Roasts

Posts

• 6 Seconds or 6 Hours

  Sex is underestimated by everyone. If it were really that good, nobody would ever leave the house. People like talking about sex more than actually having sex.

• The Stroggonification of the Entrepreneur

  Throughout my career, I have had the opportunity to engage in conversations with entrepreneurs of different ages and financial backgrounds. These conversations have revealed not only the individual…

• PAIN INSIDE

  Till now what i felt i wrote that. Eventually,i realized a lo

• Is jiu jitsu the only martial art that fails the seven-year-old test?

  Every other martial art has a moment a seven-year-old would stand up and cheer for. Brazilian jiu jitsu is two grown men in matching pajamas lying on the floor, breathing hard, slowly adjusting their grip on each other for six minutes. It is the one art that does not impress children, and children are right about almost everything.

• Is sumo the greatest setup-to-payoff ratio in all of sport?

  Most combat sports make you wait a little for the violence. Boxing gives you a few rounds. MMA gives you a feeling-out minute. Sumo makes you wait so long that you forget you came to watch two men touch, and then it gives you about four seconds, and then it sends everyone home. The lead-up is a full production. Salt gets flung across the ring to purify it, fistfuls of it, arcing through the air like a man seasoning the largest steak ever conceived. The legs come up one at a time and slam down…

• Does anyone actually choose Oracle, and is Oracle fine with that?

  Oracle is the cockroach of enterprise tech, hated by everyone, used by everyone, and staffed by people who stopped pretending it was cool around the Clinton administration. The product is the sales motion, and the database is the hostage.

• Is your 0.05 percent and the word 'family' really a salary?

  The startup guy will tell you he is basically a co-founder. He has 0.05 percent. The founder described this on the offer call as "could be worth millions someday," in the warm tone of a man who has personally read the cap table and knows that after three more rounds and a 1.5x liquidation preference, 0.05 percent of the exit is enough to buy a used Subaru, if the exit happens, which it will not. He is counting on you not running the math. You do not run the math. You frame the offer letter.

• Is Krav Maga too deadly to test, or is that just very convenient?

  Krav Maga is the one of those martial art that found a way to never lose. Boxing tests itself every Saturday. Wrestling tests itself until somebody throws up. Jiu jitsu tests itself so relentlessly that a purple belt will tap his own grandmother for the data. Krav Maga skipped all of that and discovered something better than winning, which is being too dangerous to check.

• Was kung fu ever actually great, or just great in the movies?

  Kung fu has the best movies of any martial art, and that is the whole problem. Fifty years of cinema promised hands too fast to see, a punch that detonates a man from one inch away, and old masters who knock you over with chi from across the room without leaving their chair. You grew up on that. Then you sign up... and slowly learn that the trailer was the entire film.

• Is MMA the only sport that convinces you the world has a cage?

  MMA is the closest thing we have to an actual fight. Two people, almost everything legal, find out under pressure who actually trained. I love it. I will defend it against every traditional art that claims to be too deadly to test. Which is why it kills me that the average guy with eighteen months of it now narrates his entire life like color commentary for a fight that is not happening.

• Does taekwondo sell the black belt before the kid can even spell it?

  There is a strip mall near me with a vape shop, a place that does eyebrows, and a taekwondo academy that has a banner reading BLACK BELT BY AGE 10. I want you to sit with that as a business strategy. They have looked at the single most loaded object in all of martial arts, the thing Bruce Lee bled for, and decided the move is to guarantee one to a fourth grader on a timeline, like a savings bond that matures into the ability to register your hands as deadly weapons.

• Did judo ban its own best moves until it became a fight over a sleeve?

  Judo is the only martial art that has been defeated by paperwork. No opponent did this. No rival style exposed it in the cage. A room of men in blazers met in a hotel conference center, looked at one of the most complete grappling arts ever built, and voted, year after year, to make it less. They are still doing it. Judo is being strangled, slowly, by its own governing body, and the governing body keeps calling it a rule clarification.

• Does wing chun only train you to win a fight that politely agreed to happen?

  Wing chun has the best lore in all of martial arts, and that is exactly its problem. Ip Man taught Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee became Bruce Lee, and now a strip-mall class on a Tuesday gets to borrow the entire glow of two of the most charismatic men who ever lived. You did not sign up for a fighting system. You signed up for a biopic with a folding-chair budget, and the trailer is doing one hundred percent of the marketing.

• Does twelve weeks of classes make you a boxer?

  Twelve weeks ago this man could not skip rope without garroting himself. He has now decided he is a boxer, the way you become a sommelier by finishing a bottle. The wraps come off at brunch with the reluctance of a soldier removing his medals.

• Is karate the only martial art you can master without ever being touched?

  Karate is the most photogenic martial art ever invented, and that is the first clue. It is built around fighting people who are not there, breaking objects that agreed to be broken, and sparring that ends the instant anyone makes contact. You can earn a black belt without ever once absorbing a consequence.

• Is wrestling the only martial art too tired to start a cult around itself?

  Every martial art eventually grows a religion. Karate gets the kata and the invisible attackers. Jiu jitsu gets the lineage tree, the belt with a man's whole soul stitched into it, the professor. Krav maga gets the cope about being too deadly to spar. Kung fu gets a guy who can drop you with chi from across a parking lot, allegedly, when no cameras are running. Aikido gets the dojo where everyone has agreed in advance to fall down. Each one builds a little temple and sells tickets.