Tom
blue belt
I’m running a community of about 150 people, many of whom are in transition. They’ve realized they’ve already climbed the top of one mountain and are now looking around, asking what’s next, after being confronted with a simple question: Is this all there is? Most of them aren’t in a crisis. They’re just getting really curious about things that don’t have a peer group. They’re interested in fringe areas of science and spirituality that are often associated with low discernment and the New Age.
Q: What do you mean by low discernment?
Like aliens. There are a few people in the group who are really interested in the alien topic, and when you spend five minutes on it, you realize it’s actually a very serious topic with really serious people in it. Yet for most of our lives, it’s been regarded as the kind of thing you get into when you’ve lost your mind.
That’s an extreme example, but the longer I spend in this space, the more I realize there’s really robust data for things that you’d just assume are New Age bullshit. There’s this creeping, embarrassing sensation that maybe the New Age people were onto something. But on a much more practical level, there are practices and tools. People have now understood that talk therapy is what it is, and it isn’t getting any better. In fact, for many people, it’s really counterproductive. It was for me. So, given that we already know what that is, and that it’s the standard of care, and materialist science is failing, what else is out there that can help me grow as a human being that I don’t know about?
Usually, if you go to the meditation guy, he’ll say meditation. If you go to the breathwork guy, he’ll say breathwork. There aren’t really communities full of high-discernment people who’ve been very successful and who want to explore these topics and modalities together, around people who are relatively impartial to the benefits of all these things and are just curious themselves.
Another thing is that a lot of these people have very strong professional identities. Every conversation comes with their persona. In our conversations, they can drop the persona. It’s just, “Hey, what’s your story? What are you interested in?” They don’t have to pretend to be anything other than someone talking about what they’re genuinely passionate about. There aren’t many venues for that in modern society.
Q: Let me push back a little. A blue-collar person might say, “Well, these people already have the material things. Once material things stop having resonance, people just pivot to this other stuff. And the second pushback is: isn’t this all just a placebo? Because the placebo effect is real.
But no one actually knows what the placebo effect is. So that’s not really a response to anything. No one knows what consciousness is either, so that’s also a bad response.
I’d push back on the pushback in two ways. First, there are blue-collar people inside The Leading Edge. And second, the idea that you can’t be unhappy because you’re rich kills people. I’ve seen three people kill themselves.
I was speaking yesterday with this nature guy, Bill Plotkin, and he talks about how every healthy human culture has a stage where, once you have enough—don’t get me wrong, “enough” is very different for different people—your life detonates. Often, people who are really wounded need more than most, and sometimes nothing is enough. But once you have enough, your life detonates because you’re supposed to move into the next stage. That transition from adolescence to adulthood—where you’re meant to put your gifts in service to the whole—doesn’t exist in modern society. So you have people who are objectively very wealthy, or at least very successful, whose lives suddenly fall apart. And society looks at them and says, “Boo fucking hoo. Get a 26-year-old girlfriend and buy a motorcycle.” And that actually really hurts people.
I’ve spoken to about 2,600 people over the past 10 years about this. Most of them are surprised that they’re not happy with what they’ve got. They feel lonely because they’re worried people will say exactly what you just said. And then they feel ashamed that they have everything they’re supposed to have, yet they’re still not happy.
Most of the people I interface with aren’t billionaires. Some are, but most are people like you and me—comfortable, not post-economic, with reasonable lifestyles, but unable to walk away from anything. They have kids. They have responsibilities. It’s the worst of all worlds: peak earning years, mortgage, college looming, and health insurance.
Q: So within your community, people don’t ask “What do you do for work?” In some ways, that’s very jiu-jitsu. How long does it take before you know what anyone does outside of jiu-jitsu? Maybe never.
That’s what makes jiu-jitsu so powerful—it strips back identity. You literally cannot pretend to be what you’re not in a jiu-jitsu roll. One minute in, your mask is gone. The mats never lie.
My community isn’t the same—you can still lie on the mat, metaphorically—but people can’t hide forever. They can choose not to contribute, which I won’t allow, or they can pretend to be experts. But ultimately, people want to show up as who they are. To sound a bit woo-woo, people want to manifest that authenticity in what they actually do. This life stage is about asking: What am I good at? What has this prior stage been training me for? How do I bring that onto the map?
You wrote about this recently, but for me, the hardest part of jiu-jitsu has been not focusing on the win. I feel better coming out of class if I’ve tapped everyone. But focusing on that has probably stymied my growth. I should feel better after losses. After all, my mind is clearer after defeats.
Q: How did you come to New York, and how did you find jiu-jitsu?
The accent gives it away—I’m British. I was good at jumping through academic hoops: public school, Oxford. I came to the City after failing multiple times after university because I was arrogant and incompetent. I spent five years in the City during the financial crisis, from 2005 to 2009, then moved to Wall Street in equity sales. I was in love with an American girl. I was a US equity specialist.
Suddenly, half the US desk resigned in the summer of 2009. The global financial crisis. The world was ending. I got an inter-company transfer to a desk that was legendary for being toxic. Merrill, then Bank of America. My girlfriend dumped me after four months. I had no portion control and gained 15 pounds. I’m surprised I didn’t get fired sooner, yet I lasted six years. I got hired immediately by a friendly mid-tier bank and realized no one working there cared. Less product, less intensity, everyone phoning it in. That created its own toxicity.
My body and brain started to break down. I gained weight. Hypochondria. Brain fog. Doctors couldn’t find anything wrong. It wasn’t because I was working too much. It was because people around me were really suffering in ways that were invisible. Traders couldn’t make eye contact. I eventually went to a functional medicine doctor. The only thing I remember is the elimination diet: cut everything out, including booze, and reintroduce slowly. I did it for three months and got my energy back. I wrote a 60-page PDF of random ideas. One morning, I realized: this book is me.
In that moment, I had what you might call a spiritual awakening—or psychotic break. I stepped out of consensus reality. I could see energy in trees. Two absurd synchronicities. My internal monologue stopped. I was flooded with a transcendent sense of love; it was impossible to describe. Imagine the best orgasm of your life times a million. I started chuckling at my trading desk. There was no narration in my head—just doing things. Absolute bliss. I met with a hedge fund CIO and was fully composed. If anyone came within twelve feet of me, I felt their emotional state. If I said something untrue, my heart hurt. Then I started getting precognitions—memories of what was about to happen. Including knowing I was going to be in immense pain.
Over the next months, I unraveled—delusional, dissociated, spiritual inflation. Every spiritual emergency box checked. On Boxing Day 2017, I made a heartfelt commitment to deal with my shit and then immediately went insane.
A voice started in my head. Horrendously negative. After six months of relative silence, it had returned—hostile. “You’re damned. You’ll suffer forever. You’re worthless.” All night. It was the worst night of my life. I had visions of a snake eating my heart. My wife wasn’t pregnant yet. She got pregnant the following February, which was a disaster. I went to a priest at St. Patrick’s. He brushed me off. My wife was incandescent with rage when that happened. For two years I lived in hell. Dissociated. Ashamed. The loop in my head made it hard to speak. But I never missed a day of work.
I quit after my bonus. First day back, I thought I had a heart attack. My left side went numb. It ended in an ER visit. I’m convinced my unconscious was telling me: If you come back here, you’ll die. A trader ten feet away from me later ran under a train in Darien. That wasn’t rare, but emblematic. I saw an army of people, like the Terracotta Army, buried and immobile.
I tried hospice work. Social work. Fordham. Disaster. Tried finance again—pure hell. Tried recruiting—appalling. Eventually I became immobile. Not catatonic, but bored of living. February 2020 was the bottom. My psychiatrist went on paternity leave. I got ketamine infusions. The eighth one, I saw a black blob—my depression. I leaned into it and saw my son. I cried for four hours. Within a week, I could feel again.
It was redemptive. I don’t know why.
After that, I got a job selling vaporware for an electronic trading company. I had to give 300 pitches. I learned to use my voice again in the world’s safest environment: my bedroom. So even though I was sweating and barely coherent, I could bootstrap myself back up. I was employed. I was joyful. I was able to see my son and touch him, and hear music. And then, because I was so bored at work, I just started following certain ideas. And the ideas appeared at very, very weird times. But basically, the ideas started to explain what I’d been through in ways that neither science nor spirituality could. I merged them together. I wrote one piece. I sent it to my old distribution list, like 100 people. And an internal client from the investment firm KCP came back and was like, “This is really interesting. We’re gonna hire you.”
And it was the wildest thing: I had basically spent three years being repeatedly kicked in the dick, and I was like, I must be up to something. So I spent three years being increasingly crazy-cakes for a wealth manager. That was the intersection of finance and… finance and what? I don’t even know what the word is, because the words are all shitty.
I worked in this situation where it was a completely hidden epidemic of these mid-career finance guys who had literally been told—as I was, many, many times—there is no second act.
There are a lot of people who don’t get out of that because of the fear of circumstantial stuff, and then they’ll kill themselves. Or they’ll just die. They’ll become the guys that don’t go to jiu-jitsu and their neck becomes a thumb—you know? They just become a thumb in a fleece vest.
Q: So, jiu-jitsu. Tell me why you went the first time.
In 2017, just after my awakening, I was in a very strange expansive state. My friend Dave Ross was like, “Dude, you should come with me to jiu-jitsu.” And at that point, I was like, everything’s a message from the universe—I’m gonna go.
So I went to Dave’s gym. It was very confronting. Dave went quite hard on me, in a nice way, and I didn’t know what I was doing. But there was something in there for me, and I was like, hmm. This kind of… tricked me out. This is an interesting headspace. And I wanted people to know about it. It’s kind of embarrassing and I’ve never told anyone this, but: I came out of the roll, went to the changing room, and punched myself in the face—my left eye—and gave myself a black eye. Because there was something in me that wanted the identity of being a fighter, and I wanted people to know that I’d been fighting. And I still don’t really know why I did it. But I had a black eye for the next week and everyone was like, “How did you get a black eye? Did you train with Dave?” because he worked in my office.
And then once I quit my job, I started going more regularly, two or three times a week. I got my larynx pushed in, which really hurt. I got a few niggling injuries, but ultimately, I just got depressed. And rather than double down and accelerate into the depression, I couldn’t bring myself to train anymore as things got bad. And then I got pulled into a career that almost mysteriously took up all of my time—despite that time being empty. So I didn’t really have time to go in the evenings anyway. So I couldn’t. So I quit for four years.
And it’s two blocks away. Every time I walked past it for two years, a voice in my head said, “You gotta go. You gotta go back.”
There’s this great Jordan Peterson-ism, which is like: Don’t hide things in the fog. There are things you know you have to do, yet you just keep ignoring them. And I actually think it’s a really short list of things that you just know; that needle on you. And one of them was learning to drive, which I’m finally addressing at 35. And the other one was doing jiu-jitsu.
There was something in me that knew I had to do it, but it was a very faint voice. But the voice was utterly insistent. It kept going over and over again: “This is something you need to do.” And in May of 2021, I went back.
One of my favorite lines is from the movie Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: “Every fanatic conceals a secret doubt.” And I think there’s something about that for a lot of jiu-jitsu people, including me. You have to make it a big part of your identity, or you could quit too easily. If everyone knows you’re a jiu-jitsu guy and you quit jiu-jitsu, what does that mean? What does that say about you? I think folding certain things into your identity, like politics, is usually a really bad idea because it makes that persona fragile. But I think folding jiu-jitsu into identity is an excellent commitment device. I’ve made sure that everyone knows I’m a jiu-jitsu guy. And part of that is so I can have continuous conversations with people. But part of it is also to hold me into the community and to the community.
Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian mystic who was allegedly a cross between the Buddha, Borat, and Indiana Jones, talked about this nested series of positive-sum games: body, brain, and heart. I have writing in the morning. I love writing, and I only write about things I think people care about. And then at lunchtime, jiu-jitsu, which is sort of a positive-sum game. You’ll get better from rolling against me, and vice versa. But it’s in a closed system—I’m not saving whales. After that, I meet people, which is purely relational. And so I have this very tightly constrained life, but an infinite variety within that—very, very, very tightly constrained.
The day I quit Wall Street forever, I was like: I know what I’m doing tomorrow. I’m doing it with more degrees of freedom. I’m writing, rolling, and relating, and I’m doing it with more degrees of freedom than I did yesterday.
Q: How often do you train?
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and sometimes Saturday.
Q: Tell me about the gym.
SD Jiu-jitsu is phenomenal. Silvio still competes, currently the world champion in his weight class. And his wife Vedha is the world champion in hers. We got seven medals in Worlds for a gym of probably 100 people. It’s physically small, very clean, very nice. Silvio is a great teacher.
My previous instructor, Victor Shaolin, was a living legend, a four-time world champion, and the fourth fastest black belt of all time. But because he got his black belt at like 18, I don’t think he knows what it’s like to be a spaz, right? I’m uncoordinated and unathletic. And I think it’s often hard for instructors who’ve been doing it since they were kids to put themselves in the mindset of someone who can’t do it, and doesn’t have the aggression gene, which I don’t.
And Silvio’s really good at not being that person and just keeping it accessible. Even though he’s clearly a phenom, I feel held in the classroom, even though the drills are the same as those in other gyms. At Shaolin’s, that wasn’t really a brotherhood that I noticed as much, because I think I was more intimidated. And at SD, it’s much more of a tribe now. I think I’ve contributed to that in some way. I’m now very forthright in welcoming new people to the gym when they come in. I’m excited to roll with new people because they’re an unknown quantity, but also because I know what it was like walking into that gym when no one said hi. And I do what I can to support the gym.
And all the guys in my gym—I’d say half the people I roll with are older than me— they’re square-jawed. They look like men, right? And maybe there’s a causal relationship, but they look like men, and they’re super crazy functional as human beings. And I was like, oh, so there is a trade-off. Like, yeah, you’re gonna break stuff. But fine, right? Again: what are you saving your body for, if not this? And I’d say an important thing for me to mention is that I’m a hilarious evangelist for jiu-jitsu. And I’ve spent years—the years I’ve done jiu-jitsu—trying to articulate why. And ultimately, the thing I say is: you’re guaranteed euphoria after a roll. Like, I’ve probably rolled 5,000 times now, and I don’t think I’ve ever walked out of the gym feeling worse than I walked in.
This is part of a weekly series on the people who make up jiu-jitsu culture.
