A male chimp is more than enough to kill any human on the planet, including Gordon Ryan.
So Gordon Ryan, fighting a chimp, a good size, no, a thousand times, how many times does he win?
He loses a thousand times.
It's not even competitive.
It's not even remotely competitive.
Do you think he will disagree?
No.
Do you think anyone will disagree?
Anyone?
Yeah, moron.
The following is a conversation with John Donahar, his third time in this podcast.
He's widely considered to be one of the greatest minds in martial arts history.
This is a Lex Friedman podcast.
The supported, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's John Donahar.
The ADCC is the premier submission grappling tournament in the world.
We just had it a couple of weeks ago.
We saw many demonstrations of greatness from athletes you coached.
But a year ago, the team and you were at a very low point.
Take me through that journey.
What was the lowest point?
We had a very, very tight team for many years, which began in New York City.
During the peak of COVID, training in New York became very difficult to sustain.
So most of the team despised the city of New York.
I was the only person in the group that liked living in New York.
I think part of the problem was that I was the only one who actually lived in Manhattan.
The others had to commute to New York.
And there's a world of difference between living in New York and commuting to New York.
So most of them had a very negative view of New York City.
That was compounded by COVID, when even the basic active training became very, very difficult.
So everyone decided they want to leave.
So there was a prospect of a complete break up between myself and the team,
or I would have to leave New York.
It was a difficult decision for me to make as I'd lived in New York for 30 years.
I had built my life there and had most of my friends and associates
that I know here in America, New Yorkers.
So I thought, you know, these guys have been incredibly loyal to me as students.
So I should also be loyal to them, of course.
So I decided that if they wanted to leave, I would go with them.
We decided to go to Puerto Rico because there was a private gym where we could train through the COVID period.
I personally wanted to go to Texas.
I thought that Texas was a better place for the team to go.
But many of the students, including senior students like Gordon Ryan, Craig Jones,
had been to Puerto Rico and stayed with one of the head officials of ADCC, Mo Jassum.
So they loved their experience in Puerto Rico and almost everyone wanted to go down there.
So I tried to explain to them, there's a little difference between going to a place for vacation versus living there.
But that didn't have any effect.
So the majority of the decision was made to go to Puerto Rico.
In Puerto Rico, the conditions in which the team lived changed significantly.
When you're in New York, New York is such a big city that if there's any
tension between team members, and there will be in a competitive sport where everyone's fighting each other,
you can kind of bury them in the size of the city because there's so many distractions in New York.
You come in, you do your workout, you go outside, and it's New York City.
In Puerto Rico, we lived in a very small, local town, Dorado, and most of the athletes were living with each other.
And so unlike New York, where there was always a break, you trained together, but when training was over,
you went about your life in New York and New Jersey, with everyone living in very close proximity to each other.
Any tensions got magnified because there was no relief from them.
You didn't get to get away from people.
If you had a problem with someone on the mat, well, now you had to live with them for the rest of the day in the morning.
You had to live with them for the rest of the day in the night, and this goes on for long periods of time.
So I believe it had the effect of magnifying whatever tensions there were.
In particular, there was a family tension between two brothers, which magnified over time.
And so often is the case, you get two brothers growing up, one older, one younger, and the younger one
wants to grow and feels somewhat like a young tree underneath a bigger tree.
And sometimes people just need this space.
So there was some unhappiness.
As a younger brother, I can understand.
Yeah.
Yeah.
As a little tree that had to grow up under a bigger tree.
Yeah.
So...
Fuck the big tree.
There's a lot of aggression I have to work on, I'm sorry.
Unresolved family issues coming out here, Mike.
That's your turn.
I'm just kidding.
I love you.
He doesn't, he's lying.
So as time went by, these tensions started increasing.
They came to a point where it was difficult for them even to be in the training room together.
At that point, you're starting to...
Once training takes a hit, then you got us out to address these.
The attempts at reconciliation fell through, and a decision was made to move to Texas.
I wanted everyone to move as a team.
What I wanted to do was keep the team together as long as the period leading up to ADCC,
so that everyone could train together.
So I said, okay, there's problems, but let's just tough it out.
One year, we move to Texas, let's just go there and keep unity.
If some people don't want to train with other people, that's fine.
But I believe that the team would be weakened by breaking apart.
I believe that they had an excellent rapport as training partners.
Their technical level was increasing dramatically.
Many of the younger athletes are really starting to come into their own and really develop well.
And so my take on it was, okay, if there's problems,
so be it.
But let's all just stay together until ADCC 2022 was a unified team.
Go out, prepare yourselves as best you can, and then after that, we can make a decision as to
whether we break up or not.
But that was rejected, and the team split.
They moved to Austin.
We'd made prior arrangements to go to a local gym, and they took that gym,
and we were left with no gym and more or less homeless in Austin.
A year out from ADCC.
Yes, this is one year out.
So roughly three-quarters of the competitive athletes left in one week.
So at that point, that was probably the lowest point, because at that point, not only did we
not have a place to train, we had very few training partners for the few that had remained.
And the main athlete in the team, Gordon Ryan, was going through a particularly bad spell with his
unresolved stomach issues, and there was doubt as to whether or not he could compete
at all, and was actively thinking about retiring from the sport.
So maybe not compete ever again, potentially.
Yeah, so that was a time when it was like, man, the whole program seems to be dead in
the water at this point.
Most of the competitive athletes were gone.
There were very few training partners for the few that remained, and the main athlete around
whom the group had initially bonded was seemingly out of action, possibly permanently.
Where is your mind?
What were you mentally?
My thinking is everything bad passes in time.
I've had a lot of bad points in my life.
So my life experiences, whenever things seem dark, have patience.
Time will ultimately cure most ills, not all of them, but most of them.
And I'm confident that if you give me a new crop of students, I can produce magic,
but it's going to take time.
So that confidence was in part a source of strength?
Yes, I wasn't confident that ADCC 2022 would go well because we only had one year without a gym,
and with a team that was completely broken up to even attempt to get into ADCC.
So things looked a little grim, but I was confident, given enough time,
I would get in a new group of students and work.
As it turns out, one of the demonstration partners that I used during filming for
instructional videos, who lives in Boston, John Carlo Badoni,
was interested in the idea of coming down and training.
But he'd always felt like it would be difficult because there were people in his
way class who were already there, and he felt it would be awkward.
But now that they had left, that opened up an area for him.
So he was the first one to come down.
He moved from Boston to Austin, Texas.
I began teaching at a local school.
It was rather like going back into my earliest days in Juditsu.
I went from teaching at the Big Hensel Gracie Academy to a tiny school in Puerto Rico,
and now an even smaller school in Austin, Texas.
And locals would come in and train, and I would watch every day,
teaching there twice a day, seven days a week.
And I would see people come in and train, and I would say,
this guy has some potential, or this guy has some potential.
And I would recruit people and bring them to another gym where they would train with the
professionals. And if they proved adept and hardworking and someone who can work well in a
team, they would stay and build their skills.
As time went by, more and more such people started coming in, and we had some remarkable
people like a young South African purple belt, Luke Griffith came in.
He had lost in the European trials for ADCC, and he was down on his luck.
He came into Austin.
He did a show against a local purple belt and lost again.
So he was feeling bad about his performance in his future.
And he came in, and I thought he was a lovely kid who worked hard and trained well.
So he became one of the main training partners.
He was similar size to Gordon, so I encouraged him to train with Gordon whenever he could.
And more and more people started coming in to train under that kind of basis.
One day, I got a text from Gordon who was filming an instructional video in Boston.
He said, hey, Nicholas Marigali was training at this.
He was shooting video at the same time as me, and we just did some grappling.
He's a really nice guy, and he's literally never trained without a ghee before.
He's, for those of you who don't know, Nicholas Marigali is one of the outstanding
ghee jiu jitsu competitors of his generation.
He has an amazing game and is a superstar with the ghee side of the sport, but had never even
trained without a ghee once in his life.
So his first ever no ghee training session is with Gordon Ryan, the best no ghee competitor of all
time. And I remember Gordon texting me saying, he's really talented.
He's a nice guy and he wants to come down to Texas and train.
So yeah, sounds great.
So over time, just more and more people started coming in.
And I told everyone, you guys are at a severe disadvantage.
Like you've got very little time to get ready for ADCC.
Luke wasn't even in ADCC.
He had to win trials.
Same for Dan Manisoya. He had failed at trials and needed to get a win to even get into ADCC.
So around this time, a doctor suggested by Mo Jassam, who had himself had stomach issues
earlier in his life, began working with Gordon Ryan.
And Mo is the organizer of ADCC.
Yes.
Probably people who don't know.
Yeah. He's the head organizer.
He was able to get Gordon Ryan not cured, but significantly better than he was before.
And to a level where Gordon could train up to five to six days a week.
And that was a big improvement on what was going on during the end of the time in Puerto Rico.
So things started moving.
We had a core group of athletes training at a local gym, which was very, very generously
offered to us by the head manager of Roka Sunglasses, a company here in Austin, Texas.
They have a private corporate gym, which we were able to train in.
And these talented youngsters from around the globe essentially came together.
And I said, you guys are going to have to train harder than you've ever trained in your lives,
because you've got less time to get ready for this than anyone.
And you're going to be going up against people potentially who know exactly what I teach,
because I've been teaching them a lot longer than I've been teaching you,
in addition to the other best people in the world.
So it was an incredible challenge for them.
And I must say, all of them gave literally everything they had.
Everything I asked for, they gave twice as much.
And we had a crazy training schedule as many as three classes per day.
I know that sounds easy, three classes a day, but try doing it sometime.
These classes are not your average classes.
These are preparation for ADCC.
They're both mentally and physically.
Very, very hard.
And we had many people come in and try to train alongside us.
And they fell off by the side of the road within days.
Forget about weeks, months, or a full year of this.
I gave a very abbreviated set of skills for the athletes.
I chopped everything down to what I believed were the most essential skills.
Anything that wasn't essential to ADCC preparation was just pushed aside.
And they had to focus almost entirely on ADCC, with one exception.
I'll come to that soon, over the period of their training here in Austin.
So it was compacted by time and also by the breadth of skill that I taught.
Everything was just purely for ADCC preparation.
In a very short period of time, Dan Manasoyo and Luke Griffith and Oliver Taza
all won European trials and got into ADCC.
Nicholas Miragali was already a superstar, so he was invited.
But he had to show himself.
So we enrolled him in local shows here in Austin, where he had his first three no-geam matches.
And with each match, you could see progress being made.
And so that convinced the ADCC people, okay, he's good enough to compete.
He ended up winning decisively a match against one of the greatest American
grapplers of all time, Rafael Lovato.
And this was a clear sign that his skill level and no-ge was sufficient to justify an invite.
And by the way, Lovato, an incredible set of matches in this ADCC.
Yes, that was actually very impressive.
And retired, which is really impressive and heartbreaking as well.
But if you go out, that's a good way to go out.
Indeed.
So there was this long and tough preparation, and it was compounded by the fact that as Gordon
felt better, he felt a need to build up his own competitive record prior to ADCC,
because he'd been inactive for so long with his stomach issue.
So he proposed one of the most ambitious fight camps that I've ever heard of in grappling,
which was he would take on the current WNO champion, Pedro Mourinho.
Who's number one is WNO.
And also, I believe the current no-ge world champion and IBJJ here as a tune-up match,
as a warm-up match.
Then he would fight his old nemesis, Felipe Pena, the only man who submitted Gordon at
Black Belt and had defeated Gordon in an ADCC match in 2017, and then ADCC itself.
So there was going to be three big high-profile matches back-to-back and very different rule sets.
So WNO was a 15-minute match.
The fight with Felipe Pena was no time limit, which is a very different format to compete in,
and then ADCC.
So we had to drag out a 14-week camp covering three matches with three different rule sets,
which went in diametrically opposite directions.
And the entire team had to go through all of this over this 14-week period,
in addition to the previous year that they had been working hard.
There was a further complication in the midst of all this.
Nicholas Miragali had to go to the GEE World Championships,
and we had to throw an extra morning class for that to help him get ready.
Nicholas went on to win the open weight gold medal in the GEE competition,
and then the next day had to come back to Texas and begin his ADCC preparation.
It was a crazy, crazy time.
But they all came through it so well.
I'm immensely proud of what they did.
And shockingly, in the space of less than 12 months,
we went from rock bottom to having a more successful ADCC team performance
than we did the previous ADCC.
It was, in fact, the most successful team performance of the event.
And it's testimony to how hard those young men worked in the course of less than a year to prepare themselves.
If we can just linger on the low point,
is it heartbreaking to you that the so-called Donna Hart death squad split,
or the team, as it was originally called, split?
You know, we live a short life on this earth,
and you put so much of your love and work into this team,
and everybody put in the work.
Does it break your heart?
It was a sad time, yeah, it was.
It was, you know, I'm not a particularly emotional person,
but it was an emotional time for everyone.
It had an element of tragedy insofar as not only was it a team break-up,
it was also a family break-up, which is much more serious.
I do believe that in time,
even the most intense family break-ups can be reconciled.
And I also believe that once dialogue begins, people will remember
just how easy it was for us to get along and how tight we were for many, many years.
It's so easy to let a minute of anger destroy 10 years of friendship.
But there's also the weight of those 10 years.
Like, when I ran into the old squad members at ADCC,
we got along like a house on fire.
It was like we never had a problem.
So a house on fire is a good thing?
Yes, yes.
Sorry, that's a New Zealand expression, yeah.
Yeah, that definitely could have gone the other way, right?
Only a New Zealander would say that is a good thing, yeah.
So there's, I still believe, you know, in time, things will be fine,
but there was an element where, you know, youngsters need to grow.
And sometimes, think about it this way, from the athlete's perspective,
there's definitely a generational problem.
I'm much older than my students, okay?
And the years and the viewpoint that I have is a reflection of the time in which I grew up.
And they're from a completely different generation, with a completely different world view.
It's got to be hard from the athlete's perspective,
when you're training seven days a week, and you're getting very, very good.
You're beating everyone that's getting put in front of you.
You're losing very, very rarely, and it's always a tough competitive match when you do.
Everyone around you is calling you a superstar.
And you look phenomenal.
You check social media.
Everyone's saying you're a god on the mat.
And then you come into the gym, and there's some old guy telling you you're not good enough.
And every day, it's like, what does this guy want from me?
How hard do I have to work?
Like, you're not good enough.
Like, I want you to be the best in the world.
If I want you to be good, I want you to be great.
And all of your friends are telling you, hey, man, you're incredible.
You submit me so easily to do this.
And then this old guy's just saying, no, you got to get better.
You got to work more.
You're not working hard enough.
At some point, you're going to be like, you know what?
Fuck this old guy.
Like, it's tough.
You know, mentally, I get why, you know, they left.
When I was 20 years old, I didn't get along with authority figures at all.
And to have someone telling you, you've always got to work that little bit harder.
No, your skillset's not complete.
You still need this, this and this.
When you're already doing very, very well and far better than all but a tiny,
tiny percentage of people.
And then you've got this guy just constantly telling you, no, more has to be done.
You're not there yet.
I can, you know, of course, I understand.
Let me just enjoy this more.
It's always a choice in life.
You can be the best you possibly can.
Or you can go a route where you just get to enjoy life a little more.
You do other things, you know, like there's more to life than just the inside of a gym
and learning how to do a better heel hook or a better double leg.
So of course, you know, years go by, you want to try the things and you have to make this
choice in life between extreme excellence versus being incredibly good, but maybe just
enjoying my life a little more.
It's so interesting that incredibly good is the hard thing to deal with.
I saw like when Kayla Harrison won her first gold medal at the Olympics, you know, to go
back to the gym and to trust again, maybe the old man, you're being too questioning yourself,
but to trust the old man.
So Jimmy Page on Jimmy Page, you're senior in that case to say, okay, we're going to go
back to this grind and there's still a path to improvement, there's still a lot to grow
and still have the humility, even though you've just demonstrated greatness.
So really good is just the stepping stone to true greatness.
That's really tough for athletes.
Like winning is actually very difficult.
Gold medals are very difficult.
Plus there's the personal stuff of depression that comes with that, which is you give so
much of yourself to trying to win that.
And once you do, there's a lot of personal stuff you have to deal with, which is like,
what do I want from life?
To understand what is exactly one of my chasing?
Is it just winning or is it some bigger picture of excellence that's beyond just winning?
So that's all of that mixed up together.
And then when you have to be as a team really close together,
there's the personal relationships, all of that gets exacerbated.
Do you think the team ever gets back together?
I think there's definitely a chance of that.
Right now, I think they have an excellent team themselves and they're doing very well.
They had an excellent performance at ADCC.
So there's not a need for them to come to us.
It's not like they lack anything.
They still remember everything I taught them.
They still coach and teach with the same methodology that I taught them.
So I don't think they have any need to do so.
If they did, it would be because they wanted to.
I still think many of the same personality conflicts that originated the conflict would
reemerge currently if they started training together.
By the way, to pile on the compliments, they have really nice merch to the t-shirts.
They're just excellent.
What have you learned from that process about how to have a team with personal conflicts?
Do you have to deal with these giant egos as well?
Yeah.
Because the ego is in part a superpower too.
So you don't want to suppress egos.
You don't want to suppress egos.
I always laugh when people say, leave your ego at the door.
What do you think drives competition?
Like if you want to be good at anything in life, you've got to have an ego.
No, I don't believe it's good or even a healthy thing to suppress egos.
I'm a realist and I understand that this is a sport where they make one gold medal per
weight division.
As guys get better, they're going to be looking at their training partners and thinking like,
I'm going to have to fight this guy one day and they're training next to each other.
Of course, there's going to be tension.
There's always going to be disagreements about what's the right way to
act around certain people, certain issues, and people are going to come into conflict.
Everyone's being programmed to be an alpha competitor.
You get a room full of people like that.
There's going to be conflict.
Now, your question was, well, is there a way to resolve this?
Yeah, there was.
And for eight to nine years, I was very successful with this.
But there's also a tipping point where things can flare out of control
and there will be periodic breakups.
You're not the first students I had that left.
I've been coaching a lot longer than I've been coaching the squad.
I'm sure in the future, there'll be other students who leave me.
That's just the nature of the beast.
It's sad when it happens, but life goes on.
Like Bukowski said, love is a fog that fades with the first daylight of reality or something
like that.
So even love is temporary.
Let me ask you about leading up the preparation for the athletes.
I mean, this is such, given the darkness from a year ago,
from which you had to find glimmers of light and try to get greatness out of athletes,
what was the mental preparation like?
For Gordon, for Nicholas, for Giancarlo, for the other athletes,
what was the mental side of things like?
Is there some key insights you can give to their mental preparation?
I really think that people, when they talk about mental preparation,
need to take a step back and realize that almost every element of what people describe
as mental preparation has physical underpinnings.
Literally 95% of what I teach the athletes is physical skills.
And it's my belief that every mental aspect of competition, the most important,
which will be confidence on stage, is a direct result of the accumulation of physical skills.
People tend to see things like confidence as a mental state.
It is, but it comes out of the performance of physical skills.
All my life, I've seen sports psychologists try to
create confidence in athletes through non-physical means.
And it always ends up being the same kind of cheesy motivational speeches,
highlight video reels where they try to pump artificial confidence into people.
And I've never been impressed by this, nor have I seen,
have any kind of positive effect on athlete performance.
What I do see build confidence is the sense that athletes are developing skills
and using them successfully under conditions that closely mirror the event they're preparing for.
Once they get this down, that's where true confidence comes from.
Confidence doesn't come from words, it comes from accumulated skills,
which experience shows you have been responsible for successful performances in the past.
And if you accumulate enough of these, your confidence rises.
So when it comes to the mental aspects of competition,
I created a program where everyone was given a set of skills that they had to work on,
skills directly related to what I believe is the most important elements of success in ADCC competition.
In the gym, they accumulated those skills over time.
I do it in two different ways, depending on whether these are offensive skills or defensive skills.
For the accumulation of offensive skills, I like to have my athletes work with athletes
who are lesser than themselves in ability, so that they start to gain confidence over time.
Just as you would never send a beginner into a weightlifting gym and put 500 pounds on the
bar and talent to lift it, rather you would start with a wooden bar, then the metal bar,
and then gradually accumulate weight over time, so you get a progression in weightlifting.
So you don't take a brand new move and say, okay, do it on Gordon Ryan, never going to succeed.
I have the athletes practice their offense on blue belts and work their way up.
Defense, on the other hand, you've got to start them in the deep end of the pool,
so that they start to see what are their vulnerabilities.
So I put them with highly competitive athletes that they start, so they can see, okay,
there is a problem here. And then even in defense, they start off with lower belts
and build up their confidence over time. So just as a weightlifter builds up,
his ability to lift weight over time, so to a jiu-jitsu player does it, by
gradually increasing resistance. Now in jiu-jitsu, resistance is not done by weight,
it's done by skill level. And so over time, they started to accumulate this experience.
In time, we were able to switch off and have them go against
very, very tough athletes, each other. So Luke Griffith will do a full power match with Gordon
Ryan. Now, they're fully aware that there's no one better in the world than Gordon Ryan.
So if you have a competitive match with Gordon Ryan, that's a very, very healthy sign. So they
went from the start where they were being programmed going against relatively mild resistance and
building up over time and then building up to the greatest resistance possible in the sport of jiu-jitsu.
And their goal is not to win, obviously, but their goal is to provide a competitive match.
Now, Gordon doesn't have any confidence issues. So for him, it's just good, hard competitive
training against people that are in some ways better than those you'll be facing in competition.
For the other guys, it's getting a clear assessment of what their current skill level is
by going against the best there is. Then we add to this a competitive schedule where the athletes
have to go out into competition so they get used to the idea of performing in front of strangers
on stage, getting used to the strange elements of going out, being observed and judged by people
you don't know in a performance atmosphere. And so they were all given matches and WNO competition
leading up to the event, ADCC trials, local grappling events here in Austin and given a
competitive schedule to fight and prepare them for ADCC. Obviously, as ADCC got closer and
closer, this was pulled back because of the danger of injury. So within about three weeks out was
the last time we had a competition. And by this method, confidence starts to grow. And so the
mental preparation came out of those physical underpinnings, the idea of progressive resistance
increasing over time for both offense and defense, building up to a peak where they're going against
the best athlete in the world so they can get an accurate assessment of where they stand.
Once you're given a competitive match to the best guy in the world, you know damn well that when
you go out and ADCC, you're ready to fight anybody. And defense is broadly defined. So defense and
in symmetrical positions like positions like guard. And then defense also includes escaping
from horrible positions. Yes. We're big believers in the idea of depth of defense. The idea that
you should be able to mount defense all the way through from early stages based mostly around
anticipation of identifying danger visually before it emerges. And all the way through to the deepest
levels of defense where you are 100% defensive and terrible positions and you have to claw your way
out and over time and get back to a neutral position or even better back to an attacking
position. You have an Instagram post on this topic. When you get ready to step out for the
biggest moment of your life, ask yourself one question. How different is this really from
what I do every day? If the answer is not very different at all, then step forward with confidence
and do what you do every day in the same manner and ignore the hype and distraction. You're
ready for action. By the way, for people who don't know, you need to follow John Donner,
Donner John on Instagram because you have nuggets or large buckets of nuggets of wisdom
often, which is quite profound, even bigger than jujitsu. But anyway, there's some aspect where
you want to mimic the conditions of your daily training in intensity and physical
to that of the actual matches. You asked the question about mental training. For me,
the central focus of whatever small amount of mental training I give my students comes down
to a very, very simple concept to understand. This is the idea of identifying competition
in terms of its normalcy. Most people see training and competition as two different
things. Training is normal activity that you do every day. Competition is the exception.
It's different. You're going out. There's people watching you. There's a big crowd. They're making
lots of noise. In fact, the promoters of shows go out of their way to reinforce this.
Look at, for example, ADCC, when Gordon Ryan went to fight Andre Galvan. Do they just come
out on the mat and fight each other? Absolutely not. There's music. There's pageantry. There's
fireballs. They're literally shooting fireballs. Some dude in a tie sitting with Joe Rogan.
I heard about that guy. Meathead podcast or comedian, whatever.
Which one was the meathead? Well played, Joe. Well played.
But you see what they're trying to do. They're trying to create theater and pageantry.
Well, in fact, it's just a grappling match. It's just two athletes, a referee and a ruleset.
That's the reality. Now, what they try to sell you is something which is not reality,
which is this is somehow bigger and different. And they reinforce this with pageantry and theater
so that it becomes not just a grappling match, but a grappling performance,
the same way you have a theater performance. And my goal as a coach is to dispel that and say,
when you go out there, there's only one reality. You, him and the referee reinforcing a ruleset.
That's it. Everything else you see, the smoke, the fire, the music is an illusion.
And it's put there intentionally to make you feel a certain kind of way.
And your whole goal is to see this as illusion and walk out and see only the reality,
which is that this is the same damn thing you do every day in the gym.
The only difference is you're going with a guy you've never grabbed before.
So, the actual act of removing the illusion or realizing that it is an illusion,
how do you practice that? So, when you step on the mat.
Once you're aware of it, I always have them, it's like when you see a magician
and you have his tricks explained to you, you never see the magic again. The first time you see
a good card trick from a good magician is, oh my God. Then when they explain it to you,
I did this, this and that, step one, step two, then you look at it like, it's not that special.
And when you explain to people this idea of the pageantry is an illusion,
then just as when you watch the magician and you learn the trick,
all the magic flies out the window, so too with the nervous response.
So, that's for the pageantry, but what about the, maybe the physical intensity of competition?
And isn't there an extra-
No, it's the same in every competition. It's not like, you know, they're twice as strong
at 80CC as Aaron and the IBGF World Championships. It's the physical intensity is always pretty
much the same. They experience it every day in the gym and like, you know, if you go out and you
grapple Gordon Ryan, it's not like the next guy you grapple is going to be twice as strong as him
or twice as fast. He's going to be a little stronger, a little faster, but not so much so
that it completely changes your approach to the game. You know, there's not that much difference
between the human bodies out there on the stage. So, if you've felt intensity before,
you're not going to be shocked by 80CC.
But in terms of entraining, do you have to try to match the intensity of competition?
No, that would be false. You'd be, every athlete in the gym would be injured.
You can do it for short periods of time, but the training has to be carefully monitored
in terms of intensity levels. Remember, we're training seven days a week, a minimum of twice a
day. You've got to keep things under wraps. Like, you know, every other workout, you can have one
of the five rounds can be full power, but not seven days a week, three times a day. That's
just going to break bodies. And the full power is just the reminder of- It's more about skill
development. For us, it always comes back to skill development. But what about matching the
feeling of the intensity of competition?
Yeah, periodically. Periodically, rarely.
But it can't be every single time.
Not really. It's not rare. Meaning like, out of three hours of hard sparring per day,
like 15 minutes might be like 100% full power. That's more than enough to get psychologically
ready for the intensity of conflict, but won't break your body over time.
Intensity of conflict, that's well put. There is competition. Doesn't it have that extra level
animosity? It's a little bit more conflict than it is-
It can. Sometimes there's personality differences. Like, for example, like Gordon
Ryan and Felipe Pena, they admire each other a lot. They respect each other's skills,
but they certainly don't love each other. That's for sure. So there can be certain
matchup where there's more intensity. But then there's other matchups where the two athletes
come out and it's no more intense than a hard sparring session.
So first of all, because I would love to look at a couple of matches with you.
And before that, let me say a big thank you to Flo Grappling for, first of all,
helping the sport of grappling and jiu-jitsu in general by having organized footage
and tournaments that sort of show this sport and its best light to the world.
And they do an incredible job of that. So if you're interested in supporting Grappling
as a sport, helping it grow, you should definitely support Flo Grappling,
go to their website, sign up, also Flo Wrestling. I'm a huge fan of wrestling. So
maybe there'll be a Flo Judo at some point. They don't currently, I don't think, do any
major Judo stuff. So anyway, I'm a big supporter of theirs. And I do have criticism
that they know about, which is I hope they continue to improve on the aspect of
making the footage discoverable and accessible, making it easy for you to do search through
Google and on their website to find matches to get excited. Like if me and Joe Rogan are
getting excited about a particular match, you want to be able to pull it up super quickly.
Want to be able to pull up Gordon Ryan's matches super quickly from ADCC, make it super easy to
show and share. If we have to pay for it, fine, but make it easy. And when you sign up for Flo,
it should be one click, not five clicks. It should be one click. It should be easy.
I think it's inexpensive. If you care about grappling, it's definitely worth it. You should
sign up. Anyway, my love goes out to Flo Grappling. And also my love goes out to Mo Jassim, as we said.
He's the organizer of ADCC. The next one is in 2024. It should be 2024. Well,
you should follow ADCC underscore official on Instagram and just send as much love towards Mo
and ADCC in general. Like I said, the most prestigious, it's like where the best grapplers
in the world show up. And the magic happens. It's like some of the most historic matches
in grappling and jiu-jitsu ever happened on that stage. Anyway, if I could talk about some of the
interesting performances for the athletes you coach, you post that on Instagram. Let's start
with Gordon Ryan. Gordon Ryan, ADCC 2022. The greatest event in grappling history is over.
New stars emerged, established stars shown bright again, but one man stood above all like a colossus.
Gordon Ryan. You have a way with words, John Donner. I have seen many incredible feats of
grappling, but I've never saw a performance like this. For many, Mr. Ryan is a polarizing figure
in the sport. For many others, an inspiration to look up to. But after this weekend, there was no
disagreement amongst haters and fans about his merit. He is the best ever. It was a long and
difficult journey to ADCC 2022. Just one year ago and so on, as you told the story. It was a
virtuoso performance of unmatched technique, preparation and confidence. No one else can
claim credit for this achievement. This was his and his alone. No one else today brings together
technical depth, tactical insight and confidence to use them on stage as he does. I had many students,
but I only won Gordon Ryan. I think Gordon responded. All this is true besides the credit
that sits with you. Thank you and a heart emoji. Very nice. Anyway, that's as a way of introduction
to Gordon Ryan. Can you take me through his set of performances and maybe any matches that stand out?
He competed in his division, which is the plus 99 kilos and in the superfight against Andrzej
Gova. That's correct. This was in fact the first time in history that this was allowed. For your
listeners who don't follow grappling, we may have been very rude in just throwing a lot of stuff at
you without explaining ourselves. First of all, ADCC is like the Olympics of grappling. It occurs
every two years. You can either qualify for the event through winning matches in a qualification
process, or you can be invited. The only people who get invited are either former winners or people
in the sport who are just widely recognized superstars who bring some kind of brand value who
have proven in the past that they have what it takes to compete at that level.
In this format, there are two kinds of matches. There are weight division matches
in which you compete against people roughly your own size and weight.
There is an open weight where any one of any size can enter, so you can have very small people
fighting very large people. There is a second category called a superfight where established
champions who have won previous open weight tournaments fight each other in one off battles,
one athlete against another. In most of the matches, you will fight repetitively over time
towards a gold medal, but in one category, you fight one fight, the so-called superfight,
which is usually the headline fight of the event. Traditionally, if you were in the superfight,
you could not compete in the weight categories. It was seen as too risky because you might get
injured during the weight category, or you might have to fight for very tough fights in a row and
get exhausted so that you're ineffective during the main event of the show, the superfight.
Throughout its history, ADCC has always resisted the idea of an athlete being allowed to do both
weight category and superfight. It's never happened before. Gordon Ryan requested to be
able to do this because of his extraordinary stature in the sport, the ADCC organization
granted his request. That was the first time ever. In addition, Gordon Ryan would be fighting
to be the first person to win three gold medals in three different weight categories. This has
never been done before. It was a huge event on Gordon's part. Bear in mind also that prior to
this event, he had fought just a month and a half earlier against a former ADCC open weight
champion, Felipe Pena, who had defeated him in the past in a completely different ruleset,
and then previous to that against the current world champion. There had been a build up to this,
so he had been very active coming up to the event. Then he went in to fight arguably the greatest
ADCC champion of all time, André Galvon, which would occur late on Sunday and would have to fight
the toughest people, including the possibility of fighting his nemesis, Felipe Pena,
in the weight division prior to getting to the superfight. There was genuine concern here that
he may have completely overstepped himself. The biggest concern I had as a coach, and I'm sure
the organizers, Mo Jason, must have had the same concern, is that he would get injured
or exhausted fighting in his weight division. There were two athletes in particular, Felipe
Pena, who had given Gordon a very tough 40 minute match in a no rules setting,
shortly before ADCC, and his former training partner, Nick Rodriguez, who were expected to
give Gordon very, very tough matches if they came up against each other. There was a genuine
concern that Gordon may burn himself out before he even got to fight the guy who most people
believe is the greatest ADCC champion of all time. Our concern was how do we manage this?
So, what we looked for is extremely efficient methods of reducing the time of the matches,
making the matches as short as possible. Our favorite way to fight bigger, stronger athletes,
and I think Gordon was the lightest athlete in his weight division. Everyone goes,
oh, Gordon's so big and strong, he's actually quite light. I think he was outweighed by almost
all of his opponents. It's nice to see Gordon looking small relative to his opponents, which
is absurd to say, but it is the open division plus 99 kilos. It was plus 99 kilos. Right,
that's what I mean, sorry, by open plus 99 kilos. Everyone looks like the incredible Hulk, yeah.
So, our big thing is when we fight bigger, stronger opponents, we always go in two directions.
You either go for the legs or you go for the back. And so, we constructed strategies based
around those two methods. So, going for submissions. And we should also mention that ADCC rule set is
for regular matches, I think it's five minutes and five minutes total is 10 minutes. And then,
for finals matches, it's 20 minutes and half the time is spent with no points.
So, these can be very, very long matches. I mean, to put this in a perspective,
a modern judo match is five minutes. Yeah. A modern wrestling match, I believe,
is six minutes in international freestyle. So, these matches can be 40 minutes long. Now,
that's a long, long grappling match. Yeah. And depending on how you compete in it,
that can have a huge toll on you. Absolutely. You can get to the finals and just be absolutely
spent. So, our whole thing is, okay, Gordon's got to not only get to the finals, he's got to fight
the toughest ADCC grappler of all time after that. So, we were looking for quick and energy-efficient
matches. And that meant going to the back or going to the legs. And in the overwhelming majority
of cases, that's exactly what he did. He was able to get some very, very quick matches, courtesy
of leg lock finishes. And in the few cases where he didn't finish on legs, then he would simply take
his opponent's back. And that's a very low stress position to occupy. In one case, his opponent
deliberately kept his back on the ground to prevent the backtake. And he just chose mounted
position instead. And so, he was able to go through his weight division with an extremely low energy
expenditure, which set him up well to go into the finals. No injuries, very little energy expenditure.
Now, it sounds easy to say that, you know, okay, the strategy worked. But in order to get that
strategy to work, you have to have one hell of a set of skills. And we can see those now. Would
you like to? Yeah, I would love to go through them. And I should also mention, for people just
listening to this, I'll try to commentate on different things we'll look at. But the thing
that was made clear is maybe you can speak to that. Maybe to you, it looks like efficiency.
But to me, it looked like Gordon was not even trying. There was a relaxed aspect to the whole
thing. So, maybe it had to do with saving energy, but he made it look very easy. And he made the
path to submission look very easy. So, here's the first match against an opponent that again
looks bigger than him. Okay, I'll just give an initial comment here. First, you'll see that Gordon
elected to sit to the bottom position. The hardest work in submission grappling is when two athletes
take the standing position and joust for takedowns. That's where most of the energy gets burned up.
So, working on the idea of energy efficiency, let's go out and we chose to sit into guard
position and then start looking to access our opponent's back. Because if our opponent's head
position of far side arm drag makes a lot of sense, Gordon's able to beat the arm and quickly get
behind his opponent. Now, the question is going to be getting into a scoring position. It's too
early to score at this point, but we're just concerned at this stage of just energy expenditure
and make the other guy work harder than us. So, Gordon did the arm drag to the back and now
he's working on the hooks. The hooks are not particularly important here. He'll use it just
to get stability on his opponent. But interestingly, his opponent here had an interesting strategy
too, which was to occupy bottom turtle position and look to get to the critical five-minute
demarcation point where points begin to get scored. His idea, I believe, I'm speculating
here based on his actions, was to keep Gordon at bay in a defensive turtle position until
a five-minute mark occurred, in which case he would shake Gordon off, walk away, and force
a takedown battle. How many people are comfortable in that? And what do you think about the defensive
turtle position versus always trying to come back to guard? The turtle position is the second
bottom position of unit. So, many people only associate guard position with bottom position.
It's naive. There's two. There's guard position and turtle position. Now, as a general rule,
guard position offers a much, much greater variety of attacking options than turtle position does.
But that's not to say turtle position absolutely can be an effective bottom position. You can
work effectively from there. So, there's some case to be made that, to wait out five minutes,
turtle might be. I mean, I personally think against Gordon Ryan, I mean, I admire the
fellow's courage. It's not easy. But there was a logic to what he was doing. People think, oh,
he just got his back taken so easily, but he did have a strategy. Now, did he pick the right
person to use that strategy against? Probably not. So, Gordon is able to break the turtle down,
get one hook in, at which point is this becoming an extremely controlling position with Gordon
in the back? At which point are you happy with where it is? At this point, it just started
to dawn on me at this point, this guy actually had a strategy, which was to maintain a prone
position that he's in now and then shake Gordon off after the five-minute mark. So,
once that became obvious, then I was now excited to look at the clock and how close we are. If
you can take it up to five minutes. Right now, this guy's only intention is to stop Gordon from
strangling him and finish. Okay, now the guy's trying to go up and vertical freeze it there.
Now, do you see how he's taking his elbows off the mat in turtle position? In jiu-jitsu, there's
only one reason you take your elbows off the mat from turtle position. That's to stand up.
So, now it's clear at this point what his actual strategy is. It's to get up,
force a standing confrontation, win a takedown battle, and beat Gordon by points. So, he did
have a strategy. Now, our counter strategy is always based around the power half Nelson.
This is a common move in the sport of wrestling, and it's a great way to break people down as they
try to stand up. Gordon is a master of it. So, there's a power half Nelson that Gordon has on
him as the elbows are off the ground and knees are off the ground. He's going to return his
opponent to the mat, and as you can see, he's successful in doing so. Now, it's clear what
the main strategy is. So, I'm calling to Gordon to break him down to a hip. You put a man on a hip,
he can't stand up. Gordon successfully does it, traps the shoulder using that one-on-one grip
with his right hand, puts him down to a shoulder and a hip. That means standing up is no longer
an option for his opponent. Now, Gordon goes in. He's already scoring because of the turtle
position that he's in. His opponent stays down on his shoulder. Now, Gordon's responsibilities
start looking for the stranglehold. His opponent has basic defensive structures, discipline with
his chin, keeps the chin down, but Gordon is a master of tying up defensive arms and penetrating
under the chin to get to a strangle. You'll see that shortly. There's the trapping of the arm.
Notice that no advanced grips were required. It was just a spontaneous trap. There's the
penetration of the neck. So, the arm was trapped with the leg. Yeah. So, now he's only got one
defensive arm and he's just taking that away with his left hand. He gets a one-handed strangle for
the finish. And it looks like not much energy was expanded during that puzzle. Yeah. So,
the tournament got off to a very smooth start. Very little energy expenditure, no injuries,
and a submission win. There's a kind of certain look to Gordon that could be interpreted as
nervousness. That was an incorrect interpretation. Yes. Okay. So, there's a...
What do you interpret as nervous behavior? Well, this is part of me's trolling, but
sometimes on the surface, confident behavior can look like almost like anger. And there's...
Gordon's face had a vulnerability to it, almost like... When you go to judge confidence, don't
look at the face. Look at the extremities of the body. Yeah. That's where the truth comes out.
You see it in body language. And the further from the face and chest, the more honest the body
becomes. Look at the feet and the hands. Well, there were... I mean... That's when you'll see
if people are nervous or not. He was very relaxed in the extremities. That's true. See, you look
more confident in this than anything. What are you thinking about? What's going through your head
here? Is this the same stuff? Are you intimidated by the two-meat heads, one in a suit and tie?
Or are you not thinking about that at all? I know. Now, for me, it's just about, okay, what's
the most efficient path to victory against this particular opponent? It says, okay, I've done
my job. I've taken them through an extensive fight camp that prepared them for every conceivable
situation that they're in. I've run an efficient warmup. Their body temperature is perfect. The
elasticity in the muscles is perfect. My main role when I corner is I avoid what most people do
when they corner, which is to be a cheerleader. Most cornermen, they're not cornermen, they're
cheerleaders. They're there to express some kind of emotional support to their training partners
or their student. Sometimes they're even worse than cheerleaders. They express their own emotional
fears as the match goes on. I always believe that 99.5% of the job of the trainer is done,
the coach is done, when the athlete steps their foot on the mat. At that point,
you shouldn't need me at all. Everything I needed to tell you should have been not just
told to you but imprinted into you. Remember, there's 15,000 people in that crowd. For half of
the match, you're not going to hear a word that I can say. There's too much noise,
but you'll hear my voice inside your head. Because you've heard it so many times over the last
14 weeks, you're sick of hearing it at that point, and their program know what to do.
I'm usually pretty confident. I'm also very confident that even in worst case scenarios,
they can have effective solutions because they train those worst case scenarios every single day
in the gym. In part, you're there to have a front row seat to analyze what happened
so that you can take that to the next match. The biggest danger in athlete faces is tunnel vision.
Sometimes, they will hit upon a certain move or strategy and just say,
I'm going to go with this when there's much easier alternatives. But because they're so
focused on the alternative they've chosen, they get this tunnel vision and just focus
only on that. The most constructive thing the corner man can do is alert them to the presence
of time, which is very important in an ADCC match because all the scoring is structured by time,
and to alleviate problems associated with tunnel vision. Okay, you're doing this,
but if you just did this, it'll be so much easier. So that's the main goal.
So here, this was one of several anticipated matches against the second one against Victor Hugo,
which is a very tough opponent. Again, this was a situation where Gordon was
considerably outweighed by his opponent. So the main thing here was efficiency.
His opponent elected to avoid the standing position by jumping into guard.
So now, Gordon would be in top position this time.
He has a very good closed guard.
But unfortunately, Gordon has very good guard passing. So he's an excellent guard player,
very talented, but Gordon is renowned as the imminent guard pastor in the world today. So
it's a tall order to hold Gordon off for a 10-minute match.
Is there something you can say about this guard passing? Gordon is making it look very easy.
It's middle distance guard passing here, and he eventually passes to Mount, I believe,
in a very... Again, making...
Why don't you run through the sequence where he gets mounted? I believe he gets mounted twice.
I'll just back this a little bit further. So he's trying one arm under...
Yeah, this is a stacking position. Now, normally, we always insist on the idea of getting
advantageous angle first, controlling the feet and getting angle. But there's a height advantage
that Victor Hugo has here, and the length of his legs means that he can play very,
very wide with his legs. So getting an advantageous angle might be difficult.
In these circumstances, it often makes sense to go right up the middle.
Now, Gordon could just go back for legs because Victor Hugo's legs are so far apart at this point
that you could easily isolate a leg and attack that. But Gordon wanted to show off his passing
prowess. Very often, he'll go into a match and say, okay, I'm going to show this skill. And
he'll often use it as a demonstration of techniques he teaches in instructional videos.
So he wanted to show that he could pass to mount readily on a world champion.
Like this part here, this little step.
Okay, just freeze it right there. Go back one step. Okay, you can clearly see that all
of his opponent's defensive frames are built on his opponent's left-hand side. So everything
is defense on the left. But you can see this comes at a price, and that price is back exposure
on the right-hand side. You can literally see his opponents back on that side. So Gordon's
whole game is to place sufficient pressure that the opponent overcompensates on the side of pressure
just to set up a quick switch across to the other side. There's the vulnerability. There's
the back exposure. His opponent has to put his back on the ground, switches back. That's a world
champion right there on bottom who does a good job of recovering from the first danger. But
unfortunately, Gordon has been here a thousand times and just switches his hips and kicks out.
A little step. And so you see there's two changes in direction, left, right, and a very short
period of time that people find very, very hard to keep up with. Now his opponent builds up to
an elbow. He's looking to create more and more space from here, but Gordon counters by just
stepping over the hips. It's just when you feel like every move, he's doing the right things.
The man on bottom is doing well. He's doing the right things. But the other guy's just
being here too many times and it's just a half second ahead of every decision that they make.
Going up in the elbow, Gordon makes it look so easy here. It almost seems like Victor's out,
but this turning of the hips with arm over the opponent's back is able to bring him back down
and Gordon takes mount. Notice how Gordon is never satisfied with the mounted position itself.
He's only satisfied with an extended mounted position where the elbow comes up over the
shoulder line. Yeah, only then does he show. There's a little bit of relief right there, right?
Right? There's a little bit of relief. No, that's the look of a man who's just proved a point.
Yeah, this is very Michael Jordan like sticks his tongue out. So yeah, I mean,
there's no points at this stage. He really is going for submission.
And then this happens again.
Is this the match that wasn't, Gordon, wasn't it?
This was the only match where Gordon didn't finish his opponent by submission.
Was this very frustrating for him? It's actually interesting that when he came off the mat,
he was visibly frustrated. He wanted to get a finish and I think he was more upset about not
finishing Victor Hugo than he was delighted by winning his two gold medals. So I think that
says a lot about the perfectionism of Gordon Ryan. Most people would be thrilled to beat one of the
great grapplers of this generation decisively in this fashion, but he was not happy.
And so this is a Gordon's third match against Sousa, who's about Sousa, another guy who's very
big. This is different because now we're on to the second day. Your listeners should be aware
that the event occurs over a two day period. So the previous two matches occurred on Saturday,
and now we're into Sunday. Now this puts a different context on things if we could just
freeze it right there, maybe go back one step. Now we're on Sunday morning and the idea is that
Gordon will be fighting the biggest fight of his life late that afternoon. So now we're into the
idea of energy conservation. It's okay to have two hard matches on Saturday because you get to rest
on Saturday night, but now Gordon has to beat two people back to back and save energy for the
biggest fight of his life on Sunday, late Sunday afternoon. So now the emphasis is on a quick
win and you can see Gordon Ryan certainly delivers on this. Now when you go to entangle your opponent's
legs, the basic choice you have is between straight ashigurami and cross ashigurami.
In the last five years, cross ashigurami has proven to be statistically the more important of the
two. And as a result, many people have forgotten the value of straight ashigurami-based leg locks
and undervalued them. Gordon has outstanding heel hooks from both straight and cross positions,
and his opponent was probably more concerned about the danger of a cross ashigurami,
left the right leg undefended for far too long. And as a result, Gordon goes into
a very classical ashigurami you would normally expect to see from five or six years ago and gets
a very, very quick finish. So lifts his opponent. There's the ashigurami, the entanglement of one
of his opponent's legs with two of his. Now he's got to turn and expose his opponent's heel. So
there's an initial off balance to the left to get a defensive reaction. The opponent overcompensates,
exposes his heel, and then there's the submission. There's a danger of his leg being broken here.
Gordon has an absolutely ferocious outside heel hook until you've felt it. It's quite different.
So the opponent, probably before he even felt the heel hook, felt the control that he's screwed
there. So he doesn't even want to... When someone who knows what they're doing gets a bite on your
leg like that, you feel it deep inside your knee and ankle tendons immediately. And
there's a sense in which you almost tap. He got a couple of taps almost like as if they're early
because the opponent knows... People came up to us and said, this guy tapped early. He knew that
late would be a big problem. Got it. So this is within like 30 seconds, within 10 seconds.
I think it was within 10 seconds. So this was an excellent example of someone saying, okay,
I'm going to conserve energy with a short match. I'm not just going to go down into a neutral
position. I'm going to directly pull into a leg lock attack from standing position. You don't see
that much in heavyweight divisions. That's something you see more in the lightweight divisions.
So we got to go to the final match of Gordon's within his division, which I think
as opposed to facing Felipe Pena, who lost to Nicky Rod, he's... Nicky Rod had a great match
against Felipe Pena and past Felipe Pena's guard, I think only the second person in ADCC
competition to accomplish that. I believe with a body lock, it started as a body lock,
but he converted to half guard, top head and arm and passed out of half guard top, chest to chest.
I think I listened to Craig Jones' sort of interview summarizing what happened to ADCC,
and he briefly mentioned that Nicky Rod might have the best body lock pass that he's ever felt.
So the way to face Nicky Rod is don't let him get the body lock.
But if you stand up, he's a good wrestler. So there's a dilemma there. You have to sit down
to guard, but that goes into his body lock. But then if you stand up, now you go into his wrestling
skill. So it's a great dilemma that he has. And that's what... In facing Nicky Rod,
Gordon Ryan here chooses to... Yeah, if you look at the limbs, there's a relaxation there.
We should also explain some things here. This is a finals match. So instead of being 10 minutes long,
it's 20 minutes long with the option of a 20 minute overtime. So this could potentially
be a 40 minute match. So you can see why the ADCC people were very concerned about Gordon
doing this match. Because what if this match had gone 40 minutes? And then an exhausted Gordon Ryan
has to go out to fight Andre Galvong, who's fresh and ready to maul him. And on top of that is
two former teammates who know each other's game very well. So there was a high likelihood in most
people's minds that this would go the distance. Because when you train with each other for years,
every single day in the gym, seven days a week, you get to know each other's tricks.
One big problem here for Nicky Rod is that his body lock guard passing game, which is
his main weapon on the ground, was taught to him by us. So it's not like we're going to be taken
by surprise by it. So that must have been figuring in his mind. Do you think psychologically for
Gordon and psychologically for Nicky Rod, it's tough? So for him with that body lock, for example,
do you think it's tough for him to know what to do here? It's tough because he would have
remembered the outcome of the training sessions. It's hard to go up against the guy who used to
dominate you in training and then say, okay, I'm going to beat him in competition.
Can you shut all of that off? Because it's tough. Memory is memory. You can't lie to yourself.
What do you think about competition? There's been a lot of Olympics bring this out.
There's been a lot of big upsets at the Olympics. There's something
where people find something in them. I mean, Judo is a different sport than grappling.
In Judo, there's much more room for upset because a mistake in Judo
will have ramifications that will be felt within half a second. If you take the wrong grip in Judo,
you can be thrown in half a second and there's no recovery. If your two shoulders hit the
mat with momentum, it's over. It's done. In Jiu Jitsu, you could, especially in ADCC,
where there's no points in the first five minutes, you could get taken down and mounted by your opponent
and still win. You can recover from a bad start. In Judo boxing, kickboxing, MMA, you get hit.
There's no recovery time. You just get swarmed on. Jiu Jitsu is a much more forgiving sport
where you can make a series of blunders and you just recover from them. You don't make a series
of blunders in boxing. You're unconscious. There's the blunder case, but there's also been just
people where it's their day. Again, maybe it's romanticizing the notion, but there's been some
epic performances in Olympic wrestling, in Olympic Judo. As an example, Satoshi Ishii,
he had a 2008 performance. We talked about all Japan and all that kind of stuff, but the Olympics,
he destroyed everybody on this path to the Olympic gold medal. That's when Teddy Reneiro
was also competing. He got the bronze. You could say he was at that time the best in the world
also, but some people have a say. Yeah, but I think it would be very fair to say he was the
best in the world. Think about the people he beat to win three old Japan championships.
Like he beat Kosei Inoue. He beat Keiji Suzuki. They were Olympic champions. Like he was already.
So you don't believe, I don't believe that a person can walk on stage and be better than
what they are supposed to be. You have a skill level. It's set in stone. This is your skill
level. You don't just go on stage and suddenly your skill level gets here. What you do have
is a situation where you have a skill level. Another opponent has a higher skill level,
but he runs into confidence issues so that he only uses a small percentage of his actual skills,
and then he will fall below someone who is technically lower on the skill scale than he is.
That can happen, but you can't just magically acquire skills. Yeah, but all of us are able to
fall in confidence. Yes. So the question comes, who manages that fall best? And that can create
upsets. Absolutely. So you don't think Gordon could have fallen in confidence against a former
teammate when the pressure is so high? There was just no basis for a fall to occur. You said he
doesn't have confidence issues. What do you attribute that to? That's because he never loses
in the gym. There's no experience that he's had that would make him say, I shouldn't be this
confident. So it's the physical, it's like we talked about mental preparation. Don't get me
wrong. If Gordon lost 20 matches in a row, of course his confidence would drop because experience
is now, there's going to be a psychological dissonance between his experience, his recent
experience, and what he believes. If you believe you're the best in the world, you've lost 20
matches, at some point reality is going to break in. But if you're just never losing in competition,
dominating people in the gym, then there's nothing in your experience that would shake
your confidence. Can I ask you this just in a small tangent? Why is Gordon Ryan so good?
So we're looking at, you've trained a lot of special athletes, you're a special
human being yourself. I could just look at human history. There's some special humans.
It seems like Gordon Ryan is one of them. I totally agree with that. Can you try to dissect?
That's what I meant when I said I had many students, but only one Gordon Ryan. I've
taught many, many people, but they don't all have his skill level. So there's an obvious
elephants in the room here. What distinguishes him from other athletes?
That's a great question. I'll try and give an answer.
More than anyone else that I've ever taught, he has a memory for things that were taught to him.
He has an ability to recall information that is extraordinary compared with other people in the
room. So that's definitely a big part of it. Secondly, he has a pride in technique and technical
prowess that will not allow him to settle for anything less than perfection, and he will
hate himself when there is imperfection. So there is a love of excellence and a hatred of
anything less than excellence. He has an ability to pull the trigger when opportunity arises,
which is truly extraordinary. Many people know what to do, but when the moment comes,
they back off, and they'll doubt themselves. If Gordon sees the opportunity, the trigger
pulls every time. So can I just link on that briefly? There's a few times where he gets a
little bit of an advantage, and he just chases it to get a big, like with Andrew Gauvalle.
It's like there's a dance, and you get one step ahead, and he's able to chase that,
you know, get a little glimmer of the back, and he's able to chase that all the way to back control.
So is that kind of the trigger that you're referring to?
Yes. It runs deeper than that, too. The idea is that good athletes are greedy athletes.
When they see a small opportunity, they try and get as big a bite of it as possible,
so that a mantra that we always have in training, if you can see the back, you can take the back.
And if Gordon sees an inch of your back, you know that's the duration he's going to be going.
If your far shoulder is within an inch of the floor, he's going to be mounting you.
If your shoulder comes off the floor, he'd be on your back on the other side.
He's a maximalist with opportunity. He's not satisfied with, oh, let me get a good enough
outcome. It's like I want the maximal outcome. So when you combine all these things together,
an ability to recall information, which is just far superior to anyone else I've ever coached,
an ability to work in the training room towards not just good technique, but excellent technique,
the confidence to pull the trigger whenever the opportunity arises.
This is a maximalist mindset where it's never enough to have a good enough outcome. It's always
got to be the best possible outcome. And the fifth element, which I believe is very, very important,
is extraordinary depth in his technical prowess, in particular with regards to his defensive
acumen. Everyone looks at Gordon and focuses on his offensive prowess because they see him
dominate other athletes. But what they don't see is what I see every day in the gym,
where he works from impossibly bad defensive positions. Someone locked in on a full heel
hook on his body and a full duty guitar miamba. In a complete pin, mounted with Gordon's two arms
stretched out over his head in what looks like a hopeless position. And Gordon will work in these
positions. And of course, because it's such a bad position, sometimes you'll have to tap.
But he just works so relentlessly in these bad positions that when he steps on stage,
he's like, if this guy got the worst possible position on me, there's nothing he could do
with it. And within 30 seconds, I could turn it around on him and win this match.
That gives his game an overall breadth and depth, which is very,
very hard to deal with. It means there's no obvious weak point where you can just say,
okay, I'm going to attack him here and use this strategy to beat him.
And that goes back to his confidence that the reason why most people lack confidence is because
they fear bad outcomes. If you're a strong guard player, you've got an excellent guard,
but you're terrified of leg locks and your opponent has strong leg locks,
you will shut down your own guard and won't play as freely and well as you normally do because
you're afraid of the leg lock danger. You'll pull your feet in, you'll play a very conservative guard
game. But if you had extremely adept leg lock defense, then you just play with all the confidence
you normally do from guard position. Gordon puts himself in that situation. He's so defensively
sound that it translates into his offensive confidence. When you talk about memory recall,
which is interesting, I can't help but see parallels between him and Magnus Carlson,
who's a chess player, who's the number one in the world, arguably the best ever, certainly the best
ever if you just look at absolute numbers. The chess has the luxury of having a rating,
which you cannot have in jiu-jitsu because it's a game of human chess.
Chess is just a board game, so you can actually calculate the probability that you could win.
So he has the highest ELO rating ever, and he's maintained that rating. Without competing against
the number two in the world, he can just prove that he's the number one in the world for many years.
Anyway, there's certain similarities. One is ability to recall. Memory recall of information
is fascinatingly good. And the other one is not so much a love for perfection, which is something
you mentioned, but the flip side of that, which is what you also mentioned, is the hate of imperfection.
Now, in the case of Magnus, it almost creates a level of anxiety for him that's almost destructive.
So the thing he seems to hate the most is imperfection against people he knows are worse than him.
So the thing he loves is competing against people that are close to skill level, or the favorite
is people who might actually be better than him, especially in certain positions. He loves
competing against them. He hates competing against people that are still, from the perspective of
everyone else, what are called super grandmasters, so top three in the world, but he knows he's much
better than them. And the anxiety of being not perfect against those people, that's why he,
I don't know if you're paying attention, but he stepped away. He's not going to defend his world
championship because he hates the anxiety of playing people worse than him.
Interesting. He figures they would somehow make him look bad?
No, for him, at least the language he uses is just not fun, and he likes having fun.
To him, it was fun to win, no matter the skill level, the world championship the first time,
but then defending it is a very grueling process. With classical chess, you play these many hours,
it could be seven hour long games, and on top of that, he really hates the fact that it's only,
I forget what it is, but a single digit number of games. He says it's low sample, so I would like
to play 20, 30, 40, 50 games if we're going to do it this way, but then they're too long,
it's going to take too long. He really emphasizes the fun of it and the clear
demonstration of who's the best. Now, chess is an interesting game. It's probably different
than grappling because it's been played for centuries. There's this giant body of people
that are playing it. There's other Gordon Rions out there. Imagine a world where there's multiple
Gordon Rions or something like that, different dimensions, but you have sharks everywhere,
and so there, there is fun to be had even at the very, very, very, very top, but the memory recall
is the thing that stands out and the hate of imperfection. More intense than anybody else in
the game. Fascinating. That takes us back to the final. Yes. Here, Gordon is facing Nicky Rod,
former training partner. Again, the intention here is this has to be put in the context that
Gordon will be fighting the greatest ADCC grappler of all time in a few hours after this.
So, what we're looking for is a quick resolution, still the shortest possible match. Now,
there's a complicating factor here. Nicky Rod was a wrestler before he was a jiu-jitsu player.
On paper, the way his route to win is via wrestling. He's not going to be able to
submit Gordon Ryan and he's not going to be able to pass his guard, so he has to win by wrestling.
In the ADCC finals, you cannot set the guard. So, the approach that Gordon used earlier that we
saw on video cannot be used in the finals. Gordon must wrestle his opponent. So, on the way out,
Gordon and I were talking and we'd had discussions obviously during the camp. What's
the appropriate thing to do here? And there had been some matches earlier in the event where it
was becoming obvious that stalling was being heavily punished by referees.
So, I said to Gordon on the way out, just give him your leg. Let him take you down. Because in
the first 10 minutes of the finals, takedowns don't score anything. There are no means of
scoring the first 10 minutes, but you can't set the guard. That will award you a negative point.
So, I said, just let Nicky Rod take you down. And he's like, Nicky Rod's not going to take
the bait. And I said, if he doesn't, I'll call him for stalling. And then Craig Jones also
commented after the fact is, I don't know why Nicky Rod took the bait. So, if we see the start
of the match, you see Gordon comes out and offers a leg. Now, it's not that Nicky Rod is smart. He
knows what's happening here. And what's he going to do? Stall for 10 minutes and get like five
stalling calls put against them. So, Gordon gives them the takedown. That way, they go to the ground
immediately with no effort. And the match now favors Gordon because Gordon is
significantly more skilled on the ground. The question is, how can we make this match as
short as possible? And as is so often the case, the answer comes back to legs.
So, for people just listening to this, Gordon is in an open guard and Nicky Rod appears to be
trying to keep his hips away from Gordon's legs. Yes. The big, Nicky Rod knows there's a danger
here. So, he's elected to go to his knees that will set up his favorite body lock passes. And it
will in some ways mitigate some of the dangers associated with leg locks. So, Gordon's whole
thing is, how am I going to get my body weight underneath him? He has a choice between linear
entries where he enters between his opponent's knees and circular entries where he inverts and
spins underneath his opponent to get under a center of gravity. Is there a way for somebody to try
to get a body lock without giving Gordon an opportunity to get under them? Well, the body lock
is an excellent way to shut down leg lock entries if you can get to the body lock. But you can see
Gordon's very, very disciplined with his elbow and knee position. Elbows and knees are working in
position. It's very, very hard for his opponent to access his waist. That shoulder is always either
across the hip or in front of the shoulder. Sorry, his knee is either in front of the shoulder or
in front of the hip. And we're one minute into the match. And just if I were to look at the video
player here, it appears that the match is over soon. So, I guess Nicky Rod is facing this. I
need to get close in order to do the body lock. And the closer you get, the more danger there is
to the Gordon get under you and get the leg control.
Now, they're starting to get close here. Gordon's going to try and get his head underneath his
opponent, make a circular entry into the legs. He's clearing his opponent's head out of the way
by faking the arm drag on the far side, the first move that he used against his first
opponent earlier in the tournament. And there's the leg, spins underneath it,
goes circular, rotates through, gets his body weight underneath his opponent.
And now he's going to trip him down to the mat. Now, I believe Nicky Rod tries to pull out
his foot here. And Craig also said that Nicky Rod has gotten used to be able to pull that foot
out from anybody. And then he was very surprised at the grip that Gordon was able to actually hold
on. So, I just want to comment. I'm just parroting commentary.
If you look at what's happening here, if you just freeze it, you'll see that Gordon,
like any good leg locker, will always treat his opponent's foot like a knot at the end of the
rope. Just as you slide down a rope, if there's a knot at the end, your hand will catch. So too,
with the human leg, when they go to extract by pulling, you just keep your fist as close to
your shoulder as possible and narrow the gap, the foot will always catch. The failure that many
people have is they let their hand drift away from their own shoulder. And so there's room for the
foot to extract. But you'll see Gordon's extremely disciplined with thumb close to his own shoulder,
which creates a situation that's very, very hard just to simply pull your foot out.
You're focusing on the knot of the foot. Yeah. Also, it's very early in the match.
There's very little sweat. Both athletes are still pretty dry.
Now, Gordon has to climb the leg and now he's already captured his opponent's shoelace. There's
the heel exposure coming up. Nicky Rod already knows things are getting bad and there's the win.
Actually, the comment I made, I guess, was from a little bit earlier. There was an earlier time
where Nicky Rod was trying to pull out the foot and the Gordon is able to hold on to the knot,
which is interesting. Now, that was a brilliant day's work by Gordon Ryan. He said two matches
against opponents considerably bigger and stronger than himself. And the time of the two
matches can be measured in, I think, less than two minutes. So he's done what he's set out to do.
No injuries, no exhaustion. He's beaten four guys back to back. All of him are excellent
athletes with minimal energy expenditure and he's ready to go on to his super fight.
And that's against one of the greatest arguably for a long time, really, really up there.
Jiu-Jitsu practitioners, competitors, grappling, no-geek competitors of all time,
which is Andrei Gava. Yes. Andrei Gava was almost certainly at this point the greatest ADCC
competitor of all time, one more super fight than anyone else by a landslide. So if I may,
just read a few words you've written on Instagram about this match, about Andrei Gava on greatness.
How great you become in any given endeavor will always be assessed by the degree of difficulty
of the barriers you had to overcome to get to the top, just as the lion became king of the jungle,
not by living among sheep, but by dominating a world of elephants, hyenas, buffalo, leopards,
crocodiles. So too, the greatness of an athlete will be determined not just by his own ability,
but by the greatness of the athletes he faces. Thus, in his quest for greatness, Gordon Ryan owes
a debt to the greatness of his toughest opponent, Andrei Gavao. And you go on to sing him praises.
So, and that introduces this match. You know, there was an interesting moment. I didn't even
listen to the words exchanged, but because I had the great fortune of sitting next to Hydra
Gracie, there was this fascinating moment before the match. And I can't believe Gordon
is sufficiently relaxed to do this. But he walked up to Hydra Gracie and had a discussion.
What do you think? You faced Hunter Gavao before. What are your suggestions? And they've talked to
back and forth. They brainstormed ideas like minutes before the match. And it was just a
beautiful moment of like, I don't know, like, like Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan talking to each
other, something like that. I mean, I wonder how much brainstorming there really was. And how much
was it just kind of like spiritual inspiration or something like that? Yeah, I think it's more
spiritual inspiration. He looks up to Hydra as a very close friend and mentor of mine. So,
I always tell my athletes, look to Hydra as your example. This is a guy who always fought for the
finish. He tried to express the highest ideal of jiu-jitsu, which is control leading to submission.
And every match he was ever in, he even lost matches on tactics against people that he could
easily have defeated if he adopted a different tactic. But he always insisted on victory by
submission. It defined his career, made him who he was. And I always try to have my athletes emulate
him. So what was the strategy going into this match? What were you thinking? What were you thinking?
Okay, for Andre Galvon, there's a sense in which Andre Galvon had to fight literally the perfect
match to win this. This is a match that's going to be 20 minutes long and potentially 40 minutes
long. Andre Galvon cannot win by submission. Gordon's submission dominance here is just too great.
It would be exceedingly difficult for him to win on the ground. Gordon's ground
positional game is just too advanced. And so, for Andre Galvon, he had to win. If he was going
to win, it was going to be an astounding wrestling exchange where most people assessed him as having
a measure of superiority over Gordon Ryan. The problem is that it's hard to just keep a potentially
40 minute match off the ground that whole time. It's very, very difficult indeed. So he would
have had to fight literally the perfect tactical match to make it happen. And he would have to
do it without getting called for stalling points. Gordon has the luxury that if at any point they
go to the ground, he has complete dominance. But Gordon too has a problem that he can't
pull guard without being penalized. And if Andre Galvon can play this tactical game of
forcing Gordon to pull guard and then staying at a distance where he doesn't, he's doing enough
action not to get called for stalling but not so much to engage with the dangerous Gordon Ryan on
the ground, then it's feasible he could have won. But it would have been, as I said, it would have
required the most perfect application and integration of technique and tactics that he's
capable of. How much intimidation was there? Or are these athletes already beyond that?
When you say intimidation, be more precise. Do you think there is some degree, if you're just
to empathize with Andre Galvon, do you think there's some degree in which Gordon was in his head?
Because of the trash talk leading up to certain events, because of the level of dominance that
Gordon has shown in this competition and in the months and years leading up to it. Also,
the fact that Andre Galvon is also a coach of a large team. So there's some pressure to
demonstrate to the team that the old line still got it. Yeah. I can't speak for Andre, but I know
for Gordon, it's hard to be intimidated when you know the other guy has no method of finishing you.
It just takes so much pressure off. When you just go in the sand, there's literally no way
this guy can finish me. And there's no way this guy can pin and control me. I can't be finished.
I can't be pinned and controlled. The only way I can lose this is if this guy plays a tactical
game. So in his best case scenario, I lose by a tactical game. But from Andre's perspective,
it's like if I make one screw up, this kid could finish me. You can see which way the
intimidation game goes. Now, for the start, things get interesting here. We've already said, if you
could just freeze it right there, Andre's only realistic path to victory is standing grappling.
Okay. That would require him to take Gordon down presumably multiple times after the first 10
minutes and not be taken down at all by Gordon. So it's a tall order. It's possible, but difficult.
And here's where things get interesting. I told Gordon before the match,
just go out and offer him the leg. Same we did with Nicky Rod. And that's where things get
interesting. I must say that I loved what Andre Galvan did at the start of this match. He's a
little crazy here. There was just so much energy in the room at this point that his hand fighting
got involved. For people just listening, there's a bit of hard slapping that could be considered
a strike. It's fine. There was just a lot of electric atmosphere in the room. So now things
settle down a little bit. But here's where things get interesting. Andre throws the whole tactical
game out the window right from the start. He goes for the take down. Gordon doesn't try to fight the
take down because it's in his interests to go to the ground. But I love this about Andre. He's
literally like, fuck you, kid. Let's see how good your ground game is. So he shoots the take down
and Gordon accepts it obviously because it's to his advantage to accept it.
But I love the fact that Andre was like, I'm not even going to try and stall this out. I'm just
going to bang. There it is. So he's like, okay, let's see what you got, kid. They say you're
good on the ground. Let's see what you fucking got. And I love that about Andre. Unfortunately,
he's entered the hornet's nest now. What happened there real quick? Because that was very...
Gordon immediately went into Ashigurami. Not just any Ashigurami, but Ashigurami was holding
both legs. There's an open guard and he's scooted forward. Oh, wow. That's really nice.
So he splits the legs. Now he dominates the space between the knees. So there's a guaranteed
straight Ashigurami here. He split the knees against Andre Gauval, like effortlessly right there.
Wow. So already Gordon's in his preferred domain now. So he's starting to offbalance
his opponent. He's looking for a reaction to get heel exposure. He does get heel exposure.
Andre does a good job of monitoring the feet to try and reduce the breaking pressure.
But the brute fact is it's in Gordon's realm now. This is where he has all the advantage.
And the match is going to be 20 minutes in Gordon's realm. That's going to be a very,
very tall order. Was there a moment here? Again, Gordon's on the legs. Are you impressed that
Andre was able to get out from this corner? I would expect this. Andre's been preparing for
this for two years. And remember, Andre has gone against some of the greatest leg lockers
in grappling before and prevailed. So he's not naive. He knows how to defend himself.
The big problem is that he's going to create defensive reactions, which lead into other
aspects of Gordon's game, in particular back exposure. So here Ashigurami goes to a single
leg type of position where Gordon runs to Andre's back.
Now he has to return him to the mat. The most efficient way to do so is always courtesy of
foot sweeping. So he pulls out a dashi hirai from the back to sweep him down to the mat.
And now Gordon's on top. And this is a serious problem for any grappler in the world. Once
Gordon gets top position, he's just relentless.
But just getting Andre Gava's good, just getting the guard back, all of that is great.
There's also a sense here in which Gordon is pacing it too, just to physically fatigue an
opponent. So he's passing the guard, but not rushing it.
Now what Gordon's looking for here is complete chest to chest contact.
He's getting very close to it now. And once he gets chest to chest on an
opponent in top position past one of his opponent's knees, it's going to be awfully,
awfully difficult for an opponent to recover.
What is he waiting for here? Is there pressure here over time?
Yeah, it's part of a campaign of attrition, of pressure over time. Now he's creating a
situation where he's either going to get back exposure or mount exposure. And either way,
it's pretty much fatal when you're dealing with Gordon. Andre elected to go to the route of back
exposure. Now Gordon got the body triangle, is on his back. Now there's one physical problem here
that's that Andre Galvan has a neck like a ball and he's a very short and very thick neck. So
penetrating under the chin for a strangle can be a real problem. He also has extremely well
developed shoulders and upper arms. So when the head comes down and the shoulders go up,
there's very little real estate to work with with regards to your strangle holds.
So Gordon in time will trap one of his opponent's arms with his legs in order to take away one of
those strong defensive arms. There you can see the arm has been trapped and now he can start
fighting towards the strangle. And now here it's still difficult. It's still difficult but
things are looking good. There's still considerable amount of time left on the clock. Gordon is
well ahead on points. So all the pressure, all the tactical pressure now is on Andre.
You'll see the critical penetration of the jaw with the wrist. Now Gordon
likes for a one-handed strangle. Wow. Andre fought very bravely but a strangle,
it doesn't matter how brave you are. And where does the strangle actually happen in terms of
it felt like the strangle was at the blade of the, it wasn't even fully sunk in. So where is
that like a full chroma is like a one-handed? There's a sense in which once you get underneath
you know the inevitable. So it's again the inevitable, you're feeling the inevitable.
It's like a, to go back to your chest analogy, it's like resigning in chest.
Yeah. And chest is considered almost like in pull eight to let it run out when you understand
when you understand that death is on the horizon. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of respect.
That was the beautiful thing with all the trash talk and everything like that.
And Gordon always shows respect. I love that about the drama of combat.
It's trash talk in the beginning and respect at the end.
I think it's, you know, when you, when you feel someone,
Andra has great skills. And when you, when you grapple someone, you feel just how skilled they
are. And whatever issues you had prior to the match evaporate when you, when you feel, okay,
they're just like you, they do the same moves and same kind of concepts. And you see that there's
more that bonds you together and separates you. And that's the feeling that the end of most grappling
matches. So if we could talk about John Carlo, who had an incredible performance. And I mean,
there's a lot of things we can say, we can probably go through his matches, but if we could just talk
without that, about some of the most impressive things he saw about him, one of the things I think
you mentioned elsewhere in here is about confidence. So one of the things you saw
that could really benefit him as an athlete and competitor is to build up his confidence.
Is there, can you speak to that? First of all, I should give you some background.
John Carlo Badoni was a strong local black belt in Boston, teaching at Bernardo Faria school.
When I would film instructional videos, I would often talk to him and talk to him about his
competitions and training. And he would do local competitions. He was trying to go from
ski training, which was the majority of his competitive background into no ski. And he was
struggling in local competitions, especially with things like leg locking, where he had no
background in leg locking and would often get submitted. So as we worked together in instructional
videos, we would talk and discuss how he would periodically come to the gym in New York City
and come to work out with the guys. And he often struggled in the training room. He had no experience
of things like body lock guard passing. And this used to mean that he was, many of the training
sessions didn't go well for him. So he was always like a very polite, well-spoken young man and
worked hard. When we went to Puerto Rico and the team ended up drifting apart,
when we moved into Austin, he said, you know, now that many of your athletes have left,
could I come down and train with you guys full time? And I was like, yeah, I'd love to. I thought
it'd be a great training partner for Gordon and Gary. We didn't really have any training partners
at that point. And sure enough, he literally just picked up everything he had and moved down to
Austin. Now, anyone who just moves halfway across the country to begin training, that already gets
my respect right there. That's a big commitment. And he began training. We put him on a training
schedule where first he had to cover up his big weaknesses. He had limited attacks from
bottom position. He had poor leg lock defense. And he was very, very vulnerable to
certain kinds of guy passing, which weren't part of his experience.
This is all a year out from AGCC. Yes.
And we should also maybe give the spoiler, which is he wins his division in a dominant fashion.
He also does incredibly well at the absolute end.
It was an amazing thing. To give you an idea, when he first moved to Austin,
he competed in a WNO event. And I don't think he scored a single point, lost a couple of matches.
Including matches to people who were in this ADCC. So he came out of that looking very depressed.
He lost to Ken Anduate. He lost to Mason Fowler.
So John Callow always struck me someone who was positionally sound. He had good guard retention,
things like this. But he had no offense. He had no leg lock defense. And he just wasn't able to
assert authority on matches. He was a guy who was always going to be tough to be because
he was hard to pass his guard, that kind of thing. But he wasn't dangerous.
Can I ask you a question on that? Because my interaction with him early on when he came to
Austin, I remember he interacted with me a bunch on the match, showing me stuff. But I wonder if that
kindness is a detriment to the confidence. Is there some connection?
The killers can be nice too. Absolutely. Confidence comes from skill level.
And confidence is a much more rational thing than most people describe it. People think of
confidence as this esoteric, ethereal element that you either have or you don't. When in fact,
confidence is much more a reflection, a rational reflection on your past experience. And if you're
successful with your past experience and you're expecting to compete in a situation which is
similar to your past experience, and that past experience has mostly been successful,
you'll be confident. Are you pretty confident that the sun will rise tomorrow? Of course you
are, because it's done so every time in the past. Now there's no, as people like Hume pointed out,
there's no supreme rational reason for believing this. But nonetheless, your confidence is high.
And it's the same thing in jiu-jitsu. If you're performing well and skills are the reason for
that, your confidence will be high in the future, regardless of what your mindset is.
So it's not a question of this personality does better in competition or that personality.
Ultimately, it's going to come down to your skills and your confidence will be a reflection of your
accumulation of skills. So what was his journey like to a person who lost to a person who dominated
the competition? First things first, we had to say, okay, you've got an obvious weakness,
leg lock defense. So every day in the gym, he would be taught, okay, this is where you put
your feet. This is where you position your knees. Your point you need this way, not this way. Then
he would have to start sparring situations in leg locks and have to work his way out. Initially,
these were like heartbreaking sessions for him where, I mean, I've got to give that kid full
credit. Like he just worked his way through it patiently, dealt with frustration, initial
failures and just said, I'm going to get better. Can we just look at on that? So what's the experience
of those early training sessions like, from an athlete perspective? It's daunting.
Is that, are you basically dealing with the rational thought that you're not going to ever
be good? Yeah, you're wondering, have I even got what it takes? Yeah. Think about it. He's an
established player who's been an IBJF competition, I believe he's a Brown Belt world champion in the
GEE and suddenly a group of kids that he's never even seen before repeatedly submitting them with
leg locks in the gym. And he's like, man, this is terrible. Like a year from now, I'm supposed to
fight ADCC against people like Craig Jones, like some of the best leg lockers in the world. It must
have been hard, but he just stayed in there and no one worked harder than him. He just
was in the gym three times a day, studying every day. And unlike so many other people,
every time he was showing something, he consciously and deliberately tried to enact it,
even at the price of initial failure. Do you advise that that's a good way to go?
It's the only way to go. If you can't wrap your head around the idea that trying to acquire new
skills will create a temporary time where your effectiveness diminishes as you're trying to
bring on new skills, you're never going to make it because you'll always stay at whatever skill
set you are. The whole mental trick is to imbue this idea of delayed gratification,
that you have to accept that when I bring on new moves, my overall effectiveness will diminish,
but there's the belief that in time, as my skill performance increases, it will increase over time,
but it will come at the price of initial frustration and failure. And John Carlo made that mental
switch early on in his time in Austin, and to his credit just stuck through. Within a very
short period of time, he came very hard to leg lock, and even the best leg lockers in the room
had a hard time with him. And that was the first step in confidence. He said, okay,
I'm not getting finished quickly anymore. Then he had to bring in a whole new set of
upper body submissions. He neglected upper body submissions.
When you say upper body submissions, do you mean arm locks?
Arm locks, things like this. And in particular, he put very, very hard work on his strangleholds.
He had always been someone who was positionally strong. He could get to the back,
but he could never finish from the back. And then suddenly, in the Germany side of finishing
from the back. And then as gym performance against the lesser students increased,
then you bump him up against better students. And then this goes on all the way up to the
best guys in the room. And in time, in a relatively short period of time,
there were significant increases in performance and success begets success. And this kept going.
We started to get a hint of his developing confidence in local competitions. I remember
putting, seeing Giancarlo compete in a local fight to win competition against a tough Brazilian kid.
Giancarlo just came out, dominated and finished with a leg lock. Now, that was interesting. He said,
okay, you're the guy that used to get finished by leg locks, and now you're beating tough opponents
with leg locks. And that was an important psychological step for Giancarlo Badoni. And
with each little step as we went further and further, then he got to ADCC trials and had
one of the great performances. I believe he submitted all of his opponents in ADCC trials
and put on a fantastic display of grappling. Shockingly, no one paid attention to it.
They were just like, oh, yeah, he won. And Giancarlo flew into ADCC completely under the
radar. They just saw him as, oh, he's the guy that won American trials. And no one really paid
much attention. In his first match, he took on a great Brazilian champion, Izake, and
won in dominant fashion. He was about to strangle him with just a few seconds left on the clock.
And I remember Giancarlo being furious at the end of the match, thinking like I was so close to
finishing. He wanted a perfect finish. Up on point, six to nothing. Yeah. And still chasing.
Still chasing. I mean, he could have just coasted at this point, but he wanted to finish every one
of his opponents. And he got very, very close, but not quite there. And then in his next match,
he had to take on the defending gold medalist from the previous ADCC. Yeah,
Mateo, the news. This was the guy who was the favorite to win. So you have a relatively
unknown Giancarlo fighting the man who defeated Craig Jones in the previous ADCC.
What do you remember what stood out to you about this match? So Mateo Dignis is good
wrestling, is good everything. He's good all the wrong grabber.
He's got, by judicious standards, he's a very strong wrestler. So our intention was to match
his wrestling with John Carter's judo skills. So you will see if we could perhaps go back.
You'll see the first takedown. On drag. And took him down with a simple drag and pack.
So that was John Carter's first takedown that was more wrestling oriented and good for his
confidence to see that he could score a nice takedown. But Mateo Dignis is very, very good at
standing up from bottom position. If we just go back just a step. Okay. Now here we have
something interesting. Mateo comes up from bottom, seizes a leg and John Carter defends
the wrestling move and then goes immediately into with the foot. It's kind of a mix of
sasai and diashihara. That was beautiful. I didn't even notice that. That's really nice. Look at that.
Defending a single, threatening a guillotine. One of the big themes of our ADCC camp was that
most of our opponents now are getting very strong in hand fighting. But they're not strong in foot
fighting. And so we put a very heavy emphasis on foot sweeping attacks. You remember Gordon
Ryan took down Andre Galvon with a foot sweep. And here you have John Carter using the same
technique, not from the back, but from the front. And an overhook.
Probably in post. Catches the foot, Mateo. Look at that. And that's just a beautiful,
beautiful takedown. That's beautiful judo. And then later in the match, you'll use a
kusurigake, another classical judo takedown to get top position.
Now at one point, John Carter was in trouble. He got his back exposed.
With this situation? Good.
Double leg to knee-pick. So he has to expose his back in order to avoid giving up takedown points.
But here's the defensive training that we work on is coming through.
His defensively sound shuts out the hook, prevents the score,
keeps his body at the right angle to prevent a power half Nelson.
Staying calm. Now he's got to turn this around. It's one of the hardest things to do in ground
grappling. How dangerous is it to put your, in this position, to put your hands on the ground?
It's, ordinarily it could be dangerous because your opponent could switch to an armbar.
Whoops. And there's the body lock. Now there's some controversy here, but you can clearly see it.
The hands were locked. So it shouldn't really be as controversial as people are saying.
Now watch for the right leg kusurigake here. Pulls in the hips, exposes the leg, boom, and down.
Beautiful kusurigake.
Also probably a lesson that
complaining to a ref does not protect you from a good takedown.
Yeah. That's why they say in combat sports, define yourself at all times.
But now the great advantage of judo takedowns over wrestling leg tackles is that they can
throw upper body connection after the takedown, which is very, very important for ADCC.
That's why we put such a heavy emphasis on them. And now John Carlos is absolutely in the driver's
seat. He just scored four points for that takedown. So he's well ahead at this point
against the established favorite for the entire weight division.
So now Mateus Denise has to start taking some risks. He's staring down the barrel of defeat.
There's not that much time left. And that's what's going to set up the pressure. Now it's
tactical pressure. It's not physical pressure, it's tactical. Mateus has to turn away
and that's going to create back exposure. The most dangerous kind of exposure in ADCC.
Oh, there it is. Mount to back.
And John Carlos capitalizes. Mateus is smart. He's keeping on his side so that
that less than 75% of his back is on the floor to deny the mountain points. But that comes at a
price and that price is back exposure. So the thing we talked about with Gordon,
the circumstance of fate, which is he has a lot of grueling tough matches and still chooses to do
absolute. And he seems to just power through all of it. How much of it, how much of the
calculation is how to survive the cardio, the grueling cardio aspect of all of this?
That's a great question and the truth of the matter is you can't afford to pace yourself
because if you say, I'm going to hold myself back for this match
and expectation of the others, you could end up losing your first match.
So he didn't pace himself at all for any of the matches?
You have to just be in good shape and that's what the camp is for.
No. No, it's mostly physical. That's what the camp is for. Like he's felt more pressure in
the training room that he felt in any of his matches.
But still sort of attacking. Look at this. That was a beautiful transition with him.
From back or from whatever the heck that position was.
From looking for the back, transitioning here. What the heck is this transition?
So Mateus is engaging in a very good tactic, which is to get most of his back off the ground
to deny them the mountain points. So as back exposure starts to occur, he turns in.
Threatening an envelope.
But you can see what's happening here is the left foot goes under. It's going to create a
beautiful triangle entry. Right foot penetrates through underneath the neck.
And now he's locking a triangle, a Senkaku, but not just any triangle, a triangle with the
the figure four locked on the back of the opponent's head, which makes any kind of stacking defense
very, very difficult and makes it very, very hard for an opponent to pull away
and creates a much tighter strangle than average.
And as a result, it's a quick submission.
Beautifully done. Still chasing the submission.
Yes.
With a minute left up on points.
Against the former champion.
Against the former champion. That's match number two.
Now that's the first day. That's Saturday. So John Collar goes to sleep that night thinking,
okay, I just beat a world champion in my first match and almost submitted him.
And I just submitted the defending champion.
So of course he wakes up on Sunday morning feeling pretty damn good.
Now there's an interesting twist here. His opponent is a talented young Irishman who won
European trials, I believe, almost entirely with leg locks and almost all of his major attacks
in the tournament so far being leg locks.
Now bear in mind that a year ago, John Collar was losing to local blue belt competitors via leg lock.
Yeah.
So in my mind, I'm thinking, okay, how's he going to handle this?
Is with the leg lock training kick in and you'll see the result.
John Collar is on top, passing an open guard.
So you can see.
Keeping his legs away from any attacks.
Yes.
His opponent Owen from Ireland is employing the same tactics that we made famous years ago.
The idea of sitting to butterfly guard and looking to entangle the legs.
He's kind of playing that game.
So John Collar is obviously used to this from training in the gym.
So he's doing a good job of preventing entanglement,
controlling his opponent's shoelaces and moving out to an angle,
which limits his opponent's entry options.
So hands on the shoelaces and angles is a good defense here.
It's an initial defense.
Now, his opponent wants to get underneath the center of gravity.
So John Collar wants to get outside the line of his legs.
At some point, your opponent's going to entangle.
If he's determined to entangle, at some point, it's going to happen.
So John Collar decides, okay, let's let it happen and let's see where his feet go.
And let's see how disciplined he is with his feet.
And the opponent is inverted.
Here, there's a good job getting behind John Collar's knee.
So now they're fully locked in.
So John Collar moves away to protect the heel, rotates out, controls his shoelaces.
Now, at this point, the Irishman's starting to lose discipline with his own foot position.
He's so focused on his own attack that he's starting to get a little sloppy with his own
foot position. He's assuming, oh, I'm the guy who's attacking.
So my opponent will be afraid of my leg locks.
And he's starting to make some small tactical errors that John Collar will take advantage of.
So he's threatening the sort of the north-south passer.
Yeah, he's not putting too much pressure on the pass because we're still
pretty early in the match and he's not ready to score yet.
So here again, he turns away his heel.
Now his opponent's starting to get more and more cavalier with his foot positioning
to a point where now it's just downright sloppy.
So John Collar sees it, identifies it, locks up a wrist-to-wrist toehold and breaks his foot.
Where's the dumb question? Where's the control here?
How's the control comes from his opponent? The entanglement is his opponent's.
His opponent is holding his own body in place with his own legs.
He's the root of his own problem here.
So you got sloppy, well done, well done.
And a little smile from John Collar, that's very nice.
Now, the reason for that smile you can probably guess is because
a year ago, this would have been a disaster and now instead it's a guaranteed ticket to the finals
in either a gold or a silver medal. And so you can see in that compressed moment,
that's the look of a man who's made, who's just recognized just how much progress he's made
and what was once a weakness in roughly 10 months was the time it took.
And so he faces Lucas Hulk, Barbosa in the final here.
Now, these two have a history. Hulk has beaten John Collar many times.
And so for John Collar, it's a question of, okay, here I'm matched up against a guy who's
repeatedly beaten me. How am I going to turn this around now?
And in terms of, we talked earlier about confidence.
If confidence was just a mental thing, John Collar never would have won this fight.
When you've lost all those times to an athlete, words aren't going to change anything.
But you can see right from the start, when they get into the hand fight,
John Collar is much more tactically adept with his hand fighting.
He's doing a good job of controlling his opponent's hands,
preventing any kind of prolonged pressure on the head.
And Hulk gets a sense here in which he realizes he's fighting a very different person.
And this goes, this goes a long time.
Again, another super grueling match, wrestling
that eventually leads to a back take here, back triangle, body triangle, I guess.
Here you can see the same tactics utilized by Gordon Ryan.
Back control based around the body triangle.
Many attempts to try and trap his opponent's arm and take away those defensive arms.
The main difference here is, again, you have an athlete with a very powerful,
compact neck. So neck penetration is difficult.
And so John Collar will switch to a palm-to-palm strangle instead of the conventional figure four.
And now there's eight minutes left. So all the time in the world,
is it only just a matter of time at this point in situations like this?
Yeah, John Collar has a massive tactical lead in points.
There's literally no way he could lose this match at this point.
But even if his opponent did get out of here and take him down,
John Collar would still be a hit on points.
So this question, the question now is not whether John Collar will get the gold medal,
but whether John Collar will get it by submission.
And there it is. There's the penetration of the neck.
And he can't get the figure four, so he opts for palm-to-palm instead.
And there's the submission.
Now, John Collar is a relatively unemotional man,
but you can see there's emotion. That's not fake. That's genuine.
And that's the emotions of a man who 10 months ago couldn't have done that.
And then 10 months later, by dent of his own hard work and dedication,
and his ability to actively attack his weaknesses and turn them into strengths,
and then develop an ability to finish. That was a truly, truly remarkable achievement.
Let me ask you about Gary Tonin. So he is one of the, at least in my opinion,
greatest submission grappers of all time. There's a lot of components to that.
But he lost in his first match. Not only did Gary lose, he lost to the bottom seed
of his division. And that in itself is something pretty remarkable about what's happening in ADCC,
how there's a sense in which the days of the invited athletes being far superior to the
trials winners are over. It was a clear signal that anyone who makes it to ADCC can beat the best
people. Sam McNally is a very talented submission grappler from Ireland. He specializes mostly
in armbars, but he has a good positional game as well. Has a very modern look to his Jujitsu,
and he did a fantastic job against Gary Tonin. I think tactically, Gary perhaps got a little
far away from his true nature in grappling, which is relentless submission attack. And perhaps
I should be given blame for this because I put such a heavy emphasis on the training camp
overall on positional pressure. And I feel that worked very well for all of the athletes except
Gary Tonin. Interesting. So you have to acknowledge the nature of the athlete part.
And I think I was coaching so hard to the new people in the room on positional pressure
that I neglected Gary's innate ability to the fact that he does best when he attacks
exclusively by submission. So I think if anyone should get blame for the failure here, it should
be me. There's another comment as maybe I'm overvaluing that sort of just the physical
aspect of this, but it seemed like Gary looks skinny. Is the weight cut difficult here?
This is the first time he ever went down to the 66 kilos. So it wasn't critical. There's other
guys who are bigger than him who made the weight. But the weight cut, if you can just comment on,
is that, does that ever play a part in the athletes, the physical and the mental aspect
of the weight cut? It is a thing in wrestling that could break even some of the toughest minds.
Yeah, but no, it wasn't a weight cut that would break someone like Gary Tonin. It's
more physical. You train lighter and weaker. You tend to get injured more in camp because you're
lighter. We have a team now after the breakout that's mostly comprised of people over 215 pounds.
So there's very few small people left in the gym. Most of the smaller athletes went to B team.
Gary's been struggling a little bit with training partners. But here, I think the
chief problem was that Gary focused perhaps a little too much on the positional tactical game
and got away from his true gift, which is relentless hunting for submissions.
And as I said, I think the person that blamed for that is me because I had to put so much
emphasis on the positional game for the developing athletes that I didn't pay enough attention to
Gary's unique attributes. So I mentioned I posted some stuff on Reddit. So there's a relevant
question here. Somebody on Reddit asked, Gordon has said, and perhaps you have said as well,
that there are two types of jiu-jitsu practitioners, ones who move themselves around like Marcel
Garcia and ones that control the motion of their opponents like Gordon. What are the strengths
and weaknesses of each approach? And how do those different approaches apply depending on which
weight class you're in? That's a great set of questions. Yes. I'm the person who promulgates
this idea that there's two broad ways you can go in jiu-jitsu. You can either focus on promoting
your own movement to create opportunity or by restricting the other person's movement.
If you're a slower, less athletic opponent, then you should definitely focus on the idea
of restricting the other fellow's movement. That's how slow, unathletic people win in jiu-jitsu.
If you're quick with the ability to change direction, stand up quickly, go down quickly,
and move like a leopard, then you're almost always better off generating movement
in order to create opportunity. So one is based more on movement as the source of opportunity.
One is based more upon pressure as the source of opportunity. So you'll get someone like Gary
Tonan or the Ruatola brothers. Their game is based around the idea of promoting their own
movement to create opportunity. Whereas someone like Gordon Ryan or Hodrick Gracie is about
restricting movement and using that pressure to create reactive opportunity. Those are the
two paths you can take in jiu-jitsu because our team now has become mostly associated with
people over 200 pounds and because most of them will begin as I took the more high percentage
approach of, okay, let's focus primarily on controlling the other fellow's movement.
But Gary is a unique individual and I feel like I let him down by not
giving him special attention in regards to what he does.
The fact that you mentioned this now like four times in the span of a few minutes,
just I love that, that all of this stuff weighs so heavy on you. And he is a truly special person
and it is truly interesting to see what is the nature of a particular athlete that
if you highlight makes them shine. Let's go to the part where Gary actually loses the match.
Okay, so the match is pretty innocuous at this point. The guy does a good job of turning into
the arm and Gary gets caught reaching from the knees. Okay, that's always a mistake.
And the guy does, I think there's a great job capitalizing on it. Now, there's limited time
left on the clock. This guy realizes, oh, this is my opportunity. He's got good flexibility
and he gets the hooks. If he just frees it right there. So there's a minute and a half left and
typically in ADCC, if you get the back, you score three points. So this is a huge score.
For Gary to win here, it's got to be by submission. Okay, so Gary's made one mistake.
Now, this talented young fellow from Ireland does a great job, not only of getting the back,
but he really attacks well from the back. And let's look at the depth of Gary Toner's defensive
acumen here. And we should say leading up to this, his defense is incredible. He keeps escaping
every position. Our nickname for Gary is the slippery salmon because it's like trying to
hold a goddamn salmon on the riverbank, trying to hold onto this kid. So he gets into a position
which looks absolutely hopeless here. It gets worse. This is already bad, but...
It's one of the most fun things to watch about Gary is the skill and the escapes. It's incredible.
It's beautiful to watch. So the guy has an excellent opportunity to transition off here
into a rare triangle, which is one of the hardest things in the world to get out of. And
from here, if this was anyone but Gary Toner, I think it would have been curtains.
But you see Gary just extends, just the right angle to pop out and gets out. So now Gary's like,
oh, crap, I'm going to lose to this fucking guy. So he's got a minute left to do something. So he
goes back into a submission mode. He goes back to who Gary Toner is and immediately goes into
leg lock action. Now, the young man from Ireland realizes, hey, I'm going to win this match against
the number one seed. So Gary goes into the legs, gets to one of his favorite techniques, the heel
hook. Now Gary has a brutal heel hook as a heck and gets real pressure on the kid's leg.
It's hard to watch. Yeah. But to his credit, the kid is smart. He's like, you know what, let me...
He just wants that. Let me take some pain.
Wait, is there a weakness to that? Like, well, he turned his hips.
Yeah, it's unclear from the video whether Gary's arm slipped up. There's considerable
breaking pressure. Oh, it slipped, I see. Yeah, it's unclear. But sometimes the heel can slip because
it's, because something's popped. So it's unclear what happened there. There seems to be a reaction
from the part of the opponent. Like, it definitely did some damage. So Gary goes back for a second
one. Oh no. And again, you get that same kind of pressure. Oh no. All right. But I like the Irish
kid's reaction though. He's just like, you know what, let me eat this because I'm going to win
this match and I'm going to be a legend for beating Gary Toner. So I admired his internal
fortitude. But now Gary knows he's lost it. So there's a sensor in which you see how
close it gets in these situations, how little there is between winner and loser. And sometimes
you just get these heartbreaking situations where someone who ordinarily you would probably do very
well against and you make one mistake and it's an unrewarding, uncompromising sport. One mistake
can be fatal. In class, you talked about escapes for arm locks and applies here as well. So you
were teaching arm lock escapes and I think choke escapes. And the question came up,
what should an athlete not tap and risk their arm being broken? And you quoted George Patton as,
of course, you would, that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He wanted by making
some other bastard die for his country. So what's your view on when to tap and when not to tap in
competition? First off, in training, you should be tapping very early because you're not getting
paid to fight in the gym. You're getting paid to fight on stage. So be a professional in the gym,
tap early, tap fast. That way you'll last a lot longer. In competition, things are a little different.
You also have to specify what is the situation. Okay, if you're in the first round of ADCC,
your first match, you get caught, I would always expect my students to tap because
if you get your leg broken or your arm broken in the first round, you still got three more matches
before you get to the final. There is a escape clause there is if you're a guy from Ireland and
you're fighting the number one seed. There is always an escape clause. Like let it snap. Yeah,
let it go. Your students, yes. Yeah, I would expect them to tap. I also think that if you're
in a stranglehold, it doesn't make a lot of sense and not tapping because you're going to pass out.
Like you said in chess, it's kind of impolite to make the guy take it through to its conclusion.
So I don't see any heroism in just letting yourself pass out. Now, things change when
you get into a final. If you're in a final and you're ahead on points and you're willing to,
most people at that point are going to be willing to let something break in order to win a gold medal.
At that point, I leave it up to the student. It's a deeply personal decision. I would never
say to a student, I expect you to let your body break in order to win a gold medal.
I think my students are more than mature enough to make up their own minds. I would be angry if
they let their bodies break in a meaningless fashion in some random tournament or in a first round
match where there's no way you could have gone on to the second, third, and fourth matches with a
broken limb. But in a gold medal match in ADCC, I would leave the decision to them, a spontaneous
decision in the moment. I would be confident that I had prepared them to do their very best to defend
themselves. But what ultimately they do is their decision. Winning ADCC is for a grappler, at least
life-changing. You're a world champion forever. No one can ever take that moment away from you.
I would understand if they took a decision to take damage. Hopefully, it will never come to that
because I do a good job of preparing people to get out of situations as he saw with Gary Turner.
He was in a dreadful situation and got out within five seconds. Gary's been in arm locks that looked
like even I was in the corner going like, oh my God, what is happening here? And still got out.
It comes down to training preparation. But if they did make that decision, I would understand,
provided it was a situation that would make their lives better and they made a calculation,
it's not an emotional thing. Now, sometimes you get emotional. You fight a guy you just don't
like and you just don't want to tap to him. Then things get a little more interesting. Then,
again, it's a personal decision. If you hate someone so much that you literally can't even
conceive of yourself submitting to them, probably best you don't get into matches with them in the
first place. But if it should happen, again, it comes down to the student. I teach technique,
not morals. I let people make their own decisions on that. My thing is, look, don't get injured,
because if you're injured, you can't train. You can't train, you can't get better. Stay away
from injuries as much as you can. One of the other incredible stories here is, as you mentioned,
Nicholas Maragalli, one of the incredible ghee athletes in Jiu Jitsu world,
not ever having done no ghee training or competition and so on in a period of a year.
Actually, it's significantly less than a year. Nicholas only came about six months,
I believe, before ADCC as a phone call came from Gordon. He was just like, okay,
Nicholas wants to come down and train. He wants to move to Austin. So he came down. It was funny.
I remember the first day Nicholas came in, Nicholas Maragalli, as you can see, this tall,
handsome, Brazilian guy with a great personality and a wonderful smile.
Yeah, also a super nice guy.
So he comes in, he sits down on the mat, and we're all kind of looking at the new guy and
introducing ourselves. And I look at him, I go, buddy, what the fuck are you doing here?
And he's like, what do you mean? And I go, look at you. You're tall and good looking. You should
be a fucking model, not a Jiu Jitsu guy. Look at us. We're all fucked up with horrible bodies
and bad personalities. You're like a happy, good looking guy. You should be surrounded by super
models. What are you doing Jiu Jitsu for? And he just laughed and he started training with us.
So he came in. Now, historically, he has been an athlete who always pulled guard in Jiu Jitsu
parlance for your viewers. In Jiu Jitsu, you have the option of sitting down to the ground. Jiu
Jitsu was mostly performed on the ground. And many athletes take advantage of this,
that he's come out and sit to the ground position and completely forego takedowns.
Nicholas did this his entire career. Jiu Jitsu also was practiced both gi and no-gi. Nicholas
was a shining light in the gi side of Jiu Jitsu. He's one of the great champions of his era.
But he had not only never competed without a gi, he'd never even trained without a gi.
So there's significant differences between the two. There's a lot of overlap, but there's also
some very significant differences. We're talking about a sport where even small differences can
make a difference between a guy who gets the gold medal versus a guy who loses his first match.
It doesn't take a lot. So this was a very, very tall order.
Yeah, a lot of his attacks involve the gi from guard.
Yeah, absolutely.
He's in a very dangerous attack.
He doesn't just wear the gi, he really uses the gi. Like 90% of what he's based around
is based around a combination of cross and straight collar controls with the control
of the sleeve cuff. And so he really actively uses the gi. So when it came off, his first
training decisions were like, oh, he looked like a fish out of water. In addition, he had no
experience of leg locking. So one of the most significant parts of the modern game, he just
had nothing. Plus the wrestling.
He had literally zero wrestling, which is half of ADCC is based around this.
So ADCC is like six months away, and he has to get ready for the gi world championships.
Nicholas had won many accolades in gi judas, but he had never won the open weight division
of gi worlds. So he's like, the first day he's there, he's like, John,
I want to be the first guy to win gi open weight and ADCC open weight in the same year.
Yeah. I'm like, yeah. Now, in my mind, I'm thinking like, yeah, that's never going to
fucking happen. You're fucking weirdo. Do you think there was a degree to which he actually
believed that? A degree. He thought it was like a certainty. So he's looking at me like, yeah,
I'm going to do this. So I'm like, well, Nicholas, this is very laudable and I approve of your
confidence. But this is a difficult goal. You've set yourself, but perhaps maybe like 2024 would
be a more realistic. He's like, no, no, I'm going to do it.
In all seriousness, it is incredible that Nicholas Muragali had the guts to set such a nearly
impossible goal. So what do you learn from this experience of setting a goal that most people
would say is just unachievable and him actually almost doing it? It's on the surface, just absolutely
crazy. Like when he mentioned the goal to me, I was, as I said, just looking at him and almost
like disbelief. I didn't want to show it on my face. And yet he came within inches of actually
doing it. He won his first ever gold in the open weight with a gi and got to the finals
and lost a tight decision in the finals and to take a silver medal. He wanted two golds,
he got a gold and a silver. And there's a sense in which the sheer audaciousness of the goal set
seemed ludicrous when it first happened. This is insanity. And yet he came at it with a plan,
he came at it with his characteristic passion and hard work and came within inches of doing so.
And there's a sense in which you could look at it as, oh, he had a plan and it failed.
And yet, of course, no one in their right mind would look at it. They would say,
he set an audacious goal so high that it seemed impossible and it pulled his entire performance
up to a level where even failure creates something truly memorable.
Do you encourage athletes or do you not get in their way when they set such a goal?
Maybe even just forget athletes, human nature.
Yeah, that's a great question. There's a sense in which you don't want to make people delusional
that's sad. But I do believe that if people are sufficiently embedded in a given project,
if they're committed to it to a certain degree, then you can skimp on many things in life,
but don't skimp on your goals, okay? Because the bigger your goals, the bigger your achievements
will be. And even failure, as we saw in the case of Nicholas Miragali, I almost frowned
use the word failure because if this is failure, give me more of it, you know.
Falling slightly short of perfection. Falling short of what would otherwise be a perfect year.
Even that still creates such a massive uptick in your performance
that it's absolutely the right way to go. But there is a danger to this where people
aren't committed and simply aren't working from a framework where they can realistically achieve
these things, then it descends into delusion and that direction goes towards madness. You
can't have that. So there has to be some kind of reality check here where you have to be
physically and mentally capable to some degree of moving towards these goals. You can't just,
you know, a random blue belt can't make audacious goals like that. It's just ludicrous.
But with that in mind, if you're committed and there's a sense in which this is a
definite possibility, set your goals high, okay? Make big demands. Yes, there'll be times of
frustration. There'll be more failure in your lives than otherwise, but even your failures
will be something great, something memorable. See, but in the near term, you would be hard
pressed to find any data that justifies that goal because in his case, he probably wasn't
very good at no gi even in the training room. So it's like, where do you look for even inklings
of hope? We saw it in incremental progress with each successive competition that he was in.
His first competition, he looked good, but not great. Second competition, a little better.
Third competition took on one of the legends of American grappling and one decisively.
So there was a sense in which it was becoming more realistic with each outing.
So now, now putting that inspiring philosophy aside, what was the actual plan on how to make
it happen? So the leg locks?
First, the same thing with John Karlo. First, you got to learn how to defend a leg lock. So
initially, just as John Karlo struggled, he struggled, then he had to learn not just takedowns,
but just how to set up a technique. He had to learn basics like stance and motion and
how to fight with the hands, et cetera, et cetera. So he had to learn from the ground up.
Then he had to improve. He always had a very good triangle. Always had a very good armbar.
Those were his two strengths coming into the no gi training. And those translate pretty
well between gi and no gi. But he had no gi routine. He had no strangles from the back where
he has great collar strangles from the back, but he really, really struggled with finishing people
from the back. So he's learning all this. And then he's like, well, now I've got to get ready
for the gi. So we had to switch his training to gi training. And that took out a couple of months.
Then he went back briefly to Brazil and got a terrible rib injury right before the world
championships and came back like more or less unable to move. So the world champion just
is a week away and he's like, John, I can't move. So I'm like, what are you going to do?
So I'm going to compete. So I'm like, you sure? So we fly to California. He goes out and competes.
His first opponent is literally the biggest man who competes in Jiu Jitsu. This man is almost like
400 pounds. Nicholas has got completely broken ribs. We're taping up his ribs backstage before
he goes out to compete. He beats everyone by submission and wins for the first time the open
weight, a title he had never won before. He steps off the mat, looks at me, he goes, well,
I got the first of them. He wanted gi open weight and now ADCC. And now we can barely move. He's
still gone through two days of brutal competition and his ribs are completely screwed up.
Takes a week off to try and get his ribs somewhere back in order and then begins light training,
building up to ADCC. We start putting him in no-gi competition. He fights two opponents of
good quality, but not like world beating quality. And then as his game starts improving,
we're getting closer and closer, he's starting to develop a sense where he can wrestle confidently
on his feet. He's no longer easy to leg lock at all and is starting to leg lock people
and is starting to get his very strong guard passing, which was based mostly around pant grips
and the gi to adapt to leg no-gi grips. In addition, he's starting to develop strong
chest to chest positioning, which was never really part of his game, a pressure top game. And so
things are looking good. He's matched against Rafael Lovato, one of the great competitors of
ADCC and wins a convincing victory featuring a lot of takedowns and a lot of pressure passing.
And people were just absolutely shocked. I remember the staff of Flow Grappling coming
back going like, who is this guy? He's literally transformed. He's like a different person.
So he goes into the world championships. In his weight division, he was matched with a fellow
Brazilian in the first match and they had an absolute barn-burning battle where at one point,
Nicholas was picked up and slammed and then ended up winning by Kimura, a beautiful Kimura.
Then he took on the man who ultimately wins ADCC Open Weight Division and defeats him.
And again, grueling matches.
Yeah, tough, tough match. Now, Yuri Samoy at that stage was two-time gold medalist in ADCC.
Nicholas wins a very, very close match against him and then fights Craig Jones, who's one of the
best leg lockers in the world. So I think most people were expecting Nicholas to get leg locked
very easily by Craig. Nicholas showed the degree to which he had improved his leg lock defense
in a six-month period. Craig never really got close to the legs and ended up becoming a takedown
battle. It could have gone either way. Craig, I thought, did a really good job of pacing himself.
Both athletes were very tired, but Nicholas was a hit on points and then Craig hit one last takedown,
which sat Nicholas down to a hip. It didn't score, but it was the most aggressive takedown
of that last period. And so Nicholas got the nod and won a narrow victory.
Yeah, Craig commented afterwards. He said that I really wanted the submission. And he said,
Nicholas seemed to really want the submission, but it ended up being a grueling match. It took
everything like exhaustion-wise, everything he had. It was a tough, tough match. And they were
very well matched. Once they figured out they couldn't submit each other, it came down to their
wrestling ability. Neither one of them is a wrestling specialist, but they're both competent
in wrestling. And it became physically very, very tough. Then Nicholas went on to win the
bronze medal in his weight division. So the next day, when we get called for the open weight,
obviously John Carlow won a gold medal. Everyone agreed that he should go into open weight.
Did John Carlow agree? Because he didn't have an easy format.
You don't order people until you ask them. No, no. I guess the question I'm asking
is how do you find the strength to then go on to absolutely after...
Because you've done a 14-week training camp where every day was just as intense as any
ADCC day. So you're used to it at that point. But he had very, very long, tough matches.
But he's used to it. He's a good athlete. So Nicholas and John Carlow went out and
John Carlow had a spectacular submission victory against his first opponent.
Nicholas had some firework matches and one of the toughest opponents he came up against was
the brilliant Ty Rua-Tolo. They had an absolute barn burner. It was a very, very close match.
And Ty had an incredible first two matches. He'd beaten Pedro Mourinho by submission
and he'd beaten the great Felipe Pena in a very narrow match. Very, very tight. Felipe lost on
a guard pole. But Felipe is considerably bigger and stronger than Ty. So for Ty to win that match,
even by a guard pole, it was deeply impressive. It was an action-packed match that went back and
forth. Very, very impressive. Can I ask you a small tangent? Yeah.
Both Rua-Tolo brothers had an incredible performance. What do you think makes them so good
if you were to analyze their game outside of you in just this specific match?
Yeah, absolutely. There's a range of factors. One is that they started the sport very,
very young. They're probably the first example in American grappling of American students who
started at age four or five. Most people, when I began jiu-jitsu, started jiu-jitsu as adults.
I was 28 years old when I had my first lesson as a white belt. So in time, people got a little
younger. For example, Nicky Ryan started when I think when he was 12. But the Rua-Tolo started
when they were literally children. They had excellent coaching going all the way up through
into their teenage years. So they had the advantage of starting the way so many successful athletes
do as children and going up through adulthood with strong coaching all along the way. Excellent
parental support. So they had a great history where their youth didn't show off just how long
they'd been in the sport. So you're dealing with a kid who's 19 years old, but he's been grappling
for 15 years. And what counts is not your age, but your mat age and quality. Now, they were very
young in years, but they were very old in mat age. But there's a lot of athletes that have now, as
you correctly said, have spent from a very early age on the mat, but still these particular ones
stand out. It's interesting. There's a lot more to it than that. It's just the first setting the
scene. But what really makes them stand out is that they've mastered this idea of covering up
and improving initial weaknesses while building upon strengths. When the Rua-Tolos first encountered
my students, they were relatively easy to leg lock because none of their training experience had
prepared them for that. Now, they were young at that time, I believe like 16 or 17. And
it was an obvious problem for them. They both got heel-hooked by my youngsters also,
Nikki Ryan and Ethan Kralenstyn. And you could clearly see that they identified their current
weakness and made prodigious steps to improve upon it to a point now where they're winning
championships with their own leg locks. I love the fact that even as teenagers,
they had the maturity to say, okay, here's an obvious weakness. Let's get around this. Let's
turn it into a strength. I love the way they did that. And focusing on the weakness and let that
guide you to the thing you're working on. But they also covered up their weaknesses,
but they also understood what are our actual strengths. Now, physically, both of the brothers
have extraordinary reach for their height. They both have extraordinarily long arms for their height.
That means that variations of kata-gatame, in particular darses, anacondas,
are going to be much easier for them in their weight division than for most people.
These are all chokes.
Yes, strangleholds. So they specialize in those. They adapted a game based around movement,
which forces opponents, not with physical pressure, but with tactical pressure,
into positions which expose them to those specialized strangleholds that they use.
Traditionally, when we looked at the root holes when they were young,
we saw that there was a disparity between their top game and their bottom game.
They were generally much better in top position than they were in bottom position.
Again, they saw that as a potential weakness and they turned it around,
using again their unique long limbs relative to their height. They make use of a buggy strangle.
I'm not sure why it's referred to as a buggy strangle, but basically,
it's a variation of kata-gatame using the legs done from disadvantageous positions on bottom.
They both make brilliant use of that, not so much as a strangle weapon. Occasionally,
they'll strangle some of it, but they mostly use it to create pressure to make people back off.
As a result, they're able to, they overcame the disparity between their top game and their
bottom game. Now, their bottom game is part of their offense and they're very, very successful
from there. Again, you had that really impressive sense in which they identified their weaknesses
and leg locks in bottom position, turned it around and made it into strengths.
At the same time, they identified, okay, what are our physical gifts and how can we maximize their
use? They created a program of initiating movement that created tactical rather than physical pressure
to set up their best strangle holds. I deeply admire what they've done. Those two young men
have a huge future ahead of them. Here, one of the brothers faces in the absolute, Nicholas
Muragali. Bear in mind, Tai has just fought two very tough matches against guys bigger and stronger
than himself. He's coming into a third match against a third guy who's also bigger than he is.
Hats off to Tai fighting open weight against three monsters in a row.
Tai and Kade, one of their best attributes is they're two of the best scramblers in the sport of
Jujutsu. Whenever you go to shoot on the legs with them, there's a danger of running straight
into a dart strangle hold. They're very competent at counterattacking single legs with dart strangles.
It's also very hard to control them after a takedown. They do a very good job of springing
back up to the feet. I told Nicholas to favor upper body judo-based takedowns rather than wrestling
takedowns. You see here a fine example of Nicholas's gathering skill in Uchimata, one of the great
throws of judo. There's a bit of a foot sweep. The nice thing is he starts off with what it looks
like. It's actually a two-directional Uchimata. He threatens Uchigari to the back. That's a throw
that throws your opponent to the back. His opponent pushes into him. Then he changes direction with
a support foot and takes him over with Uchimata. As we said earlier, the great advantage of judo
over wrestling is that because there's upper body connection during the throw and after the throw,
it's much harder for an opponent to scramble away from you. Even Tai Rua Toto is one of the best
scramblers in the sport. He has to stop scrambling here and just go back to guard position and enable
Nicholas to hold top position. Some of it is also the surprise. There is something less understandable
about judo techniques because there's less data it feels like. The root holders also have a good
Uchimata. I think they're very familiar with it. How often do you think are they on the receiving
end of an Uchimata? That's a good point. I just feel like they have more data in terms of defending.
Of course, there are fundamentals to the Uchimata that make it difficult to scramble around.
This is a good example of someone who literally didn't have a single takedown six months ago.
Now, he's throwing one of the toughest guys in the sport with one of the more difficult
throws of judo. You're a judo man. You'll back me up and say, Uchimata is not an easy throw to
learn. It takes some time. You're hopping on one foot with both of your body weight supported on
one foot. It's one of the more difficult throws to let go of your understanding of takedowns,
of maybe wrestling style takedowns or more intuitive takedowns to understand it. There's
many throws like this. Uchigari is like this. Soto-gari is like this. Uchimata is like this.
It's weird. What? I'm on one foot. I'm hopping around. It makes no sense, but it works. Foot
sweeps are also weird in that way. They're a little bit more intuitive, but you get very good
at foot sweeps. You have to understand timing, weight distribution. It's a dynamic thing that's
weird. I always laugh when I talk to Nicholas. I say, I try to teach him a single leg, which is
traditionally most like a high single leg is one of the easier takedowns to perform in terms of
mechanical difficulty. Nicholas always struggles with it. Then I teach him one of the more difficult
takedowns Uchimata and he does it flawlessly. You never know. Certain things get attached.
You see this in Judo. It's interesting to see there's classes of takedowns and certain people
just gravitate in their philosophical, intuitive understanding of body mechanics or something
like this. It's like Seinagi versus Uchimata. You very clearly see there's some people that
understand, they like to have both their feet planted on the ground and there's some people
that are okay with this one foot on the ground and the other one is doing something else.
What is that? I don't know. It's what makes you fall in love with one field versus another.
Okay. Can you speak to that, that you've released a new instructional
on takedowns and standing skills for Jiu-Jitsu just at a high level
using Nicholas as an example. What are some key ideas about takedowns?
Whenever people talk about standing position as Jiu-Jitsu, they always say, I need to learn
some takedowns. But it's never a question of just learning the takedowns. It's learning the
prerequisites to the takedowns. The takedowns are more or less like an afterthought.
You've got to begin with stance, motion, the ability to engage and grip and contact, get
your opponent out of balance, and then comes the takedowns. The takedowns in Jiu-Jitsu are mostly
divided into lower body takedowns, tackles the legs, single legs, double legs, to a lesser degree
high crotch in Jiu-Jitsu, and then upper body takedowns, which are mostly Judo derived.
Nicholas had to start more or less at the ground. I didn't even know how to come out and make grips
or hold a stance. So he had to learn every element of it. And the fact he was able to do so in six
months was just incredible. Can you comment on the upward posture that seems to work for Jiu-Jitsu?
The matches in Jiu-Jitsu are much longer than the matches in wrestling. In addition, there are many
kinds of submission threat, which are not there in wrestling. So the stance has to be significantly
changed. In wrestling, they favor generally a very low crotch because the vast majority of
attacks are tackles to the legs. So anyone who stands upright in wrestling tends to get heavily
punished by being taken down immediately with a leg tackle. In Jiu-Jitsu, the matches are so much
longer, it would be difficult in a 40-minute match, for example, to maintain a bent over crotch.
You'd be exhausted. There's also problems associated with submission holds. There are many forms of
submission hold, guillotines, darts etc. Where if your head comes down too low, you become a little
vulnerable to this. And so the distances in Jiu-Jitsu competition tend to be much more upright,
more like Judo and Greco. So right off the bat, you see the stance is different. The motion tends
to be much slower and more evenly paced because you've got to be able to do this for long periods
of time. So the number of fakes per minute, the number of shots attempted per minute is usually
much lower. So these are obvious differences. The biggest difference, however, has nothing to
do with that, has to do with tactics. In Jiu-Jitsu, the scores will be judged by what happens
after the takedown. In the case of ADCC, you can take someone down in ways that would score
in both wrestling and Judo, and possibly even win the match in the case of Judo,
and it would score zero in ADCC because of the nature of the rules. The whole idea of ADCC
scoring is to demonstrate control after the takedown. That's what happens in the critical
three seconds after the takedown that creates the score. In Judo and in wrestling,
the emphasis is paced on the takedown itself. In Jiu-Jitsu, the emphasis is placed on the
aftermath of the takedown. That's where the score is allocated. And that can be a period of up to
three seconds. Now, three seconds doesn't sound like much, but in a scramble after a takedown,
three seconds is a fucking eternity. It goes on forever. And so you will see many examples of
takedowns that, as I said, would score very well in Judo and in wrestling, but don't score it all
on ADCC. And so the whole skill becomes packaging the standing position in terms of the takedowns
themselves, but in particular preparing the athletes for that critical three seconds after
the takedown. That's why many people who are very fine wrestlers struggle in ADCC. They take people
down by wrestling metric all the time, but don't score on their ADCC rules. What makes GSB so good
at takedowns? I've gotten GSB even recently watching them do takedowns. Is it within this framework
that you're teaching, what stands out to you about him that you draw lessons from? That's
another example of someone who's performing takedowns in a rule set radically different from
wrestling. Just as the ADCC rule set is so different from conventional wrestling rule sets,
that the whole manner in which you approach takedowns and even your understanding of takedowns has to
be quite strongly modified. So to an MMA, it's even more extreme. People always think, oh,
this guy's a good wrestler. He should be able to get takedowns in MMA easily.
What you find is that the wrestling skills in MMA enable you to finish takedowns. If you get in on
your opponent and get to the legs or the waist or what have you, your wrestling skill will enable
you to finish the takedown. But getting to the takedown is massively different in the context
of MMA than it is in wrestling. The entire stance is different. The entire set of distancing is
different. There's the idea of positioning within a cage, like how close you are to the perimeter
of the cage changes radically how you approach the takedown. The setups are literally night and
day different. The setups are almost entirely composed of striking setups rather than grappling
setups. And so the act of getting to the takedown is like a completely different sport.
Now, George studied wrestling and used to go to wrestling practice twice a week. In Canada,
they do freestyle wrestling. They don't use the American college style of wrestling. Now, George's
main emphasis in wrestling training was takedowns. Obviously, the whole ground element of freestyle
wrestling was of no interest to him. Like learning how to put people's back on the ground and turn
them with leg laces and gut wrenches was of no value in MMA. So he devoted almost all of his
study to just the act of taking someone down. So in pure wrestling, George is not bad. I think
he would be a very competitive match even for a highly ranked American freestyle wrestler. Obviously,
he would lose easily on the ground because he's not used to the part here. He'd probably be leg
laced or gut wrench quite easily by a skilled opponent. But in just a pure takedown battle,
he'd be a competitive training partner for even a good wrestler. But in actual MMA competition,
he could take down even the most highly credentialed wrestlers. And in some cases,
it would make it look almost effortless. And that came from his unification of striking skill
with wrestling. So he used wrestling skills to finish the takedown and his karate and boxing,
kickboxing pedigree to enter into the takedown. Now, when he initiated the study of this,
this was at a time when MMA was pretty much in its infancy. And he was one of the
most impressive people I've ever seen in this regard. He was a true innovator. He
innovated this specialized area of striking to a takedown to a greater degree than anyone else
I'm aware of. Well, let me ask you about this innovation because you're one of the most innovative
people in martial arts. There's several major categories of innovation that you have led.
Obviously, leg locks, body lock, now wrestling. What's your process of innovation? So seeing
the problems in a particular system, the gaps, how do you identify them? And how do you figure
out systems of how to fill those gaps? First thing I look for is what are the current weaknesses
in a given combat sport? So in the case of Jiu Jitsu, it was very obvious that historically,
Jiu Jitsu had always been weak in leg locking. Jiu Jitsu had always been weak in standing
position overall. And these were things that needed to be sorted out immediately. In its
infancy, mixed martial arts was divided between grapplers and strikers. And most of the emphasis
in early mixed martial arts was on the idea of specialists in a given domain forcing the fight
into their domain. And that my early work with George St. Pierre convinced me that the right
approach wasn't increased specialization and learning to force your athlete into that area
specialization at the expense of the opponent, but rather the real battles of the future would be
won and lost, not with techniques per se, specialized techniques, but rather the integration of
techniques and the overlap between the various grappling and striking skills. So that someone
who was an inferior grappler would have just enough grappling skills to be able to hold a
grappler off and then defeat them with striking. And a striker who was, if you went to fight someone
who's superior to you in striking, you would have just enough striking skills to be able to
hold them at bay and then enter into grappling. This went further and further until it got
clear that there were whole areas of the sport that needed, you needed to change your entire
mindset about them. So that people went into early MMA thinking in terms of grappler and striker,
what I started to think is in terms of, okay, there are four fundamental skill areas of mixed
martial arts. There is shootboxing, which is the integration of takedowns and striking.
There is clinch boxing, which is the integration of upper body clinch skills combined with striking.
There is fence boxing, which the two athletes are locked up with each other on the fence,
and they have to integrate takedown, takedown defense and striking skills. And there is grapple
boxing, which is the merging of ground grappling with striking. And when you broke MMA down into
those four categories, you saw that each one of those four domains transcends the specialized
martial arts that form their components. So for example, in clinch boxing, you would incorporate
things from judo, Greco-Roman freestyle, juditsu submissions, Muay Thai clinching techniques.
But even if you took all five of those, the rule set that you're operating in
required such extensive modification that the final product of clinch boxing transcended all
five of its component martial arts and became its own autonomous skill needed to be worked
autonomously. And when we broke Georgia's training down into those four areas, that's when real
progress started to be made. That's when you started to see the integration of those four phases
and the striking and grappling within each of them was where victory was being won and lost.
So once you reframe how you see a particular combat sport, then you could start doing these
detailed development of ideas that actually fit. There's a sense in which it had to start with a
paradigm shift and then a research program began after that. You don't start with research,
you started with a paradigm shift and then went to research. Well, let me ask you, I got a chance
to hang out with you and Henzo Gracie at ADCC. He keeps messaging me saying he's going to call me
and not calling me. I think aside from being hilarious, charismatic and handsome, he is also
and wise for his young age. He's also one of the greatest coaches and athletes of all time
in martial arts. So let me ask, what have you learned about life from Henzo Gracie? The degree
of difficulty that Henzo must have encountered. He never talked to us about it, but I figured
this out as the years went by. The degree of difficulty that he must have experienced when
he first came to Manhattan inside of teaching, it must have just been incredible. You've got to
remember, Henzo came from Brazil training with the best people in the world at that time, you know,
Hexen, all the machados. All of them were located around Gracie Baja and
that Rio de Janeiro set. They all knew each other and they all trained together. They had internal
problems, of course, but they all knew each other well and knew each other's games. So all of them
had beautiful and highly developed Jiu Jitsu. So all Henzo knew from childhood on was perfect,
beautiful Jiu Jitsu and communicating with other people who also knew perfect, beautiful Jiu Jitsu.
Then he comes to New York, where he has to teach in a language that he, at that stage,
barely spoke to a bunch of fucking morons who didn't even, on my first day in Jiu Jitsu,
they had to explain to me the difference between the mount and the guard, because as far as I was
concerned, yeah, you're on top. It's the same thing. They're like, no, no, no. Mounted is
different from guard. And I'm like, no, it's not. Like, you're on top of the guy. You just hit him.
So he has to argue with you about this. And actually going from training with
Hexen Gracie to having to tell some moron that guard is different from mount. And we were so
primitive back then. He went from the best training culture in the world to literally the worst,
just a bunch of guys in their mid-20s who knew nothing about the ground. Well, luckily,
he's the first patient. Out of that, he molded one of the greatest gyms ever in New York.
Yes. He did a fantastic job. And most of it was based around the idea that he gave us
complete freedom. We came in, we trained all day, and I started teaching beginner's classes.
And then some of his senior students, Hecarro Mada, Rodrigo Gracie and Matt Serra,
opened their own schools around the tri-state area. So they left. There was a vacuum of teachers,
and he asked me to start teaching. I taught for many, many years there. And he always gave us
complete freedom. His only thing was to say, okay, do whatever you want. Just make sure it's
effective. Prove to me it's effective. And that's the best research program you can ever get.
Show me proof. And so many times, especially in those days in Jiu Jitsu, there were so many
things that were just off limits. You couldn't study Legos. You couldn't do this. You couldn't
do that. This kind of game was for cowards. This is the only kind of game we accept.
And Hensel was never like that. He was just like, okay, just do what you want. Prove to me it works.
And if you give people that simple structure, you give them some time, some ingenuity,
a lot of things can happen. I got to ask you, and by the way, he'll come on this podcast,
and I do feel like it's a little bit like riding a dragon or a bull of some kind. It'll be a fun
journey. I can't, at least from my perspective, interacting with having met him. It's hard not
to smile. He's easily one of the most charismatic people in Jiu Jitsu. It's kind of fun to watch
that humans can be like this too. It's just the love that radiates from him is incredible.
I got to ask you, this is from Reddit. There's a few legends that come from that gym, but
people on Reddit kept asking about some guy named Boris. Apparently, you coached him at
Hanzos and he was a legend, and he was terrifyingly good. What made him a legend? Who's this Boris
character? Boris is one of my early students. I think he was either my first or second black belt.
Boris came from Long Island. He was a wrestler. He was a Russian Jewish descent and highly
intelligent. Now, he was short of stature, but very powerfully built and compact. Very nice,
polite young man, but also slightly eccentric, which I always liked about him. He would always
come dressed with glasses on and he would leave the gym dressed like, to use the American phrase,
a complete nerd with his pocket protector. Now, he was heavily muscled, but he would dress in such
a way that he didn't appear so when he left. We always used to laugh. Imagine some guy tried to
mug Boris. They would see him with his nerdy glasses on his pocket protector, and they would
literally run into one of the most formidable human beings in the entire New York area. Boris
started training Jiu Jitsu, I believe, in Long Island. When he got a tech job in Manhattan,
he started training with us in a morning class. Now, these were relatively early days in Manhattan
and in my teaching career. He and a group of others, a very small group, used to train early
in the morning around 6 a.m. before work. Boris was a legend in those days. Now, a very young
George St. Pierre came to train with us at that time, and he would come in at 6 a.m. to do his
morning class. He was one of the main training partners for Boris. Boris being a wrestler,
I used to generally prefer top position, and I would always encourage George to play bottom
position. I'd say, you've got to get good in bottom position. You never know. I know you're
good at takedowns, but one day someone's going to put you down, so you've got to work bottom
position. Boris had a very strong guard passing. I remember one of George's happiest days was
finally after two years. One day, he swept Boris, got on top, and finished him. I remember
that he was one of his biggest thrills in all of his training career.
That was the last time that ever happened.
No, Boris was a very formal man for that time. The funny thing about Boris is every time we
would have a conversation, he would say, I'm only going to do this sport until I'm 40 years old,
and then I'm going to stop. I was like, why not be like a lifelong martial artist?
You got so good. You're good at jiu-jitsu. You've got great skills. You've worked hard.
Why not just keep going? He's like, it's ridiculous for a man to train after 40.
There's no need. You could never give any reason for this. It was just ridiculous.
One day, now this is the guy who came in literally every day, 6 a.m. every day.
One day, he comes in, he comes up to me at the end of the train, he goes, hey, John,
I just turned 40, so I won't be seeing you again. I thought he's joking. I'm like,
I'll see you tomorrow, Boris. He's like, no, you won't, and walks off.
How gangsta is that? Then he never came back. I've never seen Boris since. He came in,
was one of the best crap I ever saw. That's it, buddy. I'm out.
And to this day, no one to walk away. I also got to hang out, got to meet,
hang out with Ali Abdelaziz. He's a Hensel Gracie Black Belt, 4th-degree judo Black Belt,
and friend and manager of Khabib Nurmagomedov, who's coming down to Austin soon.
We'll do a podcast. Hopefully, you'll get on the mat and have a bit of brainstorm.
Also, he's a manager and friend of many other amazing fighters.
I really love the guy, the fact that he looks for loyalty and has that close inner circle,
and integrity and character in people. I really like them. I connect them really quickly.
But any fun stories about Ali? Did you train together?
Yes. He trained for many years in the basement of my classes. His story is one of the most
unlikely stories. If someone wrote a movie plot about his life, they'd be like,
it's absurd. We throw another door in a second, and yet it all happened.
You're absolutely correct. From the unlikeliest possible starts,
created a situation where I think it's incontestable now to say he's the most successful
manager in mixed martial arts history. He has more champions under his care than anyone else I'm
aware of. And respected and influential on all dimensions.
Yes. Now, many people aren't aware of the fact that he was actually a very good judo player.
Jidoka first, yes. Yes. He had very good nogi judo. He had an excellent haraegoshi,
very good taniyatoshi. And he threw many people who were highly credentialed wrestlers
in back in the basement, back in the glory days of MMA training. He was a good example of a guy
who had very, very good judo hips and often used it to counter wrestling. And it was a fine
demonstrator of the idea that when judo is adapted to nogi gripping, it can provide a
very effective foil to many of the standard forms of wrestling attack. And he would often use
Uchimata to counter leg tackles and do so in very, very spectacular fashion.
Well, what do you think about Khabib? Is there something from just watching him or
is there something you can imagine if he comes down to the gym that you might learn from the way
he moves, the way he approaches wrestling? Absolutely. He's one of the greatest combat
athletes of all time. If you can't learn from someone like that, there's something wrong with
you. So he emphasizes control. Yes, he does. And he's absolutely a master of exerting control.
The amount of grappling control he was able to put over some of the most difficult people in the
world to control was truly astounding. He beat people from every style. He beat wrestlers,
he beat judo players, he beat kickboxes, and he controlled them all in more or less the same way.
He has a very underrated bottom game. People think, oh, he's just about stifling top control.
But people forget he was taken down on several occasions and ended up in bottom position.
And he showed excellent guard work from bottom. He was able to get into submission holds readily
on opponents from bottom position. He's got an excellent bottom game. People say, oh,
he's just a positional guy. No, he's not. He's got great submissions. The application of his
triangle from both top and bottom was top class. He had a sharp arm lock from bottom position.
Excellent Kimura. If you look at his Kimura finishes in MMA, they were technically very,
very well set. Excellent breaking mechanics. He's a very, very fine grappler in both submission
grappling and MMA grappling. I think we'd probably learn a ton from moving around with him.
Is it possible to learn something about him or about Haja Gracie or about Gordon by watching them
or rolling around them for a little bit? So maybe Haja and Khabibas are good examples
because they're able to do seemingly very basic things on everybody and dominate them with that.
I think Gordon is as well, but Gordon seems to have more preference and range of what he's able
to do. It's almost miraculous how much Haja can do by just the same exact thing on everybody.
Is it possible to understand why Haja or Khabibas are so good at very basic positions?
Or do you have to feel it? Or is it just something that's developed over years and years?
I think for most people, for the vast majority of people, it would have to be explained to them.
For a smaller group of people, if they felt it, they could try to replicate it. There are a few
people who could look at it and have enough knowledge and say, okay, I can see what he's doing.
For example, Haja could probably look at video footage of Khabib grappling and say, okay,
I understand what he's doing, but the average person would probably go over the hits.
You sometimes think of these great athletes. Maybe they're too narrow. You might imagine
they're so focused on a particular thing. They don't develop in interesting ways. He's just a
sweetheart. He's a wonderful person to be around. He's also visiting Austin. First of all, I'm
honored just drinking a little bit too much in Vegas with Haja Gracie and talking about
love and relationships and life and death and all those philosophical topics as one does in Vegas.
I'm a little bit too much to drink. Anyway, after ADCC, it was beautiful. On top of that,
hanging out with Rogan many days for UFC and then ADCC, one thing, I don't know if you've
gotten a chance to hang out with Joe when he plays pool. I spent a lot of time with him when
he was playing pool recently on that trip to Vegas. There's something zen-like about, first of all,
just watching him, but I've never seen the focus the guys got on the game for hours. Just deep
focus, unshakable focus. That was so interesting to watch that this human being, he's a celebrity.
He does all kinds of stuff that he's able to allocate as close to 100% of his mind
as I can imagine to a particular task and nothing can distract him. That was really inspiring that
you could still do that on any task. Pool is a game of physics. That should be your domain.
It is, but that wasn't just physics. I would think you understand the game. You understand the
physics of it. You also understand the fun of it because they're friends and laughter and so on.
I would be distracted by that a little bit. I wouldn't be as much as Joe.
He literally, as the closer you get to the table, the more everything zooms in. The jokes,
there's funny things. You can't get his attention on anything. It's that focus. I don't know,
that really stuck with me, that those memes, I want to find somebody that looks at me the
way X looks at Y. I want to find somebody that looks at me the way Joe looks at a pool cue or
the focus there. I want to find something in my life. Rather, I want to attain the level of
focus he has for pool on a task that I care about. That focus like, fuck everything else.
This is now it's time to do work. I don't know. That was really inspiring. I haven't seen that kind
of focus for prolonged periods of time on a task. You should see some time. The guy is,
part of it is just being competitive with himself. It's the hatred of imperfection,
all those kinds of elements, but embodied in a singular focus.
I had no idea he even played pool. We should watch him. I think it could be one of his greatest
obsessions. I thought pool is for degenerates, like gamblers and hustlers. The same way I see
poker. I saw a wolf slash elite athlete in Joe. I didn't know this. I don't know much about pool.
I didn't know that you could have that level of focus while still drunk at your ass, but
extremely focused. It was beautiful to see. I don't know. Inspiring for me as a person who
highly values singular focus on a task. Let me ask you from a perspective of a hobbyist,
what major practical changes can a hobbyist who works regular nine to five job do to improve
their jiu-jitsu? There's a lot of excellent gyms throughout the United States. What can they
do to improve their jiu-jitsu? About the way they think about jiu-jitsu, about the way they approach,
their actual schedule, those kinds of things. That's a great question.
Okay. The less training time you've got, the more you want to maximize its effect.
A question becomes, okay, if I'm training, say, twice a week, and sometimes even once a week,
what can I do to make sure that that two-hour period is used maximally?
The less training time you've got, the more the onus is on you to have a plan before you walk in
the door. If you go in to saying, I'm going to roll around and see what happens, or I'll just
follow what the instructor says, you'll get a certain amount out of each class,
but it will never be what it could have been. Go in with a plan and enact it. Many people go in
with a plan and don't follow it. Let's say, for example, we start with a program that goes like
this. First, try to create the most honest assessment of yourself as a jiu-jitsu player. It's tough to
make an honest assessment of yourself because you never actually get to see your game.
So what I would recommend is to start by videotaping yourself, inspiring with your peers.
That's fascinating because we don't even have that level of introspection,
ability to reflect of what we actually look like in grappling.
Start with an assessment of yourself. The most honest one comes not from you,
it comes from the camera. Have a look at what you see and start to say, okay,
many of the weaknesses in your game are made much more apparent by looking from the outside in,
rather than feeling them during the heat of a match. Identify four or five of the
biggest weaknesses that you see and start actively attacking those weaknesses. Ask yourself,
let's say, for example, in the course of watching the videotaping yourself, you observe yourself
losing three triangles. You attended three triangle strangleholds, you failed all three. You could
start by saying, okay, let me ask myself, who are the people I look up to the most with regards
a triangle strangle? Who are the guys who have the best triangle strangles out there?
Then ask yourselves, of those people, who are the ones whose body type and personality
most closely mirrors my own? That would be a good example of taking a problem in your game,
contrasting it with elite level performance in people whose body type roughly matches your own,
and then try to take lessons you learn by observing the best people and bringing them into
your own game in one specific area. As time goes by, you do this with more and more elements of
your game. You will undoubtedly improve. You will also have to make sure that you take time
during class to actively work on these things. Now, sometimes in class, you don't get a choice.
The instructor sometimes says, okay, today we're working this, this, and this, but there's always
time after and before class, where you can do your own drilling, where you can make your own
inquiries. And during sparring, there's no rigorous control over what you do. You can
try to work the game into the area of focus. So, for example, if you want to work on front triangles,
it would be wise for you to do most of your sparring from bottom guard positions that will
give you the most opportunity. And in this sense, it always begins with
an accurate assessment of your current skill level. You've got to start there. Then I always
encourage people to use a video camera to make the most honest appraisal you can. Because your
own mind is not dishonest, but it's understandably inaccurate. You tend to feel things rather than
see them when you're performing jiu-jitsu. Then make a program for yourself based around what you
see as excellence. Look at the people in the sport who's in the area you want to work on,
people who are renowned for skill in that area. If possible, narrow it down to people who have
excellence in that area and their body type corresponds with your own. And then try to
take lessons learned from observing the excellence in these elite athletes and bring elements of
them into your game. Never try to bring an elite athlete's entire game to your game.
That will create an inauthentic game on your part, which will always be a poor copy of what
you're trying to watch. Rather, bring very specific areas and skills that you see and
import them from different people until eventually you find something for yourself.
Experiment a lot. Everyone's different. And so you don't see the video research as the final word.
See video research the way a writer will see a muse as someone who initiates discussion,
opens inquiries for your own research. The most powerful moments you will have on the mat
come from making discoveries for yourself. Not being told what to do, not observing someone
else doing something, but self discoveries. Those are the ones that will last inside you.
So use video research not as the definitive answer to your problems, but as initiating
research for yourself on the mat. And as time goes by and you do this more and more often
in more and more areas of the sport, I promise you you'll improve. Yeah. And I guess when you
have the plan, have a plan that carries across many training sessions. So I just remember,
I know this is perhaps dumb, but I saw in my own game early on, a lot of growth by
self identifying a problem and coming up by myself with a solution by watching,
in that case, Marcel Garcia. I just thought my butterfly guard was very weak. And so I thought,
okay, what's the solution here? I thought maybe this X guard thing, double X guard.
Okay, so I watched a bunch of video, let me try to work on this. And then all I did,
just this is self, but when I could get by myself, meaning like not instructor guided
classes, but in training, I would just every, everything I would put myself into butterfly
and X card. And then just let go, like, don't progress, sweep and figure out a way to get
swept to get right back to it back to and everything. It was annoying probably to train
with me. That's all I did. And that's all I thought about. I bet you learned quickly.
Yeah, I learned it's the most progress I've ever made. Now, you could say that X guard wasn't
the right solution for me. That maybe that wasn't the weakest point for me to work on.
If I were to look back now, it's still to this day, sadly, the week, the obvious weakest point
of for me is escapes from much worse positions that that should be worked on. That should have
been worked on from the very beginning. That's still today, if I were to say, what's the weakest
thing that I should work on? Absolutely is even even with one day a week is escapes.
But yeah, a lot of that has to do with just carrying like focusing on the one thing over
and over and over and over across training sessions. Now, it also I would write down on
the sheet of paper the number of times I would get an X card sweep. And I would set a rule that
I have to get whatever it was like 500 sweeps a week. So I have to and then like the closer you
get to the end of the week, the more you like just pick up a small 500 in a week. Yeah. Your
training partners must suck, bro. No, you start with good ones and then you get more and more
desperate to start like finding the kid, right? You can just sweep over and over. But like that
number for me, the numbers for some reason will look like it set a goal to pull off a technique.
It enforced like we're staying with this for a while. This is a journey we're doing and then
for some reason for me that helped me focus the study to understand the deep complexities of this
thing that at least for me other people like nobody at the gym was doing X guard or anything of that.
So you have to kind of figure everything out yourself. I'm sure there's better ways to do
that, but at least that focus helps from a hobbyist perspective. What's the day, what's the perfect day
in the life of John Donner? If we're talking about a basic non-ADCC, now you're,
I'm really grateful that you sit down with me on a Sunday late at night, but it all starts again
for you tomorrow. So three training sessions a day. What times do you wake up? Do you do
like a mantra in the morning? Do you listen to like some Zen music? What do you eat in the morning?
What's the perfect day look like? When you sacrifice a small animal to the gods?
I usually, when you say a perfect day, what I think you really mean is an average day.
Perfectly productive average day. Yeah. So let's take Monday morning. For you
watching this video, we're filming this late on a Sunday night. So after this, I'll drive home.
We just had ADCC. It was two weeks ago. It was one of the longest training camps.
It was the longest training camp I've ever run because of the fact we had to go through three
different matches for Gordon Ryan leading up to it. So immediately after ADCC, I cut the training
down for the competitive athletes to one session per day for the first week after ADCC to give their
bodies a bit of a break. I still have to teach two classes in addition to that, two recreational
classes. So my teaching schedule went down to three classes per day. After one week of relative
break, we go back to two competition classes per day plus two recreational classes,
plus an MMA class for Gary Tonan and his friends. The first class requires me to get up around 6am
to drive. I'm still a student driver, so I'm not very good at driving. So I have to spend a little
extra time to get to the destination on time. Just for the record, John pulled in in a red Lamborghini.
No, you're the worst liar I've ever met. My day typically starts pretty early. I don't eat in
the morning. I just get up and go to work and I teach through the day. My last class finishes
usually around 8pm. During that time, I coached Jujitsu. I try to find time for one Instagram
post per day, which usually describes some basic theme of Jujitsu in most cases, unless we've just
had a competition in which case I'll talk about upcoming competitions or what happens after a
competition. But most of them just express a simple Jujitsu theme. I try to do a short
workout for myself. Then I go home. At the end of the day, I always start by asking myself,
what do my students need for me tomorrow based on what I've seen today? What do the recreational
students need? What do the competitive students need? This is always done in the light of what
are the upcoming competitions. But throughout the day, you're doing a lot of really in-depth classes.
So how do you either prepare for them or think through them as they're happening?
Think through the material that you're teaching. I can look at a class. I've been doing this a
long time. So I can just look at a class and be like, okay, these guys need distance in this.
And then I make reflections at the end of the day. Then I'll take care of things that we all do,
talk to family, occasionally go out for dinner with friends, dates, things like that.
Yeah. Hendo had to really harass you to drag you out and hang out. And he was very convincing.
And food-wise, at the end of the day, I usually stop off at a place like a supermarket,
like Whole Foods or some equivalent to that and buy something simple and eat.
The internet wants to know the details. Did you end up getting Wi-Fi for your apartment?
No. I'm still thinking about it. What are the pros and cons?
There's no cons, lots of pros, but I just don't put much importance to it.
Things that are unimportant, I just ignore. Yeah, there's a lot of things in life that
have a lot of pros, but they're lower on the priority list. Why? Because of the 5G already.
5G's got it covered. Do you watch much video? Do you watch video? Do you watch footage?
I watch video footage quite often. Yeah, especially things from freestyle wrestling,
record Roman wrestling, judo, and mixed martial arts. Also, subsidiary sports to mixed martial
arts like boxing, Muay Thai and European kickboxing. Just for long-term idea generation.
Like a plant to seed an idea. This is an interesting thing. How could this be
incorporated in the context in which we use MMA or judo? Maybe it's immediately obvious
or it might become obvious in a few weeks or months. Is there some aspect to the way you
approach life and training and martial arts that amends itself to minimalism? It seems like you
live a pretty stoic life. Or is that just a symptom of a focused existence? My life wasn't
always like this. I've gone through different phases in my life. I was a university student and
teacher at university. I was a nightclub bouncer for more than a decade. I've been through different
areas of life. I've seen most things. I've experienced a lot. I've traveled the world.
At this point in my life, people think I live some kind of monk-like existence. But
I have a private life. I like to go out and have fun like everyone else. I'm not like some kind of
monk who just sits under a waterfall and meditates or anything crazy like that.
Well, that's what I'm currently going through that stage in my life, the monk-like existence.
So I would be amiss not to ask you one of the most important questions one can possibly ask
John Donahar, which is on the topic of animal combat. Who wins in a fight to the death?
Or maybe in a sport competition setting, but let's go with the fight to the death.
A grizzly bear, a silver-backed gorilla, and maybe a lion or a tiger, an African lion,
or one of the flavors of tiger. I don't know who you think is more ferocious.
What are the parameters to consider here? Maybe I can throw a few out. Maybe you can give me
some thoughts about how much of these parameters matter. So first of all, intelligence.
I do believe the gorilla is the most intelligent. I've did research for this, as you can imagine.
The expert advisor to this very podcast on this very topic is indeed Joe Rogan, yes.
So in captivity, gorillas have been documented to show complex emotions, form family bonds,
the ability to use tools, and to be able to reason about the past and the future.
That's impressive. So that's something that, at least in captivity,
the other animals have not been able to do. They already sound much more advanced than I am.
Yeah, so that's intelligence. Then there is weight. I think that's something that you think of at
first. The lion, let's go with the big ones. I took notes here, 550 pounds for a big lion.
That's exceptionally large. Most male lions are around 450 pounds. That's an exceptional beast then.
Thank you. The tiger can be larger than that. Yeah, much larger.
So we've got the grizzly bear, which is probably the biggest of the bunch. The large ones get to
1,500 pounds. Correct me some of this number. I believe most grizzlies around 1,000-pound
mack. It's a big, big beast. I was looking up the biggest, but I didn't want to do the biggest ever,
just what are the big ones, like the top of the range, because there's always a range.
You can put it in a roughly double, even a very big lion.
Of course, how that weight is used is very important. So there's also things,
which I find is interesting, is anaconda. Let me throw that in there, because it's 200 pounds.
What I really like about that is not just the weight, it's the form factor. I think out of all
of these, the anaconda is the most non-standard form factor. I totally agree with that.
It's like the night on the chessboard. It comes from a completely different angle.
So we got that. We got also strength, which could be measured in ability to carry stuff.
So this was surprising to me. I did look into this carefully. The grizzly bear at 1,000 or
1,500 pounds can only carry at most its body weight, which is a lot. But a gorilla can carry 10 times
its body weight. A gorilla can lift over 2,000 kilograms. That's over 4,000 pounds.
And gorillas themselves, an adult male, weighs in around 350 to 400.
400 pounds, yes. So I like how in this particular place where I found this,
2,000 kilograms is as heavy as 30 average humans. So a gorilla can carry 30 humans.
So that's carrying strength. And then of course, bite force, because that's one of the weapons
in question here. So now this is really surprising to me. The gorilla has won me over through this,
by the way. Intelligence, some of them are sucker for intelligence, but the gorilla bite force
is the highest of all these with 1,300 psi. Bear is second with 1,200 psi. Tiger is a third.
I think tiger and lion is third with 1,000 psi. That's comparable. And a bear is anywhere from
900 to 1,000 psi. They're close, but gorilla, I would not have expected. Now, gorilla is not a
carnivore, but apparently it chews, it's mostly it's grassy stuff. But it's difficult to explain
why it has such a powerful bite. And it also, of course, has very large in size of teeth,
as well as chewing teeth. So also no neck. So it's Nick begins at the top of his head,
and this goes down to the shoulders. Well, a lot of the way they use their teeth,
all of these animals, the ultimate kill is to go for the neck, the bite on the neck. I don't know
exactly why that is, probably has to do, why is that? Because it's a very strong, controlled
position, not just that it's a, is it the same as jujitsu you think? Because they get to also
choke them out. It's very much in line with jujitsu. Like lions are famous for using strangulation
as their primary method of killing. They get a hold of the neck and hold until the animal drops.
Plus claws, I believe the tiger and the bear use their claws. And the lion too.
The lion, right, and the lion. This is something that the gorilla doesn't do.
And, and a condo obviously doesn't. Yeah, yeah.
Different. So what do you think? How do we think about this? Also, there is,
I'm just not letting you talk apparently, there's levels of aggression in terms of.
These are also very important considerations. All the considerations you've raised are very
important and we would have to address them if we're going to go through this topic.
First things first, whenever you go into a discussion of this kind, there's
a kind of natural impression that we all have as to which one would be the most formidable.
And it's important that you become rather skeptical of your first intuitions because
they're often very misleading. Just as every boy thinks his father is the strongest man in the
world. And then when he grows up into adulthood, he realizes his father was not even close to
being the strongest man in the world. It's not because of anything other than inexperience.
To a boy, his father seems overwhelmingly strong. He literally can't even imagine
anyone else being stronger than that. So naively, he thinks his father is the strongest man in
the world. So too, in our relationship with animals, when we look at a silverback gorilla,
it just looks overwhelmingly strong to us to a degree, which is almost absurd. Like
you picture the greatest combat athletes that humanity has ever produced. Prime Mike Tyson,
Gordon Ryan for grappling, they would literally be torn limb from limb by an angry gorilla. It
wouldn't even be remotely competitive. And so there's a sense in which we look at them in awe
because of what they could do to us. But that can be very misleading. And just as a boy looks at
his father as like the pinnacle of strength, you can't necessarily, from a position of inexperience
and weakness, look at a given animal and say, oh, that must be the toughest animal in the animal
kingdom. There's levels to this game. And I think we can point out that the gorilla ultimately would
be pretty low on those levels. I have some pushback to this analysis, because the data,
we don't have much data on this. We actually have slightly more than you think, I believe.
Oh boy. Well, it's anecdotal. I feel like it's out of context. So these species don't use,
this is not MMA. They don't do interspecies fighting often.
Yeah. But there are some ways of looking at this, which can take this already interesting question
and make it a lot more interesting. First, we've seen that intuitions aren't to be trusted. So
if intuitions aren't to be trusted, well, what is to be trusted here? Well, I've always believed
that there are three general elements that determine what level of success or failure
anyone will experience in combat. And this is true both for individuals and for groups and even all
the way up to nations. The first is what are your skills? The second is what are your physical
and mental attributes? So skills, attributes, those are the two primary ones. And there is a
third, which is your experience in using those skills and attributes and real world scenarios.
Okay. So whenever two, we'll start with two humans. When two humans get into a fight,
ask yourself, what is their skill set? What are their physical and mental attributes?
And what is their experience in using those and real world applications?
And that will give you your first look at, okay, who's going to be the more successful?
Then in addition to those three general elements, there's also four more specific elements.
What is the ability of the combatants to initiate combat? Because initiation is a big deal in fighting.
The one who sees the enemy first and can create ambush conditions or initiate combat in an area
or terrain, which is favorable to them. This is huge in determining the outcome of battles.
Second, not only is initiation important, but disengagement is important. A lot of
battles don't go according to plan. And so your ability to disengage at will and break off and
away from a battle is key to success. So initiation and disengagement are big.
The third big element, what is your ability to end a fight? Okay. Do you have an efficient
method of ending conflict? Without that, the conflict could go on to a point where you no
longer have the ability to continue it. If you have some succinct method of finishing,
this is huge in combat in determining winner or loser.
So both from a winning and a losing position?
Yes, but if you don't have one, there's a much higher chance you'll lose. But if you have an
ability to finish an opponent in the conflict reliably, this is very, very important in determining
success or failure. And third, is your ability to endure conflict longer than the person you're
engaged in. It's engaged with, sorry. And so you get these four more specific elements now.
Do you have the ability to initiate contact at will? Do you have the ability to break contact
and disengage at will? Do you have the ability to finish your opponent efficiently? And do you
have the ability to endure longer than your opponent does? If you have all four of those,
that's huge for combat.
That probably applies to human on human.
Everything.
Military conflict.
Everything. Even all the way up to nations.
Yeah. Also ask yourself, what are the most efficient
methods of combat across the globe, across all species, all times, etc., etc. And you'll see that
ultimately, they always come down to three things.
The first is concentration of force. One of the most successful combat strategies of all time is the
ability to take concentrated force against the zone of weakness in your opponent. And if you can do
this, you will often break through to a point of vulnerability, attack that vulnerability in a way
where your opponent cannot respond and cannot recover from that vulnerable point being broken.
Damage with precision. Yes. So this is one of the great combat strategies across the animal kingdom,
across human history, etc. The second would be ambush tactics.
If you can ambush an opponent with the element of surprise, this is huge for success in combat.
Almost all of the truly successful predators on this planet are ambush predators. The ability
to get off to a good start in a way where opponents simply can't recover is huge for combat.
Are we allowing ambush in our discussion? Because humans would call this cheating, perhaps.
Yes, we would. Humans are pretty damn good at it, too.
And then the third is endurance. Some species, some people, humans actually are pretty good at this.
Use endurance as a weapon, and they simply wear an opponent down over time and break them internationally.
This can be done economically through numbers, etc., etc., and you can destroy
someone with sheer endurance. Yeah, a lot of wars throughout human history has been siege warfare.
Yeah. And so when you ask yourself, okay, which one of these animals are going to
be the most successful in combat? Ask yourself, well, there's these three
elements which tend to determine success or failure in warfare, which animals exhibit these
three principles the best, and we'll discuss this. But as far as generalities go, whenever
you ask a question, who will win between A and B? Ask yourself in terms of the light of what we've
just discussed. What is their skill set? What are their attributes, both mental and physical?
What is their experience in utilizing these in real-world situations? And then the four
more tactical elements. Who gets to initiate contact? Can you break off contact at any given time?
What is your endurance? Can you keep going longer than your opponent does?
So with skill set, I wonder if a big component of that of how much practice there is off the
battlefield. Exactly. So how much, quote-unquote, you would probably call it play, like play fighting.
Now, let's start going through our animals. Okay, when you look at the gorilla,
you will see immediately that almost every experience a gorilla has of combat is theatrical.
Yes. They don't engage in killing things. They scare rival males away in order to
gain ownership of females. But there is almost no interest species death in those conflicts.
They're almost entirely theatrical. They have, for example, enormous canine teeth,
but there is no record of them ever being used in combat.
They appear to be used purely for intimidation purposes.
There's a sense in which they have this tremendous appearance and they have tremendous potential.
They really do have freakish levels of strength in many different ways,
and yet the actual track record of using it is negligible.
So a strange evolution would develop such an awful killing machine.
Like their bite force just makes no sense with regard to what they actually eat.
I think, well, no, I think even the presence of canines doesn't make a lot of sense.
They're not going to use them. What are they? It comes down to this idea that their big thing is intimidation.
So as a show, you want to fake it and don't care if you ever make it,
because fake it is good enough given that particular dynamic.
Now, let's contrast that with a male lion. Lions take on the biggest, meanest, toughest animals
in the most competitive killing war on planet Earth, which is continental Africa.
Occasionally they lose, but it's rare and they take out everything.
Just in order to eat, they have to take down wildebeest, Cape buffalo.
Like, Cape buffalo are incredibly dangerous beasts just by themselves, and yet lions regularly take
them down. Occasionally large numbers of lions will even swarm elephant, and over 12-hour periods
take down elephant on some occasions. This is all on video. This is not just speculation.
So they just have a level of combat experience, which no other animal can do.
If I were to also project the Eastern European style of wrestling, where they spend so many hours
on the mat, they really value the number of hours on the mat at play from childhood.
The lions probably, from my extensive watching videos on YouTube, they seem to play with each
other for fun a lot. And I guess with the gorillas, you don't interact, you don't play with other
gorillas. You're more spending a lot more time around the opposite sex.
Even lions, when they fight each other, the mortality rate when lions fight each other,
male lions, for ownership of a pride, is very, very high, much, much higher than, I believe,
any other species on earth. They're almost always fights to the death for the simple reason that
when a male lion loses control of a pride, the first act the new lion does is to kill
the genetic offspring of the previous male lion. So when a lion fights another male lion,
when one male lion fights another, it's not just a fight for his own life. It's a fight for his
genetic offspring. And failure means not only does he die, all his offspring dies. And so when
they fight, the implications are so deep. It's like a fight for your, not just you, but your DNA.
Most male lions have very short runs at the top. They get killed or run off by other lions.
Now, this kind of harsh combat experience, no other animal can claim to have this. Between
what they kill to eat and what they have to do to defend their steak and a pride,
no other animal fights like that. They just bring a level of depth to combat,
which is unmatched in the animal kingdom. They also have some other elements too that
they get the luxury because of their social nature of taking more risks than other animals,
like a tiger hunts alone. So if it gets injured, it's a big problem. It can die if it's injured.
A lion can fight, Cape buffalo get injured and be covered by the other lions for food
until it recovers. So it learns to take risks and it's not afraid to go out and fight very,
very hard, whereas other animals tend to shy away from risk because they're solitary, bears are
solitary, tigers are solitary. So they learn from an early age not to take the big risk,
to go to a certain level and stop. If I could push back, so that's aggression and risk-taking,
that's a plus for the lion. But to defend the gorilla, because you said skill set, they are of
all of those, the only ones that use tools, I've shown to use tools. We didn't say anything about
weapons. A gorilla could in theory pick up a rock and it does have the force, the power,
and the capabilities to do a lot of damage. It doesn't have the practice. It doesn't have the
experience. But don't you think if a gorilla's back is to the wall, so you put them in a situation
of it is left and death for both, the lion and the gorilla. Don't you value intelligence at
least a little bit here. There's a reason why humans, this is like evidence that humans have
spread all across the world while being kind of weak. Why? Intelligence is a huge, huge asset.
Humanity is positive proof that it is the most important asset, but it takes time in order to
work its magic. It took humans 200,000 years to go from the bottom of the food chain to the
top of the food chain. Gorillas have a lot of work to do before they get to that level.
You said in theory gorillas could do this, but let's talk about practice now.
First off, there are many documented incidents of leopards killing gorillas.
That's anecdotal evidence. No, it's not anecdotal. There's a bunch of bitch ass gorillas walking around.
We know this. We're asking. Not anecdotal. It was observed by a group of people who specialized
in observing gorillas over a 12-year period. They regularly found gorilla toes in leopard
defecation. They also saw that over a certain period, some 36 gorillas had been killed,
and evidence strongly suggested leopard predation was the reason. Apparently,
leopards had figured out that there was a femoral artery in gorillas' legs,
and we're doing a move, which from the sounds of it sounds a lot like a berambolo,
where they were spinning underneath gorillas and biting the femoral artery, and then
disengaging and watching them bleed out and die, and then eating them. Now, a leopard
is no match for a lion. The only defense it has to a lion is to run up a tree. It cannot engage
with a lion on anything close to equal terms. It may seem like we're going on tangents,
but we're not. Just because of the foot, the attack of the artery on the foot. Is there
weaknesses that the lion might have of that? What I'm saying is I know it's not equivalent,
but the fact that a leopard does so well against even fully grown male gorillas
makes you, should make you rather suspicious of a gorilla's ability to fight a lion.
Fair enough. Let's also go further into this. Let's talk about concentration of force.
A lion has the quintessential concentration of force, which is fangs and claws.
The gorilla is the exact opposite. It can't even make a fist, and so it can only throw
open-handed slaps and grab things. So it has no ability with its arms to concentrate force
in any kind of efficient way. When a lion or a tiger swoon or a bear, for that matter,
swings at you, it's got four claws from four to six inches long. That's like four blades going
into you. They can retract their claws, so they're always sharp. But the reach is significantly
longer for the gorilla. The ability to engage with speed on the part of the cats is far, far
greater. And also mobility and to feed the bipedal nature of a gorilla, the temporary bipedal.
This is the bear has no impact. Humans are bipedal and lions kill 240 humans a year on average.
So, okay. Okay. Okay. What about bear? Now, bear is different. It has all the same things that
a lion has. The claws, the teeth, has more weight, has more strength, has more power.
Okay. Now, this is an interesting question. You get a fully grown North American grizzly versus
an African lion. This is an interesting bear. I also have questions about polar bears. It's
unclear to me because they're bigger in every way than a grizzly, but they probably don't get
the experience in the practice. Yeah. Also, they have a much more limited set of animals that they
prey upon. So, I'm pretty sure grizzly is going to be tough to beat as far as top bear goes.
A grizzly bear, I believe, would be a formidable adversary even for a male lion. They're literally
twice their size. They have an ability to get away from strangleholds by standing up on two legs.
So, the lion's primary method of killing, which is to strangle, would be very difficult for them to
employ upon a bear. Interestingly, the bear's primary method of killing is to pin. It pins
animals and then just slowly eats them while they're still alive. They have a rather barbaric
means of killing. Lions are much more humane in the way they kill. What I see is the primary problem
is that neither one would be able to kill the other. That finishing thing that you mentioned.
They would both fail on the finishing criteria. The lion would not be able to strangle a bear.
Even in a bear's case scenario where he got his teeth into the neck, the bear can stand up and
presumably shake him off. The bear would never be able to pin a lion for long enough to better hold
it down and slowly maul it over time the way it came with an elk or a caribou. So, I don't believe
either would be able to finish the other. They would just become exhausted. It would come down to
endurance. Now, that's where things get interesting because the bear is much more of an endurance
hunter and the lion is much more of an ambush hunter. Lions, quick, explosive, much higher top
speed. They got a top speed of 45 to 50 miles an hour. The bear can do up to 35, but it can run
for long periods at up to 25 miles an hour. Very long periods. They're mostly an endurance hunter.
They just run elk and moose down until they're exhausted and then pin them and kill them.
So, if it came down to endurance, it might go the way of the bear if they were caged up together.
However, there is very strong evidence from both hunters and video which shows on many occasions
bears being chased off by cougar and wolverines. Now, what's that? That's fear. What is that?
What do you mean chased off? If they fight over meat and say, for example,
a cougar has killed something and the bear wants to meet, the cougar will chase off the bear.
Risk aversion. Exactly. The bear's a risk averse. What I would say is this, the bears are very,
very powerful in their domain, but they don't have the battle experience of a lion. They don't
take on animals as tough as a Cape buffalo. They don't take on elephant. What the toughest thing
it would probably take on would probably be a bull moose. A bull moose is a formidable animal,
but it's nothing like a Cape buffalo. It's nothing like an elephant or a hippopotamus.
Yes. What I would suggest is this. In the wild, I don't believe either one is capable of killing
the other, but I do believe based on video evidence of cougars and wolverines chasing off bears
that a lion would provide enough threat in a brief fight that a bear would back away.
If you put them in a cage, however, where neither one could back away, I would slightly favor the
bear based on the fact that neither one can kill each other, it would come down to endurance.
You mean like an octagon? Yes. That's got to be the next UFC, by the way, bear versus lion.
Things change. Joe Rogan is a big fan of the idea of fighting in a stadium,
for humans fighting in a stadium. In the stadium, a bear, I would slightly favor a bear.
Now, I still think that the lion would have a chance, but I would favor the bear in a betting
match. Some of the best evidence we have for animal versus animal fights come from the ancient
Romans who actually used to put animals in gladiatorial combat. They, for example,
had several incidents where they wrote about tiger versus lion conflict. In one famous passage,
they described a lion getting destroyed by a female tiger. There's some evidence to suggest
that they had more expertise of this than we do because they had a big population of wild animals,
which they just put to fight each other. Unfortunately, there's nothing that they wrote
about bears versus lion. They did talk about bears versus bulls. They did talk about lions versus
tigers, but they never mentioned bear versus lion, so we don't have any evidence for that.
So we have to be a little bit more speculative. Now, given that bears do get chased off by cougar,
and cougar is weak compared with a male lion. We'll listen to you draw from that, by the way.
I would suggest that... Is it about the bears or the cougar? Yeah, it's more about the bear. In
theory, a bear should be able to crush a cougar, but it seems to be the bear is just saying,
this thing could hurt me, so I'm not going to risk injury and backs away. I think it would
back away in the wild from a lion, but put him in a cage and I slightly favor the grizzly based
on endurance. So the final conclusion, if you had to just bet everything you own, so you got,
let's say, we got the octagon, we're bringing a bear. Now, this is like legendary bear.
Okay. Full-grown grizzly. Full-grown grizzly, but not only that,
that grizzly has seen some shit. What's the most it could have seen? A bull moose?
A caribou? That's the toughest opponent he's ever had. No, this one once ran into a pack of
other grizzlies and had to fend. He's got scars. A pack of grizzlies, isn't a pack of grizzlies?
It's solitary. Wolves, wolves, wolves. Wolf's a good practice for a bear. Who attacks a bear?
That's my point. Bears don't really live in a competitive environment, lions do. But sometimes
they can get desperate as it was a pack of wolves. But a pack of wolves is nothing.
Lions deal with packs of hyenas. Okay. What was the, just imagine over the past 100 years,
what do you think is the hardest fight that a grizzly bear has been in? Like somewhere in Alaska,
we never heard, all of a sudden in the middle of the night, all you hear is the bear just.
Yeah, they don't really, there's nothing there. Nothing has got to have been something.
Humans have killed millions of people. They run away from cougars and wolverines.
No, that's anecdotal evidence. There's got to be one bear.
There's video footage of it. You can watch it yourself.
That's called anecdotal evidence. There's got, I guarantee you in the dark of the night,
there was an epic battle of which there's still legend amongst the bears in that part of Canada.
Who did it battle in Canada? Moose.
Other bears, you don't think they'd go at it.
Yeah, bears fight each other, but it's largely theatrical. They never kill each other. When
lions fight each other, they kill each other all the time. Someone would have seen it by now.
Interesting. All right, so my point is that bears are just, they want to get their feet wet.
You're giving no credit for gorillas, so you're saying lion wins. Your money's on the line.
No, I'm saying lion would win in the wild because they can't kill each other. They can't
end the fight. That's one of our most important criteria. Lions can almost always initiate
the action because they have much better ability to see at night, for example. Bears have very
average night vision. Lions have superb night vision. At night time, they can always initiate
the fight. Lions are natural ambush predators, so it's always going to have the advantage of
ambush. The great advantage that bears have is endurance, but bears are very risk averse,
and they're not used to fighting the toughest animals. The toughest animal they fight is a moose
or a caribou. These are not even close to the animals that lions have to go up against on a
regular basis. If somebody wins, it's going to be the lion for you. I still think that the size
and endurance of the bear, if they were locked in a cage together, I would still favor the bear
under those circumstances, but in the wild, I believe the bear will back away quickly from
cage. No time limit, you favor the bear. What if it's five rounds of five minutes championship?
Then I would go with the lion because the lion has a huge speed advantage. It's going to injure it,
tear it up, and do immediate damage. I put it this way. If lion and bear fight, first 15 minutes,
I favor the lion 100%, but then as time goes by, that size and weight and endurance is going to
have an effect. I'll bring up shortly somebody that's going to probably disagree with you about
some things. Hopefully, it's a grizzly bear and he comes and he just eats me.
Oh, that would be so epic. Make a hell of a podcast. I wonder who he would eat first,
who would look scarier, more delicious. I'm not sure. The black and white could either piss him
off. He would think you were a penguin. Is that a good thing or not? Not good. If it was a polar
bear, maybe it's different. Do you care deeply about athletes you coached, about people in your
life? I have to ask this question. If one of those athletes, let's say Gordon Ryan,
I was the dictator of the world and this would entertain me. I forced you and Gordon to do this
to fight a bear or a lion. Gordon has to. How would you coach him to do it,
to have any chance of winning? He goes in empty-handed. You can choose stadium or cage.
Gordon Ryan, empty-handed versus a lion. You get to choose lion versus bear. It's up to you.
Okay. My advice would be very simple. I would say, Gordon, you're fucked. You're going to die
badly. Choose the lion because it will strangle you to death rather than pin you down and moor
you to death. Didn't we just talk about audacious goals? This is not a question of audacious goals.
This is a question of minimizing pain. So you coach your athletes to quit before the battle
has been fought. 100%. Yeah. You don't think he has a chance? You don't think he has a chance?
How? What's he going to do? You don't think there's a technique, first of all, intelligence. So
technical side. What's he going to do? A heel hook? No, no. Well, first of all, maybe. You
kind of do it doubly. He's got four fucking legs. Okay. What if Gordon gets any starting position
he wants? Oh, yeah. That's going to be really useful. You don't think he can have bad control?
On a thousand pound beer. What good with bad control? Shaken off. He'll get torn off. With what?
Reach his back. He's got four, six inches. It's hard. Oh, okay. I wonder what is the reach?
Whatever he touches, he's going to fit. That's not a flexible bear.
So you think there's no control. What about like a low, some kind of controlling position from,
yeah, like you said, like from underneath nothing. This discussion is so insane.
I didn't even know where to begin criticism. I don't think you're open-minded enough.
We could turn this down. Forget about Gordon fighting a lion or a bear. That's completely
impossible. An adult male chimp will destroy Gordon. Isn't that even a gorilla?
What about the aggression? Yeah, the aggression. A male chimp is more than enough to kill any human
on the planet, including Gordon Ryan. So Gordon Ryan fighting a chimp, a good size?
Dead. No, a thousand times. How many times does he win? He loses a thousand times.
It's not even competitive. It's not even remotely competitive. Do you think he will disagree?
No. Okay. Do you think anyone will disagree? Anyone? Yeah, moron.
Okay. Somebody that I think you might know is a famous actor, Tom Hardy,
but he's also doing quite a bit of jiu-jitsu. The reason this makes sense to bring up now
is he's also, I saw narrating a new Sky Original series called Predators coming out in December,
where they follow five different predators and tell their full story about all the fighting
and killing and all that kind of stuff. And he's doing that. It's like Morgan Freeman for
March of the Penguins. It's Tom Hardy for the Predators. So I saw a bear and a lion in the
trailer, but they also had something, I didn't watch it too careful, but they had something
like a hyena. So they think they were talking about, I don't know if it's a hyena, but something
like that, like pack animals that attack hyenas of formidable animals. So it's not all about size,
it's about strategy. The most important thing in nature is numbers. A pack of animals will always
destroy a single animal. And I think that show in particular is not 100% about who wins or so on.
It's about the fascinating stories of how these predators dominate that particular
environment. Because it's not about these like artificial matchups. It's about giving your
environment, how you succeed and all that kind of stuff. Maybe we could do Gordon Ryan versus a
house cat. Gordon might have a small chance against a house cat, maybe. Maybe.
See, now I know you're just trolling me. I think Gordon has a chance against,
well, definitely against the smaller apes, but I have no way of proving it. And the internet
will say I'm an idiot. So there you go. The internet is correct. So there's a, oh, it's
funny enough. I'm looking at Tom's Instagram. He has a picture with Hanzo. He's competed recently,
which is very cool in Jiu Jitsu. That's awesome. That's tough to do for a celebrity to step up.
Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. He used to consult with me a little bit on moves when he was starting
out. He's a very, very nice person. Oh, about Jiu Jitsu? Yeah. Yeah. He asked questions about
Jiu Jitsu. He struck me as being a very, very nice person. I would love to be a fly in that
wall, but he made a post on Instagram, which I'd love to get your opinion on. He has very much
like a John Donahue style of digging into the philosophy of the impact of Jiu Jitsu on one's
life. Is his Instagram post 18 pages long? Yes. Oh, he's got potential then. Yes. With a profound
deep picture of somebody practicing the art of Jiu Jitsu. I think he's at least a trainee in this
art of the Donahue style of communication. If Miyamoto Masashi would be alive today, he would
probably be doing these five page Instagram posts like you do. Addiction writes Tom Hardy,
addiction is difficult and complex stuff to navigate as his mental health, subjects which
are both deeply personal for me and extremely close to my heart. It is an honor to be able to
represent the charity of my team, reorg and the great work they do supporting the mental health
and well-being of veterans of service, military and first responders through the therapeutic
benefits of Jiu Jitsu and fitness training. He represented them in this competition that he
competed in. Simple training for me as a hobby and a private love has been fundamentally key to
further develop a deeper sense of inner resilience, calm and well-being. I can't stress the importance
it has had and the impact of my life and my fellow teammates and he goes on to talk about this
organization reorg that uses Brazilian Jiu Jitsu to form a therapy to overcome physical and mental
challenges, strengthen social connections and improve overall health and well-being. This is
for veterans, for people going through PTSD. They have saved lives around the world by not
only providing an effective and positive means for navigating and managing the challenging
psychological aspects of military and first responder careers, but also has allowed many to
find a renewed sense of purpose, identity and community that's often lost when transitioning
to civilian life. Do you have thoughts about that, sort of the effects of Jiu Jitsu on folks who've
gone through some really difficult things in their life? First of all, I think that's just a
beautiful statement by Mr. Hardy. I must give him a phone call after this and talk to him.
That was beautiful to read. One thing that's always struck me when I train people who either
have a military background or on more than a few occasions, we have special forces soldiers coming
and training with us for a week or two. When you talk to them, the overwhelming sentiment
I get when the conversation is over and we go our separate ways is, I'm always asking myself,
the transition from military life, especially the more extreme military lives of special forces
soldiers back to civilian life, it must be the craziest experience of all. You've got people who
are fighting and dying alongside their comrades in the most extreme circumstances that any human
being can go through. Then they're pulled back into a life where people are arguing with them over
parking spots. The average person's day-to-day life is so mundane that imagine what must be going
through a man's head who a few weeks or months ago was literally fighting for his life and his
comrades' lives, watching people that he loved die or get mutilated in front of him. Things that,
in a matter of seconds, people's lives can be torn apart and changed forever. Then suddenly you
get thrown into a life where people are arguing over who's cut, who are in line to buy a coffee.
The intensity of camaraderie and love that you have for each other and war, you go from
incredible intensity and war to just mundane, boring life and going from one to the other,
where people are yelling at you or nagging you over issues that just seem so inconsequential
compared to what you've been through. You're supposed to take these people seriously and
listen to them. Not only that, you do have trauma, visions of dead brothers and sisters,
and you feel like you can't really talk to these civilians about it.
There's nothing in their experience that would enable you to have a conversation with them.
How do you talk to your new girlfriend about watching one of your friends' legs get taken
off? There's no conversation you could have with them. I find that typically,
they do best when they hang out with each other because they have shared experience and they
can talk about these things. I do find that most juditsu schools have something like a kind of
military barracks demeanour to them of camaraderie, hard work, shared hard work, team work,
building towards a goal over time, the acquisition of skills, usually along with that, a kind of,
for want of a better word, rustic and primitive sense of humour and a kind of soldierly way
of talking to each other and disparaging self-deprecating sense of humour. It's
something that most people with military service naturally come into because it's part of what
they were in. It's like a toned-down version of it, which enables them to form a stepping stone
between the military life that they were in all the way down to civilian life. Juditsu was
kind of like a bridge between those two. Also the honesty, so you said the skill acquisition,
the honesty of really testing that skill. There is a deep honesty to war in a distant way,
but in a way, there is an honesty to jitsu, technique, working a knot. There is simulated
death. It's not real death. It's simulated death on the mat. There's a similar kind of honesty there.
And there's also a similar kind of esteem towards skill, just as regular soldiers look up to special
forces soldiers because they see them as people have greater skill than themselves,
something to aspire to, so too in jiu-jitsu. The thing that we esteem most on the jiu-jitsu
matters skill. No one gets a damn what you look like or what you think that you judge mostly
by your skill level. And so they tend to identify with that. I do think that most people from a
military background kind of find a natural gravitation towards the atmosphere of jiu-jitsu
learning. And if it proves to be a positive way for them to rehabilitate and come back into civilian
lives, then that's a wonderful, wonderful thing. I know we're linked with We Defy, which is an
organization which caters to former soldiers who were badly injured in combat and many of whom
lost limbs or suffered mental trauma. And they come in and train and they often speak very,
very highly of their degree to which jiu-jitsu has helped them come back into civilian life.
And for them it's even worse because they come back not only mentally, but physically disadvantaged
after war. And I've always been proud to be associated with We Defy. And I'm very happy
to see Tom working with this organization. Is this an organization based in England for English
veterans or is it international? That's a good question. I'd have to look into it. It certainly
is based in England, but it could be international. But it's just nice to see somebody use that large
platform for that kind of message. And also to step on the mat and show the kind of jiu-jitsu
you would probably be proud of with chasing submissions. You got an arm lock, you got a
straight foot lock. We're not going to analyze the techniques because there could be a...
It doesn't matter. It's the intent that counts. The finish is the finish. Yeah,
no, that's impressive. He's actually quite an athlete. He's in great shape and strong and flexible.
And I'm glad he's doing well with his jiu-jitsu. And it's good to see Henzel's smiling face next
to him. I can only imagine the conversations. I have to ask you a deep and important question.
You often, when we text back and forth, send me two hugging emojis. Can we psychoanalyze
the reason why that's your favorite emoji of the hugging face? It's kind of like sending a heart,
but a little bit more gender neutral. When jiu-jitsu players meet each other,
they often shake hands and then give a quick hug. So I thought it was the most appropriate emoji
for jiu-jitsu players. I see. It's a pretty simple explanation. Nothing too fraughty in there.
Are you sure? Quite sure. Okay. Have you really asked yourself deeply? Because you're really
lean on an emoji. Is there something behind it? Tomorrow I'm never going to use that emoji again.
Walk away. I'll shock you tomorrow and I'll hit you with three. Three. It's almost always two.
I think maybe you're a creature of habit in communication. I'm a creature of habit in
almost every aspect of my life, so even emojis. Yeah. You fall into these little pockets of
how you communicate, how you show affection towards others. I say love a lot. I send hearts
and don't give a fuck if it's too like me sending a message to a CEO I'm about to interview.
I'll send a heart. I don't give a damn. They'll probably just like, look, what is this? I think
people are too afraid of simple communication of affection. It could be in any form, but
there's a hesitance to that because I think underneath it, in order to show affection,
you're taking a risk and you're showing vulnerability because if you show affection
and the other person rejects that affection, you've now placed yourself in a hierarchy going back to
lions of like, oh, this person, you're just like this silly weak person and they're the strong
person. I think that's how you might see it, I guess, but I don't. To me, the display of vulnerability
is a display of strength, not weakness, at least in human society, at least at this time.
I don't know. Let me ask you about love. I must ask John about love. What do you think is the
role of love in the human condition at the highest philosophical level? Let me first ask. What's
romantic love? Romantic love, let's say romantic love. I have one or two
areas of apparent expertise in my life. Romantic love, definitely not one of them.
So like, lions versus bears, animal combat, pretty good at, and then different grappling
arts, judo, samba, jiu-jitsu, wrestling, MMA, so fighting and so on. Romantic love. You don't see
them as similar. It's a kind of fight. It's a kind of dance. By the way, do you think-
There's a sense in which I'm glad I'm not an expert on that. Imagine what it would be
to be an expert on romantic love. You would take the one thing in life that's actually interesting
and make it boring, because once you develop an expertise about something, you can start to predict
how things are going to unfold. You get answers before events even occur. You see, you can read
into the future of everything. I think there are certain parts of human life where you want to be
a beginner at all times, and you don't want to gain expertise. So excellence and systematizing
something in order to achieve excellence might destroy the very magic of things. Yes. And I
think the magic of romantic love is the fact that we're all beginners at it. And the minute you try
to gain expertise in it, what does that even mean? What would it mean to me? And would it be good?
I don't think it would. I think you're better off just having fun with it and plowing through and
making dumb mistakes and looking like a fool. And then whatever success, whatever that means,
comes in a kind of lighthearted, frivolous kind of way. And that, I think, is over the course of a
lifetime far more desirable than having expertise and affairs of love. So I don't think it's even
a good thing to study too much. And I think if you did, you would actually take something good
out of your life. Yeah. So there's communities of people called pickup artists that try to optimize
this particular aspect, which is of dating, of guys picking up girls and turning that into a system
and seeing what's the most successful. I think that would be, I mean, maybe the first few months
would be good. And then after that, I think it would be a disaster. Given that humans are
fairly easy to study from the standpoint of psychology, I'm sure it's not that difficult
to gain expertise in things like picking people up the same way advertisers can pick up your
attention to sell a product. You can do the same thing presumably with romance and sex. But I don't
know. I feel like if you became very good at it, you would end up being very disappointed by the
results. And so as I said, I think there's some things in life where it's better to be a beginner.
And this is one of those. Yeah. Enjoy the chaos, the push and pull of the beginner. I make that a
lifelong journey. That's really inspiring to hear you say that. And there's a deep truth to that.
That also justifies the fact that I suck at it.
I think it also justifies, and it would sell very well, that John Donner should write a book on
dating. And that would be chapter one. Embrace being a beginner. Check the two will be bear versus
lion. Pivot quickly to violence. By the way, we totally skipped over Anaconda.
I assumed the implied... I'll put it to this way. On video, you can watch Puma and
similar sized cats. Jaguar destroy Anacondas even in water, which is Anacondas preferred domain.
So given that Puma and Jaguar are several orders below lion, you have to go with the idea that
lion would utterly decimate Anaconda. So it's probably good that we did skip over it.
And I think going back to the original thought that you had about this,
don't trust your first instinct. Also, think about the other elements. An
Anacondas has no ability to disengage from the fight. Once the fight's on, it's got to go until
the end. It has no ability to disengage and get away. Its only hope would be ambush. And it's got
a tiny, tiny chance against a truly formidable animal. And the fact that if we look at actual
concrete real-world results when Puma and Jaguar are kicking your ass, lion and bear,
it's going to be a lot worse. Science is not to be found on YouTube. Or rather,
YouTube is not science. I bet you there's a bear somewhere in Canada that has seen some shit.
I'm just going to leave it at that. You're a fan of knives.
There's guys like Miyamoto Masashi who, instead of doing who's number one type of tournaments,
when both competitors walk away, only one competitor walks away. Miyamoto Masashi is known
for having John Donahar like philosophical skills, but also is known for having fought 61
duels to the death and won them, obviously. What do you think made him so good?
I don't feel qualified to talk about him because I haven't made an in-depth study of his life and
times. And we also don't know how much truth there is to his recollections. And there's a lot
of controversy over this. So I don't feel like you can give a definitive statement of, certainly,
I can't give a definitive statement of his prowess. But his writings are fascinating
and deeply insightful. But as to what actually happened out there in his duels, it's unclear.
But with guys like that, you almost certainly know that they wore people
like the character he projects that have existed. Whether it's 61, whether it's 20,
but people really put their life on the line in a different time in human history. Is there
something compelling to you about fighting to the death?
I think it's not just compelling to me, but to anyone. I mean, there's nothing we value more
than our lives. And to be able to say, I'm prepared to die for a sense of honor, things that are so
foreign to our modern society. Imagine we criticize people for something as simple as
like road rage. And yet you can imagine someone who has a sufficiently developed sense of honor.
If you took them out of the 17th century and put them in a modern car, they might be killing
people on the side of the road on a regular basis, just over the smallest acts of honor.
To say that your sense of self overwhelms your sense of self-preservation. It's a very unusual
thing in the modern age. And yet it appears to have been quite common back then.
You often wear a fanny pack. I'm not going to ask you what's inside the fanny pack.
But if you were to design a perfect killing machine that also wore a fanny pack, what would you put
in that fanny pack? Would it be something mundane and practical? Would it be something
surprising and hilarious? Would it be something of philosophical significance,
or maybe sentimental significance? Or would it be empty as a troll on human civilization?
But if it was a perfect killing machine, it would have to be some kind of weapon.
But in a fanny pack? Is it in what has to be a very compact weapon?
We mentioned offline that there's also things in the chess world where there is a different kind
of vibrating devices that could be used to communicate information in communication
with the AI systems that can help you in your particular pursuit. I don't think in jiu-jitsu,
you need as possible for a machine to give you information that gives you advantage.
You can in chess and in poker, so you could put one of those vibrating devices in your
fanny pack. But in jiu-jitsu, it would not help you. Any idea what kind of weapon?
To fit in a fanny pack? To your fan of knives. Where's the interesting
advice come from, by the way? That's more metaphorical. The truth is,
in the modern world, a knife is not an efficient weapon. Easily be overwhelmed by firearms.
My fascination with knives comes more in the sense that they convey a spirit to my students,
where a knife is made of steel and steel begins as ore in the ground. It's an ugly,
unfinished product, which through the enactment of knowledge, time, and discipline can be
transformed into beautiful, shining steel. It begins as something which has no real function
and becomes one of the most functional and important tools in all of human history,
without which human civilization could never have even begun. It's what separated humans and
took us from the bottom of the food chain and began our gradual rise towards the top of the
food chain. So it has immense historical and cultural value, but it has this metaphorical
value insofar as the martial artist begins as a white belt like iron ore, but over time transforms
into some beautiful, shining steel, which can have immense value. In addition, there's a sense of
maintenance. As remarkable as steel is, it is in need of constant maintenance. It will fall
apart through rust, and neglect will destroy a blade both in terms of rust and the edge falling
apart. And so just as the martial artist, it's not good enough just to learn the techniques. You
need to maintain them over time. And just as steel is perishable, so too are the skills of
martial arts. And that when I give a gift of a knife to a student, these metaphorical elements
start to emerge. They say, okay, I began as iron ore, and I want to become the finished blade.
There's another sense in which a knife is morally neutral. A knife can be used to save a life. It
can be used to cook a meal, but it can also be used for murder for the worst possible purposes.
Jiu Jitsu is the same way. Jiu Jitsu can make you a better person. It can make you a worse person.
Jiu Jitsu is just a power. It's not a particularly great power, but it is a power. And like all power,
it can be used for both good and bad. It's morally neutral in itself. And it's up to us to make sure
that just as the knife gets used for good purposes rather than bad, so to let Jiu Jitsu be used for
good purposes rather than bad. There's also an element where the basis of the knife is steel.
And historically, there's always been a riddle of steel, which is steel has the property of both
hardness and suppleness. The harder you make steel, the better its edge retention becomes.
The longer that edge will stay sharp. This is good, but it comes at a price. The harder you
make steel, the more brittle it becomes. And now that edge can be damaged easily.
So the solution is to make the steel softer, more malleable, that will prevent breakage of the blade
and chipping of the edge. But when you make the steel softer, that comes at a price. And that
price is now the edge loses its sharpness very easily. And so the riddle of steel is how to
work with these two to the greatest degree possible and create an edge, which is hard
enough to stay sharp for long periods of time, but without making the steel so brittle that the
blade overall is compromised. So too in juditsu, your task and training is to make the training
competitive enough that you actually get used to the rigors of real combat. But on the other hand,
it can't be so brutal that the athletes get broken down on their gym to a point where they're no
longer effective. And so this duality of hardness and softness, which we see in the case of blades,
is there in the training of the juditsu athlete. So I often give a gift of a knife
to a student when they've done something significant, because it demonstrates in a
metaphorical way these key themes of the sport. Well, I've been honored to be a student of yours.
I've been plagued by injury, but I hope to one day earn one such knife. And I think that's a
really powerful metaphor. I'm really honored that you would spend any time with me in any context,
but especially on the mat, and especially today in conversation, John, you're an incredible person.
Thank you for everything you do. Congratulations for historic accomplishment. It's always beautiful
and inspiring to see greatness. And what I saw, what we saw at ADCC was greatness, rare greatness.
And it's beautiful to see that humans can achieve that kind of thing. So thank you for
making that happen. And thank you for talking today. Thank you, Lex.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with John Donahar. To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from
Miyamoto Musashi. The only reason a warrior is alive is the fight. And the only reason a warrior
fights is to win. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.