 outside of competition let's explain it to people yeah okay so yeah let me uh okay so let's say for instance let's say you know i'm a big believer in never being sore you should train and the next day you should wake up feeling good. Okay, now why? How's that possible? Well, because, look,

if, okay, that's a great example. Let's say, let's say your energy level is a second. We're talking about fit people,

by the way, right? Every human being. So guys never worked out before? Even if it's your first day. First day, never trained. How is it possible

to work out and not be sore? No problem. Okay, here we go. So, let's say, there's something called rate of perceived exertion.

Okay? So let's say I make you do pull-ups. And let's say the maximum amount of pull-ups you can do. The maximum amount of pull-ups is 10. Let's keep a nice round number. At 11, you couldn't do 11. If I pointed a gun at you, you couldn't do 11. Should I make you do 10 pull-ups on our workout? No, I'm going to make you do five.

Why? Because I'm setting you up to work the next day. The next day we're going to do five. And the next day we're going to do another five. And then we're going to do six. When six is really easy, we're going to do seven. Why? If you count, if you did 10 pull-ups on Monday, you're going to be sore till Thursday. Let's say it's really your max. So Thursday, you've only done 10 pull-ups. From. So Thursday, you've only done 10 pull-ups. From Monday to Thursday, you've only done 10 pull-ups. Me, I've been doing five pull-ups every day. So I'm at 20 pull-ups already, 25 pull-ups.

I have more volume than you. Now, if you add up at the end of the year, who trained more? I've trained way more than you. So let's say I go to jujitsu practice. I'm doing jujitsu every single day, three rounds, five days a week. That's 15 rounds.

You go in twice a week, but you kill yourself. You do five rounds each day. You push yourself those last two rounds and you burn yourself out. I still did 15. You're at 10. At the end of the year,

I've done countless rounds. I mean, I've had so much more training than you. So how much training can we pack in in the week? That's the real question. How much volume can you expose your athlete to? So I always tell people, look, exercise can produce energy. So let's say I'm feeling like a seven out of 10. 10 being I'm really energized. One, I was really lethargic, feeling like I need to lay down. And seven, I'm feeling good. If I get up and I do a right amount of exercise,

the right amount, I can feel like an 8.5. Exercise can give me a tonic effect like drinking this coffee. So let's say I just do some jumping jacks, I hit the back for a couple of rounds, I'm feeling good. Once you get that high, shut it down. Don't go into the phase where your body's beat up, tight, broken up, don't redline the body.

That's only for training camps for a small period of time. Why? Because you get a little bit more from the system. But in the long run, you get less. In the long run, you've taxed the system. So if you do that regularly, by the time you actually get good, you'll be broken up. That's why I do a lot of flow training.

Have you ever heard of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow? No. Okay, so Jamie, can you look up a flow chart? It'll be so much simpler. Like just put in flow, flow in the workplace or flow chart. This is pure genius. This guy is pure genius. Basically, he went and he coined the term flow.

So like when you're in a state of flow, we've all been in a state of flow. The number one way to know that you're in a state of flow is time flies by i'm sure sometimes you've done podcasts and you're like well it's three hours already yeah it was it was a great podcast you know the one where you have the worst guest or you're having the worst workout it feels like every minute is an hour that's that's a bad you're not in a state of flow the state of flow is you're having the right amount of difficulty but it's not so difficult that you go into stress,

and it's not so easy that you're bored. It's the right amount of challenge. So let's say as simple as playing Tetris. If I put you on a level that's too high, you're going to play for five minutes, and you're going to be like, I'm done. If I put you on a level too easy, you're going to be like, this is boring.

If I put you at the right amount of level, see, that's the flow channel. So if the challenge is too high, you'll meet anxiety. If it's too low, you're bored. When I go in the practice room, I'm trying to create flow. I'm having fun. Training should be addictive. Imagine training was addictive.

Everybody would train, everybody would be fit. But people always go into anxiety. They go and they kill, they slam their body. Then I have to convince you to do it again three days later, two days later. And you're like, dude, the mental energy is gonna take me to get there. It shouldn't be, it should be, training should be a pulling force.

It should be pulling you. You wanna go training. If you don't wanna go training, it's not fun. If it's not fun, you're not gonna do a lot of it. And if you're not gonna do a lot of it, you're never gonna reach mastery. So how do I make it pleasurable? How do I make it fun?

I have to be in a flow state. And you can get into a flow state in almost anything. But when you're out going to do a lot of it, you're never going to reach mastery. So how do I make it pleasurable? How do I make it fun? I have to be in a flow state. And you can get into a flow state in almost anything. But when you're out of that flow state, cut it. We're going to get further. We're going to do more training if we cut it today and come back in tomorrow. Because I'm a big believer in consistency over intensity. Intensity should be done once in a while. Because by nature, intensity can only be done once in a while.

If you're going hard every day, you're not really going hard every day. You can't go your max every day. There's a cost to going to your max. Can you sprint every single day? You cannot sprint every single day. It's ludicrous. You could sprint once or twice a week.

The best sprinters in the world, they sprint once or twice a week. Nobody sprints every day because intensity by nature entails that you need to take a break because if you don't need to take a break you didn't really go to your maximum intensity if you lift your maximum lift the maximum amount of reps you can the maximum weight you can lift if you do two reps that wasn't your max because if it was you wouldn't have to have a second rep in

you you understand i would have to give you a break for you have a second rep so we didn't find your true max right intensity maximum effort entails you have to stop because it's the maximum there was no more reserves there are no more reserves so what do you think about people that that say there's no such thing as over training here's the john denner narrative and i don't add, he coins it really, really well. He says, look, it's under rest. So he says, look, you can overtrain if you didn't give your body the rest later. But he says, look,

no matter how hard I push in practice, if I didn't kill myself, I can rest from it and recover and have super compensation. I agree with that. Some guys have made great strides with just mental fortitude and mental strength over training the shit out of themselves. Okay.

But can I ask you this? Yes. They were successful, yeah? Yeah. But their bodies break down. Right. But could they have been better if they used flow? Exactly.

Right. As good as they were. Dan Gable, for example. Right. Dan Gable essentially was done in his 20s, right? In terms of like his body's broken down exactly knee replacements hip replacements that kind of deal let me ask you this who wins more often russians or american wrestlers russians every time an american wrestler wins he's like

some prod prodigy he's rare it's rare it does happen but it's rarely he's a technical master right however you have these russian guys that win gold medals you've never heard of them and they're like michael jordan's of the sport yeah there's just so many of them they train long consistent practices whereas america we do monday wednesday friday hard we kill it and then you rest tuesday thursday the eastern block had a totally different understanding they're like it's volume volume volume near the fight short and intense only near the the competition phase but before that it's the maximum amount of volume you can imagine me and you are we're two athletes a and b you're a and b you're training jiu-jitsu three times a week really really hard you're going all out i'm training jiu-jitsu every single day my average practice is two hours your average practice

is two hours but when you go in you kill it kill it. Like you go with all the black belts and you kill it. At the end of the year, I'm averaging three practices or two practices more than you. So I've had a hundred practices more than you by the end of the year. 104 practices. Let's give two weeks for vacation. A hundred practices more than you. 200 hours more than you have been training. When we roll, your intensity that you put on the mat is gonna be irrelevant. Why? Because I've also tasted that intensity periodically. It's not that much of a factor now.

When you go super aggressive on me, when you attack me aggressively, I have felt that. I know how to deal with it. Plus I have an extra 100 hours on you, 200 hours. So I'm gonna mangle you. You know what I'm saying? The volume is far more important than the intensity. The intensity by nature is need to be done periodically.

If you do it every day, it's not intensity. So how the Russians, how do they structure their training? They're more playful. You know, they kind of like, they kind of warm up. They kind of flow roll. They kind of like, they do a lot of technique, high emphasis on technique. Now, a lot of people hearing this are going to be like, well, the Russians also are funded by their government. You know, their government supports them a lot more than maybe an American wrestler.

Okay, I agree with that. There are many factors. However, we cannot deny that they're technically, I hate to say the word superior, but they're technically more advanced, technically, when it comes to wrestling. They have more of a flow understanding. They play around,

and the practice gets more and more intense, more and more intense, until you see them going really, really hard. going live you know they're going really really rough but they were playing they have a more playful attitude look at the cubans you ever see cubans sparring they're like 50 guys in a room they're just touch sparring there's no headgear there's no mat on the floor they're literally sparring on concrete you think they're really trying to drop each other they're on concrete i mean the cubans are the top boxers. They consistently win gold medals. But in practice room, they're playful.

Nobody gets hurt. Like you're seeing the ties. The ties are just, if you go in there and you kick a tie really hard, he won't spar with you anymore. He'll be like, this guy's too amateur. There's a time and place for intensity. I'm not anti-intensity. I think there's a time and place. Like Angelo Dundee was probably arguably the greatest boxing trainer in history.

He says, look, fighting is for fight night. In practice, it's only practice. George St-Pierre has that attitude. And I think that's why he's so good and so healthy today. Because he never hurts his sparring partners. People line up to want to spar with him. It's a joy to spar with him. Yeah, I love this idea and I love this approach.

I think that we have this attitude that you have to be tough. We have this attitude that you have to work hard. And I mean, I've fallen prey to that many, many times in my life, where you just got to be tougher. You got to work out harder. You got to push harder. But when I read Pavel's stuff, one of the first things that struck me is like, well, yeah, of course, if you just do five reps every day and then

you won't be sore, you could do it more often. And then your body, like you get farmer strength. Exactly. Where's farmer strength come from? Exactly. Farmers aren't, they're not going to exhaustion. No. You know, they're not like throwing hail bales, hay bales to the point where, you know, they

literally, they're heaving, they put their hands on knees and like, come on, five more. Exactly. You should never be sore. If you're sore, you overdid it. Because I can't train the next day if I'm sore. I open the wound. Every time I work out then. What's that?

I said I've overdone it every time I worked out. You may have. You may have. There's a lot of people listening to this right now. I'm like, wait a minute. What? How the fuck? Make your workouts a 7 out of 10 and do them every day.

You're going to get far more training hours. You're going to spike your metabolism far more often. Your energy levels, your mood is going to be far more up. And training is going to be more addictive. Now, what kind of training do you do at this stage? Like you're not competing, but you're constantly in there sparring with guys who are professionals and you're constantly training them. Like what kind of stuff

do you do? I do jiu-jitsu, wrestling, Muay Thai and a small amount of conditioning after practice. I'm too bored.

I find jumping hurdles and throwing, like doing weights and stuff. Me personally, I don't find that as enjoy, I don't have to take that much enjoyment of it.

I can do five to 20 minutes in a practice. Isn't that because sparring is just so fun so much fun i'm in a flow state we're having fun you know we're wrestling with i think conditioning you can't get away with it you need it you need it and we've got to talk about what george was saying on your podcast that he doesn't do strength and conditioning there's there's a language issue there there's a language and we've got to talk about that because we've done tremendous amounts of strength and conditioning me and george like tremendous like barrels full okay and uh but he has a different definition he there's a misunderstanding okay so i really want to clarify that but me personally like look

if we roll for an hour for me it passes like this because it's so fun it's so fun we're having a time i'm fascinated i'm fascinated like oh you grab like this like i'm always learning new things right um to swing a kettlebell to do push-ups, pull-ups, I can only do that for a fine amount of time. So I'll put a timer, three rounds, two minutes, and I'm doing it. And I bite the bullet and I do it. It keeps me healthy. But I don't go and practice to just do that.

That I never do. It's always after my workout, after I do jiu-jitsu. So you never have a day where you say, today I'm going to do Olympic lifting. No, I don't think Muhammad Ali ever did that. Muhammad Ali never, he boxed and then he did his conditioning. Mayweather does his conditioning, then he boxes. It always came together.

Why? When I go to the gym, I'm going to go have fun. I'm going to go wrestle. I'm going to go box. I'm going to have a blast. Then I'm going to grab the kettlebell. I'm going to do a few presses. I'm going to do a few Turkish get-ups and I'm done.

Because I need to have some general fitness. You have general fitness, then you have specific fitness. Specific fitness is to get better at my sport. General fitness to keep me healthy, strong, and allow me to reach new levels of athleticism that later in the long term can translate to my sport later. But if you just do your sport, in my opinion, your system's going to break down. Your back's going to break down. Your knee's going to break down. Your shoulder's going to break down. Your knee is going to break down. Your shoulder is going to break down. You need to stimulate certain muscles that are not getting stimulation in your specific sport. You create atrophy in certain muscles because you're not using them really.

I need to work my stabilizers. I need to swing the kettlebell. I need to squat. I need to do certain exercises. What are the standard course? Kettlebells? Triple extension is number one. So any type of squatting maneuver. I don'ts? Is that like your main? Triple extension is number one. So any type of squatting maneuver.

I don't particularly use the squat. I like to use. Triple extension? Triple extension. So your knee, hip, and ankle are bending. So like a squat. Your knee, hip, and ankle are bending. I like to jump.

I like to throw the med ball a lot against the wall. I like to do hurdles. I like to do box jumps. I like to do very low impact plyometrics. I like sprinting. Sprinting is huge. You ever do the beep test what's that oh you got you got the space for the beep test here you got to implement what

is it's the best way to do cardio really you ever hear the the soccer players use a lot it's a beep right you run you beep and then it beeps back and the faster the beeps go the faster you have to run ah that's really amazing because what i do is i set a timer for five minutes i put it on a high pace like i'll put it 10 or 11 and i'll just shuttle back and forth and it keeps it tells you how fast to run the beat test and some days i feel really good i'll do 11 because i know how fast i have to run to keep up with the beats and that just it's amazing for cardio it's short sweet painless and it's it's very uh it translates very well to sports do you do tabatas do you ever do tabatas are good. Yeah. I think Tabatas are good. If they're done well, they're good.

But again, you have to do it in a way it doesn't create soreness. Because Tabata can create soreness. You have to be very careful. I wouldn't do Tabata kettlebell swing. That'll cook my hamstrings. I'll probably do like hurdle jump. Like you take a small hurdle and you just hurdle over it for 20 seconds. Now what you're saying though, like there's got to be a bunch of CrossFit people out there

right now that are screaming Into their phones. They're wrong all the respect They're wrong. I like respect with all the respect the run. Let me tell you why okay? And look if you like crossfit do it whatever motivates you do it okay cross its problem is it's fatigue seeking Yes, it says look go out there and burn yourself out. Yeah, that's totally wrong. They're not building any skill Try to show me a guy who's a champion in CrossFit, champion in Jiu-Jitsu. That guy would need two lifetimes

to reach mastery in both of those. Why? Because my CrossFit workout is gonna tax me so much. I cannot learn armbar sweep, triangle choke, double leg takedown, underhook. I've taxed my whole system. My system is in recovery. When your system's in recovery,

what can you do but rest you understand okay half amendes do you think half amendes one of the arguably the greatest pound for pound one of the greatest pound for pound jiu-jitsu guys in the world do you think he's got a great uh crossfit workout that he's really mastered he's really good at you think he has a great back squat do you think he's a great deadlifter it doesn't look like it no he doesn't believe me you think we think uh uh gordon r, he's a great Olympic lifter? No, they're always going to be at an amateur level in the fitness world. Why?

Because if they were experts, they would have taken so much from their jiu-jitsu. Like look at George, he does gymnastics. And I'm the one who, I twisted his arm a little to put him in gymnastics. Why? Because I thought it would give him tremendous benefit because of the amount of, first of all, they use a lot of body weight. So it doesn't cost us anything neurologically. Body weight exercises are very easy to recover from.

Body weight exercises are very easy on the nervous system. They use leverage instead of weights. Plus the stabilizer strength is unbelievable. So, and of course, I want a coordination. I felt George was a little bit stiff, mechanical. And the tumbling makes you more fluid. I thought I would create more efficiency this way. So we get him there and there's difficulties, okay,

from A to F. We're still at A and B. And he'll always be at A and B. Maybe he'll touch C in his career. But he'll never get to F. You'd have to start really young and you'd have to do it full time. Imagine somebody trying to get good at jiu-jitsu,

doing it part time. He'll never get good. He'll be so-so. He'll reach such a level. CrossFit is too fatigue seeking for an MMA fighter. Now if CrossFitters followed, if they just followed that 70% rule, and periodically went to their max, periodically,

as opposed to every single workout, go totally out. I bet you their top, top guys don't go all out every day. I bet you if you watch what their top guys do, they taper off the workout. They make the workout between 70 and 85% of their true max, and they work volume. And then closer to competition, they go higher in intensity. I guarantee you

that's what the best CrossFitters do. There's no way that the guy who goes balls out every day is going to add up as much workout and as much training time

as the guy who's going 70 to 85% of his max. There's just no way. But when they do those classes, like say they do a CrossFit class and I'm speaking out of ignorance honestly

because I only watch them on video. I've never done a CrossFit class. But it seems to me they're competing against each other. Yeah, they're going all out trying to set up PR.

Every class. Yeah. That's ridiculous. All due respect. I mean, it just doesn't make any sense. But why is it so popular? Because people think that's right. Because why?

Because when you watch a primetime or a fight, the guy's at the peak. He's at a point in his training camp where he's at the high end of intensity. So people are always watching the last part of your camp, the part where you're peaking, and then you're going to go taper off for 10, 15 days. They don't see that part,

and they don't see the months before where you ramped up to that level. They just see the last two, three weeks where it's the last few sparrings, and we're mimicking fight speed to the maximum as we can. We're flirting with danger here. We're only doing it a little bit, but that's the part everybody's watching. So they think, oh, if you want to become really good, you have to flirt with danger every day.

That's what their workouts are. If you see George train throughout the year, you'd be like, hey, that wasn't so intense. That wasn't so intense. There's another really mellow practice. I remember when I was younger, I was training at the Grand Brothers Gym and I would see Otis Grant.

He's a world champion boxer. Everybody knew him in Canada. He's the man. And he was training really relaxed. I was like dude, I'm training harder than him. But that's his millionth workout, it was my 10th. He's doing in the long run, he's added way more years of training.

So that's when I started to understand that the champion, the best guy, he's training for the long run, it's far more intelligent, he's getting far more workouts in than me that's burned out and the next day I need to rest. Right. Yeah. So it's consistency over intensity.

Intensity entails you need to take a break. There's just no way around it. So if you're a young person listening to this and you've got a coach that's trying to burn you out every day, what the fuck do you do? I don't know. If you go into the gym and go you know what i was listening to frost a hobby the other day and frost saying you're a retard here's my here's my uh you know when i roll with guys i think they feel when i grab them i'm grabbing them gently and they realize

it and i'll let them like i'll let guys pass my guard like i'll just go ahead start second show and i'll just get they'll get the message that we're just kind of playing around. Right. And then later when we're going more intense, you know, they'll feel it. They'll feel the intensity. But I don't always roll hard. Like, if you see me rolling, like, I usually will roll with blue belts and purple belts. Why?

Because I need to warm up. I need three, four rounds of warm up. Right. I don't want to even have a tight shoulder or tight hamstring. Of course. I don't want anything tight. a tight shoulder or tight hamstring of course I don't want anything tight of course so

I warm up with them really good when I'm really warm then I go and I wrestle I like to go wrestle I like to stand up okay who wants to wrestle now let's go

because I'm really warm now I can wrestle I can hit the ground but you're in a position where you can sort of determine and dictate what kind of exercises

you do right but if you're the question was like if you're a young person and you're entering into an MMA gym and the instructor, let's to be kind, is a meathead.

Yeah. Right. Which there's a lot of them out there. There is. Yeah. What do you do? What do you do? You might have to take a few beatings as a white belt.

You might. Like, I mean, I grinded my gears when I was younger, but as you get older and more skilled, now you can take the VIP lane You know now's the time you've got the skill and you've got the knowledge You know early on you have less miles on you, so it's you survive more more of a beating you ever see those

There's a lot of jiu-jitsu classes where they go through an extremely rigorous Conditioning routine before they ever do any training mmm, and I've disagreed with that. I agree. Totally right. Yeah, I feel like... Show me one world champion that did it that way. Well, I don't know. Maybe it's possible that they did. Who? I don't know.

I don't know who did what. I've trained with a lot of the greatest jiu-jitsu guys in the world. And they all warm up with technique. Yeah. All of them. You think Ryan Hall gets up and does burpees before practice? You think he goes and he runs five miles? He does weights?

Well, I know that a lot of the old school guys, they were into that. Isn't Half Gracie famous for those conditioning drills they do? I don't know, but he never won. I mean, he was in a time and place where very few people knew jiu-jitsu. Right. Now the secret secrets out. Who are the top guys? What are they doing?

Yeah, I feel like there's also a thing where people want to be really tired from a workout. So they feel like they're getting a great workout in if you beat them down. Yeah, I agree with that. There's a disconnect. There's like, I want to feel pain. Punish me. Yeah, you're retarding growth, though. Yeah.

You know, like people don't like that word retard anymore. But because, you know, they think you're talking about someone with a disease. But the real term of being, of retarding, you're slowing down growth. And that's really what retarded action is. You have an issue in that the way you're approaching things is uniquely damaging to your ultimate goal of progress. I agree. But it's so common. Someone right now is listening to thousands of people that are going to class and they know that they're going to have to do all these crazy burpees

and all this crazy shit before class. It's so fucking common. Icarus, you fly too close to the sun, what happens to you? You get burned, baby. And you drown.

Stay in the middle. Stay in the middle. So if you're going to do those conditioning exercises, kind of half-ass them? Half-ass them a bit. I give you permission. That's why I like to do

my conditioning after. Yeah. Because my body's warm. That's why I like to do my conditioning after. Yeah. Because my body's warm. I agree too. And I don't need, because the thing is, look, when you do conditioning before, you weaken your stabilizers. The muscles in your body that are prime movers have more endurance than your stabilizers. So if you weaken the stabilizers, your joint is less stable while you're rolling.

Yes. The element of fatigue can put your joints in danger. That's why I only do, because when you're doing exercises, you're in control. You're not in a live role with somebody trying to tug on your arm. Right.

So I need maximum strength when somebody's trying to tug on my arm in case I'm in a bad position. I need to make sure that I have my strength levels are there to protect my joints. Joint protection is huge. You need to make sure your joints are healthy. It's huge. What kind of exercises do you do to make sure your joints are protected well i do uh

the supple leopard i do a lot of mobility work and i do low impact plyometrics low impact so for instance that's why i like the med ball throwing the med ball against the wall i like to do steps you know like you have a block like a 12 inch block like to jump, like do steps over, back and forth. So you kind of jump up in the air, but you never leave the ground because the block is also high. So you never get the negative contraction. You never get the impact of hitting the ground. I like sprinting. So explain that.

How are you not getting the negative impact? So let's say, for instance, this is a block. And this is my feet right here. So I'm like this. I'll jump. Okay, so I'll jump. Okay, so you touch the block. I'll jump. Okay. So I'll jump. Okay. So you touch the block.

I'm touching the block. So I'm never, when I jump off the ground, I'm landing on the block. So I'm always, I'm stepping down, jumping up, stepping down, jumping up. I see. So I'm always exploding up, but landing on a block softly. Because it's, when you jump up, it's the landing that kills your joints. If I put up a 50 inch box and I make you jump up,'s the landing that kills your joints if i put up a 50 inch box and i make you jump up the the landing's gonna be very soft if i tell you jump over a hurdle

now you're in midair and you're crashing down towards the ground and you land you gotta absorb that shock but that's why i like like hill sprints hill sprints are great because your foot never leaves the ground even though you're exploding upwards the ground is coming up with you yeah so it's a very soft landing the soft landing is key yeah that makes a lot of sense that makes a lot of sense but what about hitting a bag then it's the best cardio is the best i do a lot of dutch drill for cardio dutch drills what's left hook right kick right hand left kick three minutes just some as i do three punch combo ba-ba-bum, ba-ba-bum. Sometimes I do a three-punch combo, two-punch combo, and I finish with a kick or a double kick, and I just spike my heart rate.

That way I'm developing my skill, developing my cardio. I get very lean when I do that, and I feel great. I feel my energy levels are up. It's better than doing bike or running, personally, because I'm developing my skill, and I'm also spiking my heart rate. A Dutch drill can be very intense on the heart rate. It's low impact impact and it's

a plyometric it's everything i need yeah do you what what weight heavy bag do you use i use the vertex the giant pole bag they call it like a big big giant bag it touches the ground so when i kick it it doesn't move oh that's heavy as fuck yeah that's like a 300 pound bag right yeah why do you like that one because when i kick it the bag doesn't swing. So I don't have to reset. So I can keep that pace really high. So I'm going pop, pop, pop,

pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop,

pop. And are you hitting it full blast or are you just sort of? As I get warmed up, I hit harder and harder until I'm full blast. Wow. So I might start really relaxed, kicking low to the leg. Then as the workout gets warmer and warmer and hotter and hotter,

I'm sweating. I start kicking to the head. Everything is gradual warm-up you know and when i've had enough i stop like i'm not going to make myself sick because i'm working out tomorrow again right now what about uh stretching stretching i like but i prefer mobility so mobility is the element of stretching your muscle but also creating motion the joint has to be uh in a type of rotation in or out why because you Because you're creating synovial fluid to the joint. The joint is really more important to me than the muscle

because the muscle rejuvenates itself. The joint doesn't. It does at a lesser degree. So I got to always be oiling up the joints. This is very important to me. Very important. Now, when you say like mobility, like what do you do like for your hamstrings

and things like that if you're trying to stretch them out and also do mobility so let's say I stretch out my leg I'll be just kind of bending at the hip in and out I won't just leave it out there static

there has to be a type of motion I see it's very important because when I'm wrestling or I'm doing Jiu Jitsu my leg's out there and I'm creating motion I have to move

I'm not just putting it out there right there's always a type of movement because when I stretch my leg out to stop you from passing the guard I'm going to be moving my body at the same time. So that's mobility. That's the difference between stretching and mobility.

There is a stretch element to mobility. But in stretching, there's no mobility element. Now, what about yoga? I think yoga is good for relaxation and range of motion. I think it's very good. I just don't personally have the time and energy for it because I'm always in the gym. So for me to find time for yoga is just a little bit difficult. But I think it does allow for a great range of motion and relaxation and

centering. If you have the time in your schedule, it's good. I just personally with three kids and my, everything that I do, I just, I'm in the gym already too much. Right,

right, right. Yeah. I just wonder like for fighters, I mean, I'm hearing more and more fighters incorporate yoga into the training sessions to try to create more balance and, and also stability, joint stability in particular, because you're holding these static positions for long periods of time, balance.

It's a brilliant art. Your core as well. Yeah, it's a brilliant art. If you can have the time and energy to do it, it's great. Now, what about nutrition? Nutrition is huge. Huge. How do you eat?

Right now, I just finished Ramadan, so I've been eating a lot of processed foods. I've had, like, Ramadan's like the time of the year where I gain a lot of weight because normally throughout the year, I eat very little processed foods. I eat natural foods. But during Ramadan,

because I have such a small window to eat, to fit my calories in, and I'm very busy all year round, I always have projects, run out of fights, traveling. traveling i eat processed food so when i eat processed food why processed food because there's more calories in them you know if i gotta if i gotta get my if i'm gonna go the whole day after no water no food i need to have eaten a certain amount of of of calories in the night so if i eat whole if i eat a salad and some fruits, I'm going to be at zero by afternoon in a hot gym with a bunch of guys

who need to drill and work. And I'm sweating in the gym, just standing there. I haven't even started yet. I'm sweating. I got to hold pads. I got to wrestle this guy. This guy needs these positions.

I'm working and at zero. So I need that density of foods that I get from processed foods. But I take a serious loss in energy and I gain weight for sure, no doubt about it. Wow. Processed foods is the worst. So for Ramadan, for the month, in the moment you wake up until the sun goes down, you can't have any food and any water. No, from sunrise. Sunrise. So you wake up before sunrise. down. You can't have any food and any water. No, from sunrise.

Sunrise. So you wake up before sunrise. Right. You eat. Oh, okay. Most people do that. By the midway of Ramadan, I stopped doing that because I just can't get up anymore.

I just can't wake up. My body's a bit of a wreck. But from sunrise to sunset, you're not consuming anything. No food, no water. If you can have water, it would be easy. Like I know people who do water fast. Like I've done water fast. It's quite easy.

You have the energy. But when you cut the water, it becomes a problem, especially if you're in a hot gym and you're just sweating standing there. And now it's in the summer. Ramadan's in the summer. It's very humid in Canada and it's hot. It's very hot.

So I have to be very careful. And that's why at night, even just to resist eating processed foods, it's too difficult. You got to eat. So do you have a specific calorie number that you try to hit? No, not really. Honestly, no. What kind of foods are you eating when you say processed foods?

Whatever my mom or wife is going to make. I'm going to eat like a pasta. I'm going to eat bread. I'm going to eat whatever. I'm going to eat a dessert after. I'm going to have a cheesecake. I'm going to eat all. I'm going to eat a dessert after. I'm going to have a cheesecake. I'm going to eat all the stuff I don't eat. I'm going to eat all the stuff I never eat. Wow.

I'll make myself an omelet. So you just crush it at night. I crush it at night. I crush it at night. But I pay the price after. After Ramadan, I got to lose the weight. I got to get back in shape. It's funny because a lot of people would think that if you're not eating all day that you would lose weight. Yeah. Most people do in Ramadan. They lose weight. Everybody is like, I lost weight. I lost weight. I got to get back in shape. I got to, you know. It's funny because a lot of people would think that if you're not eating all day, that you would lose weight.

Yeah. Most people do, Ramadan. They lose weight. Like everybody's like, I lost weight, I lost weight. I'm like, guys, I gained weight. Why? Because the thing is, I know what I'm doing the next day. It's going to be rough. You know, I'm not just working in an office. You know, I got to, I got to move. I got to move my body. Yeah. So I pack the calories in the night before I hydrate. And then I go in the gym and I try to make it like, you know, I the gym and I try to make it like no I'm like I try to do my routine as usual the hydrating part's got to be the most difficult

that's got to be exhausting yeah it's tough some fighters have actually gone through training camps while they're no yeah yeah yeah very dangerous in my opinion and risky well he Well, he won. He won. God bless him. Yeah. Crazy. I have one of my fighters now. He was doing Ramadan. I was telling him off. I was like, listen, you can't book a fight and do Ramadan.

It's one or the other. You either do your Ramadan after the fight, but not during the camp. Because it's too risky. It's too dangerous. Right. And that's one of the things. He was literally sparring. He was literally sparring.

I was like, dude, why you look so flat today? He's like, I got to confess to you. I'm like, what is it? I'm doing Ramadan. I said, dude, you either do Ramadan and cancel your fight or you book your fight and you do Ramadan after. The two is dangerous. It's not, Ramadan is not about putting yourself in danger.

Can you do Ramadan anytime you want? If it interferes with your work, you can do it after when it's convenient. Okay. So you don't have to do it uniformly when everyone else is doing it. No, because he has a fight booked. It's his career.

That's how he puts food on the table. Okay. So you have an exception here. Okay, do your Ramadan after your fight. Like, for instance, Bektik, Mirza Bektik, he's doing his Ramadan after he just fought. He's doing it afterwards. Why?

Because during the camp, I was like, look, you're either doing Ramadan and we're canceling the fight or you're going to do your job and you do Ramadan after. And he was like, okay, I understand. That's the way it's done. He looked fantastic. He did.

Against Lopez. I mean, it's just Llamas rather. Llamas is a very tough veteran. Ricardo's been around. He's fought the best of the best. He's fought for the title. And that was a really, really professional performance by him.

Ricardo came to win also. And he had that creepy mustache too. What's up with Beck Dick's creepy mustache? I think he's young. He's exploring his looks, you know? Experimenting with

the creepy mustache. Yeah. He's such a good kid though. He seems like a very, very nice guy. But I was just super impressed with the way he handled lamas because lamas is he's i mean lamas is as well-rounded as you're gonna get he's a wrestler

he's got great striking great submission skills like pretty much does and he's seen so much that for him to win and win down the stretch like he was overwhelming him deep into the second and the third i was like well this is a guy that's clearly hitting his stride and hitting the next level yeah he did a great job now when a guy like that is coming off of a fight like the darren elkins fight how do you how do you build him back up after that fight well you know what i feel like he was trying to do too much and he wore himself out and elkins is one of those guys where if you give him a window, the fight's over. You know, he's one of those guys who's dangerous. He knows what to do

in the particular situation. He's not going to panic. And he found the right moment to beat Mirzad. But I think just Mirzad overworked himself. And he didn't find pockets to, because the thing is,

you cannot exert yourself at a maximum pace forever. You've got to find pockets of recovery and get back to it. Yeah. I felt like he just, he overextended himself in the fight.

Yeah, I feel like that was the case too. But how do you know when to push? The idea is you want to break your opponent. So how do you know when you're breaking yourself? How do you know when your opponent has too much gas and you're not going to break? A guy like Elkins is famous for his durability and his heart. So he's an interesting case. Yeah, i think the

master of that is george george recovers in the round we always talk about recovering in the round and never showing the guy your maximum point like let's say we're fighting menu and i see you back off because you're tired you're huffing and puffing you i know you're breaking point now i know that if i push this pace a little bit more you're gonna break there's no more reserves however if you get to about 70 of your fatigue and then you start circling and i see you're going to break. There's no more reserves. However, if you get to about 70% of your fatigue and then you start circling, and I see you're circling, but I don't see your fatigue. You're just doing that as a decoy.

You're playing mind games with me, but really you're recovering. You're playing mind games with me. You're circling. You're tying me up in ways. You know that I'm never going to go over 70%. I'm never going to redline in a fight. Only at the last bit of the fight am I going to redline.

Because I have a reserve in case things go wrong. I have a reserve to explode out of a position that I might need. So the only times I will redline is if I'm in trouble in the fight and I have to go all in because the fight's going to be over. Or it's the end of the fight. Guys who go all in in round one, for me, eventually they will lose because some guy's going to weather that storm, sidestep, and he's going to put the kill on you

when you're in recovery mode. Or like Francis Ngannou and Stipe Miocic. Right. Francis came out, guns blazing that first round, blew his wad, and then in the second

and the third, Stipe took over. When you go for the kill, you're risking losing the decision or losing afterwards if you don't get the kill. If you go all in, and there's no if you don't get the kill. If you overextend, if you go all in and there's no reserve,

you better get that kill because if you don't. What's amazing is that when guys go all in in the first round, even if they're in great shape, sometimes they don't recover enough to complete the fight.

Right. If the guy they're fighting is skilled enough to not allow them that. Yeah. You know, if you roll with a blue belt, you'll never get tired.

He doesn't have the skill to make me work. Right. However, if I'm with a blue belt you'll never get tired he doesn't have the skill to make me work right however if i'm with a black belt and i get exhausted and now he's making me work right i may never recover right right yeah that's it it's well it's not just it's also the way you go out if you go out full clip in that first round you you have essentially sprinted yourself into a position where you're just so diminished. There's so many fighters that are like that, right? Like, Conor is kind of a good example of that.

Conor is fantastic in the beginning of a fight. Right. But, man, he gets to them third, fourth, and fifth rounds, and he takes, like, the Nate Diaz fight, the second fight. He becomes human. He turned and walked away from him. He becomes human he needed that break so badly when you see that do you think that that is a case of and i don't want you to give away too much because you know george potentially wants to fight right right right do you think that that's a case of poor

conditioning do you think that is a lack of experience in handling those moments? Because he's so used to overwhelming people and taking them out early. What do you think that is? I think it's partly genetic. Really? Yes, because you see, I call it the touch of death. He's got that left hand. It's the touch of death.

Yeah. That touch of death comes at a cost. How do you have the touch of death? Where does power come from? Well, if you look at Michael Kogan, what we were talking about earlier, he has a criteria for power. To the best of his knowledge,

this is where he believes power comes from. Okay, so I can't teach Usain Bolt to be powerful. I can only make him faster. But where did that initial power come from? Number one on the list, number one, is where your muscle is attached to your bone. It's genetic so tyson hits he has a powerful left hook not because his coach taught him how to hit a left hook he could hit a

left hook like that if he had a mediocre trainer it has to do with the leverage of his bones so for instance uh you know if i'm gonna imagine i had like a like a a really heavy pole that weighs 100 pounds and i want to stand it up. Well, depending on where I grab it, I'm going to have more resistance or less resistance. If I grab it near the end, I have more leverage. So where your muscle is attached to your bone is going to dictate how much leverage you get out of it. Second most important element is the type of muscle fiber you have.

The type. So if you have a fast twitch muscle fiber, you can hold less oxygen, but it can twitch faster. Hence the name. So if you're a fast twitch muscle fiber, you can hold less oxygen, but it can twitch faster. Hence the name. So if you're a slow twitch muscle fiber guy, you can metabolize more oxygen, but you can't twitch as fast. So there's a give and take.

Nick Diaz. Exactly. So you have a guy, Nick Diaz, who needs to knock you out with volume. He can't knock you out with one shot. Like look at BJ Penn. If round one he doesn't knock you out, likelihood of knocking you out in round two is less.

Right. Diaz is the opposite. The likelihood of of knocking you out in round two is less. Right. Diaz is the opposite. The likelihood of him knocking you out in round three is higher than round one. Yeah. Because of the cumulative attack. Yeah. McGregor, look at his stats.

It's all round one knockout, round one knockout, round two knockout. He's fast twitch, high leverage, left hand. Yeah. If you take him into deep waters, his fast twitch muscle fibers cannot metabolize with Mayweather. Mayweather is so smart. He let him work.

He let McGregor work for three rounds. And you're getting excited. Keep working. Keep working. And when you have nothing left, I'm going to put you out. That was such a brilliant strategy. It was. And it was so obvious how much more efficient he was.

Exactly. And more relaxed connor had his moments early in the fight where he hit him with some unorthodox punches and some some weird movement but after a while it was just i found both of them had a brilliant performance because what mcgregor did to go in his world oh it was brilliant it was brilliant just crazy crazy that that it even happened really stop and think about it was almost like the world got a magic trick it was unbelievable i want george to fight Mayweather I keep bothering judges you fight Mayweather you fight him he's like it's crazy I

know it's crazy but I bet Mayweather would do it that's what I'm saying George might have to lose a shitload of weight they'll find a catch weight do you think Mayweather is worried that he's gonna get concussed he's fought all the top punchers in the world right he's just gonna have to worry about George's volume and reach but he can handle himself and george can handle himself but the whole world is gonna tune into that one you know what i'm saying i'm like george you're selling it yeah man like george do it man do it but george doesn't want to fight a smaller guy doesn't want to call out a smaller guy so it's gonna have to come from mayweather it's gonna have to come from wow there's another

big money fight yep but is it a bit as big a money fight that's the thing the real big money fight. Yep. But is it as big a money fight? That's the thing. The real big money fight is in somehow or another McGregor convincing the world that he could beat him in a second fight. Mayweather? Yes. Oh, that's a hard sell. It's a hard sell. We bought that one already. Yeah. We bought that one.

They need George to fight McGregor. There was the one thing of doing it in the octagon and doing it with small gloves and no kicks. Remember, there was some talk of that. And people were like, well, where's this talk coming from? I don't know if it was legit or not. I called Dana. Dana said it's 100% bullshit. Because the state can't enforce that.

So if McGregor wants to throw a kick, he'll throw a kick. Right. It'd have to be gentleman's rules. Do you remember when that happened with Tim Sylvia and Ray Mercer? No. Tim Sylvia fought Ray Mercer and they had originally been scheduled to fight gentlemen's rules. Do you remember when that happened with Tim Sylvia and Ray Mercer? No. Tim Sylvia fought Ray Mercer and they had originally been scheduled to fight a boxing match. Gentlemen's rules. But the commission said they

wouldn't sanction the fight because Tim Sylvia doesn't have any pro boxing experience. Ray Mercer, Olympic gold medalist, former world champion. And they decided to have an MMA fight, but they had a gentleman's agreement to not throw kicks. Tim opens up with an inside leg kick.

Of course he did. You ever see the fight? Yeah, I did. He knocks him out one shot. Here it is. Watch this. I just forgot about the kick. It starts off, and Tim Sylvia immediately, oh, this is, go before this. Go before this, because that's the KO.

If you go before this, they open up, and Tim kicks him right away. And look, see, Ray puts his hands down. You motherfucker. I can't believe this shit. Oh, that's why you right away. And look, see Ray puts his hands down. Like, you motherfucker. I can't believe this shit. Oh, that's why he gave a look. And then boom. And then he hits him when he's down. He just KOs him.

Let me see that one more time. Wow. Boom. I mean, come on, son. And that's like a 50-year-old Ray Mercer at the time. Oh. Wow. Crazy.

That's why he gave that look. Yeah. He couldn't believe it. He's like, I thought we weren't kicking, man. So they made a gentleman's agreement. And Tim Sylvia's like, yeah, whatever, dude. But he paid for that. I mean, he got starched.

It's also the difference in skill level. You see a guy like Ray Mercer who's seen all these patterns and a guy like Tim Sylvia is just so used to MMA fighter striking. It's a different speed also. It is. How much does it help fighters to cross-train in these different disciplines and how difficult is it to take those skills and then to put them into their overall MMA game?

I think it's beneficial if you do it to a certain degree, because if you go too much, let's say you're always sparring with pro boxers, there's a distance that's not realistic. Because in MMA, you're further away from each other. Yeah. So when I get to that distance, the guy's going to grab me. However, because there's more punches per second, it's more of an intensive training. So if you can deal with that speed of training, then later when I put you in MMA zone, it's slower a little bit.

So there's that element. There's a balancing act. There's boxing with pro boxers, but then there's doing it too much. Then when you're sparring with MMA fighter, it's harder to hit the MMA fighter than it is for me to hit the boxer. Right. Because we're in a different pattern. We're a different world.

I want to do just a bit of that, not too much. Are there any patterns that people pick up in boxing that become a real problem when you add in elbows yeah yeah when you duck down some guys just start okay you throw a right hand i'm gonna duck down dude you do that once with me i'm throwing a left kick right after my i'm throwing a shallow right hand and the left kick is coming upstairs and when you slip you're slipping right into the kick john jones daniel cormier exactly i mean that was a pattern that john had seen and they even talked about it beforehand, where Daniel said,

don't think you're going to hit me with that left high kick, which is kind of crazy when you see how it went down. Yeah. That's a weird thing when people just develop a sort of pattern that they just keep repeating over and over again. And then it's instinctual. Mm-hmm. You want to take it out now.

Ooh, good luck. Good luck taking it out. Isn't't that that's one of the things that when um you see people learning technique one of the more difficult things is to relearn something once you learn it one way like with uh kicking in particular when they get tired or when they get nervous they revert back to their old way of kicking and you you see it especially if they learned it young yeah it's hardwired yeah how do you get a guy out of that i haven't been very successful like for instance if i take a guy who's been kicking taekwondo his entire life and then i try to teach him a thai kick it's not that easy it's really difficult yeah that's why i believe when you're young you have to have a diversity

you have to learn how to kick like a thai like a Taekwondo guy, like a karate guy, like a kickboxer. The variety. And then you can go out there and you can morph your style. You can exchange from one style of kicking to another. However, if you've done 10 years of one way and you were hardwired that way, it's very difficult. Almost not worth it to redo it. Just let him kick the way he kicks. Really?

Yeah. It's not worth it. Not worth it? No, because you're going to train him for so many hours then he's going to go in there he's going to revert back like you said when he's under the pressure and the stress he's going to revert back to what he normally does when he's a little bit tired because it's more efficient for him so you're asking him now to do something new is there any way to rewire a person's brain not that i know of not not in that, of course you can change someone's behavior,

absolutely. But if it's hardwired from a young age, we're talking about it's a long-term project. Do you have the amount of time? You could do it, but it's a lot of time

and energy. And it's painful. It's painful to undo an old way. Yeah. It's a lot of energy. The guy will feel tired, the guy will feel sluggish,

the guy will feel uncomfortable because he's doing something inefficient. You see those feel sluggish. The guy will feel uncomfortable because he's doing something inefficient. You see those patterns, though, where you watch a guy fight and you go, man, why does he always do that? He's always throwing these wide looping punches. Like why can't he throw efficient, smooth, technical punches? He might have learned. I've had that problem.

They learned it wrong early on in their career. Then when they get to you, they're good enough to get to you they're good enough to you know come near the ufc now they're they want that next level and you're working with this new athlete who has so many inefficiencies you got to remove them one by one gently if you try to rehaul him you just confuse them yeah he just doesn't know what to do anymore what do you want me to do coach like i'm totally lost it's it's like a it's like a scientific experiment, right? You isolate one variable. If you change too many things, we don't know what caused what anymore,

and you're in a chaotic now. Now you're in a world of chaos. He doesn't know what works anymore. You don't know what's wrong anymore. One thing at a time. We don't want to flood you, and we don't want to bottleneck you. We're taking you from one place to another

one step at a time, gently, and you have to ask yourself, what's the one thing I can help this guy with? The one thing. They'll change the rest of the system. This is the most important thing. And let's do that one thing at a time. So when you see a guy and say, like,

he's got a Kyokushin background or something like that, and you see he throws kicks, but he keeps landing with the instep, you just let him keep doing it like that? Yeah. It depends how many years he has and how much time we have before the next fight because i believe it can work it works the reason why karate is still here is because it worked right guys won right you know it exists karate's not

it's not a bad it works if you can make it work i might teach your karate guy some boxing and then his karate will shine even more because he can box yeah that does seem to be the problem is when, I mean, Taekwondo guys in particular, they don't punch to the face. So when they get into sparring situations and they're first learning how to do it, we saw that with Raymond Daniels early in his career as well. Just have the hardest time with hands.

So do you take a guy like that and just have him only box or? I would make him box a lot and that'll open up his kicks even more. Definitely, no doubt about it. Especially with his reach and his distance, his footwork that he has, he could look, he could do a lot more, I think.

Do you write all this stuff down, like your thoughts on these things? I know you do your YouTube series. Yeah. But have you ever considered putting out a book on your ideas about MMA? I'm writing a book, but it's more of a philosophy book. Oh. I have a background in philosophy, I have a book, but it's more of a philosophy book.

I have a background in philosophy. I have a degree in philosophy. So I spend a lot of time just contemplating things. So I do a lot of fight philosophy stuff. I write it down. Publish a book. Not really interested in that, to be honest with you. I'm more interested in going into philosophy, writing about philosophy.

Not so much MMA. Like philosophy in particular? More about truth, reality, paradigms, you know, how we see the world. You know, what is truth? What is reality? Those kind of things. I know it sounds weird that it's coming from an MMA coach, but I do a lot of philosophy in my own personal life. I don't think it's weird at all. I mean, I think that what you do is essentially you're taking fighters and preparing them for one of the most difficult challenges in all professional sports.

I don't think there's, I don't think there's a more difficult challenge outside of war. Yeah, exactly. You know, or being a firefighter or a police officer where you're actually putting your life in danger. I think combat sports are just, it's extremely difficult to do and to be able to do like what you've done with

George and what George has done as well. I mean, what you guys have done together, it's just an incredible accomplishment. And especially him coming back after four years off and looking better than he ever looked in the past. That was what was crazy. When he came back and the fluidity of his combinations, the way he looked, and the way he sunk that rear naked choke,

that was a rare rear naked choke in MMA where the blade of the hand was on the back of the neck and it was just fully sunk in. You know how you see guys get the choke, but you're seeing that old school Ken Shamrock style back of it. I'll never tap to this. I'll never tap to this. You put me out. If the hand's not behind-

You'd rather get put put out it's funny i was rolling with my students yesterday and i let him take my like i was kind of toying with him and let him take my back and he was stronger than i thought he was like i haven't wrestled with him in 10 years i just put out a youtube video of me and him if you guys want to put it up it would be funny but this is we were rolling off camera and i kind of let him take my back you know I never give up my back but sometimes he's purple belt

so I was just kind of toying with him a little and he put a choke in and I was like okay let's see if he can finish I didn't think he could finish it but then all of a sudden he got in deeper

and he didn't have the hand behind my head so I was like I'm not going to tap no way I would tap to this impossible first of all he should know better

okay if I let him tap me with this he's going to think he did it right so I was like no but I was like and then when he took a breather i just took it i just took his hand out because i could reach your hand right it's not tucked away behind yeah i got out i'll never talk to this man never so he's doing this yeah his hand is like here okay it has to be here and i make gloves or uh no no we're full rolling yeah he's a good purple belt. He's a tough guy. Very good shape, strong. And the choke's not in this video.

That was off camera. But, I mean, I would never tap to this. Like, even in practice. Because it's not on. The choke is not on. Right, right, right. Yeah, there's definitely a difference. But some guys have gotten it, even in the UFC, with just a gable grip.

The guy who's being choked? Oh, with the gable grip works. Yeah. Because I the guy who's being choked oh with the gable grip works yeah because i can't i can't grab your hand i see what you're saying like if your hand is here and i can grab it why would i choke why would i why would i tap i can hold your hand i can grab onto it right right right yeah it's funny that in the early days that was how everyone did a real but it was more panic it's more panic. Okay, oxygen is lower and you're tapping but you're not going to go out.

People just didn't know any better. They thought that that was okay to do. Right. They thought that that palm in the back of the head was okay to do.

I don't know who figured out to do this. No, the palm behind the head is okay. I'm not against that. It's when the hand is at the top of the head. When it's here.

Right. It has to be unreachable. If I can reach it, I'm not tapping. Right. i'm not tapping right i'm not tapping forget that what would it have it's it's an experience if you tap it's like you panicked a bit what's your feeling though on tapping because here's the thing about tapping like this i've had some injuries where like fuck i should have just tapped and i got out of it and i kept rolling with it and then my elbows fucked and i can't do chin-ups for a couple months i tap quick i don't tap to strangle holds easily except for

ghillie things i feel like a torque my neck yeah but a rear naked there's no joint issue so i won't tap i'm as stubborn as the next guy my joints i tap right away i don't i don't put any miles on my joints i want to be as good as i can be as good as I can be, as healthy as I can be. Because I want to roll until I'm, you know, like the week before I die, I want to be rolling the week before. Well, that's the ultimate goal that very few people ever achieve. Right. I know so many jujitsu guys that are so busted up. Like Eddie Bravo has an artificial disc in his lower back.

Yeah. Both of his shoulders are completely fucked, and he's trying to avoid surgery in his shoulders. And his knee too, right? Because I was just with him in Vegas. Yep. His ACL, he had a tear in his ACL, and then he just got his knee operated on.

He had a bucket handle tear, so he got his meniscus repaired. But his ACL was at least partially torn, and he's letting it heal, but I'm very skeptical about people that just let partial tears and ACLs heal because I feel like, yeah, you let it heal, but it healed with like 60% of its original strength. Like you might have let it heal, but how much did you actually do? There's a weakness.

Yeah. You know what they're doing now, which is really fascinating, Dr. Roddy McGee out of Las Vegas, who does a lot of work with UFC fighters, he's showing me that they're taking torn ACLs, completely torn, and instead of replacing it now with a cadaver graft or patella tendon graft, they actually take that ligament and can reattach it. Really? And in three months, they had someone competing in the Olympics. Really? Yes. What's his name?

Dr. Roddy McGee. Wow. Yeah, cutting edge shit. In America. Here in the Olympics. Really? Yes. What's his name? Dr. Roddy McGee. Wow. Yeah, cutting edge shit. In America. Here in the US. Yep. Latest and greatest. And they're doing, it's a crazy operation. They're taking this broken ligament, and they obviously have to do it quick before it pulls back and disintegrates. But when

it gets to, they get the torrent, the tear in it, they reattach it, and they sew the shit out of this thing. They've got like stitches in it and it's all weirdly bound up and then it reattaches. It reattaches and actually grows. Impressive. And it's your original ligament as well. It's not, you know, something that your body can reject or something that you're, you know, you don't have to compromise your patella tendon.

You know, I don't know how George had his done. Did he do the patella tendon graft i feel like he did with at least one of them i think hamstring did he do hamstring i can't remember he didn't he didn't take cadaver he took his own did he do it both ways both times the same way i think so yeah i think so yeah if i remember correctly um matt uh matt brown just did uh hamstring He just had his done, and they did a hamstring, and he said he feels pretty good already. Yeah? Yeah. It's a scary injury. Oh, I've had both done.

Really? Yeah, I've had one with a patella tendon graft and one with a cadaver. The cadaver was much easier for me. Really? Yeah. It took? Yeah. See, the thing about it taking or not taking the idea what happens with

the cadaver is people think that your your body takes it like an artificial heart no or like a you know a transplanted heart it actually uses it as a scaffolding to re-proliferate with your own cells and i think part of the problem is it gives you the feeling that it's stronger than it is early on you're like yeah i'm ready to go i'm ready to go and you start you mean everybody wants to start rolling again everybody wants to start training again and so i think some guys just get in there a little bit too early and they do something and it pops and they go oh it didn't take well is that really the case or did you just put too much stress on it too early on? I thought the fear was it can reject, your body can reject it.

I've heard of that, but I think that's extremely rare. I think what's more common is that they say it doesn't take, like that it didn't. But I think when I hear it from MMA guys, it's like I know you're a meathead. I know you guys are savages. You get in there and you're training hard way earlier than you should be. And then it fucks up again.

I mean, there's a bunch of guys that have gotten ACL surgery and then in the recovery process blew it out again. It happens really common. And then they're back to square one again. Right. It's all narratives. I mean, even the, even the, I mean, to, to explain something, it's, it's really just, it's narratives. That's where our our explanations are 99% of the time

just narratives and then to weed out narratives and not use them is very difficult what household what do you mean by that I mean there's difference between logical arguments empirical observations and then there are narratives we tell ourselves why things are happening around us all the time and it's 99% of the time it's wrong but we believe it we tell ourselves why things are happening around us all the time. And it's 99% of the time it's wrong, but we believe it. We tell ourselves that. And to try to work around that is actually quite difficult. So like for instance, when the field of philosophy, and if you give an argument, if you give a deductive argument, your argument has to conclude, the conclusion has to have no other possibility. There can be no other possibility. All your premises have to be valid

and sound, and there can be no other possibility. When I say have to be valid and sound and there can be no other possibility. When I say, hey, my ligament didn't take, there's a, that's an explanation. It's one of many possible narratives. It's one of many, many possible explanations I can give why my knee is injured now. Including that you didn't let it rest enough. Right, exactly. You didn't let it rest enough. Right. Exactly. Let's say I'm walking and I trip over my shoelaces.

I'm going to be like, I tripped over my shoelaces. That's why I fell. Well, you could have made, if your shoelaces were tied, maybe you tripped anyway. Maybe it was something else, right? You haven't, you haven't eliminated every other possibility. If you haven't eliminated every other possibility, it's just a narrative. It's not actual fact. The Tony Ferguson injury was the most fucked up one I've ever heard ever.

Right. The week of the fight, doing press, trips on some cables, and rips his knee apart. For sure he had an injury before he's not aware of. You think so? There had to be a small rip, a small tear, a small weakness somewhere. You know, he could withstand tripping on a cable. But I mean, it was hanging by a thread. Is that the case or did he just fall at a really fucked up angle?

I didn't see the fall. Yeah. But I assume he's such an athletic guy. He could fall in a way. He can catch himself falling in a way that you know is athletic maybe he had you know

when you're sparring you hurt yourself you don't feel it so much is going on maybe he hurt himself when he cooled down he didn't feel it there's not many

pain sensors there or what not again this is just a narrative then he goes in there he's hanging by a thread he tugs it boom the whole thing

breaks apart you know it's a possibility it's such a violent injury if you see how bad it was did you see the surgery photos no i saw i saw actually a little bit craziest photos i've ever seen i mean his it's a fucking enormous scar to have that kind of a scar in 2018 with the surgery techniques they have today it's very rare that you see someone who's just i mean it's i'm you're looking at like a 12 inch scar really

that i didn't see i just saw him he posted a oh my god wow that's huge it's incredible i mean that that is a giant scar it goes well below his knee to above the knee and they opened him up and what is this is this pre-surgery what is that so this is. Was it ACL? What was it? No. His MCL. Was it PCL? Which one is it on the outside? Outside is MCL. So his MCL was ripped completely off the bone. Wow.

Yeah. Man. Go to his Instagram page now. Does he have any updates? Because a guy like that, you got to wonder, like when is he going to be... That's the photo I saw.

The one with the suction cups. The cupping. Is that... Okay, let me ask you this. Because I was just having a conversation with someone. Who was it that just said cupping was bullshit?

Who was that? I don't know if it was on here. I don't know. Was it? I was having a conversation with someone there saying cupping is essentially almost total nonsense, but so many people do it and it just puts your mind that you're doing something

and healing and doing something you know addition in addition to standard procedures that it's that's helping you out but really ain't doing shit um i would say yeah it's probably more psychological but everybody does it yeah it's fun it's psychological more psychological. But everybody does it. Yeah, it's fun. It's psychological. You feel like you're taking care of yourself and it makes you feel good. It's psychosomatic. It's fucking weird.

Go back up. Hold on. Go back up to that image, Jamie. I mean, look at that. That is fucking crazy looking. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Yeah, but psychosomatic medicine can help you.

But here it's an insurance covers acupuncture treatment because it's effective i was skeptical the first time i tried it but yeah see i don't know you are a complete moron then even insurance covers acupuncture well does acupuncture work i have no idea never tested never fucked with it i've had it done to me i didn't particularly enjoyed it yeah i only had it done once and the guy was kind of a quack yeah and i was like all right yeah he didn't once they start talking about toxins you know we're cleansing you of toxins like oh i can't see that's a narrative yeah it's possible let's not prove it right it's just a possible story you tell yourself yeah but that term toxins right is so

that that is like there's certain things that people say where you know you're dealing with woo oh this is some woo woo bullshit here and toxins is one of them cleansing and toxins i'm going on a cleanse and i'm i'm getting the toxins out of my system dude scientists are just as guilty as of woo as every other guy. You think so? Oh yeah, big time. In what way? Oh my God, man.

Like there's scientists and then there's philosophers of science. There's so much woo-woo in science. Even the most popular guys have woo-woo. They just never studied the philosophy of science. So they don't really understand what they're saying per se. Like give me an example of woo-woo in science. I'll give you a great example.

Okay. Okay. There's this guy named isaac newton okay i heard of that dude yeah and you're asking him hey isaac why don't i fall off the face of the earth and he's gonna be like well joe there's this gravity there's this force of gravity pulling you down to the earth the earth has a greater mass than you therefore it's there's this force pulling you down we call it gravity and then some guy comes around his name is is Zahabi, and he tells you, no, Joe, don't listen to that guy. I have another theory, way more, it's truer than his.

I believe there are gremlins pulling you down to the earth. They have lassoes, these infinite long lassoes, and every time you're falling off the earth, they pull you. Every time you jump up and down on the earth, they pull you back down to the earth. You don't see these gremlins, they're invisible, but that's what's pulling you down to the earth. Now, how do you know who's right and who's wrong? Who's telling you the truth, me or Isaac? Well, Isaac lived a long time ago before they actually had provable studies that could show you why gravity works.

Name me one of those studies. Well, I'm not a scientist. Well, let me break it to you this way. No scientist has a study to prove us that gravity works that's that's the whole thing that's that's what's scary about but how we talk about the universe but they understand that gravity is in relation to the size and mass of objects so the moon is smaller therefore it has one six earth's gravity because it's one quarter the size of the earth there's a standard formula they can follow there's a correlation.

Now, my theory of gremlins, which obviously I don't believe in, right? I'm using mythological language to make it really simple. Don't somebody misquote me that I believe in gremlins. Frost the Hobbit believes in gremlins. He doesn't believe in gravity. He's a gravity denier. Exactly. Well, there's less atoms. The moon has less atoms, therefore less gremlins,

less of them pulling you. My gremlin theory correlates with the gravity theory exactly. But I'm using a mythical language just to point out that every type of force we're talking about is an inference. It's something we project out there. We don't actually see gravity. And you know, later on, Einstein debunked gravity, right? Well, what do you mean by he debunked it isaac was totally wrong isaac's explanation of why you don't

fall off the earth was totally wrong well what did einstein do to debunk it einstein taught us that a new theory a new hypothesis that gravity is a pushing force not a pulling force see isaac newton he debunked Aristotle. First we used to believe what Aristotle used to say. Aristotle used to say, look, this thing

has a natural place. It has to be stuck to the earth. That's its natural place. The force is within that one thing. That's why it doesn't fall off the earth.

So when Aristotle saw a bird fly, he said, look, it has levity. It's natural status to be in the earth. So when Aristotle saw a bird fly, he said, look, it has levity. It's natural status to be in the air. The force that carries it up in the air, it's within it. It's within the bird itself.

Isaac Newton came around and said, no, that's totally wrong. Nobody, no entity can move itself. It's only a force that's applied. So let's say you're walking. Isaac Newton would say, you're not pushing yourself forward. You're pushing the ground beneath you backwards.

And that, the ground is pushing you forwards. So every action is opposite equal reaction. So when I run, I'm really pushing the ground behind me. It sounds like he's splitting hairs, but he's saying something actually very profound. He's saying, you're pushing the earth behind you and the earth is pushing you forward. There's a reaction there. So what they do to, to illustrate that to kids is they take like a train track, they elevate it and they turn on

the train. And then you see the train track starting to spin underneath the train. And it's showing, look, the train is pushing the train tracks back and the train tracks are pushing the train forward when they're, when they're connected to the ground. So when I put you on a treadmill, you're pushing the treadmill behind you. the treadmill is not pushing you forward because it's spinning along with you but if i put you on the ground the ground is pushing you forward now so for every action is obviously equal reaction i'm sure you've heard this then einstein comes along and says no that's totally wrong well he uh when it comes to gravity okay when subject to gravity says Because Isaac Newton says this, he says, look, the force of gravity is in the earth.

The earth has this invisible force, this magical woo-woo thing. And that's what his contemporaries said about him. That's what his peers said. He said, oh, you're appealing to magic. What is this gravity thing? It's non-comporeal. It's not material.

It's not made of a substance. Is this magic? And he was like, yeah, it's this force. You can't feel it. You can't detect detect it it's just observable in nature and for 300 years everybody believed that and then einstein comes along says no you guys are totally wrong there is no mythical force called gravity it's a pushing force so really what he says is sorry i mean let me get a sheet of paper here make it really really simple and i going to put it in a nutshell here, okay? Okay. This is, he says, look, Einstein says, look, space and time are one.

Space is actually a thing out there. It's actually, the space between me and you is an actual physical thing. He says the sun is so heavy that it dents it. It makes like a toilet bowl. And the earth is bumping around in that toilet bowl because space is actually curved. It's curved like this. Space is curved because the sun, imagine I put a bowling ball on your bed. Your bed's going to indent.

Right. That toilet bowl shape, the earth is flooring around that toilet bowl shape. So it's a pushing force, no longer a pulling force. So the weight of the earth is pushing down on space. Exactly. It's bending space, literally. It is pushing down on space. Exactly. It's bending space. Literally. It's mass is bending space.

Now, Isaac Newton thought light travels in a straight line only. And to prove this, Einstein said, look, light will bend. If I'm right, light will bend. So they observed the sun during an eclipse and they saw that the light bends. Light does not travel in a straight line. This is another belief that was debunked. I mean, how many scientific beliefs are debunked? Countless or overturned because a scientific fact is not a mathematical fact, they're two different things.

A scientific fact can never go higher than hypothesis. If somebody understands the philosophy of science, he understands that every single scientific fact is not equivalent to a mathematical fact. One plus one equals two. A scientific fact is always subject to cross-examination and new evidence. Have you ever heard of Thomas Kuhn? He's very famous for that, right? We have a paradigm. So during Aristotle's time, he had a paradigm. He thought the sun goes around the earth. It was an observational scientific fact. Every day he saw the sun go around the earth, literally.

He said, look guys, I'm using my senses to observe the sun go around the earth. And then one day we find out, no, that's an optical illusion. It's not true that the sun goes around the earth. It's the earth goes around the sun. Scientific revolution. Every scientific fact we have or theory, including gravity,

because gravity became the law of gravity. It was no longer the theory of gravity. It was so gravity because gravity became the law of gravity it was no longer the theory of gravity it was so accepted it became the law of gravity today we don't we don't understand gravity as einstein understood it excuse me as isaac newton understood we understand it completely backwards literally backwards now and that's true with every scientific theory because science is always subject to new evidence coming to light right but the difference between isaac newton living living like whenever the fuck he lived a long ass time ago. 300 years ago.

Versus the science that we're dealing with today. Like science today. But what woo-woo do you see in the science of today? The biggest culprit? Yes. Randomness.

See, it's funny because I heard you in this conversation with Sam Harris on randomness, which I loved, by the way. You did a great job. Thank you.

I thought it was a great conversation. However, he was giving you, in my opinion, two contradictory ideas. He was telling you, which I loved by the way. You did a great job. Thank you. I thought it was a great conversation. However, he was giving you, in my opinion, two contradictory ideas. He was telling you, look, the world is determined, but also there'll be random events. And I found that- Well, he was actually talking about determinism versus free will. Right. Yeah.

So the idea being that you don't necessarily have free will, that everything about your decisions and what you're going to do is based on your life experiences and your genetics all these Variables that are essentially out of your control. So this idea of free will is an illusion Which is a really complex Conversation and I think you could see it in both ways I think you do have a certain amount of this control of your decisions And I think you are also shaped very much so by your past and your genetics and your interpretation of those events.

What are those interpretations of those events though? And why do you make those determinations? Who's in your head pulling the gears? Like what are you? I'm a hard determinist. Like I'm a very hard determinist. I'm like determinist extremist. But do you believe in free will?

I also believe in free will, which is tricky. But I think that's, upon further examination, I think there is something that allows people to, I mean, what takes a guy who's 500 pounds and all of a sudden he goes on a keto diet and starts running and starts walking. And then he, he sends you a picture on Twitter. I lost 179 pounds in six months. You're like, holy shit.

How the fuck did you do that? Like that guy has some fucking will, man, to say that that's his whole life and his, his life experiences and his genetics. It's like, yes, I could see what you're saying. I could see that he, he had enough because of his life experiences and that it led to him making this change but there's a tremendous amount of will involved in that and to deny that seems like you're denying the spirit of human beings well let's look at it this way okay real quick let's look at it okay let's say a

couple of the speech paper and I going to catapult it. Okay. And it landed there. Right. And now I'm going to reset the entire universe. I'm going to reset every molecule there, every fiber in this paper. You're going to be in the exact same spot. The whole universe has been reset.

And I fired it again. Is it going to land exactly where it landed the first time? Or is it going to land somewhere else i've reset the universe i the earth was the earth every molecule of matter in the every every every particle of matter in the universe has been reset with the same amount of force everything is identical i would assume if the same amount of space and the same amount of air, you would land in the same spot. Infinitely precisely? I don't know. Well, I've reset everything perfectly.

If infinitely precisely you throw it the exact same way and it lands in the exact same dirt with the exact same resistance, I would assume it's infinitely precisely going to land in the same spot. If randomness is a force at work in nature, why didn't it factor itself into our little experiment here because your little experiment's impossible but that's irrelevant it's a thought experiment but it's not a thought it's not impossible it's not logically universe right but it's not logically impossible right well in that case though with the variables that you presented yes okay but where's randomness where's this force there's no randomness if you're recreating the entire earth in a in a very duplicatable way that's not randomness at all what

is random that's the thing there is no randomness right randomness is when a human being can no longer compute all the factors and we use an expression called randomness meaning okay i rolled this dice it landed on on seven randomly why Because I couldn't compute all the variables. Okay, I see what you're saying. So randomness is kind of a, it's an illusion that we project onto the world. So Laplace, one of the greatest physicists in history, okay, Simon Laplace, he says,

look, look at a billiard ball table. Okay, if you tell me which way you're going to break the billiard balls, if you tell me what velocity and what angle you're going to hit the cue ball, I could tell you where every single ball is gonna be on the pool table. That's what Laplace says. He's a phenomenal thinker. And he says why? Because I'm gonna take that table, I'm gonna turn it into a math.

I'm gonna take the weight of the ball, the friction of the table, the density of the bands, the gravity of the earth, I'm gonna take all those variables. I'm gonna put them up on this board here. All I need to know is how hard you're going to hit the ball. And I'll tell you precisely where every ball is going to land. Now, somebody who doesn't know mathematics or geometry is going to look at that table when he sees the break. To him, it's going to seem random. But randomness is really a reflection of his ignorance. He's not able to compute all this information. That's why Laplace

says, to God, the world is not random. To somebody who has information, the world is not random. That's why he says, it's very important. That's why we're so deterministic because we believe that what's happening right now is a byproduct of the past. The past caused this happening right now. The past was out of your control. If I reset the universe and let it play all over again, identical circumstance,

you would drink that exact same amount of coffee you had today. You would have made the same, you would have married the same woman, you would have the same kids, you would have the same

t-shirt on right now, you would have the mic at the same distance. Everything would be reset. So when we look at the world through the eyes of physics, they say the causal line is complete.

The causal line is complete, meaning where is this space for randomness or free will? We don't factor it in. The only time we do factor it in is when we look at ourselves inwardly. But when we look at the world objectively as a third person, so there's two views. There's the internal view, first person experience.

We don't believe in determinism. We have free the internal view, first person experience. We don't believe in determinism. We have free will. That's first person experience. Third person experience, I'm studying Joe. All I see in Joe is billiard balls. So when you have a thought, it's all billiard balls hitting one another. And if I had an infinitely precise calculator, according to Laplace, I could tell you where you're going to be five years from now,

what you're going to be doing why? because I'm seeing one billiard ball hit another it's just take that pool table experiment and make it

the greatest pool game in history there are countless atoms there are countless billiard balls striking into one another somebody can calculate the world of physics

and tell you where your hand's going to be Laplace says I'm going to tell you where your hand's going to be in five years from now but you don't know my personal choices I'm going to make that's irrelevant he'll tell you where your hand's going to be. Laplace says, I'm going to tell you where your hand's going to be in five years from now. But you don't know my personal choices I'm going to make.

That's irrelevant. He'll tell you that's irrelevant. Why? Because he sees the billiard balls moving inside your mind, so to speak. Now Leibniz reconciled the two. Because, see, for instance, when I'm living in the first person, this is my intuition. I'm like, hey, I grabbed that cup of coffee.

I had this internal experience that's outside of physics so leibniz gives a great example he says look if i was really really tiny and i'd walk around your mind i would see blood flow i would see neurons firing i would see all sorts of biological uh interactions but i wouldn't see anything of consciousness. I wouldn't see your thoughts. I wouldn't see you thinking about your wife, hearing your child's voice, thinking about what you want to have for dinner. I wouldn't see any of that. I would just see billiard balls hitting one another. However, now that I'm having this first person experience, there's something we call intuition, this first person experience itself. You're having this spiritual type of transcendent experience. What it's like to have a thought, what it's like to be me.

So for instance, I see that cup of coffee. I desire the cup of coffee and I drink it. Science has no information about my conscious experience, my intuitive experience. Science is not absolute. It cannot tell me everything about the universe. It could only tell me about the billiard balls. It can only go so far. At that point, it has to stop because it doesn't have, we don't, our senses cannot sense the conscious experience that we're having. The conscious experience is only known intuitively. So first person experience. So Leibniz says this, he says, look, you look at the world. When you study the world, we're all seeing billiard balls hitting one another. Nobody argues about that. However, our intuition is telling us that's all untrue. We have the ability to move our own hand,

desire something, grab something, eat something, consume something, make a choice. And he says, how are the two, how could they coexist? Because remember, in reason, for me to accept something as logically true, I have to eliminate every other possibility. So he found one possibility, one possibility that, till today,

it's never been refuted. He says, he calls it the twin trains. So picture two trains, okay? They're going up and down, side by side, traveling at the same speed. They look like they're connected

to one another, but they're connected to one another but they're not they're just synchronized every time one goes left the other one goes left one goes up one goes down and so when I go in lightness tells you says look when you reach for that cup of coffee the universe had already decided millions of billions of years ago that that was gonna happen your intuitive sense just coincides with it perfectly. And he said, that's what he calls the twin trains theory, the correlation theory.

That your desire to grab that cup of coffee doesn't affect your hand, does not move your hand. That would be impossible. That would be something non-physical moving something physical. So he says that they're just correlated perfectly. When you ask him, how do they correlate so perfectly? He says, well, God, it's like God took the world's, the greatest pool shot in history. This is Leibniz. He's the guy who invented calculus, the binary code, you know, like all our computers today work because of Leibniz.

That to me is a hard sell. Yeah. Most people can't wrap their mind around it. Yeah. It's a hard sell yeah most people can't wrap their mind around it yeah it's a hard sell and first of all he can a woman can create the first computer code uh he he invented the binary code binary binary code not computer code but it's based on binary now when he's saying he's saying this that your desire coincides with the universe having this. That seems like a lot of woo. That seems like quite a bit of a stretch.

That's the interesting part. Tell me why. Well, why would the universe have a plan for you and your movement? Well, he's saying God. He's saying God directly. Well, prove that. Okay, that's a great objection. Why would you say that it would be God?

This argument wasn't to prove God. This argument was to tell you that this is a possibility. Free will is true and so is determinism. Yes. Because can you deny free will? Aren't you having a direct experience of free will? Well, the only denial of free will would be determinism. The only denial would be that your idea of free will is an

illusion. You are really shaped by the momentum of your past, your genetics, life experiences, all the variables and the way you've absorbed emotions and interactions with people. These are flavored your very being to the point when presented with an obstacle or an opportunity or a thing, there is a predetermined solution in your mind for whatever the situation is. That's determinism. Okay, so let's back up. I should say action rather than solution. Let's take a step back and look at what Leibniz is trying to say.

He's trying to say, look, there's three ways of knowing something. And you have to understand, this is a brilliant human being. Many men have said the same thing throughout history. But let's let's just at least entertain him okay he says look you know something empirically through your senses okay you touch fire it's hot then you can know something deductively one plus one equals two via logic then you could know something intuitively, meaning direct first experience. Okay. So let's say you tell me, I don't know, I've had coffee taste great.

You don't know that deductively or empirically. The sensation of coffee tasting great is known intuitively direct, meaning there is no interpreter. In philosophy, we have something called the egocentric predicament so right now you're experiencing this entire room within your consciousness right i might be outside of your ego but i'm i'm occurring right now in your consciousness do you see the difference i'm perceiving you in my consciousness yes or with my consciousness which is connected to my senses is there anything you can perceive outside of your consciousness that's a weird say way of saying something it's impossible but perceiving outside of my consciousness meaning not being not conscious

but yet still perceiving no when you perceive something it has to be within your consciousness right you have to or with your consciousness right it cannot be outside of your right so even if something touches your skin you're consciously recognizing that it touches your skin um the egocentric predicament is more about your whole universe is made up of your consciousness you cannot sense anything or experience anything or get any information outside of your consciousness like kanto is very big on this he's like look this is called idealism the whole world is happening on inside your head right supposedly like for instance you see this cup of coffee they're gonna say like clusters hit the the cup of coffee it goes in your eye your eye your your eye gives your brain a signal

your brain interprets the signal and creates this universe around you it creates this image the theater of your mind yeah can you experience anything outside the theater of your mind very difficult to argue that you could it's impossible yeah according to all the philosophers in history we we cannot we cannot this is called the egocentric prediction what about subconscious that will be still happening inside your your conscious mind so subconscious is still somewhat conscious in some way yes it would be happy whatever whatever you would perceive would be happening in your conscious mind it would just be outside of your standard awareness now the scary thing is is that we have

we make a lot of inferences and that's where the woo comes in everything is woo you think just you think just everything outside of science is science is just as woo as everyone else you keep saying that but i don't understand why you're saying that because you haven't made a good example okay well the only example that you said was that they changed the way they look at gravity when new information was presented right that doesn't equal gravity was woo it was a magical force my grandma you're talking about gravity in terms of people that didn't didn't have phones they didn't have cars they didn't have paved roads mean, you're dealing with a very primitive notion of what gravity was. It was a very interesting idea that has since been proven to be true.

False. Gravity, Newtonian gravity? Okay. Has been proven to be false. But gravity is still real, right? Not, we're using the same word for a completely different idea. Okay. So Newton's gravity was magical.

It was an appeal to magic. Okay. Here it is. Here it is. Let me make it clear. Newton's gravity is different than Einstein's gravity and that Einstein's gravity is what's been proven. Right? We know now that light does bend around the mass of the sun, which is one of the reasons why we have a hard time seeing asteroids that are coming from behind the sun.

Because the mass of the sun actually bends space-time around it to the point where it distorts our view. It's our new narrative. It's not proven. You can never prove a scientific fact past the level of hypothesis. I know it sounds strange. What do you mean past the level of hypothesis? If you can prove it in studies and tests, you still don't buy it. You have not eliminated every other possibility.

Okay. So it's not the same as a logical fact. How is that woo? This is understood in the philosophy of science. It's comfortably accepted. It's not anti-science. I'm not trying to say anything. No, I know you're not.

But you're saying that science has so much woo, and I'm not seeing the woo part. What I'm seeing is the necessary testing and the idea of incorporating new data and changing beliefs and ideas. Again, it's a bit of a difficult thing to wrap your mind off in one day, but you have to think about it. And throughout time, it becomes clearer and clearer. When we observe the universe, all we see is pattern and regularities found in nature. That's it. We don't see actual physical laws. The physical laws are bookmarks inside our mind. We see the same pattern over and over again,

and then we attribute a physical law. But that physical law doesn't exist out there. So here's a great example. Okay, let me give you a great example okay let's say i'm about to flip a coin okay now you're going to tell me it's probably going to land on heads or tails yeah do you know that logically or is it based on your history with coins i know it logically and based on my history of coins perfect i'm arguing you don't know it logically you only know it on your past history.

Okay, so pay attention to this. This is a little bit weird. We got to go slow. It's very weird. Okay. It goes against our instincts. Okay, erase all your history with coins. You've never seen a coin before.

Okay. And I flip it. Right. And now it turns into a butterfly. You've never seen a coin before. It doesn't surprise you. You're like, whoa, turned into a butterfly. Then I flip a coin a hundred times in front of you a hundred times it turns into a butterfly now i'm gonna flip the coin a hundred one time you're gonna be like i bet you it turns

to a butterfly that's how we express science we see the patterns and regularities then we we predict them science this is this is a little bit, this is a good way to put it. Science is the faith, it's faith that the future will behave like the past. Science is faith that the future will behave like the past. So now you've developed a faith that this coin will flip into a butterfly and now you can predict it wouldn't you say that science is the use of measurement to understand matter and things around us i wouldn't say that it's using the past to predict the future i would say that if you know that fire melts lead at a certain temperature, and this is provable, and then you can show this over and over again, here's what we know about fire. It reaches a certain temperature. When lead reaches a certain temperature, it melts,

it changes its form. Whereas if you want to do that same test to carbon-based steel, it requires far greater temperatures. And then we know that there's variables in matter. This is something that you can prove and show. There's no woo to that. Okay. Water boils at how many degrees? I think it's 250? 220?

In Celsius, it's 100 degrees Celsius. I don't know about Fahrenheit. Oh, you Canadians with your wacky metric system. Is that a scientific fact? Is it a scientific fact that water boils at a certain temperature? Yes. Actually, no. It's not?

They can boil water now. Water can resist boiling up to 200 degrees Celsius. If you put in a certain atmospheric pressure and suspend it in a certain liquid, if you change the circumstance... Suspend water in liquid? They suspend it in a particular liquid that's not heated or cooled. All right.

It's not supposed to... It doesn't affect the temperature of the water itself. And now water can boil at 200 degrees. Okay, so you're doing something different to water. That's the thing. You're taking it outside of the normal Earth environment so the variables also include earth environment agreed but the water doesn't inherently boil at 100 degrees it's not a fact but we believed it to be a scientific fact we believe that water if it gets to 100 degrees is boiling it's going to behave this way

as a matter of fact no there are many other things things that that fact has been debunked and there's countless amount of facts. But wait a minute. Is that the facts been debunked or is that when you add in sufficient external variables, then water takes longer to boil because of these variables playing into the properties that we already observed with water. That's why whenever we have a scientific fact, there might be new information coming to change our view, change our view of this fact right this is not necessarily new information what this is is new additional precise more precise information but what you're talking about with water you're talking about additional variables like that's

just more science that's not woo okay well here's some okay because we talked about gravity was woo okay randomness was woo. Okay, because we cannot find one instance of actual randomness. The causal line is complete, as Laplace would say. There's no randomness in the world. So the randomness idea is just our inability to calculate unbelievably difficult variables. Exactly. But it's a projection of your ignorance.

Right. If you knew, you wouldn't be random. So, for instance, I can't remember who coined the term, but they say, the man who says the tallest mountain I've ever seen is the tallest mountain. He's making himself the measure of truth. I measure truth. If you take that perspective, you're the center of truth.

I'm truth. There's nothing outside of me that's true. Then you see randomness everywhere. However, if you believe in correspondence theory, that truth is independent of me and you, which I think most of us will agree, then randomness doesn't exist in that context because randomness only depends on you

and when things are true outside of your beliefs. Let's take another classic Wu term. Again, this is very advanced philosophy. I know it sounds crazy, okay, but this is what the greatest thinkers in history report, what they've written down. Okay, you see this uh you see a knife okay let's look at aristotle's theory of knives okay so look at this knife i show you a plastic knife i show you a wood knife i show you a metal knife i show you five different knives and you're like they're all knives all of

them are knives you point to them and say they're knives. Aristotle says, look, they all share in one something. Let's call it the essence that makes them all knives. Would you agree? The form. They all share. If I draw a knife on a paper, you'd be like, he just drew a knife. Okay. That knife on the paper shares something with the knife made of steel, the knife made of plastic.

Okay. The knife made of wood. The form. There's something about it. We call it the essence in philosophy. Okay. The form might be confused with what Plato says. Plato had a whole thing about forms.

But let's call it for now essence. Okay. If you change the essence, you change the thing. So if I take that piece of, if I take that plastic knife and I melt it, you'll be like, it's not a knife anymore. Why? What did I do? You change that thing about it that essence right now that essence does it exist out there in the world or is it only in your head

you made it up well by calling it essence you're confusing me so i would call it the form okay the form of it it exists in culture it exists in our understanding of these objects and their useful shapes. It's your idea of knife conforms to that knife out there. That's a great, yeah, bring it out. That's obviously a knife. Yes. Right? You recognize it, I recognize it, that's a knife.

Yeah, I totally agree. My model of knife, yeah, my model of knife, that fits my model of knife. Beautiful. But there's some weird looking knives out there too. Sure. And there might be a knife where we don't agree that's a knife. You think it's a knife, I don't agree. I think that's a sword.

I'd reach the level of sword. Right. Yeah, like a bowie knife. We might have a different, that's great evidence that it's something in our minds. It's not actually objective. Right, right, right. They get to the certain length. It's subjective.

Yeah. It's subjective, right? Okay. Let's look at matter now matter okay is an inference of the mind just like the the knife is an inference of the mind in terms of subatomic particles and atoms and watch this you see this cup you see this bottle yes you see this clock yes you made an inference they all share one thing what do they share all of them share one thing what is that thing they They all share one thing. What do they share? All of them share one thing. What is that thing they share?

They share this thing called matter. But that was an inference, just like we inferred the essence of a knife. Matter has never been observed in nature. Matter is a byproduct of our mind. So when you see a tree, you're not seeing matter. There's no matter. Not that I'm inferring matter. I'm observing an image.

Right. But I'm inferring the matter. The matter is a mental construct. Is it a mental construct or is it our inability to see things smaller than what is necessary for our survival? Like we can't see atoms. We can't see subatomic particles. We can't see them with the naked eye. But we understand through science that they exist.

How do you understand that they exist? Are you saying that matter exists out there independently of your mind? Is matter objective or is it dependent on your mind to exist? It's not dependent on your mind to exist. It's dependent upon your mind to observe you need your mind to be able to observe matter okay so matter if you didn't exist do you think this table would exist that i don't know right but what would you guess i would guess that all i know if i'm going to use occam's razor you know if you've heard of occam if i'm going to go to the extreme

with occam's razor i'm just gonna believe what i observe okay and kill all the woo kill it all you have had loved one die right yeah everyone has right um do you assume that when they die the universe is still the universe what do you mean still the universe it's like the world is the way they are i mean the way it is there's trees and grass and dirt and this person dies the trees and grass and dirt and this person dies The trees and grass and dirt they don't change. They're still the same thing What do you mean the nature of the tree would change no I'm saying if you love someone and you know this person and they are no longer with us Mm-hmm all the things around you like this coffee cup and this knife they remain the same they don't change no

They don't change no they don't change why would you assume that it would be any different for yourself if you weren't here why would you think that this table would not exist or the microphone would not that's great that's a great argument i'm not saying that it wouldn't that's this is what we call hard objectivity something that's hard objectivity exists without any human mind and exists if all human minds were dead, whatever exists still is what we would call, philosophers called hard objectivity.

Now we have objectivity. So for instance, let's look at George Berkeley's example because that's such a great question. Look at a triangle, okay? Okay. Picture a blue triangle. Okay.

Picture a green one. Picture a black one. Picture a white one. Can you picture one with no subjective elements? Meaning, because color is subjective, right? Color is a construct of the mind. green one picture a black one picture a white one can you picture one with no subjective elements meaning because color is subjective right color is a construct of the mind so if i was colorblind this shirt would be a different color to me than it is to you right however there would still be one shirt it would be objective to a certain degree okay so a triangle has three three sides

three corners it adds up to 180 degrees. We all agree. Whether you're colorblind, it doesn't matter. There's no subjective element to how many points does it have. Nobody's going to come in and say, to me, triangles have four sides. Right. You'd be like, that's not a triangle. There's not three angles to that.

Right. You've gone past analytical understanding. Okay, so, George Berkeley says, can you picture a triangle without any subjective element, without any color? Let's call it color to make it really simple, really obvious.

Can you picture a triangle without any color? You would have to have it in contrast to something so that you could see it. Like if you had, say if you had a purple curtain, like what we have behind us, and out of that purple curtain, we cut a triangle.

Even if there was no color, even if it was just clear, you would be able to see, you'd be able to differentiate between that shape. But you needed that purple curtain. To differentiate. So we cannot have it without subjective element. This was Berkeley's point. Exactly what you said. I see what you're saying. Beautiful.

Every objective thing we've observed in the universe is made up of subjective elements. Even when you draw the number one on a blackboard, it has to be a color. It has to be something. It has to be a contrast like you said. It's beautiful. You said it beautifully. All our objective elements are mental constructs. Three sides. The idea of side is a mental construct.

The idea of a point is a mental construct. The idea of 180 degrees is mathematical. It's happening in your mind somewhere. It's not out there being observed. You can draw it and I can see it and I can repeat it and you can teach it to me and I can teach it to someone else. They may be mental constructs, but they're provable mental constructs that are repeatable so they're we think of them as a real thing we're in agreement that mathematic is a mental construct

and it's true it's definitely by definition true so it's both a mental construct and yes but it's not outside out there in the world it's within but if you make a triangle on the ground it's not outside, out there in the world. It's within. But if you make a triangle on the ground, it's in the world. The numbers are in your head and the subjective element is in the world. There's a two-way street. The subjective element is in the world, but it's a triangle. So how is it in your head? Because when you look at a triangle, So how's it in your head? Because when you look at a triangle, the subjective elements, when you observe them in your mind, your mind points out different objective elements of that triangle.

But it's dependent on your mind. By that argument, the entire universe is dependent on your mind. Absolutely, no doubt about it. If we're going to use Occam's razor, not everyday language, we're using occam's let's take away everything we're not sure of everything that has a doubt get rid of it okay get rid of everything with a sliver of that you ever heard the problem is matter itself as a sliver of doubt absolutely well when you have subatomic particles that you know they exist in two different states simultaneously they're both spinning and still they're in super states berkeley would tell you those are images of subatomic particles they're both spinning and still they're in super states berkeley would tell you those are images of subatomic particles they're not some subatomic particles independent

of your mind well i had a conversation with sean carroll about it was a physicist and he made it familiar even more muddy to me i thought i thought it was crazy before I talked to him. And then when I talked to him, he's brilliant. He's brilliant. He's essentially saying that subatomic particles don't blink in and out of existence. It's just, it's the way we're looking at them and that they exist in this just bizarre state, but they exist in this state in a way that it's very difficult for us to use normal language to sort of explain. That's the true issue. But you know what?

I might have fucked, he's probably listening to this. He's like, you fucking dummy. You ruined what I said again. You know what? What a great, one great conversation.

I heard a conversation between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris. Oh, that conversation about truth? I loved it. Oh, that drove me crazy. I think we could do better though. Yes. I think they could have done better too. They needed a moderator. Oh, that conversation about truth? I loved it. Oh, that drove me crazy. I think we could do better though. Yes, I think they could

have done better too. They needed a moderator. Yes, exactly. Exactly. I think they need to get to know each other personally first. Yes, they never met

by the way. Right, that's fireworks, right? That was such a great conversation but here's my question. What's the difference between knowledge and belief? Because a lot of what we said is kind

of muddy okay let's make it super let's make let's make the waters crystal clear as much as possible okay what is the difference between knowledge and belief well the belief that the gremlins are pulling down on people which is why we have gravity that would be a belief no they're both beliefs well that gravity is not knowledge it's belief okay we're talking about gremlins right i was gonna say that's knowledge or that's that's a belief belief knowledge is if i throw water on you you get wet i would say that's belief it's a belief yes so maybe one day i throw water on you and you show me that you're jesus yeah and the water just goes right through you and the reason why you believe water will make me wet is because it happened in the past.

And you think that the future is going to behave like the past. Just like Aristotle saw the sun go around the earth and he thought that this is going to happen every day. Well, he didn't understand. I understand. It's optical illusion. Let me give you a break. But I understand what water is though. It's H2O.

I throw it at you, you get wet. All flamingos are pink. They're not. They're not. We didn't know that all the time, did we? Then we went to Australia. They don't have the same food source. They don't have the same food source. They're black here. They're white here. get wet all flamingos are pink they're not they're not we didn't know that all the time did we then we went to australia they don't have the same food source they don't have the same food source they're black here they're white here yeah they have a different food source flamingos are not

inherently pink a scientific fact can always be overturned oh look at this you threw water and didn't get wet yeah but this is not that's just because it's a certain coating. Right. I got you. But if he's got that over his body, he's not going to be able to breathe. Okay. How about this? You've never seen fire before. You've never seen fire.

You've been being warmed by electric blankets your entire life. Okay. Then you see a flame. And you don't know. Can you know that that flame is going to burn you if you touch it logically? Or is it only via experience through history? Developing a history, a relationship with fire it burns you once it burns you twice you're like hey well i think the future is going to behave like the past there's people who know

that fire burns you and they've never been burned by fire because they went to school and they learned from people who explained the properties of fire what it is how it works what temperature it operates on how it's different depending upon the color of it or what's burning. Borrowed history. Borrowed history. It's still history. Borrowed history? How so?

You learn from my mistakes of touching fire. Okay. But it's still known via experience, via history. Well, it's known via science if you explain exactly what the elements of the fire are and how it works and what it burns at and what temperature specific things need to burn. And you don't have to get burned to know that it will burn you. No, no, but that's how we discovered fire burns by testing it,

not, not via logical deduction. Okay. I see what you're saying. It's only history. Science is patterns and regularities found in nature. We observe nature. We see these patterns and irregularities.

Right. We have no idea what's causing them. Well, wasn't that Descartes' original idea about science in the first place was using measurement to sort of understand nature? Well. Was that one of his original concepts of establishing science in the first place? No, his original concept was science is doubtable. he said that science is doubtable no doubt it's called cartesian doubt an extreme level of doubt he says those are all beliefs i don't have any knowledge what do i know because knowledge means zero chance of being wrong okay zero chance of being wrong

give me one scientific fact you truly trust 100 okay Okay. If I take a match and I take a yellow piece of paper from this particular notebook, I will light that motherfucker on fire with that match. That's a fact. Okay. That's a scientific fact? Is it? No. It's a scientific fact, but it's not higher than hypothesis. It's just hypothesis you have.

Why? Because every time you've seen a fire, a piece of paper it burned it so you're relying on your historical experiences okay so it's not deductive essentially saying there's no scientific fact possible only to the level of hypothesis we can this is not me talking and this is thomas cool he's saying look he's saying look we have two phases in science standard science and then a scientific revolution what's standard science well whatever the the flavor of the day is let's say today it's let's say today it's evolution and then he says look every every piece of information we receive we interpret it through that lens he called it a paradigm we look at the information through the

lens of evolution so it makes sense it fits right here in our lens of evolution. So it makes sense. It fits right here in our story of evolution. Right. And then he says, look, a small amount of contradictory information is going to pool slowly. It's inevitable, he says. And then this, we're going to ignore it. We're going to sweep it under the rug. Everything doesn't make sense.

We're going to sweep it under the rug. And then one day that level of information, that amount of information that doesn't fit in any way with our theory, our current theory, is gonna pool and pool and pool and pool until one guy comes around and says, no, we had it backwards or we had it wrong. It's this. Now all this new information fits in the new theory.

All the old stuff fits and all the new stuff fits. And that's called the scientific revolution. And he says, science is always going through a normal phase and then a revolution phase and man is becoming more and more precise but we'll never reach the level of past hypothesis why because science is based on our faith that the past excuse me that the future will behave like the past we only know things via experience, via our history. So when I flip that coin, you have no idea what's going to happen

until I flip many coins in front of you. Or I give you my, if you trust me and I tell you what, listen, I did this experiment, here are my results, and you trust me, you just take it for granted. You take it on way of authority. I agree with everything you said. I still don't see where you're saying science has so much woo. Or science has as much woo okay or science has as

much woo as healers or crystal suckers or listen i don't believe in crystals in any of that i know you don't i don't i don't i just i have a higher standard of skepticism i'm missing the woo though okay the woo is when we project physical laws combustion gravity. These are all appeal to magic. Can you demonstrate these physical laws? Or are they byproducts? Are they inferences you made in your mind because you've seen a certain pattern over and over again? That law doesn't exist out there in the universe. It's only a bookmark.

It's only a name we have for a pattern we've observed in nature. It's pretty heavy stuff, I know. It's only a name for a pattern that we've observed that exists in nature. Exactly. So that means you can't label anything ever because everything is just a pattern that we've observed in nature.

Exactly. Everything is a pattern. So there's no things. There's no logic behind it. Nothing is real. There's no logic. We give an explanation. We give a narrative to it.

Okay. But that narrative to it. Okay. But that narrative is just our paradigm. Thomas Kuhn would say, that's the shades you're wearing. Okay. You can't set it beautifully. He said, look, you have pink tinted glasses. You can have blue tinted glasses, but whatever glasses you're wearing, that's the song and dance.

That's the story you tell yourself of why those things are happening the way they're happening. Okay. The truth of the matter is all we're seeing is one pattern happening over and over again. So what this is essentially is an intellectual exercise. But the reality of our ability to come up, well, not ours, obviously, but super smart people, come up with the very technology that we're using right now to broadcast this podcast. It means that they have figured things out, that they're provable, and that you can use science to determine what frequency things need to be, how much electricity you need,

what kind of components can take the image and project it through the power lines and through the the internet cables and all the different things that we need to be in place to provide the electricity to provide the internet connection that's all science so this is all predictive science is predictive right but this is all these are all things that are not just observable but they're repeatable right the pattern where's the woo here's here's where the woo is okay our explanation for why it happens the laws of nature are woo it's not woo it is our our words that we use to describe repeatable things okay which which which law of which force of of of nature are you referring to? Let's pick one.

Okay, randomness. Can you show? I don't think that's a force of nature. I agree with you that randomness, the idea of randomness. Okay, pick one. Because they use it. They say it's evolution, a natural selection via random selection. Temperature.

Temperature. Okay. Okay. What causes temperature? I observe temperature like you. I believe temperature exists. What causes temperature observe temperature like you i believe temperature exists what causes temperature we don't know that's true and we don't know we you and i don't know and we would have to talk to some they don't have any idea what causes they can only tell me about the patterns and regularities that's it that friction causes certain things that the magnetic

pull of the sun on the earth causes certain temperature shifts and these are recognizable and repeatable and they understand how to measure them these are all just patterns and regularities found in nature right and they're giving them names and explanations i see what you're saying these names and explanations can be debunked later on i put them in the maybe bio plausible pile but. But this is, listen, I know it's frustrating, but the philosophy of science, this is it. The cause and effect, we do not observe cause and effect. We do not observe one thing causing another. We just see A and then we see B. It's really, it's a bit difficult, but imagine this. We see A and we see B. We don't see cause

and effect. We don't see the causal connection. Because if we did see the causal connection, you would know what happens when I flip that coin. You could have predicted it. You could predict what's going to happen when I touch fire. I would have to know exactly how much force you're exerting on your thumb to flip that coin. I would have to know what altitude we're at to understand what the atmosphere that this coin is going through. I would have to know the weight of the coin. I would have to know the position of your thumb on the thing.

It's like what you said about the billiard balls. That is true, that if you could calculate the exact amount of friction on the cloth and the table, the amount of polish that are on the balls, the amount of force, you'd have to have all the balls in exactly the same spot. But this is not possible today. Today, if you set up a table and you set up, let's just say nine balls, and you told me you were going to know where every ball was to the millimeter, I would say, I will bet you a million dollars you're wrong.

And I would be right every time. You're never going to get it. Why? Because you don't have the ability to calculate all those variables. But it's theoretically possible. And it's also the physical change of the amount of force that you drive when you break those balls varies. And if it varies even slightly, it's going to change the way. So a person just doing it with their body is not capable of that kind of precision.

If we got a robot to break. Even if you got a robot to break, you would have to have those balls in exactly the same spot. And they don't usually sit that way because the cloth has fiber in it. And it's wool. It's a worsted wool. And that worsted wool moves and shifts and bends and it flattens out in some spaces. In other spaces, it gets dirt and debris and chalk. There's too many variables.

So because we cannot compute all the variables, I'm't maybe right we can create it with a slight margin of error right there'll still be a margin of error that's why laplace said i need a divine calculator yeah he said i would have to even round off the numbers so i'll be slightly wrong right but the argument is that if we had all the variables and that that's a big if, it's logically possible. It's logically coherent with the reality that we see. Yes. Randomness is by the wayside. It's a figment of our imagination. We project it when we cannot compute.

But if we could, this is objective outside of us. Right. The truth is outside of us. It's not dependent on me and you, how we see the world. So randomness is based essentially on our inability to calculate variables. It's not dependent on me and you, how we see the world. So randomness is based essentially on our inability to calculate variables. It's not on

an actual law itself. Yes. So when we say that's random, it's woo-woo. It is. In the strictest way of the word. Now, every logical law, now this is what hurts people, but I love science. Look at me, I'm a lover of science. I'm a science addict. I read all the books. I'm fascinated

by science. Let's say I take object X and I throw read all the books. I'm fascinated by science. Let's say I take Object X and I throw it at a window. What's going to happen? I don't know. You don't know? I have any experience with Object X. I don't know what Object X is. Why can't you deduce it? Why can't you deduce what's going to happen?

Well, if I had more information. You need a history with Object X. You need to get to know object X, interact. You cannot deduce it. Well, you would write down all these different variables. You would find out what people have learned from the past about these variables, and that would be science. Exactly. Science is the history of patterns and regularities.

It is not deduction. It is not logic. It's a type of logic. We call it inductive logic. This logic is the faith that the past, that the future, excuse me, the future,

will behave like the past. So the patterns and regularities we see in nature, we say, look, if these happen often enough, we can recreate these circumstances often enough, we predict it'll happen

in the future. We have a faith that it'll happen again in the future. There is no logical reason why it does. There is not one single logical reason why we don't fall off the face of the earth. Every explanation we give ourselves is just a narrative. It is always subject to reinterpretation.

However- With the change in variables. Like even shifting of the earth's magnetic poles or I gave you a ridiculous Narrative the gremlin one right just to show you look. I know you don't believe in mine I don't believe in mine either right, but I'm doing the same thing Isaac did and I'm gonna correlate my gremlins theory as Far as he can correlate his gravity theory he used the word gravity. He made it. He made it sound better He made it sound less ridiculous.

But the truth of the matter is he's throwing his hands up in the air saying, look, I don't know. Let's just call it gravity. This is a way to think about it. Now his contemporaries laughed at him. They said it's an appeal to magic. And then when people started wearing those shades,

those paradigms, they're like, hey, it makes sense. If you just believe in gravity for a second, it explains all this ballet of celestial bodies and how they move. But really what he discovered was a pattern. And he gave that pattern a name. But does that force exist out there?

Well, not according to Einstein. He came up with a different narrative that fits the evidence even better than Isaac Newton did. But it's still a narrative. It hasn't removed all the other possibilities. For something to be true without a doubt, for it to be knowledge, not belief, there has to be zero doubt, meaning no other possibility whatsoever. That's knowledge.

So can you know something that's untrue? You cannot know something that's untrue. You could believe something that's untrue. Knowledge means that this is known. There is no possibility of doubt. That's why Descartes was such an important philosopher because he gave us one thing that we know the cogito have you heard of the cogito I don't remember what it is I think therefore I am oh okay that's so what is it that we know for

sure because because uh you know it's funny there's two great philosophers that I've read that they went through a crisis in their life one of them was Imam Ghazali a great Arabic philosopher and one of them was Rene Descartes. And both their writings are very, it's amazing. Why? Because they go through this crisis. They go through, what do I actually know? What's not, because they came to this exact same conclusion

that hey, it's all song, it's all explanation. It's not proof. It's all a narrative. It's all a point of view. Science keeps getting refined and changed. With more information. What we believed yesterday gets taken out from underneath us. Today's paradigm is going to be shifted again.

A hundred years from now, a thousand years from now. What can I grab and be like, this is true. Nobody can ever take this from me. That's going to be called knowledge. So it all comes down. At the end of the long journey of Cartesian doubt, it was so extreme. The philosophers gave it a new name. They call it Cartesian doubt. They call it modern. The philosophers gave it a new name. They call it Cartesian doubt.

They call it modern philosophy. So philosophy is thousands of years old. Descartes comes, writes a book. He wrote six chapters in six days. And he was like, what do I actually know 100% without a doubt? Nobody could ever question me. And he said, look, I believe in the cogito.

What's the cogito? I think therefore I am. So he goes through a long process. If we have the time, we'll go through a little nutshell of it so he says look he says look when i when i put a straw in a glass of water my eyes tell me that the straw is bent right because the reflection of the water is is bent the light the reflection of the light of the water is is bent yeah he says look my eyes lie to me. Aristotle thought the sun goes around the earth. His eyes lie to him.

Our senses lie. And he talks about if I put my hand in cold water, then I put it in tepid water, it'll seem warm to me. But that's just my bias, my inability to tell you what, my instruments are not accurate enough. So he said, okay, let's put empiricism or senses by the wayside.

It cannot give us truth. It cannot give us truth. He said, what about deduction? What about math and analytical knowledge? One plus one equals two. Believe it or not, philosophers also disagree with a lot of mathematical beliefs. So for instance, here's a big critique of math, okay?

One plus one equals two, we all believe it. But the critique is that one plus one is another way of saying two. There's no actual information you ever gave me. Mathematics is just one way to sum up a lot of information. It helps me give you an epiphany. It helps me make you understand what's happening on the billiard ball table.

Right, so by calling one plus one two, you're not changing the objects themselves. No. It's always been two things. It's always been two. Yeah. It's a tautology. You're just explaining to me something

that's out there, already existing. So if I tell you a triangle has three points, well, when I said the word triangle, I already told you it has three points. But maybe you didn't pick that up. Maybe I had to point that out to you. So Bertrand Russell said it beautifully. He said, look, at first in his career,

Bertrand Russell is a very, he's a great thinker. He said, look, mathematics is the thing we're most sure of. By the end of his career, he was like, guys, I'm not even sure about math anymore. Why? He's like, I think math is just another way of saying a four-legged animal is an animal. But you said that when you said it's a four-legged animal. And you just repeated yourself by saying it's an animal.

If I say, there's my wife, I married her. When I said my wife, I told you I married her. That's what math is doing. Math is giving you the information again in a simpler form that you can understand. And you think, oh, I've deduced this information. No, actually the information was there in the question. Right. Some philosophers disagree with this.

They said, no, math brings you, like Kant said, no, math tells you something. Okay, let's put that on the wayside. Here's another critique. One I personally could never get around. They say, look, he says, look, all the greatest thinkers in history, this is actually an Ibn Taymiyyah critique of logic. He says, look, all the greatest thinkers in history, this is actually an Ibn Taymiyyah critique of logic.

He says, look, all the greatest thinkers in history all disagree. Like Plato and Aristotle. You know, Plato tutored Aristotle. Two of the greatest thinkers in ancient history. They don't agree with one another. They both say you're wrong and the other guy says I'm wrong. Okay. Fast forward.

Every generation, their greatest thinkers disagreed. Leibniz didn't agree with Voltaire. Today, Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson, okay, maybe they're not the top, top intellectuals on earth today, but they're among the elite. They don't agree on what is true. When you ask them, what's truth? You guys are talking about truth all day long.

Can you define it for us? We don't agree. So if logic is something that tells us about the world, if it is, let's say we grant that. Descartes saying, look, we can't use it.

Nobody's good enough to use it and get to a conclusion that everybody agrees upon. So he's saying, look, even that doesn't help me. So he came up to the cogito he says look he doubted everything like he even went to the point where he said what if i'm dreaming what if there's a evil demon out there always tricking like he went really out there like

well that's one of the reasons why simulation theory is yeah like people really do like serious people, consider the potential that not only is it possible that we are in a simulation, but that there are many, many simulations inside of simulations.

Because we couldn't, that's what the egocentric predicament we were talking about earlier is. You cannot experience anything outside of your consciousness. Right.

So you could be plugged into a machine right now and this is just a big old dream. Could be. And that's why Descartes wanted to know what would be true even if I was in a simulator. And that's I think therefore I am.

Therefore I am. Because for me to have thoughts, I'd have to exist. If you doubt the cogito, you've proved the cogito. Because to object to it, you first have to have existence. Right.

Right. He refined it. I think thinkers refined it later on and before him also many thinkers came to this conclusion he just did it really famously he did it did it in one sentence too he did in one sentence he summed it up that's why if you you know i've heard of occam's razor if you use occam's razor to an extreme if you go create if you go to an an extreme degree, everything with a doubt, you chop it. Everything that might be imaginary,

inferred, logical, empirical, you chop it. What happens? You have a transcendent experience. If you take off all your paradigms,

this takes a very brave human being to do. To remove everything that anybody's ever told you and have the experience of the one thing. What you would know, what you would come to, mystics, that anybody's ever told you and have the experience of the one thing what you would know what you would come to with mystics that's why i believe that there's there's a place where you can get where religion is true and science is faith and i know it sounds crazy

but there is a point and i believe in science don't get me wrong i'm uh i can't praise science enough but there is a transcendent experience a human has and that transcendent experience is consciousness itself not the content of consciousness this is where people make a mistake consciousness itself reality your world is nested in consciousness people think consciousness is within my brain it's the opposite your brain your body your your yourself is in consciousness and when we when we get to this point, then all our paradoxes disappear. There's no more paradoxes, logical paradoxes. Maybe if we have time we can talk about logical paradoxes. They never end.

But when we understand that our world is nested in consciousness, there's nothing happening in the world around you that's outside of your consciousness. It's only outside of your ego. The thing you associate with Joe Rogan is also happening inside your consciousness. Your brain is within consciousness. No brain has ever been observed outside of consciousness. See, in materialism, they have this philosophy called epiphenomenalism, that the consciousness is a byproduct of this physical brain.

The consciousness is a byproduct of this physical brain. We have this physical brain. And your consciousness is like a byproduct. It's like a smoke. Now we ask them, how do you know about this physical brain? Oh, we know it because of our consciousness. So if your consciousness is fake, unreal, then so is your brain. The reason why we all know about brains is because of consciousness.

Consciousness tells us about brains. So brains are dependent on consciousness, not consciousness dependent on the brain. So I know this is a bit of a tricky thing, but this is what idealism is all about. There is no physical object outside of consciousness. It's all mental construct. We started this podcast talking about MMA and we ended on a mind fuck yeah seriously this is a serious mind fuck the egocentric predicament not in not an easy one well it's uh it's it's a fascinating yet impractical exercise because you will you will do it to the end of time. You'll be sitting here debating and discussing

and dissecting the very, but that's also how you gain a greater and deeper understanding of all the things. You have no idea what the fuck they are. Exactly. But it's still amazing to me how much is to be explored about what is real around us.

Like the world, the reality of the world around us is it's, it's, it's greater than any mystery in existence. That's why for me, I can't read fiction. I only study science, history,

philosophy. That's the only thing science, history, philosophy, religion. Cause it's weird enough. No, because it's,

they're all trying to tell me, they're all trying to explain the world around us and it's that's such a hard thing to do to sum up what's what's reality hey all these philosophies and theories are trying to sum it up this is reality and to cross-examine them for me it's far more entertaining than watching a movie or hearing a fictional story hmm yeah no i get it i mean it's definitely fascinating and entertaining. And I like fictional stories too, though. I like observing creativity because I'm fascinated by the human experience. And I'm fascinated by what people are able to create out of their own mind.

Something like we were talking yesterday about Stephen King, about how amazing it is that this guy just keeps continuing to create these bizarre stories and that someone can do that, your consciousness, and by putting so much emphasis on creativity and your ability to just write down things that never really happened and paint a picture inside someone's mind. Now, let me ask you this. If determinism is true, who wrote those stories? His past? When you write a story on a computer, did the computer write the story? No, you wrote the story. Right.

But if determinism is true, Stephen is just a computer. And his buttons are being pushed by past events. Yeah. So that's why one student asked me asked me hey you should read a book by Sam Harris on determinism. I'm like well can you ask Sam

who wrote the book? You know who wrote the book on determinism? He's going to say well he did. No he can't write anything he's determined. So these are all

philosophical questions that need to be explored but they are like you say mind bending you know. Very mind bending. Firas I'm glad we finally did this man. It seems like we could do

about a hundred of these. Sure. Let's do it again man. How often are are you in town uh rarely but next time i'm in vegas for ufc or something i might take a trip over here let's do it let's do it thank you sir i really appreciate it man it was great awesome for us a hobby ladies and gentlemen