Ep. 327: Perseverance, feat. Stephan Kesting

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatrice Jin, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models premium community member, has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in Jijitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in Jijitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access. And if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free. Go to BJJmentalmodels.com and check it out today. Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 327. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jijitsu approach. And I'm here today with an OG internet Jijitsu instructor and a newly published author, too. I got Stephen Kesting on the line. Stephen, how's it going? Speaker 3: It's going really well, Steve. Thanks for having me. Speaker 2: I am glad to have you, man. Now, you've been on the podcast before and we've talked about resilience as a topic. I mean, we've talked about kind of your health situation in the past and what it takes to bounce back after something goes wrong, after you have to step away from the mats. Today, I want to talk about a related topic, not just because it's relevant to Jijitsu people, but also because it actually lines up with your new book that you're publishing. Why don't you talk a little bit about what you've been up to and what you're working on? Speaker 3: Well, I think the last time I was on, we talked about the idea of resilience, coming back from the inevitable layoffs that happen when you're doing Jijitsu. If you're doing Jijitsu for 5, 10, 15 years, it's really inevitable that you're going to have layoffs in the long run. People when they get started, they're so excited about training every day. They're like, "Oh my God, I missed a week. I missed two weeks." And those of us who've been around for a while, we laugh because it's inevitable. It's always going to happen. But in 2015, I was facing a really severe health crisis. I was dying essentially, right? I had kidney failure from a genetic condition, and then I was looking at a kidney transplant. And as I was decreasing in kidney function and that was getting lower and lower and lower, and actually as far as being on the slab, being wheeled into the surgery, into the operating room, I was thinking about a couple of things. If you have your life and you kind of define your life by the physical things that you can do, be that Jijitsu, be that well, running, I don't run, but if I imagine that runners identify themselves as runners, the twin pillars of my life have really been Jijitsu and the outdoors. And I found myself wondering if I'd ever be able to do those things again, right? It'd be one thing to just survive the surgery, but it'd be another to be able to come back and actually do those things that give your life meaning. And one of the last things I thought about before I went under the knife was, will I be able to make it up to this area of Canada? It's this very, very remote area at the border of Nunavut and Manitoba and Saskatchewan. It's called the Land of Little Sticks. It's basically that intermediate zone between the boreal forest and the tundra. I'd been reading about it. I'd been looking at photos of it. I'd been studying it for 20 or 30 years. I'd been thinking about traveling up in this area. And kind of the last thought that I had before going under was like, I'd like to make it back up there. That would be kind of the a homecoming. That would be a a celebration tour of having survived this awful ordeal. And then a few years later, I did that. And then a few years after that, I ended up writing a book about that trip. And that book is Perseverance: Life and Death in the Subarctic. All those things were difficult. Coming back from the surgery was difficult. That trip was incredibly difficult. And then right, it turns out that writing a book isn't easy either. There's a reason that many people start writing books and not many people finish it. Speaker 2: Oh, what are you talking about? Writing books is easy, man. You just talk to ChatGPT for like 10 minutes and you tell it your life story and then it spits out a book. What could be easier than that? Speaker 3: I am very happy to say that there was no ChatGPT or AI of any sort other than spell checking, well, Grammarly. I guess Grammarly is a basic AI, but there was no AI more advanced than Grammarly involved in writing this book. Speaker 2: Amazing. Well, yeah, that's I'm actually glad that we got a chance to talk about this because I think people aren't really aware of the stuff that you do in your life beyond just Jijitsu. I mean, of course, you are a first responder as well. And if people follow you on social, they know that you're an avid wilderness explorer, too. And, you know, as I talk to you and get to know you, you're always doing these big long just involved trips going up into like the Arctic and up into Northern Canada. Was this trip that you did the first one that kind of got this ball rolling for you or is this something that you had done before? Speaker 3: It is something I'd done before, but I was much younger. I was in my 20s, right? That magic era when you have no kids and you have no money, but you have time. So if you have time, then, you know, if you're eating rice and beans in the city, you might as well be eating rice and beans out in the forest. And if you can't afford a float plane into some remote river, well, then you can start connecting different rivers and different lakes and doing portages over the heights of land to get from point A to point B to point C to point D. So it was a very formative in my youth. And I think that's, you know, so many of the the lifelong passions that we have, if you go back into your youth, you can see where the roots are. I can see where the roots of my Jijitsu passion are from the Bruce Lee movies I used to watch, from staying up late to watch the Kung Fu movies on late night television, to standing outside a martial arts store that used to screen Kung Fu movies and especially Bruce Lee movies continuously. So I think I watched all of, you know, Game of Death and all of Enter the Dragon probably 20 times standing outside Warrior's Martial Arts store on Young Street in Toronto. I didn't know a single word of the dialogue, but that turns out that's not very important to fall in love with something. So it was something I'd done before. It wasn't this De Novo idea, hey, I'm going to go up into the Arctic by myself, but it was, let's go up into the Arctic by myself. Now that I've got 30 years more mileage on the body, and now that I've got one kidney instead of two, and let's see if I can still do it. This is not a new fixation, but it's kind of a trying to reaffirm that I'm still capable of this. Maybe not as fast, maybe not for as long. Kind of the same way that somebody who did a lot of Jijitsu competing in their youth might still really enjoy getting on the mat, right? You hear the stories of old Judoka in Japan who are so broken up from Judo, but they still come out and they still train Newaza. They still roll around on the ground. So really, we're in these sports, I think for the most of us, for the long run. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now, I want to talk about the concept of perseverance in general, because of course, in Jijitsu, we've got this saying that it's not who's best, it's who's left. And I mean, this sounds so frustrating to a beginner when you hear something like that, because you think, oh yeah, it's all of these black belts talking about how they're not that good, but they tap me out 800 times. What do they know? But it really is true. When you get to black belt and beyond, you realize that a lot of this is just attrition. Yeah, there's an aspect of, I guess, natural talent and athleticism, but those things can fade over time, whereas your perseverance is what lets you go into the deep waters and keep exploring this journey and deal with setbacks like we've talked about before. As a concept show here, I'd love to get your thoughts on perseverance as a concept. Like what really is it and how do you cultivate something like that? Because that is one thing that will be common to everyone who wants to succeed in Jijitsu is they have to have a degree of perseverance to stick it through. Speaker 3: Mhm. Definitely. I mean, none of these things, whether it's Jijitsu or I don't know, a degree in mathematics, or building a business, or going to do a 1,000-mile solo trip in the Arctic, is something that just arises. This is all built up from little bits and pieces. There are skills, there are physical attributes, there's a mental attributes, and they can all be developed slowly. They can all be developed piecemeal and over time. And so it would be idiotic to go out into the Subarctic of Canada and start trying to run white water and trying to portage across portages that haven't been used for 50 years, or trying to orienteering by compass through dense forest or across open tundra, if you didn't have any experience. That's a good way to end up dead. Yeah, there are risks of doing that, but you can greatly mitigate risks with things like training and skills and to some extent equipment. Same thing's true in Jijitsu. Nobody is ever born a fully formed black belt. Nobody ever. So then what do you need to do? You need to acquire the skills, you need to acquire the timing, the intrinsic knowledge. To some extent, you need to acquire the physical conditioning, and that all happens piecemeal, a little bit at a time. The interesting thing is that toughness is transferable across sports. If you have somebody who's done, I don't know, high-level triathlon, they're used to suffering. Now they come into Jijitsu, they don't have any of the physical skills. They might have the endurance, they might have that attribute, but they're used to suffering. And if they're used to suffering, then they don't quit the second that things go bad. So I think kind of tempering yourself and getting good at suffering and getting good at, you know, basically eating shit again and again and again, and realizing that things are probably going to go wrong in the short term, and they're probably going to go right in the long term. So short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism, that's what's going to get you through on any of these large goals. No large goal is ever achieved overnight. No large goal is even achieved in a couple of years. It can take half a decade to achieve those goals. It can take a decade. And you got to be okay with that. Speaker 2: Now, sometimes when people hear things like this, they will look at star athletes or Jijitsu professionals and they'll hear about people getting their black belt in like six years, even four years, and they'll think, well, did perseverance really apply there? How come these people are getting so good so fast where it's taken me 10, 12 years to do this? What are your thoughts on that argument? Because it does feel sometimes when we look at people who are just exceeding at the absolute highest levels that everything comes easier to them. So I think, you know, we would mostly agree that yeah, suffering in and going through adversity builds character, but sometimes when you look at the people who are at the absolute tippy top of the sport, it doesn't look like they're going through that. It looks like just everything is easy for them. What are your thoughts on that? Speaker 3: Well, there are a couple dirty little secrets there. I mean, first of all, a lot of those people who get their black belts in three or four years were already high-level athletes in some other sport. Maybe they did Judo, maybe they did wrestling, maybe they did rugby, maybe they did something like that. That's actually really quite common. So you're already starting with a person who's got a very high level of athleticism. Secondly, a lot of those people are able to train multiple times a day. A lot of those people are able to, you know, like BJ Penn was one of the first people to get his black belt in under four years. But he also had a rich father. He also was able to train two or three times a day because he was young, and then he would go to private classes, and then he would fly around the world to train with the very best people. So in terms of total numbers of hours on the mat, it might have taken him three and a half years. It might take a normal person 10 years, but they put in comparable number of hours. It's just that BJ Penn or whoever it is, put in those hours in a much more contracted, much more compact unit of time, which then brings us to something else, which brings us to survivor bias. If you and I start training three times a day hard, the odds of us getting injured go up much more than three times, right? If because we're not recovering fully. If we could train three times a day, if we could wave a magic wand and be fully recovered a couple of hours after each training session, but that doesn't exist. That might exist for a 19-year-old. That might exist for a 20-year-old, especially if they're on steroids. So there's a survivor bias, right? It's the people who train really, really hard multiple times a day and don't get crippled in the process. For each one really good person, for each one Marcelo Garcia, there's 10 people who are just as good as Marcelo Garcia who trained just as hard and just as often, but somewhere around purple belt, they blew out their, I don't know, their cervical vertebra, their lumbar disc, a disc in their lumbar. They ripped their shoulder in half and they were never the same and they quit doing Jijitsu. So we're just looking at the survivors of that process, of that cauldron of very, very intense training situation. So it takes a certain number of hours and you can accumulate those hours quickly or slowly. It's just easier to accumulate those hours quickly if you're young and if you're lucky. Speaker 2: Right, right. I'm glad you brought this up. And I know that you and I have talked about this in the past, the survivorship bias that we see in Jijitsu. When people talk about how to succeed at the highest levels, we are hearing that information from the people who are at that top 1%. They have survived. And so they'll give advice on what worked for them, but I think what they often don't realize is a lot of that, I mean, yeah, hard work and talent go into it, but a lot of it is also luck. 99% of people that they passed by, I mean, some of them maybe didn't work as hard, but a lot of them just due to life circumstances or injury or situations out of their control, they might have been filtered out, even if they did everything completely right. Like you said, someone could suffer a terrible injury, a setback that takes them away from that goal. And so when you listen to the people who have succeeded and you only listen to those people, you run the risk of sometimes thinking, well, if I just follow their instructions to the letter, I'll get the same results. But that doesn't take into account all of the luck and chance and life circumstances that put them there, which you simply can't duplicate. Speaker 3: And for each one person giving you advice, there's somebody else giving you contradictory advice. If you go to the top level, you'll see people saying, "Oh yeah, absolutely. Strength training is essential to my winning the world championships." And then you go to the next guy, and they're not common, but they exist, and they're like, "I never do strength training and I'm a world champion." And you see some people going, "Yes, having a really high-level coach, that's essential to my winning the world championships." And the next guy goes, "Nah, I just sparred really hard." So you can also find whatever advice you want by basically option shopping. Fact is, there are different routes to the top. Maybe they have different chances of success, but there are different routes to the top and different examples that you can follow and you can look at. I mean, Kazushi Sakuraba, an amazing grappler in an MMA context. And he was a smoker and a drinker for God's sake. What athlete now is going to tell you, "Oh yeah, I fought at the highest level of Pride and I tapped out four Gracies. But yeah, I encourage you, yeah, my favorite type brand of cigarettes is this and here's the amount of alcohol that I drink every night." Right? The contradictory advice is always possible to find. Speaker 2: Yeah, that is a great point. And another thing that's worth pointing out too is that sometimes you can be doing everything right and then you hit that setback. Something takes you off course. You brought up how when your health issues started to take priority in your life and you realized that this might prevent me from doing the things that I want to do in the future. There had to be a moment there where you had to come to terms with that. I mean, yeah, it's possible that even if you survive, you may never be able to train Jijitsu again. You may never be able to take that expedition that you wanted to take again. And that raises all sorts of questions about when you tie your identity and your sense of worth, as you mentioned, to what your body is capable of. I've always felt that that's a risky proposition because one thing that is inevitable to all of us is over time, we will lose the ability to perform with our body. And if everything that you do is wrapped up in your ability to perform, what's left when that gets taken away? Because that's inevitable. And I think we see that a lot of the time with Jijitsu athletes whose entire identity is wrapped up in their competition performance, and then at one point they lose that. And they just kind of disappear. They fall apart. You never hear from them again. I'd love to hear your thoughts expanding on that as someone who, as you mentioned, when you were going under the knife, you had to have this very difficult conversation with yourself. Speaker 3: I think I'm older. I think I've seen enough people decay and die as a firefighter, right? I've witnessed many people's last moments on this earth. I've witnessed my grandmother passing away. I've had enough family members die to not have any illusions about mortality and also one's abilities fading as one gets older. I know on this trip that I wrote about, the last eight days of that trip were horrendously difficult because an Arctic front had moved in. And so every single day I was dealing with near snow, it was August, the temperatures were just barely above freezing, amazing headwinds, no matter which way the river went, I was getting blasted right in the face. It was dark, it was cold. It was really difficult. It was kind of a dark night of the soul. And I had to dig super deep and also rely on the conditioning that had happened in the first couple, in the first two-thirds of the trip. But then there was one day, and it was not blowing, and the clouds parted and there was blue sky. And I got on the river, and there was a little bit of a tailwind. And then I caught, I saw something moving in the river and it was a herd of caribou moving across the river. And then for the rest of the day, the day just got better and better and better. And I saw hundreds and hundreds of caribou crossing the river going from south to north, and then just running across the tundra, often to wherever they were going. And as I was going, I was very, very conscious of, I've got to remember this day. I've got to remember this day so that it's still in my brain when I'm 80 years old. Because at a certain point, I won't be able to do this anymore. In which case, I've got the memories and I've got the photos and I've got the stories. And I think I'm highly aware of that. I mean, you can't, I don't know if you can make a run for the world championships and be thinking about that too much. You've got to focus on what's important now. But man, is it a tough transition? A lot of fighters, a lot of fighters, especially MMA fighters, have a really tough time when they stop competing. I think it might be a little bit worse in MMA than in Jijitsu, just the partying, the money, the fame is at a next one level up or two levels up from fame in Jijitsu. And all of a sudden they've gone from being UFC contender and walking into a club and having nines and tens throw themselves at him. And now they're just a schmuck. And on top of that, they were cutting weight like crazy for years and years and years. And now they're ballooning up because they've had their metabolism ruined, they've had their relationship with food ruined. And that can be and maybe they've got some CTE on top of that. Retiring from MMA is especially rough, but there are certainly parallels as people retire from active competing in Jijitsu, especially at a high level. Like all of a sudden, the people coming up to you at a tournament aren't coming up to shake your hand anymore. They're coming up and then walking right by you to use the bathroom. And I've seen some pretty high-level guys, you know, they kind of, they're used to being feted and they're used to accolades and they're used to not groupies, but their entourage coming up and hanging out. And all of a sudden, they're just some guy standing at the sidelines of the tournament and people come up to them and walk right by them and you see a little piece of them die. So hopefully, one diversifies what gives one's life meaning, right? I've got Jijitsu and I've got the outdoors. To some extent, I have family as well, and I have other passions that I could subscribe to. You know, I often think, what if I became a paraplegic? What would I do then? How would I find value in the world and how would I contribute value to the world? And that's a useful thought experiment to uh, just to put a total downer into this podcast. What would you do if you became paraplegic to remain valuable in the world and to fill your life with value? Speaker 2: It's an interesting point and I mean, you say it's a downer, but I mean, as they say, right, Memento Mori, remember that you will die. It's a a thought experiment that has been tied to the military and martial arts for ages. Just this idea that thinking of your own mortality and being in touch with that is a thought experiment that can help you grow and be stronger as a person. It can give you perspective of the fragility of life and making the most of the moment. And I agree with you that I think as your, you know, when you're younger and when you're new to Jijitsu, you don't have that perspective of time. But I'm starting to see this now. I saw, I think it was on Reddit a conversation recently where someone was asking, you know, hey, I've heard about this Marcelo Garcia guy. Was he really that good? Speaker 3: [laughs] Speaker 2: And to me, that's insane, right? As someone who started training Jijitsu in 2008, to hear someone say like, that Marcelo Garcia, really is he that would be like someone asking, hey, have you heard of this person named Taylor Swift? It seems crazy to me that someone would not know who Marcelo Garcia is. But time, as they say, father time is undefeated, right? And it's not even just us getting older, it's that although we may have a moment, we may have a point in time where we are at our best, points in time are fleeting. And as time passes, the next generation won't necessarily know who they are, right? I mean, I'm guessing that probably 10 years from now, people are going to be asking like, hey, this Craig Jones guy, this Joseph Chen guy, were they really all that hot, right? I mean, I think we're going to have the same series of conversations. And as you persevere, it's interesting because it gives you the perspective of time. I see this now where as a younger person, I used to struggle a lot of the time with the people who are more athletic and more gifted at Jijitsu than me. But having the benefit of time, I realize now, I can wait these people out. I can wait 10 years. I'll still be here. Maybe they won't still be here. And if they are still here, time will have ravaged them and they won't have those benefits anymore. So now we're on a much more level playing field. And that perspective of time, I think is something that comes with persevering, right? You don't get that perspective unless you stick with something. Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, the two tricks of perseverance are getting started and then keeping going. I mean, that sounds really trite, but how do you get started at something? I think the answer is to tell yourself whatever lies that you need to tell yourself to get going. In a Jijitsu, well, I'll start with an outdoor example. An outdoor example, that would be, it's 5:00 in the morning. Every muscle in your body is aching. It's cold outside. You've been going for 12 hours a day for weeks on end. You haven't had a rest day. But you need to get going because you've got a deadline. You've got a limited amount of food in your canoe, and you've got to make it to the Hudson Bay coast before the big fall storms come in. Because you don't want to be trapped on the Hudson Bay coast during say a week of bad weather, along with a thousand of your best polar bear buddies who are also hanging out on the coast waiting for winter and are starving. So, you have to get started. So what do you do? You lie to yourself. I call it the just a tip principle, right? Just a tip, just for a second, just to see how it feels. If you can get momentum going, the odds of you continuing are much better. So I would tell myself, I'm just going to paddle for a couple of hours today. I'm just going to go 10 km and then I'm going to stop. Then I'll take the rest of the day off. And sometimes that happened, but most of the time, once you get going, and once you develop a bit of momentum, you keep going. In a Jijitsu context, I've done some very similar things. If I'm on the fence about training, like, ah, you just don't feel like it. What I do is I give myself permission to not train that day. But I have to get dressed for training and I have to go to training. So I would have to take all my gear and I would have to drive to the club and walk in through the front door. If I still don't feel like it at that point, it's okay to turn around and go home. So that happens, you know, go to the club, turn around, go home. That might happen a couple times a year. So you might think that's two training sessions less that you're going to a year, but that's not true. Because it's actually 20 training sessions where you went to the club, and once you walked into the door, the adrenaline kicked in a little bit, you saw your friends, like, "Oh, I'm just going to go and I'm just going to make some position on the mat." And then before you know it, you're actually getting in a half-decent training session. So giving yourself permission to quit, ironically, gives you permission is a way to trick yourself to keep going. It's like just putting on your running shoes and just putting on your running gear, and then saying, I can stop. I can not go for a run. Then saying, it's okay to not go, gets you out for more runs than not having that little cheat in there. So that's one trick I use for getting momentum started. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's great advice. Often getting momentum going and getting the first step is the hardest part. And if you overthink it, it gets progressively harder to then will yourself to go and actually do that. There's always completely valid reasons why you shouldn't do something. And if you marinate on that and you give yourself time to really think about all of the reasons why maybe you shouldn't do something, it's easy to talk yourself out of it. So sometimes just making that commitment that I'm just going to go and try it and give myself permission to leave, but I'm going to require that I go and at least give it a try. That that's super important. As they say in Jijitsu, right? If you're feeling like, ah, I don't want to go today, a lot of the time when you do go, you wind up being super happy that you did, right? You wind up feeling like this today was absolutely it was a great day on the mats and it was worth me going. And you wouldn't have had that moment if you decided not to go. And it gets hard because, you know, not all of us are young folks who can devote every waking moment of their life to Jijitsu. Like you said, I was that guy in my 20s who trained all the time and I had no responsibilities and no kids and no family really, so I just trained all the time. But nowadays, I have to balance everything, right? And that often comes at the expense of my training. And you have to kind of be at peace with that. And I think that's another thing about perseverance, right? Perseverance isn't always about volume or intensity. Sometimes it's just about consistency over time and showing up. And that in itself is often more important than anything else. Speaker 3: 100%. Going for three half-ass sessions is better than going for one session when you go balls out and then can't train again for three days. In fact, there's a heuristic in Jijitsu, but it applies elsewhere, which is never go 100%. If you and I are are rolling around and I have almost an arm bar on you, or I have almost a sweep on you, I might want to push it. I might want to go up to 80 or 90%, but going up to 100% effort, I should do very, very rarely because if it doesn't work, if I go 100% on this sweep attempt, or I go 100% on this arm bar attempt, and it doesn't work, then I'm cooked. Then I've got no reserve left to fall back on. If to deal with you who's going to be kind of pissed that I tried to arm bar you or kind of pissed that I tried to sweep you. I guess the only exception is if there's five seconds left in a tournament and you've almost got that bow and arrow choke. Okay, great. Then you can go 100% because there's a a safe zone coming up in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. But in general, going 100% is a bad idea. Same as in the woods. You should not be right on the edge. If you're right on the edge and then one thing goes wrong, you're screwed. If you are right on the fringe of hypothermia, you're there, and you're shivering and you're shaking, but you're still kind of okay. And then you turn an ankle, you could die. You could die from a twisted ankle because you were so on the edge. So only ever going to 60 or 70 or maybe 80% physically and leaving some reserve there to deal with the inevitable setbacks, to deal with the inevitable disasters, to deal with when things go wrong, is a really important concept. And I think that applies in both fields. The easy one is never go 100%. The more subtle version of that is go to 100% very, very rarely and only in controlled circumstances where the risk of failure afterwards is minimized. Speaker 2: And, you know, it's interesting because part of the lore in Jijitsu is that people sometimes think, well, you can go 100% in the sport. I mean, Joe Rogan, I know you're a huge fan of his. Speaker 3: I am the Mel Gibson to your Joe Rogan today. Speaker 2: Oh God, yeah, well, actually, I have a question about this for you. Speaker 3: Perhaps I'm the Vladimir Putin to your Tucker Carlson. Speaker 2: Well, I do have a question about this that I want to get into and so remind me at the end. But um, something that Rogan did say once in his best efforts to actually advocate for Jijitsu was that Jijitsu is one of the only sports that you can, like a combat sport where you can go 100% and still be safe. And I mean, to some extent that is that's partially true. If I have to go 100% with someone, I'd rather it be in Jijitsu than in kickboxing. Speaker 3: Sure. Speaker 2: But like you said, the practice of going 100% all the time and constantly red zoning yourself in Jijitsu is not good. It dramatically increases the risk of injury for yourself and your opponent. And it also dramatically decreases your ability to learn because you're always in fight mode. You can't actually focus on skill acquisition. So people hear that sometimes and they think that they should go 100%. But as you say, in reality, you want to keep reserves in the tank, right? You want to make sure that you have enough energy to keep persevering because if you exhaust yourself and there's nothing left in your tank, then you can't persevere. You have to stop. And part of good Jijitsu is just never stopping, right? Both when you're in a match, but also over the long term for skill acquisition, the most important thing is to not burn out, to not exhaust your energy, but to just keep going at all times. Speaker 3: Yeah. We can explore this idea. In general, I totally agree with you. Now, sometimes in training, it's important to go 100%. It's important to find out where your limits are, if for no other reason than to not go to those limits. In weight training, it's important to know roughly what your one rep max is. Doesn't mean you're going to go to your one rep max every training session and you shouldn't. But it's important to know where it is. There are kind of proxies for that. You can say, well, I can bench press, I don't know, 200 pounds five times and I can look it up on a table and that means that I should be able to bench press whatever the number is, 235 for one rep. Let's assume that that's the relationship. And for a marathon runner, it's important to have a guess as to what their best time is if they were actually running a marathon. But then they don't train for that marathon by running a marathon every day. So similarly in Jijitsu, it's important to know that just because you're dead tired, you can keep going. This isn't something that you should do every single day. This is something you want to do very rarely and under controlled circumstances. I have a friend, Mike McCassell. He's an extreme endurance athlete. He's done insane things. He beat David Goggins's pull-up record while wearing a 30-pound backpack. So, you know, the first time he tried to beat David Goggins's pull-up record, he ended up in hospital with kidney failure. The second time, he beat David Goggins's record while wearing a 30-pound backpack. So thousands and thousands of pull-ups. The guy's pulled a pickup truck through Death Valley in the middle of the day. He's crazy. He said, and that's his phrase, that you should train often and test rarely. Train often and test rarely. There are times to go to 100%. It's important to know where that limit is. But man, you shouldn't be living there. If you're living there, then disaster is inevitable. It's a place that you should visit once in a while. And really, we know this, right? We know this now that the best way to get good at, I don't know, guard passing, isn't to go out and do a really hard round where I try and pass your guard 100% and you resist 100%, and then you sweep me, and then you end up on top for five minutes, pinning me down and I'm fighting off a cross face and arm attacks for the next five minutes, while you go, there's no effing way I'm letting Kesting get on top again to try his pressure guard pass. That's not a very effective way to train a guard pass. If we want to work on my guard passing and you want to work on your guard retention, there are actually better drills and games that we can play where we can each develop what we're trying to develop. So that in in essence is train often, test rarely. It's a question of really focusing what we train and trying to train it in a controlled, relatively safe circumstance. You know, you wouldn't go run a marathon every day to prepare for a marathon. Why are people rolling all out for 5, 6, 7, 8 minutes as hard as they can to prepare for a tournament? Some of that's important, but that shouldn't be the bulk of your training. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. And that kind of restraint, I think is something that just comes with wisdom and experience. And I think it's important that you try to cultivate that as soon as you can in your journey. This is, I think part of the responsibility of the coach to make sure that the people in the room understand this is not a fight. You need to put on those reserves. Friend of the show, Matt Curtly, a black belt who is probably best known as Esopian, a well-known blogger in the Jijitsu space, a former moderator on R BJJ. But something that he said is that there are just way too many easily preventable injuries that happen to people at white belt. And one of his big regrets in his journey was allowing that to happen to him and suffering way more pointless injuries at a junior belt rank where it didn't really matter, simply because he didn't know better. And I think that's where having a strong relationship with that perseverant spirit matters a lot because if you understand, I got to stay in this for the long game, then you're much less likely to put yourself in these dumb situations where you increase the risk of injury to yourself. At least that's how I would assume things would shake down if you had a coach who was like that. But even when I came up, there was way too much of this emphasis on like, hard every day, go out there and kill each other. So you've got a bunch of these barely trained white belts, you know, snapping at each other's shins and dislocating their elbows and it serves absolutely nothing because at white belt, none of this matters, right? You're just injuring your customers for no good reason. Speaker 3: Yeah. I feel a little bit bad for brand new white belts or people low down on the totem pole of a Jijitsu club, listening to you and listening to me, because they probably know there's a better way to do it. If they're listening to you, then they they're aware of things like, you know, fuck your Jijitsu training methods or gamification or drills that you can do to isolate certain aspects of your development to develop faster. And then they go back to their club where it's, okay, now we make training. And that's all they can do. And it's a little bit difficult to say, as a, you know, Joe White belt, hey, you know what? I was thinking of doing this drill where uh, here are the constraints and here's the goal. Like, they're going to tell you to pound sand. So it is, I do feel bad for sort of the well-educated lower belts who don't have any power over their environment. I mean, hopefully they have access to training before class or after class or getting some mats and putting them in a garage or meeting at the community center to put some of this more or even just have a verbal agreement with the guy that they're going with. Look, we're just supposed to be sparring right now. Can we just do guard retention versus guard passing? That's not a very sophisticated drill, but it's already way more sophisticated than let's just murder each other for five minutes. So it can be difficult, but and you might just have to survive first and uh, then have control over your training environment later. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. It is difficult, I think for people because look, you can know all of this stuff, but if you are in a culture that doesn't encourage you to take care of yourself, it's easy to get sucked into the the vibe of that culture, right? And it's hard to kind of have that perspective. Now, something I want to ask you about, one thing that people sometimes tell me is that coming from a place of serious adversity can be its own benefit because if you're already in a difficult situation, if you have less to lose, it's easy to try big, brave things. I mean, I think most of us would agree, we would much rather have all of the advantages in the world than the disadvantages. But some things that people say sometimes is that look, if you have all of those disadvantages, if you have less to lose, then it's easier to be bold and to try big, brave things. As someone who's been through difficult times in the past, is this something that you agree with or do you think that's mostly hogwash? Speaker 3: I don't know if I agree with it at all. I mean, yes, I've done big bold things, but I was also more constrained than I was before. I mean, for one thing, I had far less time. When I was young, I had lots of time and no money. Now when I'm older, I've got more resources, but far less time. I also have responsibilities. And one of my principles for taking risk is that you can't take risk for other people. Right? At a simple level, this is easy to understand. It's one thing to watch Alex Honnold free climb El Cap, and we can, you know, it's his right to risk his life out there on that rock. But imagine watching Alex Honnold climb El Cap with his two-year-old baby in a baby Bjorn behind him, right? Free climbing some giant cliff with 1,000 feet of air beneath him with a two-year-old. We would all agree that that's wrong. He's taking risks for other people. So at a superficial analysis, me being out there deep in the bush, I'm really only putting myself at risk. That's true at the first level of analysis, but it's not true at the second. Because first of all, if people are out there searching for me, I'm putting them at risk as well. In a white water context, one out of three fatalities in white water is somebody trying to rescue the original person. So that's it's not an entirely consequence-free environment. And more importantly, I have kids. So if I go out there and die, then that's obviously a major impediment on their life. Now, I did hear my kid while he was busy gaming, talking to his friends, like, "Yeah, yeah, my dad, yeah, he he does Jijitsu and he goes out and goes out into the wilderness, goes up into the Arctic and, yeah, I mean, yeah, he could get eaten by a bear, but you know what? It'd be kind of cool. If you got, I mean, I don't want my dad to die, but if you got to go, then getting eaten by a bear, that'd be kind of cool." So like, okay, I take this as some kind of benediction that uh, my kid thinks it would be kind of cool for his dad to get eaten by a bear, even though he doesn't want me to get eaten. Bottom line is, Speaker 2: I mean, he's not wrong. If you've got to go, Speaker 3: If you got to go. Speaker 2: You're not going to make the news if you, you know, die from slipping and bonking your head on something. But if you die because you were eaten by a bear, I mean, they make movies about people like that. Speaker 3: How can a man die better than facing fearful odds, defending the ashes of his father and the temple of the gods? Yeah, I'll have my Horatio on the bridge moment for sure if I could. But the point is, I've got more to lose now than I ever have before. And I'm still doing these things. It really places an extra level of onus on me to minimize the risks and to take risks intelligently. Right? Just because you're going to take a risk, doesn't mean you take all the risks. You're going to take a certain number of strategic risks for a purpose. There's a purpose here. It's not just reflexively going out and I don't care about my life, so I'm going to go risk it. You're going to acknowledge the likely worst-case scenarios. And you're going to try and have plan B's and mitigate for all that. And because I would never in a million years just recommend to somebody to pack up their a canoe and head off into the wilderness if they don't have the decades of white water paddling experience, the decades of camping experience, the decades of dealing with bears in the wilderness, of dealing with foul weather, and all the gear that goes with that. I mean, if I lost my rain gear today, it would take be like $1,500 to replace it. You know, Arc'teryx SV foul weather gear isn't cheap, but it can be the difference between dying and staying alive. So, if you want to fight MMA, I don't know why you would, but let's say you wanted to fight MMA, you have to acknowledge the credible worst-case scenario, which is major brain damage. I think that's the most likely terrible outcome from MMA. And then there's orthopedic damage. So what steps are you going to do to minimize this damage? How are you going to modify your training to absolutely minimize the number of head shots that you take in training? How are you going to modify your style to absolutely minimize the concussive trauma of fighting? Are you prepared to essentially tap out if you start, you know, if things start going sideways in a fight and you start taking shot after shot after shot? That's a hard decision to make in the moment. Just like somebody climbing Everest, turning around 300 feet short of the summit because it's getting too late in the day. That is a hard decision, right? You've invested so much of your life, so much of your identity getting up to Everest or getting there into that cage to then go, holy shit. Today is not my day. This is not going my way. On the one hand, there's perseverance. On the other hand, too much perseverance is suicide. Too much perseverance looks a lot like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. So that balancing between those two things is really difficult. You want perseverance and grit and stick-to-it-edness on one hand, but too much of that can really get into trouble as well. Speaker 2: That's a really good point. And something that, you know, I was actually talking to my family and they suggested, they said, you know, Steve, one topic that you should do at some point for the podcast is when to quit. Because so much of the the lore about things like Jijitsu is, oh, we do hard things and we never quit and yada, yada, yada. But you know what? I mean, there is a time and a place to quit and to give up, right? We all have to think about that. If I had some sort of injury where where if I ever trained again, there was a legitimate chance I could die, I would probably quit, right? As much as I like Jijitsu. That doesn't mean I have to completely remove it from my life. I mean, I've got the podcast, I've got premium and our community. So there's still stuff and ways that I can engage with the thing that I love, but I would absolutely quit if my life were on the line if I kept training. And I think that in our enthusiasm to encourage people to persevere, I think it also merits that discussion of for some things, there comes a time when you do want to step away. Now, that's probably quite different from the situation that you're talking about here because I mean, if you were in the middle of an Arctic expedition, if you just quit part way through there, you're basically dead, right? So, Speaker 3: Well, no, it's actually super applicable. It's actually super crazy applicable. So, I'll give you an example of when I something I quit. When I had my kidney transplant, I went from having two kidneys now to one kidney, and the new kidney is in a much more vulnerable place. So, I decided to quit doing takedowns because the odds of getting if you and I are doing takedowns and I'm fighting your takedown, ghee or no ghee, it doesn't matter. And I was falling together and you spearing me in the abdomen with your shoulder or your head or your knee are pretty high, right? Like two bodies falling through space, it's a pretty uncontrolled situation. Taking a heavy shot to the kidney in its new location would be a very bad thing. I don't have that many brothers left who can give me a kidney. The brother who gave me one kidney is unlikely to give me his second kidney. So, I really love takedowns. I think Judo and wrestling are beautiful arts. I think the takedowns are incredibly important if you're doing Jijitsu with a mind towards self-defense. I'm also aware that takedowns are the highest percentage, by percentage, the most dangerous thing you can do in Jijitsu, short of trying to tough it through heel hooks. So, I had to stop doing one aspect of the sport that I really enjoy. It makes me a less complete martial artist, and it's something I really enjoyed. But in order to continue doing the sport as a whole, I had to give up on part of it. In the outdoor setting, there were quite a few places I could have bailed out. I mean, for one thing, for much of the trip, I was fighting my way up river. I was fighting and that's a long and difficult process. Probably on a day when you could make 50 km down river, you might be able to make 10 or 20 km up river. You are in the water, you're pulling that boat up through the water, you're portaging, you're using ropes to pull the boat up along shore, you're using every trick in the book, but you're cold and wet and it's difficult. So for much of the trip, I could have bailed. I could have turned around and gone back down river. Worst-case scenario, I could have gotten on my satellite communication device and called for a bush plane to come get me. So there were extraction options. Now that bush plane might take a couple of days if the weather's bad. It wouldn't be fast enough if my leg had gotten, if I'd shot my leg off or was bleeding out from a bear bite. Then I would have died. But if it was a question of, I can't go on anymore, I've lost all my food, but I still had my communications equipment. There would have been ways in the modern 21st century to extricate myself in that situation. It would have been expensive, and it would have been humiliating. And certainly that's one thing that kept me going. It was a strategic use of social pressure. I had told everybody I knew about this trip. I was essentially live streaming, not live streaming, but live photoing from the bush because I had a little satellite communication device that was one-way communication and about $1,000 a gigabyte of data transferred up onto a satellite. And so I could share photos of my day-to-day and little tiny stories of my day-to-day. So that was fun, but it also increased the pressure on me to continue. And I knew that, right? It would be kind of embarrassing to have to pull the plug after a couple of days or a couple of weeks and not complete it. So there was pressure to continue that I created and actually helped. But at the same time, I had to be so, I had to be aware that this pressure could push me into dangerous situations. But bailing out was definitely something I thought about. I'd be lying to say I never considered quitting. I considered quitting multiple times a day, every day, almost every day. On some of the days that went beautifully and swimmingly, I was happy to be there. But I guarantee you that when the weather turned and I was fighting my way at 1 km an hour across some giant fucking lake with headwinds and waves coming and no place to hide, I thought about quitting every 10 minutes. But I didn't. So it's it's I guess the larger lesson there is it's okay to think about quitting. It's okay to like mentally give up for little periods of time. Most of the time though, you should just get back on that horse after you've calmed down a little bit and keep going. So don't be too premature in your decision to quit. But when to quit, because there are legitimate times to quit, that is a really tough question. I mean, in an outdoor setting, it's probably when there's an unreasonable chance of a very bad outcome, by which I mean death or severe injury. And that was also where you went to in your hypothetical, what would make me quit doing Jijitsu example. It was, if I had some kind of injury that could be vastly exacerbated by doing Jijitsu, then I would consider quitting doing Jijitsu. Speaker 2: Yeah, makes a ton of sense, man. I mean, what are your thoughts here on the Jijitsu front in terms of lessons that you've learned here pulling from the Arctic? I mean, is there anything now, if you could go back in time and, you know, you're 20 years old again, you're starting martial arts again, is there anything that you would have done differently based on what you've learned just about perseverance over the years? Speaker 3: Sure. Uh, perseverance is built in part on a physical foundation. So, yeah, it can be great to be all tough and like, I will complete this no matter what. But ultimately, it's your body that's your vehicle for getting these things done, especially in the context of physical sports like Jijitsu. So, preserve that body. Tap out earlier to the neck crank. It is not worth not tapping out to that training buddy of yours who's got you in that weird crucifix type neck lock just to deny him the satisfaction of tapping you out because that one neck crank could affect the next 20 years of your training. So anything you can do to minimize injury early in your training is a good thing. Another thing is that little problems become big problems. I thought about this a lot on that trip because if I had a strained hand, right? There's some muscles that are overworked and strained in my hand. Yeah, in normal life, you get around, you can still drive with the other hand. You might use voice to text to dictate the emails that you need to write. There there are ways around it. When going forward depends on you holding a paddle with both hands, you really need that hand. And that hand that's a little bit strained one day or sprained, the next day, that could become a complete deal breaker. The next day, that could entirely stop your progress completely. And you won't be able to go on. A friend of mine, Chris Duffin, is an insane powerlifter out of Portland, Oregon. He's done things like squat 800 pounds every day for a month. He tried to deadlift 880 days every day for a month. And I asked him what lessons did he learn from this? And he learned, he said that he learned an awful lot about recovery because unattended, little problems became big problems. A little niggling pain in his back or in his quad one day could be the thing that could derail his attempt at this feat the next day. So, getting onto the little problems before they compound and became big problems was a super important thing. So physically, in a Jijitsu context, that means if you have, I don't know, a pain in your lower back, get that looked at sooner rather than later. Now, this is complicated by things like health insurance in the states and whether or not you have coverage for physiotherapy and whatnot. But if you have the resources, or if you have the connections, or if you have the time, try to find a way to address those little problems early. Just jump on them because that little niggling pain in your back could mean that you end up training at a vastly reduced level or not training at all for months. That little bit of tendinitis in your arm, if you jump on it early and start doing the correct physio for it and start stretching it and start avoiding doing the things that make it worse, means you'll do more training, not less. So, unattended little problems can become big problems. I think that's one lesson that was very, very evident on that 1,000-mile solo trip, and it was very much in my mind, but it totally applies to regular training as well. It might not be as life and death, but, you know, for some people getting their purple belt and competing in this year's Pans feels like life and death. So, the more preventive maintenance that you can do, the better. Speaker 2: Yeah, makes lots of sense to me, man. Well, something else that I wanted to ask you is just about your life perspective here. Having been through so much, you know, being an older guy who's been through a lot, who spent so much of his time pushing the limits of what we as human beings can do, doing things that a lot of people would consider insane and crazy to do. But one of the things that I always love about your perspective is that you're a, in a lot of ways, you're a rationalist in the Jijitsu community. And as you know, look, this is BJJ Mental Models, right? I try to take a rational, conceptual approach to Jijitsu. And people in Jijitsu are often anything but rational, right? Like a lot of fight sports, we attract a certain personality type. And sometimes, you know, like you said, getting these people to go to the doctor can be real challenging because they just want to train all the time. And one of the things that I always love about your perspective is that you're, you know, you're a rationalist, you're science-based, you know, back on to the Rogan stuff, right? When you only say things and you only advocate for things if you're really sure that there's evidence behind what you're advocating for. And that can be quite rare in a sport like Jijitsu where we've got a lot of conspiracy theorists and, you know, I don't need to belabor the point here. But I wonder, has your experience with all of this adversity and having to persevere through that, has that helped shape your mindset? Were you always this way or did those brushes with death somehow change your perspective and kind of broaden your understanding of what it means to be alive? Speaker 3: An interesting question. I think if one's doing unusual things, one has to have a thick skin. Right? I started Jijitsu back in the late 80s and early 90s when there was almost no awareness of that in the general public. So, you're doing what with whom? That, you know, you're attacking, you're working on new ways to attack the turtle. That's not what that looks like, Stephen. Right? You're lying on your back with your legs wrapped around another man. I can't count the number of times I heard that. So, you develop, you have to have, end up developing a fairly thick skin because it's easy for people to pass judgment on you, but it is your life. So, similarly, going out and going into the wilds by myself, that is an unusual thing to do. And certainly there's no shortage of armchair experts telling you that you shouldn't do it, or how you should do it, or how many guns you should carry when you're going out into the bush, and exactly how you should live your life, right? There's there's an awful lot of people out there who are willing to tell you how to live their life. Usually they're in their underwear in their mom's basement, but not always. Sometimes they're living their best comfortable life and they're actually giving you advice from their best intentions, right? From their bottom of their heart. They believe that you should do this. But you might know that that's not what you need to do. So that has nothing to do with rationality. But certainly having a fairly thick skin there made it a little bit easier to essentially become one of the self-appointed spokesmen for rationality in this crazy sport. And having a, I'd say, fairly strong science background, so a couple of degrees in science, a strong background in statistics, a strong background in experimental design, a strong background in microbiology, and a platform, you know, being cursed with a platform on top of that. I have been and will continue to be an advocate for science. And that doesn't mean that my opinions don't change. My opinions do change as the science evolves. Science is a process, it's not a set of received wisdom. But, you know, that's often not very popular in a world where somebody like Joe Rogan and fucking Mel Gibson can talk about how Ivermectin cures cancer. If the data comes out that Ivermectin actually cures cancer and it's multiply corroborated by reputable journals, in reputable journals, with decent randomized controlled trials, preferably done in a couple of different countries, I will change my mind on whether or not Ivermectin cures cancer. Up until that point, you can piss right off with your, you know, dog whistling to the anti-big pharma crowd. And, you know, I've over COVID, I ended up blocking 5 to 10,000 people from my social media. And I imagine that I'll be blocking a couple more before the day is done. And that's okay. I'm okay with that. I'm okay with doing things that most people wouldn't want to do. I think I've demonstrated that enough times that I'm willing to, uh, I'm willing to walk the road less traveled. Speaker 2: Nice. Well said, sir. Well, let's tie this up. Let's talk about the book. I mean, what's it called? Where can people find it? And maybe give us just a quick plot synopsis. I mean, obviously the main character doesn't die. I know that much, but otherwise, other than that, feel free to go on and tell everyone where they can find this and what they should expect. Speaker 3: He dies inside, Steve. He dies inside. It's Perseverance: Life and Death in the Subarctic. It's available everywhere that you get books, whether that's Amazon, whether that is Audible, Indigo, Barnes & Noble, preferably your local bookstore if you go and order it, then uh, it should be arriving just as fast as if you'd ordered it on Amazon. And it's a couple hundred pages long. It is the story of that trip I did in 2019. I had it planned for 50 days. I took 250 pounds of food into the wilderness in a canoe. And 1,000 miles later, and 42 days later, so I finished a little bit early, had a little bit of a buffer. I reached Hudson Bay, which is above the tree line, and reached the native community of Arviat. So it was an incredibly difficult trip, and I tried to really inject the things that I learned and the the sort of the greater principles that kept me going and kept me safe into that book. So it's it's travelogue, but it's also an attempt to be more than just pure travelogue or adventure memoir. And so far the people who've read it have really liked it. So I'm super grateful for the the early reviewers and the people who felt sufficiently confident in it to say nice things about it and endorse it. So yeah, I I hope people pick it up if they are either interested in the outdoors or if they're kind of the armchair adventurer variety, or if they're just interested in learning more about the development of perseverance and grit. Not perseverance and grit because it's nice to have, but how do you develop it? And I think I try and go into that in the book and talk about things like conquering self-doubt and slowly, gradually developing strength and toughness and how to deal with setbacks and those sorts of things. Speaker 2: Amazing, man. Well, as I always do, I will put links to everything in the show notes. So if people want to learn more about the book, presumably they can just check out your social. I'll put a link to that. If the book is already to go by the time this episode goes live, I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. So if people want to pick up Perseverance, check the show notes. There should be a link there that you can use to find it. But Stephen, as always, man, thank you so much for coming by. I love having these chats. I also like these kind of broader philosophical conversations. And hey, I hope this encourages people to go and check out your work as well. So thank you so much for coming by. Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Steve. As always, it was a pleasure. Speaker 2: No worries, sir. And thanks to everyone listening as well. Hope you had a good time here too and enjoyed this chat as much as I did. Talk to you next week. See you then.