The people you sweat with are the people you’re gonna bond with. Especially if they’re trying to kick your ass.

I had this idea when I was younger that I wanted to be in comedy. But I don’t want to do the starving artist thing. I like food. And training.

I spent many many days a week just because it’s so much better than not going. Even if I wasn’t training for a fight, I would be in fighting shape because it’s either that or your life is terrible and boring. . . . Fighting is a remarkably clarifying thing.

What I needed from that class, from Krav Maga, from fighting at that point of my life was not to learn the techniques of fighting. I needed someone to say, “All that anger and aggression that has been in you for your entire life, and for the sake of civilization and your own notion of yourself to be a good human being, stuffed away and pretended wasn’t there and thought you could sublimate in alcohol and sex and words, you now have permission to let all of that out today.” And I don’t remember anything about that first class. I remember being extraordinarily exhausted and that we did knees. All I know is I left there feeling like something that needed to come out that I had never allowed to come out finally came out.

I kind of knew that I was a coward for most of my life. So the thrill that I got from first going to Krav Maga classes and then learning how to spar and then realizing fully in the cage was a wiping out of that lingering fear that my physical timidity was the dominant aspect of my life, or at least of my physical life.

I recommend that everybody spar some. [After my first sparring match], I was just standing there with my entire concept of myself as a fighter just shredded in a very good way. I came out of that being like “oh, I don’t know shit.”