Josh Barnett is an MMA fighter, catch wrestler, and a scholar of violence. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:07 - Nietzsche
7:25 - Good and Evil
22:37 - Joe Rogan library
24:35 - Catch wrestling
34:41 - Anarchy
53:10 - Hitler and Stalin
1:10:11 - Karl Gotch
1:18:36 - Mike Tyson
1:26:58 - Violent victory
1:35:07 - Fedor Emelionenko
1:37:28 - Greatest MMA fighters of all time
1:47:25 - Early UFCs
1:52:09 - Advice for young people
1:56:02 - The value of competition
1:58:40 - Blade Runner
2:09:32 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Josh Barnett, 1 of the greatest fighters and submission wrestlers in history, with an epic 25-year career that includes being the UFC heavyweight champion and countless other accolades.

He also happens to be 1 of the most intelligent and brutally honest human beings in all of martial arts.

And especially so about his appreciation of and fascination with violence.

Quick mention of our sponsors, which feels ridiculous to say after that introduction.

Munk Pack low-carb snacks, Element electrolyte drinks, eight-sleep self-cooling mattress, and Rev transcription and captioning service.

Click the sponsor links to get a discount to support this podcast.

As a Side note, let me say that I've been a fan of Josh Barnett for a long time.

This conversation was indeed a long time coming and I'm sure we'll talk many times again.

For what it's worth, I'm a student of combat sports and admire when they're done at the highest level, either through masterful execution of skill or relentless dominance of pure guts.

For context, I'm a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu and have competed in wrestling, submission grappling, Jiu-Jitsu, Judo, and even catch wrestling, which is a variant of submission grappling that Josh is 1 of the great practitioners, scholars, and teachers of.

I could probably talk for hours about what I've learned from my time on the mat, but if I were to say 1 thing, it is that the mat is honest.

You can't run away from yourself when you step on the mat.

It reveals your fears, the lies you might tell yourself, all the delusions you might have, or at least I had, that there's anything in this world that can be achieved except through blood, sweat, and tears.

That honesty, taken to the highest levels, as is the case with Josh, creates the most special of human beings, and definitely someone who is fascinating to talk to.

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.

And now, here's my conversation with Josh Barnett.

Who were the philosophers and philosophical ideas that influenced you the most?

I had an interesting philosophical journey, at least I think it's interesting, and that was, I think as far as organized philosophy or maybe, authentic's not the right word, but like, yeah, we'll say organized.

I would say that Nietzsche is probably 1 of the people with the most influence on me, but I also feel like, to a degree, your personality will oftentimes dictate what philosophers that you can vibe with.

So what ideas from Nietzsche was it, the Übermensch?

Definitely the Übermensch is huge to me because I see it as an extension of basically the religious concepts of God and higher ideals, but just put into a different, a secular context.

And the idea also that the Ubermensch is striving and overcoming, you know, something that you're always working towards that very few will ever, it's not like the concept that you can just make them.

And it's not based simply upon if you were, say, put through a genetic program and turned into a super soldier, like that wouldn't make it.

That's like the very surface level and incorrect understanding of what the Ubermensch is.

The Ubermensch is the idea of this kind of human that transcends all the weaker, lower aspects of humans, which we're full of.

But I also think that there's an element in Nietzsche's writing that suggests that it's not something you can even be in all the time.

Like it's even a temporary state because it's not something that we're capable of maintaining.

It's something to strive for, like a morality, an image, an ideal, a set of principles that we can connect to that doesn't rely on otherworldly kind of out there things.

With Nietzsche, I feel like the concept of the Ubermensch is something built on authenticity as well.

So when you are authentic, and Heidegger being a follower of Nietzsche's and highly influenced by him, I think that the Ubermensch is an example of authenticity in that it isn't about Trying to be anything that you cannot be or to go against who you are but to actually understand that accept that and then work with what you can work with and and and create from your Lump of clay that is you because I can't become certain.

There's certain things that are just not gonna happen for me because it's not in my proclivity.

I mean, I'm never gonna be 5 foot tall and 120 pounds.

They made that again, I guess, but I know, but as you get more in tune with who you are as you start learning more about what unique things or at least what that That combination that makes you that gestalt part of yourself what those things are and how you can use them, then you can work towards being that, taking what that is and seeing if you can get to that point.

Now the likelihood is no, maybe, probably never.

Religion is a constant striving and a look at a higher ideal concept, even if it's multiple gods or 1 god, it's still essentially all built around this concept.

Like I like the idea of Catholic's original sin, if you think of sin not as evil, but as missing the mark, the archer's term where it derives, or even like in Spanish, without.

So as being, if you accept that you are imperfect, if you accept that you need to constantly strive even against yourself, because you will figure out the best ways at which to submarine your own capabilities, submarine your own dreams and wishes and whatever, you will ruin them more than anything else.

And you will tell yourself that you ruined them on purpose for a good reason.

Or you'll say that you'll figure out a way to put it on everything else but yourself.

And so the idea of thinking of, well, as I'm starting off on this whole thing, I got a lot of work to do, and that's just the way it is.

And I got to figure out what areas those are going to be.

And so I thought, oh, yeah, if I think of original sin, actually can be, that can be kind of a clever idea, but it's also just accepting that we're all uniquely strange and unequal in our own ways, but we have to figure out how that fits

The word authenticity kind of connects to all of that.

So striving to be your authentic self means figuring out exactly the shape of the flaws, the character of your little demons that you get to play with and around them, finding a path to whatever the hell ideal versions of yourself you can carve and pretending like that's such a thing as even possible.

The other idea about Nietzsche is, on his idea of morality, he presents the argument that morality's a human illusion and that there's not such a thing as good and evil, and these are all kind of constructs.

Do you think there's such a thing as good and evil that's connected to some objective reality?

I think that there are some, I actually do believe that there are some universals.

I'm not Kantian in any way, but I do think that there are some universals.

And the thing that actually brought me to even the concept of that was Jung.

So, Jung's concept of the collective unconsciousness, and then taking that thought and then applying it to looking through history, and the most varied history you can find.

So I would say probably religion is your earliest 1 that you can get for written history or written examples of human behavior and psychology at the furthest that we can look into it from man's hand to whatever the medium is, cuneiform or whatever.

But as you do that, and then let's say going from Mesopotamia to India to Europe, and just going from all these places, as disparate as they may seem, as many different cultures and ethnicities and religions, and how the religions will vary quite a bit from monotheist to polytheist and so on and so forth.

But then just seeing how there's all the through lines and of course Campbell, he did this much earlier than me thinking about it.

But I think that by looking at things that way and starting to find the threads instead of always just looking at everything as being its own compartmentalized concept, is if it only applies to this time, this people, like getting overly pomo about it is just a really idiotic postmodern.

So you think that there is, just like Joseph Campbell, there's a thread that connects all of these stories, narratives that we constructed for ourselves as we evolve, and that thread is grounded

in some kind of absolute ideas of maybe on the morality side, which is the trickiest 1, of good and evil.

Somewhat, yeah, I think that a lot of this stuff is just derived from a biological perspective.

I feel like these things are innate within us.

Do you think our innately humans are good?

I feel like, I also feel like there's an issue of scale too.

Like Nassim Taleb likes to talk about how he views his, the way he interacts with groups in terms of scale.

What is this thing about at the familial level, I'm a communist, and then at the civic level, I'm a Republican or something, and at this other level, and then it goes on, at the widest level, he's a libertarian or something of that nature.

Like fundamentally, human interaction changes.

And scale, and also from subjective to the environment around them.

And I don't even mean environment just in the sake of physical environment, nature, right?

Like nature's constantly trying to murder you.

Well, it's not really trying, it's just nature's being nature the universe is the universe, and at times it takes you out.

It's just not with any particular compunction or prejudice, it's just oops, sorry, there's no more dodo's, my bad.

But don't you think the particular flavor of the complexity that is the human mind was created, like let me make an argument for that all people are fundamentally good.

There's an evolutionary advantage to striving to cooperate, to add more love to the world, of compassion, empathy, all that kind of stuff, and that the very thing that created the human mind was this evolutionary advantage, whatever the forces behind this evolutionary advantage.

So when we're dealing with a small tribe, sure.

There's other factors that are going to go into that.

Let's say you scale up and so your 150 has exceeded their 150 and you start to get to a certain point where, you can't really be close enough to someone down the line of some of that next, like that 1 fifties, 1 51 50.

And they just now all of a sudden become some, some guy, whatever.

And when it comes to some guy, once it starts hitting scale, I don't know that it's capable.

People can be as magnanimous to a stranger as to the known.

If they orient themselves to be secure enough, because it does come to security, insecurity, in 1 way or the other, either brought on by the unknown, brought on by an actual threat, brought on by even their own, as we would use the word insecurity, in that their own insecurity within their own capabilities, their own belief in themselves, all these things can change things from being compassionate and what have you to at least at the very least, maybe not evil, but self-interest driven to the point of negative results for those that aren't.

But another way to frame that is maybe it's less about scale and more about the amount of resources available.

So if we're overflowing with resources in terms of security and safety, all the things you've mentioned, if we have more than enough resources, then the way we treat a stranger, the way we position ourselves towards that stranger might be in a way that allows us to be our real human selves as opposed to sort of our animal self.

And therefore, it's mostly about how clever can we descendants of apes be in coming up with all cool kinds of technologies and ways to efficiently use the resources we have such that we're not constrained?

And my hope is that we can, that human innovation will outpace the growth of our, that number of people that are starving for resources.

Yes, I think that there's a lot of rationality behind this argument.

And in some ways I agree, and in a lot of ways I see it as Missing the point of How this experiment has been playing out across time when you look at what?

You know, what is a resource as humans would define it, right, or wealth even.

And so you can say, well, you know, an iPhone's a resource, the internet's a resource, water obviously is a resource, but if we weigh them, what is more important to human beings?

So if we look at resources, if we start with what do human beings need to live?

I mean, actually live, not live here in this bullshit fantasy creation extension of our own ingenuity and a prison of our own creation and also a paradise of our own creation.

But this is not how human beings normally live.

This is all built upon stuff on, this is built on concept, on idea, and some of it's built on just, well, this is the paradigm, so this is what you do.

Human beings need food, they need water to survive, they need shelter from the elements, and they need certain skills to perpetuate these things and be able to pass them down so that they can, so that these things don't become, you don't end up in this gap where you have to relearn things.

Cause if it's lost, then that time before you can get it back again, is going to be dark ages of sorts, you know, or it's going to be highly detrimental to your group.

Because not knowing how to fish, not knowing how to hunt, not knowing how to even clean and cook the game once you have it could be lethal.

The knowledge to attain the very low level things of water and

We did it once before, and we've done it over and over and over and over again.

But When you think of how you look at the, we'll just deal with the first world of the West.

You look at the pathway of Western civilization and its growth, and then you look at how technology injected into it over time, how it magnifies things or pushes things at orders of magnitude faster.

And then the internet comes along and even faster, so you're watching industrial revolution to, what is it, the capacitor and then so on.

And as the internet and technology, especially on the electronic side of things start increasing in capability it massively outpaces even our necessity for it at times.

It becomes plant obsolescence happens quicker and over and over and over again.

And wealth increases, increases, increases, increases in terms of the things that we're able to acquire.

I mean, I've seen homeless people with smartphones.

So we're living in the most wealth-laden, luxury-laden age of all of humanity, yet What happens when we see calamity or people go on hard times?

The things that they value, what if people go to an argument about the cost of things that are luxury items generally and not necessity items?

We get into fights about things that are, at the end of the day, not necessities to us.

People are so concerned about Netflix and the internet.

Personally, I'm very concerned about the internet because I look at it as my own little personal library of Alexandria in my pocket.

That's what I love about it, and the ability to have a tool as effective as it is, even though I'm in a constant battle, to not let that tool become a vice, or to become something that actually brings me to a lower state.

But the question is, are we willing to murder each other over Netflix

We're willing to murder each other over water.

Right, but that's our animalistic selves of, that's.

Well, it's also a necessity for, it's animalistic, but it's also either you do it or you don't, right?

Like, unless somebody's willing to share that water, or if that water is of such a limited capability, or such a limited amount, then you will have to murder to have that water.

Netflix, the argument is the higher we get up to this hierarchy of what we consider in Los Angeles resources, We're less willing to commit violence.

We're less willing to commit violence, I would say over Netflix, but we are willing to commit violence over Netflix, over everything associated with Netflix, over televisions, over sneakers, over, I mean, when we look at a good, I mean, the majority of the stuff that came with the riots, I mean, it was used car dealerships targets, I mean, and then you look and it's like, well, okay, what are people, what do they gotta, what are they so hell bent to get out of this whole thing?

I'm even talking about the ideological elements or anything like that.

Just like, okay, something's going on, boom, looting, whatever.

You'll have AOC say, oh, people needing bread.

But to me, it is poetry in a sense because you get to see how we actually are operating.

What is becoming first principles to most people?

But you could also argue that those riots were more like

Oh, it's definitely a lot more than just that.

I'm just saying that given a chance, it's like, okay, boom, the lights are off, the grid is down, we've hacked into the whole system, turned into an 80s movie, and you have the ability to go get a hold of whatever it is that you think is most important.

And I say we, as in, you know, including all of us, we grab a TV, we break into a sneaker store in Melrose.

We do, it's just like, we steal giant cause statues, where the value of that is completely market driven.

It's just a piece of polypropylene or whatever, butyl, and it's cool.

I'm a big fan of art, but it's like, you know, I can't eat that, and at the end of the day, man, you're sitting there with your, like, what'd you do today, honey?

You know, man, we were able to, oh, I got this designer art statue.

Are you gonna go, well, you can't really sell it on the art markets where people are really gonna pay for it, so are you gonna become an underground art dealer with your 1 piece of cause art?

1 interesting thing, before I forget it, you mentioned the Library of Alexandria and your...

Well, your phone, but also just thinking of your little world that you're creating for yourself on the internet.

That's a really powerful way to actually phrase it.

1 of the things that, you've been on Joe Rogan several times.

Although everybody always comes to me and goes, oh that was so great, I didn't know, you've been on Joe Rogan?

I've been a fan of yours for a long time from other avenues.

Everybody, you have no idea how many times through messaging and missing each other over the years, this is ridiculous, this is a long time coming.

You don't realize how special this is for us.

We'll talk about this, but you symbolize something very important to me through my journey, through wrestling, through jujitsu, through judo, through just street fighting, through just combat.

You're the, in some sense, the devil on my shoulder of violence.

I realize, you know, sitting encased in ice down at that low ass level, you know.

But, you know, the angel side is more like the athletic, the sport, the science, the technical, the chess side of things.

But on the Library of Alexandria, let me ask, because you were on Joe Rogan, it does make me really sad, and I realize that I'm just probably being romantic, that most of his library of interviews that were on YouTube have now been taken down because he went to Spotify.

And that was the first, I'm probably an idiot, but it was the first time I realized that this knowledge that we've been building up on the internet doesn't necessarily last forever.

If you do not preserve them, if you do not make efforts, so many of my, It just really brings to mind off the top of my head, so many friends of mine that are Jewish, they're basically secular.

But yet, through even the secular aspect of just keeping the traditions alive, it's like, well, you could always pick a book and read about it, clearly.

But if you don't put these things into action, if you don't make them a part of your consciousness, maybe even on the subconsciousness, just through repetition, they will die.

They will become simply something that exists somewhere until you find it again.

He would say that I don't invent moves, I just rediscover them.

But yet, Gotch and Billy Robinson also would understand that if someone's not carrying the torch, it'll go out.

Now, that doesn't mean fire can't be rekindled, it just means that that torch no longer is lighting the way on this knowledge.

And so it's important to be an individual, even on an individual level, to be a repository for aspects of knowledge.

So I've mentioned to you offline that I competed in a couple of catch wrestling tournaments.

Can we go Wikipedia level at the very basic, you're the exactly right person to ask what is catch wrestling and what are its defining principles?

I would say the easiest way for us to talk about and give an overview of what catch is, in the simplest terms is, think of collegiate wrestling with submissions.

And it's not surprising because collegiate wrestling is actually derived from catch as catch can It's just that over time certain aspects were were Removed from the competition structure so that they became null elements things that were discarded But it's funny that you can take high level amateur collegiate types and you can show them a move and then add a little bit to it and go, oh, well hey, that was just like what we already do here, but except, oh, I didn't know you could take it all the way to this point, or things of that nature, especially when it comes to professional wrestling, like teaching people, like, no, I know you're just using this in a show, but this is actually a real move, and here's how it really feels.

And so collegiate wrestling and wrestling in general for people who are not aware is basically 2 people start on their feet and they have to score, they're trying to take each other down and they have to, they score points along the way.

You can end matches by pinning them, for example, on their back.

I think 1 way to describe wrestling is, it's very much about figuring out ways to establish control and leverage in these kind of tie-ups, or there's different styles where you can do more from a distance to where it's more about the timing and all that kind of stuff.

Ultimately, it's an art of like both upper body and lower body and you could choose the different puzzles that you solve there.

You could be attacking the head, the arms, you could be attacking the legs.

There's also part of collegiate wrestling that's on the ground that has more, what's called like a referee's position or whatever.

Right, the referee's position where you're on your hands and knees, basically.

Do you understand what that's supposed to simulate?

It's 1 of the standard positions because, 1, it's 1 of the easiest ways to actually get up.

But 2, it's because you cannot be on your back.

If you're on your back, you're getting pinned and the back exposure or being pinned is pretty much the universal wrestling thing.

1, taking the guy from their feet to the floor and 2, pinning them.

Cornish wrestling, Turkish oil wrestling, Mongolian, Sumo, Indian, Well, they'll call it Pellwani, it's also called Kushdi, Jiu-Jitsu, Judo, so many of them is, there's a, Sambo, even if it doesn't end the match, it's still like 1 of the most important aspects of the competition itself across

And this is where submission, like catch wrestling, or submission wrestling, or jujitsu feels different.

Which it seems like for most wrestling, for a lot of wrestling, the dominance is the goal, as opposed to submission, which I guess those 2 are related, but dominating the position.

It's almost like breaking your opponent, breaking through all of their defenses to where they're completely defenseless and you can do anything with them that you want.

Maybe that's what could be a definition of dominance, I don't know.

Yeah, I mean it sounds very much like a chain to a radiator, yeah.

Yeah, there's a thread that connects all corners.

It is actually different when you think about it across the landscape.

I don't think radically different, but still slightly different in that if you think of wrestling as being derived from from from combat right so well it is combat sports but more more lethal combat getting somebody off their feet and onto their back is about a lethal place for the person on bottom to be in general.

I mean, I don't, don't come at me with your talks about your fucking worm guards and blah, blah, blah, and whatever fit spider, barren.

This is, we're not talking about you in this highly regimented sporting environment.

We're talking about general, you know, all the body hair, none of the waxing human beings.

There, as you're trying to get up, you're getting hit with a rock or stabbed or what have you, set on fire, who knows.

Generally, these conflicts are not just isolated to one-on-one, if it's four-on-two, your buddy that was with you back-to-back, now he's on his back, What do you think?

And now it's going to be 1 on 1 while 3 go on 1.

So, and then you go, you elevate this to, to armored combat, right?

Well, while you're struggling to get up stab, you know, that's where Jiu Jitsu's, concepts come from with all their leveraging and off balancing is, oh man, if I end up in this situation in tight close quarters combat, yes, we could fight it out with swords and knives and what have you, but it's way easier if the first thing I can do is foot sweep you on your back and then pull my knife and just go stick.

that connects all of these different arts from not just arts, but from the very base violence of war, just like you said, that there's no rules to the very regimented IBJF.

Jiu-Jitsu tournaments, and just, you've kind of laid out some of it, but can you go all the way to the?

So, when you start off with absolute Skills in the sense of absolute offense and defense in the taking or preserving of life, right?

Full on at its purest form of self-defense and self-preservation, okay?

And then you extrapolate part of that in that all animals train in violence.

All play usually degenerates into some sort of soft violence.

So be it cats when they're kittens and puppies and everything learns how to kill, how to fight.

Not that, you know, just that dumb alpha meme stuff where the idea is that, oh, by being alpha, that means you run around like basically just being a bully and a shithead.

No, actually, alpha wolves spend very little time fighting because if you were actually alpha, you don't get into fights.

And if you're probably getting into any large amount of fights, it's probably because you're being shitty at being an alpha and now people are tired of you being in charge and Yet in the animal world and it would be the same for human beings at that that that base beginning level of violence There's a big risk So I know that we live in this place with healthcare and where you might be in a place with nationalized health, whatever, right?

There's Band-Aids, there's penicillin, There's all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, there's a channel that just hurts me every time.

I used to follow it and I had to unfollow it because it was too painful for me as a human being called Nature is Metal on Instagram.

It was sobering and then it was like, this is too sober.

So in there, the risk is at its highest level.

The damage you take, the Winner walks away hurt.

Getting lamed when you need every aspect of your physical and athletic faculties to survive because is it gonna be the, this isn't the first and it's definitely not gonna be the last, especially if you're the slowest 1.

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Josh Barnett: Philosophy of Violence, Power, and the Martial Arts | Lex Fridman #165