John Carmack on Training Judo and BJJ

How did you get involved in grappling? How do you have time to turbocharge Ferraris? Like where do you come up with the extra time to do all those other things? So, you know, I like to tell people that I, one of my pitches is like, you should always get enough sleep. Like I do not work well. Like I said, I can't work more than 13 hours. If I don't get eight hours of sleep, I also start falling down, but there's a lot of hours left in the week after your eight hours of sleep there. Like on the martial arts side, it is kind of interesting where I wrestled in junior high and I did sort of Midwest YMCA judo back then. I wasn't any kind of a phenom. I was sort of a second place finisher for most of it, but it was still weird enough that the kind of the school geek was pretty good at that type of stuff. I messed up my knees a little bit doing that. And in retrospect, I wish I had pushed on a little bit more with that where in recent years, I sort of try to challenge the wrestler ethos, the embrace the grind to people where it's just like discipline is something, I was always obsessed, but I could have done with a little more discipline when I was younger. And I probably would have been better off if I had, I kind of stuck through some of the wrestling side of things. But I got back into it in my thirties where it was kind of something of just, again, one of the between projects. Well, what interesting thing do I wanna take a look at? And I looked up some of the local judo places. And it was interesting where the place that I wound up is called Becerra judo. And I had come again from Midwest YMCA judo, which is just kind of, you go and you learn your moves and it's not that serious. But this was a, you know, he was a Cuban Olympian and it's still judos, mostly kids, you get mostly kind of teenage kids coming in, but I go in there and he's just yelling at the kids and berating them. It's like, get up, grab the gi and all this stuff, much more serious training environment. But I got in there and it's like, hey, I did wrestling in judo back when I was a teenager, 20 years ago at that point. But I got on the mat and rolled in. I had enough kind of wrestler instinct memories that, you know, I'd go down, I'd base out, and then the guy would roll me over an arm bar me like three times in a row, cause you know, early teens YMCA didn't teach you the arm bars or anything. But that was enough. It's like, hey, I was having a good time with that. And so I did what I always do on something. I studied, you know, I went and said, well, okay, I, you know, let's learn these arm bars and things. And I got the, you know, the instructionals and the tapes and started working my way back through that and got pretty good at that. And then my wife for Christmas one year got me a year of private lessons with Carlos Machado. Oh wow. Yeah. And that was where I certainly took me up several levels. I was in a situation where I had Armadillo Aerospace, my rocketry company at the time, we had enough space. So I had a whole bunch of mats set out there and I would work with Carlos and one of the other guys there on Saturdays. And he really tuned me up where I had a really good straight arm bar. That was my go-to move for everything. And against most of the judo people that I, it was just most of them wouldn't know what hit them on that. I would just be able to get that over and over again. And there was a period there where I had, I am, you know, I'd go mix it up at the club on one day. And then I had judo with one of my coaches another day and then Carlos on Saturday. There was a period there where I was pretty dangerous. Although I was always one of the, I never did work out proper flow, kind of just the way to just kind of roll effortlessly. I was always a very tense, aggressive, kind of grappler. And an interesting thing about that where, you know, you know from rolling with any of the really good guys, like rolling with Carlos, it's always happy, fun, he's smiling and you always think you should be able to do something but just actually can't. But in contrast with that, one time when I went to Japan, I stopped in at the Kodakan, you know, the home of judo, kind of the ancestral land of judo. And, you know, it's funny where talking with a friend about that, that also did some judo, where you'd think that that should be like going to the Jedi temple. It should be this majestic thing, but it looks like an old middle school when you go there until you actually get out onto the mats there. But I remember I did some rolling with an old judo guy, you know, gray haired guy practicing his English with me. And it was shocking how different it was versus rolling with Carlos, where still, he was way, way better than me. But it was a sense where when I was rolling with him, I just felt I had no options. Like for whatever reason, I was just always bound up and I couldn't do anything until eventually gets my arm and I tap, as opposed to the fluidness with Carlos, where I'm like running around thinking, oh, if I just do this, maybe I'll be able to get, you know, get around it. Yes, they're playing. Yeah. Jiu-Jitsu is very famous for playing. My instructor is his brother, Jeong-Jong. Yeah. You said you messed your knees up. How did, what did you do? So of course, back then, I had tweaked my knees in some way where it wasn't bad enough that I had, maybe at the time I should have had surgery, but I did. This is the jiu-jitsu training? No, this was actually back in, one in wrestling and one in judo when I was a teenager. And so that's why I've still got these little stick legs because I could never lift what, you know, heavy weights because my knees gave me problems. So I wound up with strong upper body and really nothing on the legs. Did you get your knees MRI'd? I never did. You know, again, this was back in the 80s. How does it got like you not embrace MRIs? Well, so again, this was the 80s back then. Did you get MRIs back then? Yeah, they did, but it's like, you know, I was not, you know, it was teenage me back then. And it was like, okay, my knees hurt, my knees hurt a little bit. No, so by the time I was in my 30s, they generally felt okay. So that was when I decided I'm going to go back into judo and it's been all right for quite a while. And it's, you know, it's interesting. There were a lot of people are surprised that I care about this. Like I tweeted about going to the UFC in Dallas and there were a number of people that are like, you know, this is shocking and disappointing that you, you know, that you like, you know, seeing people harm each other. And there was one interesting thing at the club where there was a new kid that came in and I could tell he was probably here because his dad thought he should toughen up a little bit. You know, a very not forceful person. I am, and when he found out who I was, he said, what is someone like you doing here? And it just didn't compute for him that I, somebody that was a technical, I kind of brainy sort of person would appreciate my kind of rolling at a judo club. And I probably agree with his father that there's a, there is a value to getting people into a sense where they felt the physicality of it. They've had to push as hard as they can and maybe not get through and learn that, find the extents of what you can and can't do and what the limits of your body are. And I think that's good for almost everybody to get that at some level. I mean, even if you don't care about the competition and the winning, but kind of knowing what's possible and the different limits there, I think is valuable. I agree wholeheartedly. And I love the fact that you got into it because I would like to encourage so many more people to experience that there are, there's many things going on simultaneously. There's the technical aspects of the various moves, they have to understand the points of leverage and how to get to a superior position. There's also the physical exertion aspect where you're managing your body's resources and you have a finite amount of energy and you can't burn it all out quickly. So there's this sort of management game that you're playing. And then on top of it, it's like, you have to be able to be uncomfortable. You have to be able to put yourself in a good state of mind while you're uncomfortable. And so many of those lessons learned from that are applicable to everyday life. And they give you a higher threshold for discomfort, a higher threshold for pushing through obstacles and understanding boundaries and how to overcome them and how to increase your physical engine, how to strengthen your meat vehicle. Yeah, that whole lesson about sometimes you're the hammer and sometimes you're the nail. And a lot of people do go through much of their life without ever really internalizing that where it's always a participation trophy or whatever, but it's like sometimes you get your ass kicked and that can bring you, you can come back stronger after that. Yes, it's good for you. It's actually good for you. And it's an amazing camaraderie, particularly in grappling. I found that grappling the camaraderie is much nicer than striking, I came from a striking background because the thing about striking, oh, there is a camaraderie, a deep camaraderie with people that you would go and compete with. You're hurting each other. Whereas in grappling, you're not really hurting each other in the same way and you can kind of do it full blast and you appreciate each other because iron truly does sharpen iron in that area. Yeah, I mean, there are so many times I remember just driving back from Judo where I just have a big smile on my face just thinking that was really great. Now it's like the Judo Club was in a, a little bit of a sketchier area of town. So my wife was always like, you can never drive your Ferraris to Judo practice. I'm like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.