"the following is a conversation with john donahue widely acknowledged as one of the greatest coaches and minds in the martial arts world having coached many champions in jiu jitsu submission grappling..."

"with john donahue are you afraid of death let's start with an easy question there's no warm-up that's it they're jumping jacks let's uh let's break that down into two questions um i'm a human being an..."

"after our physical death um in this sense from someone who starts from that point of view you have to understand that everyone has two deaths we always talk about our death as though there was only on..."

"time i don't wake up but are you going to be afraid of it is there some mortal terror you have of this no you didn't have it before you don't have it when you sleep um going from the fact that you kno..."

"comes with this um uh but there's also a sense in which the moment you're born and the moment you can think about these things you know this is your inevitable fate is it so inevitable so if we look a..."

"understand most of the physics and how the universe functions you said laws of thermodynamics but maybe that's just a tiny little fraction of what the universe actually is maybe there's multiple dimen..."

"die an early death or what have you we never know what's going to happen tomorrow as such we get work done as soon as we can the moment you gain immortality you can always put every project off you ca..."

"almost every action we partake in it's kind of tragic and beautiful that what what makes things amazing is that they end yeah i think it would actually be a terrible burden to be immortal you would um..."

"ethic which is the highest peak is what defines you asked an initial question which what makes a great life but then pointed towards two options one of longevity versus are there a degree of difficult..."

"four to five truly defining battles in his life which uh responsible for the for the lion's share of of his achievements and burned very bright but didn't burn long um stalin on the other hand started..."

"wondering what judo is and then s i started watch we're we're all proud of our countries and so on so i started watching he was i think the only american in the olympics for judo uh maybe the so this ..."

"i started to see this sport i guess you can call it of effortlessly dominating your opponent and like throwing because i in to me wrestling was like a grind you kind of control you slowly just break y..."

"you can if you have a lapse of concentration for half a second it's done it's over um if those guys get a grip on each other any one of them can throw the other the the idea you know uh when you see s..."

"yes and now travis was always going for he's off of course really good at gripping and con to that whole game but he was going for the big throws and he was almost getting frustrated uh by a lot of th..."

"still with that both the frustration and the power i mean the the the kind of throw he does is the his his main one i think is the standing was called tsunagi keep on saying i can hit pause that was t..."

"throwers of all time or you [Laughter] a recreational guy who couldn't throw my grandmother yes um uh i'm supposed to take your word over his well say don't listen to what people say i'm going to give..."

"that koga opened up that i wanted to understand why his technique worked it made no sense to me that with a single foot like the way you turn the hip the single foot that steps in why does that work b..."

"because there's very few people that i'm aware of that do it the way travis and koga did may i ask you a question yes um the choice of standing sanagi um i i should uh say this for you for your listen..."

"successful with standing sanagi is dramatically lower and it appears to be a move which is completely absent in the heavyweight divisions and rarely seen in the lightweight divisions why what was the ..."

"though it's you're correct and so far as you you're not just going with aesthetic and the sense of beauty but also but you are making uh as it were value judgments yes about the throw and that's fasci..."

"but do you uh prefer certain techniques over others because of their like for example i'll tell you for me chokes of all sorts with the ghee without the ghee probably with the geese the most beautiful..."

"you know a huge part of jiu-jitsu is understanding the weak strengths and weaknesses of the human body there's parts of the human body that are shockingly robust and there are other parts that are sho..."

"ryan is probably the single best body dog guard passer i've ever seen nikki ryan is outstanding with it nick rodriguez is very good craig jones is outstanding all of my students use this for a very si..."

"discover that how do you how did you discover the body life that as a as one of many methodologies of achieving this asymmetry um it would be an overstatement to say we discovered the body line right ..."

"on a subject matter which is intrinsically simpler okay there's a sense in which naive and overly simplistic assessments of scientific method may not work well at advanced levels of science but they w..."

"we should have a computer that's as thin as a sheet of paper and then you start to play with ideas of like what does that actually look like the reason i bring it up is because he talked about he had ..."

"compromise between those two is a very very difficult thing when you look at the history of science you will see that there's some pretty damn chaotic moments anytime there's major theory change where..."

"that's it no more it doesn't work and then uh five years later they would see my students finishing world champions with it and in some cases finishing the very people who said that the technique woul..."

"and rick mcglarees where i got my black belt where i grew up as a jiu jitsu person in philadelphia they have a huge number of black belts but they have a huge number of all other ranks and the way the..."

"in all of us i'm sure you're you're well read on people like duversky and etc who talk about this all the time for your viewers uh there are numerous psychological experiments that have shown that mos..."

"that number of techniques is usually pretty small and if you're always battling with the same tough opponents every day where if you make even a single error it will cost you that match in sparring an..."

"and then competition cycles where you're working with people much closer to your own skill level is there something to be said about the the flip side of that which is um when you're training with peo..."

"feel it because for example you haven't never seen me roll uh you know when there's people you know i've seen the look in people's eyes when they see me train and they i could see maybe it's me projec..."

"he i'm a huge advocate of handicapped training where you handicap yourself to work on skills he's took that to heart to a level that few people i believe can match i just wonder what his psychology is..."

"effortlessly get out with no problems in seconds because he's been in that situation 25 000 times with varying degrees of skill opponents and there's just no panic no fear he's just doing what he's do..."

"opponent that anything they throw at you like their weapons are useless against you um there's a little bit of legs friedman kicking through on this question your obsession with dominance is um uh it'..."

"moment came you back down you didn't pull the trigger building that confidence is the key to championship performance and the single best way to do it is to take away the innate fear that we all have ..."

"to attack without fear i think that is so profound and so rare it's so rare to hear this i think it's because it's the most painful thing to do always ask yourself when you enter a jujitsu match you a..."

"holds i start them with mechanics where they learn the end game how to break someone once they develop in their mind the belief that if the conditional if they can get to one of those six positions th..."

"important step yeah so you coach the end game first and then you fill in the details afterwards yeah that's a huge confidence builder but i just i have to say to admit and it makes me sad but i think ..."

"but i have a fervent belief that human beings in most skill activities not all skill activities but i will say combat sports for sure can reinvent themselves in five year periods now you might be sayi..."

"you will see that no one body type is definitively superior to another you will see every variation of body type and the metal platforms and jujitsu as skill and tactics become more and more important..."

"but i do believe that the nature of a training program plays an enormous difference i don't mean to say this in an arrogant way i believe that there's again a mountain of evidence to suggest this is t..."

"international world championship and olympic competition they are disproportionately successful despite their relatively small numbers there's nothing genetically special about them um you can talk ab..."

"different training programs have different success rates and so i truly believe with all my heart and all my soul that how you train does make a significant difference i would even go further and say ..."

"these are all virtues but the one indispensable virtue is persistence the ability just to stay in the game long enough to get the results you seek but what does persistence really look like if we can ..."

"there's two ways you can leave in a gym you can leave from adversity it was too tough or you can leave from boredom everyone talks about the first no one talks about the second most people when they g..."

"it's drilling i don't know maybe people are different but i love the idea maybe even outside of jiu jitsu of doing the same thing over and over it's like jiro dreams of sushi i love doing the thing uh..."

"ultimately any movement in the gym that doesn't improve the skills you already have or build new skills is a waste of time a waste of resources everything you do should be done with the aim and the un..."

"students and so i give them drills where the whole emphasis is upon getting a sense where they understand what are the problems they're trying to solve and working towards practical solutions they nev..."

"three years and there's a dedication to it where it's a long-term commitment to where you're forcing yourself perhaps there's other mechanisms but you're forcing yourself to stay with a technique long..."

"okay that training clearly had benefits for you early on but when the point of diminishing returns starts coming and if you feel you're just doing the same thing then it's time to switch now if you fe..."

"could in the time that they've been working i mean that was it was almost a philosophical question for me that's what i was always in a search on because i know my mind is uh likes drilling i don't li..."

"look better sparring on the other hand is the exact opposite of that that's resistance where you're trying to make the other person look as bad as possible and once you understand the different direct..."

"question why i don't i mean this i i am somebody who likes to say nice things about people so let me let me answer for you yeah two reasons because they find it boring yes and secondly perhaps more im..."

"couldn't get a black belt to drill with you that's that's shameful and i but i understand i i i sympathize with those black belts too because the way in which most people are told to drill does feel i..."

"this is too complex of a story to give now with words i would need to demonstrate it but the way in which we drill is not your standard method of drilling and then it's into sparring but if you give m..."

"go for a number end up on bottom lose the armbar and lose position but i've never heard anyone criticize armbars on that account more importantly i believed from early on that the best place to attack..."

"there was also another advantage that i had in terms of creating influence with leg locking when you look at the great leg lockers of the past they they were basically iconoclasts they were people who..."

"that's why i owe a lot to those early students um gordon ryan gary tone and eddie cummings and uh nikki ryan there it was those four kids came from nowhere um uh gary had some success in grappling lik..."

"initial intuition but you know you have to have enough um there's perseverance required to uh take is the johnny eye thing to take from the initial idea to the entire system is there is there a sense ..."

"but the amount of progress from 1945 to 1955 or even better 1960 was staggering and so the initial progress tends to be meteoric but after that it tends to be incremental that's that with lake longs t..."

"but in terms of uh breaking people's legs this the simple act of breaking legs i i believe we're in the incremental phase now rather than the meteoric phase let me ask you a ridiculous question how ha..."

"trying to there's a few people in competition that didn't want to attack absolutely and i remember in particular there was one one person it was a again a finals match purple belt i remember it was a ..."

"of all the major logs it's the one where it is most likely a psychologically strong opponent will be able to absorb damage and go on to win a match um and answer to your first question how difficult i..."

"hoja was probably the living embodiment of someone who played a classical jujitsu game based around the the fundamental four steps of jiu-jitsu and and um uh like if if you took someone who had taken ..."

"so that's that just kind of lays out the story is there some lessons about his systems that you uh learn in developing your own system excellent question the the thing which always impressed me the mo..."

"students i always wonder what are the little details he's doing under there when he's in mount the little adjustments you know but perhaps that's like almost indescribable the the details of that cont..."

"bottom he has uh from an outsider's perspective a calm to him in the uh in the heat of battle that's like uh that's inspiring and confusing is there something to speak to the psychological aspect of g..."

"extraordinarily good job of of doing that gordon looks more tense in most of his training sessions than he does in his competitions because he knows his training partners are typically better than the..."

"you could only fight on indian reservations and in canada i believe his first fight may have been on an indian reservation um so the sport at that stage was very much in its infancy and it's probably ..."

"town 50 percent to come down and just get your ass kicked months by month yeah that says a lot let's talk about the whole idea of delayed gratification here i mean um that's that's a guy who's saying ..."

"the fear was not achieving the perfection is there something you've uh observed about the way he approaches training that uh stands out to you or is it simply the dedication no it's never just about d..."

"can't be weak at anything but you can't be strong at everything either life's not long enough for us to develop a truly complete skill set so you've got to be good at everything and you've got to be t..."

"you like when you when you see a thing first of all the way machine learning works is you predict you see a position or you see a situation and then you predict how good that is and then you watch how..."

"discussion um uh lex alluded to the idea of man versus machine and chess okay and i think that's a really good place for us to start the the discussion um i'm going to uh just tell people about a litt..."

"okay so no computer is ever going to be able to work with those kinds of numbers okay you that i don't even know if future generations of quantum computers could could work it with those kind of numbe..."

"history is is really when the first time a machine beat a human at a thing that humans really care about in the in the domain of intellectual pursuits yeah it was it was a it was a powerful powerful m..."

"when alpha zero took on a rival chess program which by itself was already superior to any human it only required four hours starting from learning the rules of chess to figuring out how to beat the se..."

"initial question from lex the idea of could there be a computer inside a robot which doesn't have any special physical properties this is mind versus mind because the bodies negate each other the robo..."

"computational powers that's the interesting battle i uh you asked a great question lex let me give you my initial push or for an answer would be that if it's just gordon ryan versus your your uh your ..."

"yeah if um if picking up a cup is a seemingly insurmountable challenge then then taking someone down controlling them getting past their legs that's going to be one hell of a project exactly i mean th..."

"robot gordon ryan really really strong question and i think i think by far the cyborg gordon ryan yeah that's what i'm thinking here the problems you're talking about uh with regards to the robots tho..."

"to do that that that's going to blow out of the water update on the um uh the phenomenon of cyborg or centaur chess there was some debate as to whether or not um cyborg chess teams could stay competit..."

"jiu jitsu right you want to be uh you want to create an asymmetry of power and you want to be efficient as in the way you deliver that power it's actually goes back to the picking up a cup currently a..."

"you know even like nuclear explosions those kinds of things if we add ai into the launch systems for nuclear weapons for example i think human history teaches us that software bugs is what will leave ..."

"sorry legs that was uh that was a really exciting discussion and uh the depths of knowledge in the dimensions of knowledge you have and interests you have is just fascinating is there advice you have ..."

"um yes there is some validity to these things but as a general rule if you ask me to bet in any form of street fight call it what you want between a combat sport adherent versus someone who simply tra..."

"and when you go to throw blows um nonetheless this is easily modified and so a boxer can throw with with uh open hands or with elbows and so just a small modification and technique can overcome that p..."

"found themselves people talk for example about how you know um and with some validity that weapons will change everything in a in a street fight there's absolute truth to that but this extends into we..."

"joe rogan thinks it is like the most dangerous it's like it becomes your weakest point if you wear a tie because it's very easy to choke george saint pierre seemed to have agreed with that also george..."

"with regards to the snap down question that's that is more of a problem i always recommend if you are going to work as a bouncer with a tie wear a clip-on tie so it just comes off immediately if you d..."

"every single person in the squad despised new york and wanted to leave for a long time so um uh what was the nature of your love for new york by the way uh it was truly an international city like i'm ..."

"um i loved it but the squad hated it for them it was like an expensive um things they never actually lived in manhattan they always lived in new jersey or long island had to commute in so all they eve..."

"rico stands for yeah it's uh texas on the other hand i know everyone in the compromise right texas is a compromise between those two actually i must say that everyone on the squad myself included love..."

"question we ask about life is its meaning do you think there's a meaning to our existence here on this little spinning ball that's uh you you've thrown some some powerful questions that's the most pow..."

"lived when you look back you john donahue looking back at your life first i will address that question but let's first look at why hunter thompson could say that because his life was more or less guar..."

"it's usually linked back to the idea of meaning because it's so hard it's it was hard to win the battle for survival but it's ten times harder to win the battle for meaning um when i think about it fi..."

"story we all have our own interests i try to bring in the sense that even though i'm an atheist i don't believe that we go on to to live after this i'm i i believe that there's a possibility of a god ..."