Dan Gable: Legendary NCAA and Olympic Wrestler & Coach - Manifold Episode #41

Steve and Corey talk to legendary NCAA and Olympic wrestler and coach Dan Gable. Gable describes the final match of his collegiate career, an NCAA championship upset which spoiled his undefeated high school and college record. The Coach explains how the loss led him to take a more scientific approach to training and was critical for his later success. They discuss the tragic murder of Gable's sister, and the steps 15-year old Gable took try to save his parents’ marriage. Gable describes his eye for talent and philosophy of developing athletes. Steve gets Gable's reaction to ultimate fighting and jiujitsu.

Transcript

Dan Gable vs Larry Owings - 1970 NCAA Title Match (video)

The Champion (1970 documentary on Gable's senior NCAA season)


man·i·fold /ˈmanəˌfōld/ many and various.

In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.

Steve Hsu and Corey Washington have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics. Join them for wide ranging and unfiltered conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.

Steve Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon before joining MSU.

Corey Washington is Director of Analytics in the Office of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. He was educated at Amherst College and MIT before receiving a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in a Neuroscience from Columbia. He held faculty positions at the University Washington and the University of Maryland. Prior to MSU, Corey worked as a biotech consultant and is founder of a medical diagnostics startup.


Added: The wonders of YouTube! A great interview with Chris Campbell -- perhaps Gable's best wrestler!

Ice Cream Kron

First UFC victory by a Gracie since 1994! Congratulations to Kron, son of Rickson Gracie. His nickname, Ice Cream Kron, means Cool Under Pressure. Ironically, you can tell that he's a sensitive guy and that fighting takes a huge toll on him.

He won in old school fashion. The progression was classic -- something I taught to Yale BJJ club students in the mid-1990s. Caceres throws a right, Kron ducks under to get the clinch, hiding his head under Cacere's arm. Kron takes the back, entwines his leg and uses his bodyweight to take Caceres to the mat. Kron moves smoothly into a rear naked choke, hiding his hands from Caceres. Almost no energy expended by Kron. Alex Caceres, an athletic UFC veteran, defeated in 90 seconds with a minimum of violence.

Jiujitsu, the gentle art.




Some background on Rickson and Kron, from Eddie Bravo and Joe Rogan. Kron's submission grappling fights against Garry Tonon and Marcelo Garcia are unbelievable.

Mama Said Choke You Out

If you do Judo, MMA, or BJJ you've probably seen someone choked all the way out. In this video CrossFit athlete Brooke Ence learns how to do hadaka jime (naked choke) and goes out herself. Very interesting if you've never seen it before :-)

Judo/BJJ chokes block blood flow to the brain, not air flow to the lungs. Deprived of blood (hence, oxygen), the brain transitions to unconsciousness quickly and rather abruptly, with interesting effects on memory and awareness.

I trained for years with a former Navy SEAL who would fight a submission to the end, so I choked him out on a number of occasions. Sometimes he would wake up afterward and ask me what happened. He also made the same little gurgling noise that Ence makes in the video.

See also Mama said knock you out and here for the LL Cool J reference ;-)

Well done, tovarishch

I thought Khabib's grappling would dominate McGregor's striking. Tony Ferguson would have given him a tougher fight.

The finish was not a choke -- probably a jaw lock. It seems that Conor almost taps, stops, then realizes his jaw is in danger (or just gives up, which is part of his MO) and taps.

Dominic Cummings on Fighting, Physics, and Learning from tight feedback loops

Another great post from Dom.

Once something has become widely understood, it is difficult to recreate or fully grasp the mindset that prevailed before. But I can attest to the fact that until the 1990s and the advent of MMA, even "experts" (like boxing coaches, karate and kung fu instructors, Navy SEALs) did not know how to fight -- they were deeply confused as to which techniques were most effective in unarmed combat.

Soon our ability to predict heritable outcomes using DNA alone (i.e., Genomic Prediction) will be well-established. Future generations will have difficulty understanding the mindset of people (even, scientists) today who deny that it is possible.

The same will be true of AGI... For example, see the well-known "Chinese Room" argument against AGI, advanced by Berkeley Philosopher John Searle (discussed before in The Mechanical Turk and Searle's Chinese Room). Searle's confusion as to where, exactly, the understanding resides inside a complex computation seems silly to us today given recent developments with deep neural nets and, e.g., machine translation (the very problem used in his thought experiment). Understanding doesn't exist in any sub-portion of the network, it is embodied in the network. (See also Thought vectors and the dimensionality of the space of concepts :-)

Effective action #4a: ‘Expertise’ from fighting and physics to economics, politics and government

Extreme sports: fast feedback = real expertise

In the 1980s and early 1990s, there was an interesting case study in how useful new knowledge jumped from a tiny isolated group to the general population with big effects on performance in a community. Expertise in Brazilian jiu-jitsu was taken from Brazil to southern California by the Gracie family. There were many sceptics but they vanished rapidly because the Gracies were empiricists. They issued ‘the Gracie challenge’.

All sorts of tough guys, trained in all sorts of ways, were invited to come to their garage/academy in Los Angeles to fight one of the Gracies or their trainees. Very quickly it became obvious that the Gracie training system was revolutionary and they were real experts because they always won. There was very fast and clear feedback on predictions. Gracie jiujitsu quickly jumped from an LA garage to TV. At the televised UFC 1 event in 1993 Royce Gracie defeated everyone and a multi-billion dollar business was born.

People could see how training in this new skill could transform performance. Unarmed combat changed across the world. Disciplines other than jiu jitsu have had to make a choice: either isolate themselves and not compete with jiu jitsu or learn from it. If interested watch the first twenty minutes of this documentary (via professor Steve Hsu, physicist, amateur jiu jitsu practitioner, and predictive genomics expert).

...

[[ On politics, a field in which Dom has few peers: ]]

... The faster the feedback cycle, the more likely you are to develop a qualitative improvement in speed that destroys an opponent’s decision-making cycle. If you can reorient yourself faster to the ever-changing environment than your opponent, then you operate inside their ‘OODA loop’ (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) and the opponent’s performance can quickly degrade and collapse.

This lesson is vital in politics. You can read it in Sun Tzu and see it with Alexander the Great. Everybody can read such lessons and most people will nod along. But it is very hard to apply because most political/government organisations are programmed by their incentives to prioritise seniority, process and prestige over high performance and this slows and degrades decisions. Most organisations don’t do it. Further, political organisations tend to make too slowly those decisions that should be fast and too quickly those decisions that should be slow — they are simultaneously both too sluggish and too impetuous, which closes off favourable branching histories of the future.

See also Kosen Judo and the origins of MMA.

Choking out a Judo black belt in the tatami room at the Payne Whitney gymnasium at Yale. My favorite gi choke is Okuri eri jime.

Training in Hawaii at Relson Gracie's and Enson Inoue's schools. The shirt says Yale Brazilian Jiujitsu -- a club I founded. I was also the faculty advisor to the already existing Judo Club :-)

Keepin' it real with UFC fighter Kevin Lee (JRE podcast)

A great ~20 minutes starting at ~1:01 with UFC 155 contender Kevin Lee. Lee talks about self-confidence, growing up in an all-black part of Detroit, not knowing any white people his age until attending college, getting started in wrestling and MMA. If you don't believe early environment affects life outcomes you are crazy...

They also discuss Ability vs Practice: 10,000 hour rule is BS, in wrestling and MMA as with anything else. Lee was a world class fighter by his early twenties, having had no martial arts training until starting wrestling at age 16. He has surpassed other athletes who have had intensive training in boxing, kickboxing, wrestling, jiujitsu since childhood. It will be interesting to see him face Khabib Nurmagomedov, who has been trained, almost since birth, in wrestling, judo, and combat sambo. (His father is a famous coach and former competitor in Dagestan.)

Here are some highlights from Lee's recent domination of Edson Barboza.

Kosen Judo and the origins of MMA

When I was in Japan in the mid-1990s almost no one outside of a small group of MMA fans had ever heard of BJJ or Gracie Jiujitsu. Sometimes when I went to a judo club to practice I would just explain that I was a "newaza specialist" (ground technique specialist) or even that I wanted to do Kosen-style judo.

The Imperial Universities that specialized in Kosen judo did so partially because they were nerds! One could become adept at newaza with less natural athleticism and less practice than was required to become a true tachiwaza (standing technique = dynamic throws) specialist. A relatively small amount of training in ground technique allows a fighter to completely dominate an untrained opponent. The Kosen competitors would simply drag their opponent to the mat without using any flashy throws or takedowns, and then submit or pin them. More video.

I cannot really tell from the video whether these Kosen practitioners have also adopted techniques from modern BJJ. I see some spider guard, but apparently that is an old Kosen style! Don't let the black belts fool you. In Japan you go from white to black belt directly, and 1st dan black belt just means you know the basic moves and are still very much a student. These guys in the video don't look all that advanced to me for the most part. (It's not easy to be admitted to Kyoto University, by the way.)

Here's a top-level Kosen guy. He's destroying those scrubs in Canada ;-)

Wikipedia: Kosen judo (高專柔道 Kōsen jūdō) is a variation of the Kodokan judo competitive ruleset that was developed and flourished at the kōtō senmon gakkō (高等専門学校)(kōsen (高專)) technical colleges in Japan in the first half of the twentieth century. Kosen judo's rules allow for greater emphasis of ne-waza (寝技, ground techniques) than typically takes place in competitive judo and it is sometimes regarded as a distinct style of judo.

Today, the term "kosen judo" is frequently used to refer to the competition ruleset associated with it that allows for extended ne-waza. Such competition rules are still used in the Nanatei Jūdō / Shichitei Jūdō (七帝柔道 Seven Imperials Judo) competitions held annually between the seven former Imperial universities. Similarly, there has been a resurgence in interest in Kosen judo in recent years due to its similarities with Brazilian jiu jitsu.

Brazilian Jiujitsu (BJJ) was introduced to Brazil through the Gracie family by judoka Mitsuyo Maeda. Maeda had significant experience fighting wrestlers and boxers; from this experience he developed a theory of combat that has evolved into modern MMA.

According to Renzo Gracie's book Mastering Jujitsu, Maeda not only taught the art of judo to Carlos Gracie, but also taught a particular philosophy about the nature of combat based on his travels competing and training alongside catch-wrestlers, boxers, savate fighters, and various other martial artists. The book details Maeda's theory that physical combat could be broken down into distinct phases, such as the striking phase, the grappling phase, the ground phase, and so on. Thus, it was a smart fighter's task to keep the fight located in the phase of combat that best suited his own strengths. The book further states that this theory was a fundamental influence on the Gracie approach to combat.

UFC 221: Rockhold vs Romero

Two superb athletes will meet at UFC 221 for the 185lb championship. I'd say 65% chance Rockhold wins, but I won't be shocked if Yoel explodes and KOs Rockhold with little warning.

Like Chael Sonnen (below) I am really excited to see them grapple -- one of the top MMA BJJ talents (Rockhold) versus a former World Champion in freestyle wrestling. Rockhold's top game is very strong -- he might be the first person ever to control and finish Romero.





See also Yoel Romero, freak athlete. He's 40 years old!

Great analysis of the fight from Firas Zahabi (Georges St. Pierre's coach) and Chael Sonnen:

The Jiujitsu Philosopher: John Danaher

John Danaher is one of the deepest thinkers in combat sports, MMA, and jiujitsu. He has coached a number of world champions in MMA and jiujitsu/submission grappling (Georges St. Pierre, Garry Tonon, etc.). The recent leg lock technique renaissance is largely due to Danaher and his school.

Danaher was a philosophy PhD student at Columbia before discovering BJJ through Renzo Gracie's academy in NYC. When I was a Yale professor (in the 90s) I made trips to Renzo's for training. I don't recall Danaher (who would have been a student/instructor there at the time), but I do recall Craig Kukuk, Renzo's partner in the school and the first US blackbelt instructor. 

Kukuk had played linebacker at Iowa State University (where I grew up), and we spent time talking about Iowa (a big wrestling hotbed) and the origins of jiujitsu and ultimate fighting in the US. I had trained in Japan and so knew quite a bit about the relationship between traditional Judo and BJJ. At one time I probably knew as much as anyone about the relationship between Judo, BJJ, MMA, and US folk style wrestling.

See Mama said knock you out.

Yoel Romero, freak athlete

Romero is 40 years old! He is a former World Champion and Olympic silver medalist for Cuba in freestyle wrestling. Watch the video -- it's great! :-)

He lost a close championship fight yesterday in the UFC at 185lbs. The guy he lost to, Robert Whittaker, is a young talent and a class act. It's been said that Romero relies too much on athleticism and doesn't fight smart (this goes back to his wrestling days). He should have attacked Whittaker more ruthlessly after he hurt Whittaker's knee early in the fight with a kick.

Will and Power

This video might help you with your New Year's resolution!



The claim that one has a fixed budget of will power or self-discipline ("ego depletion") may be yet another non-replicating "result" of shoddy social science. Note that the ego depletion claim refers to something like a daily budget of will power that can be used up, whereas Jocko is also referring to the development of this budget over time: building it up through use.

Jocko on BJJ and mixed martial arts:





See also My Navy SEAL Story.

The global jiujitsu phenomenon

This is promo footage for Polaris, a professional BJJ competition. The four competitors profiled train in Toulouse (France), Florida, San Diego, and NYC. Gezary Matuda reminds me of an old girlfriend who also trained.

One of the fights at Polaris 3 features 37 year old Jake Shields against 25 year old A.J. Agazarm. Both were college wrestlers before taking up BJJ. Shields has been a top MMA competitor for a decade now. It's funny that Agazarm wants to act tough because if this were a real fight he'd have been sent to the hospital. Warning, this footage may get taken down at some point.



Although I enjoy watching sport BJJ, a lot of the modern innovations are only suited to sport and would get you killed if strikes were allowed. If a match starts with competitors sitting on their butt and pulling guard (e.g., Miyao brothers) I usually turn it off.

See also Jiujitsu renaissance.

"Like wrestling a martian"

Not too long ago a guy tried to cut in front of me in line for the bar at a fancy rooftop party. After a verbal exchange I squared up with him without even thinking. Actually, I was thinking Really?!? Do you know what you're getting into? Fortunately he backed down. It would have been extremely stupid to get in a fight over almost nothing. But those old instincts die hard.

The friend standing next to me (another scientist!) was amazed by the whole thing. I guess I was too.

Mama said knock you out.

Slouching towards the new year

Some recommended long form articles:

One hundred years of Gracie Jiujitsu

Teen entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley

Pro Gamers in Korea

What use is the media?

Why Some of the Worst Attacks on Social Science Have Come From Liberals

Cormac McCarthy: [1], [2]

See also

Dunning-Kruger and other memes

Champions: UFC 194

3 great fights tonight (counting Jacare and Romero). Weidman vs Rockhold too close to call. I wonder whether either of them could beat peak (TRT) Vitor, though. I'm guessing Aldo might beat Conor, but not at all sure.






BONUS: some great jits with Keenan.

Jiujitsu renaissance

John Danaher discusses his coaching philosophy. Danaher trained UFC champions Georges St. Pierre and Chris Weidman, among others.




Danaher student Garry Tonon on wrestling and jiujitsu. He's shown rolling with AJ Agazarm, a former All-Big10 wrestler and no-gi BJJ world champ.




These fights are from a no-time-limit submission tournament a few years ago, featuring the top brown belts in the world. Some of the matches lasted over an hour, others ended after only 5 or 10 minutes.  I like this style of competition much more than fighting for points.

Rockhold winning and losing

I was surprised at how easily Luke Rockhold beat Lyoto Machida a few weeks ago. Once it went to the ground Rockhold completely dominated the fight.




If you're a grappler you might enjoy this video of Rockhold getting destroyed by a much smaller Rustam Chsiev at Grappler's Quest. Unbelievable how physical this match was. Luke could do nothing to Chsiev.

ROLL: Jiujitsu in SoCal

This documentary is about the jiujitsu lifestyle in So Cal. It starts old school, back in the day, when the Gracies were new to the US and teaching out of a garage.


I also recommend the video below (great little fight at the beginning, ending in a heel hook; you can feel the adrenaline). I never liked sport jiujitsu. We always rolled as if the other guy could throw punches, even if he wasn't.

16 years of training

Joe Rogan (UFC commentator) receives his BJJ black belt from Eddie Bravo.




Now go train jiujitsu.

UFC 182: Jones vs Cormier

This will be one for the ages. I think Cormier can get inside on the taller Jones. We'll see Jones fighting off his back for the first time. I wonder what his guard is like.







In the last video Cormier is shown wrestling with Russian Olympic gold medalist Khajumurad Gatsalov.