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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:43 - The great American road trip
20:13 - Martial arts and philosophy
23:13 - Real vs fake success on Instagram
33:58 - The brutal honesty of Mike Tyson
38:44 - Breaking your opponent in wrestling
46:51 - Genghis Khan
57:57 - It's okay to change your mind
1:02:34 - Why do politicians become inauthentic
1:09:11 - Greatness requires sacrifice
1:11:54 - Whiplash
1:20:02 - Relationships
1:25:39 - Greatest fighters of all time
1:33:20 - Greatest fight of all time
1:47:43 - Khabib Nurmagomedov
1:49:31 - Can Conor McGregor beat Khabib Nurmagomedov?
2:03:47 - Conor vs Khabib 2
2:10:23 - Will there always be war?
2:11:59 - Future of civilization
2:14:10 - Kids
2:20:55 - The meaning of a "like" on social media
2:29:52 - Starting a podcast
2:48:34 - Book recommendations
2:52:04 - Keeping the independence of solitude

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The following is a conversation with John Clark.

He's a friend, a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt, former MMA fighter, and at least in my opinion, 1 of the great UFC cornerman coaches to listen to.

And also, he's my current Jiu-Jitsu coach at Broadway Jiu-Jitsu in South Boston.

He was once, for a time, a philosophy major in college and is now, I would say, a kind of practicing philosopher, opinionated, brilliant, and someone I always enjoy talking to even when, especially when, we disagree, which we do often.

He's definitely someone I can see talking to many times on this podcast.

In fact, he hosts a new podcast of his own called Please Allow me.

Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode.

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Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that martial arts, especially jiu-jitsu and judo, have been a big part of my growth as a human being.

So I think I will talk to a few martial artists on occasion on this podcast.

I won't talk to people who are simply great fighters or great athletes, but people who have a philosophy that I find to be interesting and worth exploring, even if I disagree with parts or most of it.

I like alternating between historians and computer scientists, fighters and biologists, and between totally different world views and personalities like Elon Musk and Michael Malice.

This world to me is fascinating because of the diversity of weirdness that is human civilization.

I love the weird and the brilliant and hope you join me on the journey of exploring both.

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It's like not finishing a book even though you're 80% done.

Listen to ones you like and don't listen to the ones you don't like.

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.

And now, here's my conversation with John Clark.

I was thinking of doing a Kerouac-style road trip across the United States, you know, after this whole COVID thing lifts.

I've done a handful of long-distance driving trips

up and down the East Coast, but also from the West Coast, back to the East Coast, and then returning to California.

So I've definitely done my fair share of driving in this country.

Do you have the longing for the great American road trip?

I think there are so many things that I've been lucky enough to see in the world That I now at this point in my life realize there are tons of things that I need to see here in this country and a Road trip could potentially be the best way to see them.

I Think to do it effectively you need an amount of time where you can be as leisurely as possible.

There's no deadline and there's no, I've gotta make it from Chicago to St.

Louis by sundown to get to this place at this time.

I think you really need to be able to take your time and kind of like let the road take you where you need to go.

It feels like you need a mission though, ultimately.

Like there's a reason you need to be in San Francisco.

You have to meet somebody somewhere kind of loosely in a few weeks.

And then it's the, as you struggle on towards that mission, you meet weird characters that get in your way, but ultimately sort of create an experience.

I think having a loose deadline is good, but that's a beginning and an end point.

And what I mean is I don't want to have to be, all right, we're leaving say Boston on Sunday night.

And then from New York, we're going to go to Philly and we've got to be in Philly at 4.

A vague beginning and end is fine, but I think having very strict guidelines in between will rob you of certain experiences along the way.

If you have a timeframe to get from Philly to Indianapolis and some awesome shit starts to happen in Philly, do you really wanna have to cut it short because you gotta be in Indianapolis by sunup?

Why do you have to be anywhere by any time for any reason really?

But if we're talking about having a mission or the type of road trip, I just think it would be best to have it as loose and flexible as possible.

You gotta make hard deadlines and then break them.

Totally change the plans, disappoint people, break promises, that's the way of life.

Louis and all of a sudden you fell in love with a biker in New York.

I can appreciate that, but on a trip like that, I feel Like a trip with deadlines is for a different point in your life.

And at this point in my life, I don't want any of the deadlines.

Because it's not about meeting someone and disappointing them in St.

You wanna have enough time in what you're doing to make sure that you get the full breadth of every experience that you encounter.

How would you, you know, I don't think I've actually fully experienced Boston.

Like how, if you were showing up to a city for a week on this road trip?

A few years ago, I had an opportunity to move out of Boston and the thing that kept me here, no question about it, was the fact that I felt like I had a contract with my students And I did not, I felt like a great many of them took a leap of faith by joining my gym and like, you know, asking me to teach them what I know.

And when I had an opportunity to leave Boston, I thought of those people and I thought, I wanna fulfill my obligation to them.

So because I made a decision to stay here, I then that summer made a decision to endear myself to the city of Boston and I tried to find lots and lots of different things to do.

I can tell you that the coolest thing that I found to do in this city is, the MFA where they have like on Friday nights, they'll have like different exhibits and stuff and they'll have like little beer carts and food tents, and you can go do a painting class off in the, on the side, very cool night of things to do.

But in general, whenever I'm in a new city, I try not to pay attention to Google and I try not to do anything that I find on a travel site.

The best thing to do is to walk out of your hotel or wherever it is you're staying and find the most normal looking bar, have a drink and talk to a bartender.

And then you can experience that town the way that they experience it.

Even in a city where there are tons of tourist attractions, locals probably visit the same tourist attractions when they have visitors come from out of town, but you want to see how they view those places and how they visit them.

And you want to go to eat where they're going to eat.

Like, you know, you're going to, for the most part, the North End is not a place where I would take someone and say, hey, this is Boston's, the pinnacle of Boston dining, because it's very touristy.

There are a handful of really good restaurants there, but I wanna know where the, I wanna go to Bogie's Place.

I wanna know like the down low spots where-

It's like a little steakhouse in the back of Jam Curly's, exactly.

It's just a bar with like bar food, but I think they're like- It's not Boston?

Like, I don't know what the neighborhoods are called here, honestly, because they call, they have an area called downtown Boston, and I don't even know what the hell that means.

I think it's near the financial district.

But is there a difference between South Boston and Southie?

No, but like, you know, the mythical Southie.

I think the mythical Southie is something that's long gone now, and The term now actually is Sobo.

it's- It's changed what, who took over what?

What's the, you know, the goodwill hunting personality?

I came here right at the end of like, what was South Boston.

So when I got in my gym is in South Boston, the neighborhood was just starting to change.

So I think as gentrification happened and they started building more luxury condominiums, they were buying all these old businesses out, all the mom and pop businesses.

And I think that kind of changed the makeup of the community.

And it wasn't only because there was an influx of new young people with disposable income, it's because there's an exodus of the older people who kind of grew up and raised their families there because they were being offered humongous sums of money for their homes that they had bought like in the late 70s and early 80s so that they could develop those areas.

So you have a combination of the influx of new people and the exodus of the old, and now you just got this totally new neighborhood in its place.

You certainly have the love of the thing that's gone as well.

Yeah I think I don't want to pinpoint pin this on Boston because it's happening in all great cities.

As these areas become gentrified, what's happening is the personality and the character of the neighborhood is just being run out.

And I have nothing against people coming in and making money and things like that.

But when you do it at the expense of the culture, the character and the personality of the neighborhood, I mean, you're kind of standing on the shoulders of giants.

These are the people that came here and built these areas up.

It happens in all over New York, happened on the West coast.

What I love about Boston is not nearly as romantic as what it might've been 15 years ago and what I used to love about New York.

What I love about Boston is that it's walkable.

The food scene is on the rise here, but I think you're hard pressed to find the charm that people think of when they think of old Boston and old New England city?

People sometimes criticize like MIT like for the thing that it is now.

I tend to prefer to carry the flame of the greatness, the greatest moments of its history and like sort of enjoy that, the echoes of that in the halls of MIT.

In the same way in Boston, you think about the history And that history lives on in the few individuals.

Like you can't just look around where Boston is now and be like, what has Boston become?

I think it was always carried by a minority of individuals.

I think we kind of look back in history and think like times were greater in a certain kind of dimension back then, but that's because we remember, this is a ridiculous non-data driven assertion of mine, is we remember just the brightest stars of that history, And so we romanticize it.

But I think if you look around now, those special people are still living in Boston, for which Boston will be remembered as a great city in like 50 years.

I think you're probably right, but isn't there some sort of theory about the point that there's like a certain age in your life where things resonate differently to you.

Like, I think they've done studies where most people stop searching for new music after age 19.

Most dads you see like wearing super old clothes, like that's the style of the time period of the last great part of their life.

So like there's an evolution in, in people and it could also be the memories of where they live.

And when I was 17, of course my neighborhood was the best then because I was having the most fun.

And we always kind of look at things through that tint, I think.

And you're right, and I don't think there's anything wrong with the way cities are evolving now.

It's just not, I prefer the time of a mom and pop store, not a fabricated like a gastro pub that could just be like on a 4 lane super highway on your on your way out of Epcot center.

And it's actually owned by like some conglomerate.

But there's still the special places like I this takes us back to the road trip is maybe, I tend to romanticize the experiences of like the diners in the middle of nowhere.

What would you say makes for like, it feels like life is made up of these experiences that maybe on paper seem mundane, but are actually somehow give you a chance to pause and reflect on life with a certain kind of people, whether really close friends or complete strangers, maybe alcohol is involved in the middle of nowhere.

It seems like a road trip facilitates that if you allow it to.

Like what do you think makes for those kinds of experience?

I think in the context of a road trip, I think it's like hyper-localization and I think it is those experiences along the way with people.

And the people that you're with will call it the experiences differently depending on

The road trip you took was with somebody else or alone?

So I've driven up and down the East Coast several times.

When I drove from LA to New York, my friend was on the run from the cops.

Allegedly we were trying to get out of LA because, he was going to have to go away for a little while.

So we drove from LA and we just, you know, we're young kids.

We had no idea what we were doing and we drove east and then, you know, we had an unbelievable trip, mostly because we didn't really have a destination.

We didn't really have a time frame, thank goodness, because he got arrested again in Pennsylvania.

So we got kind of stuck there and then, you know, and then we drove back to LA when he got out in Pennsylvania.

But all the stops along the way were kind of like weird things.

So you're finding that like a little diamond in the rough place to eat the diner you talk about, like that place.

I think I was in Buenos Aires and the guy that I was with, he said, I know this quaint little spot around the corner.

And I thought the coolest thing in the world would be to be such a citizen of the world that you know these quaint little spots around the corner in like all these great cities like I know where to get this great chicken sandwich in Argentina I know where to get this great meal in Costa Rica I know where to get this super local like egg in another country I thought that that was really cool The ability to do that anywhere in the world.

Did you get closer with that guy through the trip?

I found that, so I took a trip across the United States with a guy friend of mine.

I was searching for meaning in life and he was searching for, what's the politically correct way of phrasing it, but just basically trying to sleep with every kind of woman that this world has to offer.

What's the difference between those 2 things?

Well, I guess you're searching for the different kinds of meanings.

I mean, I still think that you can't find meaning between a woman's legs, I suppose.

We grew closer with those experiences, but we've gotten in fights.

There was a lot of literal almost fights, and then we were close and there was silences, but then we were like brothers.

It was this whole weird journey of friendship that we went on.

I think anytime you spend that much time in a small space with another person, you're gonna have the different parts of the relationship will manifest themselves.

You'll have the periods of closeness, you'll have the periods of vulnerability where it's like, maybe you're driving through Denver and it's 3 in the morning and you talk about something you might not have otherwise talked about.

You'll have the periods where you don't want to see that motherfucker ever again.

He didn't, and depending could be because of anything.

But the guy that I drove twice with, we are still, we're still in contact.

But at that point in our lives, we were not, we never even contemplated the meaning of life.

We were about Probably more to the point of the friend that you drove with we were more about racking up experiences, whatever they were,

Yeah, I want to be able to retell this and it's got to sound cool Like I don't want to retell a story about yeah and then we drove through Alabama and they've got a lovely library and I checked out this book and I'm not interested in retelling that.

Do you remember any, oh, this is a kid's show.

Do you remember any stories that the kids would enjoy from those times that were profound in some kind of way?

There were some impactful moments on the beginning of our road trip where we had no money.

And as a couple of kids who knew nothing, we literally had to, we stopped in Vegas and we went to Circus Circus at the time they had $3 blackjack and we had like 12 bucks and my buddy was a kind of a degenerate gambler so he knew what was up.

I was just like kind of stuffing chips in my pockets making sure we could pay for the gas.

And just being at the point which is like a starting line And like we drove from LA to Vegas, which is only about 4 hours.

And being at the starting line and realizing like, we may not even like get off the starting line here.

We're gonna be 2 guys stuck in Vegas with no money.

We can't go West, cause you're gonna get pinched.

So, you know, that was kind of a profound thing where you just, it's a turning, it potentially could have been a turning point in our lives had we not made enough money to continue going East.

That's the beautiful thing about road trips when you're broke is like, in retrospect, everything turned out fine, but you're facing the complete darkness, the uncertainty of the possibilities laid before you.

And like, I don't know if you were confident at that time, but like I was really full of self-doubt.

Like just, all I could see is all the trajectories where you just screw up your life.

I'm a failure, like all these dreams I've had, I've never realized I'm a complete piece of shit, all those kinds of things.

I had literally no concept of consequence.

Immediate gratification was all I cared about.

Yeah, it did not even enter my mind in my early 20s that anything that I was doing at that point could reverberate for the rest of my life.

I think part of me didn't even think I'd make it this far.

And so I was not interested in like the long play.

I remember thinking like, why should I be acting now in a way that might impact a point in my life I never reach?

And yet now you are a man who searches for meaning in life, at least.

I would say, to put it another way, you think deeply about this world and in a philosophical context, while also appreciating the violence of hurting other friends of yours, right?

So why do you think, I mean, maybe there's a broader question there, but it's also a personal question.

It seems that people who fight for prolonged periods of time, like jiu-jitsu people and mixed martial arts people, even military folks, become over time philosophers.

Is there a parallel between fighting and violence and the philosophical depth with which you now have arrived, from the starting point of being the full existentialist of just living in the moment to being introspective human now.

I would say to that, being a soldier or a warrior hundreds of years ago is probably what started the marriage between martial arts and philosophy.

If you're constantly under someone else's charge and you're told to go out and walk in a line and, you know, overtake some Germanic tribe somewhere.

Your job is being a soldier there's on any given day, you might not come home.

So I think that you have to start your day by thinking deeply about how you've lived to that point and the people that are living in and around you and how you've treated them and I think that probably is what started the marriage of being kind of like a philosophical martial artist.

You've got to really like, on a daily basis, take stock of what's going on around you and inside you, because we all suffer with this kind of idea.

If today's my last day, did I do it right?

And we don't really do it so much nowadays because we're so comfortable, but if we were being marched out to war every day, I think you'd see people live a little bit differently.

You know, and you treat the people around you a little bit differently.

Do you think there's echoes of that in just even the sport of grappling and jiu-jitsu where you're facing your own mortality.

We don't really think of it that way, but.

To be honest, I think that a lot of people that train in a martial art in contemporary society, I don't consider them all martial artists.

I think just because you train a martial art does not mean you're a martial artist.

There are so many people that use martial arts as a form of exercise, and this little piece of self-concept, they use martial arts as a tagline in their Instagram bio.

It's something they do, it's not something they are.

And I think there's a big difference there.

There's a bunch of stuff mixed up in there because the Instagram thing is something you do for, it's also, it could be something you are for display versus who you are in the private moments of searching and thinking and struggling and all that kind of stuff.

Instagram is a surface layer that much of modern society operates in, which is really problematic, because there's that gap between the person you show to the world and the person you are in private life.

And if you make majority of your project, of the human project of your sort of few years on this earth, the optimization of the public Instagram profile, then you never develop this private person.

But it does seem that if you do Jiu Jitsu long enough, it's very difficult not to fall into like, this has become a personal journey, an intellectual journey.

Because if you get your ass kicked thousands of times, there's a certain point to where that, maybe it's like a defense mechanism, but that turns into some kind of deeply profound introspective experience versus like exercise, not yoga.

Yeah, so let me go back first and address the Instagram point, which I think there's a difference between people Whose Instagram is intrinsically tied to their profession and they have to put a specific profile out there and I think in general people who Truthfully are their businesses tied to their Instagram profile.

I think that most people Instagram is how they want to be seen.

And that's not always congruent with who you are, but I think there is a level of dishonesty there.

Like, this is how I want people to see me.

I'm going to put all this stuff in my Instagram bio, but that's really not me.

And when you do that, I think it's a little disingenuous, and you're right, you're never really gonna marry those 2 things together, and it gets tough.

Let me, sorry to interrupt, let me push back on something.

This is a good time to address the many flaws of the great and powerful John Clark.

Okay, let's go there, because it's interesting.

You strive so hard for excellence in your life and for extreme competence that you are visibly and physically off-put by people who have not achieved competence.

Do you think we should be nicer to the people who are those early, like you mentioned, a person who first picks up an art, picks up, becomes vegan, starts doing CrossFit, started doing Jiu-Jitsu for the first time and create that as their, you know, they're struggling through this like, who am I?

And they're really overly proud and it's kind of ridiculous.

And you in your wise chair of seeing many battles.

I tend to, I'm learning to give those folks, not to mock them, and to sort of give them a chance to do their ridiculousness, because I think I was that too.

I wanna be clear about what you mean when you say a level of competence.

Now, I've never won a world championship.

I've never, you know, there are plenty of things in my life where I've not achieved what most people would consider to be the penultimate level of success.

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John Clarke: The Art of Fighting and the Pursuit of Excellence | Lex Fridman Podcast #143