John Danaher: Grappling, Jiu Jitsu, ADCC, and Animal Combat | Lex Fridman Podcast #328

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 sized 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 compared do you think he will disagree no do you think anyone will disagree anyone yeah moron the following is a conversation with John donaher his third time on this podcast he's widely considered to be one of the greatest Minds in martial arts history this is a Lex Friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's John donoher 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 I was the only person in the group that liked living in New York um 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 uh when even the basic Act of training became very very difficult and uh so everyone decided they want to leave so there was a prospect of a complete breakup between myself and the team or I would have to leave New York there was a difficult decision for me to make as I lived in New York for 30 years um I had built my life there and had most of my friends and Associates that I know here in America with New Yorkers so I thought you know these guys have been unstained uh 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 uh to go to Puerto Rico because there was a a private gym where we could train through the covert period um 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 Jason so uh they loved their experience in Puerto Rico and uh almost everyone wanted to go down there so I tried to explain to him there's a world of difference between going to a place for vacation versus living there but that didn't have any effect so the decision was made a majority decision was made to go to Puerto Rico um 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 uh tension between team members and and everybody 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 know you come and you do your workout you go outside and it's New York City um in Puerto Rico we lived in a very small uh 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 um 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 to live with them for uh the rest of the day and 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 uh a family tension between two brothers which magnified over time um uh and you know as so often as the case you get two brothers growing up one older one younger and the younger one wants to grow and uh and feel somewhat like a young tree underneath a bigger tree and um uh sometimes people just need their space so there was there was some unhappiness and um as a younger brother I can understand yeah yeah there's a little tree that had to grow up under a bigotry yeah so um fuck the big tree there's a lot of aggression unresolved family issues I love you he doesn't he's lying so uh as time went by these these tensions started uh increasing they came to a point where um it was difficult for them even to be in the training room together at that point you're starting to you know when Once training takes a hit then you you've got to start to address these um the attempts at reconciliation uh fell through and uh a decision was made to 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 80cc so that everyone could train together so I said okay there's problems but let's just tough it out one year we moved 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 the 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 80cc 2022 was a unified team go out prepare yourselves as best you can and um uh and then after that we can make a decision as to whether we break up or not um but that was rejected and uh the team split and um uh they moved to Austin uh We've made prior arrangements to go to a local gym and they took that jam and uh we were left with no gym and more or less homeless in uh in Austin so uh a year out from ADCC yes this is one year out so roughly three quarters of the uh competitive athletes left in in one week um so uh at that point uh that was probably the lowest point because at that point not only did we not have a place to train um we had very few training partners for the few that had remained and um uh 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 yeah so that was a time when he's like man this is the whole program seems to be dead in the water at this point um 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 um was seemingly out of action possibly permanently where is your mind or were you mentally my my thinking is everything bad passes in time I've had a lot of bad points in my life so um uh my life experiences whenever things seem dark have patience time will ultimately cure most ills not all of them but most of them and um uh I'm confident that if you give me a new crop of students I can I can produce magic but it's going to take time so that conference was in part a source of strength yes it's just like I 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 um to to even an attempt to get into ADCC so um uh things looked a little Grim but I was confident you know given enough time I get in a new uh group of students and and work um as it turns out uh one of the uh demonstration partners that uh I used during filming for instructional videos who lives in Boston uh John Carla 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 weight class who were already there and he felt it would be awkward um 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 um uh Austin Texas I began teaching at a local school it was rather like going back into my earliest days in judici I went from teaching at the big henzo 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 their 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 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 adapt and hardworking and someone who can work well in a team they would stay and build their skills as time went by um 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 about and lost again so he was a uh 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 um so he became one of the main training partners he was similar size to Gordon so I encouraged him to train with with Gordon whenever he could and he more and more people started coming into the train under that kind of basis um one day I got a text from uh Gordon who was filming an instructional video in Boston he said hey you know Nicholas murugali was training at this he was shooting video at the same time as me and we we just uh did some grappling he's a really nice guy and he's literally never trained with without a gear before he's for those of you who don't know Nicholas murugali is a one of the outstanding gee Jiu Jitsu competitors of his Generation Um has an amazing game and is a superstar with the uh the ghee side of the sport but it 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 geek competitor of all time and I remember Gordon texting me saying he's really talented he's a nice guy and um 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 um uh I told everyone like you guys are at a severe disadvantage like you're you've got very little time to get ready for ADCC Luke wasn't even an ACC had to win trials same for uh Dan manisoy who he had failed at trials and needed to get a win to even get into ADCC so around this time a doctor suggested by Moe jasm who had himself had stomach issues earlier in his life began working with Gordon Ryan and Moe's the organizer of ADC yes he's the uh the head organizer um he was able to get Gordon Ryan not cured but significantly better than he was before and to a level where Gordon could could train up to five to six days a week and it 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 uh training at a local gym which was very very generously offered to us by uh the head manager of Roca 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 gonna have to train harder than you've ever trained in your life because you've got less time to get ready for this than anyone and uh 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 they've been teaching you in addition to the other best people in the world so it was a uh 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 um we had a crazy training schedule as many as three classes per day I know that sounds easy you know three classes a day but try doing it sometime these classes are not your average classes these are preparation for 80cc as they're both mentally and physically very very hard and um uh 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 um I gave a very abbreviated set of skills for the athletes I chopped everything down to what I believed were the the most essential skills um uh anything that wasn't essential to ADCC preparation was just pushed aside and um they had to focus almost entirely on ADCC with one exception I'll come to that soon um of the the period of their training here in Austin so it was compacted by time and also by uh the breadth of skill that I taught everything was just purely for ADCC preparation in a very short period of time uh Dan manisoyo and Luke Griffith and Oliver Taza all won European trials and got into ADCC Nicholas murugali 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 uh no game matches um and with each match you could see progress being made and so that convinced the 80cc people okay he's good enough to to compete um he ended up winning decisively a match against one of the greatest American Grapplers of all time Raphael Lovato and this was like a clear sign that his skill level and nogi was sufficient to to justify and invite and by the way Lovato had an incredible uh set of matches in this ADCC yes that was actually very impressive and retired yeah which is a really impressive and heartbreaking as well but if you go out that's a good way to go out indeed so there was this um uh long and tough preparation and it was compounded by the fact that it's golden 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 games 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 w owner yeah and also I believe the current uh no nogi world champion and IBG if so tune-up match as a warm-up match then he would fight his old nemesis uh Felipe Pena the only man who submitted Gordon at black dalt and had defeated Gordon in an 80cc match in 2017. and then ADCC itself so there was going to be three big high profile matches back to back and uh and very different rule sets so wno was a 15-minute match uh 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 cam covering three matches with three different rule sets which went and 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 um there was a further complication in the midst of all this Nicholas murugali had to go to the ghee World Championships and we had to throw an extra morning class for that to help him get ready um Nicholas went on to win the open weight gold medal in Ziggy competition and then the next day he had to come back to Texas and begin his ADCC preparation it was a crazy crazy time um but they all came through it so well I'm 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 uh team performance than we did the previous ADCC um uh it was in fact the most successful team performance of the event and as testimony to how hard those those young men uh worked in uh 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 Donahue 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 um it was uh you know I'm not a particularly emotional person um but it was a it was an emotional time for everyone it was I had an element of tragedy in so far as Not only was it a team breakup it was also a family breakup which is much more serious um I do believe that in time uh even the most intense family breakups 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 um it's so easy to let a minute of anger destroy 10 years of of uh of friendship so but there's also the weight of those 10 years like um when I ran into the old Squad members at ADCC we got along like a house on fire it's like we never had a problem um so a house on fire is a good thing yes yes sorry that's a New Zealand expression yeah um uh yeah that definitely could have gone the other way right um so only in New Zealand I would say that it's a good thing yeah um so there's there's I I still believe you know in in time things will be fine but um there was an element where you know youngsters need to grow and um uh sometimes think think about it this way from The Athlete's perspective there's a definitely a generational problem I'm much older than my students okay and the the the years and the Viewpoint that I have is a reflection of the time in which I grew up and uh they're from a completely different generation with a completely different world view um it's it's got to be hard from The Athlete's perspective when you're training seven days a week and you you're getting very very good you're beating everyone that's getting getting put in front of you and 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 you're a God on the mat and then you come into the gym there's some old guy telling you you're not good enough and every day it's like oh what does this guy want from me how how hard do I have to work like you're not good enough like I want you to be the best in the world I want you to be good I want you to be great and all your friends are telling you all day man you're incredible you submit me so easily do this to you and then this old guys are saying that 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 it's tough you know mentally I I get my you know they lasted when I was 20 years old I didn't get along with authority figures at all and um uh to have someone telling you you've always got to work that little bit harder though your skill set's not complete you still need this this and this when you're already doing very very well and far better than all what 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 um I can you know of course I understand you just when let me just enjoy this more like it's always a choice in life do you you can be the best you possibly can or you can go around where you just get to enjoy life a little more you do other things you know like there's more of a to life than just the inside of a gym and learning how to do a better heel hook or a better double leg um so of course you know years go by you want to try other things and um uh 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 a hard thing to deal with I saw like when Kayla Harrison won her first gold medal and uh the Olympics you know to go back to the gym and to trust again the maybe the old man you're you're being do washing yourself but to trust the old man so Jimmy pager on Jimmy pager senior in that case to say okay we're gonna 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 a stepping stone to to to to 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 what uh what do I want from life to understand what is exactly what am I chasing is it just winning or is it some bigger picture of Excellence that's beyond just winning so that that's all all that mixed up together and then when you have to be as a team really close together there's the personal relationships all that gets exacerbated yeah do you think the team ever gets back together I think there's all you know there's definitely a chance of that right now I think they have a an excellent team themselves and they're doing very well uh they had an excellent performance at ADCC so there's not a need for them to uh to come to us because they're like they lack anything they still remember everything I taught them they still coach and teach with the same methodology that I told them so um I don't think they have any need to do so uh if they did it would be because they wanted to um I still think many of the same personality conflicts that originated the conflict would re-emerge currently if if they started training together uh by the way to pile on the compliments they have really nice merch to the t-shirts are just excellent um 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 ego is in part of superpower too so you don't want to yeah you you don't want to suppress EOS I I always laugh when people say leave your ego at the door it's like what do you think drives competition like if you want to be good at anything in life you've got to have an ego um uh no I don't believe it's good or even a healthy thing to suppress he goes um I'm a realist and I understand that this is a sport where they make one gold medal per weight division this as guys get better they're going to be looking at their training partners and thinking like I'm gonna have to fight this guy one day and they're training next to each other of course it's going to be tension um there's always going to be uh disagreements about you know what's the right way to act around uh certain people certain issues and people are going to come into conflict everyone's being programmed to be a an alpha competitor and you get a room full of P 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 know they're not the first students I had that that left I've been coaching a lot longer they've been coaching the squad and um uh I'm sure in the future there'll be other students who leave me hey that's just the nature of the Beast it's sad when it happens but Life Goes On uh like Bukowski said love is a fog that Fades with the first uh daylight of reality or something like that so you even love is temporary uh let me ask you about leading up the the preparation for the athletes I mean this is such given the darkness from 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 uh 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 his physical underpinnings um 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 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 um highlight video reels where they try to pump artificial confidence into people and I've never been impressed by this nor have I you know have any kind of positive effect on 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 had us 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 German put 500 pounds on the bar and tell them 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 too and juditsu you don't take a brand new move and say okay do it on Gordon Ryan never going to succeed uh 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 okay so I put them with highly competitive athletes at this 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 build weight sorry to lift weight over time so to a Jujitsu 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 um they uh we were able to switch off and have them go against very very tough athletes each other so you know uh Luke Griffiths 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 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 uh 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 uh and so the mental preparation came out of those physical underpaints the idea of progressive resistance increasing over time uh for both offense and defense building up to a peak where they go in 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 in 80cc 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 um we're big Believers in the idea of depth of Defense the idea that uh 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 uh 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 um 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 we 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 Donahue or Donahue John on Instagram because uh you have nuggets or large buckets of nuggets of wisdom often which is quite profound even bigger than Jiu Jitsu but anyway so there's some aspect where you want to mimic the conditions of your daily training in um intensity and in what fossil physical uh to that of the actual yeah uh mattress you asked the question about mental training for me um 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 is two different things training is normal activity that you do every day and competition is the exception okay it's different you're going out there's people watching you there's a big crowd they're making lots of noise um 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 okay do they just come out on the mat and fight each other absolutely not this music there's a pageantry there's Fireballs they're literally shooting Fireballs yeah some dude in a tie sitting with Joe Rogan I heard about that meat head uh podcast or comedian whatever uh which one was the meat hit what well played John Idaho well played but you see what they're trying to do they're trying to create theater and pageantry when in fact it's just a grappling match it's just two athletes a referee and a rule set that's 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 rules there 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 an 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 grappled 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 I always have them to you it it it's like when you 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's 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 is 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 the nervous response so that's for the pageantry but what about the maybe the physical intensity of competition isn't there an extra no it's the same in every competition this it's not like you know they're twice as strong and 80cc is there and the ibjf World Championships it's the physical intensity is always pretty much the same they experience it every day in the gym and um uh like you know if you go out and you grapple Gordon Ryan it's not like the next guy who grapple is going to be twice as strong as hell or twice as fast this could be a little stronger a little faster but not so much so that it completely changes your approach of the game um you know there's not that much difference between the human bodies out there on stage so if you've felt intensity before you're not going to be shocked by ADCC but in terms of in training do you have to try to match the intensity of competition no um that would be fool should be every athlete in the gym would be injured uh you can do it for short periods of time um but the uh 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 um you you've got to keep things under wraps like you know every other workout you can have a like one of the five rounds can be full power but not seven days a week three times a day that's that's just gonna break bodies and the full power is just a reminder of it's more about skill development for us it always comes back to school development but what about matching the the feeling of the intensity of competition so yeah periodically periodically it can't be rare a single time not not really it's not rare like yeah meaning like you know one like out of you know three hours of hot sparring per day like 15 minutes might be like 100 full power that way you you that's more than enough to get psychologically ready for the intensity of conflict but um uh but won't break your body over time intensity of conflict that's well put there is uh competition does doesn't it have that extra level of animosity okay it's a little bit more conflict than it is it can sometimes these 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 they certainly don't like love each other that's for sure so um uh so there can be certain match up with this more intensity um but then there's other matchups where the two athletes come out and it's um 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 uh before that let me say big thank you to flow grappling uh for first of all helping the sport of grappling and Jiu Jitsu in general by having organized footage and uh tournaments that sort of show the sport in 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 you grow you should definitely support flow grappling go to their website sign out also flow wrestling I'm a huge fan of wrestling so um maybe there'll be a flow Judo at some point they don't currently I don't think do any major Judo stuff so anyway I I'm a big supporter of theirs and I do have criticism that they know about which is uh 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 we 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 you know to sign up for flow 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 flow grappling and also my love goes out to mojasum as we said uh he's the organizer of ADCC the next one is in 2024. it should be 2024 well you should follow ADCC the underscore official on Instagram and just send as much love towards Mo and ADCC in general it's the like I said the the most prestigious it's like we're the best grapples in the world show up and the magic happens it's like some of the most historic matches in uh grappling Jiu Jitsu ever happened on that stage uh anyway if I can talk about some of the interesting performances for the athletes you coach you post 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 uh I have seen many incredible Feats of grappling but have never saw a performance like this for many Mr Ryan is a polarizing figure in the sport for many others and 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 only one Gordon Ryan and I think Gordon responded all this is true besides the credit that sits with you thank you and a heart emoji very nice so anyway that's as a way of introduction to Gordon Ryan can you take me through his set of performances it may be any matches that stand out so he competed in his division which is the plus 99 kilos and in the super fight against Andre gova that's correct uh this was in fact the first time in in history that this was uh allowed um for your uh listeners who don't follow grappling um we may have been very rude and just throwing a lot of stuff at you without explaining ourselves first of all ADCC is like the Olympics of grappling uh it occurs every two years um you can either qualify for the event through uh winning matches and a qualification process or you can be invited the only people who get invited are either former winners or people on 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 your own uh roughly your own size and weight there is an open weight where anyone of any size can enter so you can have very small people fighting very large people and there is a second category called a super fight where established Champions who have won previous open weight uh uh tournaments fight each other in one-off battles one athlete against another so in most of the uh matches you will you will fight repetitively over time towards a gold medal but in one category you fight one fight the so-called super fight which is usually the headline fight of the event um traditionally if you were in the Super fight 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 four very tough fights in a row and get exhausted so that you're ineffective during the main event of the uh of the show the super fight so throughout its history ADCC has always resisted the idea of an athlete being allowed to do both weight category and uh super fight it's never happened before Gordon Ryan requested to be able to do this um 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 so it was a huge event on Gordon's part and 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 and a completely different rule set and then previously that against the current world champion so there had been a build up to this so he had been very active uh uh coming up to the event and then he went in to fight arguably the greatest ACC champion of all time Andre Galvan which would occurred late on Sunday and would have to fight the toughest people including uh the possibility of fighting his Nemesis Felipe Pena in the weight division prior to getting to the Super fight so there was genuine concern here that he may have completely overstepped himself um the biggest concern I had as a coach and I'm sure the organizers Mo Jessica must have had the same concern so he would get injured or exhausted fighting in his weight division there were two athletes in particular uh Felipe Pena who had given Gordon a very tough 40-minute match and a no rules setting um uh shortly before ADCC and his former training partner uh Nick Rodriguez um who were expected to give Gordon very very tough matches if they came up against each other so there was a genuine concern that Gordon may burn himself out before he even got to fight the guy who most people believe was the greatest ADCC champion of all time so our concern was how do we manage this so what we looked for is extremely efficient methods of reducing the time of the measures making the matches as short as possible um our favorite way to fight bigger stronger athletes and I think Gordon was the lightest athlete in his weight division everyone goes all going so big and strong which is actually quite light um uh I think it 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 yeah so um 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 um we constructed strategies based around those two methods so going for submissions and we should also mention that agcc rule said 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 let me put this in a perspective a modern Judo matches five minutes and modern wrestling match I believe is six minutes in international freestyle um so these matches can be 40 minutes long now that's a long long grappling match yeah and um depending on how you compete in it that can have a huge tour 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 then he's got to fight the toughest 80cc rapper of all time after that so um we were looking for quick and energy efficient matches and that meant going to the back or going to the legs um and in the overwhelming majority of cases that's exactly what he did he was able to get some very very quick matches uh courtesy of leglock finishes and in the few cases where he didn't finish on legs then he would simply take his opponents back and uh that's a very low stress position to to occupy in one case uh his opponent deliberately kept his back on the ground to prevent the back tag and he just chose mounted position instead and so he was able to go through his weight division with extremely low energy expenditure which set him up well to go into the uh the finals no injuries very little energy expenditure now it sounds easy to say that you know oh 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 um uh 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 we'll I'll try to commentate on different things we'll look at but the thing that was made clear is uh maybe you can speak to that maybe to you it looks like efficiency but to me it looked like a Gordon was not even trying there's a um a relaxed aspect to the whole thing so maybe it had to do with saving energy but he made it look very easy yeah and he made the the pathos submission look very easy so here the first match against an opponent that again looks bigger than him okay I'll just give an initial comment here um first you'll see that Gordon elected to sit to the bottom position um the hardest work in submission grappling is when two athletes take the standing position and just for takedowns uh that's where most of the energy gets burned up so working on the idea of Energy Efficiency let's go out and we we chose to sit into guard position and then start looking to access our opponents back because if our opponent's hit position a 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 uh going to the arm drag to the back and I was working on the hooks um the hooks are not particularly important here he'll use it just to get stability on his opponent but um interestingly his opponent here had an interesting strategy too which was to occupy bottom Turtle position and uh and look to get to the critical five-point Demarcus sorry our five minute demarcation point where points began 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 are comfortable in that and what do you think about the defense attorney position versus always trying to come back to guard the total position is the second bottom position of units so many people only associate God position with bottom position and Jiu-Jitsu that's that'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 then total 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 the turtle might be I mean I I personally think it it get against Gordon Ryan I mean I admire the fellows courage I I um it's not easy but there was a logic to what he was doing uh 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 um so Gordon is able to uh break the turtle down get one hook in at which point I I is this becoming an uh extremely controlling position with Gordon in the back at which point is there are you happy with where at this point uh it just started to dawn on me at this point this guy actually had a strategy which was to maintain a a prone position that he's in now and then Shake golden off after the five minute Mark so um uh once that became obvious then I was uh now decided 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 going from strangling him and finish okay now the guy's trying to go up and vertical uh freeze it there now do you see how he's taking his elbows off the mat and turtle position in Jiu Jitsu there's only one reason you take your elbows off the mat from Turtle position it's to stand up so now it's it's clear at this point what his actual strategy is it's to get up for sustaining confrontation when a takedown battle and be 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 so heavy yeah I mean Gordon is a master of it and so there's a power Nelson that Gordon has on him as the 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 and now it's clear what demand strategy is so I'm calling to Gordon to break him down to a hip you put a man on a hip you 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 half that means standing up is no longer an option for his opponent now Gordon goes in he's already scoring because of the uh the total position that he's in his shoulders his opponent stays down on his shoulder now Gordon's responsibility to start looking for the Stranglehold his opponent has basic defensive structures disciplined 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 is the trapping of the arm notice that no Advanced uh uh groups were required it was just a spontaneous trap just 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 very little yeah so that's a as the tournament got off to a very smooth start very lingy expenditure no injuries and a submission win does that there's a kind of certain look to Gordon of that could be interpreted as nervousness that was an incorrect interpretation yes okay so there's a uh what do you interpret as nervous Behavior well this is uh part of me is trolling but sometimes on the surface confident Behavior can look like uh almost like anger and there's a Gordon's face had a like a vulnerability to it almost like uh 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 cheers the more honest the body becomes look at the feet and the hands well there were I mean that's when you see if people are nervous or not he was very relaxed uh in the extremities that's true see you look more confident in this in this than anything what what are you thinking about what I what uh what's going through your head here all right this is the same stuff are you are you intimidated by the 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 positive Victory against this particular opponent it's just okay I've done my job I've taken him through a uh an extensive fight camp that prepared them for every conceivable situation that they're in uh I've run an efficient warm-up their body temperature is perfect the elasticity in the muscles is perfect um 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 and or their their student sometimes they're even worse than cheerleaders they express their own emotional fears as the match goes on um I always believe that 99.5 percent 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 you but imprinted into you remember this fifteen thousand 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 in their program know what to do um so I'm I'm usually pretty confident I'm also very confident that even in worst case scenarios they're going to have effective Solutions because they train those worst case scenarios every single day in the gym and so in part you're there to have a front row seat to analyze what happened so you can take that to the next match the biggest danger an 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 ADCC match because they're all the scoring is structured by time and to alleviate problems associated with tunnel vision that 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 uh this was one of several anticipated matches against a second one against Victor Hugo which is a very tough opponent and uh again this was a situation where golden was considerably outweighed by his opponent so the main thing here was efficiency his opponent elected to avoid the standing position by jumping into God so now guard yeah yeah golden would be in top position this time he has a very good closed guard but unfortunately Gordon has very good God passing so um uh he he's an excellent guard player very talented but Gordon is renowned as the imminent God Pastor in the world today so um 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 um and he eventually passes to mount I believe in a very uh again why don't you run through the sequence where he gets mounted this uh there's a couple I believe he gets mounted twice as I'm not I just back just a little bit further yeah so he's trying to one 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 um but there's a height advantage that Victor Hugo has here and the length of his legs um means that he can play very very wide with his leg so getting an advantageous angle might be difficult in these circumstances it often makes sense to go right up the middle um now Gordon could just go back for legs because the legs Victor Hugo's legs are so far apart at this point that you could easily isolate a leg and attack there but Gordon wanted to uh to show off his passing prowess very often he'll go into a match and say okay I'm gonna I'm gonna show this skill and he'll often use it as a demonstration of um techniques he teaches in instructional videos so he wanted to show that he could pass them out readily on a world champion like this part here this little step okay I just freeze it right there go back one step okay you can clearly see that all of his opponents defensive frames are built on his opponent's left hand side so everything is defense on the 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 uh game is to to place sufficient pressure that you 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 kicks out a little little step and so you see there's two changes in Direction left right in a very short period of time that people find very very hard to keep up with now his opponent builds up to an album he's looking to to create more and more space from here but Gordon count is by just stepping over the hips it's just when and you 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 guys just been here too many times and it's just a half second ahead of every decision going up in the elbow and Gordon makes it look so easy here with the it's it almost seems like uh Victor's out but this turning of the hips with the arm over the opponent's back he's able to bring him back down and get and Gordon takes mount notice how golden is never satisfied with the mounted position itself he's only satisfied with an extended mounted position with the elbow comes up over the shoulder line he only then does he show there's a there's a little bit of relief right there right right there's a little bit of relief now that's that's the look of a man who's just proved a point oh yeah this is very Michael Jordan like sticks his tongue out so yeah I mean there's no points at the stage he really is going for submission and then this this happens again is this the match that wasn't Gordon was the only match where Gordon didn't uh finish his opponent by submission was just very frustrating for him was there uh it's actually interesting that when he came off the mat um uh he was visibly frustrated he wanted to uh to get a finish and um I think he was more upset about not finishing Victor Hugo then he was delighted by winning his two gold medals um uh 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 uh he was not happy and so this is a Gordon's third match against uh Souza Roosevelt Souza now there's another guy who's yeah very big uh different because now we're on to the second day um your listeners should be aware that the event occurs over a two-day period so the previous two matches occurred on Saturday 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 um 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 okay it's okay to have two hard matches on 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 uh 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 um in the last five years cross ashigrami has proven to be statistically the more important of the two um and as a result many people have forgotten the value of straight ashigurami leg base 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 the right leg uh undefended for far too long and as a result Gordon goes into a very classical ashigrama 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 were 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 leg being broken here Gordon has a absolutely ferocious uh outside here okay until you felt it it's um it's quite different so the the opponent probably before he even felt the heel hook felt the control that it's yeah it's I think he's screwed there yeah he doesn't even want the yeah when someone has a 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 um it's there's a sense in which you almost tap uh he got a couple of TAPS almost almost like as if they're early because people came out to us and said this guy tapped early he's like no he knew yeah yeah he knew that uh late would be a big problem got it so this is within within within like 30 seconds within 10 seconds he was within 10 seconds so this was a 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 uh of Gordon's within his division which I think um as opposed to uh facing Philippe Pena who lost to Nikki Rod he's Nikki Road had a great match against Felipe panett um uh and uh past Felipe panna's God I think only the second person in 80cc competition to accomplish that I believe with the with the body luck uh it started as a body lock but he converted to half guard top head numb and uh passed out of half guard top chest to chest I think I listened to uh uh Craig Jones sort of interview summarizing what happened agcc and he briefly mentioned that uh Nikki Rob might have the best body lock capacity he's ever felt so like they're very very good with the ball the way to face I think you're right is don't get him don't let him get the body lock but there's any problem if you stand up he's a good wrestler so he is there's a dilemma that like you have to sit down to God but that goes into his body lock but then if you stand up now you go into his wrestling skill so it's it's a great dilemma that he has and that that's what uh in in facing and facing uh Nikki Rod going run here chooses to foreign yeah if if you look at the limbs there's a relaxation there we should also explain some things here uh 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 what if this match had gone 40 minutes and then an exhaustive Gordon Ryan has to go out to fight Andre Galvan who's fresh and and ready to Maul them and then top of that is former two former teammates who know each other's game very well so there was a high likelihood of most people's minds that this would go the distance because you know when you train with each other for years every single day in the gym seven days a week you you get to know each other's tricks um one big problem here for Nikki Rod is that uh his body lot guard passing game which is his main way from 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 that must have been figuring in his mind do you think uh psychologically for Gordon and psychologically for Nick Iran 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 uh it's tough because he would have remembered the outcome of the training sessions it's hard to go up against a guy who used to dominate you on training and then say okay I'm going to beat him in competition again you shut all that off because it's tough man memory is memory you can't lie to yourself you know what do you think about competition instead of there 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 it 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 like if you if you take the wrong grip and Judo you can be thrown in half a second and there's no recovery if your two Shoulders hit the map the momentum it's over it's done um 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 like 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 and um 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 and boxing you're unconscious so that there's the blunder case but there's also been just people where it's their day I mean again maybe it's romanticized in the notion but there's been some epic performances in Russ in Olympic wrestling in Olympic Judo as an example satoshiishi he had a 2008 performance we talked about all Japan and all that kind of stuff but the Olympics he destroyed uh everybody on this path to the Olympic gold medal and that's when Teddy Romero was also competing he got the bronze so I mean that now you could say he was at that time the best in the world also but he I mean yeah but I think it would be very fair to say he was the best in the world I he think about the people he beat to win three old Japan championships like he beat kosai in a way uh he beat kg Suzuki they were Olympic Champions like he was already so you don't believe him he will I don't believe that a person can walk on stage and be better than what day is supposed to be you 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 school level gets here what you do have is a situation where you have a skill level okay 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 they're able to fall in confidence yes so the question becomes who manages that for best and that can create upsets absolutely so you don't think Gordon could have fallen in confidence against the 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 is uh what do you attribute that to that's because he never loses in the gym I mean there's there's nothing in the there's no experience that he's had that would make him say I shouldn't be this confident so it's the physical uh it's like uh like we talked about mental preparation but 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 uh dissonance between uh his experience his recent experience and what he believes okay if you believe you're best in the world you just 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 a lot of not a lot there's some special humans it seems like Gordon Ryan is one of them I I totally agree with that can you try to like dissect that's what I mean when I said I had many students but only one Gordon Ryan like I've taught many many people but they don't all have his skill level so there's an obvious elephants in the room be okay what distinguishes him from from other athletes 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 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 again I just just link on that absolutely there's a few times where he gets a little bit of an advantage and he just chases it to get a big like uh with Andre gaval you know you get it's like uh 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 that that is that kind of the trigger that you're referring to yes it runs deeper than that too it's the idea that good athletes are greedy athletes okay when they see a small opportunity they try and get a as big a bite of it as possible so that the manager 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 uh if your shoulder comes off the floor he'll be on your back on the other side um 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 um an ability to work in the training room towards not just good technique but excellent technique the conference to pull the trigger whenever the opportunity arises 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 his defense of 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 on a full Duty guitar me Amber and 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 say 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 um 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 to beat them um and that goes back to uh his confidence that the reason why most people lack confidence is they fear about bad outcomes okay if if you're a strong guard player you've got an excellent guide but you're terrified of leg logs and your opponent has strong leg logs 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 uh the confidence you normally do from from guard position um Gordon puts himself in that situation he's so defensively sound that it translates into his offense of 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 the arguably the best ever certainly the best ever if you just look absolute numbers the chess has the luxury of having a rating which you can't have it cannot have in Jiu Jitsu because it's a game of human just chess is just a board game so you can actually calculate the probability that you could win so he is the highest ELO rating uh ever and he's maintained that rating he can without competing against the number two in the world he could just prove that he's the number one in the world for many years uh anyway there's uh certain similarities one's ability to re recall so 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 yeah the flip side of that which is what you also mentioned is the hate of imperfection uh now in the case of Magnus it almost uh 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 the skill level or the favorite is people who are might actually be better than him especially in certain positions he loves competing against them he hates competing against people that are um still from the perspective of everyone else uh what are called super Grand Master 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 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 uh because he hates the anxiety of playing people worse than him interesting so he figures they would somehow make him look bad or no he just for him at least the language he uses is just not fun and he likes having fun it's 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 is um with classical chess you play these many hours could be seven hour long games and uh on on top of that he really hates the fact that it's only I forget what it is but it's single digit number of games he says it's it's low sample so uh I can't 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 so he's really emphasizes the the 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 so there's this giant body of people that are playing it like there's other Gordon Ryan's out there imagine a world where there's multiple Gordon Ryan's or something like that just different dimensions but uh you have like sharks everywhere and so there there is fun to be had even at the very very very very very top but the the memory recall is the thing that stands out and the hate of imperfection uh more intense than anybody else in the game fascinating that takes us back to the final ah yes so uh here Gordon is facing uh Nikki Rod former training Pana and um again the intention here is this has to be put in the context that Gordon will be fighting the greatest ACC Grappler of all time in a few hours after this so what we're looking for is a uh a quick resolution um still the shortest possible match now there's a complicating Factor here Nikki Rod was a wrestler before he was a jiu jitsu player on paper the way his route to win is via wrestling is not going to be able to um submit Gordon Ryan and he's knocking about to pass his guard so he has to win by wrestling in the ADCC finals you cannot set to guard so the 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 uh 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 well there are no there are no means of scoring the first 10 minutes but you can't sit to God that will be that will award you a negative point so I said just let Nikki Royal take you down and he's like Nikki Rod's not going to take the bait and I said if he doesn't they'll call him for stalling and so and and then Craig Jones also commented after the fact is I don't know why Nikki took the beat um so if we see the start of the match you see Gordon comes out and offers a leg now it's not that you know Nikki right is smart he knows what's happening here and uh what's he going to do store for 10 minutes and get like five restoring 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 uh significantly more skilled on the ground um 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 uh for people just listening to this Gordon is in an open guard and nicarad appears to be trying to keep his hips away from Gordon's legs yes the big Nikki 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 them here's 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 is there a way for somebody to try to get a body lock without giving Gordon an opportunity to get under under them uh 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 a position where it's very very hard for his opponent to access his waste 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 uh so I guess Nicki Wright is facing this I need to get close in order to do the uh the body lock and the closer you get the more danger there is uh to let Gordon get uh under you and get the leg control foreign to get close here Gordon's going to try and get his head underneath this 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 uh first opponent earlier in the tournament and there's the leg spins underneath it go circular rotates through gets his body weight underneath his opponent okay now he's going to trip him down to the mat now uh I believe Nigeria tries to pull out his foot here and Craig also said that nicarad has gotten used to being able to pull that foot out from anybody and that he was very surprised at the grip that that Gordon was able to actually hold on so I just want to comment I'm I'm just I'm just parroting commentary um if you look at what's happening here from the internet uh just 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 yeah so too with the human leg when they go to extract by pulling you just keep your fist is close to your shoulder 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 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 Nikki 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 Nikki while I was trying to pull out the foot and the Gordon's able to hold on to the knot um which which is interesting now that was uh a brilliant day's work by Gordon Ryan he said two matches against opponents considerably bigger and stronger than himself and uh the time of the two matches can be measured in I think less than two minutes so he's he's done what he's set out to do no injuries no exhaustion he's beaten four guys back to back all of whom are excellent athletes with minimal energy expenditure and he's ready to go on to his super fight so uh and that's against uh one of the greatest arguably for a long time you know uh really really up there uh Jiu Jitsu practitioners competitors grappling no geek competitors of all time which is Andre govow yes Andre govows uh almost certainly at this point the the greatest ADCC competitor of all time won more Super fights than anyone else by a landslide so I if I may just read a few words you've written on Instagram about this match about Andre gaval on greatness how great you become in any given Endeavor will always be assessed by the degree of difficulty of the barriers you have 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 Andre galvao and you go on to sing him Praises so and that introduces this match you know there was a interesting moment I didn't even um listen to the wars exchanged but because I had the great Fortune of sitting next to hacho crazy there was this uh uh fascinating moment before the match and I can't believe Gordon has sufficiently relaxed to do this but he walked up to uh Hydra Gracie and had a discussion what do you think you Face Hunter Goa 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 or and how much was it just kind of um ins like spiritual inspiration or something like that yeah the I think it's more spiritual inspiration he looks after as a uh uh who's a very close friend a mentor of mine so I always tell my athletes look to harder as your example this is a guy who always fought for the Finish he tried to express the 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 of who 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 were you okay uh for Andre Galvan he hit there's a sense in which Andre gavon had to fight literally the perfect match to win this okay this this is a match that's going to be 20 minutes long um and potentially 40 minutes long um Andre gomon cannot win by submission Gordon's submission dominance here is is just too great uh it would be exceedingly difficult for him to win on the ground uh Gordon's ground positional game is just too advanced and so for Andre Galvan he had to win if he was going to win it was going to be in a standing wrestling exchange where most people assist 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 on the ground sorry off the ground that whole time it's 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 restoring points um 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 uh if Andre Galvan 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 that he's capable of how much intimidation was here was there uh or are these assets already beyond that uh when you say intimidation be more precise do you think there is some degree if you're just to empathize with Andre gaval do you think there's some degree in which Gordon was in his head um 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 uh months and years leading up to it also the fact that Andre gaval 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 um I can't speak for Andre but uh I know for Gordon it's hard to be intimidated when you know the other guy has no method of finishing you it's it just takes so much pressure off when you just go and you're saying there's literally no way this guy can finish me um 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 my Tactical by a tactical game but from Andre's perspective it's like if I make one screw up this kid could finish me like it's you can see which way the intimidation game goes now for the start things get interesting here we've already said if you can just freeze it right there Andre's only real realistic part 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 in the league same we did with Nikki 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 this is there was just so much energy in the room at this point that his hand finding God oh for people just listening there's uh there's a bit of hard slapping yeah that could be considered a strike that's fine it's um there was just a lot of electric atmosphere in the room so now things settle down a little bit um but here's where things get interesting Andre throws the whole tactical game out the window right from the start he goes for the takedown Gordon doesn't try to fight the takedown because it's in his interests to go to the ground but this I love this about Andre he's literally like fuck you kid like let's see how good your ground game is yeah so he shoots the takedown um 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 stole 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 uh The Hornet's Nest now what happened there real quick because that was very Gordon immediately went into ashigrami not just any ashigurami but ashirami was holding both legs so it's an open guard and he scooted forward oh wow that's really nice so it's against the legs now he dominates the space between the knees so there's a guaranteed straight out sugar Army here he split the knees against Andre galvao like effortlessly right there wow so already Gordon's in his preferred domain now so he's starting to off balance his opponent he's looking for reaction to get heel exposure he does get heel exposure Andre's uh does a good job of monitoring defeat to try and reduce the braking pressure but the The Brute fact is it's in Gordon's realm now this is this is where he has all the advantage so um and the match is going to be 20 minutes of in Gordon's realm that's going to be a very very tall order foreign was there a moment here again Gordon's on the legs are you impressed that Andre was able to get out from this country I would expect this on Andre's been preparing for this for two years and um uh he remember Andre is going against some of the greatest uh leg Locus and grappling before and Prevail so he's he's not naive you know he knows how to defend himself um 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 uh ashigrami goes to like a single leg type of position where Gordon Runs to Andre's back now it has to return them to the mat the most efficient way to do so is always courtesy of foot sweeping so he pulls out a DIY from the back to sweeten down to the man 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 gavar's good just getting the guard back all of that is great there's also a sensor in which Gordon is pacing it too just to physically fatigue an opponent so I was passing the guards but not rushing it now what Gordon's looking for here is complete chest to Chase contact he's getting very close to it now and once he gets chest to chased 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 the this pressure here over time he just wears you out yeah it's part of a campaign of attrition of pressure over time now he's creating a situation where he's he's either going to get back exposure or Mount exposure and either way is pretty much fatal when you're dealing with Gordon um Andre elected to to go the route of back exposure now Gordon got the body triangle is on his back and now it's uh now there's one physical problem here that's uh that Andre Galvan has a neck like a bull and um he's a very short and very thick neck so penetrating under the chin for the 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 strangleholds 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 see the biting towards the strangle and now here is still difficult it's still difficult but um things are looking good there's still a considerable amount of time left on the clock Gordon as 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 there wow yeah I'll go in the legs for a one-handed strangle foreign very bravely but a strangle it doesn't matter how Brave you are and where where does the strangle actually happen in terms of um it felt like the strangle was at the blade of the it wasn't even fully sunk in yeah so where does is that like a full car was like um one-handed there's a sense in which once you get underneath you know the inevitable yeah follow-up is again the inevitable you're feeling the inevitable it's like a um to go back to your chest analogy it's like resigning in cheers yeah and chess is considered almost like impolite to let let it run out when you understand yeah 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 Gordon always shows respect I love that um about the drama of combat is trash talk in the beginning and respect at the end I think it's you know when you when you feel someone uh Andre has great skills and uh when you when you grapple someone you feel just how skilled they are and um uh it whatever issues you had prior to the match evaporate when you when you feel that okay they're just like you they do the same moves and same kind of Concepts and and you see that there's more that bonds you together than separates you and that's the feeling that the end of most grappling matches so if we could talk about Giancarlo 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 uh elsewhere in here is about confidence so one of the things you saw that could really benefit him as an Athen and competitor is to build up his confidence is there uh can you speak to that first of all I should give you some background uh John Carlo bedoni was a um uh a strong uh local black belt in Boston um 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 gear training which was the majority of his competitive background into nogi and he was struggling uh in local competitions especially for things like leg locking where he had no background and leg lock-in and would often get submitted so as we work together in instructional videos we we would talk and discuss how it would periodically come to the gym in New York City and come in to work out with the guys and um he often struggled in the training room he had no experience with things like body like guard passing and this used to uh mean that he was uh many of the training sessions didn't go well for him um so it was always like a very polite well-spoken young man and uh worked hard um when we went to Puerto Rico and the team ended up drifting apart um when we moved into Austin uh he 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 um uh sure enough he literally just picked up everything he had and moved down to Austin um 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 um uh he began training we put him on a uh a training schedule where first he had to cover up his big weaknesses he had limited attacks from uh bottom position he had poor leg lock defense and he was very very vulnerable to um certain kinds of guard passing which weren't part of his experience this is all a year out from agcc yes and we should also maybe uh give the the spoiler which is he wins his division in a dominant fashion he also does incredibly well at the absolute you know it was an amazing thing um to give you an idea when he first moved to Austin he competed in um wno event and I don't think he scored a single point lost a couple of matches and um uh and including matches to people who were in this ADCC so um uh he came out of that looking very depressed and uh he lost the Canon Duarte he lost to um uh Mason Fowler so Giancarlo always struck me someone who was positionally sound he he had like good guard retention things like this but he had no offense he had no leglock defense and he just wasn't able to assert Authority on matches he was he was a guy who's 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 yeah because my interaction with him uh early on when he came to Austin I remember he interacted me a bunch on the mat showing me stuff but I wonder if that kindness is a detriment to the confidence is there some connection again Killers can be nice too absolutely confidence comes from skill level and um uh confidence is much more rational thing that most people ascribe people think of confidence is like 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 uh 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 for believing this but nonetheless your confidence is high and it's the same thing in Jiu Jitsu um if if you're performing well and skills are uh 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 you know this personality does better in competition or that personality ultimately it's going to come down to your skills and um 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 yeah first things first we had to say okay you've got an obvious weakness leg lock defense so um 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 um uh then he would have to start sparring situations in leg locks and have to work his way out um 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 on that so what's the experience of those early training sessions like foreign thought that you're not going to ever be good yeah you're wondering have I even got what it takes like you you think about it he's an established player who's been an ibj of competition I believe he's a brown belt world champion in the ghee um and suddenly a group of kids that he's never even seen before repeatedly submitting them with leg logs yeah in the gym and he's like man this this is terrible like a year from now I'm supposed to fight 80cc against people like Craig Jones like some of the best league Lockers in the world like it must have been hard you know um 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 like if you 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 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 uh 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 lay Lock And even the best leg Lockers in the room had a hard time with them and that's that was the first step in confidence to say okay I'm not getting finished quickly anymore then he had to bring in a whole new set of uh upper body submissions he neglected upper body submissions when you sell property submissions do you mean novel holds arm locks things like this and um uh in particular put very very hard work on his strangleholds um 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 Jeremy started 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 uh in time in a relatively short period of time there was significant increases in performance and uh success begets success and this kept going we started to get a hint of his developing confidence in local competitions I remember putting Saint John Carlo compete in a local fight to win competition against the tough Brazilian kid John Carter just came out dominated and finished with a leg lock now that was that was interesting to say okay you're the guy that used to get finished by leg logs and now you're beating tough opponents with leg locks and that was an important psychological step for Giancarlo bedoni and um uh with each little step as we went further and further uh then he got to 80cc trials and had one of the Great Performances um I believe he submitted all of his opponents and ADCC trials and uh put on a fantastic display of grout Lane shockingly no one paid attention to it they were just like oh yeah he won and no John Kelly flew into ADCC completely under the radar they just saw him as oh he's the guy that won American trials and uh no one really paid much attention um in his first match he took on a great um uh Brazilian Champion uh izaki and um uh one in dominant fashion he was about to strangle him with just a few seconds left on the clock and I remember John color being furious at the end of the match um thinking like I was so close to finishing he wanted a perfect finish and uh up on point six to nothing yeah and uh still Chase still chasing I mean he could have just coasted at this point but he wanted to finish every one of his opponents and uh he got very very close but not quite there and um then in his next match he had to take on the defending gold medalist from the previous uh uh uh ADCC amateurs and years this was the guy who was the favorite to win so you have a relatively unknown John Carlo fighting the man who defeated Craig Jones in the previous ADCC what do you remember what stood out to you about this match um is good wrestling is good everything yeah good all the wrong Grappler uh he's got uh by Jujitsu standards he's a very strong race list so Our intention was to match his wrestling with John Carter's uh uh Judo skills so um you'll see if we could um perhaps go back you'll see the first uh takedown foreign drag and took him down with a simple dragon pick so that was John Keller's uh first takedown that was more wrestling oriented and good for his confidence to see that he could score a nice take down but um uh Matthias Denise is very very good at standing up from bottom position if we just go back to the stamp okay now here we have something interesting Matthias comes up from bottom sees her leg and John Carlo defends the wrestling move and then goes immediately into what the fuck with a it's kind of a mix of society and uh that was beautiful I didn't even notice that that's really nice look at that from from uh defending a single threatening a guillotine one of the big themes of our ADCC Camp was that most of our opponents now getting very strong in hand fighting look at that but they are not strong in foot fighting and so we put a very heavy emphasis on on uh foot sweeping attacks you'll remember Gordon Ryan took down Andre Galvan with a foot sweep and here you have John Carlo using the same uh technique not from the back but from the front and the Nova hook uh look at and it's just a beautiful beautiful takedown that's beautiful Judo and then uh and then later on the match you'll use a kosaragake another classical Judo takedown to get top position now at one point Giancarlo was in trouble he got his back exposed with this situation good double leg to uh to a knee Pig so he has to uh expose his back in order to avoid giving up takedown points but here's a defensive training that we work on is is coming through he's defensively sound shuts out the hook prevents a 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 grappling how dangerous is it to put your uh in this position to put your hands on the ground um it's ordinarily it could be dangerous because your opponent could switch to a number oops and there's the body log now there's some controversy here but you can clearly see it uh the hands were locked so it shouldn't really be as controversial as people are saying now watch for the right leg because sort of Gaga here pulls in the hips exposes the leg boom and down beautiful Coast Guard game also probably a lesson that uh complaining to a ref does not protect you from a good Tick Tock yeah that's why they're saying Combat Sports defend yourself at all times um but now the the great advantage of of Judo takedowns over wrestling Lake tackles is they confirm 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 um now John Carlos is absolutely in the driver's seat he discovered four points for that takedown so he's well ahead at this point against the established favorite for the entire weight division so now Matthias 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 the pressure now it's tactical pressure it's not physical pressure it's Tactical Matthias 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 uh Giancarlo capitalizes Mateus is smart he's keeping on the side so that less than 75 percent of his back is on the floor to deny the uh the mountain points but that comes at a price and that price is back exposure so the thing we talked about with Gordon the the circumstance of Fate which is he has a lot of grueling tough matches and still chooses to do absolute so what's and he seems to just power through all of it what 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 uh it's a great question and the truth of the matter is you can't forward to pace yourself because if you say I'm going to hold myself back for this match an expectation of the others you could end up losing your first match so he didn't Pierce himself at all any of the matches you have to just be in good shape and that's what they're they're going on no it's mostly physical you've 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 from back or from whatever the heck that position was uh a rate for uh from looking for the back transitioning here what the heck is this transition so Matthias is engaging in a very good tactic which is to get most of his back off the ground to deny the amount points so as back exposure starts okay he turns in threatening yeah 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 it 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 uh 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 Kohler 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 logs and almost all of his major attacks in the tournament so far have been leglocks now bear in mind that a year ago John Carter was losing to local blue belt competitors via leglock 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 foreign Owen from Ireland is employing the same tactics that we made famous uh years ago the idea of sitting the butterfly garden looking to entangle the legs he's kind of playing that game so um so John Carter is obviously used to this from training the gym so he's doing a good job of preventing entanglement a controlling his opponent 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 Carlo wants to get outside the uh the line of his legs at some point your opponent is going to entangle if he's determined to entangle at some point it's going to happen so John Carter 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 uh here does a good job getting behind John Carlo's knee so now they're fully logged in so John Cullen moves away to protect the heel rotates out and controls the shoelace now at this point the irishman's starting to lose discipline with his own foot position okay he's so focused on his own attack that he's starting to get a little sloppy with his own foot possession you see he's assuming oh I'm the guy who's attacking so my opponent will be afraid of my leg logs and is starting to make some small technical errors that John Carter will take advantage of so he's threatening the sort of the north-south passer like uh yeah yeah it's not putting too much pressure on the past because we're still pretty early in the match and um 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 Giancarlo sees it identifies it locks up a wrist to wrist Toe Hold and breaks his foot how how where's the dumb question where's the control here how is he the control comes from his opponent the entanglement is his opponent's ah his opponent is holding his own body in place with his own legs so he's the root of his own problem here so you got sloppy well done well done and a little smile from drunk that was very nice 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 was just recognized as how much progress he's made and what was once a weakness in roughly 10 months was the time it took and so uh he faces Lucas Hulk Barbosa in the in in the final here now these do have a history um Hulk is beaten uh John Carlin many times and um so for John Carlo it's a question of okay here I'm matched up against a guy who's repeatedly beaten me how am I 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 Giancarlo never would have won this fight when you've lost all those times to to an athlete um words aren't going to change anything but you can see right from the start when they get into the hand fight John Carlo is much more technically 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 the 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 care back triangle body drawing up on this here you can see the same tactics utilized by um golden Ryan back control based around the body trial many attempts to try and entrap 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 Carl will switch to a a palm to Palm strangle instead of the conventional figure four and uh 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 Carter has a massive tactical lead and points there's literally no way he could lose this match at this point um even if his opponent did get out of here and take him down John Carter would still be a hit on points so at this question the question now is not whether John Carter will get the gold medal but whether John Carter will 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 asks for Palms Apartment instead and there's the submission now what a journey what is it John Carlo's a relatively unemotional man but you can see there's 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 and dedication and uh his ability to to actively attack his weaknesses and turn them into strengths and then develop an ability to uh to to finish that that was a truly truly remarkable achievement let me ask you about um garyton so he is one of the at least in my opinion the greatest submission Grapplers 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 um Sam McNally is a very talented uh submission Grappler from Ireland he specializes mostly in arm bars but he has a good positional game as well there's a very modern look to his uh to his Jiu Jitsu and uh he did a fantastic job against garitonin I think technically uh Gary perhaps got a little far away from uh his true nature and grappling which is Relentless submission attack and perhaps uh I should be given blame for this because they put such a heavy emphasis on the in the training camp overall on positional pressure that I feel that worked very well for all of the athletes except Gary tonan and um interesting so his his name you have to acknowledge the nature of the athletes part and I think I was coaching so hard to the to the new people in the room on positional pressure that I neglected Gary's uh innate ability to it the fact that he does best when he um attacks exclusively by submission so I think if if anyone should get blamed for the failure here it should be me uh there's another comment as uh maybe I'm over um overvaluing that sort of just the physical aspect of this but it seemed like Gary was looked skinny is is the weight cut yeah he um this is the first time I ever went down to the uh 66 kilos so um you know it wasn't critical these other guys who were bigger than him who made the weight um but the weight cut if you can just comment on is that does that ever play a part in the athletes the the physical and the mental aspect of the weight cut it is it is a thing can wrestling That Could Break Even some of the toughest Minds yeah but no it wasn't a white cat that would break someone like Garrett's owner and it was it's more physical you you train lighter and weaker you tend to get injured more in Camp because you're lighter um we have a team now after the breakout that's mostly comprised of people over 215 pounds so um uh there's very few small people left in the gym most of the smaller athletes went uh to B team so um uh Gary's been struggling a little bit with with training partners and um uh but here I think the chief problem was that uh Gary focused perhaps a little too much on the positional tactical game and got away from his his true gift which is uh uh Relentless hunting for submissions and as I said I think the person to blame for that is me because I put I had to put so much emphasis on the positional game for the for the developing athletes that um I didn't pay enough attention to Gary's unique attributes so this uh I mentioned I posted some stuff on Reddit so there's a relevant question here uh somebody on Reddit asked Gordon has said and perhaps you have said as well 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 um what are the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and how do those different approaches apply depending on which way class you're in that's a great set of questions yes um uh I'm the person who promulgates this idea that there's two broad ways you can go on 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 fellows 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 the source of opportunity one is based more upon pressure as the source of opportunity so you'll get someone like Gary Turnin or the ruatolo brothers their game is based around the idea of promoting their own movement to create opportunity whereas someone like Gordon Ryan or Hydra Grace 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 uh let's focus primarily on controlling the other fellows movement and um uh but Gary is a unique individual and I feel like I let him down by not uh Giving Him special attention in in regards to to what he does the fact that you've mentioned is now like four times in the in the span of a few minutes just I love that that that all of the stuff will be so heavy on you um and he is a truly special person 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 um Gary gets caught reaching from the knees okay that's always a mistake and uh the guy does I think he does a great job capitalizing on it now there's 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 Hawks if we just freeze it right there so there's a minute and a half left and typically an 80cc if you get the bag you score three points so uh this is a huge score um for Gary to win here it's got to be by submission okay so Gary's made one mistake now um this talented young fellow from Ireland does a great job not only of getting the bag but he really attacks well from the back and let's look at the depth of garyton's defensive Acumen here and we should say leading up to this his defense is incredible yeah he's keeping escaping evidence a nickname for Gary is the slippery salmon because he's like trying to hold a goddamn salmon on the riverbank trying to hold on to this kid so he gets into a position which looks absolutely hopeless here it gets worse this is already bad but um um it's one of the most fun things about to watch while Gary is the skill and the escapes it's incredible it's it's beautiful to watch so the guy has an excellent opportunity to transition off him 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 tone and I think it would have been curtains but you see Gary just extends keeps his arm at the just the right angle to pop out and gets out so now Gary's like oh crap I'm gonna lose to this fucking guy so he's got a minute left to do something so he goes back into his submission mode he goes back to who Gary Tillman is and immediately goes into leg lock action now the the uh 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 the heel hook now Gary has a brutal heel hook his egg and gets real pressure on the kid's leg oh oh it's hard to watch yeah but to his credit the kid is smart he's like you know what let me uh he's just let me take some let me take some zero weakness to that like well he turned his hips yeah it's unclear from the video whether Gary's uh um slipped up with his considerable braking pressures oh it slipped yeah yeah it's unclear even before 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 oh right but I I like I like the Irish kids reaction though he's just like you know what let me eat this because I'm gonna win this match and I'm gonna be a legend for beating Gary Tony so I admired his internal fortitude and um but now Gary knows he's lost it so it there's a sensor in which you 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 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 uh so you were teaching armalk escapes and I think uh uh choke escapes uh and the question came up when 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 not to tap in competition first off in in training you should be tapping very early because um uh you know getting paid to fight in the gym you're getting paid to fight on stage so be a professional in the gym step early tap fast that way you'll you'll last a lot longer in competition things were a little different we 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 yeah like Let It snap yeah Let It Go but um uh your students yes yeah I I would expect them to tap um I also think that if you're in a Stranglehold it doesn't make a lot of sense and not tapping because you're gonna pass out and like it's like you said in cheers it's kind of impolite to make the guy take it through to its conclusion so um I don't see any heroism and and just letting yourself pass out um now things change when you get into a final if you're in a final and you're hit on points and you're willing to for 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 to win a gold medal um I think my students are more than mature enough to make up their own minds uh I would be angry if they let their bodies break in a meaningless fashion in some random tournament um or in a first round match where there's no way you could go on to to the second third and fourth matches with it with a broken limb um but in a final in a gold medal match in 80cc 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 um but what ultimately they do is their decision and winning ADCC is for a grip or at least life-changing you're a world champion forever and no one can ever take that moment away from you so I would I would understand if they took a decision to take damage hopefully it will never come to that because they do a good job of Preparing People to get out of situations as he saw with Gary Turner who was in a dreadful situation and got out within five seconds okay so um uh 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 so uh 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 them um then things get a little more interesting I 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 um but if it should happen um again it comes down to the student I teach technique not morals so 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 so stay away from injury as much as you can so one of the other incredible stories here is as you mentioned Nicolas murugali one of the incredible ghee athletes and Jiu Jitsu world not ever having done gnocchi uh training or competition and so on in a period of a year actually is significantly less than a year Nicholas only came about uh six months I believe before 80cc 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 yeah so he came down it was it was funny I remember the first day Nicholas came in Nicholas virgali as you can see he's like 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 like look at you you're like tall and good looking you should be a fucking model not a juicy guy look at us we're all fucked up with horrible bodies and bad personalities you're like a you're like a happy good-looking guy you should be surrounded by supermodels what are you doing Jiu-Jitsu for and he just laughed and he started um training with us so um uh he came in now historically he has been an athlete who always uh pulled God this in in Jiu Jitsu parlance for your viewers um in in Jiu Jitsu you have the option of sitting down to the ground you just was mostly performed on the on the ground you can and many athletes take advantage of this ladies come out and sit to the the ground position and completely forego takedowns um Nicholas did this his entire career juditsu also has practiced both gee and nogi Nicholas was a a Shining Light in the ghee uh side of Jitsu he's one of the great champions of his era but he had not only never competed without a gear he'd never even trained without a ghee 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 the guy who loses his first match um it doesn't take a lot so this was a very very tall order a lot of his attacks involve the ghee from guard absolutely he's in a very dangerous way I mean he doesn't just wear the geek he really uses the key like his 90 of what he's based around is based around a combination of cross and straight collar controls with with the control of the sleeve cuff and so he really actively uses the gate so when it came off his first training decisions were like oh this look like a fish out of water um in addition he had no experience of leg locking so one of the most significant parts of the modern game he just had nothing um wrestling he had literally zero wrestling which is half of 80cc is is based around this so ADCC is like six months away and he has to get ready for the ghee World Championships he Nicholas had won many accolades in GUI Jiu Jitsu but he had never won the open weight division of key worlds so he's like the first day he's there he John I want to be the first guy to win ghee open weight and 80cc open weight in the same year yeah I'm like I'm like um yeah uh now in my mind I'm thinking like yeah that's never gonna fucking happen you're fucking weirdo do you think there was a degree to which he actually believed that is a degree he thought it was like a certainty so he's looking at me like yeah I'm gonna do this so I'm like you know well Nicholas this is uh this is very laudable and and I I approve of your confidence and um but this is a difficult goal you set yourself perhaps maybe like 2024 would be a more realistic right he's like no no I'm gonna do it in all seriousness it is incredible that uh Nicholas murugali had the guts that says such a nearly impossible goal uh so what do you learn from this experience of setting a goal that most people would say it's just unachievable and him actually almost doing it it's on the surface just absolutely crazy like when he's 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 um and yet he came within inches of actually doing it he won his first ever gold in the open weight with a ghee and got to the finals uh and lost a tight decision in the finals and to take a silver medal he wanted two goals he got a gold and a silver and there's a sense in which the sheer audaciousness of of the goal set seemed ludicrous when it first happened as they say this is 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 that was he set on 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 uh not get in their way when they say such a goal maybe even just forget athletes human nature yeah that's a great question um there's a sense in which you know you don't want to make people delusional that 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 merigali you I I I almost frowned use the word failure because if this is failure give give me more of it you know falling slightly sure yeah falling short of of um of what would otherwise be a perfect year um even that still creates such a massive uh 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 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 uh uh physically and mentally capable to some degree of moving towards these goals you can't just you know uh a random blue but can't make audacious calls like that it's just ludicrous but um with with that in mind if if you're committed and and you 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 life 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 he probably wasn't very good in nogi in the even in the training room so it's like where do you look for even inklings of hope uh we saw it in incremental progress with each successive competition that he was in um his first competition uh uh he looked good but not great second competition a little better third competition took on one of the legends of uh American grappling and won 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 thirsty with the same thing with John Carla first you got to learn how to defend a Lego up so um uh initially just as John Carlos struggled he struggled uh then he had to learn not just takedowns but just how to set up a teacher I had to learn Basics like stance and motion and how to fight with the hands etc etc so he had to learn from the ground up and um uh then he had to improve he always had a very good triangle always said very good arm bar those were his two strengths coming into the nogi training and those translate pretty well between ghee and nogi um but he had no guillotine he he had no uh strangles from the back where he has great collar strangles on the back but he really really struggled with finishing people from the back so um he's learning all this and then he's like well now I've got to get ready for the ghee so we had to switch his training to ghee training and uh that took out a couple of months then he got 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 Championships is a week away and he he's like John I can't move yeah so I'm like what are you gonna do so I'm going to compete so I'm like are you sure so we fly to California he goes out competes his first opponent is literally the biggest man who competes in jiu jitsu this is this man is almost like 400 pounds yeah 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 um uh a title he had never won before he steps off the mat looks at me goes well I got the first of them he wanted ghee open weight and now 80cc and now we can barely move he's still gone through two days of brutal competition and his ribs are completely screwed up it takes a week off to try and get his ribs somewhere back in order and then begins late training building up to 80cc we start putting him in nogi competition he uh he fights two opponents of uh good quality but not like World beating quality and then um as this game starts improving we're getting closer and closer he's starting to develop a sense where he can wrestle confidently on his feet is no longer easy to lay log at all and is starting to leg lock people and is starting to get his very strong guard passing uh which was based mostly around pant grips in the ghee to adapt to leg no gear grips um 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 um uh so things are looking good he's matched against Rafael Lovato one of the great competitors of 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 and going like who is this guy he's like he's literally transformed he's like a different person so he goes into the World Championships because in in his weight division he was matched uh with a fellow Brazilian in the first match and uh they had an absolute Bond burning battle where at one point necklace was picked up and slammed and then ended up winning by Kimura beautiful Kimura um then he took on the man who ultimately wins 80cc open weight Division and defeats him uh matches yeah tough tough match now Yuri samoy at that stage was two-time gold medalist in 80cc Nicholas wins a very very close match against him and then fights Craig Jones who's one of the best leg Lockers in in the in the world so I think most people are expecting Nicholas to get leglocked very easily by Craig um 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 could have gone either way uh Craig I thought did a really good job of of pacing himself he both athletes were very tired but uh uh Nicholas was ahead on points and then Craig hit one last takedown which set Nicholas down to a hip 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 uh afterwards he said that I I really wanted the submission and he said Nicholas seemed to have really wanted the submission but it ended up being a grueling match he took everything yeah like uh exhaustion wise everything he had it was it was a tough tough match and um they were very well matched once they figured out they couldn't submit each other it came down to their their wrestling ability neither one of them was a wrestling specialist but they both competent and and uh and wrestling and um it became physically very very tough um 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 Carter won a gold medal uh the um everyone agreed that he should go into open weight and the John Carlo agree of course he was I mean like because he didn't have an easy format you don't order people into it you ask no no I guess the question I'm asking is how do you find the strength to then go on to Absolute after because you've done it 14-week training camp where every day was just as intense as any 80cc day so you're used to it at that point but he had very very long tough matches but uh he's used to it he's a good athlete um so Nicholas and John Carlo went out and um John Carlo had a spectacular submission Victory against his first opponent um Nicholas had some uh some firework matches and one of the toughest opponents he came up against was the brilliant Tai ruatolo they had an absolute Barn burn it was a very very close match and Ty had had an incredible uh first two matches he'd beaten Pedro Mourinho by submission and he'd beaten the great Felipe Pena in a very narrow magic very very tight Felipe lost on a guard pole um but Felipe is considerably bigger and stronger than Thai so for Thai to to win that match even by God Paul so deeply impressive it was a it was an action-packed match that went back and forth very very impressed on a small tangent yeah both of our tall Brothers had an incredible performance uh what do you think makes them so good if you were to analyze their game sort of outside if you enjoy this specifically absolutely there's there's a range of factors one is that they they started the sport very very young active 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 Jujitsu as adults I was 28 years old when I've had my first lesson as a white belt so in time people got a little younger for example Nikki Ryan started when I think when he was 12 but the rule told us 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 of starting the way so many successful athletes do as as children and going up through uh adulthood and with strong coaching all along the way excellent parental support so they had like a great history where they their youth didn't show off just how long they'd been in the sport right so you're dealing with a kid who's 19 years old but he's been grappling for 15 years yeah and uh what counts is not your age but your met age yeah and quality yeah now they were very young in years but they were very old and mad age and um but there's a lot of athletes that have now as you've correctly said have spent from a very early age on the mat but still these particular ones stand out it's interesting yeah no there's a lot more to it than that this is just the the first set in 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 rotolers first encountered my students they were relatively easy to lay lock because none of their training experience had prepared them for that um now they were they were young at that time I believe like 16 or 17 and uh it was an obvious problem for them they both got peel hooked um by male youngsters also um Nikki Ryan and Ethan crownston and um 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 like 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 um 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 that they they 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 karakatama in particular dasas anacondas are going to be much easier for them in their way 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 strangle holes that they use um traditionally when when we looked at the ruatologist 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 possession again they saw that as a as a potential weakness and they turned it around using again their unique long limbs relative to their height and they make use of a buggy strangle I'm not sure why it's referred to as a buggy strangle but it's in it basically it's a variation of karagatama using the legs done from disadvantageous positions on bottom and they both made brilliant use of that to 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 and as a result they're able to uh 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 and so again you hit that that really impressive sense in which they identified their weaknesses and leg locks and bottom position turned it around and made it into strengths and at the same time they identified okay what what are our physical gifts and how can we maximize their use and they created a program of initiating movement that created tactical rather than physical pressure to set up their best strangle holds I'd deeply admire what they've done there's two young men have a huge future ahead of them and so here uh one of the brothers faces in the in the absolute Nicholas murugali and bear wine Tai has just fought two very tough matches against guys bigger and stronger than himself so he's coming into a third match against a third guy who's also bigger than he is so uh hats off to tie fighting open weight against three monsters in a row um now Tai and Kate one of their best attributes is they are two of the best scramblers in the sport of Jiu Jitsu so whenever you go to shoot on the legs with them there's a danger of running straight into a dark Stranglehold they're very competent at counter-attacking single legs with dark strangles um it's also very hard to control them after a takedown they do a very good job of springing back up to the feet so I told Nicholas to favor upper body Judo bass takedowns rather than wrestling takedowns and you see here a fine example of Nicholas's Gathering skill in uchimata one of the great throws of of Judo set up with a there's a bit of a foot and a foot sweep like uh good the nice thing is he starts off with what it looks like it says actually a two-directional ultramata he threatens ochigari to the back that's a throw that throws your opponent to the back his opponent pushes into him that he changes Direction with a support foot and takes him over with uchimata now as we said earlier the great advantage of Judo over wrestling is that because this upper body connection during the throw and after the throw it's much harder for an opponent to scramble away from you and even Tai Rotolo is one of the best scramblers in the sport it has to stop scrambling here and just uh go back to guard position and enable Nicholas to to hold top position I mean 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 range I think they're very familiar with it how often do you think are they in the receiving end of it that's a good point yeah so I just feel like they have more data in terms of Defending um would I mean of course there is fundamentals to the gemada that make it difficult to scramble around but 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 Judah now you're a judo man yeah you'll back me up it's not an easy throw to learn it takes some time you're hopping on one foot with both of your body weight Supply yeah it's a lot of the really uh it's one of the more difficult throws let go of your understanding of uh takedowns of maybe wrestling style takedowns or more intuitive kind of takedowns to understand it there's many throws like this which agaris like this uh sort of guy is like this shimata is like this it's weird what I'm on one foot I'm hopping around this makes no sense yeah but it works foot sweeps are also weird in that way they're a little bit more intuitive but like you get very good at foot sweeps you have to understand timing weight distribution there it's uh it's a dynamic thing that's weird you have to I always uh laugh and I talk to Nicholas say you know I try to teach them a single leg which is traditionally most you know like a high single leg is one of the easier takedowns to perform in terms of mechanical difficulty and uh Nicholas always struggles with it and then I teach him one of the more difficult takedownsimata and he does it flawlessly you never know certain things get attached I mean you see this in Judo it's kind of interesting to see um 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 say Nagi versus ichimada 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 and I think that I don't know what that what is that I don't know it's what makes you fall in love with one field versus another so what can you speak to that that you know 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 okay first whenever people talk about standing position as you say they always say oh 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 um you've got to begin with stance motion the ability to engage in grip and contact get your opponent out of balance and then comes the takedowns um the takedowns in Jiu-Jitsu are mostly divided into a lower body takedowns tackles to the legs single legs Double legs to a lesser degree high quality and then upper body takedowns which are mostly Judo derived um Nicholas had to start more or less at the ground I didn't even know how to come out and make groups 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 is just incredible can you comment on the uh the upward posture that seems to work for you just the matches in Jiu Jitsu are much longer than the magazine wrestling um 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 Crouch because the vast majority of attacks are tackles to the legs so anyone who stands upright and wrestling tends to get heavily punished by being taken down immediately with a leg tackle um 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 crowd should be exhausted there's also problems associated with submission holes there are many forms of submission hold Guillotines tasks Etc where if your head comes down too low you become a little vulnerable to this and so the the stances in uh 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 the number of fakes per minute the number of shots attempted to per minute is usually much lower um so these are obvious differences uh the biggest difference however has nothing to do with that it has to do with tactics in jiu jitsu these 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 Judah and it would score zero in ADCC because of the the nature of the rules the whole idea of ADCC scoring is to demonstrate control after the takedown it's what happens in the critical three seconds after the takedown that creates the score in Judo and in wrestling the emphasis is based 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 I take down 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 and and Judo and wrestling but don't score at all on 80cc 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 have very fine wrestlers struggle in ADCC they take people down by wrestling metric all the time but don't score under ADCC rules what makes GSB so good at takedowns I've got a chance to even recently watch them do takedowns within this framework that you you're teaching what stands out to you about him that you draw lessons from yeah that's uh another example of someone who's performing takedowns in a rule set radically different from wrestling um 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 um 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 through 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 foreign distancing is different there's the idea of positioning within a cage like how close you are to the the perimeter of the of the cage changes radically how you approach the takedown um the sit-ups are literally night and day different it's the setups are almost entirely comprised 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 I 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 of Freestyle Wrestling was 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 um so as in pure wrestling George is not bad um uh I think he would be a very competitive match even for a highly ranked uh American freestyle wrestler if she he would lose easily on the ground because he's not used to the part here he'd probably be legalized 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'll make it look almost effortless um and that came from his unification of striking skill with wrestling so he used wrestling skills to finish the takedown and his karate and uh 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 uh uh 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 okay well let me ask you about this Innovation because you're one of the most Innovative people in in uh martial arts there's several major categories of innovation that you have led um obviously leg locks body lock now wrestling what's your process of innovation so seeing the problems in a particular system the 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 Judas had always been weak and leg locking Judas had always been weak in a standing position overall and um these were things that needed to be sorted out immediately and its infancy mixed martial arts was divided between Grapplers and strikeless Strikers and uh most of the uh emphasis in early mixed martial arts was on the idea of specialists in a given domain forcing the fight into their domain and that uh my early work with George Saint Pierre convinced me that the right approach wasn't increased specialization and learning to force uh your athlete into that area of specialization at the expense of the opponent but rather the the real battles of the future would be won and lost not worth 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 uh uh Grappler would have just enough grappling skill to be able to hold a Grappler off and then defeat them with uh striking and a striker who was uh if you've went to fight a someone who's Superior to you and striking you would have just enough striking skill 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 um so that people went into early MMA thinking in terms of Grappler and Striker um what I started to think is in terms of okay there are four fundamental skill areas of mixed martial arts there is shoot boxing which is the integration of uh takedowns and 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 um uh and they have to integrate take down take down 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 in clinch boxing you would incorporate things from Judo Greco-Roman freestyle Jujitsu 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 it 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 and lost so once you reframe how you see a particular combat sport then you can start doing these detailed development of ideas that actually like they they fit there's a sense in which that it had to start with a paradigm shift and then a research program began after that you don't start with research you start with the paradigm shift and then went to research uh well let me ask you I got a chance to hang out with you and Hanzo Gracie at ADCC he keeps messaging me saying he's gonna call me and not calling me I think aside from being hilarious charismatic and uh handsome uh he is also uh and wise for his young age um 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 Hansel Casey the degree of difficulty that henzo must have encountered he never talked to us to us about it because uh but I figured this out as the years went by the degree of difficulties he must have experienced when he first came to Manhattan and started 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 meaning Hixson uh all the machados all of them were located around Gracie Baja and um uh that Rio Rio de Janeiro set they all knew each other and they all trained together they had internal problems of course and but um they all knew each other well and knew each other's games so they all of them had beautiful and highly developed Jiu-Jitsu so all hens are new 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 yeah 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 hey you're on top it's the same thing yeah and they're like no no mountain is different from God 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 and imagine going from training with Hicks and Gracie to having to tell some moron that God is different from Mount and we was we were so primitive back then it 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 just well luckily he's known for his patience but out of that he molded one of the greatest gyms ever in New York yes uh he had uh 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 um and then some of his senior students uh hikarua made a Rodrigo Gracie and Matt Sarah 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 um uh I taught for 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 you know show me proof and um uh the you know so many times especially in those days in Jiu Jitsu there were so many things that were just off limits like you couldn't study Lagos you couldn't do this you couldn't do that like this kind of game was for cowards this kind of this is the only kind of game we accept and Enzo 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 gotta 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 it'll be a fun Journey there's I can't at least from my perspective uh having interactive or having met him it's hard not to smile um for me he's easily one of the most charismatic people in Jiu-Jitsu it's kind of a fun to watch that humans can be like this too it's just the the love that radiation was is incredible I gotta ask you this is from Reddit there's there's a there's a few legends that come from that gym but people on Reddit kept asking me about some guy named Boris apparently you coached him and henzos and he was a legend and he was terrifyingly good uh What made him a legend who's this Boris character uh Boris is one of my early students one 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 yeah and um now he was short of stature but very powerfully built and compact um uh very nice polite young man um but also slightly eccentric which uh I always liked about him um he would always come dressed with glasses on and he would leave the gym uh dressed like to use the American phrase a complete nerd with like his pocket protector and any now he was heavily muscled but he would dress in such way that it didn't appear so when he left and we always used to laugh like you imagine some guy tried to mug as far as they would see him with his with his nerdy glasses on his pocket protector and they would literally run into like one of the most formidable human beings in the entire New York area Boris started training Jiu-Jitsu I believe in Long Island and then um when he got a tech job in Manhattan started training with us in a morning class now these were relatively early days in Manhattan and my teaching career and uh he and a group of others a very small group used to train early in the morning around 6 a.m before work and uh Boris was a legend in those days now a very young George Saint Pierre came to train with us at that time and he would come in at 6am through his morning class and uh he was one of the main training partners for for uh Boris and um Boris being arrested I used to generally prefer top position and I would always encourage George to play bottom position I said you've got to get good and 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 um and Boris a very strong guard passing I remember one of George's happiest days is finally after like two years one day he uh sweat bar it's got on top and finished them and I remembered he was that was one of his biggest uh uh Thrills in all of uh his his training career was the last time that ever happened no Boris was uh he was a very formal man for that time the funny thing about Boris is uh every time we would have a conversation he would say I'm only going to do the sport until I'm 40 years old and then I'm going to stop and I was like why like why not be like a lifelong martial artist you know you got so good you're good at you did so 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 and you can never give any reason for this it was just ridiculous so one day he now this is a guy who came in literally every day 6 a.m every day one day he comes in he comes up to be at the end of training goes hey John I just turned 40. so I won't be seeing you again and I thought that he's joking so I'm like I'll see you tomorrow Boris he's like no you want and walks off how gangster is that and then he never came back I've never seen borrow since he came in was one of the best crappers I ever saw and just that's it buddy I'm out and um so there's no one to walk away yeah uh I also got to hang out got to meet hang out with Ali Abdul Aziz he's a hands of Gracie black belt fourth degree Judo black belt and friend and manager of khabib nuremov who's coming down uh to Austin soon we'll do a podcast hopefully you get on the mat and have have a bit of brainstorm also he's a manager and friend of many other amazing Fighters um I really love the guy uh the Loyalty The the fact that he he looks for loyalty and has that inner close Inner Circle and uh integrity and character and people I really liked my connected really quickly but any any fun stories about ali oh did you train together yeah see he trained for many years in the uh in the basement of my classes um uh he's his his story is one of the most unlikely stories like if someone wrote a movie plot about his life they'd be like this it's absurd would be thrown out the door in a second and yet it all happened um uh you're absolutely correct he his from the unlikeliest possible starts created a situation where he's I think it's incontestable now to say he's the most successful manager and mixed martial arts history he has more Champions under his care than than anyone else I've I'm aware of and respected and influential so I know on all Dimensions yes now many people aren't aware the fact that he was actually a very good judo player he had um judoka first yes yeah he had very good uh nogi Judah um he had an excellent uh haraikoshi uh very good tanyatoshi um and he through many people who were highly credentialed wrestlers in back in the basement back in the Glory Days of MMA training um he was a good example of a guy who had very very good Judo hips and often use it to to counter wrestling and uh was a fine demonstrator of the idea that when Judo was 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 some very very spectacular fashion well what do you think about khabib is there something uh from just watching him or is there something you can imagine uh if he comes down to the gym that you might learn from the way he moves the way he approaches wrestling oh absolutely he's one of the greatest combat athletes of all time if you can't run for 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 um 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 he beat people from every cell he beat wrestlers he beat Jujitsu players he beat kickboxers and he controlled them all in more or less the same way um 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 um he was able to get into submission holds readily on opponents from bottom position he's got an excellent bottom game um he people say oh he's just a positional guy no he's not he's got great submissions look at the application of his triangle from both top and bottom was Top Class he had a sharp harm log from uh bottom position uh excellent Kimura if you look at um his Kimora finishes in MMA they were technically very very well Set uh excellent braking mechanics um he's a very very fine Grappler in both submission grappling and MMA grappling I think we'd probably learn a ton from uh from moving around with him is it possible to learn something about him or about hajja Gracie or about Gordon by watching them or rolling around them for a little bit so maybe hodger and 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 just it's almost miraculous how much uh hodger can do by just like the same exact thing on everybody is that like uh is it possible to understand why Hajj or khabib are so good at very basic positions or do you have to feel it or do you have to or is it just something that's developed over I think 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 and there are a few people who could look at it and have enough knowledge and say okay I can see what he's doing like for example hodger could probably look at video footage it could be grappling and say okay I understand what he's doing um uh but the average person would probably go over their heads you sometimes think of like these great athletes like maybe they're too narrow like you you might imagine they're kind of so focused on a particular thing they don't develop in interesting ways he's he's just a sweetheart yeah he's a wonderful person to be around uh yeah he'll he'll he's also visit visiting Austin but just I was so I mean first of all I'm honored just uh drinking a little bit too much in Vegas with haja Gracie and just and talking about uh love and relationships and life and and death and all those philosophical topics as one does in Vegas um and a little bit too much to drink anyway after ADCC was beautiful and on top of that uh hanging out with Rogan many days for UFC in the nadcc you know one thing I don't know if you've gotten a chance to hang out with with Joe when he plays pool foreign I so I spent a lot of time with him when he was playing pool like recently on that trip to Vegas and 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 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 yeah Paul is a game of physics that should be your domain oh it is but that wasn't just physics yeah I would think you understand the game you understand the physics of it you also understand the the fun of it because there's friends and laughter and so on I would be distracted by that a little bit I wouldn't be as much he he literally as the closer you get to the table the more it's 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 stays that really stuck stay with me that like uh you know those memes like I I want to find somebody that looks at me the way X looks at why I want to find somebody that looks at me the way Joe looks at a pool cue or whatever 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 and that that Focus like fuck everything else this is now it's time to do work um I don't know that was really inspiring I haven't seen that kind of focus um for prolonged periods of times on a task you should see some time the guy the guy is I mean part of this just being competitive with himself it's the hatred of imperfection all those kinds of elements but embodied in a singular Focus we had no idea to even played pool he should we should watch him he won't I think it it could be one of his greatest obsessions like there's deep uh see I thought pool is for like degenerates like gamblers and like Hustlers right like uh the same way I see poker but like I saw like a wolf's slash like Elite athlete in Joe I said 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 out your ass but extremely focused it was beautiful to see I don't know inspiring inspiring uh for me as a person who highly values a 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 so they're in a gym there's a lot of excellent gyms throughout the United States what can they do to improve their Jiu Jitsu about their about the way they think about just 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 so a question becomes okay well 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 um 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 Gonna 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 the 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 and the most honest one comes not from you 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 videotape of yourself You observe yourself losing three triangles you attempted 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 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 and that would be a good example of of taking a problem in your game contrasting it with Elite level performance of 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 and 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 areas 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'll give you the most opportunity um uh and in this sense it always begins with an accurate assessment of your current skill level you've got to start there then I I always encourage people to use video camera to make the most honest honest appraisal you can yeah 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 a program for yourself based around what you see as excellence um look at the people in the sport who's uh in 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 okay everyone's different and so you will don't see the video research as the final word see video research the way a writer will see a muse as some 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 and more and more areas of the sport I promise you you'll improve yeah and I 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 I saw in my own game early on a lot of growth it's by self-identifying a problem and coming up by myself with the solution by watching uh 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 I thought maybe this escort thing double X Card 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 uh when I could get time by myself meaning like not instructor guided classes but in training I would just every everything I would put myself into butterfly and ask 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 because 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 xguard 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 worth them that should have been worked on from the very beginning yeah that's still today if I were to say what's the weakest thing that I should work on absolutely is even um even with one day a week is escapes but yeah a lot of that has to do with just uh carrying like focusing on the one thing over and over and over and over across training sessions now it also um I would write down on a sheet of paper the number of times I would get an x-card sweep foreign whatever it was like 500 sweeps a week so I'll have to and then like the closer you get to the end of the week the more you like just pick up a small white 100 in a week yes your trading partners must suck bro no no you start with with good ones and then just get more and more desperate start like finding the the kid right that you can just sweep over and over um but like that number for me the numbers for some reason were like set a goal to pull off a technique um it 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 um 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 there's better ways to do that but at least that Focus helps uh from a hobbyist perspective uh what's the day what's the perfect day in the life of John donoher if we're talking about a basic non-agcc now your uh I'm really grateful that you sit down with me on a Sunday uh late at night but it all starts again for you tomorrow so three training sessions a day what uh what time do you wake up do you do like a mantra in the morning uh do you listen to like uh some zen music uh what do you eat in the morning what what what's the perfect day look like um when you say if it's a small animal yeah to the gods um I usually uh when you say a perfect day what I think you really mean is an average day perfectly productive average day yeah um so as let's take Monday morning for you uh watching this video we're filming this later on a Sunday night so um uh after this I'll drive home um we just had 80cc it was uh two weeks ago it was one of the longest uh 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 um so immediately after ADCC I cut the training down for the competitive athletes to uh one session per day for the first week after ADCC to give their bodies a bit of a break um I still have to teach two classes in addition to that to recreational classes so my teaching schedule went down to three classes per day after uh one week of relative break we go back to uh two competition classes per day plus two recreational classes plus an MMA class four uh Gary tonan and his friends um the first class requires me to get up around 6am to drive I'm still a student driver so I'm I'm not very good at driving so I have to spend a little extra time to get to the destination on time just just for the record and John Paul pulled in a red Lamborghini with a um no you're the worst liar I've ever met um 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 8 P.M um during that time I uh coach Jujitsu I try to find time for uh one Instagram post per day which usually describes some basic theme of Jiu Jitsu 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 are just Express a simple Jiu Jitsu theme um I try to do a short workout for myself um and uh uh 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 and what do the competitive students need this is always done in the light of um uh 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 and 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 on uh for dinner with friends um dates things like that yeah I had to really harass you to drag you out to hang out and it was very convincing and food wise I eat once a day once a day yeah 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 so yeah yeah I want to go to the pros and cons um 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 like they're lower in the priority list why why because the 5G already he's got it covered do you watch much video do you watch video do you watch footage uh video footage quite often yeah I I especially things from uh Freestyle Wrestling record Roman Wrestling Judo um uh and mixed martial arts also uh subsidiary Sports to mix martial arts like boxing uh Muay Thai and European kickboxing just for long-term idea Generations yeah this is an interesting thing how could this be incorporated in the context in which we use it MMA or jiu jitsu as maybe it's immediately obvious or it might become obvious in in a few weeks or months is there some aspect to um 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 the symptom of the focusing you know my life wasn't always like this remember I've gone through different phases in my life I was a university student and teacher at University um uh I was a nightclub bouncer for more than a decade um I've been through different areas of life I've seen most things I've experienced a lot I've traveled the world um uh at this point in my life people think I live some kind of like monk-like existence but um uh you know I I have a private life I like to go out and have fun like everyone else um yeah I'm not like some kind of like monk who just you know sits under a waterfall and meditates for anything crazy like that well that's 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 donaher which is on the topic of animal combat who wins in a fight to the death or maybe a uh in a sport competition setting but let's go with a fight to the death uh a grizzly bear a Silverback Gorilla and maybe a lion or tiger an African lion or uh 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 and maybe you can give me some thoughts about how much of these parameters matter so first of all intelligence uh I do believe the gorilla is the most intelligent I've did research for this as you can imagine [Laughter] with Joe Rogan uh the uh the the expert advisor to this very podcast on this very topic is indeed Joe Rogan yes uh so in captivity gorillas have been documented to show complex emotions from family bonds the ability to use tools and to be able to reason about the past and the future that's impressive so that 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 um yeah so that's intelligence then there is weight I think that's something that you think of at first uh the lion let's go with the big ones that I took notes Here 550 pounds for big lion that's exceptionally large like most male lines are around 450 pounds that's an exceptional Beast then thank you um the the tiger can be larger than that yeah much much larger so we got the grizzly bear which is probably the biggest of the bunch at uh the large ones get to uh 1500 pounds correct me some of this numbers I believe most Grizzlies around a thousand pounds big big beast I was looking up the biggest but I didn't want to do the biggest ever I just wanted the big like the top of the range because there's always the range you can put it in at roughly double that of even a very big lion of course how that weight is used is very important uh so there's also things which I find is interesting as Anaconda would just let me throw that in there because there is 200 pounds what I really like about that is it's not just the way it's the form factor and I think out of all of these the anacondas the most non-standard form factor which I totally agree with that yeah it's like the the uh the Knight on the chessboard it comes in from a completely different angle so we got that we got also uh strength in 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 a thousand or 1500 pounds can only carry at most its body weight which is a lot but a gorilla can carry 10 times his body weight a gorilla can lift over 2 000 kilograms that's over 4 000 pounds and gorillas themselves and adult male weighs in around 350 to 400 400 pounds yes that's so I like how in this particular place where I found this to 2 000 kilograms is as heavy as 30 average humans so gorillas 30 humans so that's carrying string and then of course uh bite force because that's one of the weapons in question here so now this is really surprising to me I the gorilla has worn me over through this by the way uh intelligence sucker for intelligence but the gorilla bite force is the highest of all these with 1300 PSI bear a second with 1200 PSI tiger is uh a third I think tiger and Lions third with a thousand PSI that's comparable and a bear is uh anywhere from 900 to a thousand PSI they're close but gorilla I would not have expected now gorilla is not a carnivore but apparently you chews it's mostly it's grassy stuff right but it like 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 um also no neck yeah so because 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 they the the ultimate kill is to go for the neck the bite in 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 Jiu-Jitsu you think because they get to also choke them out it's very much in line with Jitsu like lions are famous for using strangulation as their primary method of killing they they get a hold of the neck and hold until um the animal drops plus uh claws I believe the tiger and the bear use their claws and the lion too the lion right and the lion uh this is something that the gorilla doesn't do and uh Anaconda obviously doesn't yeah so what what do you think how do we think about this also there is uh I'm just not letting you talk apparently there's uh levels of aggression in terms of these are also very important considerations yeah what what is um all the considerations you've raised are very important and we we would have to address them if we're going to go through this topic um 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 um 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 this father was not even close to being the strongest man in the world it's not because of anything other than an experience to a boy his father seemed 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 agree we just almost absurd like um you picture the greatest combat athletes that Humanity has ever produced the 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 inexperiencing 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 um I think we can point out that the gorilla ultimately would be pretty low on those levels pushback to this analysis because the data we don't have much data on this we don't have 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 inter-species 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 um first we've seen that intuitions aren't to be trusted so if intuitions aren't to be trusted or 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 out to Nations um the first is what are your skills the second is what are your physical and mental attributes so it's skills attributes those are the two primary ones and there's 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 and using those in real world applications and that will give you your first look at uh okay who's going to be the more successful um 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 compact combat in an area or a Terrain which is favorable to them this is huge in determining the uh 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 uh to continue it if you have some succinct method of finishing this is huge in combat and determining winner or loser so both from a winning and a losing position so 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 uh reliably this is very very important in determining success or failure and third is your ability to endure a conflict longer than the person you're you're engaged in okay so 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 for combat that probably applies to human on human everything military conflict everything even all the way up to Nations um 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 okay 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 do a high amount of damage with Precision yes so this is one of the great combat strategies in 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 they're 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 and humans are pretty damn good at it too so um uh and then the third is endurance okay some uh [Music] species some people uh humans actually are pretty good at this um use endurance as a weapon and they simply wear an opponent down over time and break them and internationally this can be done economically um through numbers etc etc and uh and you can destroy someone with just sheer endurance yeah a lot of words 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 Successful Failure and warfare um which animals exhibit these three principles the best and we'll discuss this but as far as um uh generalities go uh 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 uh more technical elements who gets to initiate contact can you break off contact at any given time uh what is your endurance can you keep going longer than your opponent does so a skill set I wonder if a big component of that of how much practice there is off off the battle exactly so how much quote-unquote you would probably call it play like play fighting 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 uh intra species death and 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 um 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 they really do have freakish levels of strength in in many different ways and yet the actual track record of using it is negligible it's not strange that Evolution will develop such as it is sewing machine like they're bite force just makes no sense with regard to what they actually eat I think well no I I think that 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 their big thing is intimidation so as a show you wanna uh fake it and don't care if you ever make it because fake is good enough given that particular Dynamic now let's contrast that with a male lion 's take on the biggest meanest toughest animals in the most competitive killing War on planet Earth which is Continental Africa um and they literally just take I mean 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 they they keep Buffalo are incredibly dangerous beasts just by themselves and yet Lions regularly take them down um occasionally large numbers of lines will even swarm elephant and over 12 hour periods take down elephant on some occasions this is all on videos it's not just speculation so they just have a level of combat experience which no other animal if I were to also project so the the Eastern European style of wrestling where they spend so many hours on the map they really value the number of hours on the mat at play from childhood the Lions probably for my extensive watching videos on YouTube they seem to play with each other yeah for fun a lot and I guess what even really helps you see it you don't interact you don't play with other gorillas you have like you're more spending a lot more time around uh the opposite sex yeah so yeah I mean even Lions uh when they 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 um they're almost always fights to the depth for the simple reason that when a male lion loses control of the 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 it's like a fight for your not just you but your your DNA um most male lions have very short runs at the top to get killed or run off by by other Lions um 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 their stake and a pride no other animal fights like that um 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 to 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 uh 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 beers are solitary that tigers are solitary so they learned 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 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 have been 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 like the force the power and the capabilities to do a lot of damage so it doesn't have the practice it doesn't have the experience but don't you think if if a gorilla's back is to the wall so you put them in a situation of it is life and death for both The Lion and the gorilla don't you don't you value intelligence at least a little bit here there's a reason why humans this is like evidence that you know humans have spread all across the world while being kind of weak why okay 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 is Magic it took humans 200 000 years to go from the bottom of the food chain to the top of the food chain um and gorillas have a lot of work to do before they get to that level uh humans can use it 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 that's anecdotal evidence no it's not 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 in observing gorillas over a 12-year period they regularly found gorilla toes in lipidification um they also saw that over a certain period some 36 gorillas have been killed and evidence strongly suggested leopard predation was the reason apparently the leopards had figured out that there is a femoral artery and gorilla's legs and we're doing a move which from the sounds of it sounds a lot like a baron bolo 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 it the only defense it has to align 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 out of tangents but we're not just because of the foot the attack of the artery and the foot is there weaknesses that the lion might have of that what I'm saying is I I know it's not equivalent but the 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 the 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 it has no ability with its with its arms to concentrate force in any kind of efficient way when a lion or a tiger swear or a bear for that matter swings at you it's got four Claws from four to six inches long it'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 length of the the ability to engage with speed on the part of the the cats is is far far greater and also mobility and to feed the bipedal nature of a gorilla the the the temporary Barbados this is the bear has the same no impact humans will bipedal and lions kill 240 humans a year on average hmm so okay okay okay what about bear no because there beer is a difference for all the same things that a lion has the claws the teeth yeah has more weight it has more strength has more power okay now this is an interesting question okay you get a fully grown North American Grizzly this is an African lion this is an interesting fact I also have questions about polar bears it's unclear to me because they're big they're bigger in every way than than a Grizzly yes but they probably don't get the experience in the practice yeah also they have a much more limited set of uh animals that they've they Prey Upon so I'm pretty sure Grizzly is going to be tough to beat as far as Top beer goes um a grizzly bear I believe would be a formidable adversary even for a for a male lion um 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 the strangle would be very difficult for them to employ upon a bear um 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 um I what I see is the primary problem is that neither one would ever be able to kill the other uh that finishing thing yeah they both fail on the finishing criteria the lion would not be able to strangle a bear even in the best case scenario where he got his teeth into the neck the bear can stand up and and presumably Shake him off um uh the uh the the the the bear would never be able to pin a line for long enough to better hold it down and and slowly Maul it over time the way it can with an elk or a caribou so I don't believe either would be able to finish the other they'll just become exhausted it would be 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 line is much more of an ambush Hunter lines quick explosive much higher top speed they've got a top speed of 45 to 50 miles an hour a beer 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 a uh an endurance Hunter they just run uh elk and moose down until they're exhausted and then pin them and kill them so if it came down to endurance might go the way of the beer if there were if they were caged up together however there is very strong evidence from both hunters and video which shows on many occasions beer is being chased off by cougar and Wolverines now what's that that's fear what is that what do you mean chased off uh if they fight over uh uh meat which uh and say for example a cougar has killed something and the bear wants the meat the cougar will come there risk aversion exactly exactly the Bears are risk averse what I would say is this the beers 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 a bull moose and uh a bull moose is a formidable animal but it's nothing like a cape buffalo it's nothing like an elephant an elephant or a hippopotamus so 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 beers 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 it neither one can kill each other would come down to endurance you mean like an octagon yeah that's got to be the next UFC by the way beer versus things change Joe Rogan's a big fan of the idea of fighting in a stadium for humans fighting in a stadium hmm um so in the stadium of bear I would I would slightly favor beer now I still think that the lion would have a chance but I would favor the Bear in a betting match um 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 and um they for example had several incidents where they wrote about tiger vs lion uh conflict and uh in one famous passage they described a lion getting destroyed by a a female tiger um so there's 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 um unfortunately there's nothing that they wrote about beers versus lion they did talk about uh bears versus bulls uh they did talk about Lions versus Tigers um but they never mentioned bear vs 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 they'll listen to you draw from that by the way I would suggest that is it about the Bears yeah it's more about the bear like in theory a bear should be able to crush a cougar but it seems to be the beer is a scene uh this thing could hurt me so I'm not gonna 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 them the grizzly based on endurance so the final conclusion if you had to just bet everything you own so you got uh let's say we got the Octagon we bring in a bear now this is like legendary bear okay full grown Grizzly full grown Grizzly but not only that that Grizzly is seeing some shit what's the most it could have seen a bull moose a caribou that's the toughest opponent has ever had it once no no no no now this one once ran into a pack of other Grizzlies and had to find defend and he's got heck of Grizzlies there's a pack of Grizzlies they're solitary wolves wolves wolves what was a good practice for a bear who attacks a bear that's that's my point Bears don't really live in a competitive environment lines but sometimes it can get desperate as it was a pack of wolves but that pack of wolves is nothing that that's nothing all right fine Lions deal with packs of hyenas okay what was the just imagine over the past hundred 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 they didn't really there's nothing that that's gotta have been something humans have killed they run away from cougars and Wolverines like no that's anecdotal evidence there's got to be one bear there's video footage of it you can watch it yes they're 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 on the Bears you don't think they'd go at it they have 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 like that someone would have seen it by now interesting all right so so you're seeing my point is that Biz it just they they they they want to get their feet wet they're giving no credit for gorillas so you're saying lion wins your money's online no I'm saying lion would win in the wild because they they can't kill each other they can't end the fight that's one of our most important criteria um but Lions can almost always initiate the action because they have much better uh uh ability to see at night for example Bears have very average night vision Lions have superb night vision so at night time they can always initiate the fight lions are natural Ambush Predators so it's always going to be able to have the advantage of Ambush um the great advantage that bears have is endurance uh but bears are very risk-averse and they're not used to fighting like the toughest toughest animals the toughest animal they fight is a moose or a caribou these are not not even close to the animals that Lions have to go up against on a regular basis so 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 beer under those circumstances but in the wild I believe the beer will back away in the cage no time limit you fear for the bear what if it's five rounds or five minutes Championship I think then I would go with a lion because the lion has a huge speed Advantage so it's gonna it's gonna injure it tear it up and uh and do immediate damage like I put it this way if lion and bear fight first 15 minutes I favor the line 100 but then as time goes by that size and weight is gonna 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 it comes and just eats me oh that would be so epic um make a hell of a podcast I wonder who you 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 no good if it was a polar bear maybe it's different um deeply about your uh about athletes you coached about people in your life so 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 so I force you and Gordon to do this uh to fight a bear or a lion Gordon has to uh how would you coach him to do it uh to have any chance of winning he goes in empty hand empty-handed you can choose Stadium or um 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 yeah 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 Maul you to death didn't we just talk about audacious goals this is not a question of audacious gold this is a question of minimizing pain so you coach your athletes to quit before the battle has been fought 100 yeah how what's he gonna do you don't think there's a technic first of all intelligence so technically you gotta do a heel hook no no well first of all maybe you can't do a Double A's or four fucking legs okay what if Gordon gets any starting position he wants oh yeah that's gonna be really useful on a thousand pound beer yeah [Music] shaken off he'll get torn off with what like the reaches back he's got four or six inches oh he can't get I wonder what is the reach whatever he touches he's got if it's not a flexible bear so you think there's no control what about like a low like a uh some kind of controlling position from yeah like you said purple 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 we could we could turn this down forget about Gordon fighting a a lion or a bear that's that's completely impossible an adult male chimp will destroy Gordon it's not even a gorilla is more than enough to kill any human on the planet including Gordon Ryan so Gordon Ryan fighting a chimp a good sized 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 compared do you think he will disagree no do you think anyone will disagree anyone yeah moron okay uh somebody that I think you might know uh there's a famous actor Tom Hardy but he's also doing uh 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 The Killing and all that kind of stuff and he's doing that he's like it's like Morgan's uh it's like Morgan Freeman from March of the Penguins it's Tom Hardy for for the Predators uh so I don't I saw a bear and a lion in the it's 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 yeah that attack in Chinese have formidable formidable animals so it's not all about size it's about like strategy you know the most important thing in nature is numbers like uh you know 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 sort of dominate that particular environment because it's it's not about these like artificial matchups it's about giving your environment how do you succeed and all that kind of stuff maybe we could do golden Ryan versus a house cat the Gordon might have a a small chance against the house cat maybe maybe see now I know you're just trolling me I I think Gordon has a chance against uh well definitely against the smaller Apes but I have no way of proving it and and the internet will say I'm an idiot so there you go the internet is correct every so often so there's a oh it's funny enough I'm looking at uh 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 um he he used to um consult with me a little bit on um uh moose when he was starting out he's a very very nice person oh boy yeah yeah you ask questions about Judson he struck me as being a very very nice person I would love to be a fly in that wall but he uh he made a post on Instagram which I'd love to get your opinion on it has very much like a John Donahoe style of digging into the philosophy of the impact of Jiu Jitsu on one's life is this Instagram post 18 pages long yes he's got potential then yes with a profound deep picture of somebody practicing the art of Jitsu I think I think uh I think he's at least a trainee in this art of the Donna her style of communication if Miyamoto Musashi would be alive today he'll probably be doing these five page Instagram posts like you do addiction writes Tom Hardy addiction is difficult and complex stuff to navigate as is 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 and 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 re-org 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 respondent 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 on on folks who've gone through some really difficult yeah things in their life first off I think that's just a beautiful statement by by Mr hardy that's uh I must uh give them a phone call after this and talk to him it was beautiful to read um one thing that's always struck me when um I train people who either have a military background or on more than a few occasions um we have special forces soldiers come in and train with us for a week or two and 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 Force Special Forces soldiers back to civilian life it must be the craziest experience of all you've got people who of fighting and dying alongside their their comrades in the most extreme circumstances that any human being can go through and then they're pulled back into a life where people are arguing with them over parking spots just like 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 them things that you know in a matter of seconds people's lives can be torn apart and changed forever and then suddenly you get thrown into a life where people are arguing over you know who's who's cut who off who are in line to buy a coffee the intensity of camaraderie and love the uh for each other and then 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 and you're supposed to take these people seriously and listen to them but not like 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 like they they don't even how do you talk to your new girlfriend about you know watching one of your friends legs get taken off like there's no conversation you could have with them um so I find that typically um they do best when they hang out with each other because they have shared experience they can talk about these things um but I do find that most Jiu Jitsu schools have something like a kind of military barracks demeanor to them of like camaraderie hard work shared hard work um teamwork uh uh building towards a goal over time the acquisition of skills usually along with that a kind of want of a better word or rustic and primitive sense of humor and and um a kind of soldiery way of talking to each other and disparaging you know self-deprecating sense of humor and it's something that most people with military service kind of naturally come into because it's part of what they were in and so it's like a toned down version of it which enables them to form a stepping stone between the uh the military life that they were in all the way down to civilian life and Jiu Jitsu is kind of like a bridge between those two and also the honesty so you said like the skill acquisition the honesty of really testing that skill there is a deep honesty to war in in this in a distant way but in a way there's an honesty to Jitsu deals with technique working and not and there's a final there is simulated death it's not real death it's simulated death on the mat yeah and there's a similar kind of honesty there and there's also a similar kind of esteem towards skill um just as regular soldiers look up to Special Forces soldiers because they see them as people have you know greatest skill than themselves something to Aspire to so too and and you just like the thing that we esteem most on an agility matter skill no one gets a damn what you look like or what you think that you you judge mostly by your skill level and um uh and so they tend to identify with that I do think that um uh most people from a military background kind of find a natural gravitation towards the the atmosphere of Jiu-Jitsu learning and if it proves to be a a positive way for them to to rehabilitate and come back into civilian lives and that's a wonderful wonderful thing I know we're linked with uh we defy which is a an organization which caters to former soldiers who were badly injured in combat and many of whom lost limbs and or suffered mental trauma and they come in and train and they often speak very very highly of their degree to which Jujitsu has helped them come back into civilian life and and for them it's even worse because they come back not only mentally but physically disadvantaged after war and um uh 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 it's a good question I'd have to look into it it certainly is based uh uh in England but it could be International but it's just nice to see somebody use that large platform yeah and also to step on the on the mat and show the kind of Jiu Jitsu you would probably be proud of chasing submissions you got he got an arm lock he got a straight foot lock we're not going to analyze the techniques because you know that could be uh it doesn't matter different perspectives it finishes the Finish yeah no that's impressive um he's actually quite an athlete he's uh he's in great shape and um uh strong and flexible and I'm glad he's doing well with his Jujitsu it's good to see henzo's smiling face next to him I can only imagine the conversations I have to ask you a uh uh deep and important question you often when we text back and forth send me two hugging emojis uh can we psychoanalyze the reason why that's your favorite emoji of the hugging face is that it's it's like it's kind of like sending a heart but like a little bit more yeah it's uh gender neutral when Jujitsu plays uh meet each other they often shake hands and then give a quick hug so I thought it was the most appropriate Emoji for Judas who plays I see so it's a pretty simple explanation nothing too Freudian 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 getting why is that emoji again walk away I'll shock you tomorrow and hit you with three three it's almost always two I think maybe your creature of habit in communication there's a I'm a creature of Heaven 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 sent I say love a lot I sent I send hearts and don't give a fuck if it's too like you know like in a you know me sending a message to like a CEO I'm about to interview I'll send a heart I don't give a damn they'll probably just like look uh what is this but uh I think people are two afraid of simple communication of affection like uh 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 hierarchies going back to Lions of like oh this person you're just like the silly weak person and they're the strong person I think that's called you might see it I guess but I I don't to me the display of vulnerability is a display of strength not uh not weakness at least in human society at least at this time I don't know uh let me ask you about love uh you know I must ask John honor 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 um like 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 I'm good animal combat I'm good pretty good at and then different grappling Arts Judo sambo jiu jitsu uh wrestling uh for 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 there's a sense in which I'm kind of 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 you've 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 yeah and I think that the the magic of a 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 like what would it mean to it would be good I didn'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 um uh and then whatever success whatever that means comes in a kind of light-hearted frivolous kind of way and um and that I think is over the course of a lifetime far more desirable than having you know expertise and 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 there's there's communities that people call pickup artists that try to optimize this particular aspect which is of dating of 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 um uh I mean given that humans have to feel easy to study from a from the standpoint of psychology I'm sure it's not that difficult to gain expertise and 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 if you became very good at it you would end up being very disappointed by the results and um so as I said I think there's 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 the beginner and 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 um I think it also justifies and it would sell very well that John Donner I should write a book on dating and that would be chapter one Embrace being a beginner chapter two will be bear versus lion pivot quickly to Violence by the way we totally skipped over Anaconda I I assumed the implied I'll I'll put it to this way on video you can watch Puma yeah and and um uh similar sized cats uh Jaguar destroy anacondas even in water which is the anaconda's preferred domain so given that puma and and jaguar are several orders below lion you have to go with the idea that a lion would utterly decimate Anaconda so it's probably good that we did skip over it and I think uh going back to the original thought that you had about this don't trust your first instinct also think about the other elements an anaconda has no ability to disengage from the fight once the flight's on It's gotta go until the end it has no ability to disengage and get away um its only hope would be Ambush and it's got a tiny tiny chance against yeah a truly formidable animal and the fact that if we look at actual concrete real world results when when puma and jaguar are kicking their ass you know 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 gonna leave it at that uh you're a fan of knives there's guys like Miyamoto Musashi who instead of doing who's number one type of tournaments when both competitors walk away only one competitor walks away miyamoro Musashi is is known for somebody having uh John Donahoe like philosophical skills but also is known for uh having fought 61 duels to the death and won them correct 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 um uh 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 it like a definitive statement of uh and certainly I can't give a definitive statement of of um uh of his prowess but um his writings are fascinating and deeply insightful but as to like what actually happened out there in his deals it's unclear but there is you know with guys like that you almost certainly know that they War people like the character he projects that have existed yeah whether it's 61 whether it's 20 but people really put their life in 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 than our lives and to be able to say I'm I'm prepared to die for a sense of Honor things that are so foreign to our modern society um imagine you know we criticize people for something as simple as like road rage and yet you can imagine someone who is a sufficiently developed sense of Honor you know 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 smaller stacks of honor to say that your yours 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 Fanning pack what would you put in that fanny pack would it be something mundane and practical or would it be something surprising and hilarious uh would it be uh something of philosophical significance or maybe sentimental significance or would 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 inward 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 uh communicate information in communication with AI systems that can help you in your particular Pursuit I don't think in Jiu Jitsu you need is 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 playing Jiu Jitsu would not help you um any idea what kind of weapon fit in a fanny pack so you're a fan of knives where's the interesting guys come from by the way oh that's more metaphorical um uh the truth is that in the modern world a knife is not an efficient weapon it'll easily be overwhelmed by Firearms um my fascination with with knives comes more in the sense that they 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 can have something which 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 Wipeout like iron ore but over time transforms into some beautiful shining Steel which can have immense value um in addition there's a sense of 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 to learn the techniques you need to maintain them over time and just as steel as 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 see okay I began as iron ore and I want to become the finished blade um 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 um Jiu Jitsu is the same way Jiu Jitsu can make you a better person it can make you a worse person Judas was 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 still has the property of both hardness and suppleness the harder you make steel the better it's 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 uh its 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 Jiu-Jitsu your task and training is to make the training competitive enough that you actually get used to the rigors of of real Combat but on the other hand it can't be so brutal that the athletes get broken down on the 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 Jiu Jitsu 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 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 for making that happen and thank you for talking today thank you legs thanks for listening to this conversation with John donaher to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you some words for 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