Name: Joe Rogan Experience #735 - Peter Boghossian
Uploaded: 2015-12-15T02:02:18.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #735 - Peter Boghossian' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-12-15. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #735 - Peter Boghossian' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-12-15. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #735 - Peter Boghossian

We're good?
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Peter Boghossian.
Hello.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for doing it.
Appreciate it, man.
I'm doing really good.
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.
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 at 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 know, you mentioned Rory.
I've been a long time in martial arts, my whole life, actually.
Really?
Yeah.
What did you start off with?
The fantasy-based martial arts, the bullshit.
Like, which ones?
I did everything.
I mean, I did...
I tried Kenpo.
I tried...
I literally tried...
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?
Well, you know...
Well, Kenpo's got some good striking techniques.
They just don't have an overall comprehensive system to deal with grappling.
Yeah, I tried Jeet Kune Do.
I tried Taekwondo.
I tried...
I tried Tai Chi.
So I tried them all.
And then I...
Actually, one of my turning points was when Ron Van Cleef,
who was in the original UFCs, early UFCs...
Yeah, he was in, like, UFC 3 or 4 or something like that.
Early on.
And he was, like, in his 50s.
Yeah, he was older.
He's still in very good shape.
He, like, competed in a tournament, a karate tournament,
I think, deep into his 60s.
Yeah, I trained with Ron, and I trained with this guy,
Sheehan 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.
That was...
Then I...
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, or...?
Well, I trained...
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 Kavanagh's coach,
who's obviously Conor McGregor in Nelson's.
That's a great lineage, man.
So you saw Ron Van Cleef get dominated by Hoist Gracie.
Yeah.
Like, 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 get 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, or...?
Yeah.
So I used to live in the Lower East Side between A and B.
And 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, you know?
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, 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 jiu-jitsu,
through corrective mechanisms, through aligning your beliefs with reality.
I mean, little things from, you know, testing ideas yourself,
not having to take it on faith.
I was talking to, I was talking to, I guess the name alludes me now.
I think that there's something, Chris Howder, I think, he's a super good guy.
Great guy.
Yeah, 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 I mean by tap is submit.
When you do jiu-jitsu, like, I believe it or not, I've talked to,
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?
What 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 choke holds 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, you know, a certain amount of years,
but you're going to, your mind is going to turn into mush.
There's just no doubt about it.
We know that for a fact.
And people do jiu-jitsu into their 60s and 70s.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
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, like, you absolutely know what works and doesn't work.
That's right.
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, you know,
and if someone said, how good's Peter?
I'm like, he taps me most of the time.
Yeah.
And then we know, you know.
All right.
We would know the opposite in that case, but yeah.
Well, you know what I'm saying.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We know.
It's clear.
Yeah.
And so you can't fake it.
There's no pretending.
There's no bullshit.
Right.
There's no, like, you know, 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 those combat, these combat-based martial arts, let's take a look at you
mentioned wrestling.
We know it works.
We know there are some things we just know that they work.
We know the kickboxing works.
We also know that it's head trauma for kickboxing.
We know that Muay Thai, which is, in my opinion, an insane activity, but we
know that it works.
We know that Western boxing works.
We know that jujitsu works.
So the reason that we know 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.
You know, 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 cushion to your brain or your head.
Yeah, they're not a cushioning.
Yeah.
So we can look, 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.
Like that's a mechanism, it's a corrective mechanism, it's a way for you to
discern make-believe land and reality, bullshit, reality, you know, 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, you use it.
Okay.
And so I say this, you say, well.
You just come attacking with pinkies.
Yeah, I say, you know, but it's a certain, you know, stance and I do this.
Right.
You know, come ban to stance or whatever.
And you say, really?
And so you call up, unbeknownst to me, you call up, you know, like I heard a
show, your buddies with Eddie Bravo, right?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, you call up and say, look, we got this guy in here, he says that he has
this technique, pinky blitzkrieg.
I'm going to send him over there, put him up against your good purple belt, get
it on video, and we'll see what happens.
So it's a way to test it.
Now, if that works, you'd be like, holy shit, like I can't, this is awesome.
Like we, nobody ever thought of the pinky blitzkrieg.
It's incredible.
But what you've done there is, that's a core component of critical thinking.
It's a willingness to revise your beliefs.
It may sound like bullshit, but you're completely open to the possibility if
this works against a resisting opponent, right?
So let's say that I tap out his purple belts and he's like, all right, well,
brown belt.
At some point, it would be so absurd that you'd think that Eddie and I were in
on it, right?
I don't know the guy, I've never rolled with him, never met him.
So you'd call someone else.
And then you can test it.
So you can watch it.
Eventually, you can test it with, you know, your friends.
So this idea of testability and people can figure out things for themselves.
They don't have to go on the history of tradition or, you know, some guy
punched a bull in the head or there was a blind nun walking through this and
she killed all these guys.
That's what we always had to deal with.
That was, that was the history of martial arts was always Masoyama killed a
bull with a punch.
We always hear about Masoyama, who was this, was he Kyokushin or, I think he
was Kyokushin, right?
Is that his lineage?
I don't, I don't remember.
But he was a famous Japanese guy who apparently had killed a bull with a punch,
which, uh.
And then that, that, that, that comes down as legend.
So when people are said, well, you know, how do you know this works?
Why should you do it?
Well, this guy killed a bull.
Yeah.
Well, did you see the bull?
Did you see it?
You know, so, so it's a, it's a fable and the fable takes on a life of its own.
And the, the, the geni