Welcome everyone to another episode of the questioning podcast where we look at how the process questioning can affect positively your life in various professions and it's just a cool thing to do. So, and this time I'm enjoying, I actually didn't check that to make sure I pronounced your name right, so I'll try though and you can correct me. So Philip Castagnar? Castagnar. Oh that's nice. I've heard so many versions of it that had a problem. You should hear what they say in the Czech Republic. You are a professional opera singer? Yes, yeah I sing, well I was until like three weeks ago. Oh yeah because of COVID-19. Yeah, so now everything is shut down and I'm a professional, I'm a professional waiter because I just wait. Wait for her. I usually don't like to go too much into the kind of background and everything because you know it can get a bit tedious but I also want to make sure that people know that you know you absolutely have credibility, you know what you're talking about. So maybe you could just for a moment tune down humbleness and say a few kind of cool facts about your experience like you did this and that so people will be like oh he's a cool guy. Yeah so I studied opera in university like a lot of voice students do, a lot of aspiring opera singers and I was kind of a prodigy if you will. Oh snap, nice. I was, I hit about 20 years old and then I was like the star tenor guy in my school. That's the high-voiced male singers and I entered an international competition that's sort of the one for especially for North American singers called the Metropolitan Opera National Council audition and that's an international competition and I won and I was 22 years old which is pretty young and especially at the time was quite young for winning that and then I was invited by the Metropolitan Opera to be a young artist in their training program which is like an apprentice program for young artists pretty exclusive there were maybe like 10 or 12 of us in the program and there you're you're basically paid to live in New York and study singing and then I got all the fantastic opportunities from the Metropolitan Opera I did quite a few performances on stage there and about eight or ten years later everything with my voice stopped working very well and I was getting fewer and fewer jobs and a few years later. Yeah I just wanted to quickly ask I'm intending to kind of dig down and dig a bit deeper into your whole journey and story a bit later in the conversation maybe after we talked about the pressure testing but one thing I wanted to just double check so something literally happened with your voice or well that's the way people often frame it but really I just didn't know what I was doing I just really had no idea how my voice worked and how my body worked and how it related because I was taught by either people who failed at it themselves or people who never actually knew how to sing themselves so it was not a pressure tested the methods were often I would compare them to like traditional martial arts you know it was expecting things to work without ever putting yourself under the gun and and and testing it out and that's actually do you mind if I jump in for a moment that's because I was intending to go into questions but it's just fascinating to me what you're saying and one thing that I was always interested in is and because I went kind of through that myself not obviously with singing I don't know how to sing but with the experience where when you're successful at something but you're not 100% sure why it just kind of falls into place you maybe do the work and everything but but I think that's maybe part of the danger of being talented or you know prodigy or whatever but like when you get things quite easily to a degree and you just kind of swing it and you do it and it works and I think eventually there's a huge problem when you you keep grinding and you reach that moment where you have to replicate what you did but you're not sure exactly what parts and elements were responsible for that and for me that was actually when I was running my Ikea school the first year was amazing like people were just like blown away and I had such a huge enthusiasm from my students but then I guess the grind came and some other elements in my life and and I started to feel like the morale was dropping and I wasn't sure I was like what did I do then that worked so well I tried to replicate it but it took me a long time to understand I'm still figuring out actually up to this day what I did right and what is wrong but then initially I guess the wrong things often I was like oh not like I'll make this as a joke but it's like oh I wore that orange t-shirt maybe that was it you know not really like that but kind of that level so so it seems like the same applies to singing was that a little bit like that for you yeah it was a it was a very similar thought process and very similar kind of course of events the the way I put it now I came up with with a system for basically how to train yourself in singing and how to maintain yourself in singing and I use an analogy called the castle made of sand and the castle made of sand is is the idea that whatever it is you've accomplished at any point yeah it's just it's just a castle made of sand and you can either go about trying to convince everyone that it's made out of something more solid by people do things like well they can become voice teachers for instance and now they control the environment and when they control the environment they can try to make that castle made of sand look like it's a lot more solid than it actually is because they're not really under pressures especially the emotional and environmental pressure that professional singers are under and you can either just get really depressed about it or try to spend your time kind of fixing this sand castle or you can make a decision you know what I'm gonna get good at making sand castles and then you're always in a process of starting and it's not a big deal when your castle starts to fall apart you're you're a little bit used to it it's it's it's never not a deal it's never not a thing it's always a little bit disconcerting when you go to execute something and you're expected to just happen you're used to not thinking about it and now you have to think about it and at the same time the singer's body is constantly changing your hormonal situation is changing your your cartilage your whole life is gradually turning into bone so everything about it is is constantly in flux and if you are not ready for that process you're probably going to fail at some point that kind of naturally makes me ask so how is it in the world of singing in terms of delivering that that information and maybe I'll actually just add this piece of information to kind of get a context for the whole audience I probably didn't see that on record before that my girlfriend right now is she's a professional singer or she's kind of she had like a huge success and then now she's working her way back up so it's a whole story as well but being with her for the past like nine or eight months I kind of started to get a bit of a feel for how the world of music works and and it's very different from what I thought maybe not like very different but a lot of things surprised me I was surprised and then it kind of started to make sense to me when I learned about it I was like oh yeah I guess that's everywhere but I do have to admit that before I simplified it I thought yeah you know you're a good singer you make a good song and then that's it and it just seems like it's it's actually chaotic and it's it's a tough world out there and and she specifically is she teaches singing sometimes to some of the people around her and so she's enthusiastic about it and I learned from her as well like like a lot of people don't apparently they don't really know what singing is about or she was frustrated with some of her teachers that they weren't really capable of explaining or fully understanding what they're doing and and how they're doing why they're doing and they weren't able to relate that so I was interested because you you you were all over the world and you were in these big places and I'm sure you have so much experience uh is that like would you say a huge problem that the world is you know that there's a so I'll just focus on that the thought so that the world of singing in terms of teaching and passing on the knowledge that sometimes it's it's kind of a vague area when the work started drying up and I was not 22 anymore 26 27 28 it occurred to me that the training I thought I had was more like a mining process where rather than really knowing about how to develop artists and how to develop singers they just kind of put you through a filter and the ones who can figure out how to survive the filter so in spite of the training you survive then you might go on and have a career and when I was about 35 I'm 41 now and I was 35 years old and trying to come back and I remember going to to Germany and doing some auditions and they just straight up told me I was too old like nobody expected 35 to go somewhere whereas 50 years ago they would say things like well the voice doesn't really mature until about your early 40s so 50 years ago I would be considered in my prime now and but then five years ago I was considered washed up and that seems to be the ways that that it's evolved so it's like there there's pressure but it's not pressure testing a learning process if you will it's just pressure testing your overall ability your genetics almost so it's a little bit like they're going in the mine and they're breaking up the rocks and looking for a diamond and it's they do find some amazing people this way I have to say you know that this but when you're not one of the diamonds it's not so great for sure you know we're we're both practicing martial arts and also to the competitive ones and maybe not everyone is was listening to this podcast necessarily into it but I see there's a huge parallel for me as well when I look back into the history of MMA that initially it was kind of let's throw these guys into the cage different sizes and whatnot and the best one will come out and I think you know it was a mess and and I think it was the same like you said like the training from what I heard obviously I guess I was a bit too young for that back then but from the stories I heard that that was like the training was very much like just tough guys coming in kind of fight club you know if you watch the movie yeah I remember that the Savat guy it was UFC one and there was a Savat guy and his opponent was so big that he just broke his hand on the on the opponent it was like a sumo guy or something like that and so yeah I think and I think so but but even like the training as well especially when you MMA UFC became popular and it may start become popular there was no clear methodology back then to know how to get people from point zero to point you know fighting and now these days still there are some schools which are like that you know it's just a bunch of alpha males jumping in and bashing each other and the and the tough ones who are naturally gifted they they survive there and and they keep on developing without knowing actually what they're doing but but there's no space for others while while luckily there are gyms more and more of them and that's the ones I prefer where there's a very smart methodology and now they know like how to get how to develop anyone like and doesn't mean like a person who's completely let's say I'm talented I hate actually that word but let's see a person who's just not fit he doesn't have the right body and etc I think I still think he can make it big oh you are you'd say oh you mean like in martial arts sense or okay yeah yeah but then again there's so many people like that that are not born fighters but still with the right teaching and the right dedication right now there's enough if you find a good coach there's enough knowledge and methodology to get you there and you can achieve probably incredible things or even if you're like medial core you can become like super good it's not just based on that but but that that pathway has to be developed and and why I do like mixed martial arts is because of the same phrase that will repeat today quite a few times that's pressure testing you know it's like you do if you're if you have at least a bit of intelligence you will easily and quickly start to see what works and what doesn't work the pressure testing is so big that you'll easily start to see what doesn't work and you just throw away and you start to see what works and you ask how and and that really I think helps that helped the MMA game evolve to such great heights like if you'll compare I don't want to go too far into martial arts but but just the last thought that if you compare the first UFC or even the Gracie's you know who won the first UFC they if they would now compete against almost like a medial core Brazilian jiu-jitsu guy probably he would bash them because the game evolved so much doing such a short time so so I guess it's a little bit similar yeah I think so and you know I have to say that the other like when I box and no intention of competing it's just it's the training but still because of the methodology I I've done things now that I just didn't think were possible or and well see at first I thought when I walked in I thought I could do them already because I had trained in something called Wing Chun which is a kind of Chinese patty cake and I thought oh I'll have some skills so I'll have a little bit of an advantage so first it was just a really rude awakening finding out that I was the worst guy in the class maybe not even because of any natural restrictions from my body or genetics or anything but because of what I had learned I wish I'll just quickly very quickly I'll just jump in this and I'll let you continue but that thought that it's it's one of the potential conclusions I came to as well and I spoke to some people who who think that as well like that tradition martial arts such as like Wing Chun or Aikido can actually make you worse at fighting because you have all those developed heavily developed habits which are counterintuitive and they don't really work and so I guess that that was kind of your experience that was exactly my experience I remember being really it was for me like absolute dogma that you always go forward and never back because they had drilled that into us in in the Wing Chun class and it's just a it's like the weakest bull in a china shop that it's like a bull in a china shop but the china is made out of bulls and the bull is made out of china so um and the the first class was actually not a traditional boxing class western boxing it was a kickboxing class and wasn't a very good instructor and so he had me sparring in the second class which I was not ready for in any way and I charged a guy who had like a hundred pounds on me and he just kind of lifted his leg and broke my rib and so that was like two and a half months off of or three months off I think from pursuing any kind of physical culture and then I was like okay I'm going to do a little bit more research and I did and I and I found a boxing gym with a qualified instructor he's he's actually he's a purple belt no a brown belt jujitsu and it's an MMA gym with a boxing class so I just did the boxing class and in that class I I first found out I knew already a little bit that my wing Chun stuff had put me at risk so I was very humble walking in and I remember just wondering how the hell anyone ever ducks a punch and I remember like trying to plan it out ahead of time because everything in Wing Chun is kind of planned out ahead of time you know there's a little bit of faux sparring I guess this cheese salt yeah but it's all a really it's like a rehearsed pattern and one day I ducked a punch and I know that this doesn't sound like it doesn't sound like anything to most people but to me it it really changed my attitude about myself and and what I could do and the next time I went on stage I was a lot more fearless than than I was before so yeah yeah well again I I'm intent and kind of trying not to go too much into martial arts but I guess it's a little bit inevitable so I'll just try to say this briefly but for me that was as well with my experience that I was surprised how much confidence martial arts like martial arts and to be clear especially for people who know my journey Aikido did not really give me confidence when I switched Aikido into more competitive martial arts combat sports then and I realized I can handle myself and I would deal with actual pressure etc etc etc then I was surprised how much confidence that gave me and I was confident on some level already but still the confidence was boosted in all of the situations and I'm it's just cool to hear that also that applied to you in the singing in your profession like that there there was that relationship there as well yeah and it was that and you know all of a sudden I found I could talk to girls um it was just I stopped being so afraid of conflict and a strange result is that I started to have less conflict in my life because I wasn't afraid of conflict anymore it opened up a lot of opportunities for me to be kind when before I had to be defensive and so it yeah it's it's really I guess it's something I recommend everyone should do some kind of it it doesn't need to be MMA I think it probably should be for for most people um I had to really think about being um my age and the and trying to balance the physical demands of and of martial arts training and the recovery process from when you when you train with my singing schedule uh I remember going on uh after one particularly it was just boxing class but he made us do a whole lot of squats and burpees in that class and I had to show the next night and my legs were barely working and it was my conductor asked me if I was sick or something you know like what what so I had to I also had to learn about managing that and and um you know I'm human I can't just go all out on everything and um so I mean on top of the confidence not that I think I could get in a street fight and not get hurt I'm I'm really sure now that if I ever did get into a street fight I probably would get severely injured um I said yeah but before I had this fantasy that you know I could take on three guys with my baddie cake you know I'd slap them with my chain punches or whatever um but yeah it's I learned about so many things and it started to feed into a philosophy of singing um that thinks about developing the the whole person so normally in singing from the first day they teach you that your voice is an instrument and about you know it was about 16 years after I had started to become a student of singing it occurred to me well actually there's there's no instrument it's just you and like literally um like anything that's an instrument it's it's like something you know you can hold and a lot a lot of languages have like special grammar for instruments um and the point of an instrument is it isn't you it's some kind of implement that you can you know it's it's externalized and uh this thing isn't going to change you know if you play the guitar you have to tune the guitar and stuff but you're not going to wake up one day and the guitar is sick uh and you're not going to step on stage with with uh with a guitar that's completely solid and then the moment the guitar realizes everybody's watching it starts to get all soft and can't stay in tune you know that's that's not a thing but in martial arts and and in singing that does happen so I I've never been in a professional match but I imagine that you experience the the I've seen um your amateur matches and I've seen you talk about it after and there's this common experience where it's like your level just drops from the environment um and you have this feeling like no but if only you guys could see what I can really do uh you know that wasn't that wasn't me that's not my level but that is your level in that in that environment you know and that's that's what you've been training for um oh you're freezing up a little bit okay yeah so and and that's part of the kind of the wisdom of pressure testing I guess is is that there's different kinds of pressure so when you're in MMA or boxing class it's like okay you might start with just the movement just okay here's a jab you know here's a here's a straight uh right or a straight left for me you know one two one two you learn that then as soon as you have someone in front of you who's moving around or something like that or even just with the pads it's a little bit harder and and it falls apart a little bit and then so then you work on it and then when someone's trying to hit you it really falls apart you know and it's like oh I didn't realize I would stop breathing as soon as I got into a situation where someone's putting me under pressure and the the same thing happens to you in singing when you step out there on the stage so that kind of naturally leads me into one of the main questions I wanted to bring up and that's pressure testing in singing that's something I didn't actually thought about consciously myself before although it makes sense but you were the the first person to introduce that concept to me and I became very excited about that and like a quick story for why and now I'm pursuing in my new journey I'm pursuing to kind of try to create some influence positive influence outside of martial arts but for me that was always important and when I was having my martial arts journey I always one of the best moments for me wasn't when people gave me some good comments about my martial arts stuff but it was when somebody would let's say write a comment oh I don't do martial arts but your video inspired me I was like yes that's what I want I want that influence to spread so when you told me about using some of the concepts of pressure testing in singing I was like just so happy about that so but we never like in depth spoke about that and I wanted to just ask you more about so what what is that whole subject about pressure testing in singing yeah well you can observe it in in a few ways one thing to be aware of is that everyone has this tendency to go the other way so to remove the pressure you see a lot of of like voice training exercises and things that are designed to help you succeed your next attempt and then they go ah so you made progress but all you really did was make it easier for you to do the next thing you were about to do so to give an example there's a lot of exercises I don't call them exercises really but where you kind of sing through a straw and it has a particular effect that we don't need to get into the some technical voice stuff but then you'll go to sing after you take the straw out of your mouth and it'll be easier and that can be a good opportunity to say learn a new coordination because everything you do in singing whatever style you're singing is a specific coordination just like you know a jab one two is a specific coordination and if you do a step jab that's a different coordination or if you and and bjj all your things that the specific techniques are doing require a kind of specific coordination and certain things you have to be aware of um and there is this old motor learning dogma called the optimal control hypothesis and the optimal control hypothesis says that you you kind of you're you have this muscle memory and your your body learns how to perform things in certain ways and there's channels you want and then there's other channels you don't want and if you do it enough times in the channel you want and you avoid the channels you don't want you will establish an optimal control yeah so every movement problem every all motor learning has a problem built in called um it's called degrees of freedom so if you want to throw a jab there's a and it needs to go straight away from your face and then straight back towards your face and you know that's a simple description of a of a jab but your body can move has more degrees of freedom than that so if you were like on rails or something in a robot that only moves you know or some kind of pneumatic device that can only shoot straight out and come back no problem there's no degrees of freedom so it doesn't need to learn how to do that movement but when you're talking about a coordination like a jab there are degrees of freedom that if if you go down those channels you did your jab wrong you didn't really have a jab you had maybe like a bicycle thing that left your face wide open for you know getting knocked out um and to solve that problem something like traditional martial arts for instance will do forms and forms have you do the movement perfectly over and over again and that's built on the optimal control hypothesis which is the idea that if you just do it enough times that's the only way your body knows how to do it now you've kind of worn a groove into the optimal movement pattern and you've eliminated the other options or you've inhibited them the only problem is it doesn't work so yeah so but doing something like these exercises with the straw for instance um can be beneficial and and so can you know slowly learning how to do your jab in the mirror makes it easier because you can see what you're doing wrong but from there you have to start purposefully breaking it you have to start putting it under pressure so that it fails otherwise if you rely on the optimal control hypothesis and expect it to take you to a new level you you you will eventually be under pressure and everything is going to break down except you have to train for it um and when that's part of the training process it's healthy but when that's part of your performance then it's really detrimental the audience gets let down and your career goes down the tubes and and so on so i'm sure there's more to follow and i'll be very interested to hear about that but just to make sure again i'm on the same page so i'm figuring out what you're saying again in comparison to my experience and that's martial arts primarily so i guess that same example applies if you're training all the time on soft mats bare feet specific you know japanese outfit and then when it's competition time it's shoes on it's rough surface uh unusual ops uh and unpredictable obstacles objects around you and different clothing different lighting and then you're you you get confused and you can't perform the same way because you're used to that environment so i guess that that middle way would be to train as close as you can and actually just very quickly that there's a cool story about that uh you know i trained with a coach down kavana for a while and one of the very well-known and main instructors for who coaches we don't know and one of the things he tries to bring his fighters as close as he can to to the experience of what they will have in the fight and one of the things he he sometimes stresses that the octagon he has in his gym is the same size as for a professional fighter and that's like already a plus and another really cool idea it's just an idea i guess and you can't like prove it that it works but it's a nice notion he has a wallpaper of an audience so that with the idea that people there would be even more stress in the sparring you to feel like people are watching you so it's just he's doing everything you can to replicate that experience i guess we're kind of talking about something similar in regards to that lacking part in singing right so the the audience um in in mma or in singing introduces um a kind of stress uh and also a kind of opportunity uh because you can kind of ride that wave you can ride that energy this is the way i like to think about the kinds of stresses because it's it's helpful for me to break things up especially into groups of three um because when i work with groups of two everything becomes kind of black and white um so you have um intellectual and you have emotional or spiritual however you want to say them and you have physical challenges um and or you could say uh there's knowledge and ability and heart so uh when you're in front of an audience the one thing that's obvious to most people is the social situation is very different you're going to have this pressure to perform they might make you nervous that's going to change your hormones um i think people talk about that a lot this kind of performance anxiety um but there's also just the visual stimulus so that this and that is going to catch your eye and and you're going to need brain processing power to either look at it or to not look at it that's going to it's going to have a cost it's going to pull your attention away and every time you switch your attention from one thing to another there's something called switching cost so um like this why you can't ever train really to drive while looking at your cell phone safely um because and you're always going to be in a situation where there's a cost from switching your attention from one thing to another um and you wind up with a kind of blindness to the things you're supposed to be paying attention to um so that's that seems very smart to have the wallpaper because even though the social situation isn't the same you get used to the wallpaper as you know it doesn't feel like people really um and the scenario and your your ego isn't interacting with the wallpaper in the same way but the visual stimulus is still something and and you've you're training with with um with that visual stimulus and when you get into the ring there's not going to be such a high cost to just having the sight of people there you know fine you can't do anything about the fact that now it's the real now it's go time now it's the performance and you're going to fail or succeed tonight you know and and you can't avoid the feeling that you'll have that you've put so much investment into this and and that one of you was going to lose so even i mean you could even feel hopeful about winning and at the same time you understand somewhere that that means the other guy lost and everything he invested into that contest is not a waste but it's going to be it's it's you're going to take it from him um so um that's a kind of uh where were we with the pressure testing um we we are really rambling but you're good well actually well maybe to get us back on track um one thing i wanted to ask is uh so we're already introducing kind of the idea of pressure testing but i know that from the interactions we had before that you actually already started implementing methods or experiments with pressure testing with singing you have the group and apparently there's more people involved so so how's that working i can you say more about that yeah so we have a group of about 500 people um and uh that's that's the overall group then there's a smaller core of of really active members that go into small chat rooms and in order to get into the main group we just we basically just let anybody in um but in order to get into the small chat rooms first you go to a special room we call the on ramp and in the on ramp you have to sing you have to sing something for everybody and if you don't you don't get past the on ramp and actually if you if you stay there for two weeks or something you're never participating we just kick you out of the on ramp and probably we never hear from you again or we give you a chance to you know put your big boy pants on and sing something because you say you're a singer so let's go and that came from simply going out there and looking on reddit looking on like there's a platform called discord where people discuss singing it's um originally made for gamers to sync up their chats with their games and stuff and people go into these things and they don't really sing it's it's it's like it's it's mind boggling like you went online to get good at singing and then you don't sing and not only that you start taking advice from people who themselves never sing they they make sure never ever ever to demonstrate anything and and at the same time they devalue the demonstrations of other people so anyone who does demonstrate they will criticize yeah and in my opinion their objective is not so much to um to to offer a critique it's to offer an obstacle to demonstration because they're afraid of a world that includes any kind of pressure on their own abilities i guess it's a little bit i'm jumping in here but shortly there's a difference between you could say i guess or how i phrase it is there's critique and there's feedback and like there's you know there's just something to tell like you're bad like a punishment uh or something derogatory or feedback is something constructive something that tells you gives you information to work with and the critique there's no follow-up they tell you something bad and that's it and you're like what should i do with this you know it just makes me feel bad and that's it feedback gives you something to work with and i noticed i think probably you're you're pointing to something similar uh usually people who give feedback are the ones who went down the path they they know how that's that specific part of the journey feels and they know that it's a tough one and they've been there and there's some maybe care there's some compassion and also wisdom and that's where they offer feedback but the first one is usually like from as you said like it's from people who probably are very not far by the down the road but they're they're the ones who are eager to just like go and punish anyone so i guess is that something similar yeah and they also there's there's something you can notice if you pay attention to your internal life when you're when you're a singer and that's that when you're when you're up you know when you're feeling kind of dominant socially dominant you're seeing a better um actually you're you know your hormonal situation improves like your cortisol probably goes down and all this stuff and you'll sing better so i think what they do in part is they get online they trash somebody maybe getting up on them and do some bullying they don't demonstrate there but then they go and sing for themselves and they sing better and they start to create this image of themselves as kind of the good singer but it depends on constantly abusing others and the part they're often not aware of because they haven't actually gone down the path is that every time you step on stage you're listening and if you've trained yourself to listen to others with this point of view of looking for looking for some way to dominate by finding the flaws by um shall we say you know you know in in boxing they do these stardowns and in MMA too they'll have the way in and they'll try to psych out their opponent um and that's i think that's fine and really really good for for that because i mean it's great to watch and um and it's a good way to get an ad on your opponent but singing is not uh you against the other people with you on stage it's to get it's a yeah it's a different kind of thing and that but that attitude is going to turn on someone and it's going to be you and you'll so you'll find yourself wondering why everything is is breaking down every time you're in front of people and it's self-consciousness and uh because you're you're you're kind of going around and trying to make others self-conscious and so you got technically good at that process of creating self-consciousness and then when it's your turn well what's gonna happen is you're gonna unleash that same technique but on the one target that's available and it's you um so we filter them out all of these kinds of people by just simply asking them to sing and so you'd be surprised how many people show up and are expecting to be you know participating in the normal kind of um singing discussion online where you you type on your keyboard and try to get somehow create the the impression that you're a great singer without ever singing um and so we just filter them out and on the other side of this on ramp you have the people who are willing to share what they do and the way that we communicate if if someone is um asking about a particular problem with singing and they may be we have all kinds of genres so i sing opera but i also go there to learn other genres uh just for myself because it's enjoyable and it it informs my process in general um and again because i don't believe in the optimal control hypothesis i feel like any any way i can test myself as a singer even if it doesn't seem related or just as a person so boxing or you know i've done a few MMA classes you know it's any way that i can um find some kind of culture of myself you know as as opposed to just looking for places where i naturally dominate building myself up i find just little threads that connect everything and i never know where they're gonna be um and uh so so we have that process and the way people interact is through singing which which sounds crazy you know it's like uh i mean it sounds crazy to most people who go online to talk about singing because they're just used to this it's like traditional martial arts they're just used to kind of uh doing forms i guess but even less than that it's talking about doing forms and so if someone has a problem then we ask them well show us what you mean like sing it for us and the way you're expected to give an answer is to sing back and show them what you mean now a quick thing to double check uh maybe i'm maybe i'm off on this one but so do you mean like you sing a song or do you mean like you're singing out what you're saying is just wanting to double so people so we do this on um on facebook messenger chats and the platform right now kind of limits you to one minute on on these voice recordings or you can um kind of record it in voice memo or something and then send a longer one but we tend to have these one minute things uh and you can just hit record a few times you know um and so people just sing right into their phones or they might even make a video of what they're doing because oftentimes you know someone wants to see well what is your mouth doing what is your um what is your tongue doing or something like that and so you might sing to me and and say what it is that you're looking for um and you might show me an example of someone doing it and then the thing for me to do is to show you how i would do it and that gives you an opportunity to to one uh see what knowledge goes with what results at the same time every time i hit record i put my own techniques under pressure because you know you think you got it and then you record it to go to show someone and it's like ah you don't even feel nervous but the results are there so it's obvious you have something has changed it can be that you're looking at the phone you know it can be that you're used to singing with your hands down and now you're holding the phone to try to sing into it or something like that do you mind if i jump in with question or yeah something i notice again and you know i'm new to this world and i'm just trying to figure things out but something i noticed with my girlfriend that i mentioned before uh who's a singer uh she has a challenge and difficulty of what i consider to be a challenge and difficulty of wanting to not necessarily perfect but but towards that direction and i'm starting to get that impression that maybe it's a thing that singers have more often than not i don't know maybe that's or i think you kind of mentioned that a little bit somewhere as well but but that idea that you know if you perform and you record and that's where actually she would struggle and she would kind of lag is when she let's say she wants to record a cover song and she's doing it like 30 times and again and again and again you know and she just she's just trying to nail that perfect one and it's never perfect and that demotivates her and i think it's kind of almost like a paralysis by over analysis kind of type of situation and i think i can i'm only guessing but that's where i want to hear your opinion but then when you are it could be so liberating to just jump in there and sing and even you feel and it's actually something i'm doing with my videos uh doing this period on my new channel i started doing one takes i don't make a script i don't you know do editing afterwards and if i fail i fail and but what's interesting is that i started noticing that the more i do it the more comfortable i become at those one takes and then there's more flow to them and i'm kind of becoming pretty good at them uh while initially there was a bit of a struggle but it's so liberating to to have that and and there's actually some quality which is developing there so so would you say there's some similarities there with singing in terms of trying to be perfect and demotivating yourself that way and and here you're kind of putting yourself on the line without that much filtering yeah i'd say well in in this particular situation that's not particularly stressful for me but i do go on youtube and do what exactly what you said so i do record covers or or like um like opera karaoke kind of things and it's one take and i'm often not happy with it and i like i i know people are gonna hear these flaws you know um not everyone though i think not everyone i think that's kind of the thing not everyone and the funny thing is that the ones who shall we say haven't walked the path oftentimes they miss i was like how could you miss what i'm doing really wrong here and you're you're talking about something totally invented you know that you like you you just want to try to get to me and you're looking for something um and and in the case of of singing in in classical music and opera they actually have uh like a platform where they go and they all decide on what their criticism is going to be and then they show up on your channel and they and and not just on your channel so they figure out um where all your social media accounts are and and they will find you in all these places and make it seem like 20 or 30 people or whatever are all have this opinion of you that's kind of the dark side empire stuff so dark they make sock puppet accounts and they it's extremely abusive and i've had people come to me say like what just happened how are these people telling me about social media posts i made on this other platform um and they they get a little bit freaked out and i'm like welcome to classical singing uh yeah and the result is most people just don't want to engage um and yeah and so online we have this culture of it's just like this broken culture um and but now we're stuck in this situation where online is kind of the only thing um so yeah in our uh in our chat group it's called the vocalist chat hub we don't have this pressure and that that part is actually alleviated by um every every so often all of the rooms get zapped and deleted and although people who were in the room at the time could theoretically go and find the old chat before we delete it we give it like a really hard to search name you know like zajezu or something just like something that you're not going to remember and those chats get buried and buried in someone's um feed and they've been kicked out of the room after that and so they you know they can't respond to chats and and then everyone who wants to continue with the group has to say so um they they have to go and we call it the roll call and they have to present for roll call or they're not going to be added back um and we feel like that helps it not turn into a cult because if you if you just keep adding people back then there's a question well if they didn't come back like why didn't you come back um so we we don't allow that to happen by for for us the natural conclusion is you won't come back um and while that's easier than what i'm doing by going on youtube and putting myself out there um for them for for most people out there that's already it's already a lot more pressure than they're getting by you know not singing to anybody and the idea is to just get them over that fear uh and they they will have some breakdown of their abilities when they go to hit record you know especially if they just told someone that they know what they're doing uh suddenly like uh suddenly you have to deliver on what you said yeah i guess that's moments i had those moments with the martial arts community and my main martial arts journey channel where i would get these keyboard warriors who would just go on and on with all these ideas and i'm thinking especially when i learned some combat sports i'm like if that guy was here next to me i'd say just just go on the ground show me you know and and the conversation would so quickly run out the window and actually interesting too um i was yeah i was editing we before we recorded we spoke about math orton uh brazil jiu-jitsu expert and who's very much about critical thinking applying critical thinking and i was editing one of his videos and he was answering q and a like answering questions and he mentioned that in some school like like he mentioned one of his examples like you know he would come in and then next to him they would say oh like you know it's not a martial art it's not for self-defense and we're just practicing for health benefits but as soon as he would leave the room somebody else without that experience would come in they'd be like oh this is yeah this is pure self-defense so you know when they know that they will be challenged they keep their mouth shut so i guess it's a little bit similar here right it's it's so similar that i excerpted that part of your video um and and edited together and it was it was a post called uh i forget what the name of the post was um something about like what it's like to argue with voice teachers um and he was talking about the kinds of pseudo argument and it was something like um um it works um well okay maybe it doesn't work like that but it's valuable yeah right it's kind of breaking down and breaking down and breaking out right yeah right yeah just last resort yeah let's see uh well i'm curious to ask how was your experience on putting yourself on the line on youtube especially when you're part of a culture which apparently is very judgmental and very picky so to go there and do those one takes and put stuff out there where you know it wasn't perfect it maybe wasn't up to your standards but you've did it numerous times so how was that journey what what what did you go through internally and did something change during it well so the the thing about these people is it's this kind of objectification right where um you're visible there and you're out there with your face your name your voice they're anonymous and you'd think if you just know that that this is bullshit you know if you just if you just tell yourself well you know i understand these guys are probably really insecure they can't do any of the stuff they're talking about bubble bath that doesn't matter it's still something like taking a liver shot every time you read it um it and even if you if you block you know somehow you got your guard up that's gonna cost you something it's not it's it's uh there's no infinite capacity it's always a finite capacity to defend yourself um and i noticed i had to be careful about when i read this stuff because if i read it just before i went on stage i was gonna have a bad night you know and there's this huge temptation even you know you're having a good night and now it's intermission you're in the dressing room and you're like oh let me go look at the the trolls oh yeah yeah and then now you're having a bad second half of your show yeah i'll just quickly jump in there uh i uh i like what what i noticed is that when i would be more emotionally down when i would be tired not in like you know 100 inspired mood and then those negative comments would get to me like those were the days when i was just like i knew like stay away from the comment section don't read that that day and sometimes you want i would like i would want to read them because sometimes there's good stuff there's positive and it lifts me up but it's such a gamble because in that's more you know it's in that in that more uh sensitive state i know it will get to me uh but if i'm in a good mood but maybe that also came through practice because there's so many comments i got and they became repetitive eventually and i'm just like i saw this i saw that i saw that it just kind of runs off of me but if i'm tired moody then the sensitivity is much more there and it's like it can be a mess so i have to be careful about that i guess we're sharing that experience yeah and i have the same experience and yeah i was okay some of them get repetitive and they stop working but the enemy if you will is always looking for the chink in your armor and they're gonna find it because they're relentless they got you're trying to i like to compare it to you know you're trying to polish wine glasses uh while someone is trying to fight you and it's like you're not going to be good at the fighting you're not going to be good you're definitely not going to be good at polishing the wine glasses they're gonna break um so you have to choose one thing but it's but it's it's kind of like uh um it's a dilemma it's like a sophie's choice because you you can't you can't do both things at the same time and you can't seek to spread a good message you can't seek to talk about truth and at the same time be disingenuous and at the same time just just be out to hurt people um so you're gonna get hurt and that's but you know i step every time i can step on stage and go at least it's not youtube wow so that's like is it is it did i got that right the stage for you is now like a less challenging level than youtube well i mean obviously i let just to clarify youtube one takes not like perfect recording yeah yeah but how was it uh did you feel like a sense of liberation though to go through that and to to just yeah yeah absolutely it's it's something um i i i don't think it's something everyone everyone should do um because i think some people will just get broken and sure and so you you gotta be sure that you're ready um and when i started doing it was when i was i was doing a a guest contract which is like um well it's it's what it sounds like you know a company is doing a particular show and it's mostly cast with people who are permanent members of their company and then they bring in for for some of the bigger parts they bring in some guest artists um and we always have it in in opera you're never making all the artistic decisions you have a director who's got a vision for how everything's gonna look and uh the character relationships and all that stuff and you have a conductor who is going to be in charge of the the way it all sounds and at the same time you're a soloist you know and so there's this there's constant negotiation for how much say that you have and um there's this process and if you're lucky you have people who really are on your side but a lot of people make it into these not a lot of people but some people make it into these positions by using a really kind of narcissistic approach where you know they they bring others down and then try to look greater by comparison and uh this guy was uh basically telling me how I was shit and then and that I would be excluded from um further things from so he was he was threatening my career because I had literally said to him show me um so that there's this line you're not supposed to really cross if you're if you're the guy who's in charge of how it's gonna sound tell me how it's gonna sound but when you start to interfere with how I'm gonna pull that off it's crossing a line um and it puts you in a really bad position because you're subordinate you know uh but at the same time if you do what the guy's telling you he's never gonna be he's gonna be even less happy because you I mean the guy doesn't know how to do what you're doing um and you might have all kinds of reasons for not doing it his way and it's you there's not enough time for for you to explain that so this one time I just said show me and the guy got really mad because he couldn't show me you know it it was just all fantasy we was talking about and um uh and then at the end of the conversation he he's inviting me to go watch movies at his house so it was this kind of I felt like a dangerous manipulative process and in really like buddy you're barking up the wrong tree um and I was really crushed and uh we had a three week break actually in in the rehearsals and I went and read the art of war and I went back and and you know I also got some some advice from colleagues about how I I was I was under this impression that I should be trying to show everyone how uh I'm I'm compliant and he said the more you do this the worse it's gonna get for you and I went back and things went well um and things went well because he tried to give me a compliment saying oh you're so much better now you you must have really practiced and and I said no excuse me no uh there's just a process and I'm simply following the process and this is just how it goes and so I refused the compliment um and I did it when we were alone because I read the art of war and then I then I saw ah okay you don't attack an enemy an army that has no chance of escape is going to fight to the death and I realized yeah okay so if you're in a situation uh where you have a boss and you're in front of everybody and you attack you're gonna get a fight to the death and you're gonna die because you're subordinate um and so I started and things went well after that by comparison um and I started to get the sense like you know I need to start pressure testing my because I was boxing already and I started to get the sense I needed to ramp up the pressure on my heart my my spiritual toughness if you will um and I and I was like well where are people really awful the internet for yourself like the worst yeah so I started to just go go online and try to explain my thoughts about singing actually I just wanted to talk about footwork because it's really fundamental to me if you expect to be able to move on stage you gotta know what to do with your feet and if if you want to I don't know if you've ever observed your breath as you walk around and stuff you might notice that everything you do with your body changes the way you breathe um and vice versa so and if you're if you're trying to hold a uh not break your posture for instance and you blow out all your air it's it's about to get a lot harder not to break your posture um and because your whole breathing system is part of your posture system as well um you know and if you lift weights or something then you're gonna have some opinion from an expert about what to do with your breath they might they might say one thing or another but no one's saying don't worry about your breath um and and I knew if I went online I would find all the worst of the people who can't do anything the Dunning Kruger effect people who are very good at finding your vulnerabilities and it's it's been effective it's been painful I've taken a lot of liver shots from doing that um but I wound up making those connections with people who were really sincere uh and they they have transformed the way I approach my own singing and not necessarily through telling me about a new technique it might be just um uh will show me how the rock singer does that you know and we we we work on it together and uh and I offer what I can to them and the whole way I thought about singing has evolved uh much quicker from that and my ability to navigate the my professional life evolved um due to that uh and and it's my ability to be a good colleague got really increased um and uh it was the same thing of just not being afraid of conflict and often that means I avoid the bigger conflict because you you take care of it early you know um so that that's that's the kind of pressure testing I guess that that I've done personally yeah I have to say I I just want to say that I really admire respect and encourage that uh it's it's a bit it's different levels in different situations but I see some kind of parallels to my own journey of putting myself on the line and uh putting my reputation my career on martial arts and questioning myself again and again and and giving opening that space for people to eat me alive but also taking the bits and pieces and saying oh actually there's some truth there or why am I having doubts about that and and for me that's been years that a few years down that road it's been such a transformative process which if if I haven't exposed myself I would have never transformed in so quick such quick and efficient ways although as you said like it was painful there were difficult moments I had to deal with but putting myself down the line was was probably the one of the best things I did in my life and what what's interesting too is even these days uh now I'm on this new journey I'm creating a new channel and uh sometimes I already go on record and say that it's it's not an easy path it's a bumpy road you know the easy way would be I already established myself I questioned myself and exposed myself and etc etc on the martial arts journey but also I became comfortable there like I was like for the past few months I was just like I kind of know what to expect and I know what the subjects are and I could keep digging them and kind of clarify them but but I was living a chill life and part of me didn't like that part of me intuitively I felt something is off about that and now when I embarked on this new journey it was there was much uh I thought there will be adversity but there was much more than I thought and part of me panicked I was like holy shit what did I get myself into you know but the other side of me I started to see the potential in there because now I'm again I'm on the line where I have to do my best I have to reevaluate what I think is true and what works and what doesn't work it's like I feel like I'm I had ideas on what works on YouTube per se for for for example and they definitely applied to me on my martial arts journey channel but there were some things I wasn't aware of that I was doing right and now when I'm doing a new channel I'm like why isn't it going so smoothly and then I suddenly realized oh actually look I did that thing good in the chat on my main channel and I didn't even realize that and so just so many insights come from putting yourself on that hard path and while it's not easy a big part of me and especially now since slowly the the kind of the the it's shifting towards the positive direction uh but I can recognize that I'm so grateful that I'm on this path because again I wouldn't have learned so much that I already learned in a few months just by being in that kind of turmoil uh situation so I presume that's uh similar with your journey right well um you know I I started my youtube channel is called Mr Opera and it actually started uh because there was a channel at the time called Mr Opera um that was the foundation for a a kind of um it it was the this the gathering point for this culture of bullies just really awful people who were abusive to a lot of my colleagues and their whole notion is that um all the all the modern singers from today are trash and they're big fans of these old recordings of opera that I have to say I'm also a big fan of these recordings and I don't really care for the new ones um but at the same time I understood from actually being on the path that it doesn't have a lot to do with the singers there's there's some of it okay the performance has changed a little bit of of how we sing but the biggest differences are just the recording technology and the way that that's leveraged to make recordings um and when I saw their channel I was like oh my god it's it's like they start with a good point and and then it's just the bullshit goes from there and they're also doing exactly what you should do if you want the art to suffer even more so we went for a situation from a situation where being an opera singer was like really high paying job with a lot of cultural relevance so you were like a really important person if you were an opera singer and today the job pays a lot less and it's not so culturally relevant and now if you add to that situation oh yeah and you're also going to get trolled really hard by a bunch of Dunning Kruger uh I don't know what's the what's the word for that the Dunning Kruger yeah but someone who embodies a particular effect is a poster child if you will so if you if you step out a little bit and you look at the macro effects the overall effect of what what is going to happen from a channel like this is that the job becomes even more thankless and less attractive and if you keep applying that over time you're going to push the level down even more and at the same time the fans are often people who want to do this job themselves and they're sabotaging themselves with the attitude that they had which is the same attitude I had when I was 22 you know and it's part of the culture I guess yeah I was you know winning the big competition and it's part of the culture part of also being you know I hate to say it but men in our culture are really coddled uh so coddled means uh it's it's like um they don't have pressure testing uh especially in in music so when I was a young artist at at the Metropolitan Opera for instance the women who were my colleagues and my age were much more mature than I was emotionally because uh they weren't treated like they were so special you know they they had to well one they they had to put up with the general aspects of our culture that is less kind to women than it is to men and that's just the way things are um men a man could be you know 300 pounds and it's not a big deal and if a woman is uh 250 pounds that's all anyone's gonna talk about and uh well not all anyone's gonna talk about but it's always gonna it's yeah it's always gonna come up and so and if she's beautiful it's the same thing it's it's like she that's always gonna come up uh and when you're an artist that's really depressing it's really annoying and the the the women I was working with all had this level of maturity that was so much higher than mine at the time um and this this um channel that I started fighting was particularly attractive to young men and so they and they participate in these attacks on often on women they're attracted they're attracted to the culture yeah um and they're also targeted by by the group for a kind of recruitment it's a little bit like if you think about the skinheads or or these kinds of groups there's a certain type they go they go after yeah it's dark stuff they go after these kind of insecure young men who feel like they don't have a place in society yeah yeah and this channel was called mr opera and they're all anonymous yeah that helps yeah and so I got the idea well I want to find out who they are and as I started to get close to their identities they changed the name of their channel um and so they gave it a new name this is opera and I think one of the men guys I was hunting down started to distance himself because anyone who was exposed as being part of this would be basically I mean it would it'd be really hard to show up for work and be like oh yeah by the way I'm the guy who authored that video talking about how you sound like the bg's or whatever yeah right not that any of them could sing like the bg's can which would you know they're just like highly skilled performers um and uh so it looked to me like they were trying to branch off into two channels but in the meantime mr opera was free so I thought oh this will be a mega troll I I renamed my channel mr opera and um I wound up having like a few weird moments where someone they bullied would come after me thinking I was the guy who bullied them oh yeah because of the mistaken identity but my plan was to rehabilitate the name because it was a it was a catchy name and it was it was really associated with bullying and and with hurting people and I knew if I go and and start encouraging people and and trying to you know so I'd go around just just leave messages of encouragement when people did post something on YouTube and they get this and they're like what what mr opera likes me this is shocking yeah never that's that's a cool it's a cool approach it's a cool story yeah at the same time I would be diluting their ability to bully people just by kind of messing with their branding um yeah well um one thing I also wanted to add and ask is usually I recognize that change or an active attempt to make a change most of times comes from a sense of frustration of being dissatisfied you see some type of injustice or you see that something is off and that creates that energy to to do something about it and we kind of spoke uh around that subject of what frustrated you or the dark sides of the music realm or opera singing so but if you would have to kind of narrow it down and crystallize and clarify what that frustration for you was like what what was specifically that what's the core of the frustration that you had which led you to your journey I have to give us some thought um you know I I really that this is kind of hard to talk about but when when I started boxing um the hard part for me wasn't getting hit you know actually like I would get hit and and I'd be really surprised like that doesn't feel so bad right it's not as bad as I thought and I kind of had a thrill from it like I wanted to do it again I like getting punished in the face as well after years of not having that so I I resonate with what you're saying yeah yeah but the first time I hit someone in the face I went home and cried afterwards because it brought up some really intense memories that when I was um when I was a young kid we moved from Canada to the United States and when I arrived I was like a really fit whatever my age was um for for the fourth grade um because in Canada our the culture was a little bit different you know we didn't we didn't have school lunches everyone had to bring their lunch in a brown bag and your mom would give you like healthy stuff to eat and I was very secure in my place socially and so I was a really you know mentally healthy regular kid and a popular kid and then we showed up in the United States and I was the foreign kid and they were feeding us like hamburgers and french fries for lunch and I developed a taste for it I put on a lot of weight and I started to get bullied and my response to being bullied was to become a bully myself and it's it's there's a situation that develops sometimes where you have a a kid that's getting bullied in one instance who becomes a bully in a different instance and it brought all that back for me um and then when I saw these bullies in the way they were operating online it's it's it made like a white hot rage um a very very intense frustration and it was yes about seeing them bully someone else and and it makes me feel compassion for the person getting bullied okay but I understood what they were doing to themselves when they were engaging in that behavior and that made me absolutely I just I said you know I I just couldn't stand watching people do that to themselves because I know in 20 years or something um if they're like me it's all gonna come back or even worse if they're you know if they they're never aware of them of what happened you know and why they could be ruining their lives in ways that they don't even fathom yet um and that's that's exactly that's what it was I think one of the things which I appreciate you saying is it's kind of a mature perspective to because we often as a as a society we tend to judge it's the easiest thing is to judge you know those douchebags are judging other people but then there's people who judge the douchebags but then that's kind of that vicious circle when nothing really evolves but to kind of take that one step forward and interesting enough that's kind of the core philosophy of aikido which not always is communicated well but that's one of the good things I took it took away from it is that maturity to understand that under those conditions you could easily be that person as well that douchebag without even recognizing it and sometimes they don't even realize how much bad negative impact they have towards those people or the world can switch and they may end up in that same spot the next day and there there's so so many parts to this and I think yeah it's it's great to to kind of bring that subject up and to educate everyone not only the people who are getting bullied but also the bullies themselves and interestingly enough I kind of explore that subject a little bit I'm actually enthusiastic to export more but in Lithuania the country I live in and where I'm originally from bullying in schools is a huge problem and I was invited a few times to talk into schools with children and I'm not like necessarily qualified to talk about bullying that's not like really my area of expertise but I you know I gathered my best experience and knowledge from life experience and I felt like what I can give and my intuitive kind of leaning was actually not to talk not as much to the bullied kids kind of a bit about with them as well but but part of me wanted to focus on the bullies and to tell them like look like what the fuck are you doing guys like do you really want this do you realize what impact you have and not to kind of you know be the not to patronize them but to level with them and to try to get them a few steps forward and to make them think and to realize that internally I don't really think that's what they want it's kind of a some sort of dysfunction that they developed because they are not confident or they were traumatized like there's all these levels but to make them think and realize that it's not as simple as I bullied someone and then I feel powerful at the moment and that's the end of the story but there's so much more to it so it's it's kind of a big subject but but yeah I think it's it's great to to bring that to light yeah I feel like it's it's probably like 90% of them are don't they don't really want to be doing this there there is that 10% though or I don't I don't know what I don't know what the number is yeah and and I think it's important to what I do is I actually I try to stop and make a decision am I negotiating here or am I fighting and when it's time to fight I think you should fight and when it's time to negotiate you should negotiate and when it's time to teach you should teach and then this is part of Zen I guess that you you know if you're walking you just walk if you're sitting you just sit yeah and so in that sense it's like this capacity that we have for being a little bit ruthless um we shouldn't imagine that it's just them you know that the the reason maybe it pisses us off is because we have that same capacity uh and I'm not sure it's necessarily so that you should never use it you know I I think that there's there's just is a question of timing and when you're using it to help your insecurities then that's really dangerous but if you're using if you're fighting to defend someone or something like that you should do that well you know that's maybe controversial no I I'm with you I can I can see that and uh oh there's one thing one moment where you kind of mentioned in the beginning of the conversation and it was on the top of my mind that idea that uh if you can be a peacemaker if you're confident in your own self like if you know how to hurt people not just like if we're talking about especially like physical level if you know that you could you know break bones and so on that actually gives you also the capacity to be a better peacemaker if you don't use it from a dark side because you're you're powerful enough to come in and to you know say we're not going to do this and and you can use that that same power in a constructive way it's not all bad and I think that's where uh again I don't want to go too much to martial arts but that's where Aikido guys fail is they don't have really any level of power and they are trying to be the peacemakers but but a friend of mine and a colleague who's who's actually in both realms the Aikido realm and the combat sports I think he's the first one who said that to me that you can't be a pacifist if you don't know how to be a warrior if you can't do real war because if you can't do war you're not really a pacifist you're it's not your it's not your decision to be a pacifist you are being sorry yeah it's it's just like you don't have a choice and that's why you're peaceful and kind and calm and you know and all of that but if you could kill someone literally which combat sports people actually can do like you can choke a person out and actually that's reality I know some people that I know that they could kill me in 20 seconds and I could not do anything about that but oftentimes those guys are the nicest guys I know and I think part of it comes because they know they could kill you but they choose not to and they don't need to prove anything to you and and so on but if they would need to kill you they would you know they they are the ones who like they know like if they will have to use force they will use it and force and I think that's also a line of thought I inherited from Matt Thornton where he he's he's not necessarily saying in my understanding that violence is a bad thing that and that's it there's certain people who do not understand any other language than violence like there's certain people that the only thing that will stop them is violence that's the only language they understand and if you're gonna try to talk to them you'll be nice and you'll be civilized they will destroy you but if if that's where you need to sometimes be the ruthless violent person yourself and there are appropriate times for that so I think if I understand your line thought I think I'm with you there and the guys you're talking about also are it's like this they're the safest ones to spar with the safest ones to roll with because they're going to have the capacity for showing you your mistake in a in a way that sticks you'll really understand oh yeah my legs aren't working right now because I left myself completely open over and over again okay I get it but another guy in the gym who's not quite at that level might really hurt you you know so he might break your rib or something because he he doesn't have the that same control um and that leaves you able to you know not hesitate you can hit someone twice as hard as they hit you when they were just probing and and and then they understand okay don't hit this guy uh and that gives you an opportunity if you watch their eyes and I'm thinking more about socially um you know when people are hitting people um but if you're that guy who knows how to handle that and they come for you and you show them that it's really not a good idea and you watch their eyes normally they start scanning the room immediately for the next person and if you watch to see who they zeroed in on you you can just go stand next to that person it's it's really you know it's that simple and um the the only dilemma I have is that it's not a dilemma but it's it's a little bit depressing I guess that it doesn't fix anything uh you can maybe protect two or three people in the room or and and even if the whole room starts to act like a team and not let anybody become the you know the sick sheep or the the the sick animal in the herd that gets taken by the predator that predator is just going to find someone outside the room elsewhere in their life and that's that's it sometimes I feel like it's like it's just all hopeless you know you can't really do anything to fix anything you just move the problem over but I don't know I think um I I do realize and agree that sometimes it feels hopeless but I think that's probably why you said sometimes it feels hopeless because it's not and you know that's that's being on that whole realm of being a critical thinker and criticizing or or kind of questioning publicly some of the subjects currently in the martial arts realm and getting a lot of crap for that also because it's been a few years I also got some really positive stories and and some of them were which were really inspiring to myself personally where somebody would reach out to me and they write me an email of saying that actually they initially hated my guts you know they they couldn't stand me and and and and they were trying to bash me to pieces but eventually they started to think you know what maybe there is something there and and after a couple years they actually transformed and and changed their mindset and even you know apologized for whatever they said before but initially like when you meet them at that initial stage of cognitive distance where they hate your guts it can feel hopeless it can feel like holy crap nothing is changing here but but then sometimes it just needs time like the transformation that's kind of what I just told to myself the transformation very few people I think have the capacity and the the strength to change on the spot usually people need time you know even if you like clash and you have a huge like I hate you I hate you and you're stupid and then it feels like nothing changed nothing happened still afterwards there's a chance there's an opportunity for that person to think and be like you know maybe I was wrong and you and probably a little never tell you you're never going to even hear about that but it doesn't mean that didn't change so I think it's it's important to kind of recognize that side of things too yeah and in my life when I've had these kinds of moments where I realized the person that I was hating was really just trying to help me it's usually not something that person did it's something someone else did so it's a little bit like well it is karma but um it's a someone someone else might be kind to me or it might be that I heard somebody else or something like that but some some other event causes me to go back in time and revisit what someone else had told me and I start to think you know that guy who is probably right um so that actually that makes me feel good that you yeah you know it's interesting because I do remind myself that I do try to consciously remind that myself all the time and especially these days with again I keep mentioning but it's you know the the current process I'm going through my my personal journey of starting a new project is uh in terms of specialties uh I'm so used on the martial arts journey channel to get a lot of views and to see people comment and there's a conversation going and and the feedback is quite quick comparatively I still don't know anything and so on but but I get that kind of feedback feedback loop but with a new journey I'm publishing stuff and things are taking their time for people to the way I interpret it to for people to trust me and to and to open themselves up and to say what they think and how they feel and it takes time to to experience those transformations and the views are way lower than I'm used to but I have to remind myself all the time and to say that you know the fact that nobody commented let's say on that specific video doesn't mean that did not impact someone or if it's like 100 views instead of 10 000 views it doesn't mean out of that 100 views that there's no maybe there's that one person who listened to that and that was like a crucial moment for him and maybe that didn't that person even told me that didn't even tell me that but it doesn't mean it didn't happen and the confidence that I have of seeing that to myself and not only just you know making myself believe but actually just reminding myself that it's true because of being in numerous situations in the past and even like through this journey already there are sometimes when there's no initial feedback but there's some moments where I get that message I get that email and somebody's like oh wow that was so great and it took a while for me to learn about that but it happened even without my knowledge so I know that those transformations happen it's just as I said I keep have to remind myself don't expect to always be rewarded and to always learn about that that don't always expect to get the feedback just trust it you know and trust the process it's it's important for myself to remind and remember as well well thanks for reminding me because I yeah I do tend to get down about that sometimes not all the time it's it's like it really it's what you mentioned about being tired and I mean that that just really has a lot to do with it it's like when I'm physically tired I'm spiritually tired and there's no um yeah it's it's all one thing I guess yeah just one second I'm I'm gonna grab my my hoodie because I'm I'm jealous of your I'm starting to get chilly and I'm jealous that you're wearing a hoodie it's a mushroom themed hoodie nice seem to be fond of mushrooms from what I say my my my hobby is collecting mushrooms and so I have I have like a massive collection in the other room of dried mushrooms fun gourmet wild mushrooms and stuff and that's there's another one of it's another one of the disciplines that have really helped me actually so it's kind of like you know when you when you go out picking mushrooms you you're kind of taking your life into your own hands because there are certain mistakes you could make that would be really deadly and when you want to identify the thing there's no subjective truth going on it's it's everything is completely objective you know it's that or it's not that there's no um but oddly yeah but oddly if you go into the groups that are centered around mushroom hunting and mushroom identification you see the same damn things of people who haven't they don't really know what they're talking about and they will argue with a very qualified and reputable expert that no it's not that because that totally doesn't look like that and they've invented their own way of identifying mushrooms well I just wanted to there's kind of a line of thought that we were still on and I just wanted to add a couple more points to that that whole journey I just wanted to emphasize and partly because as I said you know I'm going from my own process myself right now too but one of the books I read which was actually very timely it's called The Dip by a very well-known marketing expert Steph Gordon and it's a short book I actually bought the audio book it's like an hour and a half so I was like luckily it cost only five dollars but I was like oh that's it but but it's very good it's like a very good message in a short format and the message is and he's like again like top top level expert of marketing and entrepreneurship and he says that every path that's worth going through especially in like establishing yourself in a career or or a business that there is going to be a dip like it's an inherent part and the dip basically is like initially you start and you're enthusiastic and it's interesting and it's new but then you get the dip where suddenly everything starts to feel like it's still and nothing moves and nothing changes and you're kind of doing things but that there's no effect and when I read the book why I resonated with it so much is because I I've looked back at my my journeys I did like I took on a couple of big challenges on my life like becoming like you don't structure against the odds than the martial arts journey channel and I remember that there were those dips I was just I just got so comfortable with being successful by the end of it that I kind of forgot about those dips but they were there and now that I'm taking on a new journey I'm like oh it's just the dip and and it's nice to hear from someone expertise with expertise to say that it's it's a part of the process you cannot avoid it it's not a thing it's not a reason to stop you know you have to push through and and and it's it was also cool what he was saying in that book that the bigger the dip the more it means you will get the reward later because people and I agree with him 100% because people we as people we don't like to get hurt we don't like to suffer and usually we avoid places where they're suffering and the dip is painful it's painful to live through that process but then that means a lot of people will never go down that path a lot of people will drop away and those few who will go through the other side they will and they will suddenly get going up again that's where significant things will happen that's when exceptional things will happen and and and obviously it applies to me myself but when I'm thinking about your journey and and your work that you're doing right now publicly maybe there is a dip right now you know kind of having that adversity and resistance from from the status quo but also I have a feeling that you're personally I have a feeling that you're in the right path and and there's something really amazing down the road already there are signs of success at least from what I hear but yeah for me it just feels like oh yeah there's there's some good things coming well at least in my opinion but I just felt like I can't skip and not say that well I feel one one thing that's that's maybe going to help is that uh it's you know it's I almost feel compelled to do this anyway I I know that I could step away anytime um but I don't feel like I actually can there's just something um you know I get tired and then but then I wait a couple days and and I just I can't stay away from it um and at the same you know and people ask me sometimes how can I get into the career because they're not thinking about the youtube stuff that doesn't impress them like uh sub sub 900 subscribers isn't going to get you any questions about how to do it um but they find out that I'm on stage singing singing opera which is already it's it's hard to get into the business right um and my dip in in opera was it led to living in my car so things got so bad at some point that um you know I had no work and I was I was like picking mushrooms and selling them to restaurants to try to get by but that that was like a three-year dip in in my opera singing and I had to start over with my training but without a teacher so just by myself I had to come up with a way to train myself and then train myself and started looking after my physical fitness and then eventually my spiritual fitness and all these things um or emotional psychological we can say it's um however people want to conceive of that my heart uh and people will say like well how how can I get into the business because what they want to hear is like oh yeah just go to this place and do these auditions and follow this path that's already laid out for you and everything's going to be fine and what I tell them is just listen if you're here just long enough they have to give you a job and come to think about it basically that's just just survive through the dip and keep going and and I tell them like don't don't think about which which teacher or coach you're going to find to spend your money on yeah use them if they're when they're really helping you but I tell them plan for a bunch of lean years and find any way to just hang on uh especially in Germany I tell them because the the german uh system of of state-funded arts is is kind of like the center of the upper business there's more going on there than anywhere and so for someone from America uh they might be expecting to like show up and sing so well that they won't have to learn german you know everyone will speak to me in english and and uh they come with 90-day visas it's an automatic visa for for americans yeah we have a shengen visa and and they expect that they'll be able to just pull it off like that but everyone is coming for these 90 days and and so that's completely saturated and if you were that good you'd already be getting all the jobs anyway you know it's that's not you it's not me it's not you we're just normal people who are gonna have to persevere um so I tell them find any way to be here longer than that do any job you can and just you just keep going the difference isn't going to be who's who's the best singer today it's just who's going to last and that's how it's so so basically get through the dip and yeah it's funny you remind me of uh if we keep bringing up martial arts there's uh coach chris howter uh kind of legendary brazilian jiu-jitsu coach who's the coach of nap orton and I think I don't want to mess this up by by saying the wrong word but I think that the phrase goes that it's not who wins but it's who survives you know that's that's that's that's the real deal that's like and kind of that relates to that as well it's not about having that victory it's about being long enough in the game and and again that's that that's very relatable for me myself as well right now and there's a few books I I'm trying trying to find solutions for reading the best books out there and one of the books I I read actually we're planning to talk a bit about youtube off record later so I'll say that one again but really good book crush it the best so far I read about social media kind of creating a presence in social media but then one of the points by the guy who's considered to be the best social media expert in the world his message is very similar it's like don't focus on the results in the beginning like especially like it's it's a parallel I think that that applies like when you post a video on youtube per se and I guess you went through the same yourself already it's like nobody watches it you know it's like maybe a couple of people you know but it's like it's just so vast there that even like what's funny is like even if it's the best video in the world you can there's a small percentage chance that it's going to go viral but usually it's like even if it's like a super good video like and I'll be a bit bold here but like on my new channel I'm still kind of trying to find the best voice and how to communicate my message and so on so it's a trial and error process but some of the videos I'm publishing I know they're like quality stuff you know like some of them I'm like I look at them like no this is like badass like this like this could be like on a high level channel and it would own the audience but there's no audience yet and so it doesn't nobody cares that the video is good you don't have that recognition or that relationship with the audience there's no community so it's like you're not getting the views and Gary V the writer of the book he pretty much says that as well he's like don't focus on the views don't expect to get the views early and don't think that that's a signifying moment to tell you whether you're doing right or wrong and there's a couple of good phrases that I think are very very valuable that I took as well it's like he says until you posted at least 50 videos don't even like until then that there's like you don't even have a reference point whether you're going on the right path or not you have to put in the work and kind of his message is you put on the blinders and you just continue to develop relationships like network and put out content you just grind and grind and grind and you don't look back and you don't look sideways it's like is this working it's like you just do it and after a while maybe you can change your course a little bit you know you can make some some fine tune men's but but it's like I think people are too much focused on the whether if it works or not and then also to uh my again my girlfriend she she's friends with friends with singers and I noticed that pattern with especially singers who want to make it they publish a single song you know on youtube get very few views and they make they come to conclusion oh that means I suck you know that means my music is bad that means nobody cares and then it's not for me and I understand how those people feel I can relate to them it's it's a tough journey but but that's not a like that doesn't tell anything about you and people focus too much in that it's like I failed once I feel twice I feel failed three times that means it's not for me that's the conclusion that came to and that's not it you know that there's there's that's we're not talking about that you should I agree with you 100% like it's all about grinding grinding grinding and eventually you will make it if you you know make the right fine tune men's but but yeah I think it's kind of the same subject yeah and I feel like if you're you know singing is about communication so it's it's about like finding a relationship with someone and and in my mind it's cooperative with with the audience so there's there's only one side of this that I control and I can't do the audience's job for it and it's same and I have to trust that they are they are doing their job and if I if I put myself out there okay fine and you know it's opera it's not it's never gonna be um some kind of viral revolution but I can make quality connections with with actual people and that's it's extremely satisfying it's just um I don't know it's it's like it's like hitting a golf ball just right or something like this I'm with you there too and just I think it's probably my last thought from the books I usually don't like to quote too much but it definitely made an impression on me and and again Seth Godin in one of his books I read numerous a bunch of them recently but one of them he tells a story of his friend asking him how do I market my new book and he kind of gives this controversial idea but I think the message is really awesome he says sell it to one person it's like if you can sell your book to one person and get him enthusiastic about it kind of get him hyped about it then it means sooner or later down the road you will sell more books and you know they will spread and and then with bigger marketing strategy you will reach more people it's just a question of time but if you can't sell it to that single person then probably you're in trouble and and I I like that idea too and it's kind of what you still have to like I think you know keep grinding it's not like a one-time thing works works or not and that's it but I remind myself that to myself too is like when I release a video when I'm used to bigger views now I get less views but then that's not the thing but if that's not the the point of attention that that should be there if even if one person gets enthusiastic about that video and somebody's like oh that's such a good video part of the mind can be like oh it's just one person like it means nothing but no actually it's the opposite if you got one person invested into your video into your song into your you know content then that means sooner or later more people will go along as well and I don't want to put too much you know stuff about my girlfriend she's not in the video and it's best not to talk you know about people when they're not here but that I think it's a valuable lesson and I reflected about her journey she did publish a video clip of like a really well-made good song and everything and she got a decent amount of views and a handful of people who are super enthusiastic about it but she also for a while she was famous in our country because of those you know kind of American Idol things and and and then she she looked and she was like oh it's a failure you know and I wasn't smart enough at that day to say no look there's like 50 people who are enthusiastic but she was expecting you know 5000 people to be enthusiastic and then for her it was a failure but actually in reality it wasn't it was the wrong point of attention so I think it's it's important to scale down and and to look at those small victories and and as you said they can be so gratifying like if you're doing what you're passionate about and you get that one victory and and you're humble enough to receive it then you can create the hype that you need to keep going versus versus if you're all about numbers and and big time success straight off the bat probably you're gonna have trouble so well I'm pretty much ready to wrap our conversation but the very last question I wanted to ask it's kind of a challenge question which I like to ask for the very end the whole conversation we had if you would have to summarize it in a short version what would your summary be of the conversation I guess it would be that comfortable doesn't make a change you know we're talking about pressure testing and we're talking about this and that and and that that feeling of irritation from from wanting something to change and I think today a lot of people expect to to be comfortable and change things at the same time and they freak out when they're not comfortable and you should throw a party instead you know you should you should kind of celebrate that and it's it's I'm not gonna say it's not a big deal it is a big deal it means like you're I think it means you're doing something right and we've we've gone so far being comfortable I think with with our with our whole culture and society and I think we're starting to see more and more people realizing that that's not so helpful and that if you don't change eventually time is going to catch up with you and so I guess it would be that that you know comfortable doesn't change anything cool and the very last part before going off record people who wanted to find you the group or your online lessons like what's what's the contact point post the links the vocalist chat hub is a that's a free group on on facebook something I guess we could call it co-learning so there's there are a bunch of really really brilliant experts who hang out there but you're also there just to just to be together with other people who are engaged in learning about their voices and singing you can find me on the mr opera channel on youtube and and if you if you go there you can find me on skype and and you know various other places I'm easy to find on facebook my you know I use my my real name and I can we can put my skype address or whatever I don't mind taking those calls and it's classical singing so it's not that many of them anyway nice well good so before we go off record I want to say thank you again I personally really admire and I'm very appreciative when you get together with a person who's open to talk about you know the ups and downs I think I keep seeing on my new journey that we're so focused on the positives it's like oh look at me I'm successful here and this was good for me and and we all have shit in our lives but not everyone has the the courage and openness to talk about it so I think I really appreciate when we can have those conversations I think people who will have the mental focus to listen for the conversation will benefit from it very much so thank you for that from from me too I mean thank you so much I like your channel the the okay I know I know we're moving on to a new thing now but that's still there though a martial arts journey you had a huge impact on my life and I've spoken to many other people who when I when I bring up I I might say like oh you should check out martial arts journey just for basic basic thoughts about what pressure testing is and you know a compelling story and they go oh and they go oh yeah I know him yeah and so you I think you've really inspired a lot of people and I mean I mean you got the views and everything you probably know about that but when I talk to people one-on-one it's it's often it's the same thing it's like a big change in the way that they thought about themselves and the world and what it means to want to be good at something you know and yeah so that's a real privilege for me I would say thank you actually really appreciate saying that I think I think sometimes people presume it's like ah you know he knows but to be honest it's always if I hear that it means a lot to me so so thank you for sharing that