John Danaher - The Philosophy Of Martial Arts: The Man Who Inspired Me To Learn Brazilian Jiu Jitsu

Full transcript: John Danaher on London Real

4:08 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is John Danaher, the renowned Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt and instructor at Renzo Gracie’s Academy here in New York City. While studying for your PhD in philosophy at Columbia University, you became fascinated with Brazilian jiu-jitsu while working nights as a club bouncer. You’ve gone on to teach and train some of the biggest names in MMA, such as Georges St-Pierre, Chris Weidman and Matt Serra.

4:30 You’re the founder of the Danaher Death Squad, an elite group of Brazilian jiu-jitsu specialists including Gordon Ryan, Nick Rodriguez, Garry Tonon and Nicky Ryan. Today your squad tours the world dominating professional competitions, armed with your unique teaching style and leg lock systems. John, welcome to London Real in New York City. My pleasure. Nice to be, great having you here.

4:50 I guess I wanted to start off, you just got back from Las Vegas, I think, and actually Texas. It was Texas, oh yeah, I was a Houston, wasn’t it? And you had Caitlin, one of your students, fighting for a title, fairly quick in her career, I think. Oh yeah, she’s been fighting at amateur level for a very long time. She hasn’t worked with me for very long, but she’s had many coaches over the course of her career and started coming in for grappling classes and she had.

5:22 I’ve only been in her corner twice, but she began, I believe, quite a long time ago, finding the local New Jersey, New York scene and she’s been in the UFC now for quite a while too, mostly fighting on undercards, but she’s just been one of those very consistent performers who just worked and worked and worked and no one really took much notice for a long period of time, and suddenly she was fighting for a title. She’s had an impressive career. What’s that like to go, I mean, you’ve done this many times with Georges St-Pierre, Chris Weidman, what’s that whole process like when you go to the UFC event and you’re in the back room in the corner?

6:02 Are there butterflies? Do you get used to it? You’ve across us, yeah. I, for the coaches, there’s not really much in the way of butterflies since we’re not the ones in danger. How the athletes react to it is very, very different and you see every extreme, from some people who look like they’re going for a walk in the park to other people who look like they’re getting ready for, you know, the fight to the death.

6:29 Kaitlyn was very much the more relaxed, laid-back approach, which is one that I personally favor a lot. I prefer to see athletes treat even the most extreme forms of competition in the most laid-back way possible. I often talk to my athletes about the idea that the ideal is for them to go out into the biggest fight of their life feeling like it’s nothing more than another day expiring in the gym, so there’s nothing exceptional about it. When you look at a professional athlete going into a fight, this is really this, the athlete gets pulled in different directions by different people.

7:12 The promoters of the event want the athlete to go out thinking this is literally the biggest event of their lives, like this is something super normal which is going to define who they are for the rest of their lives. That’s what, that’s the area they want because they think that will get the best, yeah, there’s going to get people pumped up forever. They’re gonna come out and fight right, you know, early knockouts, early submissions. What the promoters are looking for are those precious and very elusive “what the f***” moments, where the audience just looks at guys like, “what the f*** just happened?”

7:53 Like something crazy just happened that they’ll never forget the race. They’re like, yeah, that’s what they want, right? Not only want the trash-talking, hopefully, before, yeah, that just builds it up and makes it even better. So they’re looking for a spectator event, but what’s the athlete looking for? Victory.

8:11 Yeah, okay, so one guy wants a spectacle, yeah, the guy just wants victory. Now victory can come in many different guises, but the safest ones are the lowest risk methods, so the athlete looks for the lowest risk method of victory, whereas the promoter wants the highest risk, and so they get pulled in two different directions between what the promoter wants on the one hand and what the athlete wants on the other. Now of course the coaches go with the athlete and so somewhere in the middle you find the compromise, that which actually works out.

8:45 And my thing as a coach is always to downplay the situation, to get athletes thinking in this, there’s nothing exceptional about this, this is just another day at the office for you. The only difference is these silly lights and some people and an audience watching you you don’t even know and you won’t even see. Once the lights go on, it’s just a cage, just like the one in the gym, same dimensions. There’s a person across the cage you probably haven’t fought before in most cases, but all the movements or the techniques, the strategy will be identical to what you do in the gym.

9:20 So you get this divergent paths between what the promoter wants, where this is something completely abnormal, something exceptional, versus what the athlete and the coaching staff push for: this is completely normal, this is what you do every day. And that’s the split, and there’s tension usually between those two, and yes, you have to just ride it out. All right, so you’re there to keep the athlete calm and make sure they focus on the win. In most cases, there are a few athletes who do better psychologically with that idea that this is something different, this guy, and they want to rise to it, to a different kind of occasion, but I think most people perform best when they’re at their calmest and most relaxed.

10:04 Think about something you do every day, driving a car. You drive better when your heart is pounding, you’re nervous? I don’t think most of us do. Most of us do our best work when we’re pretty relaxed and pretty calm and we feel we’re doing the same thing that we do every day. Stresses, it’s a very, very interesting phenomenon.

10:28 There’s some ways in which stress, physiological stress, can improve performance, and there’s many ways in which you can detract from performance. It’s this double-edged sword which can do great, great things for us and it can do great damage to us, and trying to find that right path between being too relaxed for a fight where you’re just not effective versus too amped up and becoming clumsy, short of breath, lacking dexterity in your movements, getting tunnel vision. These are all problems that athletes have to deal with, and somehow you’ve got to find the right compromise between physical excitement and alertness and the destructive side of getting too hyped up for a fight.

11:19 We get into adrenaline dump times and tunnel vision, etc. Can you condition your fighters for those experiences? There’s a very hard, I think the best thing is it’s just experience, you know. You try to get them in there and doing the right thing every time. There are some things you can do for less experienced fighters in terms of building small routines that they go through in the training gym every time they go out to train, and then taking those same routines and employing them before they go out to fight.

11:49 So for example they might go through a simple set of routines on how they tie up their gloves, how they put on gloves, how they put on their outfit, jokes and laughter that we run through in the gym, and then running over to making in before they go out to fight. Small psychological cues that create a routine in one place which is familiar, and taking those same routines and employing them in another place which is unfamiliar, so that you take the familiarity of the gym and take it to a new area and hopefully calm the person down in that way. What about visualization?

12:25 I think visualization is very vague, too tense, gets thrown around like it’s an antidote to all problems. To be honest, once I’ve always found once the referee tells you to go forward and fight, all the more esoteric elements of, you know, visualization, meditation and all these things tend to go out the window. It’s much more about your physical training preparation that’s what’s going to give you the ability to proceed in a satisfactory fashion once the action starts.

12:58 Okay, your Instagram description said “living in the spirit of Kaizen” and I was wondering why you have that up there and you always thought about. Yes, I’m a huge believer in the idea of small progressive movements towards goals. If you look at the course of an average day that we all go through, every so often, maybe two or three times in your life, there’s one day which changes the direction of your life, but the vast majority of our days are unexceptional.

13:31 They’re just a boring, mundane day. You come home at the end of the day and if someone asks you what happened today, you would literally have to think back and be like, I’m not sure. That’s probably a description of 95% of our days, so there’s a chance in which you could drift through your life where only about one to five percent of your days have any real meaning and that 95% of your life was a waste of time, and that’s a tragedy. So we have to be very, very set on this idea that we have to maximize the use of all of our days if we’re going to amount to anything in life, and that means at the end of every day there has to be a concerted look on your part: what was the most significant thing that happened to me today and how will it influence my life tomorrow?

14:30 And if we can do this, your days become progressive. Most people live day to day where the events of yesterday have no bearing on the events of today and the events of today have no bearing on the events of tomorrow, and this means your life will simply run in a flatline until the day you die. But if we make a concerted effort to build one day upon another, even if it’s just a very small thing, and in most cases it will be a small thing, it’s rare that we have a day with something monumental happens.

15:08 Most days are not monumental, they’re mundane. So on every one of these mundane days we have to take one small little gem that happened, it may not be very big, something small, and add that to your performance tomorrow. And if we can do this over 10 years, something truly remarkable can happen. It’s so easy just to let a day go and they say, I’ll try again tomorrow. But until we get a sense of one day building upon another towards a goal, you’ll never achieve anything.

15:41 You’ll just melt on and 10 years will go by and you’ll look back and say, what do I do and what did I do, and it may not be anything significant behind you. So be intentional about doing something that’s gonna make your life better. Yeah, and that whole notion of Kaizen is just this, crystallizes this idea that if I can improve my performance in any given area of my life by even a very small percentage point and then add day by day, you give this compounding interest effect where at the end of five years something quite remarkable may have happened.

16:15 You may literally have reinvented yourself in five years. You may have an entirely new skill set which you didn’t have previously. And so it’s up to us to, you know, to do this, because the natural tendency is for days just to run into each other until by the end of the week you’re looking back, say, what happened this week? I don’t know, it’s just gone. It’s so easy to let that happen.

16:38 There’s so many distractions in life, there’s so many things looking to grab your attention that you can lose a day, a week, a month and even a year, even a decade. And it’s up to us to ask, okay, what was significant and how is it going to be built into my life tomorrow, and how does this relate to the goals that I have? And if you can do this, this is the basic idea behind Kaizen, and you can do remarkable things and you can reinvent yourself many times over the period of your life.

17:12 It’s my belief that it takes around five years of full-time training to develop world-class skills in most athletic endeavors. There are many, many examples of people beginning training and somewhere between five to seven years after the onset of their training, competing at the highest levels of their given sport and getting within the top five athletes in the world. There are many, many examples of this. That’s a clear signal that it takes around five to seven years of full-time training to get to world-class level in sports.

17:53 With, you could extend that into other areas of life. You can become, in the same time it takes you to win our big bronze medal, you could have become an outstanding day trader. So we, you know, think about five years, not a long time. That means we all have within us this ability to reinvent ourselves many times in the course of MIT. If you start off at, you know, 20 years old, there’s a lot of opportunities for you to change and adapt over the course of your life if you’re intentional.

18:22 If, if you was that mean getting uncomfortable, I’m doing something fearful, I, you know, it, to be honest and I’m not gonna say these things or not don’t have value, but there’s not really a need to, you know, go out there and do things that you know you’re terrified of. I mean, most of it works on a pretty mundane level. We just identify goals and you say, okay, what is required for me to get to those goals? I very much try in the training to take the terror out of combat sports.

18:53 Like when you think about a combat sport, it’s a crazy thing, you know, you’re in the business of strangling people and breaking limbs. Okay, now on the face of it, that’s a horrible thing, but when you just break it down and dissect skills into manageable components and train them at a level where nothing overwhelms you, you can get really good in a comparatively short period of time, and at no point were you ever thinking, oh my god, this is terrifying, you know, exist. It’s just mundane daily training.

19:30 The focus of my coaching is to make something which most people would find pretty scary, got on top of you squeezing your neck, and make it fairly mundane. Is to take the scariness and the terror out of the equation rather than to put it in, and that’s kind of a fundamental of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Then we’ll get into that too. It’s practices, you know. You write these posts on Instagram, which is kind of embodying a lot of the phosp you just talked about.

19:55 Now are you surprised by how voraciously these things are read and consumed by people out there? Because I think a lot of the men and women in the sport, you know, they’ve never heard someone talk about the philosophy of it the same way. From what I understand in the comment section, I put a lot of people to sleep, so I don’t know who they’re read, but I’m always very grateful that people are interested in what we do. We do have a slightly different approach to teaching this board and I’m always very grateful that people are interested in that, they follow what my athletes are doing, saying this is an effective way of playing the game.

20:35 And when you get put on, you know, major television shows like Billions, do you just take that with a grain of salt as well? That was like a comedy to me, and the worst actor in the entire universe for me to workday for those guys is just amusing, but these are signs that you’re being appreciated and your work is being appreciated. Thank you. That’s not to be the thing. So I’ll tell you a little bit about myself.

20:59 And in 2001 I had a horrible year in New York City after kind of eight years in and out of the city. In what sense was a horrible, professionally or personal? Everything. Um, I found that I wasn’t ready for this city and my vices got the best of me. So my kind of alcoholism worked its way into a drug habit, into a heroin overdose, uh-huh, into my girlfriend leaving me and my best friend from MIT firing me from the company that he had hired me for.

21:26 Then 9/11 happened and it was probably one of the worst years of my life. Were you personally affected by 9/11? I knew a couple people in didn’t died in the talkin, yeah, yes. Gonna save me was the financial, I was in the doctor home space kind of at the time, so I was out of there, but it was just the whole malaise of the place was just this real dark hole, and so I went to London to get the hell out of Dodge, and it ended up being a great thing. But what, why did you choose London?

21:51 Well, I had actually spent two years there earlier in the financial markets, and so it was the only place I knew that I might be able to get a job, and I just thought, I can’t be in this city anymore. Mmm, I’ve got to go somewhere. And a lot of guys in AA will say you can’t run away from a problem, but for me it actually worked, and I started kind of my recovery on January 2nd 2002, and one of my good friends from New York City called me in June and said, Brian, you should try Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

22:16 And I had never done martial arts before, actually she had wrestled one year in high school and gone from a nerdy kid. How did you react to wrestling in high school? Oh my god, I mean, did you like it? I lost every single match, but I like it’s something I liked about it. Maybe it was the challenge, but being dominated by another person was, well, I guess I got more comfortable with it, but it’s a very shocking thing.

22:39 Yes, I remember there was someone that was doing, I think they call it a Saturday ride in wrestling, where I was at some school in their territory and the guys he’s locked on top of you, right, you know what I’m talking this was embarrassing me. Oh my god, yeah. And I just couldn’t win in competition, I didn’t have the mindset, and I was a science geek before that, and I went from the skinny guy to I got kind of big, and that was my experience. And so when this guy called me up and said you gotta try jiu-jitsu, I googled it in London.

23:08 Google, I think, was barely around, yeah, like a madman. I found someone who had trained with Roger Gracie in the past and we started training without Roger and now not only did you start training with the greatest ability player of all time, but given the timeline you started when Roger thought it, because Roger had only just left for London at that time, so you not only did you train was Roger Gracie but you were probably one of his first students at that point. Yeah, well I trained was with someone who I actually actually helped him set up, build the studio.

23:42 I think there we traded a gym called the Third Space, which I think Mauricio is really a train because his father being here before, yeah, before Roger, you know. So I was training there and I found a South African guy who knew him and we just, there’s always a South African guy, there’s always a Kiwi at Australia in the South African guy, you guys guarantee at London is never change. It’s so true. And you know, it completely transformed my life, you know.

24:04 I was trying to get my life together, I was coming off the drugs but I didn’t have anything to focus on, I didn’t have a way to get my boss. You mind if I ask, you didn’t your drugs follow you from New York to London, or you strangely didn’t, and it doesn’t make sense, especially for an opiate like heroin. People say that can’t happen, but I, you know, I think things had fallen so low in my life that I got a message on the deep subconscious level that if you continue this you will have nothing, because everyone I was ever close to didn’t want anything to do with me, and I always say that was the right decision because you can’t follow someone down that hole, and they actually in some ways saved my life by giving me that message of, it’s not okay with your behavior.

24:41 A lot of girlfriends gonna leave me and my best friend’s gonna sack me and you know, I was, my body was shutting down, so I stopped doing the drugs there, but I needed something else, and jiu-jitsu became that. So I trained every week and I stayed away from New York City for that whole year, and I came back at the end of 2002, and my buddy that told me about jiu-jitsu said, Brian, if you’re coming back then we’re gonna go train in my dojo, and he took me and we rolled, the three of us, and it was Dan Lepanto, I don’t know if you know Dan, and ROM. Whoa, yeah, the bald-headed Renzo, I used to call the Aryan brothers.

25:16 And so we went to the old Renzo Gracie place on 8000 36th. Oh yeah, that was one hell of a gig. Love the methadone clinic, you know. A locker room there wasn’t a locker room, it was the U.S. been freaking out because everyone there’s a heroin addict around there. Yeah, I was a year out so I was okay, and uh, it was crazy, and I remember we’re old, he started me from side to side control and you kept telling me to chill out.

25:38 I think I was really tense and really nervous, and so that was the first time I met you, and it was Dan Lovano who I think you gave his purple later that actually got me to do this, and I went on and trained for any more years in my life and got into Thai boxing and all sorts of other things. So that’s an amazing story. It is. So in some way you actually helped me recover, unbeknownst to you. So thank you for that.

26:00 My pleasure. You know, Dan was obviously really smitten with you and him and Robin each other. They were amazing kids, that loves those kids, yeah, the hard core. So what was the scene like back in 02, because there was no glamour, there was no, yeah, there’s no engine. Yeah, it goes back further than that.

26:20 My teacher Renzo Gracie came to America in 1995-96 and you gotta remember that outside of people pretty heavily involved in martial arts, no one knew what jiu-jitsu was. Like I grew up in New Zealand, I did martial arts as a teenager, loved it. What kind of, all striking martial arts, mostly boxing and Muay Thai, and, you know, yeah, the idea that grappling could be an effective fighting style was just not even a consideration. We, I, we didn’t even have wrestling in New Zealand, and wrestling was something I would see every four years at the Olympics and people looking at, what the hell are these guys doing?

27:11 That’s just gay as hell singlets, yeah, this is crazy, and just turn the channel, wait till a real sport came on, like the Catholic or something like that. And also not manly to fight down that way, it was all, yeah, yes, if someone went down they get stood up and you fought again, very Queensbury, yeah, yeah, and we saw Marquis of Queensbury and you know, there was judo, but judo was not a strong martial art in New Zealand at all and it was always seen as like a sport that wouldn’t work in a fight, you know, judo guy grab you, just knock him out, be easy. And so there was this very dismissive attitude that ran not just in New Zealand but I believe across pretty much most of the world, and that when it came to fighting it was all about striking.

27:55 Like when I grew up in the 80s there was no doubt whatsoever that the greatest fighter in the world was Mike Tyson. Okay, woman, when someone asked you who’s the best fighter in the world, easy, Mike Tyson, because he was a striker. If someone had told you that there was a group of dudes living in Brazil somewhere who would have a pretty good chance of beating, and in a way which might be kind of embarrassing for, even Mike Tyson, you would have just laughed, you know.

28:26 You know, they got a tackle, hold him down, are you kidding me? I would have laughed at you. And when I first came to America, working as a bouncer, I started working with wrestlers and judo players. They weren’t all wrestlers and utilize what some of them were, and I noticed very quickly that they were extremely effective in fighting, and this was a big shock to me as a man. These guys, it good, they can control the situation absolutely.

28:51 We had to, you know, hit people and the cops would come, people be bleeding and, you know, my hands, we thought I had to go and teach you Columbia with broken hands, it’s crazy. So why were you working door? Was this the adventurous side? I had a full financial scholarship when I arrived at Columbia and I think I blew it on booze and women in like two weeks, so there was time for me to get a job. One night I was working down Amsterdam Avenue and I saw an old, a gentle being eaten quite soundly by a much younger, large and more aggressive young guy, and I thought to myself, terrible, no one’s helping this guy, and this big thug, young thug, is manhandling this older gentleman.

29:33 So I ran up, I grabbed a young guy and picked him up and threw him down the street and shut them down towards down the Avenue, and I came back and the old guy gets up and saying to me, guys, who are you? And I said, I’m John from New Zealand, and he goes, you want a job then? I go, sure, and he goes, why don’t you work at my nightclub? He was the owner at the club and he had, unbeknownst to me, he was a complete douchebag and fully deserved the beating he got from the young guy, but that I didn’t find that out until later, but I ended up working and then you meet other bouncers, they see you do work and they say, come work at this club, and before you know I was working all over Manhattan and did you enjoy it as well?

30:21 Oh yeah, yeah, of course. I say I never do anything that I don’t enjoy. If that means unenjoyable, don’t do it. Life is short, life is fragile, don’t ruin your life doing things you don’t enjoy. And I loved philosophy, nightclub work was an adventure for me, sometimes a scary adventure but always an adventure.

30:39 And would you test yourself mentally in that situation? So it’s not even questionable methylates, always physical, physical yoga, people tend to look upon the mantle of hearing aid, and most altercations are purely physical and physical solutions for physical problems. And the girls love the bouncers and you’re sober at the end of the night makes it easy. I’m like giving away all the trade secrets. Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard.

31:03 Oh my let’s just say that the people I work with did much better than that regard than I did. I was never the Playboy type, but I have some guys I worked with who were legends and but yeah, I was a fun adventure, I enjoyed him. And so he started noticing that this, there was something to these standard grab, they were very, very effective, and it was shocking to me because, you know, I’d always thought these people would be the least effective people in fighting, they turned out they were the most effective.

31:31 Not only were they the most effective, they were most effective in ways that I couldn’t even comprehend. They could hold and control people as opposed to just knock them out. You know, when you striking there’s no gentle knockouts, you know, there are more gentle knockouts but there’s no gentle knockout. You to go, you’ve got to summon up a certain amount of kinetic energy to put someone to sleep, whereas these guys could just hold people, immobilize them, they could pin them and in extreme cases they could just pick them up and crop them on their head and do severe damage, much more damage than I could ever do with a punch or a kick.

32:03 So it’s to me this was fascinating, so after work I would always bug them with questions, you know, like show me this, so that takes our thing you do, and they would show me stuff, but of course that’s not a real way to learn and understand. You get tricks but you don’t get training, there’s a big difference. And then coincidentally about that time a friend of mine at Columbia University, who was also a graduate student also in the PhD program, and he finished the PhD program, now he’s very successful lecturer down in Australia, he said, John, you know, I know you work at night as a bouncer, I’ve started doing this martial art, it’s called Brazilian jiu-jitsu, it’s a grappling style.

32:52 I was like, Brazilian jiu-jitsu? Like that doesn’t make sense, like jiu-jitsu is Japanese, like Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And he goes, yeah, it’s like wrestling but instead of pinning people you get them in these things called submission holds. And I was like, hmm, interesting. That night I went to work and a bouncer I was working was started talking about this thing called a UFC, and he said there’s these crazy Brazilian wrestlers who win everything, just killers, they look like nothing but they’re killers.

33:27 And then I thought, twice in one day I’ve heard about this, maybe this is a sign. And you hadn’t been watching the UFC, no, it around for maybe a couple years, around for a while, so it was all videotape, yes, you had old VHS tapes in those days. So this guy comes down, puts on a VHS tape, and I see this skinny dude and Royce breaking people, tackling them, holding them on the ground, strangling. I’ll just like, are you kidding me? Did you believe that even?

33:51 Yeah. I’m saying, I mean this, you can tell when a fight’s fake, you know. This is not fake, this, these guys are going, you’ve seen like, you know, they’re hit and then blood comes in, that’s not fair, you can’t fake that. And so I’m saying, damn, this is good, these guys. And what I was seeing in the cage was so similar to what you would see in a nightclub fight: an initial closing of distance and impact, a clinch, a fall, and one guy on top, one guy on bottom normally.

34:19 In a street fight, guy on top invariably wins, but here in the cage these guys were falling upon and still winning, and to me this was just fascinating. So when my friend at Columbia came in the next day, I had my office hours and I just finished office hours and we’re in the old Philosophy Hall upstairs on the seventh floor and he goes, like, you know, I’ve been training for two weeks now. He was a small man, 140 pounds at the time, I was around 220 pounds and big, and that’s a big size difference, and you know he’d literally never been in a fight in his life and I had been bouncing for many years in New Zealand, then the United States, and I’ve been in a lot of fights.

35:09 And he goes like, you know, we start down on the ground, and the main grappling moves that I had from the judo and wrestling place that I would was essentially a sag headlock throw into a kesa gatame type hold on the ground, that was what I used to use, and I’m around, yeah, yeah, and I cranked off and I couldn’t breathe and they would, people give up and quit. So I put them in my basket, a kesa gatame, and I held him down with all my might and we’re on the wooden floor and in the philosophy department office, people walking. Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s not what the founders of that university envisioned for their future students, but I held him down as best I could and as always, holding me, son, slipping around behind me, he started getting a foot inside and I didn’t know the first thing about grappling, but I could feel this, it’s not good, this guy was going to my back.

36:06 Everyone knows that’s not a good thing in a fight, guy getting behind you. And after about two minutes my arms were getting tired, I was holding this, going, grunting and doing my best and I was unable to control him, when suddenly his head popped out like a champagne cork and he just slipped around behind me and I hit the screen, we’ll back up to my feet and get away from them. And then as I got up I saw it like this, this shouldn’t be happening. I’m twice this guy’s size, I’m twice as strong as him, I’m tired and he’s fine, and if we had to fight a second time, who’s to say he wouldn’t get behind me and strangle me next time?

36:42 And that was it. I was like, dude, I’ve got him two weeks, you’ve been training two weeks and you would have, you did just fine against the guy twice your size and strength. I have to learn this. So I went down and did my first class, and my first class is probably pretty much the same as your first class. Do I go Frankle now, I’m blocked by everybody in the room, and I came out thinking like, I’m gonna have to learn this to some degree.

37:10 I can’t go through life being completely ignorant of what is happening here. I have, so I didn’t say I want to be good at this, but I have, I have to be competent at it. And it was that answers that first one. No, Renzo, we had an assistant called Craig Kukoc in those days who was the first teacher, and then Renzo came. They worked together for a period of time and they went their separate ways, but in those early days there were some people that you would recognize.

37:39 Matt Serra was a blue belt back then, I think there were only two purple belts in the whole East Coast of the United States. Matt was there, there’s some other people you probably wouldn’t remember, but those were early, early days, and to even, you know, you just didn’t see a black belt in those days, they were like unicorns, and a purple belt was considered to be like a God, like a God on the mat, a blue belt was like a seer, as a force, like a demigod, and we were all white belts. And so I started learning and it was a fascinating sport.

38:21 My first ambitions were just to get competent at the sport and help me for bouncing, and I must say you often hit people criticized you, did sue as unrealistic for street fighting and they’ll tell you, no, you can’t use that in a fight. Let me tell you, let’s f***ing jiu-jitsu, who was extremely effective in street fighting. It made my life as a bouncer massively easier than it was before. Now your go-to moves, anything that got me behind people and quickly on the ground and of course strangleholds, to them number one method of, if someone, if things got completely out of hand you would strangle them.

39:02 And I must say I had many people come back to clubs that I worked in days or weeks later and say like, hey, I’m really saying for the, you know, you choked me out and you didn’t hit me, like my face is fine. Yeah, I acted like an a**hole, like thank you for being nice. And it gave you, even the most extreme circumstances where people were completely out of hand, a stranglehold is like an off switch, fisherman beings, and it just completely pacified the situation.

39:31 Of course, in most situations you didn’t have to strangle people, you just pin them or immobilize them, and most people don’t really want to fight that badly. There were exceptions to that, there are certain kinds of crowds that you can work in a club which have a much higher propensity towards violence, but you know, your average Joe is really looking to blow off some steam and a fine, and you don’t have to go all the way to strangling them unconscious, but there are a few cases where this has to be done and the result is bloodless. You know, even someone who’s under normal circumstances probably severely beaten by bouncers can just be completely pacified with a stranglehold and the situation taken down and made manageable.

40:14 And so yeah, dude, it was a remarkable, remarkably effective thing. So you were hooked? Yeah, absolutely, but still hooked in a very superficial way. Yeah, okay, with something which has made my life much easier, but my ambition in life was still to be a university professor who happened to be a bouncer during his graduate school years. So I just saw it as always like this fascinating, fun activity that made my life significantly easier, and that started to change when a number of factors came in.

40:48 First, Renzo Gracie, who wanted to write a book on jiu-jitsu, and I think at the time it was around 1998, 1999, I think I would say like either a blue or purple belt, I can’t remember which, and Renzo said, you know, I want to write a book on jiu-jitsu, John, can you write it for me? And I was like, dude, I’m a blue belt, like, yeah, my gonna write a book, a bad you did see. And he said, well, you know, you’re the only guy in college, yeah, he goes, oh, he or the only one that can write, okay.

41:20 So Renzo said, come to, come to class more, I’ll teach you more. So I would come down to class much more often as soon as I was done teaching at Columbia to come down, you know, I would have to go out and bounce at night until 4:00 in the morning and then go and teach at Columbia, like this crazy cycle. And Renzo really took me under his wing and he’s a superb teacher, by the way, he never gets credit for his teaching ability. People see him, so it’s a very charismatic guy, he’s a damn good teacher, damn good.

41:49 How would you describe Renzo? One of the most affable, charismatic human beings I’ve ever met. He, if he’s a 1 fiat ition, he would have, he would have won every election, he was there room by a freaking landslide. He’s looking for a fight, yeah, put it on the line in the street and in the ring, that too, yeah. You guys, is a credible comedy.

42:10 Oh yeah, the UN, see that very often, like slider and charismatic leader, you don’t, yeah, that’s a very, very rare combination. My friends, young prime fighting champion, yes, yeah, a photo always a way above his weight, like crazy, he should have been fine at 145 his whole career, that’s his actual weight, but he always quoted like, you know, like middleweight, but a good teacher is well, very good. And so he did a fine job of sanika Johnny’s what you need to know.

42:38 And the classic Brazilian jiu-jitsu teaching isn’t always highly regarded, like I went down to Gracie Barra in Rio and it’s like, you run around the mat, I’m gonna show you a move, ghost bar. Yeah, it’s not known for a specific curriculum, I know later, you know, changed with what you were doing and you know the guys doing it’s coming for, definitely, that’s definitely an issue, you know, that kind of decent way to describe it was really the methodologies of teaching, a pretty primitive transfer of knowledge. Yeah, yeah, especially in those days, right, the knowledge itself was incredible but only held probably by some very high-level black, yes, and the assumption of most schools was that the people who were very good got special attention and everyone else just came in and learned a move a day, and you know, for most people that’s fine, you know.

43:29 You learn a move a day, you do that for a year, you’ll be any regular Joe in a fight, kind of Chris things out, Kaizen, and there’s small-scale Kaizen and So I started learning a lot more and I began writing that, I wrote him, so the original book basically at nightclubs. I’d be bouncing all night and I would have pen and pad with me and in between fighting people, writing ideas, and then I would transcribe the one, a, on a typewriter, a typewriter, and and then send completed documents to California where the editors would start to put together the book. So my knowledge was starting to increase about this time and my interest started to increase and a short time after that, Renzo started saying, listen John, I’m fighting a lot and my students, Matt Serra, Ricardo Almeida and Ha Trigger Gracie, are leaving, they’re gonna open their own schools, you’re gonna have to teach.

44:36 And I was like, okay, I’m nowhere near as good as any one of those three guys, like they were mine, there was a guy who taught me, and they were all three of them were world champions, and I was like, hands-on, and I’m not qualified to teach, man. He’s got, you got to do it, there’s no one else. So could you say no to him at that point or not? Oh yeah, of course he can, we say no, but I mean they would, but I wouldn’t cuz he’s a friend, you know. And I was just like, whoa, I get, I bet I got to get better, like this is, I can’t, they, I would be so humiliated if the quality of the school went from here to here on my watch.

45:20 Like you know, people were used to like mad series a legend like a Carol made her Audrey go crazy, I at that time there were winning a DCC that were the best that it was, and I and imagine if the school that I was a part of this dropped in quality because now, oh yeah, Dan, I was teaching like great. And so I was, I gotta get better at this. And so I was thinking to myself, you know, where do you want to go with this? And I had pretty much finished my PhD requirements, I was getting very close to finishing of the PhD and part of me was like, you know, do you want to go the academic route?

46:11 Like what the head and tail, like a, I defend my dissertation, then I’m probably gonna have to go to some small college somewhere in the Midwest of the United States, live a boring life for 20 years, scrounge up enough money through grants to live a life, and then hope that maybe when I’m 40, 45, right enough journals that maybe I can get accepted to a good university in a nice place and then when I’m 50 teach in a cool school, and don’t thinking, I don’t want to live that life, I, you know, and it’s got to be a better way to live your lives. But that means walking away from philosophy. Yeah, life or well that’s my self-worth or what you really love.

46:54 And I said I loved philosophy but I didn’t love academia, and around that time the whole kind of political correctness movement was getting strong in university and I never gelled with that, it wasn’t my thing. And why not? I, it cuts a little too close to talk about publicly, but and I’m saying I don’t want to live my life in an institution where you could see the trend and academia was going that way, and I was on the early end of political correctness and didn’t like it, and the idea of just staying silent, listening to people say things that I vehemently disagreed with, and having to keep quiet for the sake of not ruffling feathers and keeping your job and getting tenure, didn’t appeal to me.

47:48 And I love the hurly-burly freedom of jiu-jitsu, it was a school where people say whatever the f*** they want and the only thing you were measured by was merit, it was just how good could you be on the mat. And you could have every kind of defect but if you were good on the mat you could be, you know, forgiven. And the bonds of friendship there were much more real and genuine than they were in the academic lifestyle. And then the deciding factor, it was around that time a young Canadian came in to train, his name was Georges St-Pierre, and he didn’t speak much English at that time and came and he started doing a few introductory classes that I was teaching and one day he said, you know, I’m fighting in these local competitions in Canada, he showed me some videotape, VHS, of his fights and I was like, this kid’s really doing some amazing work.

48:49 Like now you must understand that MMA was changing around this time. When I first started, jiu-jitsu was the king of mixed martial arts, it was then called vale tudo or NHB and jiu-jitsu was the undisputed king. Yeah, dominated the early, yeah, absolutely, like I remember, you know, around the early UFCs you could tell who would win by the introductions. Whenever they said, grandpa, you know that he’s got went, and if it was two grapplers then you always knew it was that you did see going, and if you guessed along those lines you’d be right in 95% of cases.

49:34 So things started to change when the skills of grappling got more widely disseminated and then suddenly striking became more important, and in particular American wrestlers started coming in large numbers and they’d learned enough jiu-jitsu to shut down jiu-jitsu and control where the fight took place, and then kickboxers started to learn enough takedown defense and enough submission defense that they could bring the techniques of kickboxing in, and so he had these weird cycles where dudes who started as King and then went down, wrestling came in, became King, and they round him hammer, and then kickboxing came in and became King, and there were these cycles of which martial art is best, but all that was leading towards this idea that the real truth wasn’t that any one martial art was king but rather that the skills of all the martial arts synthesized would be King, and there would be a day in the future where we really could stop talking about style versus style, instead of talking about athlete versus athlete.

50:42 And I remember looking at this VHS of Georges St-Pierre and saying, that’s exactly what this kid is, this kid’s the future, like he’s not a jiu-jitsu player, he’s not a wrestler, he’s not a kickboxer, he’s the average of those three things. And I remember just going home that night, working in a club, BC night, this kid’s doing something really, really interesting, he’s the face of a new kind of martial art, like mixed martial arts is different from its components and something revolutionary is happening here. What year is this, roughly?

51:22 This is early 2002 or something. Yeah, the book came to mind that was, no, I believe it was published in 2003, could be wrong about their barrette leasing and health exciting. And so people know you were never gonna compete yourself? Yes, because you injured your knee, there’s a bunch of reasons. I’m not the most competitive person in the world and gave a crippled leg, I’m sitting now so you can see that, but I have a crippled leg which means I could always do well in the gym with other people provided it was kept within certain constraints, but if it was like hard aggressive standing racing there would have been a problem against untrained people in street fighting, it’s not a problem because they have no real skills, but it would have been a problem to train day and day out for years at a time.

52:13 And the way I looked at it was pretty simple: if you’re gonna do something, try to be the best in the world at it. And what I felt was that I genuinely believed that as someone who started jiu-jitsu very late at 28 with a crippled leg, unlikely gonna be the best athlete in the world, but I did believe I could be a big coach in the world or at least get up there and be among the best. And a great coach needs a great student, and I had some advantages too. I came from a very strong academic background, I had, I was blessed to have brilliant, brilliant people teach me throughout my time in academia.

52:57 I have a the effect of my brother Peter, who’s a brilliant academic himself now, he was a huge influence on me as a child, so I had people push me towards the idea of a strong academic mindset from an early age, and what I saw with jiu-jitsu was there was unlimited potential but it was somewhat blocked by poor teaching methodologies, in that if someone could combine good teaching methodologies with the inherent potential of jiu-jitsu, something remarkable could happen, and I saw myself as maybe I’ve been put in this position. You’re a [expletive], you started way too late, but you’ve got some advantages from earlier in your life and maybe you can do something significant this route, and that was always how I felt. In addition, I’ve always felt that the greatest times of joy in my life always came from helping other people get to their goals rather than any goals that I might have achieved in my own life.

54:07 I always felt that, like there was a strongest sense of, I’ve done something good, that helping someone else get to a goal rather than getting to my own goals, and that’s, I think, an important thing for a coach, that an athlete, by the very nature of their sport, right, so by the very nature of their life that they’ve chosen, has to be a selfish person. If you want to be a great athlete you have to be a selfish person, you have to be, there’s no other way, but the only way for a coach to become great is to be giving, is to be a giving person. You have to get someone else to their goals, and so the coaching mindset and the athlete mindset are very, very different.

54:48 And so I said, you know, why don’t you just focus on this one, I think you can be good at this. And I’ve been blessed through my life to have many very, very talented students. I think this was a huge advantage of me living in New York, that, I do believe that New York has a mystique that tends to draw the most talented people in the United States and indeed the world to it. It’s I’ve never been to any other city, apologies for London, which has such a magnetic effect on growing and talent as New York, and that’s reflected in my students.

55:29 I’ve been blessed with great students over the years. But George came to you, yes, because he recognized Gracie jiu-jitsu, he was, he wanted to get stronger and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He came just to check out Renzo Gracie’s, we had a good reputation, yet champions that used to teach there, and he came and he’d like the classes that we taught there, and Georges is a likable character, but one of the things, he’s unstintingly loyal and he’d like someone, he stays with them and character.

56:07 Yeah, so from relatively early on in his career I began working with him on a pretty limited basis, you know, he was working as a garbage man when he first came and spoke on which no English and would come on a bus six and a half, seven hours from Montreal on Friday nights and then leave to be at work on Monday morning. And so I remember just being incredibly impressed by the sacrifices he was making and I’ve seen so, they were all these things came together which made me say Monday, let me let me go the route of jiu-jitsu, so I pulled out of Columbia. And that mean a lot to you when your students sacrifice?

56:49 Yeah, it does. I mean that’s called a lot of those guys, yeah. People have no idea how much they give, the sacrifices they make. This guy’s taking two hours each way, that’s this average day in Thursday, nothing. That shows you they want to be on the map, which means they get more of your time, and you know, you can’t help but be impressed by every, every single day I get some guy walk into the gym and say, Mr.

57:13 Danaher, I’m gonna be an ex-champion student, and I look at them, I go, mm-hmm, I don’t even listen, I just watch people’s actions, that’s all I watch. I didn’t listen to people’s words, I watch actions. When you see someone coming in day after day for hours just to get there, then hours back, and then I was on the mat, that’s impressive, and taking a beating on the mat, have you a failure on the mat and still coming with hard those days, coming in, you know, you can be a stud in your own gym, you come in there you’re nobody, and that’s admirable, you know.

57:49 That I take seriously. Words in one ear and out the other, and very few people actually manage to keep, very, very few. Some people can do a good impersonation for a week, two weeks, three weeks, but it’s not measured in a week, it’s measured in years, which shows by kind of the size of your squad is quite small? Very small, whereas you know, when you think about it’s kind of a crazy thing, like I don’t even have my own school, I teach in my teacher’s school and I only teach morning and afternoon classes there, the night classes I don’t teach because they try and keep that for more like traditional Gracie jiu-jitsu.

58:27 So really the only people I have access to are people that don’t really have jobs, they can come in the afternoon, like regular people can’t come at night because they have jobs, I think. So I tend to get a very bizarre group of people who come in and in addition I’m a guy who in almost every case takes people from beginner level to expert level. Most teams are not like that, most teams have not really coaches at all, their recruiting centers, they take people who are already champions and bring them in, they offer financial and medical benefits, etcetera, etcetera, and they corral champions and they call that a team.

59:15 What’s unique about what I did over the years is in almost every case there were people who were unknown when I met them or just starting out and I built them over time. Now that’s a, it’s a difficult process and it takes years and you get a lot of casualties along the way, a lot of people will leave. I’m a difficult person to get along with, I’m not a pleasant person to be around. I hear ya, you’re pretty pleasant now. I’m on my best behavior.

59:42 Okay, are you like that, you like that teacher in that drum movie Whiplash, it’s just ruthless? I didn’t see them. Okay, yeah, how are you hard on your students? I’m up to facialist and I’m also just as a person I’m cold. I’m just like Renzo, I was like this warm, a small creature, people to love him, he’s charismatic.

1:00:04 I’m the opposite and I’m cold as ice and I’m not personable and I’m weird to look at and I’m this demanding, strange character who’s always saying it’s good but not good enough. And I have a very set idea about what’s going to make someone a champion and people get funneled into that and some people don’t like being funneled and then there’s, you know, they’re like, giant, can’t take it anymore. And I didn’t blame them, you know, it’s a hard life and it gets harder when the person who’s guiding you was not always there, the easiest person to get along with.

1:00:44 And so you know, you’re right, there’s a lot of casualties along the way, but you’re willing to sacrifice your life for your students. I’ve seen your schedule, you’re flying to Singapore with Garry and flying back the next day, going straight to the Blue Basement, you’re flying out to LA for Abu Dhabi with Gordon and Nicky, you’re flying back. I mean your whole life is dedicated to your students, isn’t that? They make so many sacrifices that what kind of person would I be if I didn’t make similar sacrifices back for them?

1:01:17 There’s a sense in which I’m rather unusual in jiu-jitsu insofar as the only credibility I have comes from my students. I have zero accomplishments on my part, I haven’t even competed even once, not even once. So I have zero accomplishments, everything that I’ve known 400 assume as a result of my students. Were not for them I would be literally nothing, that’d be some guy tinkering away in a basement. Renzo’s.

1:01:49 So I owe my students everything and I lived my life that way. That still doesn’t make your dedication any less exceptional. Quickly, with Georges St-Pierre, what did you learn from teaching him for so many years? What did George show you and what did you both create? That’s a great question.

1:02:13 The great lesson of George St-Pierre’s career is this: more important than any fighting techniques that you employ is the integration of those fighting techniques. George was never the best boxer, he was never the best wrestler, he was never the best jiu-jitsu guy, but he could integrate those techniques together better than anyone else. And at the end of the day, when it’s time to fight, your ability to integrate techniques and switch to and fro between them counts for more than whatever perfection you have garnered in any one, two or three of those techniques.

1:03:06 You see this a lot in military history too. If you look at the development of warfare in the last 100 years, it’s been very much towards the theory of combined arms, that nowadays you can’t really separate the work of Air Force, Army and Navy. It’s more about the ability to use high-speed communications between all three branches of the military to get a desired result rather than any one branch of the military. Combined arms is everything, and that’s what gives America such ascendancy in the military realm today.

1:03:41 We have greater ability to communicate between various units and to take various disparate units and make them work together in this combined fashion towards a common goal. And that’s exactly what Georges St-Pierre is. We saw him take down wrestlers, we saw him pop people with the jab, there were better boxers than him, and that’s because everything he could intimidate strikers with his takedowns, so he would throw off their striking game. Then with wrestlers he could use setups to takedowns which they never had, and so even though he wasn’t the best wrestler, he lived for many people with far greater wrestling credentials to him, they could never cover distance on him but he could cover distance on them effortlessly, so every time they threw up was an opportunity for him to take them down.

1:04:28 On the ground he was never the best jiu-jitsu player but he could integrate striking with grappling better than the best jiu-jitsu players could, and so throw off the jiu-jitsu technique of jiu-jitsu champions without a problem and punch in ways where they were going for a submission hold, he was punching on the ground. And so by switching back and forth between these things he could throw off the rhythm of every fight of any forward, regardless of their style. So that was a great lesson of George, this modern approach to combat, that integration of fighting technique was more important than the techniques themselves.

1:05:06 At first most people, when they think about what it takes to become a champion, assume that, how am I gonna refine technique? Okay, and they say, okay, right, I need jiu-jitsu skills, I need wrestling skills and I need striking skills, and let’s work on the refining of tui. Now that’s a valuable, valuable thing and certainly not something you can ignore, but even more important than that, once you’ve got to a sufficient level in all of those disciplines, then it becomes more of a question of integration.

1:05:32 Okay, have you, and if you just keep piling away at perfection of technique without integration you can get diminishing returns upon your upon your training time. It comes a certain point we’ve got to switch the focus from perfection of technique to integration of technique. Think about it, look at an armbar from guard, okay, look at a double leg takedown, these are commonly seen techniques. if you get to a certain level, let’s say on a score of 0 is the worst double leg in the world and 100 is the most perfect double leg in the world, you could invest a lifetime in trying to get to a skill level of 100, but if your opponent only requires a skill level of, say, 40 to be taken down, what’s the point of getting a double leg all the way up to 60 or 70?

1:06:27 You’re not really getting any return on the investment at that point. You’d be better off learning how to integrate that double leg with another technique and switching the focus of your training to something else and then focusing on integration, rather than just continuing to work away at getting a better and better double leg when it’s at a point where it’s already good enough to get the job done and it’s not gonna make any difference. At that point you’re wasting training time you could be investing more wisely somewhere else.

1:06:54 Yeah, so George was the first true mixed martial artist, you know. Mine, you’re always going to get people to say there are other people before him, but he was, if he wasn’t the first, he was among the first. No one else brought more attention to the sport through that approach and no one else took it to the level of professionalism that he did. Yeah, it’s a guy who literally sought out the best coaches in the various disciplines and then actively asked himself, how can I integrate those skills with his skill, and created this incredible fighter.

1:07:28 Did you enjoy his comeback fight? Was it getting the band back together? It was getting the band back together, yeah, it was a fun time and yeah, it was a scary time too, because you know, if George was going through some physical problems that you weren’t really discussed, but he had severe ulcerative colitis, and I didn’t know if you know anything about it but it’s a severe lifelong physical problem and it became a real issue in that camp. George, you know, he’s a very, very brave fellow and never complains, but he suffered through that camp and physically he wasn’t quite the same, but he still fought one of them, I think Michael Bisping, is right, behind, he’s got a label or right behind you, same here, is the winningest fighter in UFC history.

1:08:16 So people go, I judge got an easy opponent to win the middleweight crown. I say, since when is Michael an easy opponent? My god, he’s one of the most successful fighters in UFC history. It’s tough, and to go up a weight division was a severe physical problem, and still win in the most convincing fashion possible, it was great. What I loved about their match is it was a beautiful way to finish a career insofar as George had always had a sort of standard set of complaints about his achievements.

1:08:54 Everyone always said, first, he was a boring fighter, he’s too tactical, didn’t go out and just fight with passion. They always said he never finished fights and they always hid he never fought above his weight class. They say, you know, great fighters fight above their weight class, they finish fights and they fight in an exciting, fan-friendly fashion, and that was always a complaint about Georges St-Pierre. And there’s always complaints, but those are the three complaints, and then in that last fight what did he do?

1:09:24 He came out, it was a thrilling fight, he finished the guy and he fought above his weight class. So it’s like, okay, because the three criticisms, I just crushed all three in one night. So it was like a beautiful full stop at the end of a sentence. Do you celebrate with him after a night like that, or George has his own unique ways of celebrating, so no. And is he done, still trains with you?

1:09:50 Yeah, you need George’s, George’s not a fighter, man, he’s a martial artist. He trains every day and when George is 65 years old he’ll still be training every day, he’s old-school like that. I love it. And that he’s a fighter, not a martial artist, what does that mean? Um, there’s a sense in which a fighter gets ready for the next fight, whereas the martial artist is Laurent, I said, what is the course of my life overall, how will this training influence me as a person, and their training is not for a specific event but has it’s an end in itself, the training is an end in itself as opposed to the fight.

1:10:29 And you know, for a fighter training is a means to an end, it’s prize money, it’s fame, it’s glory, and if you took those things away they wouldn’t find better martial artists are still trained. You put a martial artist and a fighter on a deserted island, the fighter is gonna sit on the beach, martial artists will be doing knuckle push-ups in the same different kind of mindset. Yeah, no, for sure. When did you finally come up with your system for jiu-jitsu?

1:10:56 And I remember reading that book, I bought it in London and I just remember thing that cracking up the most was there weren’t that many jiu-jitsu books out there. Yeah, but it’s true, you know, the ones that, there weren’t any that had case studies in there, and I remember a case study, and Antonio Nogueira and there was, were stuck in between there, and I was like, I’ve never read a book on fighting, it made me feel like I was back at MIT, you know, an engineering book or something. In there was a little slice of you in there obviously, but you know you didn’t have the system set in stone there, but you start, um, okay.

1:11:29 I can tell you literally exactly where it all started. When Renzo wants me to find it, right, his first book, persona theory and technique, I was always one night working at a club on the introduction and I was thinking, okay, what the hell am I gonna write? You know, I’m thinking about, I’m a freaking blue belt in New York City, you know, what am I gonna write for the introduction on Brazilian jiu-jitsu? And at that time I was mostly fascinated by jiu-jitsu impact and mixed martial arts, more NHB as it was called in those days, and there was an obvious question here: why was jiu-jitsu so successful in those early days when mixed martial arts first started?

1:12:15 There was like a three-year period where jiu-jitsu just killed it, every fight was victory by submission, and this was shocking for the world of martial arts, it was revolutionary, because as we discussed earlier, grappling wasn’t even seen as a particularly effective form of fighting, the idea is you could win fights on the ground was just like, right, you kidding me? Like it can’t possibly happen, and it was happening right in front of everybody’s eyes. It was shocking and this obvious question came up like, okay, why was due to winning, what’s the secret?

1:12:47 And all the answers were things like, wow, ground grappling, take him down, it’s obvious. Is it? Think about it a little more deeply. You just, he’s not the only grappling style with takedowns or fighting style with takedowns. Wrestlers had way better takedowns over here, judo had way better takedowns than us.

1:13:08 Yeah, why were they winning everything? Like what, submission holds? Judo exhibition holds, sound boy, a submission holds, it’s also martial arts with submission holds. Okay, I don’t know what is the reason why it’s succeeding. You’re having this debate in your own man?

1:13:32 Yeah, so one night I was out bouncing, oh it was a freezing cold night in New York City, I hit my head on his head like five jacks, I’m sitting there, I don’t have a nudie somewhere I can, why is it winning? And I thought to myself, because it’s a system. I feel like all of the grappling arts out there, they have moves but they don’t have a clear and coherent system that takes you from beginning through the middle to the end of a fight. Jiu-jitsu does. At any moment in a fight that you do, the player knows exactly what he has to do, there’s no improvisation.

1:14:15 The first thing you got to do, you got to get him down on the ground. The second thing, you got to get past his legs. The third thing, you got to get into a dominant position and move from one dominant position to another. The fourth thing, you’ve got to take him out with a submission hold. If you end up in the bottom position it changes a little bit.

1:14:34 First thing you got to do, you got to get your legs between him and your opponent, put them back in guard in other words. Then you get a bunch of choices, you could sweep and then go through the four steps we just mentioned, or you could just finish him right there from the bottom of the guard, right? So changes a little bit on bottom position but the idea is the same, somewhere between three and six steps. It’s a very simple system and you always know exactly what you ought to be doing at any given moment in a fight, and why both learn this?

1:15:03 Yeah, you can learn this in literally five minutes, I can describe this view in five freaking minutes, it will change your life, you know. There’s people I knew in bouncing who never took a single jiu-jitsu lesson, not one, they just watched Fear of UFCs with me after work and they won fights based on their fights that they would normally never win because they got onto, say, they just tackled the guy, climbed on top was, I’m in a kind of a clumsy, klutzy way, the other guy didn’t have any knowledge or technique, so it didn’t stop it and then hit him a few times, they turned and they put on like a beginner-level stranglehold and they won. So that proves the system is simple, it’s a very simple system, you can live right on the back of a postage stamp.

1:15:47 And no, you asked a black belt in Rio de Janeiro forty years ago if there was a system, they might not know that that’s what they had. Yes, they hate the way, yeah, they had implicit knowledge but not explicit knowledge. Like the goal of a teacher is to make implicit knowledge explicit, that’s how you can take information from here and implant it in the mind of a young man over here, that’s what you do. Yeah, that’s our living, that’s what I do, that’s my job.

1:16:11 And I remember sitting there going like, holy crap, that’s it, dude. It’s a system of grappling. The techniques of jiu-jitsu aren’t that different. [expletive] has many similar techniques, judo has even more similar techniques, wrestling has some techniques, but they didn’t give you that step by step guide. Wrestlers in those days had to improvise. It’s not easy to improvise in a fight.

1:16:36 Yeah, make mistakes, the errors in judgment. Yeah, and then I remember thinking like, holy heck, that’s big. At that exact moment a massive fight broke out downstairs, I had to run downstairs and I remember in the middle of this crazy fight, they all, though, like throwing bottles, flying around, I don’t, thinking like, I can’t get killed in this fight, I can’t get killed, I’ve got, I’ve got to stay alive so I can get this information out there in the book.

1:17:02 And I remember like nine Stein or something like that, did feel something significant had been said. That’s an insight was writing down. I remember I strangled a guy unconscious and he was bleeding heavily from a cut on the head and my hands were covered in blood. I still remember clear as day, on a freezing cold winter night, coming out, the fight had cleared, the cops would come and people were taken away in cuffs. I took out my little notebook and pen and my hands were covered in blood and I was writing four-step system, like that.

1:17:34 And then so that’s where it all began, and then as I wrote that book, 1002, this is early 2000, okay. And I remember thinking, well, okay, if you just is a four-step system, what would happen if you took little components within that four-step system and created subsystems? What would happen then? So if you got to say, for example, guard position and you had a system of ways to attack from closed guard, and then ways to attack from butterfly guard, and you created these little subsystems within an overarching system, would that improve performance?

1:18:24 So I started playing around with that. Things got more interesting when a a very talented American grappler called Dean Lister came to Renzo Gracie Academy, he was invited by Matt Serra to do some training and he gave us later, mid-2000s, just notice later, this would be earlier, this would be, I think, early 2000s. This is all happening around the same time, okay. And a violent Pride, yes, he fought various and mixed martial identifiy for him Pride, that I could be wrong about that, but he certainly had quite a bit of mixed martial arts experience, but this was pretty early in Dean’s career and he came in and he was doing leg locks, mostly in those days are killing logs, he became famous for heel hooks later in his career but at this point it was all Achilles locks, and I remember watching him train with some of the guys, the upper belts at the academy.

1:19:18 This was really interesting because our school didn’t really focus on the leg locks at that time, we did them but it wasn’t like a set thing, and it was a pretty general bias against leg locks in the sport, they were seen as kind of cheap, like it was like a cheap shot. And I remember looking at things, teasing, he’s pretty effective with that, it’s working, this is not just some ineffective technique. And you know that was also one of the great criticisms of leg locks, they don’t work, like you can tap out a white belt with that stuff but anything about that, it’s just gonna cook, get you in trouble.

1:19:55 And I remember talking to him afterwards and he said, you know, why would you ignore 50% of the human body? I remember thinking like, yeah, why would you? And did you ever think, why didn’t I think of that? Of course. Yeah, they say the whole idea is to submit people, that’s the whole point of it, control to submission.

1:20:17 Like why would you arbitrarily say that 30% of the body is off-limits? Now there are reasons in jiu-jitsu for that, it’s not foolishness on the part of the old masters, they reasoned that the more high-percentage submissions are upper body submissions, and there was some truth to that, you know. If you’ve looked at the stats in those days, lower body submissions didn’t figure particularly highly, and you could easily argue, well, they’re right, there’s a reason why Bo attacked the lower body, because you could lose position.

1:20:50 I thought about that for a while. They lose position, well, if I do an armbar from mount and it doesn’t work, that’s pretty likely I lose position just as easily there, but no one’s criticizing our box from out. Yeah, and I thought, you know, they’re too dangerous to do was that, well, the most dangerous things I’ve seen in jiu-jitsu were things like flying guard pulls. I’ve seen more people wrecked by those than I ever saw by any leg locks, and they’re legal.

1:21:17 So it kind of to do is that, potentially dangerous abuse logs anyways, there’s nothing intrinsic about leg locks which makes them somehow more dangerous to the limbs than arm locks. I’ve seen more people get limbs dislocated by key morholt’s and I hear by heel hooks. And so most of the early criticisms of leg locks didn’t really hold weight if you just question them, you realized that they really weren’t that good. Weird cultural, yeah, yeah, there was a cockerel bias, you know.

1:21:45 Jiu-jitsu is a sport derived from judo, and judo of course put a ban on leg locks many years ago and as a result jiu-jitsu, which was stemming from judo, took on a little bit of that bias against leg locks. Why did judo put the ban on it? I believe, like I can’t state it certainly, but I do believe 1925, they were banned for safety reasons. There was a significant rule change in 1925 where numerous techniques were outlawed, other things like slamming from guard were also outlawed, and I may be wrong about the date but I’m pretty sure 1925 was like a seminal year in rule changes with judo, and various forms of leg lock were banned.

1:22:24 And so jiu-jitsu did take that on a little bit, but there was, so some of it was cultural, some of it was practical, there was a belief that leg locks really were less effective. But what I did see in leg locks is tremendous potential. What I saw is that, you know, probably the single greatest thing you can find in life is an undervalued product, okay. There’s always an objective value of a product and its perceived value, and very often those are two very different things.

1:22:59 There’s a lot of diamonds in the rough start there that people miss, identify as rough because we’re enjoyed by what other, yes, absolutely, yes, especially it comes something like it’s, yes, passed on through generations, that your teacher, you kind of argue with your teacher to teach you, yeah, it’s a picture, a guy, yeah. So in a communal, the Gracies, and can’t question, so there’s a lot of appeal to authority in martial arts and authority counts for a lot, you know. There’s so-and-so says this then you better damn well listen.

1:23:27 And I remember thinking like, you know, there’s nothing mechanically different about locking legs and there were some locking arms, so more degrees of freedom, complex, hell, I thought to myself, well, let’s do some experimentation. So my main way of researching is always physically experimenting on the mats, particularly before my hip replacement, and I spent many years just playing around, tinkering with various kinds of leg lock, and what I always found was that the great deficiency of leg locks was the notion of control, that there was no positional control in leg locking, and as a result leg locks was seen as a kind of a Hail Mary move where you just kind of jumped into it and see what happens, and that was unacceptable. You can’t just base your game on Hail Mary locks, there has to be this idea of control, and jiu-jitsu.

1:24:26 So I’ve always understood jiu-jitsu to be control leading to submission. What I saw lacking in the leg lock game was the notion of control, it did have a lot of potential as a submission hold but it lacked the Pyrrhic control to make it effective in combat. That word control is something you brought into the game, because we always see her position of, yeah, yeah, but people have to understand that the traditional cliche of jiu-jitsu is position before submission.

1:24:49 There are many ways to control someone, okay. Positional control is one form of control, it’s arguably the most important form, but it’s one of many forms of control. There’s control through balance or kuzushi, okay, grip control, reaction speed control, there’s many components of control, and I believe it’s more accurate to talk about control leading to submission rather than just position. There’s many ways to similar, people don’t rely on position at all, okay, just different forms of control.

1:25:19 So yeah, so whenever I talk, yeah, you don’t hear me talking much about position before submission, right? There is an important concept to teach a beginner but there’s deeper concepts people can learn in that, and language is very important here. Yeah, you want to be precise with your language. Yeah, you know, I’ve always found in life that the more precise you are with your descriptions, the more precise you’ll be with your movements. You see this in every aspect of life.

1:25:47 Imagine you and I were fixing a car engine, okay, and I’m like, hand me the cylindrical thing with the white top and gray bottom with the white sticking out of it, and you’re like, mm-hmm, any shot, looking around for the white cylindrical thing with the Y’s together, you know. What if I could escape your hitman, possibly the spark plug? Okay, now you know exactly what I mean. And so precision in language, of precise terminology, enables you to operate more efficiently, and that’s how you have to be with your grandpa.

1:26:17 That’s why I always insist on nomenclature. My students speak a language so that I can communicate very quickly to them. Okay, I need lift beside cross, ah, she knows exactly where I want, using those traditional Japanese terms I used to. Yeah, I use Japanese terms on occasion. I often get a lot of stick over the screws and Anna is the stuck-up [expletive] who, you know, tries to sound like a smartypants with his Japanese terms.

1:26:41 Not true, it’s, um, truthfully they’re also more specific. Yeah, young, yeah, absolutely. What are you looking for with terminology is, first, I didn’t care what names you use, to be honest with you, but you do have to have names, okay? So you and I Samba communicate for a slice, okay. We have to have a use language to our advantage if I’m gonna communicate to you and reduce the time it takes to teach you, I needed to teach you in a language.

1:27:08 Now what language that I choose, well, it depends on the situation. I always try to honor the people who made, who made the sport, and you know, it’s called Brazilian jiu-jitsu but a big, big, big part of it came from Japan. The truth is that jiu-jitsu is a, has three major cultures woven into it. Now the dominant one is Brazilian but its forebears were Japanese and now there’s some American influence, so it’s a multicultural thing. They may have come a day where we do make them stop calling it a zone you did say, you know, 100 years in the future I might just be called jiu-jitsu, so again I don’t know, but and the personalities of each culture are blended, yes, it’s just odd all it sport, if it hadn’t gone via Brazil it wouldn’t be what it is, you know.

1:28:02 I knew you and you look at Japanese martial arts, look, you know, just psychologically they’re completely different profile from the Brazilians, or ones a very rigid, hierarchical kind of society, the other was a very laid-back, laissez-faire society, yes, it’s like this incredible mix, the Americans are somewhere in the middle. It’s a strange thing you feel on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Yeah, but I do try whenever I can to honor the old Japanese masters who gave the sport its beginning, and so you know, clearly you can see in old textbooks the Japanese knew what actually garami was, they tended to identify it more as a specific lock of the legs, at least in judo manuals, but it’s also a generic name, just means untangled legs, you might two legs Integra one of yours.

1:28:49 So where it’s appropriate I try to incorporate Japanese terms, this is a mark of respect, but there’s also times I deliberately do not use Japanese terms. At the correct Japanese term for the Kimura lock is Judy gourami, okay, but if I’m in a crowded amphitheater with a crowd going crazy and I start calling Judy gourami, phonetically it’s too close to ushi gourami, so my student might not understand what the hell I’m saying. Did he call for really gourami, ah she cries, I didn’t hear, it’s too noisy in here.

1:29:19 So if phonetically names are too close, then I won’t use the Japanese term, so I use more the same way the Brazilians do, even though technically it’s the incorrect term. So there’s a mix of practical and I guess honorific reasons why I use certain terms. Where I believe it’s appropriate I try to honor the old masters of the sport. Certain moves were not made in Japan, like the Baron borrows, purely Brazilian, so of course I use the Portuguese term. So wherever the move originated from, if I can I try to honor the people that made it, if that’s not practical because phonetically it might be confusing in an amphitheater and a crowded arena when I’m trying to call instructions, then I will change things and make it so.

1:30:14 So this is practical and cultural reasons why I choose terms, but all that’s beside the point, you just got to have a language we have to have to communicate effectively, clearly, where I can call commands to you and you can immediately react to them in the appropriate fashion, and that’s the basic demand. And you started working both of these systems in parallel then? Basically the insight was that there’s an overarching jiu-jitsu system, okay, and within that we can make it a better martial art by incorporating many systems within, then.

1:30:47 So there are certain initiators of the sport, in particular the submission holds that I believe the most high-percentage submission holds in the sport are Shigure army base, leg locks, variations of strangles from front headlock position, mostly the guillotine, rear naked strangles, which are the most high percentage of them all, the armbar, jutsu kutami, the triangle stranglehold and Kimura, okay. So most of my work is centered around six submission holds and I try to build elaborate systems around those six submission holds. Then there’s the whole idea of positions can also be worked in a systematic fashion, certain positions, not all of them.

1:31:31 For example closed guard is a pretty localized part of the sport, okay. When you lock someone in a closed guard it tends to limit movement and so this is an area which could be realistically systematized, okay, because it’s the the options that both athletes have are rather limited in their position, so it’s entirely feasible to systematize it, but open guard, it’s just not feasible, just easy freedoms, way too many variables, it’s all happening too quickly, so in those situations you can’t offer a system but you can offer a broad set of brush strokes, okay, this is what you should be aiming for in these situations, etcetera, etcetera. So certain parts of the sport and submission holds and some positions can be systematized.

1:32:18 Half guard, it’s a good example, you can systematize half guard, you can do it with closed guard, but open guard is a whole scary, tough to systematize there, okay. Guard retention, it’s gonna be hard to systematize it, you can give broad recommendations and give principles and concepts but it’s hard to give you a step one, step two, step three system for that. So the basic idea here is we have an overarching system pursuing units who as it was always understood, and my input to the sport was to say that we can enhance performance by incorporating subsystems within that, we’re appropriate submission holds, some positional areas, and done in this way athletes can find the same advantages in these little subsystems and tying them together that jiu-jitsu players found in the early days of mixed martial arts, when that simple four-step system always gave them a sense of direction that would prove to be so valuable in a fight.

1:33:19 Think about fighting in combat in general, what’s the single most common experience you have whenever you’re in a combative situation or a fight? Not knowing what to do next, you know, it’s failure. Yeah, you try something and nine times out of 10 it fails. So the thing that you have to be able to accommodate is failure, that’s the most common occurrence. You try very, very 10 museet right begins some on your own size and your own skill level, you can pretty much reliably figure that eight or nine times gonna fail, and so the ability to deal with failure, it’s really the number one priority that you want to build upon as a combat athlete.

1:34:03 That’s exactly what a system does, okay. Think about that simple four-step system, you’ve got to take him down, you’ve got to get past his legs, you got a worker issue the hierarchy of pins, and then you’ve got to submit them. Let’s say you take him down, let’s say you get past his legs but then as you work your way through the pins the guy bucks you off and gets back up to his feet, what do you do? Take them down here, reboot the system, right, you know exactly what you do, just go right back to the start of the system, and that’s what makes great fight exactly this ability to say, okay, I know exactly what I have to do, anytime there’s a failure just reboot the system and start again.

1:34:39 So with any one of those many, if I’m going for a given leg lock on my opponent and then at some stage in the system of this failure, I know exactly what I have to do: stop, disengage, reboot and go again and do, repeat the same process until it works. This is new teaching technology basically. Hmm, you’re giving yours, yeah, yeah, but still it’s based on the same insight that the original jiu-jitsu masters had, rights idea, this is a simple four-step Alyssa, yeah, I’m just elaborate, you know.

1:35:12 The idea that is within the major system there’s smaller subsystems and these will enable students to get considerable expertise within those niche areas of the sport, and if they can consistently push fights towards those niche areas, even though they’ve been trained for less time than their opponents, they’ll have more time in training in those niche areas, and as long as they can keep it in those niche areas they will be able to beat people who have been training two or three times longer than they have, which we started to see happen with your students. Yes. First of all, why did you complete these systems in your mind, or the majority of that?

1:35:49 I would say that none of them are complete and nor will they be complete when I die, because my students will continue to evolve them, they’re always moving forward. When did they become 70% complete? Yeah, that’s an entirely legitimate question. I would say the, I would do it by what were the biggest insights and when did they occur. For me the biggest insight with leg locking was the notion of double trouble, which is the idea that if 90% of your opponent’s defense to any given leg lock comes from the other leg, it’s your responsibility to control the second leg, to make a division between primary and secondary leg, and that insight came in 2006.

1:36:38 Was that a Eureka moment? I remember thinking like, holy hell, focusing, because it’s so natural, you see a leg in front of you, it’s so natural to go, please get that leg, right, just like an arm, you don’t worry about the other arm when you’re on the other. Yeah, but that’s counterintuitive actually. it’s the other leg, it’s constantly pushing, magic is in the other leg because that’s where all the resistance is gonna come from. If I can shut down that leg, breaking this one’s gonna be easy, but to break your right leg I need to shut down the left leg.

1:37:05 And I remember thinking, like, that’s significant. 2006, what happened, you know, watch something out there? No, it was a tinkering on the mats. I remember I had a guy in an icy or inside heel hook and he stepped over my body and I remember just watching his leg go across, when that said I’m focused on this leg but all this defense came from that leg. We rolled through and I grabbed the other leg and laced it and he just said they’re squirming, looking at me, and I just held him with, like it must have been like two, three minutes, I mean I can break this guy’s leg anytime I feel like it, and then I just separated the legs and submitted him.

1:37:43 That’s important. Hmm, is that because of the hips basically? Think about those fixed hips whereas these shoulders have weird degrees. What’s the easiest way to make an athletic man unathletic? Shackle his ankles together.

1:37:55 Just like you show me the richest athlete in the world, shackle his ankles together, he’s not athletic anymore. That’s exactly what my approach to leg locking does, shackles the ankles together. Double Trouble. Yeah, who came up with the name? You?

1:38:13 Yes. From what I understand it’s actually a pretty common name in many other sports including wrestling, and someone told me that in wrestling there the term that will travel, it means something completely different. But I bet it’s a catchy name. Okay, so you’re in the Blue Basement in the R&D lab creating this stuff and your students are starting to pick up certain bits of it. When does the world start knowing what’s happened?

1:38:38 That’s a good question. The first part of it actually came in an area that no one associated with systems, and that’s Georges St-Pierre. It became very obvious, in line with what I said earlier, that the secret to George’s success was always his ability to integrate striking, grappling, and an integration of skills was really the way he was able to win fights. And so I started to ask questions about, okay, how are we going to integrate the skills of grappling that I’m showing them with striking?

1:39:15 And so I came up with the idea that most people identify mixed martial arts as this kind of eclectic sport where you just take, pick and choose skills from other combat sports and gerrymander them together into this kind of pot pie curry of mixed martial arts, and I thought that was a fundamental mistake, and anytime someone trains along those lines you see a very disappointing result where it looks like they’re trying to improvise a set of moves that don’t really gel together, okay? Right now he’s a wrestler and ten seconds from now he’ll be a jiu-jitsu guy and 15 seconds after that he’ll be a kickboxer and it looks messy, as opposed to Georges St-Pierre where you’re watching him and I, my god, it’s just one thing to another, I just went crazy to watch.

1:40:20 So I started to say, okay, how do we think about mixed martial arts, is it really just a sack latex sport where it’s a little bit of wrestling, a little bit of kickboxing, a little bit of karate, a little bit of boxing, a little bit of jiu-jitsu? No. How about we start seeing it as having four specific skill areas? These were shoot boxing, which is the integration of striking and takedowns, clinch boxing, which is the integration of clinching skills with striking, Finn’s boxing, which is essentially clinch boxing done upon offense, which significantly changes the dynamic of the match to the point where it has to be separated from regular clinch and clinch fighting, and grapple boxing, which is the integration of grappling moves with striking on the ground.

1:41:13 And if you saw mixed martial arts as those four skillsets wedded together, and won, then you started to create athletes who did a better job of integrating skills. And so one of my big early projects was building a system of grapple boxing for Georges St-Pierre. And I’ve always said with regards to championship fighting, if you want to be the best in the world at anything you have to do at least one thing better than all of your competition. Okay, that’s very important.

1:41:48 So say it again. If you want to be the best in the world in whatever discipline you’re interested in, you have to do at least one thing better than everybody else you’re gonna come up against. You’ve got to be good at everything and you’ve got to be the best at at least one thing. George’s is based at two things, he was the best at integrating striking with the takedown, he was the best at integrating striking with grappling, and that made him, it was good at everything, didn’t have any obvious weaknesses, but he was the best at two things and that made him a very, very difficult person.

1:42:24 Striking from side mount, striking from guard, when someone’s years you’re inside someone’s guard, you say you saw that, for example, and it’s fine with BJ Penn, who’s a technically better jiu-jitsu player than George was, but he wasn’t a better grapple boxer than George was. And it’s some of that with Matt Serra and she has P as well. Yes. Yeah, that was a tricky situation for me cuz I’m very close to both and that was a terrible time in my life, let me tell you.

1:42:49 She had, oh yeah, one of them, yeah, we’re doing that, leave for camp. It was weird, the first time they fought, George was world champ when they first came up and that was, there had just won The Ultimate Fighter show and I was coaching both of them and I remember on the plane home from George’s world title fight they announced that he’d be fighting that’s here and I was like, oh no, that’s not what I wanted. And for the first match I coached both of them and there was a huge upset, Matt Serra won, and that was a terrible night.

1:43:33 I remember getting phone calls from both of them, one ecstatic and one despondent, and just a bizarre night, I remember it well. And then things got complicated, they had a personality fallout, Matt was angry with some of the things that George had said after the fight, saying he had underestimated, I mean if it was any other fighter he would have trained more, and it was a misunderstanding, they’re both very nice people and they thrown together, not real as mad at his own gym. Yeah, yeah, Matt inherits own place, so George was from a generation after Matt, the Academy, and so we came to a gentlemen’s agreement that I would train George for fights where he wasn’t fighting Matt Serra and I wouldn’t train either when they fought each other.

1:44:26 Now things are complicated, was Matt Serra ended up getting injured, he had a bad back injury which kept him out of them out of fighting for a while, so George had a series of fights, was I think it was John Fitch, Josh Koscheck, perhaps a few others in there, and I couldn’t appear in George’s corner, I could train him to fight those guys but the understanding that Renzo hashed out was that I wouldn’t corner George until the whole Matt versus George thing got worked out. So that’s when Greg Jackson came in as a cornerman and he and for us for the main corner man at that time. And then George won the rematch against Matt Serra and it became pretty obvious at that point they were never going to fight again, and so I remember talking to Matt saying that, you know, Matt, you probably never gonna fight George again, and he agreed.

1:45:29 And then I went back to George, started coming back to the Academy, and he got ready for what at that time was the biggest super fight in UFC history, him versus BJ Penn, and that’s when I went back to corner George and he was Australian. It was a crazy time, I remember George couldn’t train at the academy at that time, so I would have to call up local martial arts schools in Manhattan, now I totaled a, and then at like 8:30 at night I would have to call up Jo Bob’s karate school on 12th Street and 3rd Avenue and I had to like, what’s how many guys, open until 10:00 p.m.? Okay, if we came by at 10 p.m. and gave you some extra money, could you stay open while we train?

1:46:22 Sure. And we would show up and it would be Georges St-Pierre and me and some like fifteen-year-old kid behind the register would be like, it’s Georges St-Pierre, like, you know, they, oh my god, his hero just walked in. And we were trained in these tiny little Taekwondo schools or karate schools in Evil Place that had a little mat and we’d get ready for these fights with Koscheck and Fitch and these other monsters, and then he would go back to Canada and try and work those techniques in Montreal, was a training partner there, was a crazy time, another, yeah, it wasn’t ideal but to his credit he still did incredibly well through all those fights, but it was an awkward, awkward time.

1:47:02 It said, you know, fighting’s a hard thing in general and to watch two very close friends fight each other, that’s not a good, it’s not a healthy thing to go through. But so system-wise, George St-Pierre started putting, he’s the MMA systems, great boxing offense, boxing, and I’ve always said I had a strong influence on George on offense, clinch and ground, but he was the absolute originator of his work on shoot box and that was his work, he taught me way more about that than I ever taught him on that subject matter, and he was incredibly intuitively tuned into the relationship between his original karate background, the nuances he was learning in boxing and Muay Thai, and in wrestling and integrating it together. Yes, that’s correct, and but he had a unique ability to use sets of feints, distancing and his jab, you know.

1:48:07 George is always a lead hand fighter, he always was very strong with his lead hand and never really punched well with this rare hand, but if that’s all he needed was the lead hand and his feints off the lead hand to enter into the legs. But his best takedowns came when his opponent would come back at him. George would provoke and provoke and provoke, then whenever the guy came back, who disappeared underneath him. It’s a funny thing, you know, I do these drills with George all the time whenever we get together, I’ve been doing them with him since the early 2000s, to this day almost 20 years later.

1:48:40 When George does his deception and fake drills to enter into the legs, I still can’t read when he gets, when he’s gonna punch me, or he’s gonna go to the legs, like you would think after 20 years I would have figured it out, right, but no, he’s so good, like the chances of someone else in the middle of a fight figuring that out are minimal. I know, it’s incredible. He dumps collegiate wrestlers in there, but yeah, and then they die, and this is my other eyes sworn with his Janus.

1:49:08 It doesn’t matter how good a striker you are, if you’re overextended and your body’s out of position and you got a guy, he’s got a good double leg on your hips and your hips are squared up, he’s gonna put you down. And that was the magic of Georges St-Pierre. Wow. When did your leg lock system start? That was starting around 2004, I got very serious about leg locking.

1:49:33 Matt Serra, he’s for me, Johnny leg lock, that was going back a while, and small steps, clumsy steps, then when I got to the idea of Double Trouble, then I, okay, now I think it’s getting interesting, and I started playing around deeply with the idea of a ashi garami as a control. A big insight came when I started to make a difference or see the difference between gravity pins and biomechanical pins. The idea of pinning is immobilization, to pin someone down, and most people associate pinning with the effects of gravity, get on top of someone and wait, hold someone down, as aggressing.

1:50:16 Yes, but of course there’s different ways to pin someone, you can pin someone with zero body weight on them, then you have to use biomechanics to do it, okay, and one way is to throw in a nice ashi garami and lace both of your opponent’s legs, and in this way you’re immobilizing someone not with body weight, because your body weight’s on the floor, sitting on your hands, but with the structure of your leg position in the use of wedges around your opponent’s body to immobilize. An interesting word as well, you came up with? Yes, and when I started to see that the secret to immobilizing people is wedges, and there’s two ways to hold wedges in place, you can use body weight or you can use some kind of lock of your body, choice of a triangle out of your legs, and that’s when things can become interesting.

1:51:01 And then when I start taking philosophy, is you’re looking at? Yeah, so instead of you’re saying, okay, let’s just jump in there and try a heel hook, it’s like, no, no, let’s tie down his hips, shackle his two legs together and take your time to break people. Then it became, okay, now you’ve got control leading to submission as opposed to speed, which was the old way. Yeah, Hail Mary, get it. Yeah, let’s get in there and get what getting worked out before we can react, and that was dreadful and practically Minda, you had to snap your hooks on, which led to a high number of training injuries, a bad reputation.

1:51:33 Now suddenly you had the ability to control things and slow things down, take your time and get control, the injury rate just dropped, which was the learning rate goes up exactly. People were confident about it and they could try these things without being fearful of hurting your friends and training partners, and you know, when all those factors combined, same magic starts happening now. I’m more or less set on this knowledge for a simple reason, at that time I was teaching a pre-conventional form of jiu-jitsu to two students, leg locks were seen as kind of like a nasty side after you did jiu-jitsu and they weren’t really encouraged to be taught in class, so whenever visiting students would come in and Renzo would say, John, roll this guy, I would pull out the leg lock stuff and I did very well but I didn’t generally teach them in class, and in those times just because they were seen as like still have yeah in coach and also the majority of my classes especially that time with geek glasses and of course he Hawking his I understand illegal and they’re gay and you not even allowed, so there was also that practical factor as well.

1:52:46 But all that started to change when George St-Pierre and Chris Weidman moved away, George retired and Chris wipe and opened up his own gym in Long Island so he stopped coming in to train and my work in mixed martial arts ended and at that time I was just teaching regular classes and a brilliant young student called Eddie Cummings came in and started training with me and he really wanted to do well in competition, he was highly intelligent, he was a physics graduate student, very industrious and really passionate about doing well in grappling, and I had just stopped teaching mixed martial, I said no one was competing anymore. Did you want to continue doing that if if they were still fighting? I absolutely I would have continued, because I’m actively seek out a new students.

1:53:44 You never, I never seek students, I can never sort out a student in my life, if they come to me I’ll teach but I’ve never tried to recruit ever, and if someone comes to me I’m always there to help but I won’t ever recruit a student. Why? Just embarrassing, I think, you know, if it doesn’t reflect well upon me if I have to seek out talent in order to make myself look better. If I’m good at coaching I should be able to make someone good, I shouldn’t have to steal someone else’s product and then use that to boast of my name.

1:54:20 I’ve always said most people who claim to be coaches are not coaches, they’re trainers, they get people who are already good and prepare them for competition, they train people, but a coach is different, a coach takes you from beginning, beginner to expert, and it’s not many coaches out there, there’s a lot of trainers, it’s not many coaches. Saying so, Eddie said, you know, I want to compete, I want to do submission grappling, I’m starting to get big. Yeah, it was just a starting like that point you being, you know, there was that was a little bit before EBI and so I said, let’s get this done.

1:55:01 Now Eddie joined my school precisely because I had a reputation as someone who taught a lot of leg locking. He had a choice of course between Marcelo Garcia, who teaches right down the street, and al gem hands us, and he came in, says precisely because he wanted to learn leg locking. He was very, very gifted student, highly intelligent young man, and easier to train someone with a physics background? Yes it is, yeah, not gonna lie about them, it’s they can take on information faster than most people and doesn’t mean they can perform it.

1:55:39 You there are some people who take on a little information but perform incredibly well. Eddie was a different kind, he would taken huge amounts of information and relentlessly work on it until his performance was satisfactory, and he started just wrecking people in local competition, he had a really firecracker style, he would come out and win fights in 5 seconds, 10 seconds, and people were shocked, people, what is happening to fellow kid is his record, he’s not physically intimidating and all, he’s quite a small fellow, and he just tore up the local scene. Garry Tonon was a brilliant young student who I had known through his first teacher, Tom DeBlass, way back in when I was coaching mixed martial arts, I would invite Garry Tonon, who back then was a very shy and quiet teenager, to come up when George’s fight, him against various opponents such as Nick Diaz, I would bring Garry up, he would train as a training partner for George, but he would only come in once or twice a week and he was really only doing the MMA-themed grappling classes, where it was kind of grappling for MMA, and he started coming in, impressed by the results Eddie was getting as a pure grappler, so okay, let me just do grappling with you, instead of coming in seven days a week he brought in two brothers, Gordon Ryan and his tiny little 13-year-old brother Nicky Ryan, I will coordinate the time, 1700, he had to be like late teens, okay, and the four of them just started making stellar progress, all four of them were incredibly gifted students in very different ways, very different personalities,

1:57:36 Very different body types, but all four brilliant, like all of my students they were self-starters, innovators and we’re never happy with just taking on information but always expanding upon it and experimenting among themselves, saying, okay, this is what you showed me but I’ve got this idea here, and they were brand, I was blessed to have all of them as students and they just started tearing things out, they yeah. At that time we had some good fortune, the whole EBI event came on that proved to be very, very popular, and the squad were an incredible story when you think about it. There were four kids who didn’t really have any notoriety, Garry Tonon had some accomplishments I think before the squad but nothing crazy, wasn’t like, you know, one of the best guys in the world.

1:58:30 They were four guys who seem to have very limited training time and yet they were taking on and beating some of the best players in the world and they were doing so in a very exciting format, a new format, submission grappling, they were doing so in a way which was weird because they were all doing ostensibly kind of the same thing. Like normally when you have a sports team in jiu-jitsu, none of the athletes look like each other. I got this guy over here, he does his thing, and this guy over here, those who sing and they go up there, does his thing, and they’re on the same team, but if you just looked at them you would never guess they’re on the same team, whereas these kids were coming out and they were doing the same crazy leg attacks and it looked like they were, this guy came out to the same thing as that guy and that guy, and it was like a program was going on, that was what was unique about those kids and whispered start.

1:59:22 Yeah, so people were like, what’s going on here? Like was it 2013? I’m guessing around 2013, yeah. And but there was also this constant complaint that, well, they’re good there but they’re one-trick ponies, they all they do is his damn leg locks and if they ever win it means someone really good, they get crushed. That came to a head in the ADCC World Championships in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where Garry came in and his first fight he won brilliantly against Ellen Danis with a beautiful leg lock and that was obviously very impressive.

2:00:05 Eddie came in and won his first match against an Eastern European with a beautiful heel hook and I believe he won the fastest submission of the tournament award for that one, but then in the quarterfinals they both came up against world champion Brazilians and got beaten on points. And so the obvious complaint was, yeah, see, big good leg locks but as soon as they fought world champs they’re not gonna make it, they’re not good enough. And that was a signal to me that I had to do better as a coach.

2:00:38 It was very hard, you know, everything’s hot but I have everything. Yeah, Betty it, when you’re emotionally attached to your students you don’t like to hear unfair criticism. Fair criticism I have no problem with but some of the criticism was a little unfair and some of it came out of just the cultural bias against leg locks, said things like that, but elevators always get, yeah, of course, it’s part of the process, it’s not the first time it’s happened.

2:01:08 So you thought to yourself, how can I make this, yeah, how can I do better for my students? And the obvious question was that I had been pushing them purely as submission grapplers, okay, the only thing that counts is submitting people, and that had to change in order for the work of these kids to really be appreciated, they had to win at a higher level, and that meant they had to go to the positional realm as well as submissions. And so I, the next ADCC camp, I really changed the focus and by the end Eddie had left to start his own career, but the young Gordon Ryan had really started to physically mature and he was training full-time and just making remarkable progress and he went out and absolutely crushed it at the, I believe, 2017 in Finland and had the most successful debut performance in ADCC history.

2:02:11 The other guys also put on a very strong showing and that was clear then that people at that point, people like, okay, these guys are serious, like they’re good, and the more dismissive criticisms got finished at that point and it also gave everyone else two more years to work on their own ashi garami defense and offense. That’s great. Did some did, but most didn’t, okay, and because we didn’t have a system, yeah, I think by then they should have been able to just watch videotape and figure it out.

2:02:45 At that point you hadn’t published your own systems yet? That’s correct, but still they should have been able to figure it out just by looking at videotape. And then the big one with the solidification of that was the most recent ADCC where the squad, despite being a relatively small team with no financing, not even really having its own school, won more medals than any other team in history. Talk me through 2019. Meet us, you’re going there with Gordon Ryan, Nicky Rodriguez, blue belt, yes, which is not your average Nicky Ryan was there and Craig Jones, strain with us for that one, he’s been training us for a long time now.

2:03:29 And this was a big one and all eyes were gonna be on you guys. Yes, I’ve been watching your team training and knew there was a lot of potential. Yes, it was. It’s a fascinating thing getting ready for ADCC and we always start about 12 weeks out and getting people ready for the rule set, which is a little different from most. People that don’t know what it is, what is the background of ADCC, why is it the coveted, if they’re on a strange background really?

2:03:57 Obviously financing is a big part of any industry and jiu-jitsu always suffers from a lack of finance, like it’s a pretty mom and pop industry really, but some members of the royal family in Abu Dhabi were living in the United States, I believe they were going to college at the time in California, and they became interested in jiu-jitsu through MMA, watching UFCs, and they started practicing in California, then when they moved back to Abu Dhabi they became interested in the idea of starting a championship. Now there was no accredited no-gi submission grappling World Championship at that time, they were the first ones in the block and they had serious financial backing, and so they were able to get the leading figures of the sport and bring them in in large numbers too, and the original ones were all set in Abu Dhabi, so they had this kind of exotic locale of, you know, you go to the Middle East and you sit in front of kings and princes and you battle against the best guys in the world, so it was kind of like that, the island of Dr.

2:05:06 Han in an old Bruce Lee movie, and so it had this kind of exotic thing, and then for that time the prize money was good, it was better than most UFCs at that time, so it had a lot of prestige associated with it and the event took off and evolved over time to become more professional. The early ones were a lot less professional than today, you tended to have very good people with a lot of people that weren’t so good, there were a lot of fixed matches and that’s all been looted out now, and now it’s like the grappling Olympics. And 1,019 in LA, yes, and there’s a lot of people in that stadium.

2:05:50 Yes, there was, it was gratifying to see how far the sport has come. Mo just seemed ran the event in a splendid fashion, put on a very, very professional show, and it looked like you would go to see like the World Judo Championships or the world freestyle wrestling, gym, it was on that level and it’s very, very impressive to be a part of it. Some Hollywood in there as well, yes. And so you start preparing 12 weeks out, you know, there’s a lot riding on this, you got a lot of talent, probably more than people even know.

2:06:20 What, how does it, how do you feel in the basement? I’m always quietly confident when my students go out but everything’s about preparation, is every time you go to prepare there’s always things that you never predict would have happened, there’s crazy things that you never foresee that did happen and can interfere with, say, small injuries. In this case we had a crazy infectious eye disease that broke out early in the camp and you know, whoever would predict that would have happened, and it almost put the whole thing on hold and interfered with training for almost a week.

2:07:01 Gordon, so knee injury, Gordon, Gordon was coming from major reconstructive knee surgery like three weeks out, I didn’t even think he was going to be in the event, and then suddenly two weeks out I’m looking at like, this guy’s the best guy in the world, like even was a Miss nearly percent, he’s the best guy in the world, simple as that. I said, Gordon, going through the event, do it. And then Gordon literally chewed his own hand up. He bought one of these crazy electric bikes, he’s such a [expletive], my god, he bought this crazy electric bike which he insisted on driving from his place up in Harlem down to the Academy every day to save money.

2:07:44 I’m like, dude, like if there’s one way to derail an athletic career it’s buy a motorcycle, there’s you a hundred percent guaranteed to get injured, get rid of that, saying he wouldn’t. And then one day he’s on somehow he goes to pick it up, the wheel spins, drags his hands into the operating, it’s lucky he didn’t lose a finger, for crying out loud, and his hand was lacerated all over his entire hand and he comes in whenever his hand like this big with just blood all over it. I’m like, that’s it, you’ve survived a knee injury, the eye diseases and now this, like you’re not gonna do Abu Dhabi.

2:08:24 So he, to his credit, he just tapes everything up, continued, trained all the way through despite all the pain, and then the night before ADCC he got crazy food poisoning, like so bad that he couldn’t even make an appearance for the pre-fight appear, you know, all the athletes come together, he was in the bathroom just literally puking his guts out, he lost like 7 pounds in 24 hours, was crazy. So we went through all of these trials that no one ever could have foreseen and still came out and beat everyone without a single point being scored on them. But everyone performed it really, really well, I’m really happy.

2:09:00 And more, the best moments for you, uh, weekend, or all of them are good but it’s in different ways because, I never want to say that one is greater than another, it devalues the achievements of the other athletes. The truth is with only a few rare exceptions like your teacher Roger Gracie, Gordon, the difference between the first-place winner and the fifth place winner is minuscule and often it comes down to just small things that happened on that day. Every so often you get a truly dominant champion like Roger or Gordon who will win pretty much regardless, like they can be sick, they can have influenza and they’ll still go out and win, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.

2:09:46 For most people the difference between first place, second place, third place, 4th place is tiny, and if you had the event on Saturday and so-and-so won the event, if you threw the same event on Sunday he might come 7th, okay? That’s how tight it is. So I never like to say, oh, I enjoyed this moment the most, because it devalues the work of the other guys who work just as hard and, if circumstances were just a little bit different, maybe they would have been on the gold medal platform, like Nicky Ryan had a heartbreaking match where some refereeing calls, they were rather dubious, if they had been different you just say he wouldn’t have had a medal.

2:10:28 So yeah, favorite, rhyme with so many good moments. With Nicky Rodriguez break out, that was incredible. Yeah, the funny thing about Nicky Rodriguez, you every so often you will see someone come out and just know they’re gonna be a superstar and you’re not sure what it is, you know. But the first match he came out I remember the crowd going like, who, right, something’s about to happen, and he just had a freaking war with Muhammad Ali that was resolved with like three seconds left on the clock and he won, and from that moment forth the crackling berserk, every time he went to fight the whole crowd would just be magnetized to the event.

2:11:15 Like some people just have that crazy superstar quality where they step out on the stage and everyone wants to watch, you know, they’d this bra rise to them. Gordon’s got it, the Android has it, Garry Tonon has it, and drugs, it’s a fascinating thing to observe and that is also created by having the confidence in their own talents. Yeah, you know, confidence is a strange thing, it’s a, that’s a topic in itself, into a whole podcast on that. Do you have a confidence coming up soon?

2:11:42 Oh actually yeah, I do. I, this is the word system gets thrown around so much I would quarter system, but I do have a spiel on confidence. I do believe that most people tend to look in two directions which aren’t really profitable. I’ve been in combat sports for a long, long time and I’ve seen every hackneyed theory of sports psychology and sports gurus who try to talk confidence into athletes, and Georges St-Pierre grappled with this for a long time because he’s by nature a rather nervous person and often struggled with confidence and made frequent use of sports psychologists and Sarah Sarah and none of what they said ever impressed to a lot of competitions, do you see that, do you see the confidence disappear from people in certain situations, maybe based on the fact that they haven’t been in those, you know?

2:13:08 Yeah, yeah, you you definitely do see breaking points in matches where they’ll be resistance up to a certain level and then just call me acquiesce. Yeah, yeah, acceptance. It happened in Abu Dhabi as well, some seasoned people. Yeah, I mean everyone, I mean so I, Gordon Ryan to a certain extent is kind of the Conor McGregor of jiu-jitsu, I mean you know, he’s talked in an incredible game. Do you find that that fun and amusing?

2:13:36 I’m kind of old school and but I do, people get upset over the smallest things, like do at the end of the day Gordon’s a very, very nice person, he means he’s got a heart of gold and he’ll do anything for his friends. I value people based on their actions, not their words, and when I see someone helping a friend and making real sacrifices to help a friend, he’s a good person who kids what their faith his jokes and these are superficial things, but people, we live in an age where people get upset over words but meanwhile they will let heinous actions go by without a blink and but they get hung up over words, this is ludicrous. And it’s good for the sport.

2:14:25 Yeah, it’s very good for this point. Look, no one else has done more to attract viewership, there’s a reason why this was the most-watched ADCC of all time, because of Gordon Ryan. And I sympathize with the people who’s fearless, he ruffles, you know, I used to say ten years ago I might have said the same thing and let’s say the same criticisms, but I’m also confident that if athletes do a good job of building a brand there may well be a day in the future where submission grapplers can earn a very viable living.

2:15:02 Thank Gordon’s doing very well for himself, very young man, he’s making very good money and a large part of that has to do with the visibility he’s created for himself, so he’s been very successful in that regard. There’s also, you know, there’s a negative part of humanity to which some people don’t like to see another person do well, is I hate to say but there’s a lot of that out there, and Gordon has done exceptionally well in a short time and in a slightly unorthodox fashion and that’s gonna ruffle some feathers, but at the end of the day he’s a good person, he goes out to help his friends, he’s unstintingly loyal to the people that are good to him, and those are the things that I measure when it comes to character, not all people are sane, it’s not important.

2:15:47 He’s really paved the way for, you know, making money as, yeah, easily, he’s Mr. Krabs, Stephen Saunders, yeah. And then who’s to say five years from now there won’t be a bunch of other submission grapplers also doing well, and it would have been because of the start someone I like him, think about the pay structure of mixed martial artists now. A large part of that has to do with the fact that Georges St-Pierre was one of the first highly paid mixed martial artists and now people have expectations for pay in mixed martial arts which are completely different from 1998, where people were fighting for $5,000, you know.

2:16:23 Once you change people’s expectations about pay then progress can be made for everybody, and Gordon Ryan is changing people’s expectations about pay for submission grapplers and in the end the people who profit from there are all submission grapplers. So I’m not against his social media antics at all, I think it’s, I understand, I sympathize with people who, like, you know, they come from the old respect background of course and if they’re in it and that’s how I typically think, I never say bad things about anyone publicly, but the truth of the matter is it’s a changing world and the more submission grapplers build a fan base and build a brand, the more they’ll be able to eke out a successful living and the more submission grapplers will be able to do the same, so that we could look forward to a time 20 years who knows where submission grapplers are fighting on ESPN and making 2 million dollars a year and these week there’ll be a wonderful thing if Gordon are having, I believe, this potential.

2:17:29 Yeah, I do. I believe that combat sports in general have a fascination for people which transcends other sports. Like it’s one thing to watch a group of guys kick a ball around on a soccer field, so nothing to watch to see what means fight each other, it’s a very different level of my, that’s interesting, they know why it says it’s in our DNA. Yeah, my dad white oh, he says if two guys are playing basketball and you guys are playing hockey and a fight breaks out, they’ll all go watch the fight.

2:17:58 That’s a hundred percent true, my experience with that and bouncing is a hundred percent true. You can, if a fight breaks out in a nightclub I guarantee every single eye in the club will watch the fight. You can have the most beautiful woman in the world lined up on a stage and if a fight breaks out over there all the men’s eyes will go to the fight and also got the females. So yeah, we do have a fascination with combat and so I think it’s tremendous potential in combat sports.

2:18:31 I do think that no-gi submission grappling, it’s easier for most people to relate that to combat than traditional gi competition, it looks on the surface more like mixed martial arts, that the uniforms etc. closer to it. People tend to associate the gi rightly or wrongly with a little bit of artificiality, it’s a little distant from fighting, but when you get two guys in, like if you took the average person and made them watch the gi World Championships or the ADCC World Championships and you ask them which one is closer to fighting, I think it’s probably fair to say 90% of people would point at ADCC, probably understand it better, we are training Mizzell, so it’s an easier sell to the public at large. And so yeah, I think Gordon is doing a great job of building his brand and he’s doing so in a slightly different way than most people.

2:19:32 Some people are going to get offended by it but it’s a kind of offense that you can’t really take seriously, it’s just words and at the end of the day he’s a good person and everyone who actually meets him and gets face to face with him generally walks away going, oh, I hear he’s a pretty cool dude, okay, he’s a nice person. Yeah, now if he was like a seriously mean-spirited person, that’s a different thing entirely and that’s not to be tolerated, but if someone has a good spirit and good actions that counts for me much more so than whatever words they fail to build a brand on. That same note of confidence, when you see someone with their Conor McGregor, what do you see?

2:20:11 Because again we saw him come back after quite a long layoff and some losses and have confidence that, you know, probably wasn’t built with some guy hyponym up backstage. Yeah, but you must see things in Conor that I can’t see because you taught people for so long. What do you see there? He’s a remarkable character. MMA fans are incredibly harsh and they tend to base all of their assessments of an athlete on their last performance.

2:20:46 Was Conor McGregor, he’s incredibly gifted at what he does and he has obvious limitations and the things that he doesn’t do, and that tends to create very extreme performances where it’s either brilliantly dominant or in some cases mediocre and in other cases like absolutely flawed. So for example when he fought Chad Mendes he looked quite limited in the opening rounds, getting taken down repeatedly, but then when the takedown stopped suddenly he looked brilliant again. With Khabib he never really got a chance to get his game going and he see it’s serious fashion, he just looked very limited, but when he can play his strong points he’s very, very impressive indeed.

2:21:39 And he’s got that highlight-reel element to him, he’s got an ability to pull attention to him which is quite unique and extraordinary. If you look at the discrepancies in pay-per-view numbers between when he appears and when he doesn’t, it’s it’s different, night and day. Like he has a charisma, if there’s many different kinds of charisma, here’s one form of charisma which is obviously very, very powerful. I think it just comes from that larger-than-life look.

2:22:20 Like most people go to their whole lives with a massive inferiority complex and a lot of fear, okay. We’re afraid of looking like a fool, we’re terrified of failure, and most of us see ourselves as an underdog fighting around people who are much smarter than us, much more physically gifted than us, and as a result we go through life kind of timid. And there’s a strong attraction looking at someone who’s the exact opposite of that, who goes through life completely confident, everything they do with no fears whatsoever, and that’s a different form of charisma.

2:23:04 Like if there’s an attraction to that, and that’s what Conor McGregor brings. Those known moments as well, he was all in, yes, and when he was little he doesn’t and represents, you know, maybe that limitless possibility. I think it’s, think about the idea of, he always makes predictions for fights and some of them are unerringly accurate and that takes a lot of confidence, man. I like fighting is the most chaotic thing, imagine why anything in heaven at any moment, and his style of fighting is particularly chaotic where you make one mistake and you get caught, is that it’s over.

2:23:42 It’s not like grappling where you can make many mistakes and still recover and win. In in fisticuffs you get one good clip on that jaw, it’s done. And you know occasionally he does screw up, like was Khabib got hit with a heavy overhand and almost dropped, but to have the confidence and with that style to say, okay, this is how I’m gonna win, this is how it’s kind of beard that at points is something really impressive. No, he’s very, very gifted and he has tremendous vision, when he finds, sees everything.

2:24:16 And you know you watch the slow-motion replays of him and he’s watching a punch go by that most people, the eyes are all over the place, and the eyes are the foundation of your defense, and everything, defense and offense, comes from your eyes first. Your eyes, your greatest weapon, if one talks about this is your wave in this, you know, your eyes see everything. They when danger comes the eyes are lit and the I see possibilities for attack, anything. You always see with Conor’s the eyes are always watching, never closing, their opponent, and you physically see him, you know.

2:24:52 When you talk about punching at that level, human reaction speed isn’t fast enough to get you out of the way of a punch, like you know there’s there’s limits to human reaction speed, number, there’s small variations but there are limits to it and if I stand in front of you and flick at a certain speed you’re not going to be able to move in time. So you can ask yourself how do these guys make punches miss, because physically it should be impossible? Well, they’re watching for the cues before the punches thrown, that’s where the eyes become so important, where they’re seeing the shift in your knee or hip, your shoulder alignment, and so they know what’s coming and move accordingly, because if they just waited for the punch and they tried to move out of the way, no one would ever miss a punch.

2:25:41 These humans aren’t that fast in our reaction speed, so it’s a remarkable thing. But put him, his vision is extraordinary, he sees everything coming, and but then when he gets to a grappling exchange and it’s a problem because then he doesn’t have nearly the depth of understanding that he does in the standing position, and that’s when you see him get tired. Yeah, he starts becoming inefficient because he is no gas, he has lots against, provided he’s in his favourite areas, right, but if you put him in too hard grappling exchanges that’s when he gets tired.

2:26:12 It’s like anything in life, you know, you take the greatest jiu-jitsu player in the world, you put them in a pair of boxing gloves and make them box each other, they’re gonna be exhausted in three minutes. They’re good athletes, they can grapple all day, but they’re not used to getting punched and the movements associated with the tempo of striking is completely different from grappling, the muscular demands completely different, and so it’s three minutes up, we completely exhaust it on the floor. And then similarly you take two great boxers and make them wrestle each other, they’ll be exhausted in three minutes because it is not efficient with the movements.

2:26:46 Most of what we call endurance and gas, as the Americans say, it has to do with muscular efficiency, and Conor is very efficient in his realm but much less so in grappling. Wrong, share this theory with GSP, right? Yes, there’s no cardio, there’s, yes, that’s correct, you some charity. Yeah, okay. Do you enjoy being back in the MMA arena with Tonon?

2:27:12 Yes, yeah, I love it, enjoy, you know, it’s a very, very difficult challenge. Like grappling is one level of difficulty, then when you add the skills of mixed martial arts it’s like a whole new level of difficulty. Now it’s two wheels instead of one and you can even go beyond that and say it’s two worlds plus the combination of the two worlds, and it’s a different thing, so the complexity goes up and the stakes are much higher. And you know the price of failure in grappling is pretty low, you just tap and it’s over.

2:27:47 In mixed martial arts it can get pretty ugly, things from, you know, their potential for damages is much, much greater. Yes, but some nasty injuries. You know what’s Abu Dhabi 21 gonna look like? It can, what’s the squad looked like going for? Do you like the term Danaher Death Squad?

2:28:05 What I was usually called as the squad and then one of my students started calling the Danaher Death Squad because they finish people all the time, say they don’t just beat their opponents, they kill their opponents for the submission hold and the thing took off on social media, and I office is called on the squad, that was the original name, and but you know it’s funny, I like I said I won’t use it or something like that. There’s been some funny moments, I remember my mother, someone told her, oh your son’s like a jiu-jitsu coach in New York, and she, you should google him, he’s getting quite famous in his sport. So she googles Danaher and the first thing that came up on Google was death squad.

2:28:58 What are you doing, like you’re in charge of a disco? And I’m like, don’t worry, Mom, it was okay, like yeah. But say you’re gonna keep innovating? Yeah, it’s the main thing is always to try and find what we called early, that undervalued product. What are the aspects of your enterprise, with Vegeta to economics, finance or what have you, which are objectively valuable but which most people don’t perceive as valuable?

2:29:33 That’s always the quest. And originally it was leg locks, most people put a very low value on leg locks and I saw them as they had much higher value than most people perceived if you changed your approach, then and made some control-based rather than the speed-based. And in preparation for 2021 we’ll have to find those new undervalued products. Can anyone show up to the basement and be a part of your squad, you have the work ethic? You know, it’s not my gym, it’s my teacher’s, it’s a Gracie’s gym, it’s not my name on the wall, I’m an employee, and people come in, they join the gym, if they join my classes I train them, other spies.

2:30:19 That’s a good question, I’m sure that we have an open door policy, anyone come in. I remember always being impressed when I was a child reading the book of Herodotus, where he discusses the Battle of Thermopylae and the day before the battle the Spartans are engaging in wrestling training and the Persians are like, never fought the Spartans before, so they’re like, let’s send a spy to observe them and see how they fight. So they send a spy, he goes out on horseback and he sees the Spartan camp and approaches and sets up his observation and observes the Spartans going through their wrestling and fighting drills, and it soon becomes clear to him that the Spartans have actually seen him, they’re pointing at him and laughing, but they’re making no effort whatsoever to capture him or attack him, and they just continue doing what they’re doing until the spy just stands up and walks out in the open and just looks at them, and they just continue their drills, and the spy goes back home and reports to his leader what he’d seen.

2:31:47 And I always liked that about the Spartans, that they just didn’t care that their opponents came in and watched. I said, yeah, we’re gonna do what we do tomorrow, and they’ve, you watching us is not gonna make any difference. And I like that expression of confidence. So I don’t have no problem with the idea of an open-door policy, people come in, they see it, and we teach anyone who shows up, and the truth is very few people have the work ethic. Yet that’s the real thing, like it, you know, no one’s impressed by the fact you come in and train for a week, it’s not gonna change your life.

2:32:18 What’s gonna change you is training very, very hard, very, very professionally for five years at a time, that’s gonna change you. So that’s a hard road to go down, so not many people can do it. Yeah, you’re also releasing your systems, so you’re starting to teach the world, you’ve got a few systems out right now. Actually all six of these submission systems are out and now I’m going through a series which is different, which is the fundamentals of jiu-jitsu, and the first series I put out was our submission systems and now it’s about, okay, show me the foundational classical four-step jiu-jitsu positional system, and that’s what I’m going through now.

2:33:05 And the future I’ll put out a no-gi series which is my approach to jiu-jitsu, a little different from the classical approach, and the integration of position and submission together, the same program that I teach for ADCC, but that’s in the future. Why put that out? I think it’s important to advance the sport in any way, shape or form that we can. I think we all have two responsibilities when we study jiu-jitsu, first responsibility is to improve our own performance as much as possible and the longer you stay in the sport, the more your responsibility changes from improving your own performance to improving the sport of jiu-jitsu itself.

2:33:51 We all have different ways of doing it, some people do it through promoting events and getting athletes together, my way of doing it is through instruction. And there are some doubts as to whether I’ll be able to do jiu-jitsu that much longer, I’m going to have to get a knee replacement at some point. I’m like, I did the hip replace, how did it go? That was successful, now I need to get a knee replacement on the same side and there are some doubts about whether I’ll be able to teach, whether a knee replacement is, some people are optimistic, some people much less so, so I would like to.

2:34:26 Are you quite physically active with the guys? I can’t spar hard, hip replacement can break inside you, and so I just flow wrestle, like demonstrate the techniques. I don’t see you not teaching, John. Mmm, it’d be difficult if the knee replacement didn’t enable me to get good flexion, that would make things tricky because my game is based around legs. I survive without teaching?

2:34:55 Oh yeah, absolutely. Why don’t you do? I can still teach, you let’s go, just be much less physically active. I okay, that would to have my students demonstrate stuff, and I did when I came back with my hip replaced, when I just had a cane and I just pointed and they did all those except I have a Bond film, okay, and so I could do it, but the question is okay, if there is doubt of a, you know, should I get this knee replacement in a couple of years from now, I would like to know that I had a significant portion of my teaching on videotape before I take the risk of a nice knee replacement, so that if it should all go to hell I could at least have on record, okay, this is what I taught to my students, and give it to the world.

2:35:43 And so it’s like an insurance policy. It’s important you give back to this point. Yeah, yeah, I don’t, I’ve always believed that humans that live for themselves are never really happy and the happiest people I’ve ever met in my life were people who lived for something bigger than themselves, and the moment you only confine your interest to yourself you become an unsettled person. You can have a lot of success, you can have the trappings of success, but inside something is always lagging, and as I said the happiest people I’ve ever met in the course of my life were those who live for something bigger than themselves.

2:36:20 And so it’s important for me to get useless that you’re giving back to this water, dude. It’s in, you believe in a higher power? I’m a materialist, I believe that we live in a physical world. I don’t, I would never say that there’s no chance of a god or a spiritual realm that we don’t have direct access to, that would be foolishness on my part, it’s certainly possible, but there’s no strong evidence to show that there is a spiritual realm or a God, so until such evidence is forthcoming I believe in a material world and that when we die we die, in this it’s over.

2:37:11 And so in order to gain meaning in a life like that you have to find something bigger than yourself. You can’t just, you know, if we’re just physical beings then life’s pretty damn meaningless if you just look for yourself, you just live for a while and you accumulate some toys and then you die, that’s pretty lame. But if you expand your set of interest to something better than yourself, towards it the accruing of knowledge, for useful knowledge, of beneficial knowledge to people around you and society in general, then you can derive some meaning, and we’re all connected.

2:37:49 Some the humans are social creatures so there’s some sense in which we’re connected. You can go into any part of the world and you’ll see certain things that will make you smile and laugh because you realize that even the people who seem so culturally different from you are pretty similar at the end of the day. There’s not that much difference between different humans in different cultures, there’s some superficial differences but at the end of the day we all live pretty much the same kind of life, we have the same kind of hopes and dreams and disappointments, etcetera, etc.

2:38:24 Is it important that the Death Squad continues to win, that a metric of success for you? No, actually not, that’s not what I do believe. Is that it’s important that you show winning up to a certain level, in other words you take away any doubt as to the efficiency of your methods, like you’ve proven them once, okay, but it’s unrealistic to expect that you will win forever. That’s the history of human conflict is always showing very clearly that the pattern is one where a certain kind of fighting technique fights its way into the forefront, becomes an acknowledged power, and then gets defeated by a rising new power, and then that power in turn gets defeated by a subsequent power.

2:39:22 No one approach to warfare has ever proven to be dominant over time, that’s so it has a moment in the sun where it flourishes and it gets overtaken by a new one which then gets overtaken by a subsequent one, etc. etc. Grappling is no different, styles come and go and I don’t expect my style to live forever any more than any other style has. But what has been shown decisively is that the approach of subsystems within an overarching system wrapped up with a certain kind of teaching methodology has proven to be very effective, and if anyone started the sport of jiu-jitsu and applied themselves with it they would be very good fighters.

2:40:05 And that’s enough, you know. If we should just fall apart and start losing tomorrow, of course every disappointing day, I would hate to see my athletes losing, it’s never a happy thing to see someone who you care about not realize their dreams, but at this point the efficacy of what we’ve shown has been proven and anyone learning from us could go out with complete confidence, this is one of several very effective ways of learning the sport of jiu-jitsu and if I take it seriously I have a good chance of becoming good at the sport. That I think has been shown very clearly and future failures would never take away from that.

2:40:57 Yeah, 20 years from now are we gonna find you in the Blue Basement? That’s a great question. I’m an old fellow in so far as I often formulate elaborate long-term plans for other people but I almost never do that for myself. Have you ever wondered why? Probably some guy I can’t even see, all right, sir, that’s a great question, I’ll have to think about that tonight.

2:41:27 I’m sure that I’ll still be learning and teaching, but where and when, that’s always less certain. But I’m the only one of his original American students who still teaches at the academy and I’ve been there a long time, so we’ll have to see how my knee holds up. Doesn’t the cane, that’s got the cane, you found a place that makes you happy, you got your students which are your family, you have purpose, those are the main things you need in life, you need family, need purpose.

2:42:03 And yeah, it’s true, and I found them there. What scares you? Hmm, superficially many things, I’m afraid of heights, but in a deep sense there’s only one thing that can really scare you, and that’s the fear of death. If you’re afraid of that you’ll be afraid of almost everything, but if you’re not afraid of dying nothing can ever scare you. So there’s so many things that scare me on a deeper level, it’s not what’s the worst that can happen, you died.

2:42:54 I’ve left a good life, I’ve gone longer than most people in human history have gone, most humans throughout our history died before they were over 30, so I’ve already got almost double that. And you’ve meditated on your death before and gone in peace with it? Yeah, that’s all part of the philosophy PhD, you know, we’re all gonna die. So once you get over there, nothing really experiencing. And about being a celebrity, what’s the best and worst part?

2:43:21 I’m definitely not a filling your eyes, tell me that doesn’t make you a celebrity. I’m I’m, if I walk out on the street with you, that people are gonna recognize you far more than they recognize having you know about that. All right, so it’s just something you deal with, you know. Okay, John, I really appreciate the time, and in a strange way you’ve influenced my life as well as you probably have for hundreds of thousands of people without knowing it. So yeah, just really appreciate what you do and it’s very nice to me to say thank you, and the fact you just put all this time into creating this incredible system.

2:43:59 And I trained with a guy named Ross Nichols in London who was at a like a Roger Gracie Academy there, he was actually at Abu Dhabi and bought the same weight classes, Nicky Ryan, and think he lost the first round with a former previous champion, and yeah, he’s just always obsessed with everything you’re doing and is trying to teach me this stuff. I’m just definitely hard to teach an old dog new tricks. What’s your favorite trick you’ve learned though? Oh my gosh, I mean when he starts getting into the complicated stuff of the leg lock game, you know, sometimes I’m just looking at him like he’s speaking Martian because I grew up, we didn’t talk about this.

2:44:36 That’s true, but I am learning how to do some defense, I’m learning some of the basics, and that’s just kind of how I’m just slowly kind of coming up the curve. I know, I think Dan Lepanto went back to the placement a year ago and he’s like, Brian, I can’t, I don’t know what’s going on, it’s like attacks. But it’s funny, it’s having worldwide ramifications that goes from home. So yeah, again thanks so much better than you. Do appreciate the time.

2:45:00 My pleasure. I think everyone really enjoys this. Thank you.