Georges St-Pierre: The Science of Fighting | Lex Fridman Podcast #179

the following is a conversation with george st pierre considered by many to be the greatest fighter in the history of ufc and mma but even more than that one of the greatest martial artists ever quick mention of our sponsors all form expressvpn blinkist theragun and the information check them out in the description to support this podcast as a side note let me say that getting the chance to hang out with george talk to him on the podcast record a quick self-defense video that i'll release soon all while both of us wearing suits was one of the most memorable days of my life in setting all this up i talked to joe rogan and originally we couldn't schedule a chat with him and george on the jre which allowed me to pretend for a brief time that george came down to austin just to see me who the hell am i in truth him and joe probably conspired to make me feel special but that's the point it's inspiring to see george and joe who are at the top of their field treat others as equals as human beings no matter who they are even silly russians in a suit meeting george was an honor for me beyond words this is a lex friedman podcast and here's my conversation with my long time martial arts hero and now my friend mr george sampire in your fighting career where you're more motivated by the love of winning or the fear and hatred of losing i like to win better than i hate to lose because if it would not have been the case i would never have fought in the first place because i don't like to fight at all but you talked about the anxiety the fear that you experience leading up to a fight so to you ultimately the reason to go through that difficult process is because it feels damn good to have your hand raised there is that there is also the fact that martial art i've been introduced when i was very young and it's probably the best thing i can do in my life fighting it's that's what i do best also it provides me of freedom of access of things that most of people do not have but all that as a price and a lot of money i made a lot of money of course with it i was maybe predisposed with certain abilities i met incredible mentors throughout my life i worked really hard and of course i had a lot of chances the the stars were all aligned and in order to to kept keep that those advantages of freedom money and glory and excess of things that most people don't have and have the these dream life that i have i had to sacrifice myself and fight in order to keep it it's very hard to understand because i also believe most fighters are not like me they a lot of guys because i corner a lot of guys and it seems to me that they love their job they enjoyed to to go fight in a cage i love to train i love the science of fighting the sport the to to be in good shape the confidence that training in mixed martial art give me however i do not like the feeling of uncertainty the stress that i have not knowing if i will be badly injured or humiliated or winning the fight it's to me unbearable and it that's what takes the most out of me more than brain damage more than anything that's what takes the most out of me but the thing you get from it is the freedom that you get because uh because of the money but because of the celebrity because of everything that comes with it so you can be the best version of yourself because of fighting but at the same time you've said that quote i don't believe there's pleasure in life i believe there's only a relief from pain we have to suffer to be on top so isn't there something to just the suffering in itself just doing really difficult shit just to get to the top to explain that and so people can relate to it because not everybody is a fighter i think the best example i can [Music] gives is let's say you're you haven't eat for a long time and you're craving right so you're suffering and then when it's time to eat finally you're about to eat your favorite dish it's gonna taste so much better so that's why i believe there's always a some sort of sacrifice before the pleasure and the more sacrifice you do like they say in fighting the bigger the risk bigger is the reward and i feel that's that's how it is for me yeah i feel that with uh i've started fasting a little bit in the past couple of years and uh there's nothing as amazing as a delicious meal or anything actually anything any food when you haven't eaten for several days it's it's kind of incredible uh it's not incred it's not incredible in this simple way of finally i get to eat it's you get to truly experience the the beauty of of what it is to be alive like that little piece of food you see all the flavors you you you feel just the experience of it is uh ultimately of gratitude of how awesome it is to be alive but when you eat many times a day and you're pigging out and you don't get to experience that and it's fascinating it's re it's really like fasting is one of the most accessible things for people i think to experience that kind of uh pairing of hardship to pleasure i agree and in my case it changed my life on a good good way i cannot recommend it to people because everybody is different but after my to to fight michael bisping my last fight was against uh the champion in the heavier weight class that i used to compete at so i thought that if i would gain weight it would increase my performance yeah and i struggled a lot to gain weight i gained a lot about eight to 10 10 pounds normally i walk around 185 pounds and for that fight i was walking around 195 however i forced myself to eat like six times a day i was on a very strict diet and i didn't feel it didn't feel right to me because i feel like i i was carrying like a little bit like i was carrying a bag on my shoulder and i think it was a bad idea for me because when i did the weight the weigh-in and i i go went on a scale at 185 i couldn't go back to my initial weight that was 180 195 that i worked so hard for several months to get there so i was 190 pounds but i couldn't get back and the morning of the fight i i i got i got sick i had like uh we didn't know what what it was and the beginning because in order to know to find out what it was i needed to do what they call a colonoscopy they put a camera inside of you and to do that they give you um [Music] something that makes that empty you and i was trying to gain weight not to lose weight so i i told myself i'm gonna wait after the fight whatever it is because it was pretty bad it was blood and i i didn't know what i was i was very concerned concerned i thought i had maybe cancer i was freaking out so i said i'm gonna do that fight and then after right away i'm gonna make a checkup so i did that fight everything went well i won the fight i went back home i did a colonoscopy and i i got diagnosed with ulcer colitis then i got on very severe medication to get better and i'm not a big fan of medication i was trying to look for more natural way to to to get better and i found out about fasting and it really changed my life i met dr jason fong was one of the one i'm one of the world authority of fasting he treat diabetes patient with fasting and he gave me a program of fasting and it really changed my life and right away what i did is i went in in a cat scan to see the difference because it was right after my fight with michael bisping and i i did the cat scan so i had my uh muscle mass bone density uh fat percentage water retention it's pretty amazing it can show you which harm has more muscle than it than the other it's very precise and i did it like uh two two months after yeah so i i started doing um time restricted eating uh sixteen eight but right that right away when i started i did three days water fast and the doctor jason funk says because i like to train during those days i cons i consume himalayan salt to make sure because when you sweat there's a lot of minerals to to make sure you don't depleted your mineral and um when i went when i compare the two results in the cat scan i found out my biggest concern was to lose muscle mass i found out that i did not lose muscle mass instead of losing it i it increased a little bit even though my weight on the scale was lighter i i kept the same muscle mass even increases a little bit my bone density increases a little bit my water retention is the biggest thing that decrease so the my inflammation and my fat percentage so basically the by looking at the data i found out that by eating so much trying to gain weight for to fight michael bisping i only increases my water retention which is not good because it's like dead weight and inflammation on you so what uh was the actual process of fasting she said 16 8 time restricted so intermittent fasting but you also mentioned the three out of the three day water fast what did that feel like and you also said training during the three day yeah how did that feel oh can you give me some details of absolutely this is fascinating so i do three days water fast uh four times a year nice for me i do it everybody is different but for me i do it after uh new year's because during the the early days that's when i i eat bad foods and i drink i see it more like a like a cleansing you know like a like like a detox so to speak mental too like psychologically yes i do it after the new years right before the summer cut for the beach yeah yeah yeah after the summer because of the summer i've been partying a little bit sometime let myself go and right before the the holidays and um i've tried the doc dr fungi says to me say george everybody is different because i'm a very active person and everybody has a different genetics so so for me i i feel that three days is the sweet spot because i still train during those three days the first day the first two days i don't change nothing i i train regularly on every on my regular schedule however on the on the third day i modify a little bit i i do something more [Music] more easy and that's how i do it and i've tried before because i when i say three days is my sweet spot i've tried to go up to five days but the problems is after my third days i i found out that i had a big problem sleeping i i get into a hyperactive mode yeah they call that the hunter-gatherer uh mode you know like you you you you your brain i mean it's amazing your creativity is at its peak but you cannot sleep very well and sleeping for me i think it's very important so that's why i do three days for me it's my sweet spot that's interesting you're right it's the four or five days when you start see sleep is not important for me so the creativity is really important so it's very interesting with the places your mind goes after a few days you're right but uh i mean what does it do to your mind so you mentioned your body likes it in terms of training does it um do you find that it helps you focus and think i mean you're one of the great strategic thinkers in terms of martial arts does it help with learning does it help with thinking does it help with strategizing and all that well unfortunately i got into fasting after i retired i wish i would have i really wish people asked me would you have done it during the time that you competed and the answer is yes i think we live in a society that we're bombarded by publicity oh buy this eat protein this that and fasting nobody makes money with it because there's nothing to sell you know i think that's why a lot of people have not heard about it and even my for myself if someone would have talked to me about fast the benefits of fasting when i was training before i got sick i would probably have ignored ignored him because it i'm not you know it was it's hard to believe sorry it sounds ridiculous yes it's going to help your mind and you're going to gain muscle potentially exactly and and perhaps people have talked to me about it but i kind of it went in one of my hair and got out from the other side you know but uh it really changed my my life and dying i i was diagnosed with ulcer colitis and it helps me get rid of all my symptoms what i do is i know a lot of people have ulcer colitis and and for me i cannot recommend it to to other people because everybody is it's different but for me i made a a lot of research of how people from those circulations got better and i found out that a lot of people that got that condition get better in the natural way fasting eating fermented food collagen and like bone broth and stuff all i got and it made a huge difference in my life i just wish i would have known that before so do you have a specific diet wise stuff you like so you know i've recently another ridiculous sounding thing but it makes me feel really good it's very low carbs so you know keto even carnivore it sounds ridiculous it doesn't make any sense but it makes me feel really good even for performance is rogan has an influence you know he's a no carnivore diet i was influenced actually by people yeah well he there's i'll tell you where cause i was doing it before he was doing it uh is there's it was uh popular in the endurance athlete community where it was fat adapted athletes it's people who insane people who run 50 miles 100 miles they figured out that they could fuel their body by with fat they can go to fat as the source of energy as opposed to carbs so and i remember hoping that i'll be able to learn how to run 50 miles and so on i've never done more than 22 but it i i just remember switching away from carbs and feeling really liberated like i wasn't thinking about food as much i'm able to eat once a day and feel really good i mean it i think every everybody's body is different but i think carbs make me lazy maybe it's because uh yeah it's the crash but also just psychologically something it uh it forces me to also think about food too much like it starts becoming you know art just like you said our society is so much about food there's so many so much advertisement and so much of our social life is about food and so it's very easy to live life like live day to day thinking when is the next meal like what am i gonna eat for lunch what am i gonna eat for dinner what am i gonna eat for breakfast and uh if you're not careful that's going to get in the way of you doing cool shit for like liberating yourself and thinking like what am i actually passionate about in this life like creating and forgetting to eat those kinds of things and still being able to fuel your body i don't know it's been fascinating to to figure out like later in life that carbs aren't necessary to function well it makes me think like we don't know anything about nutrition that's right yes you know um personally i don't think i could have a diet without carbs i love chocolate too much for me eating it's a it's a pleasure of life i love my carbs i love my sugar however if you talk about that i don't have a specific diet but recently i what i'm trying to do is the days that i do not work out i only eat once that's kind of my rules plus i try to respect sixteen eight and do my three day fast four time years and but the rest of the thing i i i i let myself lose because i i don't think i would be happy if i if i uh if i if i don't give myself the the the right to to eat for me personally i love to eat so much next and um you talk about diet carnivore diet is very interesting because i a few years ago i went to africa in masai mara and it's a tribe in in east africa and i went to visit them i did a safari and i talked to them and these guys they their diet is 99 carnivore they that's crazy and you should see they're very beautiful people shredded like yeah some people would say oh it's genetic i'm like yeah maybe it's genetic but i mean and think about the eskimos also that like most of their diet is on on fish right they so i believe it can be done you know like i believe it can be done like an exclusive carnivore diet and i i think i'm gonna try it pretty soon just to have the experience you know to see how it feels like where you're gonna hang out with joe be careful bringing it up because he'll convince you to uh forever switch to carnivore definitely he loves it i mean but just like you i think he loves food so he's he can't ever stay on carnivore it was funny because we went to an italian restaurant together and i still only eat meat like i love um i love the constraints of discipline that's that's partially why i like carnivore i like saying no to food that is delicious [Laughter] but a part of the problem is that i don't know how to moderate you said chocolate i don't know how to have one chocolate is that something you're able to do have like in moderation no it's when it when i have an opportunity i do it i don't have any i'm an extremist person alex i i that's the thing i when i when i have a chance i i like i i just eat i go too much and that's why i like about my life you know that's what i like about fasting because probably if i would not have discovered fasting eating chocolate would give me cramps and all sorts of problems yeah because people on ulcer colitis normally they cannot eat chocolate they cannot drink alcohol but i believe because i'm fasting that's the reason why i'm i'm medication medicine medication free i can eat whatever i want whenever i want but i have to do that that fasting you know and now it becomes to it became to a point that it's no longer hard for me it's it's like normal i don't even force myself yeah i don't it's easy you know what i mean some of my friend thinks i'm think i'm i'm insane you know but i tell them it's like with when you get used to it it becomes like an abbot and i'm and i know that hunter-gatherer like our ancestor did not eat three times a day it's it's it's not true they they ate when they they could and when they eat they they they they feed themselves as much as they can until that because the next time because they didn't know when they could eat again right so it's uh i think that's how we're we're built you know to to to have this similar lifestyle if we could take a step back to the discussion about fear a little bit so mike tyson talks about this process of him walking to the ring he sounds similar to you in many ways of the anxiety and the fear that he experiences and uh he has this uh sort of story that he tells about walking to the ring and being supremely afraid but as he walks and gets closer and steps in he finds the confidence and becomes supremely confident i think he calls himself like a god i feel like a god in the ring is is do you go through a similar process of finding the confidence well it yes and um i usually i use a james lange theory they they did so what i do is because i'm i'm i'm not afraid to admit that i'm afraid and uh in the beginning of my of my career i really thought i asked myself because i was very good in mixed martial but i i i really thought i wasn't made for this because the idea of fighting didn't was was didn't make me happy it's something like i i was i was forced to do in order to keep that lifestyle that i have and achieve my goal perhaps one day to make enough money to retire and you know that that was my dream but when i was looking around the gym where i was training most of my training partner they were happy they were excited and sometimes i corner i corner a lot of guys and they're happy and they're in the locker room they don't react the same way i do some perhaps does but if you see me in the locker room like when i get like my last fight with michael bisping just to give you an example in my last fight with michael bisping because it's fresh it's the one that is the most recent and but it's always the same thing my last fight and my thing i get in the locker room i had like three guys that i trained with mickey gall emin zahabi and uh joseph duffy they all lost it was like like my locker room was basically cursed you know the when you're in the locker room and people from your locker room leave for a fight and then they come back it's kind of a momentum you know you you shake and yeah good job now it's my you know it's kind of a team brotherhood sort of thing so the the the the atmosphere in my locker room was pretty bad it was like uh going to a you know like a funeral so i was very scared and ever before every fight i i asked myself i i asked myself always shit what the hell i'm doing here why did i choose to come back oh my god and i'm freaking out however i'm putting on a mask like i'm acting because if i don't do that it will reflect on my coaches and if my coach my the confidence of my coaches is affected it will reflect reflect on me so i need to feel strong i need to make them believe that i'm excited to be there and i'm happy to be there so this sort of play start when i get when i first step in the locker room even though i feel completely different but that's how i play it normally the day the fight day i never felt feel 100 i always feel exhausted tired my highs are hitching because i don't sleep enough the few nights before because i'm constantly rehearse rehearsing scenarios that might happen and i find so mentally it's not that i'm not on top but you keep all that to yourself i keep it to myself and i'm lying to everybody around me but everybody knows you know for us john denahar they they know freddie roach they've been with me for a long time so they know what's going on but at least i'm lying to them i'm like i'm feeling great so and seeing all my training partner like very disappointed because they lost their fight some were were badly hurt as well it was hard so and i remember i get i get more i get i start to warm up and everything and as you start to warm up you become a different person because you know certain we know that certain posture and yoga can have affects your men your mental state but it's i would say it's a little bit the same thing in in fighting you know like when you start hitting the pads you your your muscle memory your instincts comes back and and you remember that you're good at this you know and your confidence start to grow and as seeing your trainers holding the pad and repeating your moves it makes you also remember all the sacrifice you have done through your your training camp and confidence come from how you prepared yourself and even you're afraid you can be confident confident in the same time being afraid and being confidence is two different thing and before every fight just right before i walk in it's when i'm scared i go in in the bathroom and i look at myself in the mirror i used to have a bandana and a ghee but now i it no more i didn't have this this for my last fight because of the the the new reebok deal they had but i did the same rehearsal that i always do i look at myself in the mirror and i start to complement myself like even if i don't believe it i'm starting to trying to believe it as i am i'm finding all the reason why i'm going to win the fight and and all my trainer knows that before every fight when when the guy from the ufc goes and steppen maroon says saint pierre are you up next i always take a few minutes to do that that same rehearsal and i tell myself i'm gonna win this fight because i'm better and and i'm very cocky about myself i'm telling all the reasons that i'm gonna you know when i'm i got a better team i made more sacrifice you know i'm i'm faster i'm more powerful way more athletic my fighting iq is better than him i got a strategy on point that he's never going to be able to keep up with and and this and that and i'm and be i was telling myself hey i'm going to show these young kids how things should be done you know i'm trying to boost myself yeah yeah try to to boost yourself and you start to believe in it you become a different person so when you walk out the bathroom now rock and roll now i really believe it for real you know like i'm still scared but i believe it for real and that's the transformation that happened for me right there and from that from now from from there to the fight it's until the fight is over it's called i call it cruise control because i do not have time to think in a fight if you're trying to think you're missing the opportunity so that's how i see it for myself so at that point you stop thinking and you just go cruise control autopilot trust yourself you know trust yourself because you you repeated all the scenarios you know so everything that you have done it's it's inside that your computer your computer your brain is programmed to react accordingly to certain situations and the it's not the the night of the fight that you you'll you'll tell yourself oh finally i'm gonna do this if you do this now now if you have not practiced it before you're screwed it the preparation the repetition that makes it happen you know what about like the really difficult moments in a fight where you are tested to your limits essentially usually it's cardio related exhaustion right where you have to ask yourself that same questions like why the hell am i doing this yeah do you do do you experience those or are you able to ride through the autopilot and if you do like what do you do in those moments never in a fight when i'm in a fight when it's the the when the fight is is on i never change my mind i go until the end however for example my first fight would be japan i had a terrible first round so i had to switch gear that happened sometime but it's part of my plan i always have a plan b plans plan a plan b plan c you need to have that if fighters goes into a fight thinking oh what i'm gonna do this is this and they don't have a plan b if this doesn't work that's mean they're not well prepared if you talk to me before every fight i can like in 30 seconds give you my old strategy you know for for bj penn my first fight would be japan was i'm gonna keep it standing up keep the fight from the outside you know because i'm faster than him then the fight would be japan's start i found out that i was not faster than him and i found out that his reaction time was better than than than mine so i got beat up the first round and i got the bloody nose and everything so my plan b was now i'm gonna wrestle him you know i'm gonna wrestle him and you know make him tired and trying to put him down and that's how i beat him because i switch gear you know but if you can't do that if you cannot find a way to become the perfect nemesis to your opponent you you you might win if you fight but you you're gonna find a uh you're gonna fight someone sooner or later that will that will give you a lot of uh uh a lot of trouble so that's where the anxiety pays off you're anticipating all the ways it goes wrong so you develop the plan b and plan c hi you know we talked a lot with uh like john donahue who you work with it's interesting i don't think i've heard him talk about plan b and plan c he usually has a really clear plan a an entire system of plan a i don't think i've heard him we've had uh we had a a good discussion about it in um uh over some cheeseburgers and he's uh he was kind of espousing the value of mastering escapes so when you find yourself in bad situations being exceptionally good at finding ways out of those bad situations and that's a way of dominance there's nothing there's no better way to dominate your opponent according to him than to show that they can't possibly hurt you no matter how bad the position is uh it's like it's a as opposed to a physical dominance it's a psychological dominance it's very interesting but i wonder if he has plan b and plan c in his mind too you know in uh mixed martial arts sometimes it's like in science something you can make a mis like a mistake you know like every human can make mistakes you know there's certain sport or a certain situation that you if there's a mistake made you're you're you're that's it exactly sometimes it's the case in mma but sometimes you able to redeem yourself and uh if you look the fight with bj pen one that i had which was probably one of the most competitive fight i and it was probably the it was the fight that i got the most damage and i was messed up it took me three days like two three days to recuperate from that fight i was really damaged and my first fight versus my second fight i made a lot of adjustment because i i've learned from my first fight and also i had a guy one thing people don't know like they talk about fighters having secret weapons see for me my secret weapons was not like some is that they used like certain like different things for me was knowledge i had a guy in montreal he was measuring frames he's not a scientist is he's a friend of uh ferrous and i and what he does he you watch fight and he measure frames the way he does it is when you watch a fight and one of the guy throw a punch he cut the picture by frame the video by frame so he's able to see which fighter has better reaction time than others and bjpen he found out that bjpen penn evolved the ufc roster at the time when he was in his prime he had probably the best reaction time of all according to him lyoto meshido was the second one but bj penn was the first one so i knew that if i would try to go first because i always been the fastest guy normally when i fight someone but when i fought big japan i tried to go first and he was always able to like i never was never able to to touch him with my jab and he came back with a counter punch however because of what he told me i knew that big japan has a very fast reaction time but had a very poor reset time to him the way he described it to me is like your nervous system is like a muscle bj pen was so fast but he's like more like a sprinter so what i did the second fight i when i fought with japan i made him flinch like i fake a lot so i make him react and flinch so all that that reaction time that he used to flinch was not used properly to avoid my punches so he i burn i i load up his his nervous system with a lot of information and fit and fake and to make him flinch and pretending i was kicking and wrestling so he got overwhelmed and he got tired very very fast so that's how i beat him people sometimes they don't know really what's the strategy behind the thing they only see the physical part but when you fight someone if i fight you i look at you in the eyes there's a lot of things that going on between you and i i can look down here pump jab you in the face the audience will not see this little detail but you will see it and that's what it makes the magic during a fight the relation that you have with the opponent you know like like the mental game what you you make him believe those little things i use a lot of those if you talk to a lot of my opponent they'll tell you like i use a lot of these little thing you know like i look down a banana i go i go up or i'm pretending i want to attack you so i'm i'm making flinch but in reality i'm just doing this because i want to rest i want to recuperate and i'm tired how much is you know people talk about that with poker for example how much is the value of this you know so like some people argue that poker is more about the betting you know it's just the money it's just how much you bet and so on so that would be more like uh the analogy there with with fighting would be just strictly the physical movement of your body and then a lot of people argue that there's a lot here in the way you look in the little movements in the face so do you think there's do you think you're communicating with your opponent when you look at them there's no way to know for sure 100 and i'm by no no mean psychic nothing like that and i don't believe in that at all the only thing is i know to looking through the eyes of my opponent when he's afraid and when he gives up on me yeah i've been accused very often in my career to not take enough risk to not finish my opponent but the reason why i didn't finish my opponent is because i saw in his eyes that he gave up he gave me the fight and i'm winning the fight so it's not up to me it's not to me to make it to try to sacrifice myself trying to finish him perhaps if i do that i will open up from for him to to to capitalize on my mistake it's up to him to make a risk so people sometimes they they don't understand that this is the art of fighting my friend you know like if i'm winning the fight like in aki and isaac if you're winning the game and it's the third period it's at the end of the third period you're not gonna take out your goaltender trying to score another goal because winning uh uh five to three or five to four is the same thing same thing in mma we make a living out of this and sometimes you know as sad as bad as it can be you want to save yourself for another day you know you want to minimize the damage but if he knows he's losing the fight it's up to you him to take the risk it's not up to me so i'm having i'm a good counter fighter i use a lot of my attack or counter strike or uh reactive techno proactive take down that's my specialty so i'm not gonna i i'd have no desire to sacrifice myself trying to to trying to finish my opponent if he want to if if if perhaps i might give him the opportunity to capitalize on me it's it's not it's not smart to do that and very often when i fight someone i can read him i see the fear in his eyes now i'm like i got you now he's very desperate that doesn't mean i have to put my guard down because he's getting he's going to be desperate but i know i'm beating you and i know i'm beating you i'm just going to do what i need you know if i have a chance of course i'll knock him out but i'm not gonna try to sacrifice myself to knock you out and if you do that maybe one day you'll make a mistake and you'll get dropped and you're you'll you'll tell yourself i shoot i just got brain damage maybe i'm never gonna come back the same maybe you know i i ruin my career or you know it's a it's a very serious game that we're playing it's very dangerous in the face of that risk i mean uh mike tyson talked about you know when the opponent looks away he knows he's got him right that uh that he's broken for a person like me who has trouble making eye contact with people there's there's truth to that i mean there there's truth to that that there's there's an animal nature to us looking away i mean you could see that the way the body language the way the eyes move between two animals going at it uh in in the wild when like two lions fight or to whatever fight there's a certain beta move when you've you've been defeated yes or one thing when i know that that when it happened one of the sign is when i just like made a faint and the guy flinched like crazy that's mean he's really scared of me it's a little bit like you're you're you're you're doing this that guy flinch a little bit or you're doing this he's flint like that's mean you hurt him and he doesn't want to get hurt again so he's really trying to run away and not not winning the fight anymore but not losing sort of surviving the the five round and it's hard to to finish a guy who does doesn't want to fight a guy who's not fighting anymore to win and he's fighting to not lose and the proof of that if you don't believe me just look the reign of all the greatest champion in ufc i don't care who they are jon jones or uh like you could clearly see that in the beginning of their rank they could you know finish a lot of their opponents the same as me in the beginning i was finishing all of my opponent but there's a time that the entire ufc roster is studying you and they found ways to perhaps not beating you but they found a way to navigate to the the fight in a way that they minimize the damage you know what i mean so it's a big difference between fighting to win and fighting to not lose you said that there's a difference between a fighter and a martial artist so now we were talking about fighting you're considered by many to be one of the greatest fighters of all time but you've said that there's a difference between a fighter and a martial artist a fighter is training for a purpose he has a fight i'm i'm a martial artist i don't train for a fight i train for myself i'm training all the time my goal is perfection but i will never reach perfection so what do you does it mean to be a martial artist martial artist is because that lifestyle that i have has been introduced to me and the seed has been planted to my mind a long long time ago by my father i am i do not train because i have a fight i will always train even now it kind of amused me that to see that a lot of people because i'm still training because i love the science of fighting i do not like to fight but i love the science of it and i will always do it as long as i can do it people think i'm going to make a comeback and everything i'm i'm about to get to have 40 years old you know like it's i have you know like well mike i want to fight in a cage at 40 years old i mean some people have done it they did it very well but i i'm not one of them i'm i feel a little bit to me that and you never say never i feel like to me like it's a little like a kid that you play with this train when he's young like he's five years old brother six years old or seven years old eight years old and then i was like what the hell i'm doing here and i'm too old for this like i said i i have done it you know and and and i got out of it on top and i'm i'm healthy which is the most important thing right now i'm touching wood and i'm i'm wealthy i beat the game you know what i mean in a way like i that's not to be cocky but i did it and i wish more more fighters could do the same thing i wish but it's unfortunate because a lot of them they stay there and hang out for too long and and they get badly hurt they get beaten and and and broken you know and they finish broke as well because the lifestyle you have when you're a pro athlete it's crazy you know it's it's it's unbelievable however everything that goes up in life goes down and you need to plan your future you know so for for me what if some guys have the same mentality as me and they're watching us right now i would say if you do it because you're just good at it you like the money the the advantage the freedom that it gives you but you don't necessarily like to fight when you're done you finish on top you know go go cash out and get out of here walk away this is hard to do however lex it's not everybody that does it for that reason some people generally love to fight love to compete so they do it because i love it you know or they do it because of the money but if you don't love it if you don't like to fight because it's very stressful and you don't enjoy you you enjoy the training perhaps but you don't like to fight you do it because it's part of what you need to do in order to keep that lifestyle yeah and you know like you don't need the money get out of here man if you're in your you're in your prime get out of here because if you don't you you you'll hurt your own legacy your damage your your health it's it's very sad and and it's a it's a it's a sad business you know what i mean i i it's like a lot of uh one one of the place where is the the mo the mo one of the most happiest place for me to go and the most the saddest place for me to go it's on the gym to try sorry montreal because it's one of the happiest place for me to go because i can go train and do what i love to do but it's also a very sad place for me because after when i'm about to leave there's always a bunch of young kid that comes or guys that are around 30 33 years old and they come to me hey george you have some advice for me and i look at them and if they're my friend they're real close friend of mine i'll tell them the truth in their face and i've done it many times and it was not well received but if they're not my friend i have to you know you know there's always an advice about fighting and i answer their their question it's my pleasure but the truth if they they want me to tell the truth the big majority of them i would tell them i said listen man you're in a maybe a three like an a on a losing streak of three fight you're 30 33 years old you know i think you should think about doing something else in your life you know have other goals you know because you're not gonna make it and you know i've seen that movie before and it's a very sad ending and i'm i'm sad to tell you the truth because you're not going to make the money just choose some but if i tell them that they're going to be angry at me because they're going to be like oh you you make it and you think i cannot make it so it's kind of they're going to think i'm cocky but i was lucky to make it you know what the star were all annoying but at one point you need to be able to to have a plan b you know like like some parent they come to see me with their kids hey this is the future world champion and then in ufc and what advice would you give him i always tell the same thing and it doesn't not make everybody happy when i said i say i go to the case say are you good at school say stay at school school is very important for you stay educated yeah do boxing martial arts a great sport stay in shape but don't put your eggs all in the same basket and the parents sometimes are angry when i'm not angry but i can see in their eyes they're like they kind of surprise and it's not because i made it that i will tell their kid to follow the same path that i did i went to school too i i've studied i i dropped off school when i had my first world championship fight against matt hughes but before that i was school so i had another you know a a a a another way to go if things would not have gone the same the the way i wanted but the problem and i'm saying that it's not only about boxing in mma i'm talking about hockey basketball baseball same same thing maybe it's the one on the 100 000 that make it and i'm saying i'm saying that make it when i'm saying make it that's mean they can retire and have enough money for the rest of his life because it's a sad story the only people only heard about the people that makes it but a lot of fighter even a ufc champion in boxing champion even in football basketball i don't i don't care the big names when they retire they have zero they're bankrupt my friend and it's a very sad sad story and a sad reality that most people are not aware of but having other paths in life actually can also increase the chance of you dominating and like reaching the highest peak uh in your main thing i mean jimmy pedro i don't know if you know who that is as a judo coach in uh in america he was uh he says that to all of his athletes is to make sure that you go he has a lot of you know kayla harrison two-time olympic gold medalist he has a lot of uh olympic medalists but basically there's something about going to school like having a forget school any other avenue in life that gives you the freedom to go all out in your main like that you know you're doing it for the right reasons you're not stuck it clears the mind to where you're free to be the best in the world yes as opposed to kind of you have to i mean different people are motivated by different things so sometimes some people like having their back to the wall and that's the only option they have but most people i think excel when you have other options i think it's a distraction and i think it's important to have a distraction uh when you say that i think about one of my coach john danaher he put his academic background experience into jiu jitsu and that for me that's why he's the best teacher i ever had he's incredible he started teaching me when i even couldn't speak much english at the time and i was able to communicate and understand you know that's how good he is but i i truly believe that most of athlete especially in sport like mixed martial art trained way too much if i could go back and talk to a young george i would tell him say you do way too much volume you train way too hard train smarter it's more important and i think sometimes we underestimate the benefit of uh recuperation because you i think we assimilate the information that we learn during a training when we recuperate and not during the training itself and this whole mentality of harder heavier you know like like it's it's good for someone who's lazy but if you're an elite athlete most of the time you know like you're not always but most of the times because you're not lazy and a lot of guys sometimes they're elite athlete champions and you hear people say oh i can't believe he's very gifted but he doesn't work but perhaps it's not really because perhaps it's because we don't understand perhaps he's doing the right thing and it's us who's working too much and too hard that's what i think there's a guy i train with he's uh he made me think about about it his name is mansoor bernawi he's going to be a future star is he's an incredible fighter he trained once a day and he asked me some time advice when he came in montreal he's from france you'll hear about him he's he's very good and i i saw him in the morning at tristar and i said okay i'll see you perhaps later in the other 20s oh no i only train once a day and he kind of wait for me to give him like like like not not an approval but like to see how i react or or you know i don't know it was kind of a strange feeling but i i told myself at that point i kind of i had an awakening and i and i told myself man maybe he's doing the right thing because a lot a lot of people would say for example oh that's a lazy way of doing it but perhaps it's the best way to do it i'm not saying training once a day is the the best way to do it that's what i'm saying i'm saying that everybody is different but for him it works beautifully and i wouldn't change anything you know like if i would be him because he is improving like crazy yeah and ultimately the bigger picture there is to do something that everyone else's uh says is stupid it's like the fasting thing that that a lot of people would say a lot of nutritional experts would say that that's that's a dumb way you know if you want to be an mma fighter you should be eating like many times a day you should be starting every day with oatmeal you should be carbing up constantly but that's not necessarily true for everybody and it's possible i'm sure there's actually now a few mma fighters that are carnivore only it's possible i i used to eat right before training and i it didn't bother me however now i my first training that i do normally in average around noon 11 a.m i'm uh i'm i haven't eat anything when i do my first training and it feels to me that i'm much i'm much more clear and much more clear in my mind i'm much more creative i feel better yeah yeah it's a big difference i just wish i would have known that before you know well it's fascinating the role of the mind and all this how important is it for your mind to be clear to really think deeply i there's a there's a judoka american named travis stevens i remember he said something that the right kind of practice is when your mind is exhausted at the end of it that you were constantly thinking through things like your body shouldn't be exhausted first your mind should be exhausted first it's really fascinating so people think about training hard you know a successful practice is where you walk away just overwhelmed how much you have to think it's fascinating framing of of a successful practice it's true travis stephen was one of my main training partners when i got ready for my fight with nick diaz and carlos conditt he drove every friday from i believe boston it's like a six hour drive drive to the gym in montreal train with us an hour and a half drive back he's got such an amazing discipline i was so happy for him when he won the medal at the olympic game man what a well-deserved uh you know uh accomplishment it's unbelievable it paid off you know i'm i was so happy for him and every time we we got to the the gym it was waiting for me in a in in in the kneeling position like a soldier i was like my god this guy he's made of steel you know and and after training i always have to offer him i say hey travis i know you you you like to train with that because in montreal they have very good judo team nicholas gill and all that that was guy and i say if you want to stay i'll get you the hotel you know like every anything you want is like no no i gotta go back i have another training later i'm like not only that he trained with with us he had to go back because he had another training i'm like this is insane and he's gone through a huge number of injuries so he's also an innovator because i mean it's difficult to say but for american judo there's not many high-level judoka so if you want to be the like fight with the best in the world you're you have to be alone it's a lonely journey actually it's kind of sad uh it's much easier to be in japan where everybody's a killer when you're alone at it it's uh it's a difficult journey and you know it's it's funny we talked about kind of there's some sports where a mistake is um that's it you know you can't recover from a mistake i think judo oftentimes is one of those sports and added on top of that is um the olympics only every four years and travis's story he's the reason why uh when i saw him in 2008 as i i started martial arts uh i switched from like wrestling and street fighting to doing jiu jitsu and judo and i just saw so much guts and the in 2000 i might be messing up the years here but in the next olympics he fought and he lost on just the referee call yeah and just he went to war and he just so much guts and just everything on the line and to lose and then to still persevere through all their injuries to all that through incredibly difficult training sessions to go another four years and then compete and then win a medal i mean that guy is just and like he clearly could have been very successful he's also an incredible jiu jitsu competitor so he could have switched to that but he's stuck in in a lot of sport when you're in elite like for example in canada i saw he's the number one sport in the country kids when they're in elite when they're young they get chosen and they're kind of already um known as a superstar you know in the the school where they go and on the program they follow like i'm sure it's the same thing in us and basketball baseball perhaps uh american football because they already chosen so they grew up with that uh that it that itsy kid that that uh superstar stardom so to speak and it's already gla glass sort of glamorous you know however in in mma there's no mma judo wrestling like in america because it's not our national sport it's it actually it's it's not like even when i first started was not really well received by the media there's no glamour into it now i don't know it seems like it's another era now and i feel sometimes that some people do it for the wrong reason you know some people do it because of the glamour because of the money but even if you're an elite and very good the glamour and the money won't come in the beginning it's a very long grind before you know it start it start to come in and you need to make those sacrifices and it's a it's a journey that where you will be tested you will be hurt repetitively and you're gonna have to to reach the down deep and come back up and then once you finally think you made it you're gonna go back in the down deep again it's a very exhausting and decorating um adventure sometimes but if you hold on to your dream and you believe in it you know and you have the the the stars are aligned you're gonna make it that's why it's only a few people that that make it you know and and um that's why i feel i feel sometimes the new a lot of people in the new generation do it for the wrong reason in my in my generation because a sport at first it was there were no rules i thought it was more pure the people that did it was really because of the passion that we didn't seek money and fame we did it because we wanted to be i did it because i wanted to be the man you know i i like to have the confidence that when i walk somewhere i'm you know i have the confidence that you know it's an illusion because nobody is faster than a bullet yes but i wanted to achieve it for myself and i which today now because i don't know if it's social media and all that that the world has changed the glamour the you know it's i feel it's a different thing right now yeah the uh if you get in it for the glamour or the money you may not have the right the right amount of fuel to persevere through all the ups and downs yeah sure you know when you talk about motivation of uh money and glamour the a guy comes to mind and i don't know how many wrestlers you know but in russia there's a guy named uh beauvoisiers of the city of brothers one of the greatest uh freestyle wrestlers of all time but he also has um it's funny he doesn't have many interviews one of my goals is to go out and talk to him in russian do an interview with him because he's exceptionally poetic and a deep thinker he's uh the kind of martial artist that you are in the way that it's not just about the the different battles he's been through or whatever it's about the philosophy behind the way he approaches life and he he's spoken quite a bit about that the the glamour the fame the money are all things that get in the way of um the purity of the experience the art that the way to achieve greatness is to just lose yourself in the art of the actual combat in this case it's wrestling and then kind of not to worry and actively make sure that you block out anybody who you know feeds you the narrative where you're supposed to be this famous person it's all those kinds of things that he basically says let others write your story i make sure that you just focus on the art and now another person from that side of the world is of course khabib so he represents that side of the world and we were talking about walking away and most people not being able to walk away at the top as you have but also now could be has it looks like incredibly so so i mean maybe you can comment about what your thoughts are about uh khabib nurmagomedov being able to just walk away you know we talk about the goat very often khabib is you know one of isn't the argument because he has the most dominant carrier of all martial art guy you know some guys can be named the goat for different reasons but khabib for that reason and he's undefeated he'd i don't even know if he lost he might have lost round but he'd dominate all his opponent it was ridiculous and such an incredible career that he had um i love to watch him fight he's incredible um and when you talk about the art when you say mixed martial art the idea of a flawless performance for me everybody often when we say flawless performance thinks about a knockout a brutal knockout but for me it's it's to be able to showcase beautiful technique like a beautiful take down beautiful submission be like something beautiful that you know when you you look at for example uh wayne gretzky or michael jordan or like stephen curry or even if you don't know nothing about basketball and you watch michael jordan you'll be like wow that's beautiful what you just did like we talked about fighting and and trying to say the the word beautiful and fighting for certain people it could sound kind of crazy you know but but i'm talking about the technique a beautiful technique you know for me that's the goal you know when i was fighting it's not only to to have a brutal knockout because some people are more gifted than others and so i'm saying gifted some people are better than others in certain phases of fighting but for me it was that it was to showcase to win of course but to showcase some beautiful technique that that you can watch the watch it and be like wow that was incredible the timing he did it that and when i talk up when i think about kabir norma gomanov i see all the detail that that of his work especially when he got he's got his opponent against defense that's like that's his area of expertise where he's to me he's the best that ever did it in in terms of that fighting style that that particular expertise that he has it's just the the flawless execution of that particular set of techniques yes conor mcgregor had the the accuracy the spider anderson silver was like was i would say the most flamboyant of all you know like he was moving like the matrix john jones was incredible in terms of creativity spinning elbows and that and he faced incredible adversity symmetry johnson was so complete you could you could bring like he was slamming a guy to an armbar it was just unbelievable like like he was like the complete fighter bj penn was like so flexible he he did stuff with his body then like nobody could do his dick the dexterity of his hips was just unbelievable um dominic cruz to me was incredible his footwork his distance control so when you talk about like the goat royce gracie another one he did things that i think for me is not number one because yeah i gotta i gotta and starting to interrupt the hoist is a fascinating one i'd love to hear what you think about them but many people consider you most people consider you to be the number one greatest mixed martial arts fighter ever so it's fascinating to remove you from that list and continue this discussion and asking like who do you think is the greatest fighter ever you listed some amazing ones hois you somehow skipped fedor it's as i'm very as a russian i'm very offended no i was going to there's so many fedoras one as well fedor i think in his prime was like when you say when you talk about a name for example like we talked about him when he was in his prime like when i talked for example about anderson silva i'm not talking about the andersons of who fought his last fight against urayo hall i'm talking about anderson servo who knocked out victor belfor yes bg pen same thing the problem is when fighters hang on for too long in the sport that's what happened they kind of make make people forget how good they were and it's very sad we talk about fedor and just just think about uh stephen yochich me which is probably the greatest heavyweight of all time with fedor i would really wonder who would have won this fight the both guys in their prime i tend to lean towards fedor because my heart was with fever the fedor but he could have gone the other way but just because meow chich lose his last fight now everybody's like oh yeah they forgot about him it's crazy man it's one fight you zig when you shoot zag boom it's that's the reality of mixed martial art well that's why the thing is the mixed martial arts isn't just the performance the strictly who won and who lost it's also the stories we tell ourselves and so i mean there's beautiful stories being weaved and that also is part of uh who is the greatest of all time is what what were the battles what what what had to be overcome what was the the flavor of the flawless performances you know all of that plays into it and you're right being able to walk away at the top is also part of that a lot of people ask me about khabib and that fight i want it to happen khabib wanted to happen but ufc did not want to happen between you and khabib yes and we tried to make it like about three three years ago when i when i retired two you know three no it was after two years ago and it didn't never came to fruition the ufc were clear they said they would they have their plan for khabib and it makes sense to for the business standpoint because they want to keep the ball rolling now can be retired and like everybody else after just justin gaitrey i was doing the comment theater in french for the ufc and i have butterfly i thought he was going to call me out if there's one guy that i would have said yes it would be him because for a fighter the most exciting thing things to do it's often the scariest one and khabib was you know where is the scariest matchup yes but it was worth the risk because nobody have ever been able to solve them how would you solve the khabib nurmagomedov puzzle well khabib is very good against the fans i would have to establish a game plan and everything but i think what i would needed to do is take the center of the octagon right away use a lot of fake and fate keep the fight all the way all the way out or all the wind and when i sell the win is when you close the gap use my proactive and reactive take down and my perhaps my superior explosivity to put them down i like to use those proactive and cr and reactive technology because for me i feel it's more economical khabib is a much better chain wrestler than me chain where stories when he got the guys to defense it's pure wrestling what makes my takedown very efficient it's my karate it's not my wrestling it's i'm a i'm very good at timing my opponent and getting in with with my explosivity so if you watch at my takedown it does not demand often it does not demand a lot of work when i use the i call it proactive takedown when um he's coming to punch me and i react so i mean proactive is when when i i'm faking it so i i i i instigate the attack down by a fake then i take take him down and reactive is when he's i'm baiting him to throw something and then he then have a counter yeah yeah yes but all might take down in the center of the octagon yes my takedowns are more in the center of the octagon like for example another guy that does it well is gleeson tebow that did it well in his best days you know khabib has more a style of chain wrestling i would say like kamaru uzman or sort of speak kind of kind of guy it's a different style you cannot compare both town and that's the kind of takedown i'm good and i would if i would have fight kevin that's one of the strategies i would have done i would not have been afraid because everybody that i thought i was able to put them down and and and i have the pedigree to prove it in my fight resume so you would have perhaps see him on his back and i would have perhaps be on my back as well so it would have been a very interesting fight and how hard do you think he is to take down i mean a lot of people speak about his wrestling being just it has nothing to do with it like the wrestling because let's do the correct if i get that timing and i got my boat hand around around his knees he's going down everybody goes down yeah yes yes this goes down and and and i had a lot of uh that's what i would have done i would not have been afraid of his wrestling uh i would have be the instigator i would have forced the fight forward and that's what that's how i would have approached that fight which i believe most of his opponent were afraid of his wrestling because they didn't have the tools that i have to put him down i would not have forced the wrestling i would have in in the clinch i would have tried to disengage i have many ways to disengage the clinch i would have wanted to force the fight in in that in a in a fighting distance you know like in in a shoot box distance not in that in a wrestling distance is it possible this fight still happens i you're young look great in a suit well there's a lot of problems now and the thing is now i made peace with it i no longer don't wanna fight and i don't it's not gonna happen ufc was not interested and i'm bound by contract with the ufc and by exclusivity there there's some people says to me oh how about if russians are a crazy uh wealthy russian guy come with money yeah i i i said i have the i'm gonna be uh in court with ufc and and also i'm older now and when i go home man i'm like i don't want to do this you know like and we're always i don't want to do this but like for example i was training with freddie roach a few days ago and i'm hitting pads you know and freddie is looking at me and he's like hey you have the hitch back i'm like yeah if dana white would walk in the room in the in the gym at that precise moment with a with a ufc contract i would sign it sign it in the blink of an eye but then after i go home i'm like hell no my belly is full my my you know i'm healthy i'm wealthy why would i want to fight for i made peace with it but the minute i go back in the gym because i still get it inside me when i train with the young guys i still get it and a lot of guys think hey tell me the truth you're preparing a comeback because i still get it you know i'm a little bit older but i i get more knowledge i can compensate i i i become a different animal because you know it changed you but then after you go home and you you you're like man uh no way i'm doing this yeah it's very hard to explain you need to be acquired one to understand that it's very very hard to explain well from your perspective i think khabib is one of the rare one of the few fascinating scientific puzzles yet to be solved so from that aspect as a martial artist it's just a fascinating journey to try to solve that puzzle there is a thing too like say oh who's the best part of our people lex they don't like i unders i i realized that later in my life and i'm sure a lot of young guys will say oh i said it's not don't speak for me but i'm telling you right now what i'm about to say you will realize it later when i was young i think you can proclaim yourself the more the badass man on the planet you know like nobody can beat you at it's an illusion man that's the sad thing about for example dc uh daniel cormier does probably one of the greatest if not the greatest of all time you said miyotis but like it's almost because of that little matchup with jon jones it's it's difficult for people to conceive of him as the greatest of all time it's all about matchup it's all about timing and also you make a fight you make both guys fight 10 times the result might be different like like every time you know i mean maybe he's gonna win eight out of ten but that knight is gonna he's gonna lose why because we don't know the the universe made it like that you know maybe he got sick maybe he had the emotional issues he didn't sleep well and he makes him uh lose focus and he got caught you don't we don't know but it's it's that's the thing with people ask me would you have done it with khabib what would happen i don't know maybe out of 10 time i don't know maybe as a fighter i hope i would have win more than him he thinks the opposite is only one way to find out but that night if there's a fight the guy gonna win doesn't mean he's the best fighter that's mean the the he's the one that fought the best the night of the fight same thing in basketball or aki the team that wins the game it's not necessarily the best team is the team that play the best the the night of the game and fighting is no different so being the baddest man on the planet it's an illusion i mean that's the tragic thing about it is uh on any one night anything can happen and then that tells a story for all of human history it is it's uh it's that it's sad to think about but that's what makes it beautiful that there's so much at stake like entire lives all the dreams you've had growing up all the hard work all of it is decided in a single night even though that means nothing in terms of who's actually better it's uh i mean that's the beauty that's why people love the olympics especially because it happens so rarely and dreams are broken or uh like triumph is achieved by the unlikely hero all like right there i mean that's that's why we love it right that's why that's why i love it if we would know always the result before it would be boring that's why we do it you know uh you watch the odds you know like like sometimes i like to watch the odds uh before a fight you know because you know there's things you know i believe in causality you know i believe in everybody believe different things but i believe everything is because there's a there's a cause to everything that's personally what i believe i don't believe that i i have like free will i think i have the illusion of free will but i believe there's a cause for everything and if i'm doing something because of something because of a cause by definition there's no free will in a way you know if there's a cause by definition there's not how does that make you feel by the way like the idea that if we just look uh outside of even just human psychology and fighting and so on if we look at like physics if everything is predetermined if all of these little molecules interacting it's already like your story is already written i mean it depends it's it's written but i would need to know all the data and it's impossible right like it's it's i it's kind of weird i gotta say but i don't to me i don't see any argument to counter that idea i i i i can i don't maybe i'm i'm ignorant but i haven't seen nobody and everything from that i've read so far there's nothing that countered that idea that that because in a mechanical world if your car broke or you know we don't say oh the car decided to broke or a three a tree is fall there's reason why the tree is falling we don't say the trees decide to fall right so because us human being i think it's our ego we decide and i'm no different than anybody when i make a decision i decided to do this i choose to do this but i'm aware that there is causes that make me do certain things and by definition i think if there is a cause there is no free will by definition right yes but the thing is just like you said we understand so little about human intelligence the human mind and especially consciousness that the this giant mystery this darkness that we don't understand how how it how it feels like to be something to be a conscious being that because of that we're not able to really even reason about free will or not because there might be some magic that comes from consciousness the you know the the consciousness might be the thing that makes us different from a car that breaks down there might be something uh totally fascinating totally undiscovered yet that will make us realize that free will is actually real and somehow fundamental to the human experience so it's sometimes i think we forget when we talk about free will and physics and it all seeming to be predetermined we forget how little we actually understand about the world and i think in that mystery that could be totally new ideas that are yet to be discovered and will make us realize that it's not just an illusion it is something that is like at the core of how the universe works some people believe that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe like it's a it's a one of the forces of physics like consciousness permeates everything it's in everything like this table is conscious but it's not as conscious as us and we're this little peak of consciousness and if that's true and if we get to understand that maybe there's something there's an extra bonus we get in terms of free will once you become one of those entities that are super conscious so i i tend to be sort of humbled by the mystery of it do you believe one day with with the technology that keep improving we will make a robot that will be able to be somehow conscious absolutely i that's been my dream that's been i hope i hope to do just that first of all i believe that all people are capable and want to be good to each other and i think love is uh is a really powerful thing that connects us and can create better and better worlds sort of like uh create better and better societies that improve both the technology the quality of life and just the basics of human experience and i think creating ai systems that are conscious that are human-like can enable us to be better to each other like they can it's almost like adding more and more kindness to the world through the systems we interact with will inspire us to be better and better to each other in terms of them being conscious i think that is a an absolute requirement that entities we interact with communicate some element of consciousness to us like that's how we connect to each other the reason we you and i connect is that we believe that each of us are conscious and to me what consciousness means is the ability to hurt ability to to suffer to uh to struggle in this world because just like you said uh with with without the struggle you don't have the love you don't have the pleasure and ultimately consciousness is an entity's ability to struggle to suffer and from that arises the pleasure and us together being able to appreciate sort of uh appreciate the highs and experience together at the lows that's how we form the deep connections i personally think we can create that in robots and i i personally believe it's a lot easier than uh than we think does it make you afraid sometimes about the fact that one day hey hi like intelligence artificial intelligence could be you know could hurt us or or you know like because we're you know because of hollywood of course you know the movies we watch but but it seems like when i hear sometimes elon musk talking you know like yeah so elon talks about with ai we're summoning the demon he is very concerned and i talked to him about it quite a bit he's very concerned about all the different ways ai could hurt us humans i tend to believe that there's a lot more ways in which ai can make our lives better and can make life awesome for humans i think humans are the ones that can do a lot of evil things so i'm less worried about i am more worried about humans if i look at what you men have done on on the course of history you know for for example in regards to the planet to the the scale of the universe i think what i'm afraid is that we have more of a destructive force than a beneficial force so if a height take that and cause the duration in order to protect us against ourselves it could hurt us in a way i don't know if you if you understand what like what do you think about that does it makes you afraid sometimes not because of a hype but because of what humans are doing that heihei could do to us to prevent us of hurting ourselves you know yeah no i mean definitely it can bring out the the worst in human nature and uh provide tools for evil people to do evil things at a larger scale but i just think it depends what you think human beings are i tend to believe that as we get more intelligent we we start to see the value the evolutionary value and the value in terms of happiness of being good to each other and i think ai if if you look at ai as an optimization problem of how to create a civilization that works well and expands throughout the universe i think love is much uh more effective so ai will help us maximize that i think there's going to be always spikes throughout as it has been through human history where charismatic leaders will do evil onto the world in the name of good you have the stalin and the hitlers and all of that but ultimately over time i think technology will give the good uh the good people power and the evil people less power now there's a lot of ways in that in uh that that won't be the case there's a lot of ways for it to go wrong and elon talks about them but i i honestly think in terms of intelligent ai that's going to bring more love to the world the thing i'm concerned about is dumb ai so there's been a lot of discussion between china and the united states recently on autonomous weapons system this is something people don't they're afraid to talk about but there's now a race uh where the united states has officially said that they're not against adding ai to its weapon systems so now the us military is adding automation adding intelligence to its drones to its uh anything that can create damage and so of course and they did this so in response to china doing that so you can imagine this is this is terminator you think about terminators intel intelligent systems they're not they're pretty dumb the the point is they're efficient at doing what they do and in the space of war efficient at doing what you do means killing so that i'm really afraid of but those are dumb ai those aren't your uh loving deep fulfilling relationships that's like uh efficiently being able to fly to plan the trajectory of dropping bombs of missiles of how to do counter attacks of how to maximize the destruction of a particular facility instead of individuals and then that can just escalate and as opposed to the cold war with the with the soviet union this could be a hot war and then the consequences once you allow it's kind of terrifying because currently the drones are operated by humans so you know you have say you have information about uh intelligence gives you information about a particular terrorist located at this area and then you use drones to maybe uh the automation there is to help you figure out what is the best trajectory to strike at that location so you still have a human that pulls the trigger at the end dropping the bomb now automation and ai in autonomous weapons systems might be where you say there's a bad guy over here you figure out how to get rid of the bad guy okay so then of course the systems will be very good at finding the right trajectory and so on but there's bugs that can happen unexpected bugs that the system might figure out that there is this bad guy might actually be in these other five locations so mike's might make sense to cover the entire area right and you see you might just drop bombs on the entire area and then you know that's just okay so that's going to lead to a lot of destruction of the scale of a city but then you can immediately take that to nuclear weapons if you add automation to uh responding to counterattacks to nuclear weapons somebody you might get information that somebody's planning a nuclear attack on the united states and the ai system will immediately respond and you know it can respond at a scale of launching nuclear weapons itself and so there's all of these possibilities that don't require much intelligence and that's exceptionally that's exceptionally concerning i i'm like you i do not believe there is babies that are born bad i think people do bad things because of their experience however if i look to my experience and from what i can see some very often men's of power wants more power that's what makes me afraid with yeah no absolutely i listen i've been uh i've come from the soviet union uh stalin is arguably one of the most powerful humans in history uh he's not talked often enough about by the evils he's done hitler gets all the attention yeah but stalin has done arguably much more evil than uh than hitler yeah well this is this is human nature it wants power we see that with institutions we see that with governments and nations i think you see you see this with the internet people are really hungry for the distribution of power like you see that people are very much distrustful of centralized places of power of institutions and so on so i think successful organizations successful companies successful governments will be run by people who distribute the power like i don't trust myself with power at all yeah and i think you have to build into the system that no one person can have power and that you distribute it that's where you have in the financial sector you have cryptocurrency right now with bitcoin and all those kinds of things people are exploring how can we avoid the central bank to have the control how do you put the power in the hands of people uh thousands of people millions of people and in the same way with uh with military with um any kind of uh with technology i think the future looks very distributed so what do you think about militarizing space [Laughter] the uh space force i i i don't think about it often because right now i'm filled with excitement about space exploration which is the positive aspect so elon you know i was born in an era where it was exciting i don't know about you but for me it's exciting to look up to the stars and dream about us humans ex you know uh colonizing mars colonizing other planets expanding onto the galaxy into the universe that's really exciting uh so i'm um the the the possibilities there are endless i don't think because the also the resources are endless and so i think we get into trouble with militarization with wars when the resources are very constrained so i think for a while we're not going to be fighting the the only wars we'll be fighting in space are the ones that kind of um another nation to compete yeah who goes to the moon first i guess that's those those are kind of those kinds of things or maybe for satellites and all those kinds of communication and uh maybe in assistance for like cyber warfare which is also very dangerous but in terms of space wars out in space i think i think everything out in space will be positive and inspiring it's very hard but all good things are hard i think this is where i've been i've been talking to a bunch of people about um extraterrestrial life i'm really excited by i don't know it's the other thing um when i look out to the stars it's exciting to me i know i think you've spoken about it being scary but to me it's exciting that there's intelligent creatures out there far beyond perhaps the intelligence of our own that uh are just too far away to explore yet but we might one day come in contact with them so uh that that to me is the ultimate motivator is to meet other intelligence life forms out there and connect with them have you ever meet jacques valley no but i've been in communication i want to i hope to talk to him he's amazing french yeah i am i know that there are many theories about yes you know if there is alien we don't know right but but some people think it's from another star systems and jaguar is a like to make a long story short he has a different theory he thinks it's perhaps beans that could be living in a different dimension than us and the reason why he says that is when he makes an experiment when there is a signings very often of a ufo let's say i'm i'm the ufo that you have three guys and one they they are looking at the ufo very often one experiment that you can do and sometimes that that is the case you asked your two friend to walk on the side and there's a at a point that it's like a corridor you see the ufo and then you stop seeing like a corridor and that's one of the reason why he's saying that it's perhaps a dimension and i found that fascinating you know i this is what you know to the discussion of consciousness and all that it it feels like we might be just experiencing a very particular slice of this universe we might not be understanding what's at the higher dimensions or yeah i mean higher dimensions in whatever form that means you know there's all these physical theories now that describe a world with dimensions that's much higher than the four dimensions of the three-dimensional space in one dimension of time so whatever the hell is going on in those other dimensions it could be something unfortunately this is the sad part it might be something we can't even comprehend with our human brains that the limitations are just um i mean we're built we're just descendants of apes so like it might not be possible to even understand is there alien is there another dimension are they a human from the future is there perhaps chinese or another you know what i mean a group of people that are working with a technology far behind but you know what lex i had a chance to meet you know because of the sport i'm doing i met a lot of people in military and politics sometimes that i i asked them every time i met i met one this week and and um i i i asked him i say is it true about the the uf who is there is there and he says to me is like before even before i ask him i say sorry i have to ask you a question i wasn't in los angeles sorry i have to ask you questions oh you want to ask me about ufo right away you knew i said yes you saw it in your eyes say yeah there is things that flies that we don't know but it does it didn't tell me he doesn't know it they don't know if it's you know whatever but there's things apparently that are detected and i know you met uh forever you know like flavors fascinating crazy it makes me sad that we live in a different area now that that it's used to be a subject that was ridiculed and now it's so cool that it's you know i'm very excited to live in to that that era you know yeah it's really exciting but still the governments are kind of behind the times on that aspect is they're not transparent and they don't communicate well you know it saddens me to think the possibility that that you know like the us government might be in possession of something that they don't tell the world about because they're just scared it's because they don't know what the hell it is and they don't want the chinese to gain the technology or all those kinds of things do you think the president of the united states for example because the president comes and go every right four or eight years do you think he would know all the secret or it would be a guy like for example vladimir putin with no much of a you know i don't think the president even know like even can he knows all all the the secrets the u.s president yeah i don't think so because he goes they go back and forth you know every four years you know they have the terms right so i you know i i wasn't sure before but i think i could trust the previous united states president of donald trump that if he knew he would probably tweet about it so perhaps so i yeah i i think from from the con you know i've worked with darpa i work with uh dod at clearance and i think from the perspective if you if you see the world as fundamentally a dangerous world where secrets are important to have from a military perspective i think it's very unsafe to tell the president in the united states that you have this kind of technology so if you think of the world in that way i i hate that that's how that world is viewed because ultimately i think what's more powerful than the military secrets and i hope that actually is what will happen in the 21st century because what's more powerful is inspire people inspire the the young elon musks of the world to to create cool new things if we have technology that we've come have encountered that we don't understand that should only be inspiration to uh develop that kind of stuff it shouldn't be seen as military as a military threat as a secret to hold on to i think secrets um i hope we more and more let go of the idea that there are secrets that give us advantage you know like in the tech sector people are more and more releasing the software they're making an open source like secrets don't make sense they share the knowledge right share the share the knowledge like share like being afraid to share the knowledge i think i hope is an old idea it's more yeah when you make it things more compartmentalized you know yes well yeah what that's the other thing is the bureaucracy of government is like people only know their own little thing and they don't spread the information it doesn't travel well i mean there's a lot of just inefficiencies that are it makes me sad it makes me sad because uh the the science the engineering that happens in governments like lockheed martin developing the different airplanes that they use for military applications is some of the most incredible engineering ever and it's secret because they're afraid to share it with the russians and the chinese and so on but on that topic i do think somebody like vladimir putin window probably knows some stuff my god my god i would i would love to know what he knows but then again you never know because even he is you know people think of him as an exceptionally powerful person but he's also just managing a bunch of tribes his power is very limited he's trying to hold together uh a bunch of greedy power-hungry mad men that's right okay and he's trying to establish a balance he might not know everything so i i hope this changes because i think there's nothing more exciting about i don't even know if there is a human that knows you know what i mean like this idea that there's some civilization alien civilization that that land on the white house and say hi i come to meet the prison and like why would they do that you know what i mean it's kind of absurd you know well i i do think that actually i mean that's one possibility right is lart you know if an alien civilization really wanted to contact us i think everybody would know so i think what we're if if there's any kind of interaction between humans and aliens i think most likely what we're interacting with is the crappy like probe drone thing that kind of just like like it's like this yeah this dumb thing you know we're not interacting with the aliens i think just like just like for us i think humans aren't when we uh venture out into space the first thing that's going to mean aliens is our robots it's not us humans because we keep sending robots out so they're going to like they're going to make decisions about humans by looking at the robots i say their famous greys the greys maybe they're our robots maybe it's all bs2 you know yeah yeah so i i don't know i don't know what uh that interaction actually would look like if aliens really wanted to reach out really communicate and i don't know if we're able to actually communicate with them that's one of the sad things we might not be able to that we might the aliens might already be here and we might just not even know know how to see them or know how to communicate with them there's so much misinformation and sometimes there is people that are very credible that that that made crazy claims you know like like you don't know what to believe you know like paul ellior the the the minister of defense of canada i've said like some that there is many alien race that ever that that's what he says research it and then did that that scientists from i think israel recently have said something about trump he was keeping secret or medvedev you're from russia they have been caught in there like during a break in between interviews to talks about like oh it's like men in blacks over to speak i don't know he didn't look like he was joking but i don't know if he didn't know about this yeah you can check on youtube it'd say it's it's it's it went viral yeah there's a lot of things like that sometime like or or bob lazar i'm like imagine if it's true man yeah you might imagine if we if we're like a fish in the water we live in our own world and sometimes there's a fisherman that grabbed the fish yeah take him out of the water and threw it back in the water and the fish goes back to the other fish and say hey there's someone that that take me out of the water then i've seen uh things that i did not like imagine if it's true like we like yeah and and one other thing like i wanted to ask you because you were consciousness how about dreams what is a dream yeah well i i more and more i don't know if you're paying attention to this there's now it's become more acceptable in the scientific community to do large-scale studies of psychedelics for example and there's a lot of connection between psychedelics and dreams it's very similar states there's there's a lot our mind does when it detaches itself from reality that it can just explore a lot of different ideas it's very possible that dreams is you're traveling somewhere and the same thing with psychedelics you're traveling somewhere in a different not traveling through physical space it's the other dimensions that we're talking about you're traveling some other through some other dimension to meet some other creature people talk with dmt that they meet some elves i've never done i i'd like to i don't know if there's a safe legal way to do it but uh they all talk about meeting elves and they're like creatures like entities and like who are who are they what's what is this is it because they're high or it's because they're actually meeting something and maybe there's no difference i mean that uh who knows exactly and that takes us right back to us not being able to really understand how our mind works you know i work in artificial intelligence it's clear that we understand so little about intelligence some basic things about intelligence just at the at the very sort of basic uh first principles level we don't understand what it means to to reason to think to assimilate pieces of knowledge together from the from the basics to the complex we don't understand it we don't understand how the human mind does it we don't understand how the human mind is able to take incredible waterfall of information and filter cleanly into just like clean you only see the things that are important and are able to jump together and be able to reason about the world and at the same time have moments of like genius of creativity like what what is that that also you know people writers talk about that that they're you know they're almost like communicating with the muse like where do ideas come from yeah this is the joe rogan philosophy but but i i do know that past civilization were a lot of them were based on shamanism and you know what i think it's sad is if someone drink alcohol and when he's drunk he's going to commit like create like like murders or something we're going to blame the person right we're going to say that's his fault it's not the fault of alcohol however if someone does psychedelic or any things that is illegal and do something crazy now we're gonna put the fault on on psychedelic you know what i mean and perhaps the person itself is the the reason why you know he's been doing these things you know what i mean so yeah it's fascinating how like society you know like in canada they just legalized marijuana oh yeah but before that before they did it like if you talk for example to my dad my dad is against it like because the whole mentality is like it's drug it's bad at that but drinking a glass you know drinking a beer it's fine i mean what is you know what i mean what is good what is bad and i guess you think chocolate could be bad as well for your health or i mean i'm going to the extreme now but yeah what is good what is bad if you use it for recreation you use it for an experience for to learn about yourself it's like it it said that the line is very tiny you know there are some countries that drugs are all legals you know what i mean and i i don't know the the the stats but i would i would be interesting to know if they have more crimes there than other countries where it's more strict i would that would be interesting to know about that it's fascinate me you know yeah and i mean we humans kind of just come up with the arbitrary lines of what's good what's bad that applies with drugs that applies with anything uh that applies with animals for example we talked about carnivore diet maybe the time we live and now will be remembered for the cruelty to animals for example and i believe this the 21st century will be remembered for our cruelty to robots that uh eventually there will be a civil rights movement for robots where the the ones who uh choose to be conscious the ones who have consciousness will say we deserve rights too we deserve to be treated with respect too how about the people we put in jail people put in jail i mean if i think in the future we'll look back and we'll think of ourselves being stupid to you know to put people in jail instead of you know like trying to fix the problem in in in at the base you know of course now we're or i guess it's our endurance that made it in a way that we cannot sort sometimes understand what makes uh sometimes a psychopath a psychopath or a murder or murderer but you know if we can pinpoint the problem and take care of it before you know what i mean or made it in the way that we can reestablish that person in the society you know who knows you know what was their future is old it's interesting we live in an interesting time you mentioned your father what have you learned from your dad you mentioned he was an important part of your childhood my dad is amazing i grew up we didn't have a lot of money but it doesn't mean if i'm born in a nice country that always nice thing happen you know my dad for me is a big role model because i see him through to my life facing a lot of adversity you know he um he stopped drinking when i was a teenager he was an alcoholic and i seen him struggle through that you know and it was very very hard and um i've seen him work like crazy hours like come leave in the morning come home at night burned out because of work through almost all his life to the point that it became a slave of the system yes it became a habit and a normal way of living and it made me realize that i've learned a lot through my father he taught me perseverance hard work you know when you face adversity you know to never give up until you achieve it but also he it taught me a lesson that in a way that i don't want to be like him even if he is happy it's because i realize i don't think he knows anything else like he works through all his life and i don't want to live to work i want to work for it for you know what i mean i want to decide when i work you know i feel like like he he lived to work instead of working for a living and perhaps it's because he did not have choice he he was the older of his family they had they were nine kid his dad my grandfather died when he was young so he had to become the father of the family and and work to put money on the table so perhaps that what made him that way and he became like like a habit for him my dad taught me uh when i was at school i was bullied at school he's the first one to initiate me to a martial art he taught me kyrati my dad my dad was a black belt in kyokushin karate as well very nice but because he was working too much he didn't have time to teach me and i needed self defense in order to defend myself i have a winning a great carrier and mixed martial art but in the in the schoolyard that's so good my mixed record my my record is not very good when you're a kid and you're about seven eight years old and you're facing bullied bullies that are two to three years older than than yourself it's not the same thing than when you're 25 and the guy is 28 so there is a big discrepancy in terms of maturity so my dad taught me introduced me to karate danny i didn't he didn't have time to teach me then he put me in a school with an a teacher that said it was jean kutzer and i grew up with a lot of anger and uh there were two person that was afraid growing up it was my dad my dad was very severe very strict with me and i'm glad he was because i i could have become very bad i could have become chosen on a different path people see me as a nice guy and i'm gonna i am a nice guy i try to be a good role model but i could easily have turned towards our around there's darkness somewhere in there yes they are a lot and a lot of my friends have chosen that pat and unfortunately you know they they are they are they are not with me today even if i'm from canada and canada seems like the nicest country in the world like i said it's even if you live in a nice country not always nice thing it depend of the situation but that's what my dad taught me you know and he gave me that to because i i'm very good at learning by observing people and by observing him i i see the the struggle he had with alcoholism and what he did the the the pain sometimes that even flick to to to us to my family but how he turned he did that 180 degree and i really admire that and i know it was uh very very hard for him and he did it you know and uh for me uh that's a great role model for me so with your dad being an engine of basically hard work and you finding a balance of being able to work your ass off but also to be able to enjoy a piece of chocolate what is the perfect day in the life of georgetown pierre look like so like if you were to go through a day that's very productive but also want to make you sit back and enjoy and say that was a good day what's that look like what are we talking about when do you wake up what do you eat what do you do it changed over the years when i was younger i have a good day it was like a good training session or you know achieving good thing in my training you know and that's why i was very good at it because when i i was obsessed you know i think to be good at something you need to become obsessed and to me performing in my training was everything you know like when i had a bad training session i didn't tell my training partner i was acting like a like because of the my ego i didn't you know i didn't tell nobody i was like hey then i go in the locker room i'm like man then then i'm playing the the the the training in my mind you know i'm saying okay i should have done this shouldn't have done and it hunt me it hunt me man it's a training and it hunt me until the next running session on when i can redeem myself that's how it is when we used to train in all together back in a day in canada we had david luizo we had patrick we had uh dennis kang uh steven jonathan there was all like the best guy in canada that were training with each other before we were training in different gyms but once a week i made it in a way that i contact everybody that we all join for us and we exchange ideas and we train with each other so a friendly i would say friendly competition it was not malicious but it was hard training you know like not our goal is was to improve you know but it wasn't very competitive and when that day you used to get out of the training session with a bad performance for me he used to hunt me until the following week when i could give it back and and perform better with the guy that i had the most trouble with that's how it was and that's how you get better you know but but it was not a training where it it it would we were trying to do malicious thing to one another you know what i mean you need to be playful but playful but competitive that when i had a good training session because aspiring was on a friday i had the best weekend and what i was going out with my friend drinking and partying and have fun that was that was my my my my ideal day back in the day today is strange you know my my my life has changed you know like um i i am not the same person i used to be when i go went on my knees and begged the ufc for a title shot you know what i mean i i am uh i'm wealthy i'm healthy most importantly that's the most important thing and as man i'm gonna tell you the truth as good as my career was man my private life man is a million times better man i i and and people ask me sometime they always wonder they they try to ask me and it's normal it's a lot of people is curious and they're the reporter and in the sport of mixed martial art we say we play basketball we play soccer but you don't play fighting so when you expose your private life we've seen that happen in the fight week sometime conor mcgregor and khabib your competitor knows that he cannot get to use what he will do he will try to get to someone that you love so may i never expose my my private life i never post instagram of my family of my stuff that's the reason why because i mean i'm in a business of fighting and people know that they cannot get to me and i believe because i was bullied when i was young i didn't realize that when i was young but it helps me deal with the mental warfare that i need that i had to face later on in my life in mixed martial art because it's a very egotistic sport and there's a lot of a lot and a lot of intimidation and i was used to i've been used to this thing when i was young so it does not get to me however the good way to get to me go go go go try to get to someone i i love now man i'm gonna go crazy you know what i mean and i'm aware of that so in order to protect myself i always because i'm aware i'm a public person so i try to always keep my surrounding like in a private yeah one of the ways that like uh your your friend of mine joe rogan has been an inspiration that he he's got like an incredible family and he for the most part is starting to change recently actually it's kind of interesting but for the most part throughout his life he kept it pretty secret doesn't talk about it and he's calm he's a comedian comedians talk about everything he doesn't really talk about it and there's something to that it like preserves the magic of this the silence of the private life and i think it can affect the the development of the kid if the kid grew up being oh he's the son of that guy instead of being his own person you know what i mean so so for me it's very important like my parents are older it's fine but it taught me a big lesson when i'm with my friend at the dinner or anything i talk with person always share a thing but when i'm talking i'm aware of of the audience who i'm in front yeah and i mean but oftentimes those people are just incredible it kind of makes me sad that uh you know there's a lot of people that love you right and they're a lot of really incredible people and you'll never get to really know their story that's right i mean i don't know for me it makes me sad you see them like at airports and stuff people will tell me they listen to this podcast or something like that and they're i could tell they're incredible people and it makes me it's like a little goodbye of a possible friend i don't know it makes me sad it's right it makes me it's lonely it's almost like celebrity is a lonely thing so the higher the celebrity the more lonely you become in some kind of way but of course you have that little gem of a private life where you can personally i believe every relationship i i like i don't like to use this term but it's always a give and take relationship you know like you can gain something and the person like it it could be something like not material is materialistic like something always a good confident like you're someone that they can give me good advice or or it's a word i would say like extensional like if a pilot as a co-pilot is the co-pilot is extend as a extensional relationship with him you know so he knows if he gets sick or he faint he's there to make sure you know he is there to help and i think in every relation it's about compatibility but it's about extensionality right in a way that if that person is extensional and sometimes we talk about about love you know like sometimes i think is is it is it a bs word or not because i myself sometimes look at i look at myself in the mirror and when i do s stupid thing sometimes i love myself a lot and sometimes i don't you know what i mean because i'm angry at myself i've done stupid thing so that means sometimes you could love could be fluctuating you know what i mean how about in relationships sometimes you people they say oh they love each other but then when they divorce they go oh i want the house and the dog and the kids stay with me and you know what i mean if you love if by definition if you really love someone and let's say you're an old man and you love a woman and she decided to leave you for a younger man if you really love her you're gonna help her pack and leave but in our society sometimes we we want to hone something to me love includes the missing somebody losing somebody the anger at somebody it's all the passion feelings towards somebody that's all love okay i you know it's all part of the thing it's the ups and downs it's uh the sad thing is when the feelings towards the person the ups and downs go away they're forgetting yeah that's that's the opposite of love so the opposite of love isn't hate the to me the opposite of love is forgetting and and that's that's a much bigger that's like the depth of human connection that's how i see love so sometimes i try to stay positive and i've been asked how i try to because i have the image of someone who's positive but i go to my own demon as well sometime however we talk about love when i was young you know like like i didn't love who i was at first that's how i love i learned to kind of love myself like i didn't and then when i was going to to bullying i was i believe i was bullied because i didn't love myself i i because i project a very bad image of what i think of myself i was a kid that lacked a lot of confidence i was looking down when i was walking i shrugged my shoulder when someone was talking to me i was avoiding eye contact so i was a very easy target for the bullies and i think bullies are like in predatory animal in nature they will hunt the the easier prey they would don't they don't go the lion don't go for the the alpha bull they go for the one who's old or who's sick the weakest one and bullies are the same in society i believe and i didn't like to be bullied of course but i didn't like the the person that i was but i found out through martial art the respect and my my coach was extraordinary to me he taught me discipline and self strength self strength and i found out that i needed to in order to love myself i needed to change myself because i didn't when i looked at my son in the mirror i didn't like what i saw so i decided to become like someone that i would love so i tried to look people straight up and and trying to showcase a more confident image that i had and it was hard in the beginning because i didn't really believe in it but i i faked it until kind of i make it so when i was walking at school more and more i was learning how to become more confident and i was like taking charge when the teacher was asking questions i was at first i was never answering i was like this waiting always to be the last then i was hey i i i know what the answer this is the answer i got out of my comfort zone so to speak and i wish i would tell you that i got out of bullying because a hollywood story i use martial art to beat up all the bullies but it's not how it happened to me it happened because i changed myself from the inside out and i learned how to because i didn't love myself in the beginning i learned how to become like someone that i love and even now like i'm by no mean perfect i do a lot of stupid thing but i learn as a person and even i do have something stupid i'm like shoot i did something stupid i at least i can apologize to the person if i realize and then i know that i'm not the person i was in the past i'm the person that i am right now so i can learn and become that image of the person that i love so in in a way the reason i'm trying to be positive and i and i am able to stay positive sometime in life is because i'm always trying to be like that person that i love yeah and i think if you don't look yourself in the mirror and don't love yourself or don't see any positive future for yourself how can you change your environment if you cannot change yourself you know what i mean you would never be happy if you're not happy when you look at yourself in the mirror so change yourself first then change your you know it's not the environment you're gonna change for yourself it's you have to go from the inside out you know this this i learned to martial art i have a i had a coach who was incredible used to drill these ideas in my head and and give me confidence you know like like this telling me all these these beautiful things about myself and how i he's dead now unfortunately peace peace to him but uh he was incredible incredible he was very very strict i was afraid of him i was afraid of my dad and afraid of him he couldn't teach nowadays like he used to teach me because he would be in probably in jail you know but i'm glad he did it because for that time being that's what i needed it and i would never have had that the career i had in mixed martial art without this because i would i would never have got out of my comfort zone would have been impossible and in order to improve in life you need to get out of your comfort zone it's hard it's very hard to do and and strive to be the person that you can love i i does that's that's beautifully put george if you were to give advice to a young person today about life what would you tell him if he takes life with the same mentality that i do if he has the same taste of things that i have i would tell him you know for for for sport for life in general i would say if you will have a dream you know like make everything in your power and work very hard you know never take no for an answer and go through hell in order to achieve it don't work hard only but work smart that's i think the problems with a lot of people they work hard they can work hard they burn themselves they don't work smart whether it is in in science and business they make bad choices or they are badly informed in sport how many guys i've seen ruin their career in the gyms they they spar so hard they they ruined themself in the gyms they leave their career in the gyms what i would say to for example because my field of expertise and it's in sport of mixed martial art i would say to you young kid make your training playful you know when you get ready for for competition you need to trying to recreate those elements that makes you go outside of your comfort zone but in every days life in general make your training playful don't makes it like a hardcore competition about who's who's winning who's losing make make it playful so it will increase because your know you will not be afraid of getting hurt or losing you will be tent to trying more things and be you it will make you become more create creative you know that brings up another question about learning so you you value knowledge and you're exceptional at basically being very good at learning and figuring stuff out new things or going deeper on the things you already know so what advice would you have for how to learn effectively how you know you say work smart how do you figure this game out i believe the best way to learn is learning from other people's mistake [Laughter] however i'm not perfect and i've learned from my mistakes as well and sometimes i've i it took it took me a few mistakes to learn the same thing but especially in the sport of mixed martial art because we're talking about the the failure could have very serious uh outcome on someone's life and well-being so it's crucial to trying to learn from other people's mistakes do you study others do every every fight i'm studying my opponent and i've studied myself as well to know what how my strength mix versus my opponent weaknesses and how can i make the fight go in a way that i'm taking my opponent outside of his comfort zone very often people are good at studying their opponent but they're not good at looking at themselves in the mirror and knowing what they should do in order to to maximize their their odds of success right that's why i always thought for me it was important to not be the best at one thing but be very good at everything that's why i always seek advice advices from the best and every discipline like i wrestle with the best wrestler i i i could be with i box with the best boxers i i practice karate with the best karate fighters uh same thing in jiu-jitsu i trained jiu jitsu with the best best jiu-jitsu guys however when i mix everything and mix martial art if i if i'm because i'm very confident in every areas so when i'm fighting someone i'm very good at and that the identifying where is the less competent and i know for a fact that because i'm competent everywhere i can if i can bring the fight where he's outside of his comfort zone it increased my odds of winning there is no certainty it's all about odds i believe because there is always x factor that you do not control yeah it's fascinating to see you actually because you've been a student of movement uh you've been exploring all kinds i mean gymnastics all that kind of stuff there there's something reminiscent to um like uh conor mcgregor is one other martial artist that's kind of explored movement been a scholar of movement um at least from my perspective it's very sort of bruce lee like it's almost making a study of the human body and all the possible things you can do is there a philosophy behind that that you have you talk about bruce lee man he changes my my life too he was ahead of his time yeah incredible a lot of people talked to me and asked me hey is brucy would have been able to fight in ufc i look i don't think so you know i don't know i think he was a you know he was a martial artist he could have defended himself but to say that he could have compete in amongst the elite of the elite fighter perhaps in his time but if for sure if you put him in ufc right now you know the sport hasn't improved incredibly since then but in terms of philosophy yeah bruce was amazing like one thing that just to prove that he was ahead of his time he was talking about using your longest weapon against your opponent nearest point and we see that that that kick that um it it got popular popularized by jon jones you know the the sidekick to the time it's longest weapon against your nearest point in boxing is the jab but in mma when you can use it all your weapon that's the kick to the tie and there is i feel there is like kind of three dimension in martial art there is the philosopher like bruce lee there is the correct choreography the choreograph people like for example you see in movies the stunned people they're incredible like or the one that does like forms and karate like jumping spin kick bad kick like acrobatic stuff mixed martial art they are unbelievable and there's also the the the one that compete in fighting like that's what i do that i personally specialize in well you also do the philosophy i do a little bit of philosophy but that's you know consequence we are all i guess we are all ever like we all practice the three dimension because martial art is i would say it's it whether you want it or not you have to touch these three dimensions but you will specialize in one i specialize to my life in fighting like the real thing in terms of fighting competition and of course if you do martial art you'll be able to defend yourself because it's a self defense however you might not be able to fight as an elite and the most prestigious organization and you might not be able to perform the stunt that for example the stuntmen have done in in the the syriza was playing in the falcon and winter soldier these guys are incredible they're like real life superhero things they do it's to me like it's it's fascinating it's amazing and also bruce lee the philosophy how many hours he he took like thinking about this stuff you know i'm sure he did not just came out of out of nowhere you know like he was thinking like that's mean he slept on on this he how many hours it's just unbelievable he's like water my friend exactly how many times has he thought about water going to bed yeah before he said that uh well let me ask a very important fundamental question about martial arts we're both wearing a suit and tie uh joe rogan thinks that wearing a tie is a huge disadvantage is it a clip-on or is it an actual tie are you controlled by another one so do you agree or disagree with joe rogan that wearing a tie is a is a martial art significant disadvantage in terms of combat in a combat scenario in a fight i think it would be a dissonant disadvantage yes okay but i i work as a as a security bouncer in nightclubs and event when i was 18 years old yes and um sometime i had to work in certain event that i was in suit and tie i never had to use my force to take someone out when i wasn't super untie but if i would have had to before going to the table to physically take the guy out i would have removed my tie and i would have removed my vest for sure and i would have called back up for sure and i would have probably used the element of surprise to be first on the guy yes uh when you're in a bar same thing you call back up first and and and you make sure you ask the way the waitress before to clean the table before you go yeah and when you go you have to use the element of surprise yeah because fighting fighting that makes martial and fighting in the street it's two different things and yes i'm a mix i'm a mixed martial art competitor that's what i've done all my life but i had a lot of street fight in my life a lot when i was in what's the difference what's like that oh my god it's a huge difference there is guys that if i would have a choice you know to fight like for example certain guys and you have seen a street fight and fight like other guys that are not in ufc i would maybe sometimes pick guys that are not in ufc not necessarily because in in in a street fight there's no referee that says go it's the element of surprise and when you're a nice guy you're not the aggressor you always have the element of surprise that's what it taught me oh interesting yes because if aggression in your second person will not come punch you without warning it needs to it needs to trigger some it's something need to be triggered before so if someone comes because he's looking for trouble there's a sign that is looking for trouble so i was just talking with fast food and this weekend about it and i saw that every every martial art yeah comes from like some martial arts are from exclusive week for competition yes like sport karate uh like certain martial art but traditional martial art are for the street are for self defense and i start my background in kyokushin karate so it's for and and i did japanese jiu jitsu so my background before i even start training for mixed martial art my background is in self defense and it's very important to understand that in a street fight the element of surprise is everything and there are no rules you can go for the eyes the necks it surprises everything total ball game you know what i mean you have the the chair the beard there's so much more thing going on so the idea of because you are a ufc fighter you think you're invincible this is bs anybody can come like if if a big guy who punched very hard most people don't know how to punch by the way they don't know how to make a fist and throw it in a forward direction but if someone knows how to do it i don't care who you are if you could be francis and genu someone come behind your head and whang or there's an argument and you get surprised by a punch you can beat you up and lose a fight that doesn't matter yeah the element of surprise is everything so you were saying remove all the sources of the elements the surprise all the clear the bar remove the tie i still disagree with you about the tablet just for your information if someone comes looking for trouble and you see me do this and and going sideways yeah that's my position that i'm i'm thinking there you go maybe something will happen and i'm about that's see to flip the table on you then wearing a tie is communicating the nice guy image so it actually gives you the freedom for more elements of surprise by wearing the tie if you take it off that's more you're limiting your options because nobody's going to expect the guy in the tie to do anything i'm a big believer that sometimes it's not only materialism it's what you project that's true like i had troubles in a bar and i was able to deflect the guy was looking for trouble talking to me and i was able to deflect his whole aggressivity by saying like hey man that's a nice shirt where did you get it like saying like something was stupid like this then it it kind of break break the momentum and he you know but the guy was looking for trouble i don't want to fight you i don't want to fight you but i'm not going to wait until you pull you make the first move because the first the minute you you touch me you push me or you you touch me you declare war and the war is unleashed my friend and i'm i'm taking you out of order with the necessary force of course you know i mean that's the thing with martial art if you use the necessary force to take out a problem it's okay but if you you know you you take advantage of it that's when it's not all right because it's a weapon so if someone comes up to me that's my position and now i'm i'm assessing the situation you know that's that's how they teach in self defense here never put your hands down i wasn't there because i'm brown or boom like like what this is this is very important and you never you always your center line on the side ah yeah like this if someone knows martial art he will recognize that pattern but if you go like if someone talk to you and you go like this that's mean you're telling the guy that you want to fight you don't want to do that you don't want to oh yeah um that's that's interesting you know that's that's the position because your hands are here you know whatever you can do you're here well also your ear tells the story it's not everybody that knows that however it some people might might think that it's my mom grabbed me by the air and pulled me because i didn't listen to her you know a real fight in the stream and a fight in in mixed martial is a different ball game what do you think is the best martial art to prepare you for street fighting you know people often kind of have this discussion of jiu jitsu maybe boxing maybe wrestling do you think when you talk about a young person studying martial arts to prepare themselves for um a street fight it's often much different than a mixed martial art fight and i know there is a lot of bs in the world of martial art like self defense stuff that like but i believe self defense is is very important in a way to understand the the situation to understand those those situations that might accurate how to deal with it because not necessarily the the we talk about the technicality we talk about the tacticality the tactics you know like when i'm talking to you about the element of surprise it's important this is not technique a technique is a punch or or techniques that i physically will use to enable my my my opponent my my aggressor tactic is the tactic i'm telling you about is in a street fight if someone is looking for trouble and i feel the heat rising as the conversation goes that's the position i'm gonna take and i have to be first i cannot let him go first so i have to strike first or do something this is the first thing that generally and i have to to to agree on um after that of course there is the the knowledge if you're a professional fighter you have a huge advantage once the fight is started the war is declared now it's everything goes but generally speaking the person that will intervene physically that will have the first blower the first you know the first punch will have a huge disa use advantage it's like doing a 100 meter race and having a head start you know and and that you don't you can't prepare for with any martial arts yeah and if i'm a smart guy i know how to fight if a guy like uh an heavyweight champion comes to me or like like like a you know i know i know what to do to this this ebola like boom or hair and or the neck you know like and if you if you blind them what is it going to do you know what i mean so so or a bottle you know what i mean so so the element of surprise is it's everything so that's why it's always always good to be the nice guy and not looking for trouble because if you're not looking for trouble you have the head start you have the option of having a head start so what you're saying is being a nice guy is the is the best form of self-defense maybe a little humor yeah you know i have learned that i've learned that when i was a kid yeah i was about maybe seven six six years old we used to to play in montreal there's a lot of snow we used to play king of the mountain yeah that's the first combat lesson that i've learned in my life and i managed somehow it was a lot of kid i managed to get on the top of the mountain and uh another guy came come in on the top of the mountain and he was angry that before i was there before him and when you played king of the mountain it was a mountain of snow you don't strike each other we just wrestle and push and i managed to be first and when he came he says to me say okay you wanna you wanna fight and i said yeah i don't know what it means like i wanna fight you wanna wrestle you say i i say yes he punched me right in the face boom and then i and then i fall on on the bottom of the mountain but then i when i fall down i remember that vision in my life because it it it's it's i will remember that for the rest of my life i'm about to stand up and i see the blood coming out of my nose see the the snow is red because my nose is bleeding now i i remember the element of surprises everything my first street fight i've lost i got i didn't get knocked out but i i got dropped on the bottom of the snow mountain and i was like uh he got me because i was not expecting my hand i was not expecting a punch so from there when i felt the the the eat of an in during an argument or something was not right i always stroke first i didn't win all my fight because sometimes there were more than one guys on on me you know but i think it's important to not be the aggressor so you have the element of surprise and i always use that in your favor that's so brilliant let me uh go from the very practical to the the most impractically huge question about the meaning of life you said that uh when great depths of unrelenting sorrow punctuated by great peaks of joy and liberation the result is delicious so uh what do you think is the meaning of this whole journey that we're on this life what makes life delicious to me you know satisfaction is the end for me like like i always if i'm satisfied that's mean i have no nothing to live for i'm talking i'm not talking only about my career about talking about my life what i what do you want in your life you want you want kids you want a family you want to be champion what do you want in your life you have like a long-term goal short-term goal in mixed martial art i achieved what i needed to achieve i'm sad cespar i'm no longer the same josh schneider than when i was on begging for a title shot on my knees i move on for it from it now i had a chance to go into movies now that same insane that same insane drive that i had to be the champion in the world now i put it into acting like i'm having a lot of acting class now and luckily for me the timing was amazing i got i got casper the the falcon and the winter soldier was that is on disney plus channel it's a huge huge project to be part of for me because it's like you play basketball you have a chance to go for the nba right away i was very lucky the timing was just too perfect and so you need to constantly challenging yourself and having goals to achieve you know like that keep your brain activated i keep working and the proof of that is that you see sometimes some old people like when they retire very often sometimes you see that they they got sick and they die or because they they it's either because sometimes we think we we we certainly make benefits we do something good for them by making not work and giving them a break so in our mind we're like oh it's gonna be able to relax but in their mind it's not good because they're not busy they have nothing to live for like like my dad is used to work all the time and he has always something to do is retire now i myself now call him by force to find him some job hey dad okay can you come in my house have this thing to repair i don't know how to do it so he gives him it gives him a reason not not to live on because he has other things to do but but what i mean is also in life i think you always don't be afraid to aim high don't don't be afraid to fix your objective very high and never be able to reach it be afraid of reaching your goals essentially i mean you always have to keep moving it out you think there's a it's an interesting question because you've been acting in some really exciting things do you think there's a a dramatic role where it's basically you know you go full robert de niro and taxi uh driver do you think they'll be a full length feature film with george st pierre i liken there's level to this thing i'm aware that i have to restart as a white belt and for some people it could be discouraging but for me man it's great i love it i freaking love it i embrace it because everybody told me like i would never be able to do it and it's fine but the and also the outcome of a failure in the sport of mixed martial art is much more serious than the outcome of a failure for a movie for example for for if you zig when you shoot zag in a fight you get knocked out if you zig when you shoot zagging on set oh cut we'll do it again and i know that i will be most likely be chosen for action martial art roles because that's my background there is this new trend in hollywood now when they want someone to play an italian guy they're gonna choose a real italian person when they want someone to play a russian guy they're gonna choose someone who has a real russian background now they want a real martial art fighter i've done fighting all my life i just need to improve my acting skill but when i train in acting i get myself out of my comfort zone i'm not playing a role of a martial argument i'm playing like romance comedy drama so when i go on set and playing the role of uh of a badass martial art guy it's it's easier so like in training for a fight i always make my preparation harder than the actual task i would love to see where i don't know if you've seen the wrestler with uh mickey work oh yeah those types of films i would love to uh i would love to you do something like that if not now then in 10 20 years i could see that that would be amazing there's levels to the game right yes it's gradual and i don't and i'm aware that i i don't want to take something on my shoulder that i won't be able to deliver it's like a fighter wants to go for a title shot right away could it could very well break him you know what i'm and i don't want to do that because i know i've done some gigs in the past but i was not focusing on it because i was focusing on competing as a martial art martial artists and competition in mma but now i take it very seriously so i cannot do the same mistake again because i've done some stuff i've done it for the money and it was good it was fun to to to be beat up by jacob van damme and everything but but my acting was not on point you know at that time so if i ever every time i'm gonna come back from now on on on screen you need to be sharp because you cannot mess it up if you mess it up it's like a loss on your record you're not taken seriously so so that's how i see it and it's very fun because i i had a chance to talk to a lot of guys and on top of all the class that i'm having like a few days ago i was with dani trujo and i i always seek the advice of actors when i when i see some of them that because i really admire how they do you know how they project their emotion and i asked him danny true i said i said to him he is an amazing guy by the way very nice guy and i asked him i say him how how do you do to be because you scared the hell out of me how do you do to be so scary like what is your trick and he tells me he's like george if you're threatening if you threat someone and you scream at him i'm gonna kill you wherever it's not as scary if you're smiling and you say i'm gonna kill you like and he says also to me that another advice he gave me is like when you say this think about you killing him for real that how you hate him and how you gonna kill him so the camera will take the emotion out don't try physically to do that that's the mistake i used to do before i used to physically show that i'm strong and angry and and to be mean so these are the just an example of tricks that i learned sometimes when i met an actor i always try to learn from everybody that i met in my life it's a difficult journey because then you have to go to some dark places as a person because you really have to imagine imagine some dark things that's fascinating actually i i think a lot of the actors they have sometimes problems because of that beca because now i understand why it's like if you work on your bicep your by itself will grow right it's a it because it it it's that stress that you put on it that will make it grow right emotions are i believe are the same way if you're used to dig inside of you down deep to to to to make your negative emotion depressive emotion comes out if something bad in your life happen you will fall into those emotions much more rapidly that's someone who does not that every day you know what i mean because it will it's like a muscle memory like if you program yourself to react a certain way you will reach that point very often so that's why sometimes you see some some guys they we often blame it on drugs but i think it's also because of the acting they are used to be so on the hopped up and sometimes they go to the down deep so they they they're they they're both extreme you know you got to be psychologically tough and that's life this is so exciting to see you challenge yourself in that direction that's one thing that i'm a a little bit afraid that happened to me i i i really hope i'll i'll always be uh you know like a problem having a problem to control my emotion be oh yeah much extreme i hope it does not happen to me and and if i feel that i'm going towards that i'm going to you know give up on on my new objective and find something else to to achieve but in your personal life you want to be real with your emotions you don't want to it doesn't you know you're just just like with biceps you don't want biceps that are too big you you are real but you are extreme really and and that's that that's the that's what i think something that could happen to actors sometimes when they go too much into their emotion like we talk about like sometimes guys that that that commit commit suicide perhaps you know i don't know it's because i don't know their real life but it could be something that they get so much into their character i didn't understand it at first because i never had acting class but after a while that you have acting class now you start to realize that yeah okay you understand why some actors get caught up in their emotion because that can have an influence on their life right you're on a fascinating journey uh george i can't tell you how much it means to me that you'll be so nice to me that you'll give me so much respect just that that tells everything i need to know about you as a human being with everything you've accomplished you waste all your time and you're so nice to me just as a fellow human being man i have so much respect i'm so honored and the energy you give me by just even showing up here i'll carry that forward for a long time to come george i love it thank you so much for talking today now thank you lex for having me on the show you know i've been looking to talk to you for a long time for me talking to a guy like you it's a it's a great learning experience because i always learn and uh it's life is fascinating to me and all the experience that we have and lives you know it's something that can make us grow and this experience for me just you know make me grow as a as well you know plus we look pretty damn sharp today so man and black my friend thanks george nice thanks for listening to this conversation with george st pierre and thank you to all form expressvpn blinkist theragun and the information check them out in the description to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from miyamoto musashi think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you