Latest / The Ageless Warrior Lab / Martial Arts, War Zones & Telling a Legend's Story | Peter Maguire EP 43

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Martial Arts, War Zones & Telling a Legend's Story | Peter Maguire EP 43 · The Ageless Warrior Lab

0:00
SPEAKER_01: You're in for a penny, you're in for a pound now.
0:02
SPEAKER_01: Like, it's not gonna do you any good to panic.
0:04
SPEAKER_01: You're not gonna go start choking people out when they have AK-47s.
0:08
SPEAKER_01: You can't run, or it's just gonna be like a turkey shoot or something.
0:13
SPEAKER_01: Real freedom is inherently dangerous, and it comes with no guarantee of safety.
0:19
SPEAKER_01: I was very troubled at the beginning of the war on terror when safety became the metric.
0:25
SPEAKER_01: I was like, I don't want to live a cowardly life.
0:28
SPEAKER_01: I don't want Big Brother telling me what to do.
0:32
SPEAKER_01: I didn't sign up for this.
0:36
SPEAKER_03: Welcome to the Ageless Warrior Lab.
0:38
SPEAKER_03: I'm BJJ Coral Belt and Dirty Dozen member Dave Meyer, here to draw wisdom from Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and the martial arts and explore how it applies to success in business, relationships, your long-term health, and making the most out of your life.
0:56
SPEAKER_03: What you're about to hear is a discussion I had with Dr.
0:59
SPEAKER_03: Peter McGuire.
1:00
SPEAKER_03: Peter is a surfer, a martial artist, a BJJ black belt under Hicks and Gracie.
1:06
SPEAKER_03: He's a historian, he's a war crimes investigator, a nonprofit founder and rescue craft entrepreneur, and he's a writer of books including Law and War, Facing Death in Cambodia, Tie Stick with Mike Ritter, and he wrote Breathe with Hicks and Gracie and Comfort in Darkness, also with Hicks and Gracie.
1:29
SPEAKER_03: We cover a lot of topics, including the early days of training with Hicks and Gracie in Los Angeles, Peter's experience as a big wave surfer, as a war crimes investigator in Cambodia, and many other things.
1:42
SPEAKER_03: Now, this is a lab and you're part of it.
1:44
SPEAKER_03: So I'll pop back in now and again to get your thoughts on what we're discussing, and you can drop those thoughts in the comments of the video on YouTube.
1:52
SPEAKER_03: So sit back and enjoy my discussion with Dr.
1:55
SPEAKER_03: Peter McGuire.
1:57
SPEAKER_03: Well, Peter, thank you so much for taking the time to join me.
2:02
SPEAKER_03: I really, really appreciate it.
2:03
SPEAKER_03: My pleasure.
2:04
SPEAKER_03: So we've never met, first of all, and we have intersects in so many ways.
2:10
SPEAKER_03: Of course, in terms of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, you were on the Hicks and Gracie side.
2:14
SPEAKER_03: I was in the Higgin Machado, Jean-Jacques Machado side.
2:17
SPEAKER_03: So cousins in related worlds, in related orbits, with Venn diagrams that crossed in some places.
2:24
SPEAKER_03: But this is our first chance to get to talk, and I'm excited about it.
2:28
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that wasn't enemy territory.
2:29
SPEAKER_03: I was allowed to go to Jean-Jacques.
2:32
SPEAKER_03: So we never considered it enemy territory either, although it was competitive.
2:36
SPEAKER_03: So I'll tell you what, let's start by talking jujitsu.
2:40
SPEAKER_03: And then, of course, I want to talk with you about a lot of the other interesting things you've done and some impressions I have.
2:45
SPEAKER_03: And I would love your impressions because I think you have a very unique vantage point on a lot of different things.
2:51
SPEAKER_03: And then we'll come back and we'll wrap it up with some life lessons from jujitsu because I want to get your thoughts on that too.
2:57
SPEAKER_03: So let's do the obligatory just comparing notes here.
3:01
SPEAKER_03: As you know, I started possibly around the same time you did, around 1990.
3:06
SPEAKER_03: I met Higgin Machado.
3:08
SPEAKER_03: I was already a black belt in jiu-jitsu.
3:10
SPEAKER_03: I had trained martial arts my whole entire life.
3:12
SPEAKER_03: I know you had some martial arts background as well.
3:14
SPEAKER_03: I knew Gene LaBelle very well, trained with him.
3:16
SPEAKER_03: Of course, Chris Howder and I were training partners.
3:18
SPEAKER_03: We got our black belt on the same day from Higgin and with Rick Williams as well.
3:23
SPEAKER_03: Eric Paulson, I know we have friends.
3:25
SPEAKER_03: And of course, Jean-Jacques Machado was my coach along with Higgin and his other brothers.
3:29
SPEAKER_03: So my relationship with Hicks, because you were just talking about competitive, not competitive.
3:34
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I feel like we never viewed Hickson or Horian as competitors or anything.
3:41
SPEAKER_03: I think Horian did view the Machado brothers as competitors and probably Hickson as well.
3:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
3:47
SPEAKER_03: And for that reason, there wasn't necessarily a lot of cross-training.
3:50
SPEAKER_03: But basically, everybody who I met when I first started, Bob Bass, Chris Howder, Casey Olson, like all these people, they had all started with Hicks and Horian.
4:02
SPEAKER_03: So those connections were already very strong and those personal friendships were very strong.
4:07
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
4:08
SPEAKER_03: So in terms of your starting training with Hickson, he was your first exposure to Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, right?
4:15
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I had trained a little bit with Paretti because Peretti was a student of Gene LaBelle's.
4:21
SPEAKER_01: And Peretti actually trained with Hegan and let's see, Silverado and all the Gene Labelle cabin crew, right?
4:32
SPEAKER_01: And so I actually got to go to Gene's cabin and train there long into the night.
4:38
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, it was very crude.
4:40
SPEAKER_01: It was in New York City before Craig Kukuk or Henzo.
4:45
SPEAKER_01: There was really, we found one really fat Brazilian guy who worked at the consulate who happened to be a black belt, who was super out of shape, who would come and just like put you in something horrible and lay on top of you.
4:58
SPEAKER_01: And that was our first Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
5:01
SPEAKER_01: Coming more from a kickboxing Wing Chun background, I found jiu-jitsu really scary.
5:07
SPEAKER_01: And when we saw those first Gracian actions, it was really scary because we thought we were really dangerous.
5:14
SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, the paradigm gets turned on its head.
5:17
SPEAKER_01: So I initially was a real doubting Thomas and just kind of like, well, if I did that, then you know, that whole deal.
5:24
SPEAKER_01: Then when I got to train with Hickson, there was something very profound there.
5:28
SPEAKER_01: He was a very different kind of teacher than Peretti.
5:31
SPEAKER_01: Striking is very different than Jiu-Jitsu in the way that you train.
5:36
SPEAKER_01: And we became friends.
5:37
SPEAKER_01: Mainly, you know, I was a good surfer and he wanted to surf the places that I got to surf, and he didn't really get to.
5:46
SPEAKER_03: Because that's the way things were back then.
5:48
SPEAKER_03: But by the way, I've read both of the books that you co-wrote with Hickson, Breathe and Comfort and Darkness.
5:55
SPEAKER_03: Comfort and Darkness, yeah.
5:56
SPEAKER_03: And I was gonna ask, because you don't mention in any of the books, did you guys ever surf together?
6:00
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, a little bit in Malibu.
6:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
6:03
SPEAKER_01: But I used to surf the ranch and the Channel Islands and some of those places that required boats and were very, very California paranoid localism kind of stuff.
6:15
SPEAKER_03: So I grew up in Los Angeles, very familiar with Malibu and stuff, but I never surfed.
6:19
SPEAKER_03: I never got into surfing.
6:21
SPEAKER_03: And then, of course, a lot of the Brazilians that came over, including Hickson, not Higgin, and actually not the Pachado brothers, interestingly.
6:28
SPEAKER_03: They were not surfers, but certainly Hickson was.
6:31
SPEAKER_03: And I know that was something that he and Bob Bass bonded over as well was their love of surfing.
6:36
SPEAKER_03: Did you ever meet Bob?
6:37
SPEAKER_01: No, I knew who he was.
6:40
SPEAKER_01: He was a big name back then.
6:41
SPEAKER_01: It was like, wow, you know, those were in the days when like a purple belt was a big deal, right?
6:47
SPEAKER_01: And so those first black belts, the first American black belts, that was a big deal.
6:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Bob Bass.
6:54
SPEAKER_01: I went once to the Machado School with Peretti.
6:58
SPEAKER_01: I forgot who was teaching, and Peretti did some nasty Gene Labelle stuff on some little Brazilian kid, and the kid just armbarred him really bad and hurt his elbow.
7:09
SPEAKER_01: Bob Bass could have been there at that point.
7:11
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I mean, Howder was always somebody I thought very highly of.
7:16
SPEAKER_01: Eckert, of course, Eric Paulson.
7:19
SPEAKER_01: He was really good when I sucked.
7:22
SPEAKER_01: And that was a tough class.
7:24
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that was the 10 o'clock men's open class at Hickson's.
7:27
SPEAKER_01: That was a rough crowd.
7:29
SPEAKER_01: And Eric was one of the best guys in there.
7:31
SPEAKER_01: And I think he used to train with like a swimming cap on because he had long hair.
7:36
SPEAKER_01: And he, you know, he had been in Japan.
7:39
SPEAKER_01: He was very, very sophisticated.
7:42
SPEAKER_01: And it was very impressive.
7:43
SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah, he was one of the first people that kind of opened my eyes of the Americans.
7:48
SPEAKER_01: And of course, you had the rotating karaokes coming in and out from Brazil that were just in their own league at that point.
7:57
SPEAKER_01: But Gene Labelle also really impressed me, and in terms of like a depth of knowledge, and he liked me, so that was good, as you know.
8:07
SPEAKER_01: And he was very gracious, he was generous, and he was just truly loved the martial arts.
8:13
SPEAKER_01: And the more I've learned about him over time, the more I feel like he really was the most important martial artist of the 20th century.
8:23
SPEAKER_01: Well, that's interesting.
8:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I really do.
8:26
SPEAKER_01: I look at him very differently in terms of the importance of that kind of catch wrestling with the fighting at the county fairs, and really the importance of people like Martin Farmer Burns and how the Gracies really systematized a lot of things that had been around in bits and pieces in America for a hundred years, and how those old fashion wrestlers, how dangerous those guys were, and uh and kind of mean, and and how there was that.
8:57
SPEAKER_01: Like you rip the guy.
8:59
SPEAKER_01: If he's gonna play dirty, play dirtier.
9:01
SPEAKER_01: And I don't think that's necessarily wrong.
9:03
SPEAKER_01: I think there is at some point when people act stupid, there's only really like I tell my writing students, like, show me, don't tell me.
9:13
SPEAKER_01: Don't say, you know, like you know the drill better than anybody.
9:16
SPEAKER_01: Hey, well, oh, let's go easy.
9:17
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, we're gonna go easy.
9:18
SPEAKER_01: And next thing you know, it's like you're fighting a honey badger, and sometimes a honey badger, you gotta hit him with a stick.
9:25
SPEAKER_01: All right, I've got so much to say about this.
9:28
SPEAKER_03: First of all, Gene Labelle was amazing.
9:31
SPEAKER_03: Gene LaBelle was a force of nature.
9:34
SPEAKER_03: For our listeners who don't know, he had in his youth been a national champion, like really excelled as an American, like the first American to really be at that level in judo.
9:43
SPEAKER_01: AAU champ in his weight class and unlimited.
9:47
SPEAKER_03: And then he went on to, of course, have links to him and everything else we talk about in the show notes, but then went on to do professional wrestling and stuff, had a career as a stunt man in TV.
9:57
SPEAKER_03: So if you've seen older movies or whatever, you've seen him, even if you don't know if you've seen him, popping wheelies on his motorcycle and stuff, well into his 70s, I'm sure.
10:05
SPEAKER_03: And he was older by the time we're talking about.
10:08
SPEAKER_03: He was probably, I'm gonna guess, in his 60s at that time.
10:11
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
10:12
SPEAKER_03: And very much a known as like the best grappler and really vicious, mean joint cranks, and was also well known for choking people to unconsciousness.
10:24
SPEAKER_03: Even when people asked, because people had heard about it, and it was almost like a badge of honor that you could get choked to unconsciousness by Gene LaBelle.
10:30
SPEAKER_03: And of course, the famous story of him choking out Bruce Lee on the set, which Bruce Lee responded to very positively and wanted to learn jujitsu.
10:38
SPEAKER_03: And the story of him choking out Steven Seagal on the set when Steven Seagal said, You can't do that to me, and then Gene getting blacklisted for a while in Hollywood.
10:47
SPEAKER_03: I don't know what's true of all that, although I do actually know Steven Seagal.
10:50
SPEAKER_03: I haven't talked to him in a long time, but I taught jujitsu at his school when he first opened his school in Los Angeles when he was first trying to break into movies.
10:57
SPEAKER_03: Whole nother story.
10:58
SPEAKER_03: Wow.
10:59
SPEAKER_03: But Gene LaBelle was amazing.
11:01
SPEAKER_03: And my recollection of Gene, I knew him before I started getting into Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, but certainly saw a lot more of him then.
11:07
SPEAKER_03: And he used to bring people by to kind of just see how they would do with Higgin.
11:12
SPEAKER_03: He was mischievous, I think you can agree.
11:13
SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah.
11:14
SPEAKER_03: Very kind of a prankster, mischievous kind of person.
11:17
SPEAKER_03: We had a very good relationship.
11:19
SPEAKER_03: To your point about most significant martial artist in the 20th century.
11:23
SPEAKER_03: I mean, that's an interesting discussion.
11:25
SPEAKER_01: Let me add to that because he was also a skilled boxer and that you know he was training at the Main Street gym throughout his youth.
11:34
SPEAKER_01: He was immersed in boxing because of his mother's relationship with the Olympic Auditorium, and you know, had like sparred with Sugar Ray Robinson.
11:44
SPEAKER_01: And also when a young boxer came to Los Angeles and his mother took him under his wing, she had Gene show him around.
11:55
SPEAKER_01: His name was Cassius Clay.
11:57
SPEAKER_01: Where did Gene take him?
11:59
SPEAKER_01: He took him to see Gorgeous George wrestle.
12:03
SPEAKER_01: And so I think a lot of Muhammad Ali's shtick came from wrestling, came from the influence of Eileen Eaton and Gene.
12:12
SPEAKER_01: And so the story that I've read was that Eileen Eaton gave Cassius Clay a button that said, I'm the greatest, and said, You're gonna jog down to the Main Street gym.
12:23
SPEAKER_01: The press is waiting for you.
12:26
SPEAKER_01: And so she was kind of encouraging him to become like a pro wrestling character.
12:32
SPEAKER_01: And then you have Gene, of course, fighting.
12:34
SPEAKER_03: Oh, so let me just let me just say for our younger listeners, Cassius Clay is Mohammed Ali.
12:39
SPEAKER_03: That's his born name before he became Muhammad Ali.
12:41
SPEAKER_03: Go on.
12:42
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and then you have, of course, Gene.
12:45
SPEAKER_01: He wins everything there is in judo.
12:47
SPEAKER_01: He's around some of the scariest gangsters of that era, and Mickey Cohen is like practically his godfather.
12:55
SPEAKER_01: And so Gene's about the hustle.
12:58
SPEAKER_01: And he would say something to the effect of like, I can win these plastic trophies all day long, but you know, when I get beat up on camera, I get the checks, and that buys me a house.
13:11
SPEAKER_01: And so he was always very practical about his relationship with the martial arts.
13:16
SPEAKER_01: But after he wins everything there is to win in judo, he decides to be a pro wrestler and goes on that very tough Texas circuit and was just a classic character.
13:28
SPEAKER_01: And he would go into the black section of the auditorium and pick up a little black kid, and the crowd would go crazy, and they'd interview him, and he'd say, Well, like, well, you don't know, my mama's black.
13:42
SPEAKER_01: And he would incite the racial stuff, and he was just a very curious guy, and then he has that big fight with Milo Savage.
13:52
SPEAKER_01: Really, in many ways, you could consider that one of the first MMA matches in the United States.
13:57
SPEAKER_01: He wins, he chokes him unconscious.
13:59
SPEAKER_01: There's a huge riot, someone tries to stab Gene, and then he's also the referee in the Anokia Ali fight in Tokyo, which is interesting because that's another one of the first MMA fights.
14:12
SPEAKER_01: Bruce Lee's beating up on the stunt man on the Green Hornet.
14:16
SPEAKER_01: They call in Gene to give him a quote attitude adjustment.
14:20
SPEAKER_01: And Gene actually doesn't choke him out, he picks him up over his head and fireman carries and runs him around.
14:26
SPEAKER_01: And he's like, Yeah, and he's saying, put me down or I'll kill you.
14:30
SPEAKER_01: And Gene's like, I can't put you down, or you'll kill me.
14:33
SPEAKER_01: And you know him.
14:34
SPEAKER_01: And he was just, I think he kind of hid behind that pro wrestler buffoon character, but beneath it was a very deep guy.
14:43
SPEAKER_01: And uh it's funny because I grew up like you in LA, and I watched Lucha Libre, Caille Kieh, Televidón, La Hunkelis, Richmond 9, 5171.
14:53
SPEAKER_01: And when I started giving that whole thing to Gene, he was just like, and I was like, Mil Maskaras, the man of a thousand faces, and I used to watch The Hangman, and that was Gene LaBelle, and he would come in with a noose and a voodoo doll, and he was scary, and he was a showman.
15:09
SPEAKER_01: But then comes MMA, then he's kind of MSA Grease behind the scenes.
15:14
SPEAKER_00: Gokar.
15:15
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Gokar.
15:16
SPEAKER_01: I think if Rhonda Rousey had really stuck with him, she would have been, yeah.
15:21
SPEAKER_01: I mean, in many ways, she was the greatest female MMA fighter, and we'll see what she does when she comes back into the ring.
15:28
SPEAKER_01: But for a moment there, she was just incredible.
15:31
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, and that was Gene and her mother's judo, but that the real tough judo tradition.
15:37
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, there's no question that Jean is an amazing story.
15:41
SPEAKER_03: I think if we talk about most significant, I guess how you define significant.
15:45
SPEAKER_03: I I know people would throw out Bruce Lee for his promotion of martial arts.
15:49
SPEAKER_03: I know people would throw out Porian for his promotion of U of C.
15:52
SPEAKER_03: But Jean is certainly, I would say, underappreciated.
15:56
SPEAKER_03: I think it's fair to say, yes.
15:57
SPEAKER_03: Just jumping in for a second, Peter says in his mind, Gene LaBelle is the most important martial artist of the 20th century.
16:04
SPEAKER_03: And I'm wondering if you agree with that.
16:06
SPEAKER_03: And if not, who would you suggest as the most important martial artist of the 20th century?
16:11
SPEAKER_03: I'm interested in what you have to say, and you can just leave your thoughts in a comment on the YouTube video and I will respond to them.
16:19
SPEAKER_03: And now let's get back to the show.
16:23
SPEAKER_03: So, going back though, to your training with Hickson, all of the Gracie family members, and by that I include Machado, are well known for also being very good instructors.
16:34
SPEAKER_03: But specifically, people who are noted for that, of course, Horian, everybody says Horian is a fantastic instructor.
16:41
SPEAKER_03: Interestingly, Half Gracie, who could be controversial and stuff, but a great instructor.
16:46
SPEAKER_03: But I know Hickson, you mentioned Mark Eckert.
16:49
SPEAKER_03: So I got a chance to compete against Mark Eckert.
16:53
SPEAKER_03: It was the only time I met him.
16:55
SPEAKER_03: It was at the Los Angeles Police Department.
16:57
SPEAKER_03: They had this tournament, and I got selected because of the weight.
17:00
SPEAKER_03: We were told Mark was Hicks's top American at the time.
17:04
SPEAKER_03: I remember it was the Mark Eckert and Chris Saunders.
17:07
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Chris Saunders.
17:09
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
17:09
SPEAKER_01: David Kama was really.
17:11
SPEAKER_03: And David Kama, yeah.
17:12
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
17:12
SPEAKER_03: But Bob Bass, who was our best guy at the time, was a little bit lighter than Mark.
17:19
SPEAKER_03: So I got the call, and that was fine.
17:20
SPEAKER_03: And we ended up fighting to a zero-zero tie.
17:23
SPEAKER_03: It was a lot of pressure on both of us.
17:25
SPEAKER_03: And then when it was over, because it was zero-zero, and this was before there were advantages, before that was part of the rule set, it was all on Joe Morera, who was the ref to make the decision.
17:35
SPEAKER_03: And he had Hickson in one ear, he had Higgin in the other ear.
17:38
SPEAKER_03: That's a lot of pressure for poor Joe.
17:40
SPEAKER_03: And the crowd is screaming, Mark, David.
17:42
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it was just a raucous thing.
17:44
SPEAKER_03: And Mark and I were both sitting, what's Japanese called Seiza, just on our heels, knees bent, quietly looking ahead, watching this whole scene.
17:52
SPEAKER_03: And then I turned over to Mark.
17:54
SPEAKER_03: We hadn't said a word.
17:55
SPEAKER_03: We had this amazing competition, very respectful.
17:57
SPEAKER_03: It was super quiet.
17:58
SPEAKER_03: He was trying to pass my guard.
17:59
SPEAKER_03: He couldn't.
17:59
SPEAKER_03: I was trying to sweep and finish him.
18:01
SPEAKER_03: I couldn't.
18:01
SPEAKER_03: It was zero, zero.
18:02
SPEAKER_03: I turned him and I said, I hope they don't give us overtime.
18:05
SPEAKER_03: And he looked at me and he says, Me too, man.
18:08
SPEAKER_03: I'm exhausted.
18:09
SPEAKER_03: And then Hickson prevailed.
18:11
SPEAKER_03: I think he had more authority than Higgin at that time.
18:13
SPEAKER_03: So they raised Mark's hand.
18:15
SPEAKER_03: Mark came right over to me and said, that was a tie.
18:17
SPEAKER_03: And I said, Fair enough, I agree.
18:19
SPEAKER_03: But anyway, what I noticed in that, I had great coaching from Higgin.
18:23
SPEAKER_03: And most of the match was dead silent.
18:25
SPEAKER_03: And I could hear my coach, I could hear Hickson.
18:28
SPEAKER_03: And my experience of that was I had phenomenal sweeps at that time.
18:34
SPEAKER_03: Phenomenal sweeps.
18:35
SPEAKER_03: And I could sweep Brazilian jujitsu black belts who weren't the Gracie family members, no problem.
18:41
SPEAKER_03: But every time I tried to set up a sweep with Mark when he was trying to pass my guard, Hicks would say, Mark, keep your knee down.
18:48
SPEAKER_03: And Mark probably would have done that in his own anyway.
18:50
SPEAKER_03: But I could hear Hickson's coaching.
18:52
SPEAKER_03: And it was so frustrating to me because Hickson could see so clearly everything I was trying to set up, and was literally like he was in my head telling the guy, don't lift your knee, back away, do this.
19:05
SPEAKER_03: He was thwarting me.
19:06
SPEAKER_03: I mean, Hicks was beating me in this match.
19:08
SPEAKER_03: And he kept saying, and I'm sure you heard this through all your years of training with Hicks, watch your bass, watch your bass, watch your bass, this fundamental thing.
19:17
SPEAKER_03: And I was so impressed with Hicks after that, at the quality of Hickson's coaching, the way he could see exactly both what I was doing and what would be helpful for Mark to hear.
19:28
SPEAKER_03: Like he wasn't yelling, like, go, you know, or all the silly things that coaches do.
19:32
SPEAKER_03: And you've seen Jean-Jacques, who's phenomenal, and you've been with Jean Labelle.
19:36
SPEAKER_03: Sure.
19:36
SPEAKER_03: Is there something about Hicks's teaching style or approach that you think is unique?
19:42
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
19:43
SPEAKER_01: And it's kind of the way I try to teach.
19:45
SPEAKER_01: I don't teach many students.
19:47
SPEAKER_01: And Hickson really didn't teach that many students.
19:51
SPEAKER_01: So if he did, he poured it all into those students.
19:55
SPEAKER_01: And I think what I really see with him is that he tailors his teaching to each student, both to your physical skills, your personality.
20:06
SPEAKER_01: And then he sort of builds off of that.
20:09
SPEAKER_01: And there's an incredible attention to detail.
20:13
SPEAKER_01: And even to this day, Outer or me, we'd go to see him and take a private or whatever.
20:19
SPEAKER_01: And he'd ask us to do something really basic.
20:22
SPEAKER_01: And we'd do it somewhat breezily, maybe.
20:25
SPEAKER_01: And he would start to pick it apart.
20:27
SPEAKER_01: And then the class would be built around that thing that we weren't doing perfectly, like headlock escape, right?
20:36
SPEAKER_01: Like you better have your headlock escape like that.
20:39
SPEAKER_01: You better have all three of them.
20:41
SPEAKER_01: You better be able to go to all of them interchangeably, use a half of this one, that one.
20:45
SPEAKER_01: Like I went to a seminar once of his when I was, it wasn't that long ago.
20:50
SPEAKER_01: And I was in LA to give a speech and all this stuff.
20:54
SPEAKER_01: And I was probably talking to my friends or whatever.
20:57
SPEAKER_01: I'm a kind of a bad class student and really learned.
21:01
SPEAKER_01: And you're a teacher, you should know better.
21:02
SPEAKER_01: But yes, go on.
21:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I really learned more by training and fighting.
21:06
SPEAKER_01: And I hated drilling.
21:08
SPEAKER_01: And I just, it's just the way I am, whatever.
21:11
SPEAKER_01: It's not good.
21:12
SPEAKER_01: It just is what it is.
21:13
SPEAKER_01: And so Hickson kind of sees that I'm not probably taking this altogether as seriously as I should.
21:19
SPEAKER_01: And he comes over, okay, do this escape.
21:21
SPEAKER_01: Yep, I do it.
21:22
SPEAKER_01: Do this escape.
21:23
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I do it.
21:24
SPEAKER_01: Then the third one, he just it's like I'm Sakuraba or something all of a sudden.
21:30
SPEAKER_01: And he's putting the hurt on me, and uh, and I bobble just a little bit, and man, he puts it on me so bad that I almost go out, and then I'm half out, and then he lets it off.
21:43
SPEAKER_01: I come back and he's yelling at me to make me finish the escape correctly, and then I had a red stripe across my face like that, and I had to go give a speech at the biggest law firm in Los Angeles the next day.
21:58
SPEAKER_01: But that was you know, I was probably in my 50s.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: He takes jujitsu.
22:02
SPEAKER_01: This is his life's work, period.
22:05
SPEAKER_01: And capitalizing on it was not his objective.
22:09
SPEAKER_01: There were opportunities I've seen people put in front of him to make a lot of money and do this and that.
22:14
SPEAKER_01: But he wasn't interested.
22:16
SPEAKER_01: I would show up from a surfing trip from Baja with my little kids and go to Crohn's.
22:22
SPEAKER_01: He'd take an hour to train my five and seven-year-olds, just playing basic games with him.
22:28
SPEAKER_01: Like he really loves, breathes jujitsu.
22:32
SPEAKER_01: And again, there's just a precision and an attention to detail, and also a physical genius because he really was totally ambidextrious.
22:42
SPEAKER_01: He didn't favor a side.
22:44
SPEAKER_01: He didn't favor a submission.
22:46
SPEAKER_01: And that I took from him.
22:47
SPEAKER_01: I try not to force things.
22:49
SPEAKER_01: I try to take what's given to me.
22:51
SPEAKER_01: And I'm not big, so that's what you're left with.
22:54
SPEAKER_03: I try to remind people when I'm teaching or training with them, and I don't do a lot of teaching.
22:58
SPEAKER_03: I don't have my own school.
22:59
SPEAKER_03: I used to do a lot of seminars, but God gave you two sides, use them.
23:03
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
23:04
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
23:05
SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
23:05
SPEAKER_01: And when I injured my knee, then my left side got unbelievably exponentially injured.
23:11
SPEAKER_01: Of course.
23:12
SPEAKER_01: Of course.
23:13
SPEAKER_01: I was scared to use my right side.
23:14
SPEAKER_01: It's funny, you know, like as we get old and all the injuries start adding up.
23:19
SPEAKER_01: And I'm just kind of like, oh, I don't have a headlight anymore.
23:22
SPEAKER_01: I could drive with one headlight.
23:24
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
23:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that front torsion bar is a little off.
23:28
SPEAKER_01: Just go under 55.
23:29
SPEAKER_01: The car still works.
23:30
SPEAKER_01: You just have to kind of you got to nurse it along a little bit.
23:34
SPEAKER_01: You got to work around the problems.
23:35
SPEAKER_01: And that's a big part of it.
23:37
SPEAKER_01: And I see so many guys who are so much better than me, they quit 30 years ago.
23:42
SPEAKER_01: And I was talking to someone about this recently, actually, a lifeguard who was a great lifeguard.
23:47
SPEAKER_01: I was a lifeguard when I was younger.
23:49
SPEAKER_01: And I said, look, we have reputations to maintain, right?
23:53
SPEAKER_01: I see guys, they oh, they work and make a bunch of money finally, oh, I'm gonna get into jujitsu.
23:59
SPEAKER_01: But they're very old.
24:00
SPEAKER_01: But they've got that passion of like a teenager, but the body's not gonna tolerate that.
24:06
SPEAKER_01: And then they're hurt all the time.
24:08
SPEAKER_01: And I just I kind of feel sorry for them because I know their heart is really in it, but I just know that they will sooner or later suffer a terminal injury that will end up their jujitsu journey.
24:20
SPEAKER_01: And if you're not smart, that will happen.
24:23
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think that has a lot to do with who you're training with and kind of the attitude you're bringing to the mat.
24:27
SPEAKER_03: Are you willing to tap?
24:29
SPEAKER_03: Are you being super aggressive?
24:30
SPEAKER_03: Because if you're super aggressive, people will respond super aggressively.
24:34
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
24:34
SPEAKER_03: But uh, I just did an interview that I think will be out by the time people hear this with the Robert Drysdale.
24:41
SPEAKER_03: And I talked about this for a minute with him, another sort of historian of Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
24:47
SPEAKER_03: But the way I look at it, because I'm 63, we're similar ages, and I am still actively training and competing.
24:53
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I'm right in the thick of it.
24:55
SPEAKER_03: But like you say, I've had to deal with the one headlight and the steering column not working the same way.
25:00
SPEAKER_03: You mentioned people who want to come in at 50 years old.
25:04
SPEAKER_03: That presents its own certain challenges.
25:06
SPEAKER_03: But then you have the people, like you were saying, who did it for a long time and then can't stay with it, either because they've had an injury, but frequently because it's just not fun anymore because they can't execute what they used to be able to execute.
25:18
SPEAKER_03: And my feeling on this is we perceive the loss, right?
25:23
SPEAKER_03: So I know what I used to be able to do every day on the mat.
25:27
SPEAKER_03: Someone does something, and I'm like, friend, if it was 20 years ago, I would have smashed you for what you just did.
25:33
SPEAKER_03: But look, I have to give it to you because I can't do that.
25:36
SPEAKER_03: And you're gonna think you did some great thing on me.
25:38
SPEAKER_03: You don't know who I was, right?
25:40
SPEAKER_03: I've made peace with that.
25:41
SPEAKER_03: I get it.
25:42
SPEAKER_03: That's just the way it is.
25:43
SPEAKER_03: But the one thing that helps me with that is we have to adapt our training.
25:48
SPEAKER_03: And one would, I think, fairly say, jujitsu, especially Brazilian jujitsu, all it is is adapting to a situation.
25:56
SPEAKER_03: That's how you're beating a bigger opponent, is you're adapting to whatever it is they're doing that you can't change, but you're gonna make sure that we have an answer for that that works out in our benefit, right?
26:05
SPEAKER_03: It's to me, it's adaptation.
26:07
SPEAKER_03: And we perceive the adaptation when we've had a loss.
26:11
SPEAKER_03: So I can't use my shoulder the way I used to, so I'm gonna have to adapt.
26:14
SPEAKER_03: I can't use my hip the way I used to have to adapt.
26:17
SPEAKER_03: But I think when we were whatever it is that we think of was our 100% self, we were already adapting.
26:24
SPEAKER_03: We just didn't realize it because we weren't stronger than we were, we weren't more flexible than we were.
26:30
SPEAKER_03: We could have been more flexible, we could have been faster, we could have been in better shape.
26:34
SPEAKER_03: We always could have been better at something, but we hadn't lost it.
26:37
SPEAKER_03: So we didn't perceive it as an adaptation, but it was an adaptation.
26:42
SPEAKER_03: You were adapting from day one to the body you had then, and we need to do that today is adapt to the body we have today.
26:51
SPEAKER_03: It's just it's harder because we feel the loss.
26:54
SPEAKER_03: I don't know if that makes sense.
26:55
SPEAKER_01: No, it does.
26:56
SPEAKER_01: There was a very famous big wave surfer named Peter Cole, and he used to say surfing is an interesting thing because you start as a kook and then you end as a kook because you get old, your timing, you just the b you can't stand up as fast.
27:13
SPEAKER_01: And I kind of see that analogy.
27:16
SPEAKER_01: The one thing we do have though is we have knowledge, and my biggest asset is strategic patience, is that there's nothing anybody hasn't done to me.
27:25
SPEAKER_01: You're not gonna make me uncomfortable, like maybe Hickson or John Jock, but it doesn't happen.
27:32
SPEAKER_01: And so I'm gonna live through most anything and wait for that single mistake and capitalize on that single mistake.
27:39
SPEAKER_01: And when you feel somebody, a lot of times I'll say, Okay, go ahead and mount me.
27:43
SPEAKER_01: We'll start mounted.
27:44
SPEAKER_01: I always like to start in positions, I don't like to start knee to knee, and that's a very odd distance, an odd thing to me.
27:51
SPEAKER_03: It's a position, it's just a weirdly artificial one.
27:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and so okay, go ahead and mount like somebody starts in an advantageous position, and then I'll just kind of bridge up to just see what they do.
28:03
SPEAKER_01: I'm throwing spinner baits the whole time.
28:05
SPEAKER_01: I'm like a bass fisherman, and I'm like, let's see if they fall for that.
28:09
SPEAKER_01: I'll tap my foot on the mat with no no intention to do anything, just and some half the time they'll take that bait.
28:16
SPEAKER_01: It's very funny the power of experience and the power of knowledge, and like howder, like training with howder, it's like the guy's made out of granite in terms of his positions and his base, and I'm sure you're the same.
28:29
SPEAKER_01: Because you guys were successful at a much higher level than I was.
28:33
SPEAKER_01: I could fight, and I did have to fight real-world fights in my other work, but I competed in one horrifying tournament, which was the Hickson versus Horian Academy tournament, and that was at the height of interfamilial tension.
28:52
SPEAKER_01: This would have been uh the year of the UFC, so it was like December of '93.
28:57
SPEAKER_01: And everybody's belts had been held back, and it was packed.
29:02
SPEAKER_01: Hicks' Academy and Ethan Millius, John Millius' son, was really good at that point.
29:09
SPEAKER_01: And just these death matches and people getting their arms broken.
29:13
SPEAKER_01: And I remember Ethan Millius having this guy in an arm bar from the guard going, tap, and the guy's like, and then he banged the guy's arm.
29:22
SPEAKER_01: And there was a lot on the line, there was a lot of pride on the line, and David Kama was an incredible competitor.
29:29
SPEAKER_01: He really impressed me at that.
29:31
SPEAKER_01: It was interesting, but yeah, competing and all that stuff.
29:35
SPEAKER_01: No, the ghee I didn't like at all coming from the kickboxing and that thing.
29:41
SPEAKER_01: I was teaching by 94-ish.
29:46
SPEAKER_01: I was teaching in Southeast Asia, I was teaching in Cambodia, which was a war-torn country, still in the midst of a civil war, training with a lot of really dangerous soldiers, mercenaries, people like that, that were all really skilled fighters, real-world fighters, tie boxers, things like that.
30:04
SPEAKER_01: So you had to show them.
30:07
SPEAKER_01: You couldn't tell them.
30:08
SPEAKER_01: Oh, this is jujitsu, this is the best thing ever.
30:10
SPEAKER_01: And we're taping those foam aerobics mats together with duct tape on tile, and it was very tough.
30:18
SPEAKER_01: And then just walking around the streets was very tough.
30:22
SPEAKER_01: You're in a society where everybody in there had survived genocide.
30:27
SPEAKER_03: We'll talk about that in a couple minutes.
30:28
SPEAKER_03: Just a couple of thoughts from what you're talking about.
30:31
SPEAKER_03: Crisp being like a granite stable.
30:34
SPEAKER_03: And yes, I'd like to think that I could do that too.
30:37
SPEAKER_03: I think what happens is as you get older, obviously your mobility becomes compromised.
30:41
SPEAKER_03: You've had joint injuries, you're not going to move as fast, and you sort of condense down to more basics.
30:49
SPEAKER_03: Honestly, more of what I heard Hickson saying to Mark that day, watch your base, watch your base.
30:54
SPEAKER_03: The comment that I get from everybody I train with is, man, are you hard to sweep?
30:59
SPEAKER_03: Or man, is that a lot of pressure?
31:01
SPEAKER_03: I am not doing any crazy outside passing.
31:04
SPEAKER_03: I am not doing a lot of inversions anymore.
31:06
SPEAKER_03: Chris used to do inversions all the time.
31:08
SPEAKER_03: And he also doesn't do that anymore, Chris Howder.
31:11
SPEAKER_03: So what's happening is you kind of shrink down to more the basic fundamental, let's call it the foundation, which is literally like a foundation.
31:19
SPEAKER_03: Like it's tough and hard to move.
31:22
SPEAKER_03: And that's, I think, what you're left with.
31:26
SPEAKER_03: Because if you didn't have that foundation and your success in jujitsu in your youth was all about movement, your game is going to really deteriorate as you get older because you're simply not going to have that kind of movement available to you anymore.
31:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
31:38
SPEAKER_01: Correct.
31:39
SPEAKER_03: And because the time that you were learning and that I was learning, we were learning a, I think it's fair to call it a more basic fundamental jujitsu than what someone might be stepping into a class and learning today, because there's been such an evolution of the sport and so many different things, which is great and fun and interesting.
31:56
SPEAKER_03: But in the absence of those fundamental positional strengths and those kind of small details that you're talking about that Hickson would talk about, I think you are building your art on feet of clay a bit because that's not going to be there for you as you get older, but the fundamentals will always be with you.
32:15
SPEAKER_03: Specifically, weight, I tell people, weight is your one weapon that will literally be there with you after you have died.
32:23
SPEAKER_03: When your heart stops beating, you're on top of someone, they're still gonna have to deal with that, right?
32:28
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, why don't you use your weight?
32:30
SPEAKER_03: And I think that's just one of those very fundamental principles.
32:33
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like for example, the summer of 1993 at Hickson's, there was never a ghee for the whole summer, not once.
32:43
SPEAKER_01: Everybody was in t-shirts and swim trunks.
32:46
SPEAKER_01: A lot of it was because the school was so hot.
32:48
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was very common to train that way.
32:51
SPEAKER_01: And then wearing a ghee, like in a super tropical hot climate where the thing will never dry and stuff like that.
32:59
SPEAKER_01: I'd wear ghee pants occasionally just so red ant bites weren't so bad, but you know it is very different, but it gives you a very honest kind of jujitsu because you have less handles, you have no cuffs.
33:15
SPEAKER_01: And that's where I think I got a lot from Gene, because Gene was all about handles and grabbing a tricep or this or that.
33:23
SPEAKER_01: And so having really started in his style of grappling before I really immersed myself in jiu-jitsu, it kind of changed the way I looked at it.
33:33
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I love both Ghee and No-Gi.
33:35
SPEAKER_03: I think Ghee is great, it slows things down.
33:37
SPEAKER_03: It's like training wheels, it's easier to learn things because you've got these grips.
33:41
SPEAKER_03: It also does give you a whole panoply of chokes and stuff that just aren't there with no gi.
33:45
SPEAKER_03: And I'm not one of those people who say, oh, people don't wear a gi on the street.
33:48
SPEAKER_03: No, people wear jackets and t-shirts and stuff.
33:51
SPEAKER_03: You can use that.
33:52
SPEAKER_03: But I do also very much appreciate the more fluid nature of no-gi.
33:57
SPEAKER_03: Most of my world championships are in no gi, we're one in no gi.
34:01
SPEAKER_03: And certainly Hagen as well was very interested in learning wrestling and all that stuff is no gi.
34:07
SPEAKER_03: But so I think there's a place for both.
34:09
SPEAKER_03: But suffice it to say, kids today have it much easier.
34:13
SPEAKER_03: Like you're talking about red out bites and taping together things, and people are not coming in and actually challenging.
34:19
SPEAKER_03: We used to come taking the Gracie challenge, come into our school as well, because our school was called Carlos Gracie Jiu-Jitsu.
34:25
SPEAKER_03: So we certainly had all that.
34:27
SPEAKER_03: Just one thing before we move on to some other things, and we will circle back to jujitsu at the end, but you mentioned show, don't tell.
34:34
SPEAKER_03: And that I remember absolutely when we went out and taught seminars.
34:40
SPEAKER_03: And uh, you mentioned this in your book too.
34:41
SPEAKER_03: I know Hickson would line everybody up.
34:43
SPEAKER_03: We would do that too.
34:44
SPEAKER_03: We would teach a seminar and we'd like, come on, everybody come.
34:46
SPEAKER_03: And it was admittedly easier because before the UFC, a lot of people really didn't have grappling skill.
34:52
SPEAKER_03: But in those cases, we would go hard and we wouldn't hurt anybody, but we would definitely tap them out.
34:57
SPEAKER_03: But there were times when like a celebrity would come and visit, and that was always very difficult for me because I don't want to injure the person.
35:06
SPEAKER_03: And I remember who was it?
35:08
SPEAKER_03: It was Mike Swain, judo champion, Mike Swain of who has just started Swain mats, came by the Jean-Jacques school where I was at.
35:16
SPEAKER_03: And I knew Mike, and I knew him from my jiu-jitsu life prior to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
35:21
SPEAKER_03: I liked Mike, and he was past his prime, but certainly could still grapple on the ground.
35:26
SPEAKER_03: And so I did be sure not to hurt him, don't let him pass my guard, maybe threaten a triangle.
35:33
SPEAKER_03: And then we were done.
35:35
SPEAKER_03: And Jean-Jacques said, okay, well, do you want to train with me?
35:38
SPEAKER_03: And Mike said, No, I think I'm tired.
35:40
SPEAKER_03: And Jean-Jacques took me in the back and berated me, like he said, like I did the worst thing.
35:45
SPEAKER_03: I didn't try my hardest.
35:47
SPEAKER_03: So he didn't get the respect of jujitsu, but I tired him out.
35:50
SPEAKER_03: So now he's not going to train with Jean-Jacques and really see what has to offer.
35:55
SPEAKER_03: And I really took that to heart.
35:56
SPEAKER_03: It's not that you want to injure someone, but when someone is coming there, you need to show them why they're there, right?
36:03
SPEAKER_03: You're doing them a favor because if you don't show them why they're there, meaning what this art has to offer, they might walk away and say, Yeah, those guys aren't that good.
36:12
SPEAKER_03: I guess I don't need to go there and train.
36:13
SPEAKER_03: And they miss out.
36:14
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
36:16
SPEAKER_01: I had a lot of those experiences.
36:18
SPEAKER_01: And doubting Thomas's that were not convinced that this like skinny surfer guy was any threat of any kind in any way in any world.
36:29
SPEAKER_03: And so that was a high bar.
36:32
SPEAKER_03: Well, so let's talk about surfing.
36:34
SPEAKER_03: You have so many interesting parts of your story.
36:36
SPEAKER_03: But you mentioned that you grew up in Los Angeles and that you were an avid surfer.
36:40
SPEAKER_03: And I know, and I've you've both written a book on and talked in interviews about the very interesting connection between drug, I guess it's marijuana smuggling and bringing it into the United States for surfers as a way to fund their worldwide super.
36:55
SPEAKER_03: And like summer, yeah, yeah.
36:57
SPEAKER_03: Which totally makes sense to me.
36:59
SPEAKER_03: Because when you think about it, it's so obvious.
37:01
SPEAKER_03: Like, well, you've got these guys who don't seem to have jobs.
37:04
SPEAKER_03: And how are they surviving?
37:06
SPEAKER_03: And how are they going and traveling to these far-off places?
37:08
SPEAKER_03: Well, of course, one way to do it would be to be bringing back high quality hashish or tie sticks or whatever.
37:14
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
37:15
SPEAKER_03: I have actually a friend, I now have to ask him, but this is going to be funny.
37:19
SPEAKER_03: I have a friend, Steve Abbey, who is somebody I met through my animal work.
37:23
SPEAKER_03: He's a donor of some of the animal welfare causes.
37:26
SPEAKER_03: But early on, the story he told me, because I do believe he served, was that he went to Bali or whatever, and he noticed that people were selling these jewelry they had made for pennies, right?
37:38
SPEAKER_03: And he bought a bunch of it and he brought it back to Santa Barbara where he lived and he sold it for$20 a shot.
37:44
SPEAKER_03: And that funded his going back.
37:46
SPEAKER_03: So he's saying it was that kind of not drugs, but but necklaces and stuff.
37:52
SPEAKER_03: But then that eventually turned to him into a whole importer business where he ended up, weirdly, don't know how he made this jump.
38:00
SPEAKER_03: He ended up selling like used military equipment to countries outside the United States.
38:05
SPEAKER_03: And when I met him, he was going through a like, why am I doing this?
38:09
SPEAKER_03: This is going to kill people.
38:10
SPEAKER_03: He had this moment of reckoning, right?
38:13
SPEAKER_03: But I'm going to have to ask him, were you just selling necklaces or were you actually selling marijuana?
38:19
SPEAKER_01: No, a lot of you know, you had the so-called hippie trail.
38:23
SPEAKER_01: And so that was the overland route from Europe to it was really the old silk road.
38:29
SPEAKER_01: And so all of those India, Pakistan, certainly Afghanistan, those were all giant hash cultures.
38:38
SPEAKER_01: And so they kind of see, okay, that's easy enough.
38:42
SPEAKER_01: So it all starts very small.
38:44
SPEAKER_01: I was too young for that, but I was the Thai marijuana, it was only marijuana, it was the only thing I ever went near.
38:51
SPEAKER_01: It was the Thai marijuana that would come in the summertime, and many of the older surfers would offload the boats.
38:59
SPEAKER_01: And so, on some level, the surfers controlled a lot of the high-end marijuana trade because marijuana back then was a very limited commodity.
39:09
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't like today.
39:11
SPEAKER_01: It was the Northern California green Humboldt type pot in the winter time.
39:18
SPEAKER_01: That would all be gone by spring.
39:20
SPEAKER_01: Then the tie boats would come in early summer, and that was a limited commodity too.
39:25
SPEAKER_01: So there was an unlimited demand and a limited supply.
39:29
SPEAKER_01: I just finished directing a documentary film called Tie Stick about all this.
39:33
SPEAKER_01: But one of the things I say, I'm the narrator, is that in a few nervous weeks you could make enough money to fund your endless summer.
39:42
SPEAKER_01: And many people I know did.
39:44
SPEAKER_01: And ironically, I worked as a war crimes investigator in Cambodia.
39:49
SPEAKER_01: My book Tie Stick began because a smuggler asked me, you know, I was supposed to load this boat in the Gulf of Thailand in 1978.
39:58
SPEAKER_01: Boat never showed up.
39:59
SPEAKER_01: I heard rumors that they were captured by the Khmer Rouge.
40:02
SPEAKER_01: I don't know what happened.
40:03
SPEAKER_01: Can you find out what happened?
40:05
SPEAKER_01: And I did, and they were captured by the Khmer Rouge, tortured, killed, burned alive.
40:10
SPEAKER_01: And so I shared what my investigation yielded with this smuggler, and then I trained him how to interview people.
40:20
SPEAKER_01: So then he began interviewing all his former co-conspirators, and we basically assembled the largest archive on marijuana smuggling in the world.
40:31
SPEAKER_01: And that's what the film's about.
40:33
SPEAKER_03: I'll definitely have a link, if there is one, to wherever someone will be able to see or at least get more information about the film.
40:39
SPEAKER_03: And just to clarify, at the time when you were doing your research into what happened to this boat, this was already after the Khmer Rouge were gone, right?
40:49
SPEAKER_03: You were doing that after the fact to see whatever happened to the people.
40:53
SPEAKER_01: Basically, my great-grandfather was a judge at Nuremberg.
40:57
SPEAKER_01: My PhD advisor was chief prosecutor at Nuremberg.
41:00
SPEAKER_01: Well, I got my PhD at 28, and I've said this before, I kind of felt like a fraud.
41:07
SPEAKER_01: I was one of the world's experts on war crimes.
41:10
SPEAKER_01: And I didn't, I'd never been near a war.
41:12
SPEAKER_01: I'd never been in a post-conflict society or anything.
41:16
SPEAKER_01: And I had an opportunity to go to Cambodia.
41:19
SPEAKER_01: The United Nations had just pulled out, and basically the Khmer Rouge had committed genocide, killed 20% of their population, 2 million out of 10 million in three years, something 10 months and 20 days.
41:33
SPEAKER_01: And there was no accountability.
41:35
SPEAKER_01: There were no trials.
41:37
SPEAKER_01: The UN had really collected no evidence.
41:39
SPEAKER_01: And so basically, what my PhD advisor, the chief prosecutor Telford Taylor, always sort of drove into me was that in the absence of accountability, at least there should be empirical records to prevent historical revisionism.
41:56
SPEAKER_01: So that was my goal: find the victims, but also find the perpetrators and get them to talk so that I could establish chains of command.
42:05
SPEAKER_01: So not just the bloodstained butchers, those are easy scapegoats.
42:09
SPEAKER_01: You want to move up the food chain.
42:12
SPEAKER_01: That's a good investigator.
42:14
SPEAKER_01: And so that's what initially I set out to do.
42:17
SPEAKER_03: So let's talk about that.
42:19
SPEAKER_03: I've actually visited as a tourist to Cambodia.
42:23
SPEAKER_03: This was probably a good 10, 12 years ago.
42:25
SPEAKER_03: And I remember going to the there was a museum.
42:29
SPEAKER_03: Tool slang.
42:30
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
42:30
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
42:30
SPEAKER_01: Tool slang.
42:31
SPEAKER_03: And it's just hard to fathom.
42:33
SPEAKER_03: Similarly, I'm sure to any other genocide when we're just quoting numbers, millions of people.
42:37
SPEAKER_03: Just hard to understand.
42:39
SPEAKER_03: You got this very personal.
42:42
SPEAKER_03: You weren't talking about millions of people.
42:44
SPEAKER_03: You were actually interviewing people.
42:46
SPEAKER_03: And very interestingly, both people who you would say it were victims and people who were perpetrators, who may, in some way, you could consider, I guess, a victim of something that was going on too.
42:56
SPEAKER_03: I'm interested in your thoughts on that.
42:58
SPEAKER_03: Did you feel that the act of interviewing, talking about the individuals now, was themselves somehow healing for them, both for a person who was recounting themselves as a victim and as a perpetrator?
43:12
SPEAKER_03: Was there some healing that went on just because of that conversation?
43:15
SPEAKER_01: I don't know about that.
43:16
SPEAKER_01: I really don't know what goes on in another person's brain.
43:21
SPEAKER_01: And I was most interested in getting information out of that.
43:25
SPEAKER_03: I see.
43:26
SPEAKER_01: And so I was not a therapeutic type of interview, shall we say?
43:31
SPEAKER_01: I had a great fixer, a Cambodian right-hand man that would help me find these guys.
43:38
SPEAKER_01: And there's one experience that really stuck out, like tool slang prison you've visited.
43:44
SPEAKER_01: Something like we don't really know because the records are incomplete, but it's like 30,000 went in, probably more, and 20, 30 survived.
43:56
SPEAKER_01: Everybody was tortured and interrogated.
43:59
SPEAKER_01: And so The initial group that I was working with had found all the original negatives, and they were preserving them in a secret darkroom in Phnom Penh, reprinting them for the museum.
44:13
SPEAKER_01: And at that point, the Khmer Rouge was still a viable military force.
44:18
SPEAKER_01: On that trip, we had three colleagues captured and killed by the Khmer Rouge.
44:23
SPEAKER_01: There was a$5,000 bounty for the heads of any long-nosed Westerners and was real.
44:31
SPEAKER_01: And so you really had to be careful where you went, how you went, all those sorts of things.
44:37
SPEAKER_01: But the one guy that I really was prepared to think was evil incarnate was a guy named Him Hoy.
44:44
SPEAKER_01: And he had been the chief guard at Tool Sling Prison.
44:48
SPEAKER_01: By all accounts, he had been one of the executioners.
44:51
SPEAKER_01: And some claimed he killed thousands of people with an iron bar, single stroke to the back of the neck.
44:58
SPEAKER_01: So when I finally met Hoy, I met this little dead-eyed Cambodian peasant.
45:06
SPEAKER_01: And he was very deferential.
45:09
SPEAKER_01: And I sort of said, okay, how did you wind up there?
45:12
SPEAKER_01: And he said, Well, the Khmer Rouge came to my village.
45:15
SPEAKER_01: They drafted me at gunpoint.
45:17
SPEAKER_01: I ran away.
45:18
SPEAKER_01: They came back to my village.
45:20
SPEAKER_01: I ran away again.
45:21
SPEAKER_01: Then they sent me to the front.
45:23
SPEAKER_01: In my first battle, I got shot in the head.
45:26
SPEAKER_01: I got shot in the arm.
45:27
SPEAKER_01: I got shot here.
45:28
SPEAKER_01: I got shot there.
45:29
SPEAKER_01: And they said, Oh, you're going to die.
45:31
SPEAKER_01: You charged.
45:32
SPEAKER_01: And then he got shot more times.
45:33
SPEAKER_01: And so then he survives that.
45:36
SPEAKER_01: Then he goes back in the army.
45:38
SPEAKER_01: They're invading Phnom Penh.
45:40
SPEAKER_01: April 1975.
45:42
SPEAKER_01: The Khmer Rouge is taking the country.
45:43
SPEAKER_01: He gets a hand grenade dropped on him.
45:46
SPEAKER_01: And he's covered in shrapnel.
45:48
SPEAKER_01: He thinks he's going to die.
45:49
SPEAKER_01: Say, Wow, were you afraid of dying?
45:50
SPEAKER_01: He said, No, I was afraid that I was going to get captured and they were going to eat my liver in front of me.
45:56
SPEAKER_01: Because that was a relatively common practice then, because they thought the liver contains your strength and spirit and all this kind of stuff.
46:04
SPEAKER_01: And so then they said, Oh, Comrade Hoy, you're such a brave warrior.
46:09
SPEAKER_01: We have a special job for you.
46:10
SPEAKER_01: We're sending you to the security center, which is Tool Slang.
46:14
SPEAKER_01: So then he starts at the very bottom of Tool Slang.
46:17
SPEAKER_01: And what's interesting about that prison is roughly 1,200 people were there as guards, interrogators, all that.
46:24
SPEAKER_01: And something crazy, like five or six hundred of them wound up as prisoners.
46:30
SPEAKER_01: Because it was such a paranoid regime, they would say, Oh, well, you broke an axe when you were chopping wood.
46:36
SPEAKER_01: You're a KGB agent.
46:37
SPEAKER_01: You're a CIA agent.
46:39
SPEAKER_01: Like paranoid stuff, it's hard to even imagine.
46:43
SPEAKER_01: So his superiors kept getting accused and turned into prisoners.
46:49
SPEAKER_01: So suddenly Hoy's at the top of the food chain.
46:52
SPEAKER_01: Hoy's the one writing down the names of who's going to the killing fields, probably also killing the people.
46:58
SPEAKER_01: And I said to him, I said, Did you did you feel bad about this?
47:02
SPEAKER_01: Something stale, Western, Judeo, Christian, kind of Holocaust inspired question.
47:08
SPEAKER_01: And he just shrugged and he said it was death either way.
47:12
SPEAKER_03: Death for him or death for the people he was inflicting death upon?
47:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he assumed sooner or later he was going to wind up as a prisoner himself.
47:19
SPEAKER_01: They're all snitching on each other, too.
47:22
SPEAKER_01: They're all they have these meetings and they would say, Oh, comrades so-and-so, he wasn't vigilant.
47:27
SPEAKER_01: One guy started screaming in the middle of the night because he had a nightmare, and they said he was a KGB agent or a CIA agent, and they killed him.
47:34
SPEAKER_01: And so that's how far off the rails this thing went.
47:38
SPEAKER_01: And they took kids and teenagers and they took them from their families, they conditioned them to violence, initially with animals, and got them used to killing.
47:49
SPEAKER_01: And then the thing takes on a life of its own.
47:52
SPEAKER_01: And then you're with your peer group, and it's kind of Lord of the Flies.
47:57
SPEAKER_01: These were many of the people that I found and interviewed.
48:00
SPEAKER_01: And so, in a way, him hoy was more honest than like I interviewed the photographer from Tool Slang.
48:08
SPEAKER_01: And he was a real snaky guy.
48:10
SPEAKER_01: And at one point, he was trying to get me to take him to the US Embassy because he had a thousand men ready to go capture Pol Pot.
48:19
SPEAKER_01: And he's always sidewinding and trying to make these side deals and stuff like that.
48:23
SPEAKER_01: And this guy was sent to China to learn photography and darkroom skills and stuff like that.
48:28
SPEAKER_01: And he was profoundly dishonest and very smart too.
48:33
SPEAKER_01: I had some very smart Khmer Rouge guys, but they were incredibly dishonest and frightening to deal with.
48:40
SPEAKER_01: And then my main fixer, Soxin, died.
48:43
SPEAKER_01: So then I didn't have the same trust with the new guys I was working with.
48:48
SPEAKER_01: So you're in a situation where you don't really speak the language.
48:52
SPEAKER_01: You're reading physical cues of discomfort, antagonism, irritation, and going, how is this gonna play out?
49:02
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I had one experience where I also did POW MIA investigations, one of which was the Miaguez incident, last battle of the Vietnam War.
49:12
SPEAKER_01: Three Marines get left behind on an island in Cambodia.
49:16
SPEAKER_01: They survive for a week before they're captured.
49:19
SPEAKER_01: They're captured, Khmer Rouge tortures, interrogates, kills them.
49:23
SPEAKER_01: I found the Khmer Rouge guys who captured those Americans.
49:28
SPEAKER_01: And so I was trying to get their side of the story because the U.S.
49:32
SPEAKER_01: has basically lied about this ever since.
49:34
SPEAKER_01: And at that point was saying, oh, they were KIAs, they were killed, they were not left behind, blah, blah, blah.
49:40
SPEAKER_01: And I knew that was a lie.
49:42
SPEAKER_03: And I also the US the US military did not want to take responsibility for having left three behind in hostile territory.
49:49
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
49:50
SPEAKER_01: And the night they were left behind, they radioed the big CH 130 or whatever it is.
49:58
SPEAKER_01: It's like the mobile command plane that has all the communications and said, Hey, when's the next helicopter coming for us?
50:06
SPEAKER_01: And then they radioed the ships right offshore and said, Hey, you guys got the machine gun team still on the beach.
50:14
SPEAKER_01: And so the Navy SEALs, Air Force Pararescuen, the Marines, they're suiting up, ready to go back, ready to get them.
50:22
SPEAKER_01: And they're given a stand down order from their senior leadership.
50:27
SPEAKER_01: And that profoundly affected every one of those veterans because they knew they left men behind.
50:33
SPEAKER_01: I went to their 50th anniversary of those Marines of the Miyaguas this summer, and they're still torn up by it.
50:41
SPEAKER_01: Anyway, I go to the village to find this guy, and I show up, and I'd usually go in a just a normal white sedan, and we're hours off the main highway going through dry rice patties, right?
50:56
SPEAKER_01: Not a tree in sight, not a hill, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
51:00
SPEAKER_01: Every few kilometers, there's a tower with a guy in it with a high comm radio, car coming in, car coming out, and I'm in the backseat with a baseball hat and a scarf around my head.
51:11
SPEAKER_01: And we get to the village where the guy is, and we go and we see him, and it's very tense.
51:18
SPEAKER_01: And there's kind of the village heads.
51:21
SPEAKER_01: Who was the authority at this time?
51:23
SPEAKER_01: Cambodian.
51:24
SPEAKER_01: But it's uh it's kind of those old Khmer Rouge areas, they still have a lot of control and a lot of power.
51:33
SPEAKER_01: And anyway, so I go and I'm like, I don't like this.
51:37
SPEAKER_01: And I listened to my voice, you know, and it saved me on a number of occasions.
51:42
SPEAKER_01: And I go, this isn't good, like this is not comfortable.
51:46
SPEAKER_01: So typically I would go with fruit and flowers, give the fruit and flowers to set up an interview at a neutral location.
51:53
SPEAKER_01: And this was even worse, like just this meet and greet was bad.
51:56
SPEAKER_01: And so I was like, okay, I gotta get out of here.
51:59
SPEAKER_01: So I looked to see my car, my car's gone.
52:02
SPEAKER_01: And I'm going, like, okay, this isn't good at all.
52:05
SPEAKER_01: When things get really bad, I just kind of this voice in my head says, Well, you're in for a penny, you're in for a pound now.
52:12
SPEAKER_01: Like, it's not gonna do you any good to panic.
52:15
SPEAKER_01: Like, you're not gonna go start choking people out when they have AK-47s.
52:19
SPEAKER_01: You can't run, or it's just gonna be like a turkey shoot or something.
52:24
SPEAKER_01: So, okay, you're here you are.
52:27
SPEAKER_01: And this little kid comes up to me and starts talking to me in Cambodian like he's known me my whole life, and he kind of like wants to play with my baseball hat or something, and I start kind of playing with this little kid, and then all the old scary women kind of start giggling, and the whole mood shifts, and then there's this kind of whispering back and forth, and one of the girls takes off, and then they come back out with like the prom queen of the village, this beautiful young 15 or 16-year-old Cambodian girl, and they say, Oh, you you take her back to Phnom Pen with you, and she's smiling at me like, get me out of here.
53:03
SPEAKER_01: And I'm kind of going, like, oh, my wife's in Phnom Penh, and I don't think she really concubines aren't really part of our culture.
53:11
SPEAKER_01: And but this is a feral place.
53:14
SPEAKER_01: Like, I this one woman, the mother of the little kid, I said, Oh, where'd you have your baby?
53:18
SPEAKER_01: And she points to like like the corner, she's like, Oh, right over there.
53:22
SPEAKER_01: And anyway, so the whole mood changes, everybody's kind of laughing, and it's gotten light all of a sudden, and then my car pulls up again.
53:31
SPEAKER_01: And I knew my driver, he was borderline, kind of shady guy.
53:35
SPEAKER_01: And I would say, What where what happened?
53:38
SPEAKER_01: And he said, Oh, I saw a Buddhist monk walking to the next village, and I can't let a Buddhist monk walk.
53:44
SPEAKER_01: So I drove him to the next village, and when I was turning around, I got stuck in the sand.
53:48
SPEAKER_01: And so that's an important story because if you let your mind run, you'll create a problem that hasn't presented itself yet.
54:00
SPEAKER_01: You'll make such an escalate.
54:03
SPEAKER_01: I had another time where I was in a four-wheel drive taxi.
54:06
SPEAKER_01: You get in a four-wheel drive in the central market and you go all the way up to the Vietnamese border to the highlands where the mountain yards are.
54:13
SPEAKER_01: Horrible.
54:13
SPEAKER_01: Going through illegal logging camps, run by the military, total anarchy, Thai, Chinese gangsters, everybody's armed, stuff like that.
54:23
SPEAKER_01: And I'm coming back to Phnom Penh and we come over a hill.
54:27
SPEAKER_01: I'm the only white guy in this four-wheel drive truck.
54:30
SPEAKER_01: There's probably six people inside the Toyota Hilux and like 10 people in the bed.
54:35
SPEAKER_01: The trucks roll so much the people in the bed are wearing motorcycle helmets.
54:39
SPEAKER_01: And then all of a sudden, we come over the hump and there's a guy in the middle of the road.
54:43
SPEAKER_01: Stop, guys with AKs on the side, and all the Cambodians in the car look down.
54:50
SPEAKER_01: None of them will look up.
54:51
SPEAKER_01: And we pull up, and this very aggressive young guy is yelling at the driver, and all he's saying is Bah, bah, bah, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
55:00
SPEAKER_01: And I'm going, like, oh, this is not good at all.
55:03
SPEAKER_01: And then they kick all the people out of the back of the truck, just out in the middle of the boonies, and then they wrestle these two giant wicker baskets into the back of the truck, and we go and we go.
55:14
SPEAKER_01: And the oh, and the old kind of Khmer Rouge guy, he and his two adjuncts get in the truck with me and we drive and drive for hours.
55:21
SPEAKER_01: And of course, we run out of gases.
55:23
SPEAKER_01: They, for some reason, you always seem to run out of gas.
55:26
SPEAKER_01: And then as we're waiting to get gas, the two adjunct guys come up and they start, hey, what what's in your bag?
55:32
SPEAKER_01: What do you got?
55:33
SPEAKER_01: What do you?
55:34
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, Oh, this isn't good.
55:35
SPEAKER_01: And I always carried an Olympus XA, tiny 35 millimeter spy camera that you would just set the distance and you could take pictures from the hip.
55:45
SPEAKER_01: And so I was like, Oh, I better do something fast.
55:47
SPEAKER_01: And so I pull out the camera and they turn into kids at Disneyland.
55:52
SPEAKER_01: And they stop and they smile at me and put their hands at their sides, and I take their picture.
55:57
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, oh, let me take a couple more, and huh?
55:59
SPEAKER_01: And again, they kind of forget that they want to see what's in my bag and all that.
56:04
SPEAKER_01: And we get gas, we're on our way.
56:06
SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking, like, this is I don't know where I'm going.
56:09
SPEAKER_01: There's only one road, so I know at least that.
56:11
SPEAKER_01: But I'm just like, I don't know what's in these baskets.
56:14
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
56:15
SPEAKER_01: But what am I gonna do?
56:17
SPEAKER_01: Again, it's the same scenario.
56:18
SPEAKER_01: I can't let my mind run.
56:20
SPEAKER_03: Right.
56:21
SPEAKER_01: And so all of a sudden, one of the guys in the back slaps the top of the truck, they stop, middle of the kind of jungly area, and they wrestle the two baskets, big baskets, four or five feet tall, wrestle them out of the back of the truck, just go off, drag them down some trail into the bush, and we're off and we're on our way.
56:43
SPEAKER_01: What was in the baskets?
56:44
SPEAKER_01: I'll never know.
56:45
SPEAKER_01: Right.
56:46
SPEAKER_01: And that was it.
56:47
SPEAKER_03: So this may be a weird analogy that makes no sense at all.
56:51
SPEAKER_03: Keep in mind, I mentioned I don't surf, but when you describe these situations where you are somewhere where you simply do not have any power.
56:59
SPEAKER_03: I mean, you've been dropped off by that car, the car is gone, you're in the village.
57:03
SPEAKER_03: Like it is to me like you're in the water and you are not in control.
57:08
SPEAKER_03: And I'm wondering, is there any connection there to being out in the ocean where you basically don't have control and maybe you're scared, maybe there's a big wave coming, whatever the issue is.
57:21
SPEAKER_03: It seems like a very similar thing where you just have to say, well, panicking is not going to help.
57:26
SPEAKER_03: So let's just keep your wits about you and see how this plays out and do our best to react in the moment appropriately.
57:33
SPEAKER_03: Am I crazy to draw a comparison?
57:35
SPEAKER_01: No, not at all.
57:36
SPEAKER_01: And what's interesting too is I lived on the north shore of Oahu at this time, the home of the best big waves in the world.
57:44
SPEAKER_01: And I lived in a very remote area, and I loved nothing more to do.
57:51
SPEAKER_01: I loved and hated, but I did it.
57:54
SPEAKER_01: Get up in the pitch black, usually about 3:30 in the morning and see how big the waves were.
57:59
SPEAKER_01: And once I saw that it was big, I would begin preparing, and then I would paddle a half a mile out into the sea in pitch black by myself and surf these big waves.
58:12
SPEAKER_01: And oftentimes I would come back from these trips to Cambodia totally exhausted.
58:16
SPEAKER_01: And I would always land first thing in the morning in Honolulu.
58:20
SPEAKER_01: And as I was coming in, I would see, oh man, there's a big swell, and I would have no voice left.
58:26
SPEAKER_01: I would be so shot physically, emotionally, everything.
58:31
SPEAKER_01: And I'd see these big waves, and I'd be like, I'm out there, and I'd get to my house, I'd paddle right out and surf.
58:38
SPEAKER_01: And honestly, I would like almost feel totally recovered in a way.
58:43
SPEAKER_01: And I think I lived in a world of extremes, and it just became kind of normal to me.
58:50
SPEAKER_01: But I think that is a good analogy.
58:52
SPEAKER_01: A lot of it is acceptance.
58:54
SPEAKER_01: Acceptance is very important, and I learned that really from the Buddhists is that you accept your fate, and it's not always going to be good, and you're not always going to like it, and it isn't going to be this kind of linear American dream of constant progress.
59:10
SPEAKER_01: And I believe that, and I talk about this in the film a lot, that real freedom is inherently dangerous and it comes with no guarantee of safety.
59:21
SPEAKER_01: My friend Nate Thayer, who was probably the best reporter of our generation, the only one to interview Pol Pot, just the stuff he did was remarkable.
59:30
SPEAKER_01: He's dead now.
59:32
SPEAKER_01: He said that Cambodia was the freest country in the world.
59:36
SPEAKER_01: You could buy an AK for 30 bucks or something in the central market, you could buy China White, you could buy virginity, you could buy SAM 2 missiles.
59:46
SPEAKER_01: Like it was anarchy at that point.
59:48
SPEAKER_01: And you defined your own perimeter basically on your comfort level.
59:54
SPEAKER_01: But with that freedom was a huge amount of risk.
59:58
SPEAKER_01: And I don't believe you get true freedom and safety.
1:00:03
SPEAKER_01: I was very troubled at the beginning of the war on terror when safety became the metric.
1:00:09
SPEAKER_01: I was like, I don't want to live a cowardly life, I don't want big brother telling me what to do.
1:00:15
SPEAKER_01: I didn't sign up for this.
1:00:17
SPEAKER_01: This isn't what we're about as a society.
1:00:20
SPEAKER_01: And when I hear this metric of safety constantly invoked, well, we have to stay safe from this and that, the homeland.
1:00:28
SPEAKER_01: And that sounds to me like something from Mother Russia or something.
1:00:34
SPEAKER_01: And I believe that you don't always get to win.
1:00:37
SPEAKER_01: And there are sacrifices that must be paid.
1:00:40
SPEAKER_01: And I think these are very antiquated ideas by today's standards in America, but I don't abandon them.
1:00:48
SPEAKER_01: I keep my word.
1:00:50
SPEAKER_01: I'm very adamant about that.
1:00:52
SPEAKER_01: And I could professionally have done much better had I been a more cutthroat.
1:00:57
SPEAKER_01: I just didn't want to do it.
1:00:58
SPEAKER_01: There were a lot of opportunities that, in my opinion, were very Faustian deals that I didn't take.
1:01:04
SPEAKER_03: So, first of all, kudos to you for that, because I do think this is also something I mentioned when I was talking with Robert Drysdale, the power of your word and strengthening that, even in little ways.
1:01:15
SPEAKER_03: Just don't tell little white lies or don't say, hey, sorry, I'm late, the traffic was bad.
1:01:19
SPEAKER_03: Well, I just didn't leave early enough.
1:01:21
SPEAKER_03: Come on.
1:01:21
SPEAKER_03: But you build the power of your word, then your word means something, and that can be useful for you because you can say, I'm not going to drink after 7 p.m.
1:01:29
SPEAKER_03: and you'll do it because it's your word, because you said you weren't going to do that kind of thing.
1:01:32
SPEAKER_03: But I do think, yeah, there's been a degradation in our society of a lot of things.
1:01:37
SPEAKER_03: And I nodded when you talked about the beginning of the war on terror and the Patriot Act and things like that and the security.
1:01:42
SPEAKER_03: I do agree with you on that.
1:01:44
SPEAKER_03: I think that the safest possible place you could be is let's just lock everybody in concrete blocks.
1:01:50
SPEAKER_03: Nothing can get at them, and we'll just throw food in there and give them a TV.
1:01:53
SPEAKER_03: That's safe.
1:01:54
SPEAKER_03: So there is a point at which you are giving away freedom for safety.
1:01:59
SPEAKER_03: And when people get scared enough, they will give away their liberties for safety.
1:02:05
SPEAKER_03: It's okay to have stormtroopers, it's okay to have the government spy, or when somebody says, I'm gonna go on a little rant here, it's okay if the government listens to my phone calls or whatever, I've got nothing to hide.
1:02:15
SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, well, you've got nothing to hide from this government, but what happens if a government comes in that is doing things that you don't agree with and you are now seen as a threat to them?
1:02:24
SPEAKER_03: And now they have the ability to look inside your bedroom and look inside your telephone and read all your stuff.
1:02:30
SPEAKER_03: Like, there's a reason that we preserve our freedoms, and with that comes a certain amount of risk.
1:02:36
SPEAKER_03: That's true.
1:02:37
SPEAKER_03: If I can operate and use cash, that means a drug smuggler can use cash too.
1:02:41
SPEAKER_03: It's not an entirely safe world.
1:02:43
SPEAKER_03: So I agree with you 100% on that.
1:02:45
SPEAKER_03: Just jumping in again to get your thoughts on this, because it's an interesting topic.
1:02:48
SPEAKER_03: This balance between freedom on the one hand and safety on the other hand.
1:02:54
SPEAKER_03: The difference between having tight government control, which inhibits your freedoms, where you can be watched and surveilled, versus having very little government control, which does, of course, allow the possibility of bad actors to move around and be in our society.
1:03:11
SPEAKER_03: Where do you draw the line?
1:03:12
SPEAKER_03: What are your thoughts on that?
1:03:13
SPEAKER_03: I'd love to hear it.
1:03:14
SPEAKER_03: Drop your comments into the comments section of the YouTube video, and I will respond to them.
1:03:18
SPEAKER_03: Curious to hear what you think.
1:03:20
SPEAKER_03: And now back to the show.
1:03:22
SPEAKER_01: I have the distinction of being both on the bad person list during the Bush administration and the bad person list during the Biden administration.
1:03:32
SPEAKER_01: During the Bush years, one of my books got pulled into the dirty bomber case, Jose Padilla.
1:03:39
SPEAKER_01: And Ashcroft told us, Oh, we've got the dirty bomber.
1:03:43
SPEAKER_01: He was going to set off a radiological device, blah, blah, blah.
1:03:46
SPEAKER_01: And it was all lies.
1:03:48
SPEAKER_01: And this guy was a Puerto Rican prison Muslim.
1:03:51
SPEAKER_01: He went to Afghanistan to try to get on Team Al-Qaeda.
1:03:56
SPEAKER_01: And I think it was Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, or one of them was like, this guy is so stupid.
1:04:01
SPEAKER_01: We can get him to turn all the gas on in an apartment building and blow it up.
1:04:05
SPEAKER_01: He was an American citizen.
1:04:06
SPEAKER_01: They captured him coming back in Chicago.
1:04:09
SPEAKER_01: They immediately put him in a military brig.
1:04:11
SPEAKER_01: And he was given a court-appointed lawyer who called me about definitions of combatancy, of illegal combatants, all that.
1:04:21
SPEAKER_01: So no problem.
1:04:22
SPEAKER_01: That's my professional duty as one of the world's experts in this field to provide it.
1:04:28
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't partisan, it wasn't anything.
1:04:30
SPEAKER_01: And suddenly every time I fly, I'm getting hassled.
1:04:34
SPEAKER_01: And then I start writing op-eds in 2001 saying, do we really want to go down this road of Guantanamo Bay?
1:04:42
SPEAKER_01: Do we want to go down these kind of roads?
1:04:44
SPEAKER_01: If we do, we need to prepare ourselves for our own soldiers to be treated this way.
1:04:50
SPEAKER_01: There's a prudential self-interest in the laws of war.
1:04:55
SPEAKER_01: And that's what you see with like the rules of diplomatic discourse and stuff like that.
1:05:02
SPEAKER_01: If you're killing the people that you're telling to come negotiate with you, it makes it very difficult for anyone to trust you.
1:05:09
SPEAKER_01: And so again, there's prudential self-interest in maintaining some of these standards.
1:05:14
SPEAKER_01: And so that was my beef at the time with it.
1:05:18
SPEAKER_01: And so I continued criticizing the Bush administration throughout all of it.
1:05:22
SPEAKER_01: Ironically, I was doing POW MIA investigations.
1:05:27
SPEAKER_01: Then I became a defense contractor.
1:05:30
SPEAKER_01: So I was really kind of leading two lives simultaneously, where I'm writing books heavily critical of the war on terror and the Bush administration.
1:05:39
SPEAKER_01: But if I show up for my job and I do my job well, I was involved in combat search and rescue and I felt strongly about that.
1:05:46
SPEAKER_01: I had friends in special operations, and I felt like they should have the best equipment to aid them in search and rescue if they get left behind or whatever else.
1:05:57
SPEAKER_01: And that's what I did.
1:05:59
SPEAKER_01: When Jama'a Islam started showing up in Cambodia.
1:06:03
SPEAKER_01: I helped train their anti-terrorism commandos because I felt like I don't want Cambodia, the Cham Muslims who had been incredibly good to me all my time in Cambodia.
1:06:14
SPEAKER_01: I didn't want to see them get radicalized by the more Saudi Arabian-backed radicals like Cambali the Bali bomber.
1:06:23
SPEAKER_01: He was in Cambodia a long time.
1:06:25
SPEAKER_01: So this was a real thing.
1:06:27
SPEAKER_01: So throughout my life, I've worn multiple hats at the same time, and I keep the world sort of separate.
1:06:34
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think you're intellectually honest.
1:06:36
SPEAKER_03: You strike me as like more of a libertarian of someone who's just very straightforward.
1:06:41
SPEAKER_03: Just before we leave the topic of your expertise of Cambodia and genocides, things like that, is there something you would like people to understand either about Cambodia and what happened there with the Khmer Rouge, or more generally about genocides in the modern era, Rwanda, Germany, whatever?
1:07:03
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
1:07:04
SPEAKER_01: There is something very much that I find very troubling today in America, not anywhere else.
1:07:12
SPEAKER_01: And that is how casually people who have I say this often, people who've never been in a fist fight, much less a firefight, and how aggressive they'll be about violence and these people should be killed and that.
1:07:27
SPEAKER_01: Like celebrating anybody's death to me is odious.
1:07:31
SPEAKER_01: I don't care if they're my political enemy, ideological enemy.
1:07:35
SPEAKER_01: I just, I don't take that lightly.
1:07:38
SPEAKER_01: And when people begin to kind of endorse political violence without really realizing by far the bloodiest, most brutal war in American history was us fighting each other.
1:07:50
SPEAKER_01: I've been advocating very strongly the last couple of years that America now is at a point where we basically need a truth and reconciliation commission.
1:07:59
SPEAKER_01: We need to open the national closets and face who we are and decide who we want to be.
1:08:05
SPEAKER_01: Because, in my opinion, not just one party, it's a bipartisan thing.
1:08:10
SPEAKER_01: Since 9-11, we kind of went off the rails.
1:08:14
SPEAKER_01: And it hasn't served us financially, militarily, geostrategically.
1:08:19
SPEAKER_01: And we need to face that fact and we need to come to terms with it.
1:08:22
SPEAKER_01: And it's almost like we need a third constitutional convention.
1:08:26
SPEAKER_01: But to a truth and reconciliation commission, it's really the only remedy that is available to a society when one side doesn't have a monopoly on political and military power.
1:08:39
SPEAKER_01: The situations of post-war Germany and Japan, those are anomalies.
1:08:44
SPEAKER_01: Rarely does one side have an unconditional surrender, total military monopoly.
1:08:51
SPEAKER_01: Typically, it's a negotiated end, there's horse trading.
1:08:55
SPEAKER_01: Okay, we'll get your worst guys, you get our worst guys, and then we'll just draw a line and move forward.
1:09:00
SPEAKER_01: So I feel like that's kind of where we are.
1:09:03
SPEAKER_03: When you say Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I'm just a layperson here.
1:09:08
SPEAKER_03: I think South Africa, I think of, oh, something terrible has happened, and now we're going to just be honest and face it, like slavery or the treatment of Native Americans or something.
1:09:17
SPEAKER_03: Is that what you mean?
1:09:18
SPEAKER_03: Or do you mean, no, just the ability for sides that feel like they are diametrically opposed to be able to actually talk together?
1:09:26
SPEAKER_01: No, honestly, I think we need to open our closets going back to JFK's assassination or even earlier.
1:09:35
SPEAKER_01: Because I think so many things, and it's become even more common in recent years, if you even question them, you're a conspiracy theorist, you're a crank, you're a crackpot.
1:09:46
SPEAKER_01: And so as a result, that really spawns crazy ideas and crazy thinking.
1:09:53
SPEAKER_01: When you tell someone you can't talk about this, we can't examine that, this is the truth, you take it, or you're a bad person.
1:10:00
SPEAKER_01: That doesn't help clear the air.
1:10:03
SPEAKER_01: I think it would certainly be a stress test to the United States if we did see some of the things we really have not examined.
1:10:12
SPEAKER_01: It would be less of a stress test than a civil war.
1:10:15
SPEAKER_01: I feel like we are in a cold civil war right now, and I would like to not see it go hot.
1:10:21
SPEAKER_03: I agree with you.
1:10:21
SPEAKER_03: I'm concerned about what's going on in the U.S.
1:10:24
SPEAKER_03: I'm older, so I remember when there was contentiousness between the Republicans and the Democrats.
1:10:29
SPEAKER_03: You could have disagreements, you could have legitimate disagreements about what is the right way to run the economy or about whatever.
1:10:35
SPEAKER_03: But fundamentally, we pulled together, and honestly, even presidents at the time, in my recollection, always tried to unite.
1:10:41
SPEAKER_03: They weren't trying to divide, they were trying to unite.
1:10:45
SPEAKER_03: They were just trying to get you to believe what they believe.
1:10:47
SPEAKER_03: But, you know, everyone's trying to get you to believe what they believe.
1:10:49
SPEAKER_03: I think one of the problems that's driving this, and curious from your point of view, is on the one hand, it's great that we don't have the gatekeepers of media, because if you have very few media outlets and they're controlling the information you get, it's hard to break out with important information.
1:11:04
SPEAKER_03: That's absolutely true.
1:11:05
SPEAKER_03: But on the other side, you don't get fact-checking.
1:11:08
SPEAKER_03: And so you have wrong information that's being spread and all the stuff we hear about echo chambers.
1:11:13
SPEAKER_03: And I see it because I have friends on both sides where if I was only hearing what you were hearing, I would be agreeing with everything you're saying.
1:11:19
SPEAKER_03: If I was only hearing what you're hearing, I would be, we just disagree on truth, on facts, like on basic stuff.
1:11:26
SPEAKER_03: So if we could somehow, I don't know if it's media literacy, I don't know if it's emergence of some trusted, truly more impartial media agency or something, but we should be able to disagree on immigration or disagree on tariffs or disagree on anything without then thinking the person that you're disagreeing with is un-American and should die or something like that.
1:11:49
SPEAKER_03: Because I think that's where we're risking a civil war.
1:11:52
SPEAKER_01: Yes, and I totally agree with you.
1:11:54
SPEAKER_01: And I would say there's two things going on.
1:11:56
SPEAKER_01: The first is we're basically a subliterate, illiterate society now.
1:12:02
SPEAKER_01: And we've never been worse at educating our young.
1:12:06
SPEAKER_01: I quit teaching at the university to homeschool my kids for like five or six years because I was so disgusted.
1:12:14
SPEAKER_01: It was nothing ideological.
1:12:15
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't like, oh, that woke stuff, oh, that conservative stuff.
1:12:19
SPEAKER_01: It was just nothing.
1:12:21
SPEAKER_01: They couldn't handwrite.
1:12:22
SPEAKER_01: It was just, it was pathetic.
1:12:24
SPEAKER_01: And I thought, how are we going to be a competitive society with this low level?
1:12:29
SPEAKER_01: And if everybody's in on the scam, and it's the scam of quote, student success.
1:12:35
SPEAKER_01: And you'll rewrite the metrics so that you can show improvement.
1:12:39
SPEAKER_01: So that's part of it.
1:12:40
SPEAKER_01: A bigger part, and I know this personally, is that I'm making probably 20% of what I made in journalism when I first got out of school.
1:12:53
SPEAKER_01: Like, we don't pay journalists anymore.
1:12:55
SPEAKER_01: So we have all these amateurs, and that was Huffington's model.
1:12:59
SPEAKER_01: Oh, we're not gonna pay, but you're gonna get exposure.
1:13:03
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, I've bad plenty of exposure.
1:13:05
SPEAKER_01: I don't need exposure.
1:13:07
SPEAKER_01: I need to get paid.
1:13:08
SPEAKER_01: I got kids, I got a wife.
1:13:10
SPEAKER_01: My friend Kevin Maurer, New York Times bestselling author, four books, five books, Rolling Stone staff writer.
1:13:17
SPEAKER_01: He wrote No Easy Days, embedded reporter, done gnarly stuff.
1:13:22
SPEAKER_01: We have lunch every Friday to just kind of commiserate at our vanishing profession.
1:13:28
SPEAKER_01: And then I had friends working with the Ukrainian special forces saying, Hey, can you get this information out there?
1:13:36
SPEAKER_01: Because we're not getting these weapons.
1:13:37
SPEAKER_01: We're not getting that.
1:13:38
SPEAKER_01: So I started writing about Ukraine, critical of what we were being told.
1:13:44
SPEAKER_01: And I got hacked, deplatformed, all my meta, Instagram, all that, they put porn up on it.
1:13:51
SPEAKER_01: I tried, I had to lawyer up because now I was being accused of posting inappropriate pictures of minors on Facebook and Instagram.
1:14:00
SPEAKER_01: I lawyered up.
1:14:02
SPEAKER_01: I got no response from anyone at Meta.
1:14:05
SPEAKER_01: They don't respond to you.
1:14:07
SPEAKER_01: Head of Meta Legal was a woman who had written the Patriot Act.
1:14:13
SPEAKER_01: So after Trump got elected in 2016, I called it the Great Migration of intelligence people to Silicon Valley.
1:14:23
SPEAKER_01: She finished up her career working for initially for Cheney and then served in different unelected capacities.
1:14:31
SPEAKER_01: Jennifer Newstadt is her name.
1:14:33
SPEAKER_01: And her first year at Meta, she made$40 million.
1:14:37
SPEAKER_01: And so that's who I was addressing everything to.
1:14:44
SPEAKER_01: Nothing.
1:14:45
SPEAKER_01: No response.
1:14:46
SPEAKER_01: So then I went to an old associate from high school who worked for Meta at a high level.
1:14:53
SPEAKER_01: I was like, dude, come on, man.
1:14:54
SPEAKER_01: How many times did I save you from getting your ass kicked in high school?
1:14:57
SPEAKER_01: So he intervened.
1:14:58
SPEAKER_01: And it was unbelievable.
1:15:00
SPEAKER_01: It was, you know, weeks of emails, this, that, and the other thing.
1:15:05
SPEAKER_01: Eventually I get put back on.
1:15:06
SPEAKER_01: I get my Instagram, I get my Facebook, blah, blah, blah.
1:15:09
SPEAKER_01: I'm sitting at my kitchen table on a Sunday morning looking at Facebook.
1:15:13
SPEAKER_01: These black boxes start popping up.
1:15:16
SPEAKER_01: Sexually inappropriate pictures of minors.
1:15:18
SPEAKER_01: And then they're doing it to me as I'm on Facebook.
1:15:21
SPEAKER_01: Then I do the same thing, lawyer up.
1:15:24
SPEAKER_01: This time my friend doesn't answer my calls, my emails, nothing.
1:15:27
SPEAKER_01: And a lot of people were sort of like, well, Peter, you know, you always are pushing people's buttons, you know, maybe you ought to just mow out.
1:15:34
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, since when?
1:15:36
SPEAKER_01: I'm an American.
1:15:37
SPEAKER_01: I have a First Amendment right.
1:15:39
SPEAKER_01: Since when do I have to self-censor?
1:15:42
SPEAKER_01: Like, that's what gets me is that, and now it's kind of interesting because I'm seeing a lot of the real winners of the neoliberal state, right?
1:15:50
SPEAKER_01: That I wouldn't participate in.
1:15:52
SPEAKER_01: I could have served in government capacities or in what I call the human rights industry.
1:15:58
SPEAKER_01: And I chose not to because they seemed very corrupt to me.
1:16:03
SPEAKER_01: And for a time they were all, well, Peter, you've gone too far.
1:16:07
SPEAKER_01: You need to reel yourself back in.
1:16:09
SPEAKER_01: Now they're kind of coming back to me.
1:16:11
SPEAKER_01: Wow, that was a great story.
1:16:12
SPEAKER_01: I really agree.
1:16:13
SPEAKER_01: And I'm going like, oh, they're hedging their bets now.
1:16:16
SPEAKER_01: They're not so certain anymore.
1:16:18
SPEAKER_01: Their worldview is starting to wobble.
1:16:21
SPEAKER_01: And it's interesting to me because I'm confident in what I believe.
1:16:25
SPEAKER_01: I haven't made those Faustian deals.
1:16:27
SPEAKER_01: And that's very important to me that I don't.
1:16:30
SPEAKER_01: I'm writing a lot about contemporary things right now because so many people reach out to me.
1:16:36
SPEAKER_01: What do you think about this?
1:16:37
SPEAKER_01: What do you think?
1:16:37
SPEAKER_01: And if I had to take every call, I wouldn't do anything but talk on the telephone.
1:16:42
SPEAKER_01: So I write short op-ed-length pieces now that very uncensored because the time to speak is now because the stakes are very high.
1:16:54
SPEAKER_03: I know a lot of people who are very concerned that if they put something on Facebook, it's going to affect their job.
1:17:00
SPEAKER_03: People who work in government, people who work in academia don't want to let get their grants cut.
1:17:05
SPEAKER_03: There's a lot of chilling of free speech going on.
1:17:08
SPEAKER_03: And maybe that's been going on in a lot of ways.
1:17:10
SPEAKER_03: I don't think that's a good thing at all.
1:17:12
SPEAKER_03: I think people should be able to speak their mind without fear of reprisal, whether it's in their job, whether it's their grants or whatever.
1:17:19
SPEAKER_03: We need people to be smart, like you say, and educated.
1:17:22
SPEAKER_03: That's what makes us strong.
1:17:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:17:24
SPEAKER_03: So I agree with that.
1:17:26
SPEAKER_03: I want to be respectful of your time.
1:17:27
SPEAKER_03: There's just a couple other things I want to run past you.
1:17:30
SPEAKER_03: You have your fainting Robin Foundation.
1:17:33
SPEAKER_03: Is that what it's called?
1:17:35
SPEAKER_03: So, which I assume is based on the Emily Dickinson poem, which I actually have up in front of me.
1:17:42
SPEAKER_03: If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.
1:17:45
SPEAKER_03: If I can ease one life the aching, or cool one pain, or help one fainting Robin into his nest again, I shall not live in vain.
1:17:54
SPEAKER_03: What does that mean to you?
1:17:56
SPEAKER_03: What is the Fainting Robin Foundation?
1:17:58
SPEAKER_03: Tell me about what is driving that.
1:18:00
SPEAKER_03: And do you want support for it?
1:18:02
SPEAKER_03: And what support would you like?
1:18:03
SPEAKER_01: I'm the world's worst fundraiser.
1:18:05
SPEAKER_01: So half the time I go to fundraise, I forget to ask for money.
1:18:09
SPEAKER_01: But what it is is I was teaching at the universities.
1:18:13
SPEAKER_01: I saw this horrible trend of students being treated as customers and being kind of coached into weaponized mobs against professors.
1:18:24
SPEAKER_01: And initially I sort of founded it to defend other professors who were unfairly accused.
1:18:32
SPEAKER_01: And then it grew exponentially to the point where a sort of a friend's sister got murdered in Cambodia.
1:18:39
SPEAKER_01: We helped solve that murder and get the murderer captured.
1:18:43
SPEAKER_01: That took about five years.
1:18:45
SPEAKER_01: We've won some prominent litigation in different academic cases, but really it's just turned into a last resort for people who've been failed by the government, been failed by the State Department, been failed by universities.
1:19:00
SPEAKER_01: And I have an incredible network of lawyers and other people that will do pro bono work for me if they believe in the cause.
1:19:09
SPEAKER_01: And it's bipartisan.
1:19:11
SPEAKER_01: We support independent scholars, we support support independent journalists, people who are telling the truth, and just in in small ways.
1:19:20
SPEAKER_01: And there's no application process.
1:19:23
SPEAKER_01: It's typically I get a phone call on a Friday, and if we can do something, we're doing it by Sunday.
1:19:29
SPEAKER_01: And people really do step up.
1:19:32
SPEAKER_01: And it does kind of restore people's faith that the world isn't as horrible a place, or you're not as powerless as you could be led to believe.
1:19:42
SPEAKER_01: It's a like I said, I don't like snitches, uh probably coming from the pot world.
1:19:47
SPEAKER_01: I don't like that kind of an anonymous, you know, just see something, say something.
1:19:53
SPEAKER_01: I feel like if you're gonna say something, you better be willing to stand by it.
1:19:58
SPEAKER_01: And that is just completely antiquated, and I'm a dinosaur by today's standards.
1:20:03
SPEAKER_01: But I I just I find that really troubling that you can make an anonymous accusation and ruin someone's life and pay no price whatsoever.
1:20:13
SPEAKER_01: I think that is a problem.
1:20:15
SPEAKER_01: And so we did things like we did an investigation of the Ukrainian kids that were being taken back to Russia and Russianized, teenagers and things like that.
1:20:25
SPEAKER_01: We did a Mayaguez investigation to prove definitively that those guys had been left behind, those Marines had been left behind.
1:20:34
SPEAKER_01: So it's just it's kind of case by case.
1:20:36
SPEAKER_01: And again, it started out I'm gonna help independent scholars, I'm gonna help journalists, but then I started helping veterans.
1:20:43
SPEAKER_01: A lot of global war on terror veterans who were having a hard time assimilating back into civilian society.
1:20:50
SPEAKER_01: And I myself understand that I had a hard time too, because you go from that 24-hour day world of high adrenaline and excitement, and it's so boring.
1:21:00
SPEAKER_01: And you come back and it's like, oh my gosh, it's the same month, and the values that gave you your identity in that other life are considered antiquated and you're some kind of weird knuckle dragger or something.
1:21:14
SPEAKER_01: I have a lot of faith in the global war on terror veterans, and I hope that they assume some kind of political power because the writer Peggy Noonan she made it a distinction in 2016 talking about the real separation in America is between the protected and the unprotected, and the unprotected are those working paycheck to paycheck without health insurance.
1:21:40
SPEAKER_01: One broken transmission and their whole life gets upturned.
1:21:45
SPEAKER_01: And so I see those GWAT veterans as representative of that of getting sent on what was ultimately a political fool's errand.
1:21:56
SPEAKER_01: And we were not better, we're not safer, we're not stronger from this 25-year crusade.
1:22:04
SPEAKER_01: And rather than tripling down on it, maybe we should pump the brakes and rethink it and rethink about America.
1:22:10
SPEAKER_01: How can you have an imperial foreign policy and be an empire when every four to eight years you do a 180-degree turn policy-wise and you abandon your allies, you don't keep your word.
1:22:23
SPEAKER_01: Like this is not a recipe for success.
1:22:26
SPEAKER_01: Read Klauswitz, read JFC Fuller, do your homework.
1:22:30
SPEAKER_01: And these people don't do their homework, and they're kind of blissfully ignorant.
1:22:34
SPEAKER_01: Well, on both sides, it's not just one.
1:22:36
SPEAKER_01: When I would see the Democratic administrations pushing these kind of social reform policies in places like Afghanistan and the Pashtu tribal areas, I would say at least the old 19th century missionaries gave them soap and Bibles.
1:22:51
SPEAKER_01: They don't even get soap and Bibles.
1:22:53
SPEAKER_01: And so it's to me was every bit as imperialist as anything in the 19th century when you're directly challenging their society.
1:23:02
SPEAKER_01: I don't think we need to remake the world and turn everyone into little Americans.
1:23:07
SPEAKER_01: And then we get our feelings hurt when they don't want to be little Americans.
1:23:11
SPEAKER_01: And you look at the Romans, the Mongols, these were the masters of imperialism.
1:23:17
SPEAKER_01: And they would say, hey, that checks due on the first of the month.
1:23:21
SPEAKER_01: Worship any rock you want to worship, but you don't pay the check.
1:23:25
SPEAKER_01: The legion's coming for every man, woman, and child.
1:23:29
SPEAKER_01: But one last thing I want to say is the thing that's frightening about America today that I don't think a lot of people realize is that we're reverting back to the lowest common denominator in warfare, which is tribal war.
1:23:44
SPEAKER_01: And that's kind of identity politics.
1:23:47
SPEAKER_01: And tribal war is there's no soldier-civilian distinction anymore.
1:23:52
SPEAKER_01: Every man, woman, and child is a combatant and fair game.
1:23:57
SPEAKER_01: And that's sad to me.
1:23:58
SPEAKER_01: And that people don't realize what they're signing up for, because this is why the sovereign nation state grew out of the Thirty Years' War.
1:24:09
SPEAKER_01: Because we saw that if you ignite these furies, they just kind of take on a life of their own.
1:24:15
SPEAKER_01: And it was an imperfect system by all accounts.
1:24:18
SPEAKER_01: If you can confine war to armies on battlefields, then you can get them to behave in a way out of prudential self-interest.
1:24:28
SPEAKER_01: Because if they get captured, they don't want to be tortured.
1:24:30
SPEAKER_01: Something like that.
1:24:32
SPEAKER_01: A more cynical reading would be yeah, they played nicer with each other on Western European battlefields to save their energy for colonialism where none of those rules applied.
1:24:42
SPEAKER_01: And that's a fair argument, too.
1:24:43
SPEAKER_01: So I'll shut up.
1:24:44
SPEAKER_03: Well, you're clearly an academic in the good sense of someone who has studied history.
1:24:49
SPEAKER_03: I am very much of an amateur history buff, but I do think it is very important.
1:24:54
SPEAKER_03: We wouldn't expect to be wise in any other area without an understanding of what have we collectively learned.
1:25:02
SPEAKER_03: Maybe just one more thing, just sort of on U.S.
1:25:04
SPEAKER_03: society.
1:25:05
SPEAKER_03: I do think because we've been so privileged to not have a war of the type that we had in World War II, an existential war.
1:25:15
SPEAKER_03: We've obviously been involved in wars where we've had very brave people who have signed up to go and do our bidding for us, who I don't think we've taken very good care of.
1:25:24
SPEAKER_03: And I'm talking about people who serve in Afghanistan or Iraq.
1:25:28
SPEAKER_03: We say that we love them, but we don't actually take very good care of them.
1:25:32
SPEAKER_01: Well, look at Pat Tillman.
1:25:33
SPEAKER_01: He, to me, is a metaphor for the war on terror, a tragic metaphor.
1:25:38
SPEAKER_03: I'm not familiar with his story.
1:25:39
SPEAKER_01: What's his story?
1:25:40
SPEAKER_01: He was the football star who left the NFL to join the Army Rangers, and then he died in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan.
1:25:50
SPEAKER_01: They covered it up, they tried to make it sound heroic, and it was a tragic friendly fire incident.
1:25:56
SPEAKER_01: And to me, his motives couldn't have been purer.
1:25:59
SPEAKER_01: He got his brother to join with him, a true hero.
1:26:03
SPEAKER_01: But as I've said before, oftentimes heroes are the ones who wind up dead.
1:26:08
SPEAKER_01: It's the survivors often who we like to paint the survivor as a hero, but oftentimes their ability to survive is their ability to maneuver and again make Faustian deals.
1:26:22
SPEAKER_03: Well, I think that because we haven't seen real horror, most people, it's easy for them to engage online or hate the other side politically.
1:26:33
SPEAKER_03: Like be careful what you ask for.
1:26:36
SPEAKER_03: Like if you don't believe in our democracy, if you really don't believe in it, if you're really going to try to tear that down, if you're really going to try to paint half of the country, whichever is the half you disagree with, as the enemy, what I hear you saying is that can lead to actual real-world bad things that the greatest generation who saw how bad things could get, they wouldn't agree with the direction that we're heading in now.
1:26:59
SPEAKER_03: I don't think that's a good thing.
1:27:00
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
1:27:01
SPEAKER_01: And that's my greatest fear is that I don't, you know, I recently wrote a piece called Be Careful What You Wish For.
1:27:07
SPEAKER_01: And it was after talking to an extreme, a rich Silicon Valley tech gazillionaire and a rich right-wing Trumper.
1:27:20
SPEAKER_01: And they were both breathing fire and all that, but both have never, like I said, been in a fist fight, much less a firefight.
1:27:27
SPEAKER_01: And it really angered me to the point where I don't talk to either of them now.
1:27:31
SPEAKER_01: And I'm very generous typically with people about their political point of view.
1:27:36
SPEAKER_01: So I have too many friends I disagree with, but when you start talking about public hangings and this kind of stuff, I just I can't listen to that.
1:27:46
SPEAKER_01: It's it's corrosive.
1:27:48
SPEAKER_01: And it's like I tell my wife, like, don't start your day looking at Twitter.
1:27:52
SPEAKER_01: It's just gonna inflame you.
1:27:54
SPEAKER_01: I said, start with a left wing source, a right wing source, and then work your way into the swamp.
1:28:00
SPEAKER_01: But don't start in the swamp.
1:28:02
SPEAKER_01: And that's, I think, where people go wrong.
1:28:05
SPEAKER_01: Because that's room in what they call in the intelligence world rumor intelligence.
1:28:10
SPEAKER_01: Like, oh, the guy at the White House thing was a this or a that.
1:28:14
SPEAKER_01: And you see, and it was a setup to get the ball room.
1:28:16
SPEAKER_01: And I'm just like, how do you guys come up with this stuff?
1:28:19
SPEAKER_01: Like, where so fast?
1:28:21
SPEAKER_01: And I don't pretend to know the truth, but I know how to discern the truth.
1:28:25
SPEAKER_01: And it's going to take me a few days.
1:28:28
SPEAKER_01: And I'm going to study it and I'm going to consult all my sources from both sides and the inside.
1:28:34
SPEAKER_01: And then I'll reach a tentative conclusion.
1:28:38
SPEAKER_01: But I don't claim to have a patent on the truth.
1:28:41
SPEAKER_03: And I appreciate that.
1:28:42
SPEAKER_03: And I think that's very logical.
1:28:44
SPEAKER_03: And I know so many people who I think are smart who are just so quick to hit resend in social media on something that just came and that they have not fact-checked.
1:28:53
SPEAKER_03: And it's just the culture we live in because everyone wants to be the first to see or to know.
1:28:57
SPEAKER_03: One thing I can say, just to wrap it up and bring us full circle back to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, for me, when I talk about I have friends across the political spectrum, it is because of martial arts.
1:29:09
SPEAKER_03: It is because of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
1:29:11
SPEAKER_03: I have very religious Christian friends in the Midwest who teach martial arts.
1:29:16
SPEAKER_03: I've got left-wing liberal friends.
1:29:20
SPEAKER_03: I've got Trump supporter friends.
1:29:22
SPEAKER_03: I've got Trump hater friends.
1:29:23
SPEAKER_03: And it is because the martial arts, because when we're on the mat, we can be friends.
1:29:28
SPEAKER_03: Like we can train, we are comrades.
1:29:30
SPEAKER_03: It's like this, I don't know, a bastion where something else matters.
1:29:35
SPEAKER_03: And what matters there is your technical ability and your ability to push under pressure and your ability to both be competitive with other people on the mat and then want to help them because they're helping you too.
1:29:48
SPEAKER_03: So there's this odd competitiveness and we're on the same team.
1:29:53
SPEAKER_03: And I'll just close out by getting your thoughts on Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
1:29:59
SPEAKER_03: And could this be the savior for us all?
1:30:01
SPEAKER_03: Could this be the way in which people come from different walks of life, come together and can realize that hey, we're all just, we're all just people, we're all Americans, we're all just people here.
1:30:10
SPEAKER_03: Let's train.
1:30:11
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I agree a hundred percent with that.
1:30:14
SPEAKER_01: And that's what I always loved about jujitsu and martial arts is and jujitsu in a funny way, more, because A, you're gonna come into contact with people you're never otherwise gonna come into contact with.
1:30:27
SPEAKER_01: And B, you immediately see that person's true character, for better or worse.
1:30:34
SPEAKER_01: And so you can say, Oh, we're gonna go easier, we're gonna go harder, we're gonna, but the minute you engage, you see that person for who they really are.
1:30:45
SPEAKER_01: I've seen incredible heroism from people I never would have imagined.
1:30:50
SPEAKER_01: I've seen incredible cowardice from people who look so terrifying.
1:30:55
SPEAKER_01: And because, you know, I was small when I was training at Hickson stuff, like 145, 150.
1:31:01
SPEAKER_01: And I would live through hell to get like pass a half guard, but then get on top and crush these huge guys, and they were so unused to having this small guy that could exert pressure because I learned the pressure game from the best, and it was very telling.
1:31:20
SPEAKER_01: And I've made some of my best friends in the world through martial arts and jujitsu and teaching jujitsu at my own weird brand, but I tried really hard to never humiliate people because I was training with people that were some of the most dangerous men in the world, and I never got confused that because I could beat them at this very mannered game in this confined environment, that somehow I could go out in the jungle with them and suddenly I'm walking point.
1:31:56
SPEAKER_01: No, it didn't work that way.
1:31:57
SPEAKER_01: If I went in the jungle with them, I did exactly what they said when they said it, and I never got confused about it.
1:32:05
SPEAKER_01: And I always let people have their dignity, and that made me a good teacher and made me a lot of friends all over the world, like from West Australian commercial fishermen to Nova Scotian fisher, a lot of like surfer tough guys and things like that, and a lot of guys, ah, it won't work on me, and no, you know, here we go again.
1:32:27
SPEAKER_01: And you have to show them, like you said, like John Jock said to you, you have to show them that it works, and sometimes that's a little harder than you might want to have to show them, but you have to show them, and then once you've shown them, you can teach them.
1:32:43
SPEAKER_01: And most of them are very receptive, and especially like I was kind of the John the Baptist of Jiu-Jitsu because I didn't look scary, because I wasn't imposing, because I was pretty nice generally, and it's like you get more with sugar than you do with salt.
1:32:57
SPEAKER_01: I like people, and so and I felt privileged to have this just like you at the time we had it, which was long before I hear these guys, oh, you know, I saw the first UFC, and that's what got me.
1:33:10
SPEAKER_01: We were way down the road by then.
1:33:12
SPEAKER_03: Yes, I agree.
1:33:13
SPEAKER_03: Well, we were very lucky to be where we were, right place at the right time.
1:33:17
SPEAKER_03: That's what I certainly tell people.
1:33:19
SPEAKER_03: And so long as you came with the right attitude, and I know you experienced this too, nobody smiling bigger, giving you a bigger hug than Hicks, then Higgin, then John Jacques, my friend.
1:33:33
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:33:34
SPEAKER_03: The warmest possible people mixed with so much toughness and so much skill.
1:33:39
SPEAKER_03: And that I think is what you're talking about.
1:33:41
SPEAKER_03: On the map, we see toughness, but we see friendship.
1:33:45
SPEAKER_03: And what we definitely see is truth.
1:33:48
SPEAKER_03: And I love that aspect of the martial arts as well.
1:33:51
SPEAKER_03: Well, thank you very much for your time.
1:33:53
SPEAKER_03: You've been very generous with it, Peter.
1:33:55
SPEAKER_03: I love to yes, very fun.
1:33:57
SPEAKER_03: You're an amazing person.
1:33:59
SPEAKER_03: We will certainly have links to everything we talked about, especially Fainting Robin Foundation.
1:34:04
SPEAKER_03: Do you have a way to accept donations on the okay?
1:34:08
SPEAKER_03: So I'll be sure that's there.
1:34:10
SPEAKER_03: Such a small organization.
1:34:11
SPEAKER_03: I'm sure$20 here, it adds up and it's helpful.
1:34:16
SPEAKER_03: Everything is helpful, and I think you deserve to be supported for what you're trying to do.
1:34:19
SPEAKER_03: Sticking up for the link for Chris.
1:34:25
SPEAKER_03: Chris is very colorful and entertaining to talk to.
1:34:28
SPEAKER_01: I'm trying to get him to write a book.
1:34:29
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, you gotta write a book.
1:34:31
SPEAKER_01: And writing books hard.
1:34:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:34:33
SPEAKER_03: Well, that you're there, you're there and you can help.
1:34:35
SPEAKER_03: But yes, Chris has been on, so has Bob Bass.
1:34:38
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, been fortunate because I'm well connected to talk to a lot of wonderful people.
1:34:43
SPEAKER_03: I would love to sometime talk to Hickson.
1:34:45
SPEAKER_03: I don't know if he does interviews these days, but maybe I'll chat with you offline about that.
1:34:49
SPEAKER_03: But, anyways, have a great rest of your day, and I will hopefully meet you in person soon.
1:34:54
SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
1:34:55
SPEAKER_03: I hope you enjoyed that discussion with Dr.
1:34:57
SPEAKER_03: Peter McGuire.
1:34:58
SPEAKER_03: Would love to hear your thoughts on the questions that I asked or anything else you think about the show.
1:35:03
SPEAKER_03: You can leave comments in the comment section of the video on YouTube.
1:35:06
SPEAKER_03: And I would appreciate a like and share on whatever platform you're listening to this on.
1:35:12
SPEAKER_03: Reviews on Spotify and Apple are really helpful for us.
1:35:16
SPEAKER_03: I will be back next week with more lessons from the lab.
1:35:20
SPEAKER_03: And until then, keep developing your strengths, your wisdom, and go out and do good in the world.