The Übermensch Is a Verb, and Violence Comes Factory-Installed

Fridman skips the warmup and asks which philosophers shaped Barnett most. Barnett starts with Nietzsche, and with a correction. The Übermensch, as he reads it, is a secular version of the old religious hunger for a higher ideal. It is a striving and an overcoming, something you work toward and almost nobody holds. A genetic program that produced a super-soldier would not produce one. That, he says, is the surface-level misunderstanding.

He also thinks Nietzsche implies the state is temporary. Human beings are too full of weaker material to live there all the time. He ties the idea to Heidegger's authenticity: you do not become the Übermensch by pretending to be clay you are not. Barnett will never be five feet tall and 120 pounds. The work is to learn the actual lump of clay, including the flaws and the little demons, and carve toward an ideal you may never reach.

Original sin makes more sense to him if sin means missing the mark, the old archer's term, rather than cosmic evil. Accept that you are imperfect and that you will sabotage yourself better than any outside force. "You will tell yourself that you ruined them on purpose for a good reason," he says, or you will hang the failure on everyone except yourself. The useful starting point is simpler: there is a lot of work to do, and that is just the way it is.

Fridman offers an evolutionary hope: cooperation, compassion, and empathy were selected for, so people are fundamentally good. Barnett agrees at small scale and then changes the unit of analysis. Following Nassim Taleb, he says human organization changes with size: communist in the family, something else in the town, something else again at the level of the state. Dunbar's number is a real line. Inside about 150 people, empathy has a face. Past that, the other person becomes "some guy."

Whether people stay magnanimous, he argues, depends on security. The threat can be external, or it can be the quieter kind: doubt about your own capabilities. Fridman counters that the real variable may be resources. If a society is overflowing with safety and surplus, strangers can be treated as humans instead of as competition. Barnett accepts part of that and then asks what a resource actually is.

Water, food, shelter, and the skills that reproduce them outrank iPhones. Knowledge itself is a basic resource. If a group forgets how to fish, hunt, or even clean and cook the game, the gap before it relearns is a dark age. He has seen homeless people with smartphones. This is the most luxury-laden age in human history. Yet when the lights go out, he did not see anyone loot bread. He saw televisions, sneakers, and designer statues whose value is purely a market fiction. You cannot eat polypropylene, and you cannot sell it on the real art market after a riot.

Barnett calls himself a catch wrestler. Asked for a Wikipedia-level definition, he offers collegiate wrestling plus submissions. That is not an accident of branding. American folkstyle itself comes from catch-as-catch-can; the submissions were stripped out of the rule set until they became null. Show a high-level amateur a catch finish and he often recognizes the setup. He just did not know you could take it all the way.

Fridman asks whether there is a thread from war with no rules to a tightly regimented IBJJF tournament. Barnett starts with animals. Kittens and puppies play, and play degenerates into soft violence; every animal learns how to fight. The pop-culture "alpha" who bullies his way around is a cartoon. Real alpha wolves, he says, spend very little time fighting, because if you actually are alpha you do not need to. Frequent fights usually mean you are bad at being in charge and the group is tired of you.

In nature the risk is total. He followed an Instagram account called Nature Is Metal until it became too painful. The winner still walks away hurt; an infection can finish what the fight did not. That logic, scaled to humans, is why putting a man on his back is the lethal core of so many systems: Cornish wrestling, Turkish oil wrestling, Mongolian wrestling, sumo, Indian kushti, jiu-jitsu, judo, sambo. On the ground, with no sport rules, the person on top can use a rock, a knife, or fire, and it is probably not one-on-one. Sweep, then draw the blade. That is older than gentle art.

"Violence is an absolute," Barnett says. It is in every person, every interaction, every law. He prefers wrestling rooms to some jiu-jitsu rooms because the talk is more honest. He has rolled with ADCC world champions. When someone refuses the sweep twice and then attacks the leg, gentleness evaporates. Athleticism shows up, and then meanness, pain, and getting what you need. Strength is fine, he says, until you beat him with it. Then it is suddenly a problem.

Fridman brings up his friend Michael Malice, the New York anarchist in the white suit, and the claim that violence would not automatically swallow a stateless order. Barnett's answer is scale. At a small size, an anarchist experiment can work. As it grows, a state emerges, not only because cigar-smoking plotters want control, but because people start asking who handles the plumbing. If you want the pipes to work, someone writes a protocol. Nations are tribes with paperwork.

He has been turning a ratio over in his head. For every one unit of freedom, you need two units of accountability. Without that, you get human self-interest sabotaging the rest, and not even from malice. Anarchism, on that math, looks like two units of freedom and one unit of accountability, or maybe zero. He has never seen people stay accountable even in revolutions. Marx, he thinks, made the same category error: treat greed as a product of capitalism, then assume it vanishes when the system does. "If there was one billion Marxists in the world," Barnett says, "they would hate each other so bad."

He will not dismiss a forbidden book on the author's personality. Marx was bitter; bitterness is not an argument. Fridman mentions that he has been reading *Mein Kampf*. Barnett's reason for looking below the surface is not to mine a hidden masterpiece. It is to admit that Hitler was a human being, and to consider the possibility that any one of us could have been him. The most dangerous people, he says, are the ones who think they are acting for the sake of good.

He draws a distinction between Hitler and Stalin. Stalin, in this telling, was not mad. He was a brutal executive with a very low valuation of human life, willing to run five-year plans that produced mass suffering. Hitler was moodier, and he was fighting on multiple continents at once. Stalin first internalized control, then moved outward. Put Stalin into a world-war meat grinder, Barnett says, and maybe he would have lost his marbles too. He is not sure.

Fridman asks whether we will always have war. Barnett says yes, in some form. He puts air quotes around the word because a wrestling match is not a battlefield, and neither is American football or tennis. They are diluted forms of war. Kids need to wrestle the way animals need to play. At peace, a man of war makes war with himself. The hopeful version is that most future war is inner. Barnett is less sure the labels people live under will allow it.

The explanation that stuck with him is the Judge's speech in Cormac McCarthy's *Blood Meridian*. "All things that exist without my knowledge do so without my consent." In the novel the Judge copies cave paintings and a piece of conquistador armor into his notebook, then crushes the object. Barnett reads that as the designer's will: the world is unfinished until it has been redrawn on his terms. That is why war keeps returning. There is always someone who wants to be the designer.

War, in the Judge's register, is play. The difference is the stake. If the stake is your life, that is one game. If the stake is a coin, that is another. Winning, Barnett adds, is not the same as piling up things. Things without fulfillment make an unhappy person with a large inventory. Games also iterate: today, tomorrow, next week, then death, which most people would rather not think about. Suffering, he and Fridman agree, can still be a creative force. Without the camps, would Frankl and Maslow have written the books they wrote? The thought is ugly on several levels, and Barnett does not look away from it.

Backstage before a fight, a world champion asked Barnett if he got nervous. Barnett said no. The other man looked envious. Barnett told him that calm was not a superior method. It was only what was necessary for him. The story nested inside another. A famous boxer in Japan hated the anxiety so much that he went to a hypnotist, walked into the next fight cool as a cucumber, and lost. Whatever puts you in the state where you can actually compete, Barnett says, is the thing. It might be fear. It might be anger. It might be quiet. There is no universal optimum.

Fridman brings up Mike Tyson: fear on the walk, godhood in the ring, and the later remark on Joe Rogan that the thought of hurting someone aroused him. Barnett does not think the arousal is universal. He has never had that reaction in the ring; if anything, he says, the body leaves that part of the program at the door. What he does recognize is the feeling of aliveness. The highest states of being he has ever occupied were in the middle of conflict. You cannot live there. Other people cannot talk to you there. Stay in it and you either go mad or become untenable to everyone else. That, again, is the Übermensch: a peak you cannot hold.

He describes himself as a joyful, inquisitive kid who once took his sister's old crib apart to see how it worked. Other children learned he would react if they pushed. Once the line was crossed, the switch was total. Facing someone head-on, he felt he belonged. Using violence was never the hard part. The hard parts were dosage and responsibility: a handful of broken glass in a street fight might have felt normal at seventeen and is not an adult answer, and every act of violence comes with consequences the state would rather monopolize. Combat sports gave him a legal room in which he was more himself than he was outside it, until he could bring that self back into ordinary life.

In 2001 Barnett fought Semmy Schilt. Schilt opened his right eyebrow; Barnett busted Schilt's nose. Blood rained on him during an armbar. He won, stood up, wiped the blood onto his hands, and licked it. Japanese journalists lost their minds. Dana White came to talk to him. Years later B.J. Penn licked a glove after a win and the internet called it cool. Barnett's reaction is still a laugh: he did this in 2001, and Penn, on that same old card, had called him a killer.

Fridman wants the inner weather of that second. Barnett says there was no plan. You do not stand in that place and invent a gesture. It was how he actually felt. He is 43, he has had decent orgasms, and nothing has compared. The social restrictions drop away and he lives in a state that feels denser with meaning than ordinary life. He does not need a psychologist's chair to explain it. There is a part of him that can apply violence at any level and sleep afterward.

In the cage he generally has no mercy. If mercy appears, it is because he deliberately put himself in a state that allows it. In the natural state, only the referee holds him back. Asked for the fight that was his highest personal creation, he points to the Schilt rematch. He had food poisoning the week before. The arms still looked all right; the power output did not. Schilt, always enormous, had gone from somewhere around 260 pounds to about 290. Against the ropes, changing levels, Barnett told himself there was no way he was going to lose. Then came bare-knuckle. The night before he told a friend he might not call, because the next time they met this face might not look like this. That was not trash talk. He accepted he might die. If he has to go somewhere after, he wants Valhalla: fight all day, feast all night.

Fridman asks about Fedor Emelianenko, who had COVID at the time and was rumored to be near a last fight. Barnett's tone changes. A fight with Fedor would be epic, he says, because that is the person he would most want to give his best to, especially in the twilight of a long career. Two warriors walk in with death in the room, and the man across from you is your brother in it.

If the other man shows up as authentically as Barnett does, then even a dominant win is a form of love. He is glad the other man is there. They are in it together. The crowned and the defeated, in that sense, are not ranked. *Fight Club*'s line about not knowing who you are until you have been in a fight is, for him, reportage. He has watched people perform a self and then reveal another one in the ring. Sometimes the crowd sees it even while that person is winning.

An interviewer once asked whether the winner of Cain Velasquez versus Stipe Miocic would be the greatest heavyweight ever. Barnett's answer was no, not even close. The men needed more time, and so did the careers of the people they had beaten. One fight is not a ledger. He puts Alistair Overeem on the table as a test of the "what have you done for me lately" habit. Overeem was not the UFC champion, but he was a champion in Dream and Strikeforce, and the span of his opponents can look, in some ways, harder than Daniel Cormier's résumé.

Environment matters. Pride allowed soccer kicks and stomps to the head. Go further back and you find men who fought seven times in a night under bare-knuckle rules. Barnett did beat Dan Severn, which felt like killing an idol, except he still loves him. Severn is part of why he is on this path. Meeting your god and putting a knife in it, he says, is realizing the god is human and pulling him down to your level. The mustache, however, stays mythic. He could bring Severn down. He could not bring the mustache down.

The early days felt like a novel. He and others piled into Matt Hume's Subaru, drove from Kirkland to Nampa, Idaho, and found no ring and no real event. The fallback idea was gloves, mouthpieces, and a park. The man he was supposed to fight learned who Barnett was, realized he was undefeated after SuperBrawl, and was glad they never touched. Barnett still had to strong-arm the promoter for the money. His first organized fight came on eleven days' notice: grappling in an apartment, Thai pads in a park, a couple of miles of running, then a finish in about two minutes. After that he picked fights in the university rec center, because that was easier than getting a girlfriend.

What would he tell someone just starting? Do it because you love it, and for that reason alone. Most people who try to make a profession of this will not be world champion. They will probably never fight for a title. They will probably never net money. Do not do it for those reasons. Do it to become the best version of yourself, whatever that ceiling turns out to be. You might, at best, only be mediocre. You will not even be mediocre if you do not mean it.

Passion has different kernels. Some people love getting stronger and deleting weakness. Weakness, as he defines it, is not merely being born without a lot of muscle. Maybe you were never meant to be a super-strong person. Choosing to be weak is a different story. Strength is choosing, regardless of difficulty, to improve. Strength is even choosing to admit the lack, accept it, and decide what to do next. Belts can be a capture device for a business, twenty dollars a stripe. They can also be an honest record of growth, as long as you actually earned the thing around your waist.

He has gotten the most from the sport by losing. You sit down and pick the film apart when you did not get what you wanted, when you gave everything and came up short or failed in a way that embarrassed you. Calamity is when people finally ask who they are. After the Nogueira rematch, which he still thinks was a bad call, a coach told him he had done great. Barnett said no. He had not finished the man. He had left the fight to judges, and the judges, in his view, got it wrong. Next time the only person standing should be him. Even a clean finish still has to be interrogated: was it his action, or the other man's mistake?

Barnett's favorite film is *Blade Runner: The Final Cut*. He used to own the original on VHS and later the director's cut on DVD. He gravitates to dark material because it is more upfront about death, and therefore, he thinks, more honest. He is not allergic to orders. He will take them from someone competent, with merit and reasons, even at his own expense. That person is rare. *Conan the Barbarian*, the John Milius film, is another favorite: motivations that are easy to follow without being shallow, shot well, scored well, and serious about the human condition.

Roy Batty's "tears in rain" speech is, for him, about knowledge that dies with the speaker. Batty has seen incredible things. When he dies they vanish, especially if he never passed the flame to another torch, never wrote them down, never handed them on. That is the same fear he named when he talked about catch wrestling and Karl Gotch: if no one carries the torch, the fire can be rekindled later, but this particular light on this particular path goes out.

John Boorman's *Point Blank*, with Lee Marvin, sits high on the list: a man driven by purpose and by a contract he intends to collect. That is also why he likes *No Country for Old Men*, more as a book than as a film. Anton Chigurh, the villain, is in Barnett's reading the purest person in the story. He does what he says. On rare occasions he lets a coin decide. The coin-flip speech is the point: you have been putting everything up every day of your life. The movie, he thinks, thinned the last talk between Chigurh and the wife. Dark stories, at their best, show that the villain can be the most consistent human in the room.