Power Building and Martial Arts w/ Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Uncut + Transcript) (Patreon)

• If you’re new to LMA, start with our table of contents

Philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò joins Sam to explore the intersection of philosophy, radical politics, and martial arts. Fẹ́mi is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and the author of Elite Capture and Reconsidering Reparations. He recently wrote "The Bad Guys Don't Really Care What Kind of Leftist You Are" for Teen Vogue. He has also trained at the LMA Learning Lab.

Transcript

[Note: Transcripts are autogenerated and may contain errors.]

This is Southpaw. I'm your host, Sam. Today, I have a special guest. Femi, can you introduce yourself?

Hey, I'm Femi Taiwo. I teach philosophy at Georgetown.

You've also written some books. Can you tell us about those books?

Yes, I wrote Reconsidering Reparations, which is about thinking about the arguments for reparations in the 21st century with climate change and global politics going in the directions they're going. And the second book is Elite Capture, which was Haymarket and Pluto Press talking about the way that the most advantaged people, even among the marginalized,

end up in control of political projects and how to think about that.

I feel like there's some parallels to that and even how gym sorting mechanisms work. Definitely. But we'll get into that. So you're a radical, you're an organizer, but you're also a philosopher. Do you think there's a benefit for radicals to also familiarize themselves with a broader body of philosophy or just basic philosophical thinking?

I think there's definitely an upside to it. If you're swimming against the currents of history as it's gone, if you're the kind of person that is not willing to just accept quote unquote common sense at face value, then I think the question emerges pretty naturally, okay, what are the principles, right?

How do we decide what's worth supporting and what's worth opposing? And, you know, how do we make good on those commitments, not just in the obvious cases, but in maybe some of the less obvious cases. And at least for me, philosophy has helped with that. And, you know,

It depends a lot on who you're reading and what you're reading and maybe most importantly, who you're reading with. So it's not a get out of organizing free card by any means, but I do think it has a role to play.

It also gives us a framework to think about our own biases and also a way to self-criticize ourselves and analyze their own thinking. Yes. So when Bernie Sanders lost the first or maybe it was the second time, I remember you made a great comment about how if we want radical change,

the size of the left in the US has to be magnitudes greater. Now, in this election cycle after Trump won, you made a great comment about doing something with your political energy and not just be a part of something or just identify as something, but organize to do something.

The theme of both of these comments is systemic change. So we need more radicals and not just people who identify as one, but who do radical things. So what are some of the things you think we should be doing with our energy to cause change? to do the thing rather than just be the thing?

So I think a lot of the things that I have to say are pretty much the same kinds of things you would hear under the heading of base building or power building. Anybody who uses those terms are gonna say more or less similar kinds of things,

but I think it's because they've historically proven to be the ways of building power, so making organizations. I think, in particular, the kinds of organizations that, by their nature, can exert political power, like coercive political power. So I'm not talking necessarily about nonprofits. I'm not talking about...

lobbying groups i'm not talking about groups that make sort of appeals uh or even that do protests um but i'm talking about the kinds of organizations that can withhold something from the powerful that they want so the classic example is of course workers unions right um so if the bosses don't do the things that the

workers want organized workers can withhold their labor they can go on strike And they can do that until their demands are met. But there are also tenants unions. They can do that with rent, right? Extracting rent every month is something that landlords want. And if people organize to withhold that, that gives them some kind of organized power.

Debtor's unions, debt payments can be withheld, right? But these kinds of organizations... are the sort that not only can win immediate on-the-ground struggles against a particular boss or against a particular landlord or against a particular creditor, a particular bank, but these are the kinds of organizations that can be the basis of power at a much

larger scale than that. If you have a city full of tenants unions and workers unions and debtors unions and other kinds of organizations that can as a class withhold power from the rich as a class, then I think you're in different political territory and much better political territory.

So we didn't discuss what you would say. We didn't discuss any of these questions. But I've been having a series of interviews with radicals who are also martial artists. And a topic that's come up a lot is power. And a lot of radicals feel uneasy about power. But...

Amongst those of us who train, those of us connected to liberation martial arts, we understand. It seems like just parallel thinking why power is important and how power is not all the same thing. Speaking to two indigenous brothers who are wrestling champions and coaches, they rooted it in their own tradition and talked about power like fire.

Fire can burn you, but fire can also give you life. In the gym, a lot of the politics in martial arts might be about power politics ultimately, but there's the difference between the power to dominate others and the power to resist that domination.

So I think this is kind of a theme that keeps coming up about power and it's not all the same, but it is important to build. And so I think for radicals who feel uneasy about it, I think it's partially because they flatten power to be all the same thing.

When the power to dominate others and the power to resist that, the power to extract and the power to resist that extraction that you're talking about, they're not all the same thing. So we have to analyze those things with a better lens. And I don't know if this is automatic for people who train,

but when you think a lot about it, I think these things start coming up.

I definitely think so too. And, you know, at least for me being a particularly... anxious and, you know, kind of self-conscious person. I had these conversations with myself in the early years, you know, decades ago when I first started doing martial arts. You know, I think I felt I felt ineffective. And, you know,

it was very much the kind of classic Cobra Kai, you know, bullied nerd kid tries to be a little less of a bullied nerd kid entry point into martial arts. But along the way, you end up having to, in very practical ways, negotiate what power is about and what it's for if you keep at martial arts.

And both in terms of literal power, like striking force, how hard you can hit, And power in a broader sense. How respected are you amongst the people you train with? And what kinds of things can you get away with? And I think it's just very clear and very practical naked purposes in the context of training martial arts.

All the good ways and all the bad ways that power can go. And so I think if you're in that practical context where you're constantly making decisions about power and whose power to respect and what power to build and what to do with other people's choices around those same sets of things,

I think you're less susceptible to thinking that power is just one thing, good or bad. You see all the various directions to take it and you know that the quest for power is in part, a decision that you're making about all those different paths.

Going back to philosophical thinking, right? I think when you spend time in the gym, for people who don't spend time in the gym, maybe they think of this duality of good and bad, mind and body, this Cartesian duality. And even before Descartes, The West had already this tradition of binary good and bad.

But in the gym, it's hard to separate when you're rolling or sparring the mind and the body. It all just seems like the same thing. So I think when you are philosophical, you start making these connections differently. And seeing that it's not just this binary, it's not just good or bad. It's so fluid.

All of it works together in a fluid way and there's not any one thing. It's never any one thing. So this connects back nicely to philosophical thinking and martial arts because like you, I love philosophy. I also love martial arts. We're both radicals. So for me, all of those things are intricately intertwined.

How are those three categories for you? Radicalism, martial arts, and philosophy. Are they each their own bubble or are they intersecting?

It's really funny because here, philosophically, I'm going to borrow from you this quote that you say all the time. How we do one thing is how we do all things. Because, for me, the three are the same, not because I'm thinking at the conceptual level that radicalism just is philosophy or martial arts just is philosophy.

There's a version of that that I would agree with. But at bottom, the basic thought is when you're deciding what power is, for instance, when you're deciding what kind of character you want to build, you just aren't doing a thing that's contained to some specific arena. You're not going to...

be some fully self-contained being in the dojang or whatever, and be some totally different person in your house. You are making a decision about what kind of person you're going to be, not just what you're going to do in some... sealed space of interaction activity and the same thing is true of politics right

when you decide what you think about domination when you decide whether or not you want to be a bully you are in part deciding how you're going to treat the people how you're going to treat your roommates how you're going to treat your friends and how you're going to treat your sparring partners right and

I think there is, to the extent that you're doing that from a position of principle, you're doing something that should cut across all those different contexts. So for me, they're deeply ingrained and things I learned from one part of my life,

I inevitably take to other parts and I have to try to square the person I am at work with the person I am at home.

sticking with that what was your path to philosophy radical politics and martial

arts so for philosophy and politics it was pretty similar um so my parents immigrated here from nigeria and i had this um kind of segregated upbringing i guess you could say where there was one social world that was just all the nigerian americans and we had bible study and we had parties and

we had uh church and we had all these social engagements and there was the world at school um which was not largely nigerian american uh mostly white and black And, you know, I developed this weird set of questions and things I couldn't really explain. So Nigeria is a, you know, very resource wealthy, but very household poor country.

Extreme levels of poverty that... on a scale of which I think is pretty difficult to communicate to, uh, especially people who are from the global North or whatever. And I, I'm squaring that fact, which I know intellectually, like all the other American kids,

with the fact that everybody I know who is from that place is some kind of standout professional something or other, highly educated immigrant population, that kind of thing. And so I just grew up with this set of questions like, why isn't Nigeria rich while this country is so rich,

given what little I know about the people from there and the people here? And so in college, I just started taking the kinds of classes that I thought would answer that question I was taking. I was a professor. economics major uh econ and math and was taking political science classes and

trying to understand how the world worked in a way that would make the world make sense to me and I got fewer answers than I thought I would get and worse answers than I thought I would get. And every time I poked a hole in those answers that I was being offered by my intermediate macroeconomics textbook,

I started getting a bleaker and bleaker picture of what the kind of answers I could expect to the question, how does the world in fact work? And that led me down to some fairly left further questions and fairly left further answers. And I never... thought of the question as just purely intellectual.

I thought that it was a thing that should change about the world, that there was that much suffering involved. And I thought that what it would be to change the world would just would just be to get nicer people in Congress or something.

I'm not sure exactly how teenage Femi would have put it, but probably something like that. And as I got a deeper understanding of how the systems, in fact, work, I got a deeper understanding of what kind and scale of political change would be necessary to make the world work any differently.

And then for martial arts.

Yeah. So for martial arts, I mean, it started pretty much the way that I said, right? I was this awkward, overweight kid with a weird name and no social confidence or skills whatsoever. um and as far as i knew nobody in the world was cooler than jackie chan and so i

just figured i just figured if i could do some of the stuff that you could do that you know maybe maybe a little bit of that would rub off on me or something and you know even independently of what I expected to gain out of it. It was just fucking cool. Right. Like people do in the air.

It's just cool. You know, um, it looked cool, looked interesting. Um, I got to nerd out about all the, you know, different history around different martial arts and such. And so it really felt like something that could meet both the physical and kind of emotional, um,

needs that i had as somebody who you know wanted to try to steer a path in midwestern united states as a weird fat nigerian kid and so as soon as i could which was around 16 or so i started studying kung fu um and the ufc was getting

popular and uh as i got into college a lot of my friends were into jujitsu and into MMA. And so I would do a little bit of that with them. And it just sort of snowballed from there.

So as you got into college and started thinking about philosophy and getting into radicalism, you were also delving into more combat sports and the problems of MMA jujitsu cultures.

Yeah. Yeah. A lot of those were definitely showing up, especially in Indiana in the early aughts.

And I'll bet then the questions you were asking, the political path you were taking probably started helping you analyze some of those things.

Yeah, I definitely think so. I think... I resisted going to the gyms where my friends were training at for reasons that at the time I couldn't really articulate to myself. But later on, I think now I think I could say fairly clearly that there was just something about the authoritarian culture of

most martial arts as their practice in the United States that really didn't jive with me. And so the martial art that I did end up taking up in college was capoeira. So that's when I started training the Afro-Brazilian martial art invented by slaves and indigenous folks in Brazil,

which was not to say that it's at all free of problems. Any social space, any social activity, particularly ones performed under an oppressive structure, is going to have some issues. But it did have a culture that valued freedom and that was explicitly built in a struggle for freedom.

And I think there was something palpable about that in the way that the martial art is trained and the culture that's built around it. And just to give one concrete example, so folks know the flavor of things I'm going for here. A lot of times, you know, you can just Google...

um just get on youtube and search for proper way to throw a hook punch and you can find at least five or ten variations of people you know throwing shade at other schools of boxing you know do you rotate your front foot um vertical fist or horizontal fist and you know engaging in all these minute

details on the technical level about what the proper way of throwing a punch is, which I think is messed up in a variety of ways. Not to throw shit on boxing. There's a lot that's great about boxing as a martial art, but this is the kind of thing that doesn't jive with me at all. Whereas... In Capoeira,

they would certainly teach you technical details about how to throw this kick or that kick, but there's also a very thorough culture of every person, every person who plays Capoeira has a different body and a different style, and part of what you're doing is

in the early years as you learn it is learning what your style is you get a specific name that often is a description of how you in particular individually move um the techniques that you rely on are all improvised you know you're not getting taught specific combinations with specific angles of slips and so on and so

forth so it's just a very different approach pedagogically to how it is that you teach people to move and how it is that you train with people who are learning to move and who aren't just learning something that you're putting in their head, but they're learning and creating knowledge about their own body.

That's a part of the process. And so that culture, that philosophy jived with me a lot more and still does.

So that makes sense why when I see people who started in capoeira and then moved on to, let's say, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, you still see that capoeira because it must be their personal style. And the same with MMA. You still see that coming out of people who

Whether you knew they trained it or not, you could see it in how they move. And even having worked with you, you could see that personal style that you developed still kind of stitching all these movements together for you. And so I wanted to get into something you've been passionate about lately.

You've trained and watched various martial arts and combat sports, but you're really drawn to boxing. I don't know if that's always been the case, but what draws you to boxing rather than other martial arts or combat sports? What makes it special for you?

Yeah, it's interesting. Part of it's just, I think, growing up in American, particularly Midwestern culture. Cincinnati, I grew up in the Cincinnati suburbs. Cincinnati's had some great fighters. Um, Midwest generals had great fighters, especially you include, you know, Michigan, you know, we're talking Aaron Pryor, Thomas Hearns, right?

Like people who are very good at this particular combat sport. Um, and so, you know, I think a part of the attraction of boxing for me is just having grown up in a culture where boxing is respected and being, you know, being in cultural proximity to some of those great fighters that have been produced

in the part of the U.S. that I'm from. But also a lot of what attracts me to boxing is the combination of how hyper-athletic and hyper-technical that it is. And there are a few sports, and I would say few combat sports. It's not the only combat sport,

but there are only a few combat sports where you really get demands for high levels of both a kind of broad sort of technical proficiency and a broad sort of set of athletic capabilities, right? You know, if you're an MMA fighter, and the other guy doesn't know how to grapple, and you know how to grapple,

then you have a fairly clear path to victory, right? You don't have to be great at the stand-up element of the game. You have to be good enough so that you can work your game, right? And especially in the early years of the UFC, you saw a lot of matchups like that.

Nowadays, people are more well-rounded, so it's getting a little bit more interesting. But in boxing... you really have to be either very solid at every range of fighting or the athletic difference between you and the person you're fighting has to be pretty large.

You have to be a lot faster than someone to get away with managing distance poorly or poor shot selection. You have to be a lot stronger than someone, especially with weight class limits, to get away with poor defensive responsibility. And at the highest levels, you often see...

Um, people, even with body types, you wouldn't expect showing extremely high levels of skill. You know, Tyson Fury, maybe it's the sort of classic contemporary example of this, you know, the guy moves like a middleweight and he's, you know, 5,000 pounds or whatever and eight feet tall.

And that's the kind of thing, that's the kind of thing you get in boxing. So I find that interesting and, um, yeah, fun.

Related to that, I tell people not to be a fan of boxers or fighters, but to be a fan of styles. It gets really problematic when you try to make it good guy versus bad guy when loss of times is just two baddies, like Tyson versus Paul.

So with that in mind, what boxers have some of your favorite styles?

Yeah, so let's see. I'll name a few people. So... a person who I probably learned the most from is Archie Moore. And, you know, he, I think he still holds the record for most knockouts. And one of the interesting things about the way that he fought

is he used a type of guard that was pretty unconventional even in his day, the cross-arm guard or cross-guard. There's actually the standard guard in Capoeira, interesting enough. Yeah, but not a lot of boxers were doing then and almost no one is doing now. And he made that work And he was able to fight people 10,

20 years younger than him for a very long time, you know, and still win championships. So, you know, still win belts. So the guy was great. One of the greats ever. Contemporary boxers, like everyone else, Terrence Crawford. Um... One of the things I find most interesting about Terrence Crawford is his both ability and willingness to switch stances.

It's a thing that's very stigmatized in boxing circles, which is, I think, connected partly to the culture thing that we've been talking about. There's an idea that there's a right way to box, and anything that doesn't look like the right way is either pointless showboating or dangerous. And I think Crawford is a guy who, like Marvin Hagler,

just knows what his capabilities are and isn't going to let someone else tell him what they should be or tell him that he's not capable of something just because it doesn't look like the boxing they expect. So he'll stand Southpaw and swing with people. He'll stand Orthodox and swing with people.

He'll switch in the middle of the round. And that kind of fluidity is something that I think is really impressive and something boxers should learn from. And the last person I'll mention is Dimitri Bivol. I really like Bivol's style. If you're looking at the footwork, it's somewhat orthodox Soviet style built around pendulum stepping,

so stepping in and out of punching range, controlling the distance between yourself and your opponent, and being able to dominate fights that way. But I think what is actually... More impressive to me than that footwork style, which is difficult to do precisely, is the way that he's been able to pair that with punch volume to fight almost

exclusively one-sided fights. Other than better be of how many guys have taken more than two rounds off of Bivol? I don't know if I can name one. He has a level of tactical mastery that has been able to prevent people from fighting him for the most part.

He just puts on clinics every night, and that's why he ended up with the belt. Maybe he'll get him back from Barabia, maybe not, but he's a great fighter either way.

And for listeners who don't know what the pendulum step or that type of footwork looks like, it's what you would probably see in point karate, this bouncing back and forth. And so what makes Bivol unique is that style of bouncing is It's great for point fighting because you're just supposed to hit them once.

Hit them once and get out, right? So it's designed for that. And that's how a lot of these karate fighters in karate combat or MMA fight. It's just get in, hit them once, get out. But somehow Bivol has figured out how to use that footwork, to your point, right?

What makes him unique is he uses that footwork that was designed for that type of hit and then get out to do volume. which is really interesting to watch. It's just like, okay, how are you pairing that type of footwork with this? Which is also part of the fun of watching him, I think.

It's not necessarily that he's always knocking people out, but you're just kind of like, it's so one-sided, but also you're like, what is the physics of this? How is this working? Because you're not really planted to throw a bunch of stuff, but you are throwing a bunch of stuff.

Oftentimes it looks like you're in midair throwing stuff, but you don't seem off balance. So would you say that's kind of how you read it?

Yeah, absolutely. And the thing that's so impressive to me about it beyond the punch volume is the fact that the whole time the other guy's trying to hit him. So every time he jumps in a direction, he has to decide how close or how far to be based on what he thinks his opponent is going to do.

And he's right every time. And he's not right every time like a supercomputer, like he's calculating what the other guy's going to do. He's right every time because he always reacts to the opponent advancing or not advancing in a way that makes them wrong. So that's the impressive thing he's doing with the punches.

Other people fighting him are not able to counter his footwork. They're not able to make a decision that gets them back in the fight. And I think if folks want to see this at work, his fight with Canelo Alvarez is the absolute masterclass of this approach to fighting. I've never seen it done better than in that fight.

He made Canelo, who is one of the best fighters of this century, look regular.

And I'm sure their camp took this fight because they thought, oh, this is tailor made for us because Canelo can hit hard and he's a great counter puncher. So as you're jumping in, if I punch you at that moment, it's going to be like a head on collision.

Your face coming to me and my fist coming to you. So it could have been an easy night, right? In theory. Yes. But to your point, that's not how it played out. And he made him look very pedestrian.

Yeah, it didn't play out that way at all. Canelo was never able to get a rhythm going. He was always reacting to Bivol.

So on top of power, something I've thought a lot about and something that's come up a lot in this conversation is consensus. And boxing judging is a great representation of this dilemma. Maybe even the Bivol versus better be a fight is an example of this.

So let's forget about crooked judging and assume all three judges are good at what they do. And they are all professional. Yet even with trained professionals watching the same thing and experiencing the same thing, they might have different interpretations of what they saw. So even pros watching the same thing, trained in watching the thing,

can lack consensus to something you brought up earlier, even how to throw a hook. There's no consensus. Even when the whole thing about boxing culture is doing it the right way, there's no consensus about what the right way is, which made me think about politics. If professional judges can't always get to a consensus,

how can the rest of us get to a consensus when we're often watching different things with different values from different vantage points and at different times? I'm not saying you have the answer to this, but this is just one example of things I think about. So do you ever draw parallels between the ring to real life?

Are you ever at the gym and you're like, huh, this is like an analogy of this other thing I was thinking about.

Yeah, a bit. I think for me, it's clearest in sparring rounds where it just becomes clear that the two people fighting are experiencing the round differently. And that's a scenario where... Agreement, I'll say agreement instead of consensus since it's just two people, but agreement on what's happening is actually kind of practically important, right?

If one person thinks we're in a hard spar and we're trying to, you know, hurt each other and the other person thinks we're kind of playing around and trying out different techniques, you know, the possibility of a gym fight rather than a hard spar goes way up. And that's a small version of, I think,

the large political problem, especially when you get more than two people involved, which is the thing that we're doing together won't be a thing we're doing together unless we have a baseline level of agreement. And that's not always easy to come by, right?

Because going back to the sparring scenario, there's a time and place for hard sparring, right? So the person who thinks we're in a hard spar isn't wrong to think that that's one of the things that it would be worthwhile to do. There's a time and place for easy, technical light sparring.

And so the person in the spar who thinks that that's what we're doing isn't wrong to think that that's ever a thing to do, right? People are attuned to different kind of cues and Right. Somebody might think, oh, well, the first couple of jabs were light. So we're in the light round.

Some other person might think, oh, well, those first few jabs were range finders. So, you know, it gets sticky. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, if we're trying to get to consensus by way of. signals or by way of winks and nudges, I don't think we're going to end up there, whether it's a sparring round or politics, right?

You know, I think people take for granted that other people are reading the room the same way as them. But we actually need to have, I think, fairly explicit decision-making protocols that um and they need to assume that consensus isn't always going to be reached so so

when do we go by majority rule of you know the rank and file in this union um when do we decide whether to appoint a person to make a decision or whether to wait for a consensus to be built you know i think it's important to Have those conversations early in organizations, preferably before punches start getting thrown.

That's in sparring rounds.

Yes, yes. Don't leave it to chance. Yes. Think about these things ahead of time. And unfortunately, believe it or not, right, fists do fly in organizations and different things. You know, people don't want to make these type of movements sound bad. But because of what I do, right,

talking about radical politics and combat sports and martial arts and LMA, people confide in these stories. So even amongst radicals, it's not always them fighting the fast. Yes. Fists will also fly. Yes. But I was thinking about Elite Capture, and I mentioned it earlier.

If you were to write that book again, and it was about the gym, right? If you're applying that lens, the Elite Capture lens to the gym, how are some of the ways that could play out in a boxing gym, let's say?

Oh, my God. Oh, how much time you got?

Oh, no, you thought about this.

Yeah, I mean, I think the... And I don't want to pick on boxing in general. So I will say there is a general kind of culture of non-culture in a lot of martial arts gyms. And what I mean by that is because... There is so clearly a demonstrable pecking order in the sense that at some point we

could all spar and see who could be who, and some people would be towards the top of the hierarchy in that kind of context, and some people would be towards the bottom. There is very much, at least from my perception, a lack of thinking or intentionality about what the culture of the training environment is going to be,

which allows the people who are quote-unquote advanced or the people who are coaches to kind of set whatever tone they feel like. And I feel like of all of the things about martial arts culture that are authoritarian, that might be the most authoritarian. The idea that

How we spar or how we train is just going to be the whims of this person rather than being guided by particular goals or particular ethos that we all kind of negotiate, buy into, and have some say in collectively. That's very much how I perceive gems. So I think you could very well describe that.

as a sort of elite captor where there's whoever is at the top of the pecking order because they're a coach or they're a particularly advanced fighter just gets to decide what boxing means in that gym. And that's very much true at the level of the sport. I think a lot of rules and guidelines are adjusted, let's say,

for the stars of the sport who bring in the most pay-per-view dollars in ways that are not obviously helpful to all the fighters that compete in that particular combat sport. And that's very true of sports in general. I'm a soccer fan, so one of the things that is getting talked about in the soccer world is how

unreal the player schedule has gotten so players today compared to players 40 years ago are playing like double triple the amount of matches per year which exposes them to way more injury risk why well because the people making the decisions about how many games to play are doing that on the basis of things like ad revenue and

um stadium seats um all the sorts of things that don't have much to do with player welfare or even really the quality of the game and the quality of the games that we do see and everything to do with creating more opportunities for revenue extraction

more opportunities for concessions etc etc so you know sport in general is very top heavy it's all about the champions And quiet as it's kept, it's not even really about the champions. It's about a lot of the administrators who get the lion's share of the money generated by the champions.

But it's a cascading, very top-heavy set of hierarchies.

Some people are fine with just an intellectual life, academic life, radical organizing life, and that's fulfilling enough. So what draws you to physical training and what does it do for you, whether lifting weights or cardio or hitting a bag or sparring?

Yeah, that's an interesting question. So I think it comes back to... one of the themes we started off talking about right you know is philosophy this thing that you sit down at a desk and do and then you go on about your life or is

it not that right you know like to me if i'm thinking about how to overcome power if i'm thinking about you know becoming the kind of person that resists domination then that's what I'm thinking about. And there are ways to do that at the level of political organization.

There are ways to do that at the level of the body. I just don't think those are different concerns. It's less that I came to a conclusion that I should do both of those things, and it's more that I just never came to separate them intellectually. I don't like bullies, whether they're the size of a

mean middle school kid or whether they're the size of an empire um and you know i think the desire to cultivate in myself the ability to resist domination uh just is the same one propelling me to hit a heavy bag as it is to you know join a picket line

You've trained in various arts and you've trained under various coaches and instructors. And even this unboxing training with me at the LMA Learning Lab, how would you describe these approaches, these pedagogical approaches, and how are they the same and different?

So in general, I would say that Capoeira and LMA seem to be the end of the spectrum of that is most exploratory, least prescriptive. They are the experiences I've had in martial arts where I was most encouraged to approach martial arts as a problem solver,

which is the way of thinking about martial arts that's most natural to me. So towards the beginning of the conversation, I was kind of poking fun at these people that say, what's the right way to throw a hook? Should your front foot do this or that? Should your...

throwing hand be vertical or horizontal and part of the disconnect between the way i've always thought about martial arts particularly striking and this way of thinking that i'm poking fun at is you know how do you think that you can answer that question without seeing where the guy's hands are right you know like seeing

where my hands are right where where are my hips you know all the Ways of answering the question of what the right punch to throw are defined by context. And I'm not training a particular skill that someone has that they can just insert into my brain. What I'm training is a sensitivity,

a sensitivity to the context around me and an ability to navigate it. That's the thing I'm trying to practice and get better at.

There's also an urgency, right? Because they're also trying to hit you.

Yeah, yeah. And I don't have time to worry about the precise angle of my big toe, right? I've got bigger concerns presently. I don't think the concern for that precision on a heavy bag in a dead context will translate to a live context. That's the other thing that you need to add.

I think the translation will be very limited to the extent that it'll happen at all. So the approaches to martial art that I gravitate to are the ones that are most insistent on this. You just play capoeira all the time. You're just constantly put into these situations. And then, yeah,

you'll train later and you'll maybe do a drill here and there, but then you'll go back and play. And the idea is that... The play will teach you because you will teach you. You get into these situations and it's the experience of being in a controlled situation at an emotional level where learning is possible.

And you do that enough and you improve. And I feel like that was very much the same attitude in LMA. These are going to be real strikes, but not the kinds of strikes that are going to hurt us or prevent us from training. But just enough for us to be in a situation that we can learn from.

and that allows people of very different ages and body types and strength levels and speed levels to productively train with each other and improve and you know In other martial arts spaces, on the other side of the spectrum, you can't go into a round with someone unless you are prepared to literally defend your health. Right?

Like, just a few... I was just in a sparring round the other day where I was literally like, I have to spar more intensely now just as a matter of making sure I don't leave here with a concussion. And that's a very different cultural attitude about how learning goes. And it's not my favorite. Again,

it's not something that I don't think there's never a place for, but it's not the place I would like to live as a martial artist.

That's a great analogy. Places you want to live as a martial artist and places you want to visit. Yes. There's a lot of toxic ways people push others to train. And unfortunately, the left is replicating all those same tactics from physical culture and gym culture, especially since Trump won the election.

So let's say a friend or someone you know wants to start a physical training practice and lacks motivation. What would you say to them? What's your advice that you give?

My biggest advice to someone who wants to start up a physical training process of one kind or other is find one that is fun. That is number one, two, and three. I often find myself saying to people, especially who are starting out, physical culture of any kind. I was also really into powerlifting for a while.

And I would point out to people, consistency beats everything. I was not even close to the strongest person in my friend group or amongst the people I went to high school with. I could barely bench the bar. I would guess... just based on numbers that i'm probably stronger than a lot of those people now not

because i had some hidden talent that was unearthed by some weird trick right but just because they they stopped lifting they started doing other things right and i just kept lifting because i liked it right that's that's it you know you don't get

ranked you you know the outcome of a fight is not dependent on talent the outcome of almost nothing is dependent on inherent ability whatever weird eugenics bullshit people think is going on right What decides competitions is accumulated ability. And there is a role for people who are quick learners or people who just started

ahead in accumulating a level of ability. But over the long term, it will almost assuredly be a gap that will be made up and then some by the people who just consistently put in the work. On day one, who squats the most or who deadlifts the most might be a question of who has the

right parents or the right movement history or the right limb leverages or whatever other weird stuff people might want to put in the talent or genetics bucket. But take two people, one of whom has trained for 20 years and one of whom has trained for 20 days, and ask me who deadlifts more.

And I'm saying the person who's deadlifted for 20 years. I don't need to know anything else. That person is stronger than the first person. I don't care what their background is. 99 times out of 100. Consistency beats everything. And what things are you going to be consistent at? The things you want to be consistent at. Right.

So if you keep liking training, you will keep training. And, you know, as long as not everything else, as long as your training isn't toxic, you'll get better. And if you want something more than that, if you want some astronomical rate of improvement, well, that's a question that you can still ask yourself further down the line.

But if you're just trying to get on the road, I think finding something fun, something that you enjoy, something that you will be willing to come back to again and again is by far the most important consideration.

Yeah, people ask the Ubermensch question. How do I become the Ubermensch way too early? First show, you could just do the thing, right? And stick with it. How do I become the ultimate weapon?

How do I become the world's greatest painter? It's like, well, let's start with some fruit baskets, my guy. You'll get the rest later.

It's safe to say that to get strong at powerlifting, you have to like powerlifting.

Yeah. You should probably lift. And whether it's CrossFit or Olympic weightlifting or a strict powerlifting program or a bodybuilding program, just start lifting. Whatever version of lifting you want to do. And then later, if you really still want to be the best powerlifter ever, then you can start specializing.

Yeah, just get in the ballpark first. Yes. And find something you like enough so you stay in that ballpark. Exactly. So speaking of toxic, do you think the toxicity around physical culture and framing it as drudgery you have to force yourself to do is partly why people don't want to engage in it in the first place?

I definitely think so. Every time I go to a standard physical culture gym, whether it's the spin bikes or... or CrossFit or, you know, the kind of standard cardio fitness boxing. You know, I get all these, like, flashbacks to gym class as a fat kid in Ohio. I'm just like, I want no part of this.

And I can't imagine I'm the only person. I think it attracts some people, great for them, but maybe not fit for every single person. There's this... culture of the fetishization of work and effort that I feel is deeply Protestant and American. I don't really mind it as such,

but I get the sense that people genuinely don't believe that workouts that aren't crushingly hard are effective. People believe if something is fun, that it's not working. It's not improving you. You're not really training or something. And I've just always felt that culture around me and felt deeply alienated by it and sought to escape it every time.

Finish this sentence. My life without a physical practice would be...

My life without a physical practice would be much more boring than my life is. And it would be much narrower in the time sense. Part of what I find so interesting and compelling and fun about things like boxing and things like powerlifting is...

I can go in and just chip away at something and think, months from now, where will I be? Years from now, where will I be? On the basis of the effort I'm putting in now. And I think it's not often in life where we get to take up projects that have that big a time horizon.

And it's especially not that often where we get to do that for things that are fun, for things that we choose ourselves, for things that are expression of what we value and enjoy. The only other times I have conversations with people thinking 10, 20 years down the line,

they're talking about their fucking mortgage or trying to afford their kid's college or something. It's like deep, distressing stuff.

Retirement.

Yeah, exactly. Trying to make sure they have enough to take care of their parents. It's all this... The future almost feels oppressive when those are the only things in it, struggle in it. But one of the things that it's brought to my life is something else to tell that long-term story about that is not tied to work,

that's not tied to trying to survive life. but that is tied to something I like.

Oftentimes when we think about scale, right, it's often something stressful. It's like, okay, I need to chip away at this thing to have enough money for this or that. And it's often related to money. Yes. Or I have to spend all this time doing this thing maybe I don't like and then I got to get tenure.

Or it's like, oh, I got only this much time on this earth and then I die. Whereas physical practice, when you like the thing, it becomes one of many expressions where it's something fun. It's a personal scale. That's not something you dread, but something you look forward to and that is fun and that you enjoy.

And that is part of the motivation, right? The motivation isn't the day-to-day motivation. There's this long-term project that is for you, that you own. Me and my wife often talk about this, where when we train and we do martial arts, it's something that's ours.

It's not a time where like, oh, I'm this kid's dad or I'm this kid's mom. It's our own thing. So even with a kid, we could have our own thing, right? And even though we train together it's not like oh we're a couple building something

together it's also something that allows us as a married couple to do something where it's like no it's my own individual growth this gets to be my thing this gets to be my own fun thing right so i think that's a great point that you made about

how this is one of those few examples where it can be one of those personal ways to experience time That doesn't feel like the endless march of time and you're working against it. Instead, you're working with it, in alignment with it, and you look forward to it.

I like that way of putting it, being in alignment with time. LMA terminologies. All right. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thanks a lot.