In this episode, I sit down with Joe Rogan to talk about jiu-jitsu and what it means to him, how he got into jiu jitsu, and what he thinks about the state of the sport. We talk about how jiujitsu has evolved over the years, what it's like to be a martial artist, and how it compares to other sports, like judo, wrestling, and mixed martial arts. Joe also shares some of his thoughts on the evolution of jiu martial arts, and why he thinks it's a great sport to be involved in, not only as an athlete, but as a martial arts martial artist. I hope you enjoy this episode of the podcast, and don't forget to subscribe on your favorite streaming service so you don't miss the next episode. Check it out! -Joe Rogan: Train By Day, by Night, All Day - The Joe Rogans Experience: The Jiu-Jitsu Experience: A Podcast About Jiu Jitsu and Mixed Martial Arts by Night - Episode 4 of the "Who's Number 1?" Podcast by Night Subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review, review and subscribe to our podcast. If you like what you're listening to, please consider leaving us a review on iTunes and tell a friend about what a great podcast you think of our podcast! We'll be looking out for you in the comments section below! Timestamps: 0:00 - What would you like to hear from the podcast? 1: 2:30 - What's your thoughts on a future episode? 3:00 4: What s your favorite part of the show? 5: What do you'd like to see me talk about next? 6:50 - What is your favorite piece of advice? 7:40 - What are you looking forward to? 8:15 - How do you think I'm listening to most? 9:10 - Which is the most important part of a podcast you're most of my favorite part? 11:00 What's the most compelling part of my day? 12: What is the biggest challenge? 13:00 My thoughts on jiu Jui jitsu? 14:00 How do I feel about the sport? 15:00 Do you like it? 16:00 Is it the best thing? 17:00
00:00:30.000This idea, this concept is so fantastic to me to take elite grapplers and pay them for matches and then stream it online and Flow Grappling is doing this and they're very successful.
00:00:44.000A lot of jujitsu people are tuning into these things and it's really become a hit.
00:00:51.000A true key in the development of any sport is some kind of organization which showcases it.
00:00:58.000For mixed martial arts, it was the UFC. And grappling always struggled with the idea of showcasing the skills of the athletes.
00:01:49.000It's something where you could take someone who didn't know much about grappling, a friend of yours, invite them over, watch it together, and they'd be like, hey, that's an impressive sport.
00:01:58.000As you said, the production looks like it's a legitimate sport, as opposed to going to the local high school on a Saturday and watching you compete in that fashion.
00:02:08.000Well, one of the things that's made the sport more palatable is the approach that your athletes take, and many other athletes are following suit, is that it's a very submission-based approach, instead of just trying to score points.
00:02:20.000Because I think there's been a problem with these rule sets where, I mean, even though Abu Dhabi's done an amazing job of showcasing elite grapplers, there's something weird about their score set systems.
00:02:33.000So the first, was it first five minutes, there's no points scored?
00:02:37.000And then the next five minutes you score points.
00:02:39.000So you get guys stalling out for five minutes.
00:02:42.000So you almost guarantee a boring five minutes unless you have some sort of Marcelo Garcia attacker who just dives on submissions and goes after it right away, which is not the norm.
00:02:53.000The norm is Points-based guys who are just trying to win.
00:02:58.000As a general rule, athletes are smart and they want to win.
00:03:03.000So they will, as a general rule, always try to find the least risky way of attaining victory and doing the minimum amount of work in order to get to a win.
00:03:15.000And yet the spectators are demanding something else.
00:04:00.000When you look at jujitsu, what makes it remarkable is the idea that it's a form of grappling where the outcome is determined in a way which it's understandable to anyone.
00:04:16.000Like, as impressive as judo, wrestling are as sports, the mechanism by which they win, in judo's case, the ipon throw, they do have submissions in judo, but they're much less emphasized.
00:04:29.000And in wrestling, a pin, they're not as decisive.
00:04:32.000Like, you know, it's easy to imagine someone who got pinned with their shoulders on the mat for three seconds but came back to win the fight.
00:04:38.000That's not a difficult thing to conceive of.
00:04:40.000It's easy to conceive of someone who got thrown pretty hard and still kept fighting and won.
00:04:44.000But when you surrender, that's you saying, I quit.
00:05:32.000You see, Hodger, Gracie was another, who at a time when the rule set didn't demand it, went out of their way to go the extra distance and fight from beginning to end for submission.
00:05:46.000And what do you notice about those athletes?
00:06:08.000They represented the ideal of control to submission.
00:06:11.000And there's a sense in which athletes have to understand if you want to build a brand in jujitsu, you can't just go with that minimalist approach of do enough to win, be happy with that.
00:06:24.000And you have to go into expressing the ideal of jujitsu.
00:06:29.000Now, the natural response on the part of many organizers is to try and create rules which force athletes against their will to go the extra distance.
00:06:40.000That was the intention in ADCC, the Abu Dhabi approach.
00:06:45.000They took away points in the first five minutes so that athletes would be encouraged to go for submission holds.
00:06:52.000Now, some of them were, but as you correctly pointed out, most of them weren't.
00:06:56.000They actually used it not as a means of encouraging submission, but actually avoiding any form of contact and making for a very boring first five minutes in many cases.
00:07:08.000So what I truly believe is that there's never going to be a rule set which forces athletes towards submission.
00:07:17.000The way it's going to change is through culture.
00:07:19.000It's got to come, I believe, from coaches creating a culture where athletes strive for a higher ideal in jiu-jitsu, which is control to submission rather than It's got to come from a training room culture rather than rules.
00:07:43.000A good athlete can always game the rules to get the minimum method of victory.
00:07:52.000Like, just as a lawyer will find any interpretation of a law in order to get the result they seek, so too an athlete can find any interpretation of the rules to get to the minimum win.
00:08:03.000They've tried in the past and it just hasn't worked.
00:08:06.000In fact, it's actually had some negative connotations, as you pointed out.
00:08:11.000So it's got to come from a training room culture, and that's what I try to do with my squad.
00:08:16.000When you see rule sets like EBI where they put people in particular positions like back mount or spider web armbar defense, what do you think about that approach?
00:08:27.000About going to a certain amount of time and then...
00:08:30.000See, the pro and con is the pro is you're forced to...
00:08:35.000You're in a real bad situation from the jump.
00:08:41.000The con is that you didn't really get there.
00:08:44.000You kind of got forced into that position, which is very odd.
00:08:47.000For someone who has insane defense and they never get their back taken, and all of a sudden you start out with hooks in, you know, arm across, and ready, go, and then you have to fight your way out of it.
00:09:03.000It's actually the rule set by which the squad originally made their name.
00:09:08.000Long before their success is in ADCC. Unfortunately, it too runs into problems with athletes gaming the system.
00:09:17.000There's a trend among many athletes now just to stall for the entire 10 minutes of regulation, knowing that they've spent most of their training resources on the overtime and they can win in the overtime.
00:09:28.000So it creates the same sense in which the athletes won't engage.
00:09:33.000I was always very proud of the fact that I had three athletes, Gary Tonin did it twice actually, Eddie Cummings and Gordon Ryan, who achieved a 100% success rate in regulation time.
00:09:47.000I believe they were the only athletes who ever achieved that.
00:09:51.000In other words, they didn't see overtime as a desirable thing.
00:09:54.000They all considered overtime as kind of like, yeah, you failed.
00:09:58.000If you had to get to overtime, it was failure.
00:10:00.000Whereas many of the athletes now see overtime as the best strategy to win.
00:10:04.000Avoid contact for 10 minutes, then try to win in overtime.
00:10:07.000So unfortunately, even EBI runs into the same problem of athletes gaming the system.
00:10:13.000And so I'll just repeat my point that at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what system you offer.
00:10:20.000People will find a way to use the rules to their advantage.
00:10:25.000And that ultimately the solution lies not in rules, but in the training culture and the gyms that you come from.
00:10:33.000Ideally, in my opinion, a no time limit submission match is the way to go.
00:12:04.000When do I begin my warm-up for the next match?
00:12:06.000I think the way you do it is you have time limits for the preliminary bouts, but then when you get to the big fights, when you get to the...
00:12:16.000You could have, for example, five fights prior with a 10, 15, 20 minute time limit, and then the last one of the night is no time limit.
00:12:28.000Ideally, how much time does an athlete need to get to warm up?
00:12:32.000It depends on the athlete, but you'd want at least 15 minutes as an absolute minimum.
00:12:37.000So that seems doable, and it seems like you can kind of achieve a mild state of warming up, just light jumping rope and just sort of flow a little bit while it's happening, while the match is happening.
00:12:48.000You know, maybe eat a little bit of fruit and just prepare yourself.
00:12:51.000It could happen at any moment or it could happen an hour from now.
00:12:55.000It would have some interesting effects on pacing of the matches.
00:13:00.000There's basically two ways you can go.
00:13:02.000You can say to yourself, there's no time limit, so one of us is going down, so I might as well go maximum intensity and I either finish this guy in 10 minutes or I get finished in 25 when I'm exhausted.
00:13:16.000Or the two athletes pace themselves over time and work and work and work until a decisive moment is reached one hour, one and a half hours in.
00:13:25.000I remember when Gordon fought Keenan Cornelius in a no time limit match relatively early in his career.
00:13:34.000There was a fairly low pace of action.
00:13:37.000It wasn't a boring match, but it was slow-paced for a reason.
00:14:26.000He just had him in the cradle and just was hanging on to him, and it fucking lasted forever.
00:14:31.000I don't know if it's true, but I remember reading that and just imagining Hickson just breathing, his breathing exercise just waiting, and Hickson eventually got out and strangled him.
00:15:34.000His athleticism was fucking ridiculous and really unfortunate that Brigham Young University would not let him compete in the UFC. He had that one fight, which is one of the things that infuriates me to no end about the movie about his life story.
00:15:50.000Because in the movie about his life story, he faces a Russian guy in this one cage fight that he has.
00:15:58.000But it's a part of mixed martial arts history that he fought Big Daddy Goodrich.
00:16:04.000Big Daddy comes out with the karate gi on.
00:16:53.000You're doing a movie on a man's life story.
00:16:55.000And if you're going to change that, It was an important moment in terms of mixed martial arts, but for his life, it's really not important that he fought this guy, but that's who he fought.
00:18:25.000If I remember correctly, there was a weird rule where, because it occurred early on in the matchups, I believe that was either his first or second match, you could be put back into the action despite either a disqualification or a no result or something like that.
00:20:36.000Anytime you start with the arm captured behind the back, the arm's already extended when the lock begins.
00:20:43.000And the degree of safety in any joint lock is always reflected by the degree to which the joint is already close to breaking point at its inception.
00:20:56.000So, for example, normally when you get attacked in Jujukitama, your hands are locked defensively.
00:21:00.000So there's a 90-degree bend in your arm.
00:21:03.000So there's a long range of motion before threatening any form of catastrophic damage.
00:21:10.000But when the arm is trapped behind the back, you already start with a straight arm.
00:21:13.000And so any small movement forward will take it into the breaking zone.
00:24:08.000Yeah, I mean, there's just so much talent now in the UFC. And it's, you know, talent, it's mixed martial arts talent that is, to me, it's so hard to put it all together.
00:24:25.000You know, you have these elite kickboxers, you have these elite grapplers, but to see someone put it all together inside the cage in mixed martial arts competition, it's so interesting.
00:25:49.000Because you think, like, hey, you know, multiple-time champion wrestling, you know, Division I All-American, no one's taking me down, right?
00:25:58.000And then you get out there, and all of a sudden, a guy like George St. Pierre who didn't even wrestle in high school could take you down.
00:26:16.000So if your skills drop 10% while the other guy's skills rise 60%, that compounded effect of your downward trajectory and their upward trajectory, that can cause problems in a fight.
00:26:27.000That's why it's so fascinating to see different athletes' approaches to mixed martial arts, because it's so open-ended.
00:26:37.000You know, some athletes have a very grappling-heavy style, some athletes have a very striking-heavy style, and like, what do you concentrate on?
00:26:45.000Say if you're a guy like George, who really can do everything, like, how do you determine Like how much striking to do versus how much grappling to do?
00:26:56.000How do you determine what to focus on the most?
00:26:59.000In George's case, it was almost always based on opponents because George had such a well-measured skill set that you could tailor his skill set to a given opponent.
00:27:10.000If you are much more, as it were, fixed in one skill set, you can't tailor your skill set to an opponent.
00:27:19.000So, for example, when a very, very jiu-jitsu heavy athlete like Damien Maier fights, all of his fights look essentially the same.
00:27:32.000It's jiu-jitsu 101, regardless of who his opponent is, doesn't matter whether he's a grappler, The way he will fight a grappler is identical to the way he'll fight a striker.
00:27:44.000With George, you had the luxury of being able to tailor exactly how he would fight per opponent, whereas someone who comes from a single discipline has to play more or less the same game regardless of who they match themselves against.
00:27:57.000Do you remember when Damien Maia had Kamaru Usman's back standing and they separated him?
00:28:11.000Because I remember it at the time and then I remember watching it again.
00:28:14.000Because Damien finished a lot of people in that position.
00:28:17.000And it was dry, and it was early, and it's like, why would you separate them?
00:28:23.000I think if you're going to have five minute rounds, which is so short in terms of grappling, and Craig Jones argued this yesterday, like how hard it is to finish a guy who doesn't even want to engage if you only have five minutes, you should have no stand-ups, ever.
00:28:59.000Unfortunately, that's very much the minority of you.
00:29:02.000I've seen people get stood up from side control, which is crazy.
00:29:06.000It's so hard to get someone in side control.
00:29:09.000And you only have a few minutes to work, and you hear the referee going, let's work, let's work.
00:29:12.000I don't know if it's referees with no grappling understanding, if they don't really understand how difficult it is to advance position and to finish someone, or if they're just playing to the crowd's Cheers and boos.
00:29:26.000I think, unquestionably, it's got to be tough when you just hear an entire audience booing just to stick to your guns and say, let them go.
00:30:12.000And if it is boring, then next time that guy fights, you should hope that he gets paired up with someone who's crazy, some wild guy, looks like Prohoshka or something like that, who just charges out of the gate, guns blazing, and tries to take him out.
00:30:29.000Even in the situations like the fence is usually described as the most boring part of mixed martial arts.
00:30:36.000You drive someone to fence, nothing happens.
00:30:37.000But you've seen on multiple occasions, both the person being pinned on the fence and the person pinning the other person have achieved knockouts with, as you describe, spinning elbows or short elbows.
00:30:55.000And if it turns out to be boring, we already know that athletes that are not exciting and don't do well, they're not as marketable, they don't do as well financially, that's just how it goes.
00:31:06.000And their incentive to be more exciting, either they ignore it completely and just concentrate on winning like so many of them do, or they just decide to make their style a little bit more open, a little bit more wild, take some more chances.
00:31:20.000The way to think about it is don't let the boos of the crowd incentivize the athletes to attack.
00:31:29.000Let the eyes of the crowd incentivize the athletes to attack.
00:31:34.000Because if you're boring, the next time they're not going to watch you.
00:31:42.000If you're an exciting fighter, you're going to have eyes on the screen looking at you.
00:31:47.000That should be your incentive to action, not the boos of the crowd.
00:31:51.000When you're training athletes for jiu-jitsu, and one of the interesting things about the Gordon Ryan conversation that I had recently, I didn't know that you are Gary Tonin's striking coach as well.
00:32:03.000Pretty amazing that you can do both, that you can train them in both jiu-jitsu and also train them in striking.
00:32:10.000And I know you have a background in striking, but still...
00:32:13.000When you're training an athlete like Gary, if you're training someone like Gordon for jiu-jitsu, I'm sure there's some emphasis on takedowns, but it's not a primary concern.
00:32:26.000The primary concern is submissions, right?
00:32:28.000Like oftentimes you'll see Gordon will sit, pull guard, all these things that are not possible in MMA or very rare.
00:32:38.000How much of a shift is it to train them for mixed martial arts?
00:32:43.000Because you're clearly training him to strike and training him to strike, but ultimately the skill set, the best part of their skill set, involves in submission.
00:33:20.000A sad thing about jiu-jitsu is that when it's practiced, there's almost always a kind of gentleman's agreement that there's going to be a top player and a bottom player.
00:33:31.000And if you start in the bottom, you stay in the bottom.
00:33:35.000The moment you get into a mixed martial arts context, that goes right out the window.
00:33:40.000And now you have two responsibilities.
00:33:42.000You don't just have to pass your opponent's guard from top position, you have to hold them down while you're doing it.
00:33:52.000When you look at the notion of escape in Jiu Jitsu, the overwhelming majority of escapes in the sport of Jiu Jitsu are escapes to guard position.
00:34:02.000If you're mounted, you elbow escape, you put him back in guard.
00:34:06.000If the guy's got a side pin on you, you elbow escape, put him back in guard.
00:34:10.000If the guy's behind you, you do a forward roll, spin back into him, put him back in guard.
00:34:15.00090% of the escapes in Jiu-Jitsu are escapes back to guard position.
00:34:19.000And so when you start in bottom position, you tend to stay in bottom position.
00:34:25.000Now contrast that with the sport of wrestling.
00:34:28.000Where the overwhelming majority of escapes are escapes to standing back up to a neutral position on your feet.
00:34:36.000That means that when jiu-jitsu players face other forms of grappling, they're not trying to put us back in guard.
00:36:10.000In a game which was supposedly all about control leading to submission, there was an arbitrary rule that 50% of the body couldn't be attacked.
00:36:19.000And over the last 10 years, I believe it's fair to say we've reached a point where that is no longer the case, that that is a great weakness within jujitsu.
00:36:27.000The younger generation of jujitsu I would match them against any grappling out in the world on leg locks with no fear whatsoever.
00:36:37.000I couldn't have said that 15 years ago.
00:36:58.000They have to learn these – and there's nothing wrong with that.
00:37:00.000But the truth is that jiu-jitsu has become a smaller and smaller component of mixed martial arts rather than what it was when it first started, which is a dominant force in mixed martial arts.
00:37:12.000Now, for most of the athletes, jiu-jitsu is something you learn to stay out of some pesky submission holds.
00:37:17.000It's not the be-all and focus for most of the athletes in mixed martial arts.
00:37:21.000Most of them are centered around kickboxing skills and wrestling.
00:37:27.000I think that we have done a great job of overcoming one out of three great problems in jiu-jitsu, but there's still two more to go.
00:37:38.000I don't believe it's a satisfactory answer.
00:37:42.000I believe it's a cop-out to say, well, just learn some wrestling.
00:37:48.000Just as many people told me 20 years ago, oh, you want to learn leg locks?
00:37:58.000Okay, first of all, samba as a sport doesn't even allow heel hooks.
00:38:01.000It only allows straight leg locks, knee bars and Achilles locks.
00:38:05.000There's no heel hooks in competition samba.
00:38:10.000And so, if I had just taken that approach of learning other martial arts, learning leg locks from that, the whole heel hook revolution never would have taken off.
00:38:19.000Where did the heel hook originate from?
00:41:16.000I believe the story is that Hulse Gracie had a student who read a judo book and saw a triangle and showed it to Hulse, and Hulse brought it into the Gracie family.
00:43:00.000Now, in a crowded auditorium when my athlete's competing, I can't use the name urigurami because it sounds too much phonetically like ashigurami.
00:43:09.000So if I call it urigurami when You've got thousands of people screaming, then my athlete might mishear me.
00:43:16.000So I use kimura, because phonetically it's so different that there's no confusion.
00:43:21.000So there's also practical elements, too.
00:43:25.000Some of the Japanese names are too long.
00:43:28.000For example, Udigurami has two variations, where one is up the American lock and down, which we call kimura.
00:43:36.000And the Japanese term doesn't distinguish between the two.
00:43:41.000You have to use a much longer terminology in order to make that distinction.
00:43:49.000By the time I relay the message, the opportunity is gone.
00:43:53.000So there's practical considerations in the use of names as well.
00:43:56.000Wasn't the Americana, that was another thing, Holes was famous for applying that as well, and bringing that to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
00:44:04.000Yeah, I believe the idea of, first of all, it's a strange thing to call it Americana.
00:44:09.000I believe it was named after an American wrestler who used to visit or train with Holes, who used to use it a lot.
00:44:17.000And so they named, an American was using it, so they called it Americana.
00:44:21.000I could be wrong about that, but I believe that's the legend.
00:44:24.000It's so fascinating that although martial arts have been around for so long, so many thousands of years, that we can really trace very recent spectacular progress.
00:44:36.000Like from 1993, from the original UFC to 2021 where we're at today, what a spectacular explosion Of ability, of innovation, of just the level of technique is so much higher than it ever was before.
00:44:56.000I don't think there's another thing like it in terms of athletics.
00:45:00.000If you look at any other sport there's incremental increases in the abilities of the athletes but nothing comparable to martial arts.
00:45:08.000I'm so glad you said this because We're very privileged to live as martial artists in this age.
00:45:16.000This is, in my opinion, is the most exciting time for a martial artist to be alive that I'm aware of.
00:45:22.000Maybe in Ancient Greece, maybe they had something with pancreation that was more exciting than this.
00:45:26.000You'd have to show me some pretty damn good evidence.
00:45:28.000If you could take Gordon Ryan and bring him back to Ancient Greece, he would fuck those dudes up.
00:45:54.000The only place where I make exceptions is boxing.
00:45:58.000Because I think there are boxers from the old era that just would be spectacular no matter what.
00:46:04.000I think Muhammad Ali would be, especially when he was Cassius Clay before he was stripped of his title, you take the guy who beat Cleveland Big Cat Williams, and I think he boxes with almost anybody of any era.
00:46:17.000I think you could take Marvin Hagler, stick him in with any middleweight champion of all time, in any time, in any era of boxing, and you're just dealing with a champion.
00:47:19.000You get to see just how good Sugar Ray Leonard was in the 1980s with that match.
00:47:26.000Now, you could make the argument, as Sugar Ray Leonard does to this day, that Floyd Mayweather isn't that much better than his father was, that they're of comparable skill level.
00:47:36.000And you could argue on that basis exactly as you said, that maybe some of those guys from the 1980s would have gone against the best guys of this generation and done just fine.
00:47:47.000The difficulty, of course, is that it's difficult to measure combat sports.
00:47:51.000In the case of Olympic sprinting, there's an obvious measurement here, time.
00:47:56.000And so you see the progress more clearly.
00:48:00.000Nonetheless, as a general rule, I do think even in combat sports, earlier generations tend to lose to later generations in most cases.
00:48:08.000There could be some exceptions, but I think, for example, if Kimura, who was the greatest judo player of his generation, went up against Yamashita, Even if you took away the size difference, I just think Yamashita wins.
00:48:20.000He's just had the benefits of the insights of one generation pile upon the next and the next and the next.
00:48:28.000They create a compounding effect in learning where the athletes from a later generation start from a higher point than their predecessors did.
00:48:36.000And so as a general rule, I'll always favor the more recent generations over previous generations.
00:48:43.000But to your credit, I do think there are some exceptions in combat sports more than other sports.
00:48:54.000The reason why I make that exception in boxing is because I don't think the progress has been as spectacular as it's been in martial arts.
00:49:01.000And I don't think the approach is as comprehensive as it is in grappling or clearly in mixed martial arts.
00:49:06.000In mixed martial arts I don't think there's any argument whatsoever that 93 compared to like I was just watching one of the fights from the early UFC's and it's almost comical the difference in the level of skill today from just debut athletes that are just starting out but boxing if you take like the Roberto Duran who beat Sugar Ray Leonard at 147 pounds which wasn't even his best weight class his best weight class when he beat Ken Buchanan at 135 pounds I mean, that one, he was a savage.
00:49:34.000I mean, that lightweight Roberto Duran is one of the greatest boxers that ever lived.
00:49:38.000But boxing is two hands, a variety of techniques applied in a bunch of different ways.
00:49:47.000You have defense that's applied in a bunch of different ways.
00:49:50.000You have an understanding of distance and timing and how to feint and throw that timing off and head movement and being able to anticipate which direction attacks are coming.
00:50:02.000All that stuff was already understood.
00:50:04.000It was already understood with Joe Lewis.
00:50:06.000It was already understood with Sugar Ray Robinson.
00:50:08.000And it's just different approaches in terms of the ability to prepare an athlete.
00:50:13.000More scientific approach in terms of nutrition, rest, recovery, all those different things.
00:50:19.000There's something to be said for hard-nosed, disciplined, warrior training camps, like the kind that Rocky Marciano used to go through, like the kind that Sugar Ray Robinson used to go through.
00:50:56.000I love the examples that you're using from boxing in terms of their conditioning program.
00:51:04.000If you look at the history of boxing, all of those boxers you mentioned grew up in a generation where the most important part of modern boxing was completely absent.
00:51:18.000The most important part of modern boxing training is Pad work.
00:54:16.000And yet, those crazy old movies probably started more people boxing and doing martial arts than all of the technically perfect demonstrations of boxing technique and actual sports.
00:54:27.000I'm sure more people started boxing watching Rocky than by watching Roberto Duran actually box.
00:55:47.000When I was 14, but it was too hard to get over there.
00:55:49.000It was hard to get on the bus, and it was complicated.
00:55:52.000But I went to a baseball game at Fenway Park with a friend of mine, and we were headed home, and there was a long line to get on the tee, because everybody would leave Fenway Park, mass exodus, and all these people were on the public transportation.
00:56:07.000And we decided to walk up the stairs to just check out this Taekwondo school.
00:56:14.000And as I was walking up the stairs, I heard this sound.
00:57:56.000Because I couldn't believe someone could do that.
00:57:58.000I'd never seen anybody kick a bag before, ever.
00:58:00.000And that particular school, J. Kim Taekwondo Institute in Boston, was very power-oriented.
00:58:07.000Like there was a lot of schools back then that were about points and winning tournaments and winning the karate style point tournaments and winning taekwondo tournaments on points.
00:58:17.000So it was about speed and movement and being able to hit someone quick and get out of there.
00:58:22.000My instructor's position was what What good does it matter?
00:58:26.000What good does it do you if you can win a tournament, but you can't even hurt someone on the street?
00:59:40.000I think there's two important lessons from that.
00:59:42.000The first is that how you approach martial arts is a big part of their appeal.
00:59:49.000Just as we talked about the idea that submission is the universal appeal of jiu-jitsu, in any kinetic energy-based martial art like taekwondo or karate or boxing or kickboxing, That ability to just impart ferocious and intimidating kinetic energy onto a target is everything.
01:00:06.000Just as submissions can snap an arm, they can put your lights out in a heartbeat with a good blow.
01:00:12.000That's their primary appeal, and I'm impressed by the fact that this guy identified what is the appeal, and it showed on you as a 15-year-old boy.
01:00:21.000You looked at this, and you're like, my God, I've got to learn this power.
01:00:24.000He not only imparted that on you, it was part of the way they marketed the class.
01:00:30.000So the heavy bag was right near the lobby.
01:01:07.000He was a light heavyweight at the time, which I think, you know, the weight classes are all a little bit different, but I think it was still somewhere in the range of 175 pounds.
01:01:16.000And just watching him do that, literally, like, here's my life, I'm going in this direction, went like this.
01:02:17.000Like right before he would go to fight, he would have this wild look in his eyes and everybody would watch him fight because he was so known for knocking people out.
01:02:26.000Because training under Mr. Kim, the emphasis on power was so primary.
01:02:38.000Man, we had these team competitions where we'd be of like different weight classes of our team versus different weight classes of this other team.
01:02:46.000And we fought in this tournament and there was these guys, really high level guys from Korea.
01:02:52.000And they were on, and Korean guys were always scary because everybody was like, that's the motherland of Taekwondo.
01:02:57.000You know, you see Korean national champions, they were so technical and so good and so fast.
01:03:01.000And I remember John was sparring, he was fighting in this tournament against this Korean guy and he kept getting hit.
01:03:10.000The guy kept scoring on him and everybody was cheering and cheering.
01:03:13.000And you can see John just staying calm, just waiting, just waiting, just waiting.
01:03:17.000And then there was this moment where he faked, the guy made a movement, the guy tried to charge it, and John turned and hit him with that same kick and sent that dude crumbling and screaming in agony.
01:03:42.000And it was just seeing him hit that bag and then being on the same team as him years later, competing as a black belt and watching him do this to this national champion and sending this guy just crumbling to the ground.
01:04:37.000You can be pinned, held down, past everything, and you'll just bide your time and get to that ability, and then get to that finishing position.
01:04:49.000Relaxation and the storm of competition where you just say, okay, I can be behind, I can be down on points, but if I get a hold of you, it's done.
01:04:58.000And it's a true, I don't want to use the word superpower, but in the realm of martial arts, it is a kind of a superpower, the ability just to finish at any given time.
01:05:08.000It's a different thing when you fight someone who you know can knock you out with a single punch.
01:05:14.000Francis Ngannou is a tough opponent to deal with because you make even a single error and it's just goodnight.
01:05:36.000We were talking about Canelo Alvarez before this, too, when we were talking about the fight with Billy Joe Saunders when I was showing the picture of all the fractures that Billy Joe got on his face.
01:05:45.000He's, to me, the perfect example of what's possible as a fighter because although he has this one-shot power, he also has spectacular technique.
01:06:00.000His defense is on point, his timing, his footwork, he does everything so well, but also has that thunderous power where he puts it all together in such an intelligent and well-measured way.
01:06:15.000I fucking love watching that guy fight.
01:06:17.000Floyd has the spectacular talent and amazing technique, but he doesn't have that power.
01:06:24.000It's a different thing with a guy like Canelo because it's rare that someone has that kind of power but yet also develops that kind of amazing defensive ability that he has.
01:06:35.000The integration of extreme finishing power with defensive soundness is the highest ideal in all of martial arts.
01:07:07.000My job as a coach in jiu-jitsu is to try and push my athletes towards that.
01:07:11.000My athletes are known for their ability to escape.
01:07:14.000They can get into terrible situations and dig their way out.
01:07:18.000They prove that time and time again in early EBI competitions.
01:07:22.000But at the same time, they have devastating finishes.
01:07:24.000And that martial arts ideal of the extreme integration of the ability to finish mixed with defensive soundness is the direction you want to push all martial arts, whether they be grappling or striking.
01:07:37.000It's one of the reasons why it's so fascinating to watch the approach of your athletes in comparison to some of these other athletes that have been competing for far longer.
01:07:45.000Because they're intimidated by the approach of these guys that are completely submission based.
01:08:18.000And there's all these different caveats that they want to apply.
01:08:22.000And I think There's part of them that recognizes that they fucked up, and they've been spending all this time trying to win on points, trying to stall, trying to do all these different things to be champions, but not embracing what is really truly spectacular about not just Jiu Jitsu, but all martial arts, what we're talking about.
01:08:44.000That ability to manifest the ideal, and that ideal based around the combination of defensive soundness and extreme ability to finish, it's like the universal appeal of martial arts.
01:09:01.000It's what took you in as a 15-year-old boy.
01:09:04.000It's what made you turn your entire life in that direction.
01:09:07.000That's what I saw as potential as a 28-year-old man when I began jiu-jitsu.
01:09:12.000And I think the more we stay true to that principle, the better the future of jiu-jitsu looks.
01:09:21.000It is what martial arts are supposed to be about.
01:09:23.000It's not supposed to be about winning by points.
01:09:26.000It's supposed to be about the ability to close the show, the ability to stop an opponent, the ability to strangle an opponent, the ability to end a fight.
01:09:34.000While denying him the ability to do that to us.
01:09:37.000It's just so rare to see it applied the way your guys are applying it, where you really do have a whole team that has the hardest—they're taking the hardest path.
01:09:52.000They're taking the most difficult path, but also taking the path of legends.
01:11:08.000Like, no one wants to be a guy that's there seven days a week, that trains the martial arts, the mixed martial arts classes, trains the jujitsu classes, trains striking, trains them in grappling, and then goes and watches tape and studies, like, wrestling matches from the 80s and tries to figure out some new move.
01:11:27.000It's your and you don't have a family and you don't have other obsessions.
01:11:32.000You have a singular obsession with making these athletes the very best possible.
01:11:39.000I don't know how you do it and I don't know how you do it without straying.
01:11:43.000I don't know how you do it where you seven days a week completely obsessed.
01:11:47.000It has to be Your mind, your personality, the way you interface with martial arts is very unusual.
01:11:57.000To recreate that, you would require so much of a person.
01:12:03.000You're this weirdo that, if you were a character in a movie, I would go, yeah, good luck finding someone like that.
01:12:12.000Like, there's not a lot of you out there.
01:12:14.000So for another team to be in the same space as you guys, to have the same sort of success ratio, and to have the same sort of mindset, you need a guy like you.
01:12:27.000You need a guy who was teaching philosophy at Columbia.
01:12:32.000Who just decides to get obsessed with Jiu Jitsu.
01:12:35.000You need a guy who's fully, completely dedicated to making his athletes the very best in the world, but also does it with a quiet intelligence.
01:13:00.000It's very hard to make a John Donaher.
01:13:03.000So you've kind of raised the bar to this very bizarre and impossible standard.
01:13:10.000A big part of it is I'm just by nature a curious person.
01:13:14.000I just think that we have a short time here on this earth and accumulating knowledge about the world around us is just a huge part of what makes us human.
01:13:27.000And people that aren't innately curious about the world in which they live are usually not very interesting people.
01:13:34.000But as far as martial arts go, I think that All human beings have a kind of innate response to martial arts that comes out of our biological history.
01:13:52.000We grow up in a highly competitive world.
01:13:58.000Human life is this kind of strange mix between competition and cooperation.
01:14:06.000There's limited resources out there and a growing population, and inevitably there's going to be conflict as people go into competition with each other.
01:14:17.000The earliest forms of competition between humans were probably empty-handed, and then as weapons began to become employed, primitive weapons.
01:14:27.000And then as we got more and more sophisticated, the weapons got more and more sophisticated.
01:14:30.000But somewhere deep in our collective history, there's this sense that It's important to know how to stand up for yourself physically.
01:14:41.000And if you can't do that, you're not going to survive in a competitive world.
01:14:44.000So all of us, I think, in some kind of deeply buried part of our mind can see martial arts and say, hmm, this has some kind of innate appeal.
01:14:57.000It appeals to something very, very deep inside all of us that comes out of our ancestral history.
01:15:02.000But at the same time, unrestricted violence is a terrible, terrible thing.
01:15:08.000And no society can function with unrestricted violence.
01:15:11.000Human progress is impossible without it.
01:15:13.000And so we find as humans have to acknowledge that in a competitive world, violence is part of our world.
01:15:21.000But that unrestricted violence is just as damaging as being a complete pacifist in a world of murderers.
01:15:32.000And so martial arts is the ideal of structured violence, where you learn the techniques that can make you safe in a competitive world, but they're put into a socially acceptable framework where you're not harming the people around you.
01:15:55.000You're involved in competition, but in a way which is not going to terribly injure you, either yourself or the person you're competing against.
01:16:02.000The violence, as it were, is reduced and made socially acceptable.
01:16:10.000It's taken to a level where it could be part of a functioning society.
01:16:14.000And if practiced, I sincerely believe makes for a better society because it makes people acknowledge we are in a competitive world.
01:16:22.000That not all people in this world are good-hearted, and that at some point you've got to be able to stand up for yourself.
01:16:27.000And if you can't, you don't want to be a saint in a world of murderers.
01:16:39.000And so martial arts, as it were, is the compromise between cooperation and competition.
01:16:45.000It gives you the ability to compete all the way down to physical violence.
01:16:50.000But at the same time, it takes the violent aspect of martial arts and puts it into socially acceptable competition, socially acceptable structures that results in a population of people.
01:17:03.000If you had an entire society who practiced martial arts, so for example in Japan, everyone does judo in high school.
01:17:09.000You have a group of people who can stand up for themselves and compete physically in a potentially dangerous world, but at the same time they're socially cohesive and they're not using violence in a negative, destructive, antisocial fashion where they're harming people and stealing property or what have you.
01:17:28.000And I believe that's the greatest virtue of martial arts for society is that it finds that balance between humanity's basic fact that we live in a competitive world where there's limited resources and growing populations where physical violence is always going to be the ultimate method of determining who wins in competition for those limited resources.
01:17:52.000And at the same time, doesn't mean we degenerate into a violent culture where no human or civil progress is possible because we're at each other's throats 24-7.
01:18:03.000And that I see as being the great social benefit of martial arts.
01:18:07.000So even someone like me who came from an academic background can look at martial arts and see that's an important thing.
01:18:13.000That could be a great benefit both to individuals and to the society in which they live.
01:18:19.000Yeah, I think that the the danger of martial arts and the danger of whether it's training or competition itself is one of the most intriguing aspects of it because it makes Figuring out the problem so much harder because I was always described martial arts as high-level problem-solving with dire physical consequences.
01:18:44.000It's a very good definition because It is this thing where what you're really trying to do is overcome your fear, your anxiety, your emotions, and also apply technique, strategy, explosive force, conditioning, and discipline.
01:19:03.000Because you have to have put the time in and training in order to get your vehicle to be functional in this extreme environment.
01:19:12.000You're responsible for Adding the horsepower to the engine.
01:19:17.000You're responsible for tuning the suspension.
01:19:19.000All these things are done through discipline and hard work.
01:19:22.000If you don't do those things, your body doesn't function well enough for you to even apply your own knowledge.
01:19:28.000So there's so many different levels to it.
01:19:30.000There's the actual technique, there's the knowledge of these techniques and how to apply them, and then there's the physical capabilities of your own body.
01:19:38.000And all of them together, they're so...
01:19:43.000There's so much going on that when you meet the really truly elite players, whether it's Gordon or Gary or Hicks and Gracie or Hodger or Braulio Estima or any of these elite athletes, they're exceptional human beings.
01:19:59.000Like very, very unusual people with intense mindsets.
01:20:03.000And they are the people that figure their way through this insane maze.
01:20:07.000And by doing so, they've provided an example of what's possible.
01:20:15.000They've reached a very high level of human potential.
01:20:18.000And I think ultimately that's what martial arts are about.
01:20:23.000It's a fantastic way of looking at it.
01:20:25.000I agree with you about the whole problem-solving aspect.
01:20:30.000There's a sense in which when you're engaged in jiu-jitsu, you're both throwing problems at each other.
01:20:36.000And it comes down to, can you solve the problems that I create for you faster than I solve the problems you create for me?
01:20:47.000And that more or less determines how I train my athletes, because everything comes down to what is your speed of decision making and problem solving.
01:20:58.000People talk about speed in martial arts all the time, and almost always what they mean by that is physical speed.
01:21:04.000But the most important speed of all is speed of decision making and problem solving.
01:21:29.000The system makes the decisions for you.
01:21:33.000You've already been in that position 10,000 times.
01:21:36.000You know exactly if I perform action A, there's going to be reaction B, C, D, and E. And then if I go forth into action E, that's going to change those options.
01:21:47.000And you just go down this decision tree based upon the actions that you're making and the responses you're getting from them.
01:21:53.000And because you know what the system does and you know where the system leads to based on that decision tree, you're making decisions subconsciously, as it were.
01:22:02.000As I said earlier, the system is making the decisions for you because it's already in place.
01:22:07.000And the other guy is trying to react to those with conscious thought.
01:22:11.000I haven't been in this position before.
01:22:13.000So you're making decisions at a rate several times faster than him in that one domain.
01:22:19.000And so I see a lot of virtue in your understanding of this idea of decision-making and problem-solving.
01:22:28.000And a big part of my coaching program is to create systems to do exactly that, to take the decision-making and problem-solving you do and reduce the time it takes for you to do that in the various common The application of these systems is what's changed jujitsu because there's been so many athletes in the past that were just exceptional.
01:22:50.000Maybe they had a few good moves and they knew how to apply them.
01:22:54.000They had steps that they had done in the gym and in competition many, many, many times.
01:22:58.000So they had a clear, well-oiled pathway that they would go down.
01:23:06.000They didn't have clear systems that they would teach in that regard and a lot of times I would watch even elite guys train and it would be very open-ended.
01:23:16.000It would be very much just rolling and relaxing and flowing and all these different things but they weren't relying on systems and they weren't doing with one of the things that I think you and the squad do that's so important is putting yourself in disadvantageous positions over and over and over and over again.
01:23:33.000Putting yourself in the worst place you can be.
01:23:35.000And Craig talked about this yesterday, that when he would get into a bad position, he would freak out, and he wouldn't know what to do, and he would blow a lot of energy, and it just would be a bad thing for him.
01:23:47.000But now, because of the training that you guys do, he's always in bad positions.
01:23:52.000Every time he gets in a bad position, it's like, oh, I'm here every day.
01:23:56.000I must say just on the side that Craig's skill level has massively increased and his defensive acumen is so much greater now than before.
01:24:31.000But the other big thing, going back to the idea of systems, you talked about the idea of watching even elite athletes, and to use your phrase, the training was kind of open-ended.
01:24:42.000There seemed to be a lot of instinctual stuff going on.
01:24:44.000Guys were doing good moves, but it seemed to come out of spontaneous application of instinct rather than anything else.
01:24:52.000I think what impressed many people about the squad when they first started training is that you saw not just one exceptional person doing well, but a group of people doing well and doing more or less the same thing.
01:25:08.000And that idea of successful replication, I think, is an important part of growing the sport of jiu-jitsu.
01:25:15.000It can't just be the case that we see an exceptional athlete and go, oh, well, he can do that because he's just exceptional.
01:25:23.000The moment you resign yourself to saying someone is just gifted, you're, as it were, that's a cop-out.
01:25:30.000You're saying that you can't explain why they're good.
01:25:32.000And if you can't explain why they're good, you can't teach someone else to be good in the same way that they're good.
01:25:39.000Our goal as a coach is to be able to make everyone in the room good, not just the Gordon Ryans and the Gary Tonins and the Craig Joneses, but everyone should rise in level.
01:25:49.000Of course, I don't expect them all to be as good as Craig Jones or Gordon Ryan.
01:25:55.000Most of them don't have the time allocation to do that.
01:25:58.000They're just busy with their careers, their families, etc.
01:26:01.000but they should be able to go up noticeably.
01:26:04.000And my test, as it were, of the efficiency and efficacy of a training program is not to look at any one individual, but to look at the room overall and ask yourself, are they all performing in similar ways with similar success?
01:26:25.000First off, how good are the worst people in the room?
01:26:29.000The ones who have been there for five years, but they're the worst in the room.
01:26:32.000If they're absolutely terrible, that says something pretty negative about the training program.
01:26:37.000It means that whatever the good guys are doing isn't replicable because the bad guys can't get a heel on it.
01:26:46.000So I always look at the The weakest elements in the room.
01:26:52.000And then the other thing you look at is how many people can apply that program successfully.
01:26:58.000Is it something that only works for a certain body type, or does it work for all body types?
01:27:04.000Does it work for young people, old people?
01:27:08.000And I think that's what impressed people about the squat.
01:27:11.000You saw not just one person doing one thing well and then another guy on the other side of the room doing his thing which was completely different and he was also doing pretty well and no one else in the room was very good.
01:27:22.000That to me isn't really indicative of a good training program so much as it is indicative of two outstanding individuals and Outstanding individuals tend to arise accidentally rather than deliberately.
01:27:38.000And as a result, I can't take any credit as a coach for their success.
01:27:44.000Secondly, I can't take whatever success they had and transmit it to a guy who's come to me for advice.
01:27:51.000I should be able to take someone who's athletically ungifted, works in a bank, has a family and can only train three times a week and still make him pretty damn good at jiu-jitsu.
01:28:03.000One of my proudest moments as a coach was when I had a 42-year-old lawyer who no one's ever heard of go into a local grappling competition.
01:28:12.000He's married with kids, trains three times a week, and he submitted a heavyweight world champion jiu-jitsu black belt with a heel hook in 43 seconds.
01:28:25.000Now, that to me is more indicative of the success of a training program than Gordon Ryan doing the same thing because this guy just has much less training time and much less invested in the sport, as it were.
01:28:42.000And that to me is that ability to replicate the success of the great people on a smaller scale among the people who aren't so great, that to me is indicative of a good training program and that's always what I strive towards.
01:28:56.000We're talking about physical freaks, how important physical freaks are to test the limits of your technique and we're talking about Nicky Rod.
01:30:22.000Anytime Gordon Ryan gets a fully locked body triangle, traps one of your arms and gets his arm around your neck, the number of people who get out of that can probably be counted on one hand in the entire world's population.
01:30:34.000Nicky Rod shrugs his shoulders And slips inside the strangle, reaches back and grabs Gordon Ryan's head.
01:30:44.000At that moment, sorry, Gordon Ryan goes to adjust his body triangle, and for one infinitesimal part of a second, his body triangle is unlocked.
01:30:53.000Nicky Rod just did a full backward roll into what can only be described as a backflip.
01:31:03.000And up into standing position and left Gordon lying on the ground underneath them in a kind of a weird north-south kind of situation.
01:31:12.000and Gordon Ryan just sits up, doesn't look at Nicky Rod, looks at me and goes, so what the fuck do I do about that?
01:31:19.000I just look at him and go like, I don't know.
01:31:47.000And I remember thinking, like, my God, this is insane.
01:31:52.000But going back to attributes and techniques, whenever you go into a bout against an opponent, ultimately what you're trying to defeat is a mix of your opponent's skills or And his attributes.
01:32:47.000So, skills and attributes are related.
01:32:50.000The better your attributes generally, let me rephrase that, the better your physical attributes generally, the better your skills.
01:32:58.000You'll learn skills more easily if you're strong, flexible, fast.
01:33:02.000They generally come more easy to you that way.
01:33:04.000But there's also mental attributes, and these are things like problem-solving ability, memory, speed of decision-making, confidence, things like this.
01:33:18.000And ultimately, we're a mix between our attributes, which are divided into physical and mental, and obviously there's some overlap between those two, and our skills, which are learned over time.
01:33:31.000Now as a coach, there's only so much you can do with regards attributes.
01:33:55.000So most of my time is built up around skill development.
01:34:01.000But it's undeniable that you can have someone who has lesser skills than you, but if their attributes are at a certain level where they are so far superior to yours that no amount of skill will make up for it.
01:34:18.000There's a reason why there's weight divisions in jiu-jitsu.
01:34:22.000There's a reason why there's sex divisions in jiu-jitsu.
01:34:25.000You could have someone who conceivably was an immensely talented black belt lightweight or female who took on a reasonably talented blue belt heavyweight and could easily lose the match.
01:34:38.000You had better skills but they weren't enough to overtake those attributes.
01:34:43.000And so that clash between skills and attributes is the great clash in martial arts.
01:34:49.000Martial arts tend to appeal most to people who figure low on the attribute spectrum, people who aren't very confident, who aren't very big, who aren't very strong.
01:34:58.000And so they use skill as a crutch to overcome attributes.
01:35:02.000Things get really freaky when you get someone who is strong in both attributes, both mental and physical, and skills.
01:35:10.000That's when you see the super athletes.
01:35:12.000And that's the potential for a guy like Nicky Rod.
01:37:31.000That was an interesting thing you said earlier, Joe.
01:37:33.000We jumped over it more quickly than perhaps we should have.
01:37:37.000You made a fascinating point about the idea that There is a finish line, and that's agreed upon, the knockout, the submission.
01:37:46.000But who gets over there is a complicated story, and you gave a nice rendition of just how complex it is in terms of the various elements that you have to bring together.
01:37:55.000But ultimately, it comes down to skills and attributes.
01:37:58.000It's fascinating to me that the variety of different athletes, that they vary so much And that you rarely have, like as we were talking about Canelo Alvarez earlier, you rarely have the athlete that has everything.
01:38:15.000That has the discipline, has the physical attributes, has the mental understanding of how to win, the ability to cross that finish line.
01:38:24.000But also with those physical attributes, didn't neglect technique at all and develop the same sort of ability that a guy like Floyd Mayweather, who doesn't really have that kind of power, has.
01:38:37.000If you can impart that into a guy like Nicky and give him all the attributes that Gordon has.
01:38:45.000And understand also, Joe, that some of the attributes and skills can conflict with each other.
01:40:51.000Even his fight with Lennox Lewis, I mean, he was barely trained at that point.
01:40:56.000It was still a very competitive fight.
01:40:59.000So let's say Castamaro, in the course of almost 40 years of training, produced one truly great, all-time great champion and two very good champions.
01:41:11.000That's three people in 40 years of work.
01:41:47.000In order for someone to go into that uber realm of athletes, And I'm talking about coaches who bring them up, because that's a very different thing.
01:41:59.000There's plenty of coaches who aren't really coaches, they're trainers.
01:42:02.000They bring in athletes who are already world champions, who are already very, very good, and then they just train them for competition.
01:43:50.000There's so many things that can derail you, and it's a delicate, delicate process to get someone to that level, and there's 10,000 things that can go wrong on any given day that could derail the program.
01:44:02.000It's hard enough just to balance the attributes and skills over time and keep someone there long enough to develop those skills.
01:44:10.000And then there's intercepting forces from outside that could just derail everything.
01:44:13.000That's why we love when someone does come along like an Israel Adesanya.
01:44:33.000All value in life is based around scarcity.
01:44:36.000And there's nothing more scarce than the factors involved in getting to the top of combat sports.
01:44:42.000As you say, there's just so many things that are required to get there and so many things that could stop you and become a roadblock to the path that when it happens, it's something magic.
01:44:52.000I'm sure, Joe, I'm sure you are similar to me that you can literally cast your mind back over 30 years and remember Mike Tyson fights from the 1980s, where you were, where you saw them.
01:45:06.000I remember knowing that he lost to Buster Douglas, watching it after the fact and still thinking he was going to win.
01:45:15.000You gotta understand like that's how dominant Mike Tyson was.
01:45:20.000I remember I was working as a bouncer and I came home and it was a very very late night and I was coming home and I saw a copy of the New York Times with the news that Mike Tyson had lost in Japan.
01:45:52.000What people don't even really understand is there was such a lull in the heavyweight division before him, which made his ascension so much more spectacular.
01:46:01.000Because there was the guys like Pinklin Thomas and Tony Tubbs, and there was these champions that, with all due respect, nobody gave a fuck about.
01:46:35.000And you went from Muhammad Ali, who had taken the heavyweight division to such...
01:46:44.000It became the most important thing in sports in the 1970s.
01:46:48.000Then the late 70s to the mid-80s, there was this huge dip in the heavyweight division.
01:46:54.000All the attention went on the welterweights, and then suddenly Mike Tyson came in.
01:46:58.000Well, there was a part of that was that people resented Larry Holmes for beating up Muhammad Ali, which is very unfortunate, because I think Larry Holmes is one of the most underappreciated heavyweights of all time.
01:47:57.000Because Larry was catching him quite a bit with the jab, but just, it was this Immense firepower advantage that Mike Tyson had and when he did club him though with that one right hand you see Larry's legs give out and he went down and he's trying to shake off the cobwebs.
01:48:13.000Yeah, but you realize like it's just he's a different Species he was just he was so superior in his prime I mean what the way he would wreck people was like there were executions.
01:48:25.000Yeah, it's also crazy to think back then that It just shows you how far martial arts have come.
01:48:33.000That at that time, incontestably, when you talked about the best fighter in the world, you meant the best boxer in the world.
01:48:40.000But nowadays, no one would say the best boxer in the world is the best fighter in the world.
01:50:15.000But the difference between boxing and kickboxing at that level is, you know, if France Botha had to fight Ernesto Houst or someone like that, he'd get lit up.
01:52:38.000He popped him in the eye and dropped him.
01:52:40.000And Mirko just had that one-punch, one-kick speed and power that made him...
01:52:48.000It directly applied to MMA in a way that other fighters didn't.
01:52:52.000And, you know, other guys who were more technique-based, who would set things up and more, you know, would take time to cook their opponent.
01:52:59.000In kickboxing, if those guys tried to get into MMA, they just weren't as successful.
01:53:03.000You needed something to get guys off you.
01:53:07.000I agree with you with the lumberjack, Peter Ertz.
01:53:14.000If you look at his knockouts, a significant percentage of them come from some kind of clinch break, where he's clinching people, pushes them off, and on the separation, he would kick over the shoulder and knock them out.
01:53:24.000But if he was clinching people like that in MMA, it would have been taken down immediately, so it wouldn't have worked.
01:53:30.000Whereas Mirko had that ability to stay out, stay out, stay out, and then bam!
01:53:36.000It's so fascinating how different people's bodies work and how there are guys like B.J. Penn who had this insane flexibility and dexterity to his legs and would control guys.
01:53:48.000And one of the things about B.J. Penn that I always thought very interesting, because it applies to the way you teach Jiu-Jitsu, Is that BJ would wrestle with his legs.
01:55:14.000And I've always claimed that the people who learn the fastest in jiu-jitsu are those who learn to wrestle with their legs as early as possible.
01:55:24.000As you correctly point out, most human beings have a natural tendency to attack every problem with their hands and arms.
01:55:32.000Everything we do in our life is mostly working with your arms and hands.
01:55:37.000And so when we fight, we do exactly the same thing.
01:55:40.000And your hands and arms are only a tiny fraction of your overall strength.
01:55:45.000If I asked you, Joe, to walk across this room, that would be the easiest assignment I could ever give you.
01:55:52.000But if I asked you to walk across this room in a full handstand, even if you had the flexibility and skill for it, it would still be a workout.
01:56:02.000Our arms are massively weaker and have massively less endurance than our legs do.
01:56:12.000And so when you can get people to start working with their legs as early as possible in their development, that's when you see people getting good at jiu-jitsu very, very quickly.
01:56:23.000And so as a coach, if I'm in charge of a beginner's program, I'm mostly known as a coach of people who are already good, but I actually love to teach beginners more than anyone.
01:56:32.000Almost everything they do is learning to use exclusively their legs in their early development.
01:56:37.000Now this is very frustrating for a lot of people because you feel clumsy as hell.
01:56:41.000And athletes who are strong with their arms suddenly have to use their legs.
01:56:45.000They feel helpless and uncoordinated and foolish.
01:56:48.000But if they can get over that, they progress very, very quickly.
01:59:02.000Ultimately, your goal in jiu-jitsu is as much as humanly possible to create situations where you're using your legs to wrestle against an opponent's arms and upper body.
01:59:12.000If you can make your lower body fight his upper body, you can beat bigger people than yourself and do it quite often.
01:59:23.000Always understand the fundamental features of the human body, and one of those features is the massive discrepancy between the upper body and the lower body.
01:59:31.000Humans are quite pathetically weak in the upper body and surprisingly strong in the lower body.
01:59:38.000Interestingly, the difference in strength between men and women is very dramatic in the upper body, but much narrower in the lower body.
01:59:48.000And so if you're going to beat bigger, stronger people, the whole key is to match your legs against their arms, your lower body versus their upper body.
01:59:58.000And as much as possible, that's what I try to do in my coaching.
02:00:04.000And getting students thinking in terms of wrestling with their legs against their opponent's upper body is one of the best ways you can do that.
02:00:11.000So a lot of the early training is in the use of triangles where you're using your legs to strangle You're using your legs in a way which leads directly into submission.
02:00:23.000Your legs expressly against their head and one of their arms.
02:00:27.000When you get students thinking in those terms, legs versus arms, that's when they start making very fast progress.
02:00:34.000How much time, if any, do you guys spend on flexibility?
02:00:38.000Actually, I don't coach physical training at all among my students.
02:00:46.000We never have a class where we work on flexibility.
02:00:49.000We never have a class where we work on strength.
02:00:52.000I've always believed that athletes will tend to find physical programs that suit their own personality and body type best.
02:01:03.000If you look at physical training, Outside of the gym, I've never seen a convincing study that shows that one program is definitively better than another, that it gets sports performance in jiu-jitsu significantly better results than another program.
02:01:24.000I've seen people get excellent results with Olympic lifting.
02:01:28.000I've seen people get excellent results with kettlebells.
02:01:30.000I've seen excellent results out of just bodyweight training.
02:01:33.000I've seen some people just do basic bodybuilding and do just fine.
02:01:38.000Never has there been a situation where I saw a guy do a given strength program where he got noticeably better at the sport than people who didn't do it.
02:01:46.000I've never seen any strong evidence of this.
02:02:38.000And start tying that into the technique that I show you.
02:02:41.000I can coach people all day on technique, and I'm very, very confident that when I do that, I can improve their sports performance.
02:02:48.000But as I said, I've never seen reputable studies which conclusively show that one method of gaining strength definitively gets better sport results in grappling.
02:03:01.000Is this because there are no methods that are better?
02:03:05.000Or is this because no one has really taken the same sort of comprehensive approach to training athletes specifically for jujitsu and competition the way you have doing it with technique?
02:03:21.000Think about if someone had the same all-in approach that you have to training your athletes in jujitsu, but did that training them in physical culture, training them in stretching, range of motion, endurance training, Tabata intervals, all these different methods that we know for a fact to be beneficial to athletes.
02:03:43.000And we're talking about, like, oftentimes the difference between athletes is so small with what makes the winner versus the loser.
02:03:54.000Like, it might be just the ability to push at that one moment when the other athlete's tired.
02:03:59.000It might be a better understanding of positions to be able to push the pace of technique where the other person can't keep up with the rhythm.
02:04:40.000Canelo Alvarez having this incredible power but also having this amazing discipline in terms of his ability to recognize that power is not everything.
02:04:51.000Boxing and learning all the technique and learning how to be defensively responsible.
02:04:56.000Learning all the different strategies in terms of feinting and movement.
02:05:01.000There's so many different things to learn in jujitsu, but if you could learn all those things and have the most optimized physical training, it just seems to me to make sense that that would take things to another level.
02:05:15.000That's a fascinating argument you've raised, Joe.
02:06:08.000Yeah, he'd be better in some things, but you've got to ask yourself, that comes at a price of, now you're investing in that form of training, that means you've got to stop doing other forms of training.
02:06:21.000Let me go further with my explanation.
02:06:25.000There's things that I can do with technique which will improve your sports performance much more dramatically in a given time frame than any investment you could do in terms of attributes.
02:06:37.000Let's look at a concrete example because otherwise it's going to just sound too vague.
02:06:44.000BJ Penn had some of the most perfect jiu-jitsu flexibility I've ever seen in my career.
02:06:51.000There's different kinds of flexibility, but the flexibility he had was literally custom-made for the application of jiu-jitsu technique, especially from bottom position, but also from back position as well.
02:07:01.000George St. Pierre has good linear flexibility.
02:07:04.000He's got good front splits, side splits, good for kicking, but he has quite poor jujitsu flexibility for bringing your knees wide and feet in for guard position.
02:07:14.000So he has a good kind of flexibility for standing striking, but not a good flexibility for guard play.
02:07:23.000When George went to fight BJ, everyone said to me, this is the second fight.
02:08:51.000They were like, BJ's literally never had his guard passed in competition, either judicious or MMA. He's got one of the best guards in the world.
02:09:04.000Literally, this is a guy who you try any guard pass, he can just take his foot and without even touching his foot, just thread it back in and go into place.
02:09:13.000And I agreed he was the most flexible jiu-jitsu athlete I'd seen at that point in my career.
02:09:20.000And I also agreed that he'd had superb guard retention skills as a result of that.
02:09:26.000But I was also convinced that if you played a game where you shut down the mobility of his head and hips, you would render the flexibility inoperable.
02:09:39.000And, famously, George passed BJ's guard seven times in slightly more than ten minutes in that fight.
02:09:47.000Now, you might argue, well, some of that was because BJ took a heavy hit early in the fight, and some of it was because BJ got tired towards the end of the fight.
02:09:54.000Yes, this is all true, but the fact remains...
02:09:57.000A man who'd never had his guard passed ever in competition suddenly had his guard passed seven times by a guy who is not even in the same realm of flexibility for jiu-jitsu as he did.
02:10:18.000He got much better results not by trying to change his own body attributes, but rather by the use of technique to shut down the attributes of his opponent.
02:10:26.000You get much more mileage out of shutting down the other guy's attributes than you do trying to build your own attributes.
02:10:32.000Your own attributes don't change that much.
02:10:36.000But your ability to shut down someone else's attributes can be changed massively through the application of technique in very short periods of time.
02:10:45.000And so when it comes time to invest training time, because we all have limited time, we all have limited energy, and the question is always how can I maximize my use of time and energy in my training program?
02:10:58.000I've always pushed towards the idea of favor technique and skill, which shut down the other guy's attributes more than try to change your own physical attributes.
02:11:29.000This is all correct, but now you're going to have to presumably use that form of newfound flexibility that you have and start to develop new techniques out of those.
02:11:40.000Why not just work with techniques that suit the attributes you already have and invest all of your training time in that?
02:11:47.000It's pretty easy to shut down the other guy's attributes with technique.
02:11:50.000So why not just stick with what you're already very, very strong at?
02:12:22.000As the body changes, you're going to have to change the techniques and Technical change takes a long time.
02:12:29.000Learning a new technique and applying it at a world championship level is a big deal.
02:12:32.000It might take you six months to a year.
02:12:35.000So do you think that this same, what you're saying is because Gordon is at a world championship level, would you have that same approach to someone who's literally at day one?
02:12:55.000And at this point, it's no longer worth the investment and time to completely restructure his game, which is already winning, and especially given the fact that he's in a busy competition schedule where he has to perform not three years from now, but next month.
02:13:10.000We were talking before about ways to well and the treatment that they're going to provide Gordon and hopefully deal with his stomach issue.
02:14:06.000But in Gordon's case, he has extreme nausea and stomach pain, which began after he took an antibiotic course in response to a staph infection.
02:14:22.000Now, Gordon tends to think that the relationship between the antibiotics and his current illness is causal.
02:14:31.000But of course, it could also just be a correlation.
02:14:35.000It's not guaranteed that the antibiotics caused this problem.
02:14:39.000There's plenty of other people who have been on the same wide-spectrum antibiotics as he took and they never had stomach issues.
02:14:53.000Some of those tests point in certain directions.
02:14:56.000The treatments that he had have either not worked at all or only worked for a very short period of time and then the whole thing has relapsed.
02:15:07.000Over the three to three and a half years that he's had it, it's gotten worse over time and appears to be getting worse as we speak.
02:15:15.000Gordon won four ADCC medals with this problem in place.
02:15:24.000And numerous matches in between, and yet every training session was a battle.
02:15:32.000And I've watched Gordon's personality change as he struggled with this.
02:15:37.000He used to be a very light-hearted, happy-go-lucky kid who would come into class and laugh and talk, and that's gone.
02:15:46.000He's a person who's more or less permanently in pain and nausea, and inevitably that It has definite effects on your personality.
02:15:57.000He's at times deeply unhappy and distressed.
02:16:02.000It's incredibly sad to be around someone who you care about deeply and see this kind of thing occurring at such a young age.
02:16:13.000It's even more distressing to see that there's cycles of hope where a treatment seems to work and then fails.
02:16:20.000There was one brief period for like one month where he was fighting a very talented Brazilian grappler called Mateus Denise, who's an ADCC champion.
02:16:31.000And for like one month before that fight, there was a period where the symptoms lifted.
02:16:37.000And it was like a cloud just came off Gordon Ryan.
02:16:41.000And he immediately started eating again, gained weight.
02:17:17.000So, it's truly sad to watch, and Gordon struggled through all of this quietly, and I don't use the word heroically very lightly, but there was like a quiet kind of heroism about it where he just said, I've got to perform, I've got to prove that what we do works, and I've got to get out there and do this.
02:17:38.000And he went through camps where, dude, that guy was suffering, just coming in just miserable, and And yet he always stuck to it and went out and performed and won.
02:17:50.000He hated to talk about it publicly because he saw it.
02:17:52.000He didn't want to use it as an excuse.
02:17:54.000And he thinks excuses are weakness and won't tolerate them.
02:18:00.000And I have to say in the last couple of months, for the first time, Even Gordon's stoicism has started to break down, and for the first time you're seeing, even in the gym, he can't finish workouts.
02:18:15.000As bad as it was before, it never got to that point.
02:18:18.000And we're now at a point where Gordon sometimes finishes, usually doesn't.
02:18:23.000And there's certain elements of training, standing, wrestling, scrimmaging, he can't do.
02:18:38.000I truly hope that he can fight his way through this.
02:18:42.000At this point, I'm afraid to say that the only thing that could turn it around is either a successful medical intervention, some treatment that we didn't know about.
02:18:51.000I'm hoping above hope that your medical friends can help.
02:18:56.000But at this point, it's not looking good, to be honest with you.
02:19:00.000There would have to be either a successful medical intervention or it could be one of those things that passes with time.
02:19:08.000What you notice with the human body, particularly the stomach, which is so incredibly complex and unknown, anytime you have a situation which just seems to arise without a clear-cut cause, these things sometimes come and go.
02:19:22.000And sometimes these things can be a long-term problem which goes away with time.
02:19:28.000So those are really the only two ways I see this being resolved.
02:19:31.000Either there's a successful medical intervention or time plays a role and eventually the condition just improves by itself over time.
02:19:39.000If Gordon couldn't compete again for the future, I think that would be a tragedy for the jiu-jitsu world because he's essentially not even at his peak yet.
02:19:50.000I don't believe Gordon will hit his peak until his early 30s.
02:19:54.000So to lose someone of that magnitude who plays such a pivotal role in the technical development of Jiu Jitsu would be an absolute tragedy for the sport.
02:20:06.000I think about it in terms of worst case scenarios and best case scenarios.
02:20:10.000Best case scenario, either your medical friends or some other doctor can find a successful intervention or it resolves itself on its own and Gordon comes back to compete and everything's good.
02:20:24.000In a worst case scenario where Gordon cannot compete, I would do my utmost to rebrand Gordon as the former greatest athlete in no-gi competition into the greatest coach of all time.
02:20:42.000I take heart from the fact that if you look at the four greatest American wrestlers of all time, Dan Gable, John Smith, Cale Sanderson, and Jordan Burroughs, All of them are superb coaches.
02:21:00.000He's still competing, so he hasn't gone into a coaching career yet.
02:21:02.000But the other three were the greatest American wrestlers of all time who went on to become the greatest American wrestling coaches of all time.
02:21:11.000And they actually had more influence as coaches than they did as athletes.
02:21:15.000And I'm 100% confident that even in a worst case scenario, worst case, where this illness just doesn't resolve, and Gordon is never able to compete again, that he would transform the sport in a different way, that he would become A far greater coach than I ever was.
02:21:35.000I believe this with all my heart and all my soul.
02:21:38.000I didn't even start Jiu-Jitsu until I was 28. Gordon Ryan is 25, and he already knows almost everything that I know.
02:21:46.000And, in addition, has many of his own techniques and adaptations which I never had.
02:21:55.000So at age 25, He's just as knowledgeable as I am and only getting more knowledgeable as each day passes.
02:22:04.000I'm 54. I didn't start till I was 28. Imagine Gordon Ryan when he's 54. He knows more about the sport now than I do at 54 and he's 25. So worst case scenario, worst case, where Gordon can't compete, he'll become the greatest coach of all time and he'll have a greater influence on the sport than It's really amazing what he's been able to do in such a short amount of time.
02:22:33.000I mean, other than just consistency and hard work, he always gives credit to you and says that you are essentially like a cheat code, and then having you as a coach has been a cheat code for his career.
02:22:48.000But what separates him from everybody else?
02:22:52.000What can people learn from that if you wanted to mirror the immense success that Gordon's had in Jiu-Jitsu?
02:22:58.000Yeah, it's a truly fascinating question.
02:23:03.000There's a sense, Joe, in which you've got to ask, what's more important in skill development?
02:23:12.000And I always tend to favor the athlete for the simple reason that if I coach a thousand students, you're not going to have a thousand Gordon Ryans.
02:23:23.000You're going to have just two or three Gordon Ryans out there out of a thousand.
02:23:30.000Now, in my defense, a large part of that is because of factors we talked about earlier.
02:23:36.000Some people could have been a Gordon Ryan, but life intervened in a certain way.
02:23:47.000But there has to be a recognition that there are some athletes who bring something to the table which the others don't.
02:23:55.000And no matter how good or bad the coach is, If that person hadn't walked in the room, the coach never would have been able to develop someone else to that level.
02:24:07.000So there is something to be said for this idea that there are some athletes out there that just bring something to the table which no one else does.
02:24:17.000And the question you're asking is a fascinating question.
02:24:39.000Yes, persistence is part of the formula, because if you're not there for long enough, skills take time.
02:24:47.000There's a whole scientific literature about the development of skills and how it's almost like an electrical wiring in the human body that occurs over time.
02:25:01.000But as I said, just doing the wrong thing repetitively isn't going to make you a world champion.
02:25:07.000So what kind of persistence is required?
02:25:53.000The various things that he's tried through trial and error as time went by and looked for success and failure and paired out the various failures or tried to improve upon them and kept the various successes.
02:26:08.000And that idea of adaptive persistence is probably the single most important thing.
02:26:15.000Now, persistence itself is a evaluated term.
02:26:17.000You used a term that I love and is deeply embedded in martial arts before, Joe.
02:26:25.000Persistence is a more wide-ranging way of talking about discipline.
02:26:30.000But discipline goes in so many different ways.
02:26:33.000It's not just about showing up to the gym and showing up to the workout.
02:26:36.000It's not just about being told to do 300 repetitions and doing all 300. It's also about discipline of thought.
02:26:45.000That's the most difficult form of discipline, to stay mentally engaged in the game.
02:26:49.000When you've been working out all day and you're dog-tired and all you want to do is go home and watch a movie, but you don't.
02:26:56.000And you sit back and ask yourself, what did I do today?
02:26:59.000Why did I succeed at A and why did I fail at B? And you research and you talk to your mentors and your fellow athletes and you puzzle things out and you solve problems.
02:27:11.000That's the kind of discipline that really comes in.
02:27:14.000It's more the mental discipline of mental engagement in the project.
02:27:17.000And the ability to say what failed on Tuesday can be modified by this method, this method, and this method, and it can succeed on Wednesday.
02:27:25.000Of building cumulative success over time while eliminating failure.
02:27:31.000Of staying in the game, that's persistence, but making it adaptive.
02:27:36.000So that as circumstances change and as the problems you've confronted with change, you're adapting to that change and intelligently directing it by asking yourself these questions.
02:27:47.000What is making this work and what is making this fail?
02:27:51.000How can I change this to my advantage?
02:27:54.000And all of this training and this trying to figure out the proper way to address all these various problems and the solutions that they present that you find to deal with them.
02:28:09.000Is this something that's written down?
02:29:26.000But I've always found when you try and keep an informal group class based around things like, people don't talk about humor, sacrifice for people you work alongside, this keeps a cohesion in the room which is important for development, which can literally take years.
02:29:50.000It can't just be everything's cold, unemotional, and documented.
02:29:57.000I like to keep things, I know I come across as a cold, unemotional asshole, but in class I'm much more informal, and we joke a lot, we tease each other, and it's a lot more laid back than it appears from the way I am.
02:30:15.000I don't think you come across that way.
02:31:27.000And that kind of informal group setting keeps a better group cohesion over time.
02:31:36.000One of the problems that Gordon had with this stomach thing was recurring staph infection.
02:31:45.000Craig Jones said he had the same thing too.
02:31:48.000Is that something that's an environmental issue in a specific location?
02:31:53.000I don't totally understand where staph comes from because I know it's something that lives in the skin, it lives in your mucous membrane, right?
02:32:03.000But it also can be very prevalent in some gyms, right?
02:32:11.000You and I right now are covered in staff.
02:32:14.000And there are many different varieties of staff.
02:32:16.000And some of them are quite innocuous and some of them are extremely damaging.
02:32:22.000And in general, staff works by going through some kind of damage to the skin and penetrating the dermis and scratches, abrasions of some kind.
02:32:35.000that's why they often occur in places like the elbows and the knees and the forehead because these form most of the contact with the mat and if there's now as I said many of the forms of staff are quite innocuous and penetrate the dermis with no effect and others can be extremely damaging all the way to like flesh eating viruses which can absolutely change your life for the worst um uh
02:33:03.000As regards geographical locations, You can reduce, and I'm not speaking as a medical authority here, but in my experience as a coach, you can reduce the occurrence through good hygiene.
02:33:18.000Running a good hygienic program is important.
02:33:23.000You run into problems when mats aren't cleaned well.
02:33:27.000But in truth, I do believe that most of the infections, not just staph but also other skin infections that are commonly occurring in gyms, tend to be more person to person than mat to person.
02:33:44.000I know training in New York, we had a very high incidence of staph infections.
02:33:51.000Yeah, you had a slight smile on your face when I was bringing up environmental names or anything.
02:35:32.000Anytime you have massive numbers of visitors...
02:35:37.000You have much less control over who's coming to the gym.
02:35:41.000The visitors themselves are incentivized to continue training even when they have an infection just because they've invested so much of their money in the trip to the gym.
02:38:23.000I do believe that there are things you can do to reduce the likelihood of it.
02:38:30.000But at the end of the day, there's only so much you can do.
02:38:33.000And there is a danger that you can end up with a situation they have in hospitals where you use so much cleansing that you end up producing super strains of bacteria, which is terrifying.
02:38:47.000That's when you get into some truly scary stuff.
02:38:49.000I remember when I had my hip replacement, the doctors, there's a 14-inch scar on my butt, and the doctors were very, very concerned that even in a hospital there could be a staph infection.
02:39:06.000And they were saying like, you know, the strains we have here are not like the strains you have in a gym.
02:39:11.000These things will have to take the whole thing out again if it gets infected.
02:39:17.000So there was like a critical two-week period when the scar goes to close itself where you have to be super vigilant.
02:39:26.000So you want to be careful about going too crazy about the cleaning program, then you start killing, as you say, the good bacteria, and then you get a proliferation of potentially super strains of bacteria.
02:39:38.000So it's kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't.
02:40:14.000You could walk, you could run, but it wouldn't be like it was before.
02:40:17.000It's not like a Hollywood movie where you get cut and you're fine.
02:40:22.000So basically you're pain free but weak and the other danger of course is there's always the danger of infection that could destroy everything and just the fact that if severe dynamic pressure was put on it, it could pop out and dislocate and that would be a serious problem.
02:40:44.000More severe dynamic pressure than would be required for a regular hip or the same?
02:40:49.000Because obviously any hip can pop out.
02:40:52.000Any hip can pop out, but significantly less in the case of a hip replacement.
02:42:51.000I should be okay for coaching and teaching, but mine is complicated by the fact that I'll have a hip replacement and a knee replacement on the same leg, which is a little more of a gamble.
02:44:16.000Yeah, that is an interesting thing, right, about martial arts is it requires the person who's teaching to be able to perform the movements.
02:44:23.000Yeah, there's literally no other way to do it.
02:45:09.000While I toured in New York, many of my best students in the gym were Puerto Ricans who live— New York has a very high Puerto Rican population.
02:45:15.000They always told me about their homeland, and they would go back and talk about it.
02:49:17.000There were more people in Manhattan than there were in my whole country when I left.
02:49:21.000And moreover, New Zealand is largely an indigenous Maori population, a Polynesian population, and a European population from our colonial past.
02:49:34.000So really, there's a fairly limited sort of group of people.
02:50:27.000And if you're stuck in one place, you develop a routine, you can develop skills, but your life's boring, and you don't really get to see much of the world.
02:50:36.000But New York City was the incredible compromise.
02:50:45.000And so you had all the benefits of travel, of meeting people from every culture and seeing how they lived their lives, etc., etc., while at the same time you had a fixed location from where you could train, develop skills, and become great at the things you loved.
02:50:58.000But it doesn't seem like you really have the time to experience much of what New York City had to offer.
02:51:04.000With the schedule that you had in terms of being there seven days a week, Training people constantly, doing privates all day, training the squad.
02:52:29.000An odd thing about me, Joe, among many odd things, is that I learned to drive in New Zealand in an Austin Morris 1000. It's a car that I believe has around 37 horsepower with a four-speed stick.
02:52:50.000It is literally the most feeble car of all time.
02:52:53.000Like going up a steep hill is like a total challenge.
02:52:56.000Like zero to 60, I'm not even sure if I can get to 60. And that's what I learned to drive on.
02:54:56.000I just love shifting and putting in the clutch and letting it off and go.
02:55:02.000But In terms of, like, sheer technology and brilliance, every time I'm in my Tesla, I'm, like, shaking my head, like, this thing is fucking amazing!
02:56:57.000The shell of these beautiful vintage muscle cars and then they put a custom chassis and they take this custom chassis that they designed specifically to add rigidity to the body and then you have a much more sophisticated suspension technology, independent front and rear suspension.
03:00:15.000And they've shown it only in CGI form.
03:00:18.000They haven't, like, showed it in an actual video form.
03:00:21.000But the video with the CGI is a representation of what this jet propulsion engine out the back, along with this Preposterous four-wheel drive system in about a thousand horsepower takes this really light car that's probably about 2,500 pounds and goes zero to 60 in a little over one second.
03:00:50.000Because normally electric vehicles are very, very heavy because of the batteries.
03:00:54.000Well, the beautiful thing about the electric vehicles is the weight distribution is all at the bottom of the car because the batteries are all below it.
03:02:54.000Autonomous vehicles, Neil deGrasse Tyson was on here a couple days ago and he was talking about that, that autonomous vehicles are going to, within the next 10, 20 years, they're going to be everywhere.
03:03:02.000They're going to be communicating with each other.
03:03:04.000You're just going to sit in it and you're going to tell it where to go and it's going to do everything.
03:03:07.000In one way, it's kind of depressing because you would lose a skill, a skill of driving, which is a pleasurable skill.
03:03:14.000But on the other hand, it's also very liberating insofar as now you have presumably hours of every day.
03:03:19.000If you commute for two hours, now you've got two extra hours in your day where you could research, learn, study.
03:05:33.000Yeah, and then apparently Porsche has an even better to drive electric car.
03:05:39.000My friend Reggie Watts has one of those Porsche Taycans and he had a Tesla before and he said this one is like all the best features of the Tesla but with the kind of handling that you get from a Porsche.
03:08:06.000I think there'd be enthusiasts that still want to drive around electric or gasoline combustion engines, but once you're in one of those electric cars...
03:09:48.000I mean, it just kind of looks like a regular car until you get inside of it and you see all the screens and I'm sure the performance is going to be off the charts too.
03:11:54.000They want to get it to a point where when you go to a station, it only takes a couple minutes because instead of charging your battery, they take your battery out and put a fresh one in.
03:12:04.000So you'll pull into some station, they'll put a new one in, and then you go, like a pit stop.
03:12:12.000And so instead of waiting many hours for a massive battery to charge, they'll just swap it out with one that's fully charged.
03:12:19.000Now, the central component of these batteries, lithium, is relatively rare.
03:12:39.000I don't think there's a real solution other than maybe some new battery technology.
03:12:45.000I think not just lithium ion, but I believe there's a new technology that they're working on.
03:12:55.000I want to say something aluminum-based.
03:12:57.000There's some, you know, instead of lithium-ion, there's some sort of aluminum-based battery technology that's currently in development that they think will charge faster and hold...
03:13:30.000If that's possible, like aluminum is one of the most common metals that you can find on Earth.
03:13:35.000Man, there's some pretty exciting developments for humanity ahead between changes in vehicles, changes in currency, like there's big changes ahead it seems.
03:13:47.000And one of the things that Neil deGrasse Tyson and I were talking about the other day is Neuralink.
03:13:52.000That's Elon's crazy brain interface technology where they're going to start with people that are paralyzed and people that have spinal issues.
03:14:03.000And they're going to use it to help them walk again.
03:14:05.000And it's going to help people with various brain issues.
03:14:09.000Help them achieve a higher state of cognitive function, but then ultimately it's going to be used to advance human cognitive function to the point where in his words you're going to be able to talk without using words.
03:14:24.000Now, most people, they say that to me.
03:14:25.000It's like, oh, one of my stoner friends.
03:14:48.000Have similar shape to that lithium-ion batteries.
03:14:51.000However, these are hybrid battery superconductors which allow them to retain three times more energy and takes up to 70 times lesser times to recharge.
03:16:14.000That's going to change what a human being is.
03:16:16.000Because once that actually becomes something that really does increase your bandwidth to access information, it's going to increase your ability to be more productive, so you're going to be able to generate more wealth.
03:16:31.000The haves versus the have-nots, the gap will increase even wider, which will force more people to do it.
03:16:37.000I think it's going to be like cell phones.
03:16:39.000Cell phones originally were very rare.
03:16:43.000Now everyone has them, and they're very cheap.
03:16:45.000I think that's probably what's going to happen with this sort of technology, which is going to lead to a change of what it means to be a human being.
03:16:53.000A human being is not just going to be Symbiotic with technology and the fact that you choose to be like carry a cell phone, wear glasses, that kind of stuff.
03:18:11.000Right now it's about stopping diseases.
03:18:14.000And I think the original, I think they gave these embryos a resistance to HIV. But it gave them some sort of a cognitive improvement as well and imparted that.
03:18:28.000And then there's just like, once that gets established as something that's possible to do, they're going to keep doing it.
03:18:37.000And they're going to get way better at it.
03:20:11.000So instead of one person speaking Polynesian and another person speaking British or German, rather, you'll have one universal global language that we'll be able to, you know, all use together, which would be really bizarre.
03:20:31.000In the old days, Latin was the universal language for European countries.
03:20:35.000You could go anywhere in the world speaking, at least in the European world, speaking Latin and get along with people who were from the more educated classes.
03:20:44.000Well, there's been speculation about the possibility of developing a universal language in the past.
03:20:49.000It's just never really applied in modern times.
03:20:52.000Some of them were actually pretty good.
03:21:03.000These are things that are going to massively change the direction of humanity.
03:21:08.000But again, one of the unique things about people is the fact that you work with whatever hand you were dealt.
03:21:16.000You work with all these attributes and all of these deficits and pros and you try to figure out how to do your best with what you've got.
03:21:27.000And it's kind of what's cool about seeing a little tiny guy like Marcelo Garcia who figures out a style versus a long guy like Hodger Gracie who figures out a different style.
03:21:41.000Because you have even more variables when you add in striking.
03:21:44.000And just with styles of people, just in life, some people get by with a great sense of humor, other people get by with an insane work ethic and drive.
03:21:56.000It's weird to see all these different kinds of human beings try to figure their way through life.
03:23:07.000He's kind of, as it were, like old school leg locking versus new school.
03:23:12.000That's an oversimplification, but there's some validity to it.
03:23:15.000Both of them have a very strong positional game.
03:23:18.000I think this is a great chance for both athletes to come out in different kinds of ways.
03:23:27.000Luis Panza can say, hey, listen, old school leg locks have validity too.
03:23:32.000And Craig has a chance to either work with his approach to leg locking or he could go a completely different route and play a positional game.
03:23:40.000Craig has a very underestimated positional game.
03:23:42.000He's got great back attack, very, very impressive guard passing skills, and he's getting better at takedowns every day.
03:23:49.000So this match could go in directions that people don't anticipate.