#735 - Peter Boghossian

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Peter Begozian.

Hello, budy. Thanks for doing it. Appreciate it. I think I found out about you through Sam Harris. I'm not sure. But you're also friends with my friend Rory Singer.

Oh, Rory's a great guy.

Great guy. He got excited when he found out that you were coming on. Rory, of course. Martial artist, former UFC fighter.

And he's tapped me many times.

I'm sure he tapped me many times, too. So you work at University of Portland State?

Portland State, yeah, work Portland State. Teach philosophy there.

And you're also a guy who is. You're described as an atheism advocate. Like, not just an atheist, but someone who actively promotes. Hey, you should probably try this.

I promote critical thinking and reason and rationality, and the two go together.

Yeah.

And I think that naturally leads to atheism if people are honest with themselves. And you mentioned Rory. I've been a longtime martial artist my whole life, actually.

Really? What did you start off with?

The fantasy based martial arts, the bullshit?

Like which ones?

I did everything. I mean, I tried Kempo. If you were to put all of the martial arts together that don't work and put them in one suite. I tried them.

All of them. Kenpo's got some good striking techniques. They just don't have an overall comprehensive system to deal with grappling.

Yeah, I tried kundo, I tried taekwondo, I tried Tai Chi. So I tried them all. And then actually, one of my turning points was when Ron Van Cleef, who was in the original UFCs, early UFC.

Yeah, he was in, like, UFC three or four or something like that early on. And he was like, in his fifty.

S. Yeah, he was older.

He's still in very good shape. He competed in a tournament, a karate tournament, I think deep into his sixty.

S. Yeah, I trained with Ron, and I trained with this guy, Shion, Hector Santiago, who was quite something. And I trained with them for years in New York City. And when Ron Van Cleef got taken down and just dominated, that was a huge moment for me. Then that started me on this whole other path. And then I trained with Greg Jackson from New Mexico.

Were you in New Mexico? Yeah. Were you living there?

Well, I started in New York City before the ufcs came along, and I trained there. And then I trained in New Mexico, and now I train with Matt Thornton from straight blast, who's John Kavanaugh's coach, who's obviously Conor McGregor and Nelson's.

That's a great lineage, man. So you saw Ron Van Cleef get dominated by Gracie fairly easily. It was kind of interesting to watch, like, a guy who is this legend, really well respected in the karate world.

Total legend, and just legend.

Smoked like a beginner.

Yeah. And I saw those guys, like, I saw Hector Santiago fight in real life, and he is a very dangerous person.

You saw him fight, like in a street fight.

Yeah. So I used to live in the lower east side between a and b. So all of this, this was just part of my experience. And I thought a lot of this stuff was real, and it just turned out to be fantasy. It just turned out to be make believe.

Well, I think that's an interesting parallel. When we were talking before the podcast, we were talking about critical thinking and brazilian jiu jitsu and martial arts in general. And there are a lot of people that have very distorted ideas of many things, not just of their ability to handle themselves physically, but just of the world in general. And I think martial arts sort of highlights a lot of those critical thinking issues.

Yeah. And I think that's one of the reasons I was so excited to come on this podcast today, is because I think you're ideally situated to have that conversation with me. Because brazilian jiu jitsu, specifically aliveness training against resisting opponents, we don't talk about. This is a huge area that nobody is talking about. We can understand all of reason and rationality through jujitsu, through corrective mechanisms, through aligning your beliefs with reality. I mean, little things from testing ideas yourself, not having to take it on faith. I was talking to his name eludes me now. I think that there's something. Chris Howder. I think he's a super good guy.

GReat Guy.

Yeah, there's something in the process. So you've been tapped thousands of times.

Sure, probably, if I counted them all up.

Yeah, I've been tapped thousands of times. There's something about the type of person who would either, if you frame it in terms of subjecting yourself to that, there's something about that that fundamentally differentiates us, if you will, from people in fantasy based martial arts. It develops a kind of character, it develops a kind of attitude when you place yourself in situations and get tapped. It's a type of corrective mechanism. Jiu jitsu is a corrective mechanism. It can help you align your beliefs with reality, and I'd love to explore that with you today.

Sure.

And talk about what that means, just.

In the case that some people might not know what that means. What mean BY TAP is submit when you do Jujitsu, believe it or not, I just assume that people know what we're talking about. But I've talked to people, go, okay, what is Jiu Jitsu like? What are you doing? SuBmissioN GRapPLinG, which is Jiu Jitsu, is one style of it, but it's all about using leverage and technique against joints or chokes against arteries, like chokeholds to cut off the blood to your brain or neck cranks. And when you train Jiu jItsu, as opposed to other martial arts other than wrestling, which I consider a martial art, you can go full speed on that. You go 100%. And that's the difference between those martial arts and striking based martial arts, where you really shouldn't go 100% because you only have so many punches your head can take before your body just stops working. That's just a fact. You could train sparring hard for a certain amount of years, but your mind is going to turn into mush. There's just no doubt about it. We know that for a fact.

People do jujitsu into their, well, Anthony.

Bourdain didn't even start until he was 58, and he's obsessed. He trains every day. He goes SoMETImes twice a day. He'll take a private in the morning, and then he'll train in a group class after that. He's a maniac. But the difference being, you absolutely know what works and doesn't work, and you absolutely know how good people are.

So if we rolled, you can't fake it.

Yeah, if we rolled 20 times and you tapped me 18 of those 20 times and someone said, how good is Peter? I'm like, he taps me most of the time, and then we know.

We would know the opposite in that.

Case, but, yeah, well, you know what I'm saying. We know. It's clear.

Yeah. So you can't fake it. There's no pretending. There's no bullshit. There are no bowing rituals and masters and all this nonsense. All of those structures, I think, are put in place to conceal the underlying paucity of the effectiveness of the techniques. And people come up with this. So the other thing about that that I think is so important is that all of these combat based martial arts, I've been waiting for this conversation for a long time. All of these combat based martial arts, let's take a look at, you mentioned wrestling. We know it works. There are some things, we just know that they work.

Right.

We know that kickboxing works. We also know that it's head trauma for kickboxing. We know that moi Thai, which is, in my opinion, an insane activity, but we know that it works. We know that western boxing works. We know that jiu jitsu works. So the reason that we can test these things, we can take people, and hopefully later on, we'll talk about the difference between brazilian jiu jitsu and japanese jiu jitsu, right? Same techniques, different pedagogy, different training method. That's a $2 word for training method. We can take that. We can adjudicate these things because we take two people of equal weight and we stick them in a cage, and we have some very basic rules. And also, for your listeners who aren't familiar, Mma gloves are very thin. I think people who don't understand MmA, they think that they're kind of like boxing gloves. They're very, very thin gloves. They don't afford much protection at all.

They really let the person punch you harder so they don't have to worry about breaking their hand. But as far as, like, cushioned to.

Your brain or your head, they're not a cushioning. So we can judge what works. And one of the ways that we do that is two people, same size, put them in a cage, and we see what works. The other thing is that when you train against a resisting opponent, and I think this is the key, you can figure out what's real. That's a mechanism. It's a corrective mechanism. It's a way for you to discern make believe, land and reality bullshit. What works and what doesn't work. And once we start introducing that in systems, like, look, let's say that I said to you, hey, I've come up with this technique. I know this is going to sound crazy, but it's incredibly effective. And you say, what is it? And I say, it's a pinky blitzkrieg. I get a lot like that, okay?

And so I say this, you say, attacking with pinkies?

Yeah, I say, but it's a certain stance. And I do this banter, stance, whatever. And you say, really? And so you call up, unbeknownst to me, you call, like, I heard a show your budies with Eddie Bravo, right? You call up me and say, look, we got this guy in here. He says that