For Every Triumph, Many Souls Must Be Trampled

In his early twenties, Clarke says he had no concept of consequence. Immediate gratification was all he cared about, and a part of him did not even think he would live long enough for the long play to matter. He remembers asking why he should act now in a way that might affect a stage of life he might never reach. Violence showed more readily then; kindness was reserved for a very small circle. The balance has since slid the other way, and he worries that if he ever needs the old version of himself, that man may have walked too far away to call back.

Fridman asks why people who fight for a long time, in mixed martial arts or in the military, tend to become philosophers. Clarke traces the marriage of martial arts and philosophy back centuries. A soldier under someone else's charge, marched out in a line to overtake some Germanic tribe, might not come home on any given day. That job forced a daily inventory of how you had lived and how you had treated the people around you. Modern life is too comfortable for most people to take that kind of stock.

Lex wonders whether grappling still carries echoes of that mortality. Clarke does not really think of it that way. In contemporary society, he says, a lot of people who train a martial art are not martial artists. They use it as exercise and as a tagline in an Instagram bio. It is something they do, not something they are, and he draws a hard line between those two conditions.

Fridman pushes him on a flaw: Clarke is visibly put off by people who have not yet earned competence, including proud beginners. Online, people like to say they respect anyone with the guts to get on the mat. Clarke calls that "the biggest load of shit I have ever heard." Putting your name on a form and paying a fee is easy. The hard work is the diet, the honest weight cut, the training done properly, and then stepping on the mat with nowhere to hide.

The person who skips that work walks in with a bucket of excuses. Lose, and you can say you were not really prepared; you never made yourself vulnerable. Clarke has far more respect for the fighter who eliminates every excuse, then gets finished in round one. The gifted novice who wins a couple of matches on talent and then posts that he lost to the eventual champion learned almost nothing. That, Clarke says, is worth zero.

He plays bass badly and would love to be great at it, and he puts that fact on nothing public. The standard he wants is to agree, privately, to perform live with no escape hatch. If he fails, it cannot be because he did not try; it is because he is not good enough, and then he has to sit in that sick feeling. He can often thin-slice a new student at the gym: some people are nurturing a small flame, and some are only playing with the idea of the dream.

Clarke's admiration for Mike Tyson is a mix of timing, raw violence, and raw honesty. It is easy, he says, to cast Tyson aside as a scourge on society until you hear him speak. This is not an unintelligent man. This is someone who may know himself better than most people know themselves, and that candor is disarming.

Fridman hears two people living in the same small house: a thoughtful man and a dangerous one, having a picnic. Clarke calls it dialectical tension, opposing forces that pull at everyone, with the scale sliding across a life. Running a gym as a big head instructor makes it harder to stay mean. Soften the technique for enough years while you try to run a business, and that softness becomes who you are. He does not entirely like the result, and he has been trying to reclaim some of the old edge on the mat.

On Joe Rogan, Tyson said he was aroused by violence. Clarke cannot speak for everyone, but he thinks it was a brutally honest statement, and that many people feel it without being willing to admit it. There is joy, he says, in landing a flush right hand on someone's jaw and watching them crumble. You do not even feel it, the way a home-run swing off the sweet spot of a baseball bat does not sting your hands. When physical contact is done right, the physical and mental pleasure is hard to match.

Fridman, a former wrestler with an OCD streak, loves the clean beauty of a well-executed pin: two seconds, everything flush, everything in line. Wrestling, more than most sports, also offers the feeling of dominating another human being. In high school Clarke lost matches because of over-aggressiveness. He would take top and let an opponent stand just so he could hit a mat return, not to return him to the mat but to drive him through it. That joy was the point.

His senior-year coach told him to stop the crazy aggression and wrestle like a technician. Success jumped; enjoyment did not. At the New England tournament the coach yelled for a harder cross-face, and Clarke blasted a kid in the face hard enough to burst his nose. He did not think not to do it, because it felt good. Fridman draws a contrast with Russian wrestling and Japanese judo, where a perfectly timed foot sweep, changing the whole picture with almost no force, is treated as the highest form of mastery. The American folk hero is Dan Gable, grinding a man until his spirit breaks.

Clarke will not pick a winner between brute force and effortless technique. Beauty, he says, is subjective, based on the skills you perceive yourself to have. He was never a slick, super-athletic competitor; he had to outwork people, so he sees the beauty in that grind. A friend had just sent him a compilation of Lyoto Machida foot sweeps, and they are gorgeous. He can appreciate them. He cannot emulate them. Grit at least gives him a chance.

Fridman has mixed feelings about Genghis Khan: enormous violence, and, in Dan Carlin's telling, a kind of civilizational reset that may have been progressive in the long run. Clarke's first warning is methodological. Judging a historical figure through a cushy modern lens is too easy. We say what he did was wrong without a real grasp of what was deemed wrong in his time.

From what Clarke has read, Genghis Khan was a violent man who still offered an option. Arrive at a village, and the choice was to come with him or to run. He took good care of the people who joined, and Clarke notes he was the first military leader to pay soldiers' families when they died, funded from the spoils of raids. He is also credited with early horseback mail routes. Clarke jokes that he was the Bernie Sanders of the Mongol Empire.

Would you surrender your way of life to survive? If you have a family, Clarke says, your obligation is to them, and surrender has to be on the table. If you are alone and not buying what the conqueror is selling, try to escape and know what waits on the other side. Fridman observes that historical people often valued principles more than life, while Americans treat individual death as the great horror. Clarke's deeper worry is that people no longer know what their principles are. Isolated from parish, church, and neighborhood, they jump from one online bucket to the next and get dipshit feedback instead of a community that can tell them who they are.

Cancel culture, Fridman says, often looks like this: someone is canceled, and their friends go quiet, or worse, pile on. He admits to a maybe-problematic ethic, something like a Russian-mobster rule. Help your friends bury the body; do not start with the lecture about the murder. You can have that conversation after the hole is filled. What else do we have, he asks, except brotherhood, sisterhood, and love for a very small community?

Clarke says he has probably three friends who could call right now about burying a body, and he would tell Lex he had to go. Closeness is not the whole test. Some people near him would not do it for him, so he would not do it for them. The underlying principle, as far as he can tell, is that you do for your friends what you think they would do for you. The map is stranger than that, though. There are people outside his inner circle he would not help with a morning tire change who might still get him out of the house for the burial.

He cites a line from the film *The Town*. A man walks into a friend's house and says he needs help: they are going to hurt some people, and the friend can never ask about it again. The friend looks up and asks whose car they are taking. That, Clarke says, is the person you need in your life. Some people walk through the door with that sentence and you drop everything. Others walk through and you mention the Hot Pocket in the microwave.

Clarke cannot cite one principle he has reversed, only the discovery that principles can change without that making you a coward. Having your mind changed by smart people, and being able to say so, is liberating. A friend corners him with the five whys until he hits the core of a claim. Constant defense, he says, leaves no crack in the front line for a new idea to come in. The new idea may not even prove you wrong; it may be water on a seed.

Fridman wants more public figures who change their minds in the open. Clarke draws a line: changing because you found a better way is one thing; changing because a new demographic will vote for you is another. Hillary Clinton's evolution on gay marriage felt, to both of them, like a political calculation. Bernie Sanders could not be further from Clarke's politics, and yet Clarke hears an obvious authenticity in Sanders's passion that he does not hear in other candidates. It feels like a real human struggling with ideas.

The process, Clarke thinks, corrupts people. Dan Crenshaw looked level-headed a year and a half earlier; now, as he panders more to the right, Clarke reads a presidential run and a thinner authentic core. He admits he could be wrong. Still, he believes that on the path to the Oval Office you become beholden to so many people that the job becomes paying back favors. Political posts used to be part-time, rancher by day and sheriff by night. Now the goal is to *be* a politician, not to do what a politician is supposed to do. The same inflation of the self shows up in jiu-jitsu when a new social account fills with sycophants. People become emboldened, Clarke says, because they now have a mythical cyber mob behind them.

A Hunter S. Thompson line hangs at the entrance to Clarke's gym: for every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled. To him the quote is mostly about sacrifice. Unless greatness simply rains on you because you are genetically gifted, the path to the peak leaves carnage, personal relationships, other goals, unfulfilled dreams. Some bonds dissolve naturally. Some people get it, some do not, and some hate you. You give up what you want now for what you want more.

Fridman brings up *Whiplash*, and the drummer who lets a romantic relationship die in a messy pursuit of excellence. Clarke's first move is to dismiss convention as a boring linear picture of a life. His second is that the diner scene reveals the wrong partner, not a law of the universe. The right partner, he says, leaves a sandwich outside the door and is a complement, not an asteroid hitting the planet. A relationship should work like a binary star system, two bodies held by gravity, one larger and then the other as the seasons change.

If you want anything, he argues, you have to be prepared to live its opposite: comfortable being alone if you want a relationship, comfortable being poor if you are driven by money. Hedging means you never go all in. He is not afraid of saying "I love you"; he is an extreme person, and he does not want anyone left guessing how he felt if he dies on the drive home. Love, like bass playing, dies when you stop putting effort into it. Meditate on death, he says, and on the chance that this conversation is the last one, then make sure both people are doing the work, or you are just a chump.

Asked for the greatest fighters of all time, Clarke starts in the fourth century B.C. with Dioxippus. At the Olympics in 336 B.C., nobody even showed up to fight him in pankration. Years later, retired, he was challenged at a dinner by a Macedonian who arrived in armor with spear and shield. Dioxippus came out naked with a wooden club, wrecked the younger man, and put a foot on his throat without killing him. The nakedness, Clarke notes, was extra demeaning.

In modern MMA the first metric is the strength of the opponent at the time you beat him. Beating B.J. Penn in his prime is not the same as beating B.J. Penn late. The name Clarke thinks people know least, and should not, is Murilo Bustamante: a sinewy, steel-cable build, boxing, wrestling, great jiu-jitsu, not a great kickboxer in an era that did not yet demand it, and trouble for everyone he fought. Greatness, he adds, also needs a foil. Early Mike Tyson never really had one, which is why debates about his greatness always come back to the killers he did not face in their primes.

Georges St-Pierre is almost impossible to keep out of the conversation, because he could jab you, wrestle you, or submit you. Clarke's reservation about Fedor is the late-career turn toward the overhand right, and the fact that the great heavyweights were not really in Pride yet; when Fedor finally met a very good one in Fabricio Werdum, he was submitted. Later performances do not color Clarke's own ranking, because he is inside the sport, but they color everyone else's. In a short prime, the greatest MMA striker is Anderson Silva, then Machida for distance, making you miss by an inch and hitting you over the top as the fist comes back. Bustamante is his third. Title-defense counts do not impress him. Vince McMahon once said WWE can keep a superstar on top because the results are predetermined, and the UFC cannot. Half true, Clarke says: you cannot script the winner, but you can feed your star the most favorable matchups and pretend every challenger was the most deserving.

Can one or two great fights put someone among the greats? Clarke uses Kyle Bochniak versus Zabit Magomedsharipov as the example. One man was the silky striker; the other was the warrior. Together they made something neither could have made alone. A great performance, he says, is not the same as being a great fighter. He wants a larger sample size, and he has no idea what that number is. Toughness belongs in the criteria, and he does not have a formula for it either. This week his view is that the seed of a fighter is in you. You can tease it out. You cannot install it in someone who does not have it.

Kyle was a late replacement. Zabit was on the rise, and Kyle published the blueprint: pressure him and drag him into late rounds. Clarke told Kyle there was no area in which he would out-technique a kid who had trained martial arts since age three, so they would have to channel grit. Because Kyle is much shorter, Clarke said nothing about head movement for a long stretch and simply looped Mike Tyson training footage on the gym television. When the skill gap in wrestling is that large, he argues, both "avoid wrestling" and "become a better wrestler in eight weeks" are the wrong answers. The camp focused on not getting caught and on chain wrestling: defend the first takedown, break the hands, get up, and stay out of the sequence that will finish you.

By round three Zabit was tired from a brutal weight cut; Clarke cannot see a six-foot-one fighter living at 145 forever. Kyle walked through punches that no longer had power, and the Brooklyn crowd was among the loudest Clarke has heard in any arena. At the end he was so caught in the moment that he turned to the other cornerman, Tashaun, and asked if they had won. They had not. He is no fan of moral victories, but if one ever existed, that was it. Before they even reached the center of the cage he hugged Kyle and said, "You're my fucking hero." Most fighters, he adds, will be forgotten within a year of leaving. The value of being inside a night like that supersedes the money.

People rank fighters like slices of a pie, Clarke says, asking how good each piece is. You only need one exceptional piece; the rest are there to deliver you to your strength. You can argue Khabib Nurmagomedov is not the greatest because his striking is not slick. Clarke's reply is that the striking is good enough to get him to his grappling, where he is the best 155-pounder Clarke has ever seen. Promoters wanted Conor McGregor to be the foil. McGregor was manhandled. The foil never happened.

Clarke is a huge Khabib fan, as a grappler and because of the Russian connection, and he liked McGregor when the Irish-American flash first arrived. It later became too much for his taste. If he were Khabib, he would never fight McGregor again. Nate Diaz has fought the same fight for twelve years; McGregor will switch something to give himself an edge. Clarke thinks McGregor is one of the better overall athletes in the sport, tiny waist, pronounced glutes and shoulders, constantly evolving. Fans get emotional about him, Clarke argues, because they see qualities they lack, and many so-called McGregor haters are really haters of McGregor fans. The same pattern, he says, shows up in politics.

McGregor's base is karate, the in-and-out distance game he shares with Machida and Stephen Thompson. He sets people up for a straight left even while they circle away from it, as he did to Chad Mendes, and the flashy kicks are just a way of funneling someone onto that hand. People who call him a bad grappler, Clarke says, should come grappling. He was in the stands for Mendes and watched Irish fans in wool suits, beards, and pocket watches set the market for Vegas rooms that weekend; he had never seen more people trying to be someone else. Insulting José Aldo and Brazil helped make Aldo run onto the left hook. The same trick did not move Khabib, who was unflappable. Clarke honors Khabib's choice not to run it back in Moscow, and still mourns the cultural clash that fight could have been: Dagestan's calm city of brothers against Ireland walking into the fire.

War, Clarke thinks, will not end. In developed nations it may go cyber; in places like the Middle East it will still be tribal in ways Americans on a couch cannot begin to understand. Fridman raises the Fermi paradox and the idea of a great filter, with nuclear weapons, engineered pandemics, nanotechnology, and AGI as candidate ways a civilization erases itself. Clarke answers selfishly. He believes the vast majority of people are forgotten within twelve months of dying, sooner if they have no family, so he does not spend much time on Earth after he is gone. He wants to maximize the time he has, without overtly hindering the future, and he admits it is a me-first philosophy. He is too selfish for children, and underneath that he hears a lack of hope: he does not think humanity is going in the right direction.

The right direction, for him, is people coming back together in person, touching, talking face to face. Fridman notes that this is a picture of the world in which Clarke's mind was formed. Clarke grants the point, and also grants that a virtual world of ideas might be a higher form of existence. It depends what you value. Commerce may be helped. Interpersonal communication, he is sure, will be hindered. It saddens him to see a five-year-old slamming an iPad in a restaurant, unable to make eye contact, or teenagers who do not say please and thank you. He blames technology used as a crutch in raising kids, and he was late to cell phones and social media on purpose.

Likes, he thinks, are a drug, not a deep happiness, and the people who like his posts would like them even if he posted something preposterous. Social media, in his phrase, is a battleground of fragile egos. Fridman would rather see a fist bump between strangers, an "I got you, bro" at scale. Clarke also does not believe that many people actually want to succeed. They want the appearance of wanting it, because the work is enormous. The people posting about getting back on their grind, he says, have been on the couch. An overweight person wants to be skinny, just not enough to put down the pizza. Very few observers distinguish the person who found success from the person performing the hunt for it.

Lockdown pushed him, a brick-and-mortar owner, to find other ways to pay the mortgage, the bar tab, and an out-of-control Grubhub bill. He had resisted an online presence because he thinks of himself as a force of nature that people need to experience in person. Podcasting, he decided, captures that force better than other digital forms. The show is called *Please Allow Me*. He started with friends so he would be comfortable, and he learned that hanging out with a brother is not the same as drawing out answers an audience can use. Joe Rogan made long conversation look easy because Rogan and his friends already know what a microphone is. Clarke is putting first-timers on one. He has no destination. He wants to see the thing through to its own end.