The Joe Rogan Experience - JRE MMA Show #111 with John Danaher

00:00:02.000 Check it out.

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:05.000 Train by day.

00:00:06.000 Joe Rogan Podcast by night.

00:00:08.000 All day.

00:00:09.000 So one of the best things about this Who's Number One thing is that I get to see you once a month.

00:00:20.000 Thank you.

00:00:21.000 I've been enjoying it, man.

00:00:23.000 We've had some wonderful conversations and I figured why not get you in here and let's put one of these down on recording.

00:00:28.000 Thank you.

00:00:29.000 My pleasure.

00:00:30.000 This 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.

00:00:44.000 A lot of jujitsu people are tuning into these things and it's really become a hit.

00:00:51.000 A true key in the development of any sport is some kind of organization which showcases it.

00:00:58.000 For mixed martial arts, it was the UFC. And grappling always struggled with the idea of showcasing the skills of the athletes.

00:01:07.000 There were local shows.

00:01:09.000 When you and I started Jiu-Jitsu, there were crazy local shows where people would just informally come in and compete against each other.

00:01:16.000 But there was nothing that had any kind of overall vision or sustained program over time.

00:01:23.000 And that, I believe, is what Flow Grappling is trying to do here.

00:01:25.000 They're trying to give something, a grappling version of what the UFC has done for mixed martial arts.

00:01:31.000 And the athlete pay is improved dramatically over earlier years.

00:01:38.000 And athlete exposure is massively improved.

00:01:41.000 So it's a very encouraging thing.

00:01:44.000 And the production is excellent.

00:01:45.000 Yes.

00:01:46.000 It's really good.

00:01:47.000 It's great comedy.

00:01:49.000 It'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.

00:01:58.000 As 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.

00:02:08.000 Well, 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.

00:02:20.000 Because 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.

00:02:33.000 So the first, was it first five minutes, there's no points scored?

00:02:37.000 That's correct, yes.

00:02:37.000 And then the next five minutes you score points.

00:02:39.000 So you get guys stalling out for five minutes.

00:02:42.000 So 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.

00:02:53.000 The norm is Points-based guys who are just trying to win.

00:02:57.000 That's correct.

00:02:58.000 As a general rule, athletes are smart and they want to win.

00:03:03.000 So 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.

00:03:15.000 And yet the spectators are demanding something else.

00:03:20.000 They're demanding entertainment.

00:03:22.000 And in the sport of jiu-jitsu, the most entertaining thing you can do is to push the action towards submission holds.

00:03:30.000 And submissions function in grappling the same way a knockout punch does in boxing.

00:03:34.000 And it's the most desired result.

00:03:36.000 It's also the most impressive result.

00:03:38.000 If you think, Joe, back to when you first started jiu-jitsu, what was its primary appeal?

00:03:44.000 Well, I think for the overwhelming majority of practitioners of jiu-jitsu was the idea of submission.

00:03:50.000 I think that's the only appeal.

00:03:51.000 I don't think you could ever say to anybody, I find it appealing to win on points. 0.91

00:03:55.000 It's ridiculous. 0.73

00:03:56.000 Or even worse on advantage. 0.97

00:03:57.000 Just wrestle if you want to do that.

00:04:00.000 When 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.

00:04:12.000 It's surrender.

00:04:13.000 You make someone surrender to you.

00:04:16.000 Like, 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.

00:04:29.000 And in wrestling, a pin, they're not as decisive.

00:04:32.000 Like, 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.

00:04:38.000 That's not a difficult thing to conceive of.

00:04:40.000 It's easy to conceive of someone who got thrown pretty hard and still kept fighting and won.

00:04:44.000 But when you surrender, that's you saying, I quit.

00:04:49.000 It's over.

00:04:49.000 And that's the most definitive form of victory possible in any form of grappling.

00:04:55.000 And that, I think, was the true appeal of jiu-jitsu.

00:04:58.000 The further you get away from the idea that jiu-jitsu is about control leading to submission, the less interesting the sport becomes.

00:05:10.000 We must do as much as possible to push athletes towards that expression of Jiu Jitsu.

00:05:19.000 Don't just win by the minimum amount to get the job done, but go the extra distance and try to win by submission.

00:05:26.000 Now, you just mentioned the name of Marcelo Garcia.

00:05:29.000 He was one of a handful of athletes.

00:05:32.000 You 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.

00:05:46.000 And what do you notice about those athletes?

00:05:49.000 They're legends.

00:05:50.000 They're legends.

00:05:51.000 They're loved to a degree which all those other athletes...

00:05:55.000 And don't forget, they both lost.

00:05:57.000 They both had their losses.

00:05:58.000 They weren't undefeatable.

00:05:59.000 But they're legends because of the way they fought as much as for the victories themselves.

00:06:06.000 Yeah, they represented true jujitsu.

00:06:08.000 They represented the ideal of control to submission.

00:06:11.000 And 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.

00:06:24.000 And you have to go into expressing the ideal of jujitsu.

00:06:29.000 Now, 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.

00:06:40.000 That was the intention in ADCC, the Abu Dhabi approach.

00:06:45.000 They took away points in the first five minutes so that athletes would be encouraged to go for submission holds. 0.58

00:06:52.000 Now, some of them were, but as you correctly pointed out, most of them weren't.

00:06:56.000 They 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.

00:07:08.000 So what I truly believe is that there's never going to be a rule set which forces athletes towards submission.

00:07:17.000 The way it's going to change is through culture.

00:07:19.000 It'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.

00:07:43.000 A good athlete can always game the rules to get the minimum method of victory.

00:07:50.000 There's always a way.

00:07:52.000 Like, 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.

00:08:02.000 So it's not going to come from rules.

00:08:03.000 They've tried in the past and it just hasn't worked.

00:08:06.000 In fact, it's actually had some negative connotations, as you pointed out.

00:08:11.000 So it's got to come from a training room culture, and that's what I try to do with my squad.

00:08:16.000 When 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?

00:08:27.000 About going to a certain amount of time and then...

00:08:30.000 See, the pro and con is the pro is you're forced to...

00:08:35.000 You're in a real bad situation from the jump.

00:08:38.000 Either back mount or armbar defense.

00:08:41.000 The con is that you didn't really get there.

00:08:44.000 You kind of got forced into that position, which is very odd.

00:08:47.000 For 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.

00:09:00.000 What do you feel about those?

00:09:01.000 It was a fascinating rule set.

00:09:03.000 It's actually the rule set by which the squad originally made their name.

00:09:08.000 Long before their success is in ADCC. Unfortunately, it too runs into problems with athletes gaming the system.

00:09:17.000 There'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.

00:09:28.000 So it creates the same sense in which the athletes won't engage.

00:09:33.000 I 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.

00:09:47.000 I believe they were the only athletes who ever achieved that.

00:09:51.000 In other words, they didn't see overtime as a desirable thing.

00:09:54.000 They all considered overtime as kind of like, yeah, you failed.

00:09:58.000 If you had to get to overtime, it was failure.

00:10:00.000 Whereas many of the athletes now see overtime as the best strategy to win.

00:10:04.000 Avoid contact for 10 minutes, then try to win in overtime.

00:10:07.000 So unfortunately, even EBI runs into the same problem of athletes gaming the system.

00:10:13.000 And so I'll just repeat my point that at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what system you offer.

00:10:20.000 People will find a way to use the rules to their advantage.

00:10:25.000 And that ultimately the solution lies not in rules, but in the training culture and the gyms that you come from.

00:10:33.000 Ideally, in my opinion, a no time limit submission match is the way to go.

00:10:39.000 That's the way you find out.

00:10:40.000 Unfortunately, it's impractical as a TV event, but I couldn't agree more.

00:10:45.000 There's no more definitive result than a no time limit match.

00:10:50.000 It's hard to argue with the result.

00:10:52.000 I feel like it's not good for TV, but we're not on TV. We're streaming.

00:10:58.000 It's no different than a podcast, in my opinion.

00:11:00.000 If I went to a television network and said, I have this idea.

00:11:04.000 I want to have these three-hour conversations.

00:11:06.000 What kind of people?

00:11:07.000 Well, one day I'm going to have a jiu-jitsu coach, and the other day I'm going to have a scientist. 1.00

00:11:11.000 Get the fuck out of here. 0.99

00:11:12.000 That's not going to work. 0.99

00:11:13.000 That's true.

00:11:14.000 But it will work if it's good.

00:11:16.000 And I feel that with streaming and jiu-jitsu.

00:11:20.000 If you got Gordon Ryan and Cyborg to agree to a match, say Gordon's healthy again, Why would you have a time limit on that?

00:11:28.000 I want to see that play out.

00:11:30.000 You're talking to someone who agrees with you.

00:11:33.000 I know I am.

00:11:36.000 I will try and play devil's advocate from the point of view of the producers of a show.

00:11:42.000 They run multiple matches per show.

00:11:47.000 Good.

00:11:47.000 Do it all day.

00:11:49.000 Start at 5pm, run that pitch till midnight.

00:11:52.000 Let's see what's up.

00:11:53.000 Yeah, it's a tough one in terms of how you're going to get the warm-ups done.

00:11:58.000 I don't know.

00:12:00.000 This match in front of me could be four hours long.

00:12:03.000 That's true.

00:12:04.000 When do I begin my warm-up for the next match?

00:12:06.000 I 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...

00:12:14.000 This, I believe, could be practical.

00:12:15.000 It could be practical.

00:12:16.000 You 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.

00:12:28.000 Ideally, how much time does an athlete need to get to warm up?

00:12:32.000 It depends on the athlete, but you'd want at least 15 minutes as an absolute minimum.

00:12:37.000 So 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.

00:12:48.000 You know, maybe eat a little bit of fruit and just prepare yourself.

00:12:51.000 It could happen at any moment or it could happen an hour from now.

00:12:54.000 Yes.

00:12:55.000 It would have some interesting effects on pacing of the matches.

00:13:00.000 There's basically two ways you can go.

00:13:02.000 You 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.

00:13:16.000 Or 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.

00:13:25.000 I remember when Gordon fought Keenan Cornelius in a no time limit match relatively early in his career.

00:13:34.000 There was a fairly low pace of action.

00:13:37.000 It wasn't a boring match, but it was slow-paced for a reason.

00:13:41.000 Both athletes were smart.

00:13:42.000 Neither one had ever lost in a no-time-limit match previously, and one of them had to go down.

00:13:48.000 And ultimately, it worked into a very, very slow, long match of around one and a half hours, I believe, until Gordon won by submission.

00:13:59.000 One and a half hours.

00:14:00.000 Yeah.

00:14:01.000 Wow.

00:14:01.000 Yeah.

00:14:01.000 I love it.

00:14:02.000 Yeah.

00:14:03.000 I love that.

00:14:04.000 We would love it.

00:14:05.000 Love it.

00:14:05.000 It would be tough to explain to a complete beginner.

00:14:08.000 Yeah, but maybe not have that for a complete beginner.

00:14:11.000 Maybe, you know, that's like the king of kings.

00:14:13.000 Let's see what's up.

00:14:14.000 Let's get it.

00:14:15.000 I remember I read a story about when Mark Schultz first rolled with Hicks and Gracie, and he put Hicks in a cradle for an hour.

00:14:25.000 Really?

00:14:25.000 Yeah.

00:14:26.000 That's amazing. 0.95

00:14:26.000 He just had him in the cradle and just was hanging on to him, and it fucking lasted forever. 0.95

00:14:31.000 I 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. 0.90

00:14:40.000 Amazing.

00:14:41.000 But it took a while.

00:14:42.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:14:43.000 You know, Mark.

00:14:44.000 He was a freak athlete.

00:14:46.000 I mean, he was an amazing wrestler.

00:14:48.000 When you see him, you ever see the video of him?

00:14:50.000 I forget.

00:14:51.000 I think it was a man from Iran or Turkey.

00:14:54.000 I forget who the guy was.

00:14:55.000 Oh, you're talking about the 1984 Olympics.

00:14:58.000 He fought the Turkish athlete.

00:15:00.000 I believe that Turk was actually the favorite.

00:15:02.000 He was the world champion the previous year, I believe.

00:15:05.000 And yeah, he legitimately broke his arm with Kimura.

00:15:08.000 Yeah, he tore it apart.

00:15:10.000 See if we can find that.

00:15:12.000 Because it's pretty wild.

00:15:14.000 I mean, first of all, he's just a ball of muscle. 0.99

00:15:18.000 I mean, Mark Schultz in his prime was a fucking savage. 0.98

00:15:22.000 I understand he was actually a gymnast before he was a wrestler. 0.99

00:15:25.000 I believe it.

00:15:25.000 And he started wrestling relatively late.

00:15:28.000 His brother Dave started much earlier than him.

00:15:30.000 Wow.

00:15:30.000 And convinced him to try it.

00:15:34.000 His 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. 0.94

00:15:50.000 Because in the movie about his life story, he faces a Russian guy in this one cage fight that he has. 0.76

00:15:58.000 But it's a part of mixed martial arts history that he fought Big Daddy Goodrich.

00:16:04.000 Big Daddy comes out with the karate gi on.

00:16:08.000 Big Daddy was a big giant striker.

00:16:10.000 He wasn't a Russian.

00:16:11.000 He was an American.

00:16:11.000 He was a Canadian, actually.

00:16:12.000 What was the motivation for them changing history? 1.00

00:16:16.000 Assholes! 1.00

00:16:17.000 Assholes in Hollywood who just decide that they want to put their own spin on things. 1.00

00:16:21.000 You know, let's make it a Russian guy. 1.00

00:16:23.000 Like, for no fucking reason they changed this man's life story. 0.98

00:16:27.000 For no reason. 0.99

00:16:28.000 Makes no sense.

00:16:29.000 Makes no sense.

00:16:30.000 The Cold War was over at that point.

00:16:31.000 Yeah.

00:16:32.000 But not only that, there's no pro or con to doing it.

00:16:35.000 You're just changing history.

00:16:37.000 Imagine if instead of Reggie Jackson hitting home runs for the Yankees, you just had put in some other random person.

00:16:44.000 Why would you do that?

00:16:45.000 History is history.

00:16:47.000 Martial arts history is no different than football history or baseball history. 0.99

00:16:51.000 It's fucking history. 0.99

00:16:52.000 You can't change it. 1.00

00:16:53.000 You're doing a movie on a man's life story.

00:16:55.000 And 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.

00:17:08.000 It's what it is.

00:17:09.000 If you change that, what other important moments of his life did you lie about? 0.98

00:17:14.000 What other weird shit did you change? 0.96

00:17:17.000 Once you lose credibility in one area, it's open season. 0.99

00:17:20.000 The reason why I say it's not important, because it was a walkthrough for him.

00:17:25.000 He just took Big Daddy down, beat him up. 0.99

00:17:26.000 It was a very impressive match.

00:17:28.000 Very impressive.

00:17:29.000 He was an insane wrestler.

00:17:31.000 He was so good.

00:17:31.000 He just took him down at will, anytime he wanted to.

00:17:33.000 I think he could have done that to virtually everybody in the division.

00:17:37.000 He probably could have been a world champion, but they will never know, because they never let him fight again.

00:17:42.000 But the fact that they change the opponent, And they just made up some random guy.

00:17:48.000 It doesn't make any sense.

00:17:50.000 What else did you lie about?

00:17:52.000 Because you lied about that.

00:17:54.000 Because now I've got to look at that whole movie like, is this movie real?

00:17:57.000 What is this movie?

00:17:58.000 I know DuPont killed his brother.

00:18:01.000 I know that for a fact.

00:18:03.000 But all the other stuff did you just make up? 1.00

00:18:05.000 The fuck did you do here? 1.00

00:18:07.000 It just infuriates me. 1.00

00:18:10.000 Yes, yes, this is it.

00:18:12.000 Watch this.

00:18:14.000 So he dives in this Kimura and boom!

00:18:17.000 Just tears it apart.

00:18:19.000 Pins the guy.

00:18:22.000 Now, what did they do?

00:18:23.000 Did they disqualify him for that?

00:18:25.000 If 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.

00:18:45.000 The rules were quirky back then.

00:18:48.000 And I believe because it was early on in the Olympic roster, he was allowed back into competition despite the disqualification.

00:19:00.000 Yeah, here it says, somewhat graphic, showing the Turk's elbow being broken. 0.97

00:19:04.000 Since the Turk could not continue, obviously Mark was still able to come away with the gold medal. 0.99

00:19:07.000 This is commentary and then shows the move breaking the...

00:19:10.000 Give me one more time on that. 0.99

00:19:11.000 Let me see that one more time because it's fucking crazy. 0.98

00:19:15.000 It's such an effective technique. 0.99

00:19:18.000 It's, um...

00:19:19.000 Oh, so they're going to show it in a slow motion version here.

00:19:26.000 It's funny, they're angled too, I think.

00:19:27.000 It's funny that this is illegal.

00:19:29.000 For us, it's like, oh, perfect.

00:19:31.000 Oh my god.

00:19:33.000 That is literally exactly like Minotauro and Frank Mir.

00:19:36.000 Yes.

00:19:37.000 Same break.

00:19:38.000 Upper arm break.

00:19:40.000 Yeah.

00:19:41.000 The Jacare Sousa fight against Muniz from a couple weeks ago.

00:19:47.000 Yes.

00:19:47.000 How insane was that?

00:19:48.000 Amazing.

00:19:49.000 And again, the bone breaking rather than the soft tissue of the elbow.

00:19:53.000 And so loud, too.

00:19:55.000 Oh my god.

00:19:56.000 Clearly audible.

00:19:57.000 Even as it happened, you knew what had happened.

00:19:59.000 Have you seen a guy's arm break in that position before?

00:20:04.000 The jujigachami, the straight arm lock, is always compounded when the forearm is captured behind the back.

00:20:13.000 It creates a much more efficient interplay between lever and fulcrum and much, much harder to twist out and deny the effects of leverage.

00:20:22.000 And so you see some particularly nasty breaks with that version.

00:20:26.000 That one was scary to me because I was picturing training room situations and I was like, there wasn't a lot of time to tap there.

00:20:33.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:20:34.000 It happened pretty quickly.

00:20:35.000 Yeah.

00:20:36.000 Anytime you start with the arm captured behind the back, the arm's already extended when the lock begins.

00:20:43.000 And 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.

00:20:56.000 So, for example, normally when you get attacked in Jujukitama, your hands are locked defensively.

00:21:00.000 So there's a 90-degree bend in your arm.

00:21:03.000 So there's a long range of motion before threatening any form of catastrophic damage.

00:21:10.000 But when the arm is trapped behind the back, you already start with a straight arm.

00:21:13.000 And so any small movement forward will take it into the breaking zone.

00:21:17.000 See if you can find that.

00:21:18.000 I don't know if the UFC has pulled that offline.

00:21:20.000 Do they have that?

00:21:22.000 It's got to be somewhere.

00:21:23.000 Someone must have put it on YouTube.

00:21:25.000 It's very interesting.

00:21:26.000 What's interesting is Muniz said before the fight that he believed he had a grappling advantage over Jacare.

00:21:31.000 Interesting.

00:21:31.000 Wild talk, right?

00:21:33.000 That's wild talk.

00:21:34.000 Talk is one thing.

00:21:36.000 Justification is another.

00:21:37.000 What was his reasoning for saying that?

00:21:39.000 Did he just make the statement or did he argue for it?

00:21:42.000 Well, I am not aware of his grappling credentials.

00:21:45.000 I really didn't know too much about him other than watching some highlights online. 0.98

00:21:51.000 But Alex Davis, who I have a lot of respect for, he said to me after the fight, he's like, I'm telling you, this guy is a fucking freak. 0.95

00:21:59.000 He's like, he's incredible. 0.96

00:22:00.000 He's a really talented grappler.

00:22:02.000 Interesting.

00:22:02.000 And when you see the, just, first of all, he took down Jacare at will multiple times.

00:22:08.000 time so let's see if he was here again bring it back all the way to the beginning That snap is so loud.

00:22:30.000 That is a horrific sound.

00:22:33.000 I admire Jacare's stoicism, man.

00:22:35.000 Yes.

00:22:36.000 Impressive.

00:22:37.000 Oh yeah, he smiled.

00:22:38.000 He said good job to the guy afterwards.

00:22:41.000 Hugged him with his left.

00:22:43.000 I mean, pretty crazy.

00:22:44.000 But that man, he's got a bright future.

00:22:47.000 And that's a crazy division right there, too.

00:22:51.000 Has there been any talk of his next fight?

00:22:53.000 Nope.

00:22:54.000 It just happened, so we'll see.

00:22:56.000 Right now, the title fight is two weeks from tomorrow.

00:23:01.000 Israel Adesanya and Marvin Vittori fight again.

00:23:05.000 They have a rematch of a very difficult fight that happened for Israel's first fight in the UFC. Interesting.

00:23:12.000 Yeah.

00:23:12.000 Vittori's a beast, man.

00:23:14.000 He's a very dangerous guy.

00:23:16.000 Really well-rounded.

00:23:17.000 How long ago since the first fight?

00:23:19.000 I want to say 2017, if I remember correctly.

00:23:23.000 I think it was 17 or 18. Not that long ago.

00:23:31.000 Israel's rise to the throne has been pretty spectacular.

00:23:34.000 It was very fast.

00:23:36.000 I mean, I think he was three years in, he was the champ.

00:23:40.000 18. Okay.

00:23:42.000 And so that was... 1.00

00:23:43.000 Marvin's a fucking tough guy. 1.00

00:23:46.000 A really difficult guy to handle. 1.00

00:23:48.000 Because he can do everything.

00:23:49.000 He's a good wrestler.

00:23:50.000 He's a good striker.

00:23:52.000 He comes from King's MMA. So Rafael Cordero trains him.

00:23:57.000 He's really well versed.

00:23:58.000 So he's a tough guy.

00:24:01.000 Interesting.

00:24:01.000 Yeah.

00:24:03.000 But that was a superb break.

00:24:06.000 Spectacular.

00:24:07.000 I must watch that guy in the future.

00:24:08.000 Yeah, 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.

00:24:25.000 You 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.

00:24:37.000 Yeah.

00:24:38.000 So many variables at play.

00:24:39.000 There's something like that fight. 0.95

00:24:41.000 You know, Jacare was fucking him up, standing up.

00:24:43.000 And he just figured his way out and took the most unlikely path to success against a super accomplished world champion grappler. 0.86

00:24:52.000 Yeah, Jacare's as good as they get.

00:24:54.000 Yeah.

00:24:57.000 Perhaps some of the answer comes from what you just said, the idea that Jacare was dominating the standing striking.

00:25:05.000 That probably clues you into the fact that over the last few years, the absolute majority of his training has been in standing striking.

00:25:13.000 That's why you see the significant improvements and possibly at the detriment of his grappling.

00:25:17.000 Yeah, that could be a problem, right?

00:25:19.000 Always remember that skills are perishable.

00:25:21.000 Very perishable.

00:25:23.000 And as you focus on one thing, it always comes at the price of your earlier skills.

00:25:29.000 And you'd be horrified at how quickly, in a very competitive environment, skills that you don't maintain don't last very long.

00:25:38.000 I remember that with elite wrestlers, like elite guys like Josh Koschek, as he started really only concentrating on his striking.

00:25:46.000 Suddenly started getting taken down.

00:25:47.000 Yes, yeah.

00:25:48.000 It's kind of crazy, right?

00:25:49.000 Because you think, like, hey, you know, multiple-time champion wrestling, you know, Division I All-American, no one's taking me down, right?

00:25:58.000 And 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.

00:26:03.000 Exactly, yeah.

00:26:04.000 Weird.

00:26:06.000 It's not even a question of your skills diminishing.

00:26:08.000 It's a question of your skills diminishing as another person's skills are rising.

00:26:13.000 So you get that double effect.

00:26:16.000 So 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.

00:26:27.000 That's why it's so fascinating to see different athletes' approaches to mixed martial arts, because it's so open-ended.

00:26:37.000 You know, some athletes have a very grappling-heavy style, some athletes have a very striking-heavy style, and like, what do you concentrate on?

00:26:45.000 Say 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?

00:26:56.000 How do you determine what to focus on the most?

00:26:58.000 Is it based on opponents?

00:26:59.000 In 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.

00:27:10.000 If you are much more, as it were, fixed in one skill set, you can't tailor your skill set to an opponent.

00:27:19.000 So, for example, when a very, very jiu-jitsu heavy athlete like Damien Maier fights, all of his fights look essentially the same.

00:27:32.000 It'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.

00:27:44.000 With 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.

00:27:57.000 Do you remember when Damien Maia had Kamaru Usman's back standing and they separated him?

00:28:04.000 Yes, yeah. 0.96

00:28:05.000 I was throwing shit at the TV watching that the other day. 1.00

00:28:08.000 Going, what the fuck? 0.99

00:28:11.000 Because I remember it at the time and then I remember watching it again. 0.99

00:28:14.000 Because Damien finished a lot of people in that position.

00:28:17.000 And it was dry, and it was early, and it's like, why would you separate them?

00:28:23.000 I 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.

00:28:40.000 I couldn't agree more.

00:28:41.000 People get mad at me.

00:28:42.000 They go, boo, that's boring.

00:28:45.000 But if you can't get up, you shouldn't get up. 1.00

00:28:48.000 If a guy can take you down and hold you down, tough shit. 0.99

00:28:53.000 My bias is always towards as little referee's intervention as possible. 0.99

00:28:57.000 Might as well.

00:28:59.000 Unfortunately, that's very much the minority of you.

00:29:02.000 I've seen people get stood up from side control, which is crazy.

00:29:06.000 It's so hard to get someone in side control.

00:29:09.000 And you only have a few minutes to work, and you hear the referee going, let's work, let's work.

00:29:12.000 I 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.

00:29:26.000 I 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.

00:29:35.000 You've got to get used to it.

00:29:36.000 Yeah.

00:29:36.000 Yeah, you've just got to get used to it.

00:29:37.000 I mean, that's part of the job.

00:29:38.000 But I couldn't agree more.

00:29:39.000 The less referee's intervention, the better.

00:29:42.000 And that way you get a much more honest assessment of the outcome.

00:29:45.000 In every sense.

00:29:46.000 Even pressed up against the cage.

00:29:48.000 When a guy's got a guy pressed up against the cage and he's just holding them there, Get out.

00:29:52.000 Get out of there.

00:29:53.000 You don't like it there?

00:29:54.000 Get out of there.

00:29:55.000 Or don't get out.

00:29:57.000 But this is how it's playing out.

00:29:58.000 And people say it's boring. 1.00

00:30:00.000 You fucking watch baseball. 1.00

00:30:03.000 You watch baseball? 1.00

00:30:04.000 You think that's boring?

00:30:05.000 At any moment, someone could do a spinning elbow and knock someone unconscious.

00:30:09.000 Yeah, 100%.

00:30:10.000 How could that possibly be boring?

00:30:12.000 And 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. 0.97

00:30:25.000 Let's see what happens then.

00:30:26.000 Yes.

00:30:28.000 No, you're absolutely right.

00:30:29.000 Even in the situations like the fence is usually described as the most boring part of mixed martial arts.

00:30:36.000 You drive someone to fence, nothing happens.

00:30:37.000 But 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.

00:30:49.000 You've seen it so many times.

00:30:51.000 Anything can happen at any time.

00:30:52.000 So just let them go.

00:30:54.000 Let them go, yeah.

00:30:55.000 And 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.

00:31:06.000 And 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.

00:31:20.000 The way to think about it is don't let the boos of the crowd incentivize the athletes to attack.

00:31:29.000 Let the eyes of the crowd incentivize the athletes to attack.

00:31:34.000 Because if you're boring, the next time they're not going to watch you.

00:31:37.000 Yes.

00:31:38.000 Yeah.

00:31:38.000 Let them select on their own.

00:31:40.000 Don't listen to boos.

00:31:41.000 Watch where their eyes are going.

00:31:42.000 If you're an exciting fighter, you're going to have eyes on the screen looking at you.

00:31:47.000 That should be your incentive to action, not the boos of the crowd.

00:31:51.000 When 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.

00:32:02.000 Oh, yeah.

00:32:03.000 Pretty amazing that you can do both, that you can train them in both jiu-jitsu and also train them in striking.

00:32:10.000 And I know you have a background in striking, but still...

00:32:13.000 When 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.

00:32:26.000 The primary concern is submissions, right?

00:32:28.000 Like oftentimes you'll see Gordon will sit, pull guard, all these things that are not possible in MMA or very rare.

00:32:36.000 That's very rare, yes.

00:32:38.000 How much of a shift is it to train them for mixed martial arts?

00:32:43.000 Because 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.

00:32:53.000 That's correct.

00:32:54.000 The big challenge for most jiu-jitsu players when they try to apply their craft in mixed martial arts One, can they get it to the ground?

00:33:05.000 That's a challenge in itself.

00:33:07.000 And an even greater challenge is, can you keep it on the ground?

00:33:10.000 It means nothing if you take someone down, if they just spring back up within three to five seconds.

00:33:15.000 It's energy spent that had no reward.

00:33:20.000 A 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.

00:33:31.000 And if you start in the bottom, you stay in the bottom.

00:33:35.000 The moment you get into a mixed martial arts context, that goes right out the window.

00:33:40.000 And now you have two responsibilities.

00:33:42.000 You don't just have to pass your opponent's guard from top position, you have to hold them down while you're doing it.

00:33:48.000 And that's not easy.

00:33:52.000 When 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.

00:34:02.000 If you're mounted, you elbow escape, you put him back in guard.

00:34:06.000 If the guy's got a side pin on you, you elbow escape, put him back in guard.

00:34:10.000 If the guy's behind you, you do a forward roll, spin back into him, put him back in guard.

00:34:15.000 90% of the escapes in Jiu-Jitsu are escapes back to guard position.

00:34:19.000 And so when you start in bottom position, you tend to stay in bottom position.

00:34:25.000 Now contrast that with the sport of wrestling.

00:34:28.000 Where the overwhelming majority of escapes are escapes to standing back up to a neutral position on your feet.

00:34:36.000 That means that when jiu-jitsu players face other forms of grappling, they're not trying to put us back in guard.

00:34:43.000 They're trying to stand up.

00:34:45.000 And jiu-jitsu players never practice against that when they're doing their daily training.

00:34:49.000 And so suddenly you've got a guy who just assumes for his entire career that if he's on top, the other guy's going to play guard.

00:34:55.000 And this guy's not playing guard at all.

00:34:57.000 He's just pushing your head, standing up and hip-hiking up to his feet.

00:35:00.000 The jiu-jitsu guys are like, well, I had top position.

00:35:03.000 Why aren't you playing guard?

00:35:04.000 And so they're now put into an area where nothing in their training has really prepared them for this.

00:35:11.000 And jiu-jitsu is going to have to mature.

00:35:14.000 I've always said jiu-jitsu is one of the greatest products I ever saw in my life.

00:35:20.000 I wouldn't have invested 30 years of my life into Jiu-Jitsu if I didn't believe that with all my heart and all my soul.

00:35:26.000 But like any great product, it has its deficiencies.

00:35:30.000 Jiu-Jitsu always had three major deficiencies.

00:35:34.000 Leg locks, takedowns, and thirdly, the one that no one talks about, the ability to impose top position once it's gained.

00:35:48.000 A huge part of my career has been the recognition and the attempt to change these three great faults in Jiu Jitsu.

00:35:58.000 As much as I love Jiu Jitsu, we've got to take a step back and take an honest look at it.

00:36:03.000 It's got these three deeply entwined faults within it.

00:36:08.000 Leg locks was the most obvious one.

00:36:10.000 In 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.

00:36:18.000 That was lunacy.

00:36:19.000 And 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.

00:36:27.000 The younger generation of jujitsu I would match them against any grappling out in the world on leg locks with no fear whatsoever.

00:36:37.000 I couldn't have said that 15 years ago.

00:36:39.000 But things have changed.

00:36:41.000 Now we need to address the other two great weaknesses.

00:36:44.000 Jiu-jitsu has to do something about the crisis which is starting to emerge around takedowns and the ability to impose top position.

00:36:51.000 What you're seeing among jiu-jitsu athletes now who go into mixed martial arts is they just have to turn to other arts.

00:36:57.000 They have to learn wrestling.

00:36:58.000 They have to learn these – and there's nothing wrong with that.

00:37:00.000 But 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.

00:37:12.000 Now, for most of the athletes, jiu-jitsu is something you learn to stay out of some pesky submission holds.

00:37:17.000 It's not the be-all and focus for most of the athletes in mixed martial arts.

00:37:21.000 Most of them are centered around kickboxing skills and wrestling.

00:37:27.000 I 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.

00:37:38.000 I don't believe it's a satisfactory answer.

00:37:42.000 I believe it's a cop-out to say, well, just learn some wrestling.

00:37:48.000 Just as many people told me 20 years ago, oh, you want to learn leg locks?

00:37:52.000 Just do some samba.

00:37:54.000 I was never happy with that answer.

00:37:56.000 That's why I didn't do it.

00:37:58.000 Okay, first of all, samba as a sport doesn't even allow heel hooks.

00:38:01.000 It only allows straight leg locks, knee bars and Achilles locks.

00:38:05.000 There's no heel hooks in competition samba. 0.95

00:38:10.000 And 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.

00:38:19.000 Where did the heel hook originate from?

00:38:23.000 Originate?

00:38:23.000 I can't give an accurate answer.

00:38:25.000 When I began Jiu-Ditsu in the 1990s, most of the early people I saw employing heel hooks were from Japan, people like Romina Sato.

00:38:35.000 Iminari.

00:38:36.000 Iminari's a little bit after Sato, but yeah, he was definitely one of them.

00:38:41.000 And so it's tough to say where its origins are.

00:38:45.000 There's no mention of it in judo textbooks.

00:38:48.000 The one leg lock they mention is just a hackneyed version of a knee reap.

00:38:56.000 Not very effective.

00:38:57.000 Is it possible that it's a catch wrestling technique?

00:39:00.000 It's possible.

00:39:01.000 That's a lot of what came to Japan, right? 0.89

00:39:03.000 Yeah.

00:39:04.000 But then it's the history of catch wrestling.

00:39:08.000 I'm no expert in it, but there's so many competing points of views and there's so little reliable information.

00:39:15.000 There's very little video or photographs which definitively show the application of them.

00:39:24.000 There's video footage of Elio Gracie demonstrating a heel hook.

00:39:29.000 It's not a particularly well-applied heel hook, but it is recognizably a heel hook.

00:39:35.000 So it seems that they did know about it.

00:39:38.000 And this is from the 20s or 30s?

00:39:40.000 No, I'm guessing by his age this would be like 70s.

00:39:44.000 He looked pretty old when he was doing it.

00:39:48.000 So it appears that there was knowledge of it, but as to its origins, I can't give you any accurate statement on that.

00:39:57.000 I can't give you any evidence-based statements.

00:39:59.000 It's a really good question.

00:40:00.000 When was it first applied in competition on a large scale?

00:40:04.000 But I've never seen any compelling evidence to say this is like the first examples.

00:40:11.000 For example, the triangle, stranglehold, there's very strong evidence to suggest that its origins are shortly before the First World War.

00:40:21.000 There appears to have been no use of the triangle prior to that.

00:40:26.000 So we do have a pretty good idea that the triangle stranglehold started sometime around 1910 to 1913 in Japan.

00:40:34.000 There seems to be no evidence of triangles used before that.

00:40:38.000 There's no mention of them in Greek textbooks of pancreation or anything.

00:40:42.000 What art was it used in in Japan?

00:40:44.000 In judo competition.

00:40:46.000 That's an interesting thing because Maeda was from a generation...

00:40:51.000 He left Japan, so he's from a generation of judo players that didn't know the triangle.

00:40:56.000 So when he went to Brazil and taught, he didn't teach the triangle because he'd never learned it.

00:41:01.000 He left before 1910. That's why the triangle was only part of juditsu in the 1970s.

00:41:08.000 Really?

00:41:09.000 Yes, it's an odd history.

00:41:10.000 So when Elio was young, there was no triangle?

00:41:14.000 There's no triangle.

00:41:15.000 Wow!

00:41:16.000 I 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.

00:41:26.000 I believe that's the story.

00:41:27.000 But Maeda left Japan before the triangle was invented, and so it was never part of his instruction.

00:41:34.000 That's incredible.

00:41:36.000 Now what about the Kimura?

00:41:37.000 Because the Kimura... 0.94

00:41:38.000 This is very old.

00:41:40.000 Double wrist lock?

00:41:41.000 You see old drawings and renditions of it from medieval times.

00:41:46.000 And I also believe not only in Japan, but also in other cultures as well.

00:41:49.000 So this one's pretty clear.

00:41:52.000 Interesting though that they named it after a guy who beat Elio.

00:41:57.000 Only the Brazilians name it that.

00:41:59.000 The Japanese call it Urigarami.

00:42:01.000 Okay.

00:42:01.000 So they have their own name for it.

00:42:03.000 So only the Brazilians call it Kimora.

00:42:06.000 But we all call it Kimora now.

00:42:08.000 Yes.

00:42:08.000 I mean, it's kind of universal.

00:42:09.000 The Brazilians.

00:42:10.000 If I was doing commentary and I said, he's got a double wrist lock, people would go, what are you saying?

00:42:14.000 That's true.

00:42:15.000 Imagine if you said Udi Garami.

00:42:17.000 They'd freak out on you.

00:42:18.000 Well, you love all those Japanese names.

00:42:21.000 Jujika Tami.

00:42:22.000 You love all that stuff, right?

00:42:23.000 Yeah.

00:42:23.000 I like to give credit where it's due.

00:42:27.000 These old masters were remarkable people.

00:42:30.000 Remarkable people.

00:42:31.000 Sure.

00:42:32.000 You can still see old black and white footage of judo masters like Oda teaching.

00:42:38.000 They had some pretty advanced stuff.

00:42:40.000 Some of it was really impressive.

00:42:44.000 So when it's applicable, I like to give credit.

00:42:47.000 Now, I don't always do it.

00:42:49.000 I use the term kimura. 0.99

00:42:50.000 So you're probably asking, well, why don't you use all Japanese terms?

00:42:54.000 Why only some?

00:42:54.000 Well, there's practical considerations too.

00:42:57.000 The Japanese call kimura urigurami.

00:43:00.000 Now, in a crowded auditorium when my athlete's competing, I can't use the name urigurami because it sounds too much phonetically like ashigurami.

00:43:09.000 So if I call it urigurami when You've got thousands of people screaming, then my athlete might mishear me.

00:43:16.000 So I use kimura, because phonetically it's so different that there's no confusion.

00:43:21.000 So there's also practical elements, too.

00:43:25.000 Some of the Japanese names are too long.

00:43:28.000 For example, Udigurami has two variations, where one is up the American lock and down, which we call kimura.

00:43:36.000 And the Japanese term doesn't distinguish between the two.

00:43:41.000 You have to use a much longer terminology in order to make that distinction.

00:43:44.000 It's too long.

00:43:45.000 I can't call out a four-word phrase.

00:43:49.000 By the time I relay the message, the opportunity is gone.

00:43:53.000 So there's practical considerations in the use of names as well.

00:43:56.000 Wasn't the Americana, that was another thing, Holes was famous for applying that as well, and bringing that to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

00:44:04.000 Yeah, I believe the idea of, first of all, it's a strange thing to call it Americana.

00:44:09.000 I believe it was named after an American wrestler who used to visit or train with Holes, who used to use it a lot.

00:44:17.000 And so they named, an American was using it, so they called it Americana.

00:44:21.000 I could be wrong about that, but I believe that's the legend.

00:44:24.000 It'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.

00:44:36.000 Like 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.

00:44:56.000 I don't think there's another thing like it in terms of athletics.

00:45:00.000 If you look at any other sport there's incremental increases in the abilities of the athletes but nothing comparable to martial arts.

00:45:08.000 I'm so glad you said this because We're very privileged to live as martial artists in this age.

00:45:16.000 This is, in my opinion, is the most exciting time for a martial artist to be alive that I'm aware of.

00:45:22.000 Maybe in Ancient Greece, maybe they had something with pancreation that was more exciting than this.

00:45:26.000 You'd have to show me some pretty damn good evidence. 0.98

00:45:28.000 If you could take Gordon Ryan and bring him back to Ancient Greece, he would fuck those dudes up. 0.98

00:45:33.000 Do you know how easy it would be? 0.99

00:45:34.000 Do you know how amazing it would be?

00:45:35.000 All those guys would line up, bring their champions, and they'd be like, what is he doing?

00:45:40.000 In general, I would agree with you.

00:45:43.000 As a general rule, I believe that later generations almost always beat earlier generations.

00:45:48.000 Jesse Owens was a great sprinter, but Usain Bolt would destroy him in a foot race.

00:45:53.000 There's just no getting around there.

00:45:54.000 The only place where I make exceptions is boxing.

00:45:58.000 Because I think there are boxers from the old era that just would be spectacular no matter what.

00:46:04.000 I 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.

00:46:15.000 I think he's just amazing.

00:46:16.000 Marvin Hagler.

00:46:17.000 I 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.

00:46:27.000 I mean, just...

00:46:28.000 Because there's not much difference in boxing.

00:46:31.000 You see some unique approaches like Floyd Mayweather and his shoulder roll and his incredible defense.

00:46:40.000 We were talking before this podcast when we were talking about Canelo Alvarez, how he learned from the Floyd Mayweather fight.

00:46:46.000 His head movement.

00:46:48.000 So you're seeing these steps where they're learning.

00:46:51.000 But go back to Willie Pep.

00:46:52.000 Go back to Pernell Whitaker.

00:46:54.000 Pernell Whitaker had spectacular defense.

00:46:57.000 Agreed, yeah.

00:46:58.000 I hear you, Joe, and I think there's some good arguments to suggest that you may be onto something here.

00:47:05.000 Let's look, for example, at Sugar Ray Leonard versus Floyd Mayweather's father, which is a classic fight, by the way.

00:47:14.000 Yes.

00:47:14.000 Amazing fight.

00:47:19.000 You get to see just how good Sugar Ray Leonard was in the 1980s with that match.

00:47:26.000 Now, 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.

00:47:36.000 And 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.

00:47:47.000 The difficulty, of course, is that it's difficult to measure combat sports.

00:47:51.000 In the case of Olympic sprinting, there's an obvious measurement here, time.

00:47:56.000 And so you see the progress more clearly.

00:48:00.000 Nonetheless, as a general rule, I do think even in combat sports, earlier generations tend to lose to later generations in most cases.

00:48:08.000 There 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.

00:48:19.000 He just knows more.

00:48:20.000 He's just had the benefits of the insights of one generation pile upon the next and the next and the next.

00:48:28.000 They create a compounding effect in learning where the athletes from a later generation start from a higher point than their predecessors did.

00:48:36.000 And so as a general rule, I'll always favor the more recent generations over previous generations. 0.87

00:48:43.000 But to your credit, I do think there are some exceptions in combat sports more than other sports.

00:48:49.000 I agree with you as a general rule.

00:48:52.000 The exception I make is boxing.

00:48:54.000 The 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.

00:49:01.000 And I don't think the approach is as comprehensive as it is in grappling or clearly in mixed martial arts.

00:49:06.000 In 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.

00:49:34.000 I mean, that lightweight Roberto Duran is one of the greatest boxers that ever lived.

00:49:38.000 But boxing is two hands, a variety of techniques applied in a bunch of different ways.

00:49:46.000 But it's just two hands.

00:49:47.000 You have defense that's applied in a bunch of different ways.

00:49:50.000 You 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.

00:50:02.000 All that stuff was already understood.

00:50:04.000 It was already understood with Joe Lewis.

00:50:06.000 It was already understood with Sugar Ray Robinson.

00:50:08.000 And it's just different approaches in terms of the ability to prepare an athlete.

00:50:13.000 More scientific approach in terms of nutrition, rest, recovery, all those different things.

00:50:19.000 There'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.

00:50:34.000 These guys just...

00:50:36.000 They were young enough so that they probably didn't apply the same sort of rules that strength and conditioning coach would apply today.

00:50:42.000 But you guys don't apply those rules.

00:50:45.000 You guys train seven days a week.

00:50:46.000 So you guys fly in the face of that.

00:50:48.000 It's true.

00:50:50.000 There's something to be said for...

00:50:53.000 Just hard work and discipline.

00:50:56.000 I love the examples that you're using from boxing in terms of their conditioning program.

00:51:04.000 If 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.

00:51:18.000 The most important part of modern boxing training is Pad work.

00:51:23.000 Ooh.

00:51:24.000 When did they start pad work?

00:51:26.000 I believe it was the early 1980s.

00:51:28.000 Wow!

00:51:29.000 So people like Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Robinson, never trained on pads.

00:51:33.000 Isn't that crazy to think of?

00:51:34.000 Didn't even know what they were.

00:51:35.000 So many of the greatest boxes of all time, Willie Pipp, none of them trained on pads.

00:51:40.000 You're blowing my mind because I never thought of that before.

00:51:43.000 I literally never thought of that.

00:51:45.000 Isn't that fascinating?

00:51:46.000 That's so fascinating.

00:51:47.000 And yet now, the majority of boxing training is done on the pads.

00:51:52.000 It's literally a revolution in boxing training.

00:51:54.000 And you've got to ask yourself, what was the difference?

00:51:56.000 What did they do back then?

00:51:57.000 And you see there was probably a lot more emphasis on sparring.

00:52:02.000 That sparring was the focus.

00:52:04.000 And heavy back work.

00:52:07.000 That's crazy.

00:52:09.000 I wonder who was the first guy to figure out pads?

00:52:11.000 It's a fascinating question.

00:52:13.000 I've never seen a definitive answer to it.

00:52:15.000 I literally never thought that until today, until right now.

00:52:19.000 Like, when was the first time I saw that?

00:52:21.000 And the other big question you've got to ask yourself is, were Western boxers the first people to use pads, or was Thailand before them?

00:52:30.000 Because they used their own version of pads for kicks.

00:52:32.000 Did the Thais come first with kick pads, or did the Western boxing coaches come first with hand pads?

00:52:38.000 These are both interesting questions and I don't know the answer at all either.

00:52:41.000 It's a very good question.

00:52:42.000 It's interesting how the Thais sort of devised this strategy of training.

00:52:47.000 It's a different strategy of training.

00:52:49.000 You know, like they're all about, like the idea of training Thai without pads is like, it's alien. 1.00

00:52:56.000 Yeah.

00:52:57.000 And I think the idea of training boxing in 2020 without pads is also alien.

00:53:03.000 Yeah.

00:53:04.000 Well, you know, Julio Cesar Chavez never hit the speed bag.

00:53:07.000 There's a funny video of him trying to hit the speed bag.

00:53:11.000 He doesn't know how to do it.

00:53:12.000 And this was when he was the best in the world. 1.00

00:53:14.000 You imagine some guy looking at him going, man, that guy sucks. 0.99

00:53:17.000 Look at him on the speed bag. 1.00

00:53:18.000 He doesn't know what he's doing.

00:53:19.000 He was laughing about it.

00:53:20.000 He was going like...

00:53:22.000 I mean, when you think about it, what actual relationship between boxing, punching, as done in a fight, and speedbag is there?

00:53:31.000 None.

00:53:32.000 And yet?

00:53:33.000 And yet it's the thing.

00:53:34.000 And yet guys do that all day, every day.

00:53:35.000 Like, who punches anybody like this ever?

00:53:37.000 It's so strange.

00:53:38.000 It's such a strange way to...

00:53:39.000 How did that become an institution?

00:53:41.000 We're weird.

00:53:42.000 Didn't someone say like, hey, coach, I've never hit anyone like that in my life.

00:53:46.000 Why are you making me do this?

00:53:48.000 Yeah.

00:53:48.000 I just look at all Rocky does in the thing.

00:53:51.000 He only hits that and meat.

00:53:52.000 The rest of it, he's not doing anything.

00:53:53.000 He doesn't hit a heavy bag?

00:53:55.000 He's just, mom, meat in the meat locker.

00:53:57.000 And then he's doing push-ups and running.

00:54:00.000 And sit-ups.

00:54:01.000 Yeah.

00:54:02.000 The meat thing.

00:54:05.000 Terrible technique, Rocky.

00:54:07.000 It's funny.

00:54:08.000 Go back and watch those old movies.

00:54:10.000 You're like, hey, straighten that up, man.

00:54:15.000 Come on.

00:54:16.000 And 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.

00:54:27.000 I'm sure more people started boxing watching Rocky than by watching Roberto Duran actually box.

00:54:32.000 That's absolutely true.

00:54:33.000 I'm sure.

00:54:34.000 I'm sure.

00:54:34.000 Same thing with bloodsport and martial arts.

00:54:36.000 I mean, you look at bloodsport, it's like a comedy show.

00:54:39.000 And yet, how many people started out of bloodsport?

00:54:43.000 More than started by watching the UFC, I'm quite certain.

00:54:46.000 Yeah.

00:54:46.000 I think if you could go back in martial arts and trace what started more people in martial arts, I think it's Bruce Lee.

00:54:53.000 Mmm.

00:54:53.000 I would think it's Bruce Lee.

00:54:55.000 I think you might be right about that.

00:54:58.000 That's the start of me.

00:55:00.000 I mean, I was throwing kicks.

00:55:02.000 Isn't that crazy?

00:55:03.000 What year did you start martial arts? 0.95

00:55:05.000 Well, I started fucking around when I was like 11-ish, somewhere around there. 0.96

00:55:12.000 I took a kung fu class and I would fuck around with my friends. 0.96

00:55:16.000 What year are we talking about here? 0.97

00:55:19.000 I started Taekwondo when I was 15. Very seriously.

00:55:26.000 Like, immediately seriously.

00:55:27.000 Did you start because you had seen a Bruce Lee movie?

00:55:30.000 No.

00:55:31.000 No.

00:55:32.000 I'd taken karate before then.

00:55:35.000 I went to Joe Esposito's Karate Center in Newton, Massachusetts.

00:55:40.000 And he was like a local, really well-known, respected karate guy.

00:55:45.000 And I took his class.

00:55:47.000 When I was 14, but it was too hard to get over there.

00:55:49.000 It was hard to get on the bus, and it was complicated.

00:55:52.000 But 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.

00:56:07.000 And we decided to walk up the stairs to just check out this Taekwondo school.

00:56:14.000 And as I was walking up the stairs, I heard this sound.

00:56:18.000 And the sound was like, whomp!

00:56:21.000 Ching! 0.94

00:56:22.000 Whomp!

00:56:23.000 Ching! 0.94

00:56:24.000 Whomp!

00:56:25.000 Ching! 0.94

00:56:26.000 And the whomp was the kick hitting the bag.

00:56:29.000 And the cha-ching was the bag flying and snapping against the chains that were hanging from the wall.

00:56:35.000 That's impressive.

00:56:36.000 And there was a guy named John Lee, who was the national champion at the time, who was training for the World Cup.

00:56:42.000 And he was in his prime.

00:56:43.000 And he was a guy I learned from a lot.

00:56:46.000 I learned my turning sidekick from him.

00:56:48.000 I learned a lot of competition techniques from him.

00:56:51.000 I learned how to approach fighting because he was a ferocious guy.

00:56:56.000 Just this guy from the streets of Chelsea, which is a really tough neighborhood.

00:57:01.000 And he was just this...

00:57:04.000 Long, tall guy with phenomenal power.

00:57:08.000 And I remember watching him kick the bag and bend it in half. 0.99

00:57:12.000 And I remember thinking, fuck, I want to learn how to do that. 0.98

00:57:15.000 I was obsessed, like instantaneously obsessed. 0.98

00:57:18.000 I signed up right then and there, and it changed my whole life.

00:57:23.000 I never played baseball again.

00:57:25.000 I was into baseball.

00:57:26.000 Like, I would play baseball in school.

00:57:27.000 I would always play baseball. 1.00

00:57:28.000 I was like, fuck baseball. 0.99

00:57:30.000 I want to do what that guy can do. 1.00

00:57:32.000 I remember watching him hit that bag, and it was like a fucking car accident. 0.99

00:57:37.000 Every time he hit it, just whoop! 0.99

00:57:39.000 And that bag would just bend in half and go flying, and I was obsessed.

00:57:44.000 Obsessed.

00:57:45.000 I spent every day at that place, from then on.

00:57:48.000 Every day.

00:57:49.000 I was teaching there within a year.

00:57:51.000 Impressive.

00:57:51.000 How old were you?

00:57:52.000 Fifteen?

00:57:53.000 Fifteen.

00:57:53.000 Wow.

00:57:54.000 Yeah.

00:57:54.000 Just full-on obsessed.

00:57:56.000 Because I couldn't believe someone could do that.

00:57:58.000 I'd never seen anybody kick a bag before, ever.

00:58:00.000 And that particular school, J. Kim Taekwondo Institute in Boston, was very power-oriented.

00:58:07.000 Like 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.

00:58:17.000 So it was about speed and movement and being able to hit someone quick and get out of there.

00:58:22.000 My instructor's position was what What good does it matter?

00:58:26.000 What good does it do you if you can win a tournament, but you can't even hurt someone on the street?

00:58:32.000 You should be able to fight.

00:58:33.000 And you should be able to learn how to fight.

00:58:35.000 And so we did a lot of sparring with headgear and kickboxing.

00:58:39.000 It was a hard style.

00:58:41.000 He was a hard man.

00:58:42.000 And his approach was always power. 0.96

00:58:45.000 He's like, I want you to kick them so even if you kick them in their arms, they become terrified. 0.97

00:58:50.000 I want you to hit them so hard that they know that any mistake they make is gonna leave them unconscious. 0.97

00:58:56.000 So his approach was always about power. 0.97

00:58:59.000 Like, it was all power.

00:59:00.000 So when you saw, when I saw John Lee, who was probably like, maybe like late 20s at the time, in his prime, just BOOM, bending that back.

00:59:08.000 It was like, to me, it was like a shock, just a crazy drug.

00:59:12.000 Like, instantaneously, I was obsessed.

00:59:14.000 It was the perfect time.

00:59:16.000 Because I could have gone up there and it could have been a child's class.

00:59:19.000 You know, I could have just walked up there and, you know, a bunch of people were doing forums and I'd be like, what is this nonsense?

00:59:25.000 And I would have walked out of there.

00:59:26.000 But I literally walked in during the absolute perfect time.

00:59:30.000 See this tall, long black belt just sending this bag into orbit.

00:59:36.000 It was crazy.

00:59:38.000 I'll never forget it.

00:59:40.000 I think there's two important lessons from that.

00:59:42.000 The first is that how you approach martial arts is a big part of their appeal.

00:59:49.000 Just 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.

01:00:04.000 Everything.

01:00:04.000 That's their version of submissions.

01:00:06.000 Just as submissions can snap an arm, they can put your lights out in a heartbeat with a good blow.

01:00:12.000 That'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.

01:00:21.000 You looked at this, and you're like, my God, I've got to learn this power.

01:00:24.000 He not only imparted that on you, it was part of the way they marketed the class.

01:00:30.000 So the heavy bag was right near the lobby.

01:00:33.000 So there's a line of heavy bags.

01:00:36.000 So as you walk in, there's this big training hall, but the heavy bags were right there.

01:00:40.000 So if someone was coming in to go check out classes, he would tell me to go kick the bag.

01:00:46.000 Interesting.

01:00:46.000 Yeah, he would say, just go smash that bag.

01:00:49.000 That was the best advertising they ever did.

01:00:51.000 Oh, yeah.

01:00:51.000 Because if you could watch someone do that, it's undeniable.

01:00:54.000 You see the amount of force that a guy like John could generate?

01:00:57.000 Watching him change my life.

01:00:59.000 Like you're looking at that bag and you're saying, like, if that was me...

01:01:02.000 Dead!

01:01:03.000 Dead.

01:01:03.000 All this broken, bleeding internally.

01:01:06.000 I just couldn't...

01:01:06.000 And he was big.

01:01:07.000 He 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.

01:01:16.000 And just watching him do that, literally, like, here's my life, I'm going in this direction, went like this.

01:01:23.000 Hard right turn.

01:01:25.000 And then changed everything.

01:01:26.000 Became a different person.

01:01:27.000 And that's the second thing.

01:01:29.000 That so much of what determines the direction of our lives is completely accidental and arbitrary.

01:01:37.000 Like that was a life-changing moment for you.

01:01:39.000 And as you said, if you'd come 15 minutes earlier, you and I probably wouldn't even be having this conversation.

01:01:45.000 You probably never would have gotten into martial arts.

01:01:46.000 You'd be playing baseball.

01:01:48.000 Isn't that nuts?

01:01:49.000 Yeah.

01:01:50.000 It's really crazy.

01:01:51.000 That one day changed my whole life.

01:01:54.000 But not just the day, 15 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, however long it took for that guy to start his workout.

01:02:00.000 And then becoming friends with him and having him as a mentor and having him show me different techniques and tricks that he'd use.

01:02:09.000 He was an interesting guy.

01:02:12.000 Because just... 0.98

01:02:15.000 Fucking loved fighting. 0.99

01:02:16.000 Just loved it. 0.98

01:02:17.000 Like 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.

01:02:26.000 Because training under Mr. Kim, the emphasis on power was so primary.

01:02:31.000 It was everything.

01:02:33.000 And John didn't care if you hit him a couple of times.

01:02:35.000 He was just always waiting.

01:02:36.000 Always waiting for the opening.

01:02:38.000 Man, 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.

01:02:46.000 And we fought in this tournament and there was these guys, really high level guys from Korea.

01:02:52.000 And they were on, and Korean guys were always scary because everybody was like, that's the motherland of Taekwondo. 1.00

01:02:57.000 You know, you see Korean national champions, they were so technical and so good and so fast.

01:03:01.000 And I remember John was sparring, he was fighting in this tournament against this Korean guy and he kept getting hit.

01:03:09.000 He kept getting hit by this guy.

01:03:10.000 The guy kept scoring on him and everybody was cheering and cheering.

01:03:13.000 And you can see John just staying calm, just waiting, just waiting, just waiting.

01:03:17.000 And 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.

01:03:30.000 Just, ah!

01:03:32.000 And he just turned around and looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

01:03:35.000 And he was laughing about it afterwards.

01:03:37.000 He goes, I knew it was just time.

01:03:39.000 I was just looking for the moment.

01:03:40.000 I was just looking for the moment.

01:03:41.000 And he found it.

01:03:42.000 And 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.

01:03:57.000 That kind of ability obsessed me.

01:04:01.000 That's all I wanted to do, was figure out how to kick someone like that. 1.00

01:04:05.000 That's all I wanted to do.

01:04:09.000 Probably the single most impressive thing in martial arts is the ability to finish a fight.

01:04:16.000 And having that ability changes the very way in which you fight, as you described with your mentor.

01:04:23.000 And you see the same thing in jiu-jitsu.

01:04:28.000 If you know that if you get a hold of this guy's arm, leg, or neck, it's literally just done.

01:04:34.000 You've got the mechanics to just put them away.

01:04:36.000 You can endure anything.

01:04:37.000 You 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.

01:04:46.000 It gives you a kind of relaxation.

01:04:49.000 Relaxation 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.

01:04:58.000 And 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.

01:05:08.000 It's a different thing when you fight someone who you know can knock you out with a single punch.

01:05:14.000 Francis Ngannou is a tough opponent to deal with because you make even a single error and it's just goodnight.

01:05:20.000 He's the ultimate example of that.

01:05:22.000 Because he's such a freak athlete.

01:05:24.000 How rare is it to see a man who's a natural 275 pounds, just enormous person with just ridiculous power.

01:05:34.000 Power is the great equalizer.

01:05:36.000 We 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.

01:05:45.000 He'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.

01:05:57.000 He does everything right.

01:05:59.000 Everything right.

01:06:00.000 His 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. 0.95

01:06:15.000 I fucking love watching that guy fight.

01:06:17.000 Floyd has the spectacular talent and amazing technique, but he doesn't have that power. 0.98

01:06:24.000 It'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.

01:06:35.000 The integration of extreme finishing power with defensive soundness is the highest ideal in all of martial arts.

01:06:45.000 And you see it.

01:06:46.000 When you see it, it's a truly special thing.

01:06:49.000 You see the mature Canelo Alvarez, you see it in him.

01:06:54.000 You saw it in the 1980s with Mike Tyson, the guy who could barely be hit at his peak.

01:06:59.000 It was hard to land a blow on Mike Tyson.

01:07:01.000 But every blow he threw at you looked like it would take your head off.

01:07:05.000 Those are two extreme examples.

01:07:07.000 My job as a coach in jiu-jitsu is to try and push my athletes towards that.

01:07:11.000 My athletes are known for their ability to escape.

01:07:14.000 They can get into terrible situations and dig their way out.

01:07:18.000 They prove that time and time again in early EBI competitions.

01:07:22.000 But at the same time, they have devastating finishes.

01:07:24.000 And 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.

01:07:37.000 It'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.

01:07:45.000 Because they're intimidated by the approach of these guys that are completely submission based.

01:07:52.000 And you see it.

01:07:53.000 You see it in the reason why Gordon has such a hard time finding fights.

01:07:56.000 You see it when these guys wind up Talking about matching up.

01:08:00.000 They want all these special rules.

01:08:02.000 They want to do different things.

01:08:04.000 They want to figure out a way.

01:08:06.000 They're kind of pushing away before they even engage. 1.00

01:08:09.000 They're talking a lot of shit, and they're puffing their chest up. 1.00

01:08:12.000 But they're like, how about we doing the gi? 1.00

01:08:14.000 How about we do it this?

01:08:16.000 How about ADC rules?

01:08:18.000 How about we do this?

01:08:18.000 And there's all these different caveats that they want to apply.

01:08:22.000 And 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. 0.63

01:08:43.000 I agree. 0.90

01:08:44.000 That 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.

01:09:01.000 It's what took you in as a 15-year-old boy.

01:09:04.000 It's what made you turn your entire life in that direction.

01:09:07.000 That's what I saw as potential as a 28-year-old man when I began jiu-jitsu.

01:09:12.000 And I think the more we stay true to that principle, the better the future of jiu-jitsu looks.

01:09:20.000 100%.

01:09:21.000 It is what martial arts are supposed to be about.

01:09:23.000 It's not supposed to be about winning by points.

01:09:26.000 It'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.

01:09:34.000 While denying him the ability to do that to us.

01:09:37.000 Yeah.

01:09:37.000 It'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.

01:09:52.000 They're taking the most difficult path, but also taking the path of legends.

01:09:56.000 Yeah.

01:09:57.000 Yeah, I think that's...

01:09:59.000 And long term, I'm always trying to impress upon this is the way to build a brand.

01:10:04.000 This is the way to, you know...

01:10:06.000 No one's going to remember the guy that won by Advantage four times in 2018. They're going to remember the guy who consistently came out.

01:10:14.000 And this is not just true for my athletes.

01:10:15.000 You see it among other great athletes, too.

01:10:17.000 You mentioned before Marcelo Garcia...

01:10:20.000 We talked about Hodge or Gracie.

01:10:22.000 Everyone who embraced that idea of Barlow Estima, these were guys who went out and ruthlessly hunted for the submission.

01:10:28.000 And they're the ones that people remember.

01:10:30.000 Yeah, the only ones.

01:10:32.000 I guess it's just there's so many things that have to fall in line for that to be The main focus of your gym.

01:10:46.000 And for a place like your place, you know, whether it's Henzo's or where you're at now in Puerto Rico, it relies on someone like you.

01:10:55.000 And it's these conversations I've had with Gordon, I had it with Craig.

01:10:59.000 There's only one John Donaher.

01:11:01.000 And I don't know how you recreate that.

01:11:03.000 That's what's crazy.

01:11:03.000 It's like, no one wants to be you.

01:11:07.000 It's too hard.

01:11:08.000 Like, 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.

01:11:27.000 It's your and you don't have a family and you don't have other obsessions.

01:11:32.000 You have a singular obsession with making these athletes the very best possible.

01:11:39.000 I don't know how you do it and I don't know how you do it without straying.

01:11:43.000 I don't know how you do it where you seven days a week completely obsessed.

01:11:47.000 It has to be Your mind, your personality, the way you interface with martial arts is very unusual.

01:11:57.000 To recreate that, you would require so much of a person.

01:12:03.000 You're this weirdo that, if you were a character in a movie, I would go, yeah, good luck finding someone like that.

01:12:12.000 Like, there's not a lot of you out there.

01:12:14.000 So 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.

01:12:27.000 You need a guy who was teaching philosophy at Columbia.

01:12:32.000 Who just decides to get obsessed with Jiu Jitsu.

01:12:34.000 How many of those are there?

01:12:35.000 You 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.

01:12:47.000 The way you even coach is different.

01:12:50.000 You're a very weird guy.

01:12:52.000 I hope you know that. 1.00

01:12:53.000 You're here with a fucking rash guard on. 1.00

01:12:55.000 We're not rolling. 1.00

01:12:56.000 Why do you have a rash guard on?

01:12:57.000 But you wear rash guards every day.

01:12:59.000 You understand.

01:13:00.000 It's very hard to make a John Donaher.

01:13:03.000 So you've kind of raised the bar to this very bizarre and impossible standard.

01:13:10.000 A big part of it is I'm just by nature a curious person.

01:13:14.000 I 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.

01:13:27.000 And people that aren't innately curious about the world in which they live are usually not very interesting people.

01:13:34.000 But 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.

01:13:52.000 We grow up in a highly competitive world.

01:13:58.000 Human life is this kind of strange mix between competition and cooperation.

01:14:06.000 There'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.

01:14:17.000 The earliest forms of competition between humans were probably empty-handed, and then as weapons began to become employed, primitive weapons.

01:14:27.000 And then as we got more and more sophisticated, the weapons got more and more sophisticated.

01:14:30.000 But somewhere deep in our collective history, there's this sense that It's important to know how to stand up for yourself physically.

01:14:41.000 And if you can't do that, you're not going to survive in a competitive world.

01:14:44.000 So 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.

01:14:57.000 It appeals to something very, very deep inside all of us that comes out of our ancestral history.

01:15:02.000 But at the same time, unrestricted violence is a terrible, terrible thing.

01:15:08.000 And no society can function with unrestricted violence.

01:15:11.000 Human progress is impossible without it.

01:15:13.000 And so we find as humans have to acknowledge that in a competitive world, violence is part of our world.

01:15:21.000 But that unrestricted violence is just as damaging as being a complete pacifist in a world of murderers.

01:15:32.000 And 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.

01:15:55.000 You'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.

01:16:02.000 The violence, as it were, is reduced and made socially acceptable.

01:16:10.000 It's taken to a level where it could be part of a functioning society.

01:16:14.000 And if practiced, I sincerely believe makes for a better society because it makes people acknowledge we are in a competitive world.

01:16:22.000 That 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.

01:16:27.000 And if you can't, you don't want to be a saint in a world of murderers.

01:16:31.000 You're not going to do well.

01:16:33.000 But on the other hand, you don't want to be a murderer in a world of saints.

01:16:38.000 You can't have that.

01:16:39.000 And so martial arts, as it were, is the compromise between cooperation and competition.

01:16:45.000 It gives you the ability to compete all the way down to physical violence.

01:16:50.000 But 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.

01:17:03.000 If you had an entire society who practiced martial arts, so for example in Japan, everyone does judo in high school.

01:17:09.000 You 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.

01:17:28.000 And 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.

01:17:52.000 And 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.

01:18:03.000 And that I see as being the great social benefit of martial arts.

01:18:07.000 So even someone like me who came from an academic background can look at martial arts and see that's an important thing.

01:18:13.000 That could be a great benefit both to individuals and to the society in which they live.

01:18:19.000 Yeah, 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.

01:18:44.000 It'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.

01:19:03.000 Because you have to have put the time in and training in order to get your vehicle to be functional in this extreme environment.

01:19:12.000 You're responsible for Adding the horsepower to the engine.

01:19:17.000 You're responsible for tuning the suspension.

01:19:19.000 All these things are done through discipline and hard work.

01:19:22.000 If you don't do those things, your body doesn't function well enough for you to even apply your own knowledge.

01:19:28.000 So there's so many different levels to it.

01:19:30.000 There'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.

01:19:38.000 And all of them together, they're so...

01:19:41.000 It's so comprehensive.

01:19:43.000 There'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.

01:19:59.000 Like very, very unusual people with intense mindsets.

01:20:03.000 And they are the people that figure their way through this insane maze.

01:20:07.000 And by doing so, they've provided an example of what's possible.

01:20:15.000 They've reached a very high level of human potential.

01:20:18.000 And I think ultimately that's what martial arts are about.

01:20:23.000 It's a fantastic way of looking at it.

01:20:25.000 I agree with you about the whole problem-solving aspect.

01:20:30.000 There's a sense in which when you're engaged in jiu-jitsu, you're both throwing problems at each other.

01:20:36.000 And it comes down to, can you solve the problems that I create for you faster than I solve the problems you create for me?

01:20:47.000 And 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.

01:20:58.000 People talk about speed in martial arts all the time, and almost always what they mean by that is physical speed.

01:21:04.000 But the most important speed of all is speed of decision making and problem solving.

01:21:09.000 And that's very much a mental thing.

01:21:14.000 A huge part of what I do as a coach is to try and reduce the time it takes to make critical decisions.

01:21:22.000 A big part of how we do that is by having systems in place per position.

01:21:27.000 Because if you follow a system...

01:21:29.000 The system makes the decisions for you.

01:21:33.000 You've already been in that position 10,000 times.

01:21:36.000 You 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.

01:21:47.000 And you just go down this decision tree based upon the actions that you're making and the responses you're getting from them.

01:21:53.000 And 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.

01:22:02.000 As I said earlier, the system is making the decisions for you because it's already in place.

01:22:07.000 And the other guy is trying to react to those with conscious thought.

01:22:10.000 It's like, oh man, what do I do now?

01:22:11.000 I haven't been in this position before.

01:22:13.000 So you're making decisions at a rate several times faster than him in that one domain.

01:22:19.000 And so I see a lot of virtue in your understanding of this idea of decision-making and problem-solving.

01:22:28.000 And 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.

01:22:50.000 Maybe they had a few good moves and they knew how to apply them.

01:22:54.000 They had steps that they had done in the gym and in competition many, many, many times.

01:22:58.000 So they had a clear, well-oiled pathway that they would go down.

01:23:05.000 But they didn't have many.

01:23:06.000 They 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.

01:23:16.000 It 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.

01:23:33.000 Putting yourself in the worst place you can be.

01:23:35.000 And 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.

01:23:47.000 But now, because of the training that you guys do, he's always in bad positions.

01:23:52.000 Every time he gets in a bad position, it's like, oh, I'm here every day.

01:23:56.000 I 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.

01:24:10.000 It's very, very impressive to watch.

01:24:13.000 When Craig first came in, he had a great attacking game, but was weak in defensive fundamentals, and that's no longer the case.

01:24:21.000 He's a much more well-rounded athlete.

01:24:23.000 It's very impressive to watch.

01:24:25.000 That young man's got a huge future ahead of him.

01:24:27.000 He's deeply, deeply impressive.

01:24:31.000 But 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.

01:24:42.000 There seemed to be a lot of instinctual stuff going on.

01:24:44.000 Guys were doing good moves, but it seemed to come out of spontaneous application of instinct rather than anything else.

01:24:52.000 I 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.

01:25:08.000 And that idea of successful replication, I think, is an important part of growing the sport of jiu-jitsu.

01:25:15.000 It 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.

01:25:22.000 He's just gifted.

01:25:23.000 The moment you resign yourself to saying someone is just gifted, you're, as it were, that's a cop-out.

01:25:30.000 You're saying that you can't explain why they're good.

01:25:32.000 And 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.

01:25:39.000 Our 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.

01:25:49.000 Of course, I don't expect them all to be as good as Craig Jones or Gordon Ryan.

01:25:53.000 That's not reasonable.

01:25:55.000 Most of them don't have the time allocation to do that.

01:25:58.000 They're just busy with their careers, their families, etc.

01:26:01.000 but they should be able to go up noticeably.

01:26:04.000 And 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?

01:26:25.000 First off, how good are the worst people in the room?

01:26:29.000 The ones who have been there for five years, but they're the worst in the room.

01:26:32.000 If they're absolutely terrible, that says something pretty negative about the training program.

01:26:37.000 It means that whatever the good guys are doing isn't replicable because the bad guys can't get a heel on it.

01:26:46.000 So I always look at the The weakest elements in the room.

01:26:52.000 And then the other thing you look at is how many people can apply that program successfully.

01:26:58.000 Is it something that only works for a certain body type, or does it work for all body types?

01:27:02.000 How universal is its success?

01:27:04.000 Does it work for young people, old people? 0.53

01:27:08.000 And I think that's what impressed people about the squat.

01:27:11.000 You 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.

01:27:22.000 That 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.

01:27:38.000 And as a result, I can't take any credit as a coach for their success.

01:27:44.000 Secondly, I can't take whatever success they had and transmit it to a guy who's come to me for advice.

01:27:51.000 I 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.

01:28:02.000 I'll give you an example.

01:28:03.000 One 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.

01:28:12.000 He'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.

01:28:23.000 It's on video.

01:28:24.000 Wow.

01:28:25.000 Now, 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.

01:28:42.000 And 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.

01:28:56.000 We're talking about physical freaks, how important physical freaks are to test the limits of your technique and we're talking about Nicky Rod.

01:29:05.000 We have one ultimate physical freak.

01:29:09.000 You really do.

01:29:10.000 I mean, he's an impressive individual.

01:29:13.000 And very unusually impressive, because there's a lot of big guys.

01:29:16.000 But there's not a lot of big guys that can move the way Nicky does.

01:29:19.000 The way his hip flexibility comes into play when he's passing guard.

01:29:24.000 But you were telling me the story, and I would love it if you would repeat it, about when Gordon had his back.

01:29:32.000 Your listeners should be aware that Gordon Ryan is arguably one of the best back control experts of all time, if not the best.

01:29:40.000 I certainly have never seen anyone control a back without a gi at a level even close to Gordon Ryan.

01:29:46.000 It's truly extraordinary.

01:29:48.000 One day he was training with Nicky Rod, and that's always a tough match.

01:29:53.000 It's the classic match of technique versus attributes.

01:29:57.000 One guy has flawless technique, the other guy has insane physical attributes.

01:30:02.000 And I'll come back to the idea of technique versus attributes later, because it's an important topic.

01:30:10.000 Gordon had Nicky Rod's back with a fully locked body triangle, and it's working for a strangle.

01:30:17.000 So Nicky Rod feels the strangle.

01:30:20.000 This is Gordon Ryan.

01:30:22.000 Anytime 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.

01:30:34.000 Nicky Rod shrugs his shoulders And slips inside the strangle, reaches back and grabs Gordon Ryan's head.

01:30:44.000 At that moment, sorry, Gordon Ryan goes to adjust his body triangle, and for one infinitesimal part of a second, his body triangle is unlocked.

01:30:53.000 Nicky Rod just did a full backward roll into what can only be described as a backflip.

01:31:03.000 And up into standing position and left Gordon lying on the ground underneath them in a kind of a weird north-south kind of situation. 0.92

01:31:12.000 and 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?

01:31:19.000 I just look at him and go like, I don't know. 0.81

01:31:28.000 I ran out of ideas. 0.98

01:31:32.000 I'm supposed to be the coach and I don't know what the fuck to say. 1.00

01:31:34.000 I'm like, yeah, he's a freak. 0.99

01:31:36.000 How many people can even do that?

01:31:37.000 I didn't even know it was physically possible until I saw it with my own eyes.

01:31:41.000 I'm just imagining someone grabbing a head and then springing back.

01:31:44.000 It doesn't even make sense.

01:31:46.000 So crazy.

01:31:47.000 And I remember thinking, like, my God, this is insane.

01:31:52.000 But 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.

01:32:11.000 Okay?

01:32:11.000 And everyone carries with them their physical attributes, their mental attributes, and their skills.

01:32:17.000 And your potential in a bout against another human being is measured by those two things.

01:32:23.000 What are your attributes?

01:32:25.000 What level do they operate at?

01:32:26.000 And what is your skill set?

01:32:28.000 Okay?

01:32:30.000 And of course, they are linked.

01:32:32.000 I have a lot of knowledge, but I have a crippled body.

01:32:36.000 And so that adversely affects my skills.

01:32:39.000 I know how to do many things that I simply can't do because my body won't let me do them.

01:32:43.000 It's just something I can't do.

01:32:47.000 So, skills and attributes are related.

01:32:50.000 The better your attributes generally, let me rephrase that, the better your physical attributes generally, the better your skills.

01:32:58.000 You'll learn skills more easily if you're strong, flexible, fast.

01:33:02.000 They generally come more easy to you that way.

01:33:04.000 But there's also mental attributes, and these are things like problem-solving ability, memory, speed of decision-making, confidence, things like this.

01:33:18.000 And 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.

01:33:31.000 Now as a coach, there's only so much you can do with regards attributes.

01:33:37.000 There's things you can do.

01:33:38.000 You can improve someone's confidence.

01:33:40.000 You can improve their speed of decision-making.

01:33:43.000 There's things you can do.

01:33:44.000 But you can have less effect on an attributes.

01:33:47.000 They are more hardwired into you as a person through your DNA. But skills I can work on.

01:33:53.000 Those I can improve significantly.

01:33:55.000 So most of my time is built up around skill development.

01:34:01.000 But 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.

01:34:18.000 There's a reason why there's weight divisions in jiu-jitsu.

01:34:22.000 There's a reason why there's sex divisions in jiu-jitsu. 0.65

01:34:25.000 You 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.

01:34:38.000 You had better skills but they weren't enough to overtake those attributes.

01:34:43.000 And so that clash between skills and attributes is the great clash in martial arts.

01:34:49.000 Martial 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.

01:34:58.000 And so they use skill as a crutch to overcome attributes.

01:35:02.000 Things get really freaky when you get someone who is strong in both attributes, both mental and physical, and skills.

01:35:10.000 That's when you see the super athletes.

01:35:12.000 And that's the potential for a guy like Nicky Rod.

01:35:14.000 That's the potential.

01:35:15.000 So he's really like at the starting blocks in a way.

01:35:19.000 He is.

01:35:20.000 But always remember the attributes are much wider in nature than most people give them credit for.

01:35:28.000 Most people tend to focus on speed, explosivity, endurance, flexibility.

01:35:34.000 But always remember the mental attributes too.

01:35:37.000 And I'm not just talking about confidence.

01:35:38.000 Nikki Rod's the most confident person in the world.

01:35:40.000 But there's also things like discipline, mental, ability to retain information, ability to make decisions under pressure.

01:35:48.000 And these are immensely important and don't get talked about very much.

01:35:52.000 Okay, so you can be very strong in attributes in some areas and quite deficient in others.

01:35:58.000 And that will be either a positive or negative for your development as an athlete.

01:36:05.000 So it's not as simple as, oh, this guy's physically a god.

01:36:09.000 Okay, well, maybe.

01:36:10.000 But what about, for example, Gordon Ryan, on the attribute level, he has good isometric strength.

01:36:20.000 He has poor flexibility.

01:36:22.000 He has shockingly poor speed.

01:36:25.000 His physical speed is unimpressive, to be honest.

01:36:31.000 He has excellent endurance, at least before he had his stomach problems.

01:36:35.000 But if he's operating normally, his endurance is excellent.

01:36:38.000 But you see he's quite deficient in some areas.

01:36:42.000 But then you go to the mental route, his confidence is off the charts.

01:36:47.000 His ability to retain information, one of the best I ever saw.

01:36:51.000 His ability to make decisions under stress, I think, top three I ever saw.

01:36:59.000 Okay, so people talk about attributes, but it's more nuanced than most people think.

01:37:05.000 Don't forget some of the attributes that never get mentioned, particularly things like problem solving, making decisions under stress.

01:37:12.000 These have immense consequences for an athlete.

01:37:15.000 And they compound.

01:37:17.000 That's what's fascinating.

01:37:18.000 And the ultimate goal is getting to the finish line.

01:37:21.000 Yes.

01:37:22.000 Like, who gets to the finish?

01:37:23.000 Who wins?

01:37:24.000 Yeah.

01:37:24.000 Who manages the interaction of those attributes and skills the best gets over the finish line first.

01:37:29.000 Yeah.

01:37:29.000 And it's a complicated story.

01:37:31.000 That was an interesting thing you said earlier, Joe.

01:37:33.000 We jumped over it more quickly than perhaps we should have.

01:37:37.000 You made a fascinating point about the idea that There is a finish line, and that's agreed upon, the knockout, the submission.

01:37:46.000 But 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.

01:37:55.000 But ultimately, it comes down to skills and attributes.

01:37:58.000 It'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.

01:38:15.000 That has the discipline, has the physical attributes, has the mental understanding of how to win, the ability to cross that finish line.

01:38:24.000 But 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.

01:38:37.000 If you can impart that into a guy like Nicky and give him all the attributes that Gordon has.

01:38:45.000 And understand also, Joe, that some of the attributes and skills can conflict with each other.

01:38:52.000 Okay?

01:38:53.000 So, for example, if you have immense reservoirs of strength, flexibility, and speed, you might not feel any need to learn technique.

01:39:02.000 You might not need it.

01:39:03.000 Strong, fast, flexible.

01:39:04.000 And so it can actually hinder your skill development.

01:39:07.000 It's a tricky thing to develop this ultimate athlete who is strong in all of them.

01:39:12.000 Think about how few times coaches generate truly great athletes.

01:39:20.000 Let's look at an example of a coach who I really look up to a lot, Kastamaru.

01:39:24.000 He started coaching in the mid-1940s, I believe, and finished pretty much with his death in the mid-1980s.

01:39:33.000 He coached all the way through.

01:39:36.000 How many athletes did he produce in that time?

01:39:39.000 Jose Torres, Floyd Patterson, Kevin Rooney to a certain extent.

01:39:47.000 Great athletes.

01:39:48.000 Yeah, he's a good athlete.

01:39:50.000 Got knocked out by Alexis Arguello, right? 0.70

01:39:53.000 Yeah, that was a fascinating match.

01:39:54.000 Amazing knockout, by the way.

01:39:56.000 But Mike Tyson was the prodigy.

01:39:59.000 I think 99% of your listeners will agree with us if we just said, okay, Jose Torres was a very, very good light heavyweight champion.

01:40:08.000 Floyd Patterson is even a level above that.

01:40:11.000 Undersized, heavyweight, but very great fighter.

01:40:17.000 One of the greats of the 1960s for sure.

01:40:20.000 And of course, one, Mike Tyson, who is incontestably in the top three of all time.

01:40:27.000 All time.

01:40:28.000 In his prime.

01:40:29.000 People want to judge him based on the later aspects of his career when he had lost motivation and he was partying and recklessness.

01:40:37.000 I judge him on the Mike Tyson that knocked out Marvis Frazier, the Mike Tyson that stopped Larry Holmes.

01:40:42.000 In my opinion, he's like top two or three.

01:40:45.000 I totally agree with you.

01:40:46.000 And even at the end of his career when he was falling apart, he was...

01:40:50.000 Still very impressive.

01:40:51.000 Even his fight with Lennox Lewis, I mean, he was barely trained at that point.

01:40:56.000 It was still a very competitive fight.

01:40:59.000 So 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.

01:41:11.000 That's three people in 40 years of work.

01:41:13.000 Out of how many athletes?

01:41:15.000 How many?

01:41:16.000 Hundreds, I'm sure.

01:41:17.000 Hundreds and hundreds.

01:41:18.000 Okay, in my experience, I teach literally hundreds of people in a given month in New York City.

01:41:28.000 My average class size on a Monday afternoon was like 100 to 120 people.

01:41:32.000 That's Monday afternoon, and I teach seven days a week.

01:41:36.000 Okay.

01:41:38.000 And yet, how many came out as great grappling champions or mixed martial arts champions?

01:41:43.000 Five or six.

01:41:44.000 So the numbers are small.

01:41:47.000 In 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.

01:41:59.000 There's plenty of coaches who aren't really coaches, they're trainers.

01:42:02.000 They bring in athletes who are already world champions, who are already very, very good, and then they just train them for competition.

01:42:08.000 That's a different thing.

01:42:10.000 At that point, you're recruiting people and training recruits.

01:42:13.000 Castamaro took Mike Tyson from age 13.

01:42:17.000 He took in Jose Torres as a young developing Olympic boxer, I believe.

01:42:24.000 Jose Torres won the silver medal in 56 Olympics.

01:42:27.000 I had to check that.

01:42:28.000 But Floyd Patterson was the youngest heavyweight champion of all time when he won the titles.

01:42:36.000 So he started with these guys and he really was a coach who brought them up from youth into world championship status.

01:42:42.000 So he's like a genuine coach and mentor.

01:42:47.000 And yet three people in a 40-year career.

01:42:52.000 To make someone into that uber championship status, a lot of things have to fall into place.

01:42:59.000 And I think you raised a very deep point, Joe, that, man, the numbers of people who can get that to happen, it's very, very small.

01:43:10.000 The number of athletes that can figure their way through the maze and not lose motivation, not change course.

01:43:18.000 And Joe, there's so many arbitrary things.

01:43:20.000 We talked about arbitrary before, about how you walked into a Taekwondo school, and just based on the fact that you went in at 7 p.m.

01:43:26.000 instead of 7, 10 p.m., turned your life around.

01:43:29.000 I mean, think about how many things that can go wrong.

01:43:31.000 I've had students that were enormously talented, enormously talented.

01:43:35.000 It could have been a Gordon Ryan, but they met a woman and fell in love, got married.

01:43:40.000 Now, that's a wonderful thing.

01:43:41.000 I'm happy that they did that, but just anything can happen in your life.

01:43:45.000 You can be in a car accident.

01:43:48.000 Life is very, very arbitrary.

01:43:50.000 There'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.

01:44:02.000 It's hard enough just to balance the attributes and skills over time and keep someone there long enough to develop those skills.

01:44:10.000 And then there's intercepting forces from outside that could just derail everything.

01:44:13.000 That's why we love when someone does come along like an Israel Adesanya. 0.78

01:44:18.000 It's an incredible thing.

01:44:19.000 It just becomes that guy.

01:44:20.000 It's so rare.

01:44:21.000 It's this diamond.

01:44:23.000 But it's what makes a sport so fun.

01:44:26.000 Because it's so hard to do.

01:44:27.000 Because it's such a crazy journey to get to become a champion.

01:44:32.000 In any discipline.

01:44:33.000 All value in life is based around scarcity.

01:44:36.000 And there's nothing more scarce than the factors involved in getting to the top of combat sports.

01:44:42.000 As 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.

01:44:52.000 I'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.

01:45:05.000 I know I can.

01:45:06.000 I remember knowing that he lost to Buster Douglas, watching it after the fact and still thinking he was going to win.

01:45:15.000 You gotta understand like that's how dominant Mike Tyson was.

01:45:20.000 I 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.

01:45:35.000 I remember just disbelief.

01:45:39.000 It's not possible.

01:45:43.000 Anyone who grew up in the 1980s watching it, this guy was literally the greatest fighter of all time.

01:45:50.000 It was such a shocking event.

01:45:52.000 What 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. 0.68

01:46:01.000 Because 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. 0.63

01:46:10.000 They weren't excited. 0.69

01:46:12.000 All the action in the 1980s was between the four greats, Roberto Duran, Tommy Hearns, Sugar Ray, and Marvin Hagler.

01:46:22.000 And I guess you could also add the Jamaican fellow, the body snatcher. 1.00

01:46:28.000 Mike McCallum.

01:46:29.000 Yeah, Mike McCallum.

01:46:30.000 And there was Donald Curry and Milton McCrory.

01:46:32.000 It was an incredible time.

01:46:33.000 Amazing time.

01:46:34.000 But the heavyweights were weak.

01:46:35.000 And you went from Muhammad Ali, who had taken the heavyweight division to such...

01:46:44.000 It became the most important thing in sports in the 1970s.

01:46:48.000 Then the late 70s to the mid-80s, there was this huge dip in the heavyweight division.

01:46:54.000 All the attention went on the welterweights, and then suddenly Mike Tyson came in.

01:46:58.000 Well, 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.

01:47:08.000 Because in his prime, he was amazing.

01:47:10.000 He was so good.

01:47:11.000 And he had one of the best jabs in the history of the sport.

01:47:14.000 I mean, even when he fought Mike Tyson, that second round, he came out jabbing him.

01:47:20.000 It was competitive.

01:47:22.000 You know, it's that odd thing talking about jabbing Mike Tyson.

01:47:25.000 Isn't it remarkable to think Tyson was so short for a heavyweight?

01:47:30.000 Was he 5'10"?

01:47:31.000 And the average height of his opponents was like 6'2", 6'3".

01:47:34.000 And yet, he was never outjabbed. 0.88

01:47:38.000 Yeah.

01:47:38.000 I guess that's incredible.

01:47:40.000 It is incredible.

01:47:40.000 There's a reason why they call it reach advantage in boxing, because it really is an advantage.

01:47:44.000 And yet, he was able to completely nullify people's jabs, including very good exponents of the jab.

01:47:50.000 The Holmes fight, though, made me wonder, like, what would have been like if Larry and him had fought in Larry's prime?

01:47:56.000 Yeah.

01:47:57.000 Because 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.

01:48:13.000 Yeah, 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.

01:48:25.000 Yeah, it's also crazy to think back then that It just shows you how far martial arts have come.

01:48:33.000 That at that time, incontestably, when you talked about the best fighter in the world, you meant the best boxer in the world.

01:48:40.000 But nowadays, no one would say the best boxer in the world is the best fighter in the world.

01:48:45.000 The whole scene has shifted.

01:48:47.000 Right.

01:48:47.000 There's all this talk about Francis Ngannou and Tyson Fury fighting.

01:48:51.000 There's no talk about them fighting inside the octagon.

01:48:53.000 There's not a question in anybody's mind how that fight would go down.

01:48:57.000 Yeah.

01:48:57.000 I mean, that would be...

01:48:58.000 It would be kind of fun to see Francis hit a takedown.

01:49:01.000 I don't think he would. 1.00

01:49:02.000 I think he'd just kick the shit out of his legs. 1.00

01:49:04.000 Yeah, you're right. 1.00

01:49:05.000 And just eventually get him to the point where he could barely walk.

01:49:08.000 Just a couple calf kicks and that'd be a wrap. 0.95

01:49:11.000 There's been so many cases where talented boxers took on kickboxers.

01:49:17.000 Sometimes it goes the box this way.

01:49:18.000 There's some notable examples, but leg kicks, it's...

01:49:21.000 The only time I can think of it ever going a boxer's way is Shannon Briggs.

01:49:25.000 Yeah.

01:49:25.000 But Shannon Briggs against Tom Erickson.

01:49:29.000 But Tom Erickson was really a wrestler.

01:49:31.000 Yeah.

01:49:31.000 He had good leg kicks and he landed a few hard ones, but Shannon was so superior as a boxer.

01:49:37.000 But Vince Phillips when he fought Masato, that's a good example.

01:49:43.000 They had some excellent demonstrations out of Japan in the K1 where they had some...

01:49:48.000 There was one notable exception, though.

01:49:50.000 There was a South African boxer who did very well against...

01:49:53.000 Franz Botha.

01:49:54.000 Yes.

01:49:55.000 And he went on to fight Tyson.

01:49:57.000 It was actually a pretty competitive fight until he got...

01:50:00.000 Knocked into the next century.

01:50:02.000 Well, Botha went to K1 after he was a heavyweight boxer.

01:50:05.000 Yes.

01:50:06.000 Yeah.

01:50:06.000 But he did pretty well.

01:50:08.000 He did pretty well.

01:50:08.000 Yeah.

01:50:09.000 Well, he was just a really tough guy.

01:50:10.000 You know, there was a few of those guys that were capable.

01:50:14.000 You know, it's just...

01:50:15.000 But 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.

01:50:27.000 You know, there's levels to all that.

01:50:30.000 But even Ernesto Hoos lost to Bob Sapp, who was just a pharmacological experiment.

01:50:37.000 Bob Sapp was the freak of all freaks.

01:50:40.000 If you don't know, if you never saw him fight, when he was 375 pounds with abs, That's insane.

01:50:47.000 He was so big.

01:50:49.000 It's easy to rattle off the numbers, 375 pounds, until you're stood in front of someone who's 375 pounds.

01:50:55.000 Dude, I met him in Vegas.

01:50:56.000 He was so big.

01:50:58.000 He was just preposterous.

01:51:02.000 Just preposterous.

01:51:03.000 I remember people don't understand what it's like to be hit by something like that.

01:51:09.000 There he is.

01:51:10.000 There's Bob Sapp in his prime.

01:51:11.000 Walking out with a robe with feathers on top of it.

01:51:14.000 And by the way, Japan loved him.

01:51:15.000 I don't know what went wrong.

01:51:17.000 I don't know all the exact specifics, but something went wrong with the deal with negotiating.

01:51:24.000 Look at the size of him.

01:51:25.000 My God.

01:51:27.000 Something went wrong with negotiations and with the people that ran K-1.

01:51:34.000 And there was a time where this is when he fought Mirko Krokop. 0.97

01:51:37.000 Mirko Krokop fucked him up. 0.99

01:51:40.000 Crushed him. 0.99

01:51:40.000 Well, Mirko was an interesting example because, you know, we talk about attributes, right? 0.99

01:51:45.000 Merkel was never the very best kickboxer in the world.

01:51:47.000 He was very elite.

01:51:48.000 But what he had over a lot of the best guys was the ability to close the distance very quickly and to strike very fast.

01:51:56.000 And guys that didn't have that kind of style, like a good example is Peter Ertz.

01:52:02.000 Peter Ertz, he was much more of a technique-based, he wasn't nearly as fast, didn't have the same kind of one-punch knockout power.

01:52:10.000 That Mirko did and never went into MMA. Or if he did, I'm not aware of it.

01:52:16.000 Same with Ernesto Hus.

01:52:17.000 I don't think those guys would have been as successful.

01:52:19.000 But Mirko had this insane ability to explode.

01:52:23.000 He could stay on the outside, just bop!

01:52:25.000 And that's what he did with Bob Sapp.

01:52:26.000 He caught him with a straight left hand and fractured his eye socket.

01:52:29.000 Yeah, devastating striking with the rear side of his body, both hand and leg.

01:52:34.000 Yes.

01:52:34.000 And as you say, an ability just to close it.

01:52:37.000 Yeah, there it is right there.

01:52:38.000 He popped him in the eye and dropped him.

01:52:40.000 And Mirko just had that one-punch, one-kick speed and power that made him...

01:52:48.000 It directly applied to MMA in a way that other fighters didn't.

01:52:52.000 And, 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.

01:52:59.000 In kickboxing, if those guys tried to get into MMA, they just weren't as successful.

01:53:03.000 You needed something to get guys off you.

01:53:06.000 Yeah.

01:53:07.000 I agree with you with the lumberjack, Peter Ertz.

01:53:14.000 If 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.

01:53:24.000 But if he was clinching people like that in MMA, it would have been taken down immediately, so it wouldn't have worked.

01:53:30.000 Whereas Mirko had that ability to stay out, stay out, stay out, and then bam!

01:53:34.000 And hit, and it was done.

01:53:36.000 It'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.

01:53:48.000 And 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.

01:53:57.000 Yes.

01:53:58.000 His legs were such a significant part of his game.

01:54:01.000 And there was many guys, for whatever reason, men generally tend to try to clinch things and do things and do everything with your arms.

01:54:10.000 But BJ figured out insane leg flexibility and dexterity.

01:54:15.000 I know he practiced it, too.

01:54:16.000 Because he had a really interesting workout regimen that he would do with bands.

01:54:20.000 Yeah.

01:54:20.000 He would have these rubber bands and he would use them in flexibility training.

01:54:27.000 And he would have these bands pull his feet in certain directions so he would resist against them.

01:54:32.000 Interesting.

01:54:33.000 Yeah, I never watched him do it, but someone who trained with him talked to me about it.

01:54:37.000 The way he would use these resistance bands specifically for working on his flexibility and strength in unusual positions.

01:54:49.000 Fascinating.

01:54:49.000 If you look at BJ, one of the most remarkable factors about his career is his speed of learning.

01:54:58.000 If I remember correctly, he got his black belt in a shockingly short period of time.

01:55:03.000 And won the Mundials.

01:55:06.000 And that was at a time when no one from America was even thinking about winning mundials.

01:55:11.000 He just came out, bang, and won.

01:55:14.000 And 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.

01:55:24.000 As you correctly point out, most human beings have a natural tendency to attack every problem with their hands and arms.

01:55:32.000 Everything we do in our life is mostly working with your arms and hands.

01:55:37.000 And so when we fight, we do exactly the same thing.

01:55:40.000 And your hands and arms are only a tiny fraction of your overall strength.

01:55:45.000 If I asked you, Joe, to walk across this room, that would be the easiest assignment I could ever give you.

01:55:52.000 But 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.

01:56:02.000 Our arms are massively weaker and have massively less endurance than our legs do.

01:56:12.000 And 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.

01:56:23.000 And 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.

01:56:32.000 Almost everything they do is learning to use exclusively their legs in their early development.

01:56:37.000 Now this is very frustrating for a lot of people because you feel clumsy as hell.

01:56:41.000 And athletes who are strong with their arms suddenly have to use their legs. 0.98

01:56:45.000 They feel helpless and uncoordinated and foolish.

01:56:48.000 But if they can get over that, they progress very, very quickly. 0.86

01:56:52.000 We were talking earlier.

01:56:54.000 I was showing you a video of Jeremiah Vance, who's one of Andy Bravo's black belts.

01:56:58.000 Very impressive.

01:56:58.000 He has like BJ Penn-level flexibility.

01:57:01.000 Insane dexterity.

01:57:02.000 And his jiu-jitsu game from the bottom is so shocking to people because his ability to just...

01:57:08.000 Without using his hands at all, move his feet in position across people's, like in the gogoplata or omoplata position.

01:57:15.000 It's just so much dexterity, so flexible.

01:57:20.000 Having someone, we were talking about a guy like Nicky Rod, who's got that kind of freak athleticism.

01:57:28.000 It's got to be possible to have a guy who's got that kind of freak athleticism as a heavyweight and that kind of dexterity.

01:57:34.000 I mean, it's not mutually exclusive to be large.

01:57:38.000 I was telling you about this guy that works out at my gym.

01:57:40.000 That's correct.

01:57:41.000 He's like 6'3".

01:57:42.000 And yet has similar flexibility. 0.93

01:57:44.000 Ridiculous flexibility and ridiculous dexterity, the way this guy can move his body. 0.71

01:57:48.000 And I see him working out. 0.99

01:57:50.000 I almost want to tell him, you're wasting your time.

01:57:52.000 You need to learn some martial arts.

01:57:53.000 All this working out you're doing is great, but you're not applying it to anything.

01:57:58.000 You could be amazing.

01:58:01.000 Breakdancers.

01:58:02.000 There's something that we figured out at 10th Planet with Richie Martinez and Gio Martinez.

01:58:07.000 They were break dancers. 0.83

01:58:10.000 And we never thought of break dancing as being a way into martial arts.

01:58:15.000 I thought of wrestling.

01:58:16.000 I thought of gymnastics.

01:58:17.000 And we talked about Mark Schultz had been a gymnast.

01:58:20.000 But these break dancers have crazy dexterity. 0.98

01:58:24.000 Amazing ability to move their body.

01:58:26.000 Richie can put one hand on the ground and like put one hand up in the air and do a full lotus with his legs. 1.00

01:58:33.000 Wild shit. 0.99

01:58:35.000 And you watch them move around and spin on their head and all that kind of stuff. 0.99

01:58:38.000 And the ability just to control their body, it's so applicable to jiu-jitsu.

01:58:44.000 And Richie's another one who has this incredible leg dexterity, amazing flexibility.

01:58:48.000 But all these different tools that, when applied to jiu-jitsu, make for a really difficult guy to deal with.

01:58:59.000 Yeah.

01:59:02.000 Ultimately, 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.

01:59:12.000 If you can make your lower body fight his upper body, you can beat bigger people than yourself and do it quite often.

01:59:23.000 Always 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.

01:59:31.000 Humans are quite pathetically weak in the upper body and surprisingly strong in the lower body.

01:59:38.000 Interestingly, the difference in strength between men and women is very dramatic in the upper body, but much narrower in the lower body. 0.92

01:59:48.000 And 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.

01:59:58.000 And as much as possible, that's what I try to do in my coaching.

02:00:04.000 And 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.

02:00:11.000 So 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.

02:00:21.000 Your legs versus their upper body.

02:00:23.000 Your legs expressly against their head and one of their arms.

02:00:27.000 When you get students thinking in those terms, legs versus arms, that's when they start making very fast progress.

02:00:34.000 How much time, if any, do you guys spend on flexibility?

02:00:38.000 Actually, I don't coach physical training at all among my students.

02:00:46.000 We never have a class where we work on flexibility.

02:00:49.000 We never have a class where we work on strength.

02:00:52.000 I've always believed that athletes will tend to find physical programs that suit their own personality and body type best.

02:01:03.000 If 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.

02:01:24.000 I've seen people get excellent results with Olympic lifting.

02:01:28.000 I've seen people get excellent results with kettlebells.

02:01:30.000 I've seen excellent results out of just bodyweight training.

02:01:33.000 I've seen some people just do basic bodybuilding and do just fine.

02:01:38.000 Never 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.

02:01:46.000 I've never seen any strong evidence of this.

02:01:50.000 Similarly with diet.

02:01:51.000 I've never seen anyone change their diet and their sports performance increase.

02:01:55.000 And so I don't coach these things because I've never seen anyone engage in them and just get noticeably better.

02:02:01.000 But I can teach someone technique and then two weeks later they're beating people they couldn't beat two weeks ago.

02:02:08.000 This I can coach.

02:02:10.000 So what I do is I just tell my students find some kind of athletic program.

02:02:16.000 I do think it's important to work on your strengths.

02:02:18.000 I do think it's important to work on your flexibility.

02:02:20.000 But find something you like.

02:02:21.000 Some guys like yoga.

02:02:22.000 Some guys like P&F stretching.

02:02:24.000 Some guys Everyone finds their own ground.

02:02:27.000 And a big part of that is self-discovery.

02:02:29.000 You learn a lot about your body by working on your own attributes.

02:02:32.000 And it's important that judicious players learn to discover the strengths and weaknesses of their own body.

02:02:36.000 What are you good at?

02:02:37.000 What are you not good at?

02:02:38.000 And start tying that into the technique that I show you.

02:02:41.000 I can coach people all day on technique, and I'm very, very confident that when I do that, I can improve their sports performance.

02:02:48.000 But 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.

02:03:01.000 Is this because there are no methods that are better?

02:03:05.000 Or 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?

02:03:18.000 That's a fascinating question.

02:03:21.000 Think 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.

02:03:43.000 And we're talking about, like, oftentimes the difference between athletes is so small with what makes the winner versus the loser.

02:03:54.000 Like, it might be just the ability to push at that one moment when the other athlete's tired.

02:03:59.000 It 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.

02:04:07.000 There's so many variables.

02:04:09.000 One of them you're covering with jujitsu and technique.

02:04:13.000 But when you're talking about Gordon Ryan, say, being not very flexible.

02:04:17.000 Like, imagine if Gordon Ryan had the kind of leg dexterity that Jeremiah Vance does.

02:04:22.000 That's not physically impossible.

02:04:24.000 Like, Jeremiah, if you met him, he's a regular guy.

02:04:27.000 You know, B.J. Penn is a regular person.

02:04:29.000 You see him.

02:04:30.000 He's not a freak.

02:04:31.000 I mean, he's freakishly talented.

02:04:33.000 But imagine if you take someone who...

02:04:37.000 I mean, we're talking about...

02:04:40.000 Canelo Alvarez having this incredible power but also having this amazing discipline in terms of his ability to recognize that power is not everything.

02:04:51.000 Boxing and learning all the technique and learning how to be defensively responsible.

02:04:56.000 Learning all the different strategies in terms of feinting and movement.

02:05:01.000 There'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.

02:05:15.000 That's a fascinating argument you've raised, Joe.

02:05:19.000 Let me try and...

02:05:20.000 I believe I can give you an answer.

02:05:23.000 Why I don't coach these things. 0.98

02:05:25.000 It makes sense that you wouldn't, because I don't know how the fuck you do what you do already. 0.66

02:05:31.000 With regards to the question, would this make a difference, there's been no study on it. 0.88

02:05:36.000 So I don't like to teach in areas where I just don't have good evidence for giving an opinion.

02:05:43.000 And so it would be dishonest of me to suddenly start claiming this strength program is better than this one.

02:05:50.000 I don't have evidence for it.

02:05:52.000 If I had evidence and there was a difference, I would go with that method.

02:05:56.000 You asked a very interesting question in between that question, though.

02:06:00.000 You asked something very interesting indeed.

02:06:02.000 You said, well, what if you took Gordon Ryan and you just made him more flexible?

02:06:06.000 Wouldn't he be better than he is now?

02:06:08.000 Yeah, 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.

02:06:20.000 Stretching, though?

02:06:21.000 Let me go further with my explanation.

02:06:25.000 There'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.

02:06:37.000 Let's look at a concrete example because otherwise it's going to just sound too vague.

02:06:42.000 George St. Pierre versus BJ Penn.

02:06:44.000 BJ Penn had some of the most perfect jiu-jitsu flexibility I've ever seen in my career.

02:06:51.000 There'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.

02:07:01.000 George St. Pierre has good linear flexibility.

02:07:04.000 He'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.

02:07:14.000 So he has a good kind of flexibility for standing striking, but not a good flexibility for guard play.

02:07:23.000 When George went to fight BJ, everyone said to me, this is the second fight.

02:07:28.000 They'd already fought one time.

02:07:29.000 When he went to fight the second time, that was the mature George St-Pierre.

02:07:33.000 When they first fought George, I believe, was only a blue or purple belt.

02:07:36.000 And they'd had a close fight.

02:07:38.000 And the second time, George was a black belt and a much more mature phase of his career.

02:07:47.000 And the discussion was, well, how do you want to fight him?

02:07:50.000 And in the first fight, everyone had said, you can't go to the ground with BJ. He's a world champion in jiu-jitsu.

02:07:57.000 If you go to the ground, it's suicide.

02:07:59.000 And I was the lone voice saying, no, George should go to the ground with him, take him down.

02:08:03.000 And BJ's very talented, but he's never actually submitted someone from bottom position.

02:08:08.000 And as long as Vijay doesn't get on your back or get top position, George is going to be just fine.

02:08:13.000 The best part of George's game is positional advance or staying inside someone's guard and striking from those positions.

02:08:19.000 And that's how ultimately George won the fight.

02:08:21.000 George lost the standing game in the first round.

02:08:25.000 Vijay easily won the first round.

02:08:26.000 And George won the next two rounds largely with takedowns and ground and pound on the floor.

02:08:32.000 So when the second fight came, I was an advocate of the ground again.

02:08:37.000 This time people were willing to listen based on what they'd seen the first time.

02:08:41.000 But I wanted to go further.

02:08:43.000 I said, not only are you going to take him down to the ground, you're going to pass his guard.

02:08:49.000 And everyone just laughed.

02:08:51.000 They 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.

02:08:58.000 You're never going to pass his guard.

02:09:00.000 And they all gave the same reason.

02:09:02.000 He's too flexible.

02:09:04.000 Literally, 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.

02:09:13.000 And I agreed he was the most flexible jiu-jitsu athlete I'd seen at that point in my career.

02:09:20.000 And I also agreed that he'd had superb guard retention skills as a result of that.

02:09:26.000 But 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.

02:09:36.000 You wouldn't be able to use it.

02:09:39.000 And, famously, George passed BJ's guard seven times in slightly more than ten minutes in that fight.

02:09:47.000 Now, 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.

02:09:54.000 Yes, this is all true, but the fact remains...

02:09:57.000 A 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.

02:10:09.000 What made the difference?

02:10:11.000 Would the smart thing have been to train George St-Pierre in BJ Penn-style flexibility in the time available?

02:10:17.000 No.

02:10:18.000 He 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.

02:10:26.000 You get much more mileage out of shutting down the other guy's attributes than you do trying to build your own attributes.

02:10:32.000 Your own attributes don't change that much.

02:10:36.000 But your ability to shut down someone else's attributes can be changed massively through the application of technique in very short periods of time.

02:10:45.000 And 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?

02:10:58.000 I'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.

02:11:10.000 Most certainly, I agree with you.

02:11:12.000 But I do think that you're talking about skills that aren't mutually exclusive.

02:11:16.000 And I think that if you do...

02:11:18.000 Stretch after training.

02:11:19.000 You can still do it even if you're training just as hard.

02:11:22.000 It's a matter of doing it or not doing it.

02:11:24.000 It doesn't take away anything from you.

02:11:26.000 It doesn't exhaust you.

02:11:27.000 It doesn't blow you out.

02:11:29.000 This 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.

02:11:40.000 Why not just work with techniques that suit the attributes you already have and invest all of your training time in that?

02:11:47.000 It's pretty easy to shut down the other guy's attributes with technique.

02:11:50.000 So why not just stick with what you're already very, very strong at?

02:11:56.000 These are the attributes you have.

02:11:58.000 They are paired with a certain skill set which expresses those attributes best.

02:12:02.000 Why bother investing large amounts of time in another set of attributes?

02:12:07.000 Then you have to learn a whole new set of skills appropriate for those attributes.

02:12:10.000 Now you're juggling whole new skill sets at a time when you're competing and you've got a competition coming up in one month.

02:12:18.000 You're not going to be able to bring those in in that time period.

02:12:21.000 I see what you're saying.

02:12:22.000 As the body changes, you're going to have to change the techniques and Technical change takes a long time.

02:12:29.000 Learning a new technique and applying it at a world championship level is a big deal.

02:12:32.000 It might take you six months to a year.

02:12:35.000 So 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?

02:12:45.000 No.

02:12:45.000 At day one you would say...

02:12:47.000 No, because at that point they're an open book and you can write the whole narrative from the beginning.

02:12:51.000 Right.

02:12:51.000 So for Gordon, he's too far down the path.

02:12:54.000 Yeah.

02:12:55.000 And 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.

02:13:09.000 Right, right.

02:13:10.000 We were talking before about ways to well and the treatment that they're going to provide Gordon and hopefully deal with his stomach issue.

02:13:19.000 Yeah.

02:13:19.000 Yeah, it's Ways to Well as a company and bought.

02:13:22.000 They're actually the people that bought me the sign behind me.

02:13:24.000 It was a gift to me coming here.

02:13:25.000 So that sign's from them.

02:13:28.000 Thank you, Brigham.

02:13:29.000 And what they want to do is using stem cells and BPC-157.

02:13:34.000 Apparently there are some papers that have been published on different methods of dealing with stomach issues using those.

02:13:44.000 Yeah, I truly hope they can succeed.

02:13:49.000 Tell me what it's like, because he's described it, but tell me what it's like as an outsider.

02:13:53.000 It's one of the most frustrating things I've experienced as a coach.

02:14:00.000 George also had stomach issues, but his was an ulcerative colitis.

02:14:05.000 It's a different kind of thing.

02:14:06.000 But 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.

02:14:22.000 Now, Gordon tends to think that the relationship between the antibiotics and his current illness is causal.

02:14:31.000 But of course, it could also just be a correlation.

02:14:35.000 It's not guaranteed that the antibiotics caused this problem.

02:14:39.000 There's plenty of other people who have been on the same wide-spectrum antibiotics as he took and they never had stomach issues.

02:14:44.000 It's possible, but it's not certain.

02:14:46.000 The truth is no one really knows definitively what is causing it.

02:14:50.000 He's had numerous tests.

02:14:53.000 Some of those tests point in certain directions.

02:14:56.000 The 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.

02:15:07.000 Over 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.

02:15:15.000 Gordon won four ADCC medals with this problem in place.

02:15:24.000 And numerous matches in between, and yet every training session was a battle.

02:15:32.000 And I've watched Gordon's personality change as he struggled with this.

02:15:37.000 He used to be a very light-hearted, happy-go-lucky kid who would come into class and laugh and talk, and that's gone.

02:15:46.000 He's a person who's more or less permanently in pain and nausea, and inevitably that It has definite effects on your personality.

02:15:57.000 He's at times deeply unhappy and distressed.

02:16:02.000 It's incredibly sad to be around someone who you care about deeply and see this kind of thing occurring at such a young age.

02:16:08.000 I'm not going to lie to you.

02:16:13.000 It's even more distressing to see that there's cycles of hope where a treatment seems to work and then fails.

02:16:20.000 There 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.

02:16:31.000 And for like one month before that fight, there was a period where the symptoms lifted.

02:16:37.000 And it was like a cloud just came off Gordon Ryan.

02:16:41.000 And he immediately started eating again, gained weight.

02:16:45.000 Training was easy.

02:16:47.000 He came out, had one of the best matches of his career.

02:16:49.000 And then a week afterwards, just came right back.

02:16:53.000 And that down of a period of hope where it seemed like things were going to improve and go back to normal.

02:17:02.000 And then to see him go back into a relapse was just...

02:17:06.000 It was hard to watch.

02:17:08.000 And there was nothing that correlated with that relapse?

02:17:11.000 Completely random.

02:17:12.000 And doctors couldn't explain it.

02:17:15.000 And...

02:17:17.000 So, 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.

02:17:38.000 And 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.

02:17:50.000 He hated to talk about it publicly because he saw it.

02:17:52.000 He didn't want to use it as an excuse.

02:17:54.000 And he thinks excuses are weakness and won't tolerate them.

02:18:00.000 And 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.

02:18:15.000 As bad as it was before, it never got to that point.

02:18:18.000 And we're now at a point where Gordon sometimes finishes, usually doesn't.

02:18:23.000 And there's certain elements of training, standing, wrestling, scrimmaging, he can't do.

02:18:31.000 And it's sad.

02:18:33.000 And...

02:18:38.000 I truly hope that he can fight his way through this.

02:18:42.000 At 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.

02:18:51.000 I'm hoping above hope that your medical friends can help.

02:18:56.000 But at this point, it's not looking good, to be honest with you.

02:19:00.000 There would have to be either a successful medical intervention or it could be one of those things that passes with time.

02:19:08.000 What 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.

02:19:22.000 And sometimes these things can be a long-term problem which goes away with time.

02:19:28.000 So those are really the only two ways I see this being resolved.

02:19:31.000 Either there's a successful medical intervention or time plays a role and eventually the condition just improves by itself over time.

02:19:39.000 If 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.

02:19:48.000 He's only 25 years old.

02:19:50.000 I don't believe Gordon will hit his peak until his early 30s.

02:19:54.000 So 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.

02:20:06.000 I think about it in terms of worst case scenarios and best case scenarios.

02:20:10.000 Best 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.

02:20:24.000 In 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.

02:20:42.000 I 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.

02:20:58.000 Jordan Burroughs is too young.

02:21:00.000 He's still competing, so he hasn't gone into a coaching career yet.

02:21:02.000 But the other three were the greatest American wrestlers of all time who went on to become the greatest American wrestling coaches of all time.

02:21:11.000 And they actually had more influence as coaches than they did as athletes.

02:21:15.000 And 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.

02:21:35.000 I believe this with all my heart and all my soul.

02:21:38.000 I didn't even start Jiu-Jitsu until I was 28. Gordon Ryan is 25, and he already knows almost everything that I know.

02:21:46.000 And, in addition, has many of his own techniques and adaptations which I never had.

02:21:55.000 So at age 25, He's just as knowledgeable as I am and only getting more knowledgeable as each day passes.

02:22:04.000 I'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.

02:22:33.000 I 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.

02:22:48.000 But what separates him from everybody else?

02:22:52.000 What can people learn from that if you wanted to mirror the immense success that Gordon's had in Jiu-Jitsu?

02:22:58.000 Yeah, it's a truly fascinating question.

02:23:03.000 There's a sense, Joe, in which you've got to ask, what's more important in skill development?

02:23:10.000 Is it the coach or the athlete?

02:23:12.000 And 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.

02:23:23.000 You're going to have just two or three Gordon Ryans out there out of a thousand.

02:23:30.000 Now, in my defense, a large part of that is because of factors we talked about earlier.

02:23:36.000 Some people could have been a Gordon Ryan, but life intervened in a certain way.

02:23:39.000 They got injured.

02:23:40.000 They fell in love.

02:23:41.000 They moved to a different country or what have you.

02:23:44.000 They just chose another career.

02:23:47.000 But there has to be a recognition that there are some athletes who bring something to the table which the others don't.

02:23:55.000 And 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.

02:24:07.000 So 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.

02:24:17.000 And the question you're asking is a fascinating question.

02:24:19.000 What the hell is it?

02:24:20.000 What do these guys do?

02:24:24.000 People talk about persistence.

02:24:27.000 It's not persistence.

02:24:29.000 There's a lot of people out there who do the wrong thing very persistently and they get nowhere.

02:24:35.000 It's intelligent, adaptive persistence.

02:24:39.000 Yes, persistence is part of the formula, because if you're not there for long enough, skills take time.

02:24:47.000 There'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.

02:25:01.000 But as I said, just doing the wrong thing repetitively isn't going to make you a world champion.

02:25:07.000 So what kind of persistence is required?

02:25:09.000 Well, it has to be adaptive.

02:25:11.000 You have to be able to look at what you're doing and engaging in and assess whether it's working or not.

02:25:19.000 Which parts are working?

02:25:21.000 Which parts are failing?

02:25:22.000 Why are they working?

02:25:23.000 Why are the other parts failing?

02:25:24.000 And make adaptations over time so that you change your training structure In response to success and failure.

02:25:34.000 And this has to be done along intelligently guided routines.

02:25:41.000 And so it's not enough just to say, well, Gordon Ryan's persistent.

02:25:44.000 He just hung out in the gym long enough and he got good.

02:25:46.000 Okay, no.

02:25:47.000 It's because he's adapted.

02:25:53.000 The 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.

02:26:08.000 And that idea of adaptive persistence is probably the single most important thing.

02:26:15.000 Now, persistence itself is a evaluated term.

02:26:17.000 You used a term that I love and is deeply embedded in martial arts before, Joe.

02:26:23.000 You talked about discipline.

02:26:25.000 Persistence is a more wide-ranging way of talking about discipline.

02:26:30.000 But discipline goes in so many different ways.

02:26:33.000 It's not just about showing up to the gym and showing up to the workout.

02:26:36.000 It's not just about being told to do 300 repetitions and doing all 300. It's also about discipline of thought.

02:26:45.000 That's the most difficult form of discipline, to stay mentally engaged in the game.

02:26:49.000 When 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.

02:26:56.000 And you sit back and ask yourself, what did I do today?

02:26:59.000 Why 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.

02:27:11.000 That's the kind of discipline that really comes in.

02:27:14.000 It's more the mental discipline of mental engagement in the project.

02:27:17.000 And 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.

02:27:25.000 Of building cumulative success over time while eliminating failure.

02:27:31.000 Of staying in the game, that's persistence, but making it adaptive.

02:27:36.000 So 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.

02:27:47.000 What is making this work and what is making this fail?

02:27:51.000 How can I change this to my advantage?

02:27:54.000 And 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.

02:28:09.000 Is this something that's written down?

02:28:11.000 Do you talk about it after classes?

02:28:16.000 Do you talk about it before classes?

02:28:17.000 Is it something that you're documenting or is it something you keep in your memory?

02:28:21.000 Great question.

02:28:23.000 I try very hard to keep everything very informal.

02:28:26.000 Why?

02:28:27.000 Because informal human relationships Create a group camaraderie which cold clinical studies never can.

02:28:43.000 Training together with the same people for years is a hard thing.

02:28:49.000 Everyone's got a big ego.

02:28:51.000 A lot of times those egos clash.

02:28:53.000 A lot of times you don't like the people you're training with.

02:28:56.000 There's a lot of rivalries inside any training room.

02:28:59.000 I don't like training with that guy.

02:29:00.000 I like training with this guy.

02:29:03.000 Keeping a lid on negative social interactions over time is a big, big part of it.

02:29:11.000 I've failed spectacularly in some cases.

02:29:14.000 I've had students leave, they said, John, I don't like the way the room feels, I don't feel welcome in here, and they just leave.

02:29:21.000 And they're happy as someone else.

02:29:23.000 That's good.

02:29:23.000 It's good for them to be happy.

02:29:26.000 But 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.

02:29:50.000 It can't just be everything's cold, unemotional, and documented.

02:29:57.000 I 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. 0.81

02:30:15.000 I don't think you come across that way. 0.85

02:30:17.000 By the way.

02:30:18.000 I know you pretty well.

02:30:20.000 You're just efficient.

02:30:21.000 But, you know, we play around a lot.

02:30:23.000 We joke a lot.

02:30:24.000 And it has to be that way.

02:30:25.000 Has to.

02:30:26.000 Because, Joe, you've been in training rooms for years, your whole life.

02:30:29.000 You know what it's like. 0.98

02:30:31.000 Dude, there's times you're looking at the guy across the line and you're like, I fucking can't stand this guy. 0.84

02:30:35.000 And now you've got to go and spar him. 0.94

02:30:37.000 You're going to spar someone you don't like, it's going to get physical.

02:30:41.000 It's going to get heated.

02:30:43.000 So keeping things human is a big, big part of it.

02:30:47.000 So I try to avoid overly cold clinical documentation.

02:30:52.000 Here's how we do things, step one, step two.

02:30:54.000 In the classroom, I try to keep it more informal.

02:30:57.000 So when these situations come up and you don't feel like they're being accurately addressed, then you find an informal way to discuss it.

02:31:06.000 Yeah.

02:31:06.000 And often it's in a group setting.

02:31:08.000 And we'll, you know, we'll make fun of someone fails spectacularly with a technique.

02:31:12.000 We'll all make fun of them and laugh about it.

02:31:14.000 And then we'll go, okay, here's how you would do it.

02:31:16.000 And we go through trial and error.

02:31:19.000 We say, okay, it worked on this guy, but what if the guy was more flexible?

02:31:22.000 We pull in a flexible guy.

02:31:24.000 We go, okay, what if the guy was heavier than you?

02:31:25.000 And we play and experiment like this.

02:31:27.000 And that kind of informal group setting keeps a better group cohesion over time.

02:31:36.000 One of the problems that Gordon had with this stomach thing was recurring staph infection.

02:31:45.000 Craig Jones said he had the same thing too.

02:31:48.000 Is that something that's an environmental issue in a specific location?

02:31:53.000 I 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?

02:32:03.000 But it also can be very prevalent in some gyms, right?

02:32:08.000 Yeah, staff is universally present.

02:32:11.000 You and I right now are covered in staff.

02:32:14.000 And there are many different varieties of staff.

02:32:16.000 And some of them are quite innocuous and some of them are extremely damaging.

02:32:22.000 And in general, staff works by going through some kind of damage to the skin and penetrating the dermis and scratches, abrasions of some kind.

02:32:35.000 that'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

02:33:03.000 As 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.

02:33:18.000 Running a good hygienic program is important.

02:33:23.000 You run into problems when mats aren't cleaned well.

02:33:27.000 But 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.

02:33:44.000 I know training in New York, we had a very high incidence of staph infections.

02:33:51.000 Yeah, you had a slight smile on your face when I was bringing up environmental names or anything.

02:33:57.000 But you couldn't hide that.

02:33:59.000 There's no way to get around it.

02:34:00.000 So there's an issue with the New York gym.

02:34:02.000 There was.

02:34:03.000 There was.

02:34:04.000 What do you think was going on there?

02:34:06.000 It just wasn't clean correctly?

02:34:07.000 No.

02:34:08.000 I just think that the number one problem was that we had an enormously high number of visitors per class.

02:34:14.000 Now think about it.

02:34:16.000 Let's say you're a kid from Nebraska who wants to train with the squad.

02:34:22.000 You've just saved up all your money.

02:34:25.000 You're living in Nebraska.

02:34:26.000 You're not making that much.

02:34:27.000 And you bought a plane ticket and you got a hotel room in New York City.

02:34:31.000 New York City is literally five times more expensive than your hometown in Nebraska. 0.70

02:34:35.000 You saved up all your money.

02:34:37.000 And then three days before you fly, you get a staph infection on your skin.

02:34:44.000 If you cancel everything, you lose all that hard-earned money.

02:34:47.000 What are you going to do?

02:34:49.000 You're going to fly to New York and train with the squad, aren't you?

02:34:51.000 That's what they all did.

02:34:53.000 So we'd get people coming in.

02:34:54.000 They would have a staph infection on their elbow or knee, and they'd wear an elbow or a knee pad.

02:35:02.000 And when they come in, you look at them, skin looks good, we're fine.

02:35:07.000 After like three minutes of training, the elbow pad slips and you just see a bloody infection.

02:35:13.000 And I'd be like, buddy, come over here.

02:35:17.000 I'd be like, what's that on your elbow?

02:35:19.000 I don't know.

02:35:20.000 LAUGHTER Really?

02:35:22.000 You don't know.

02:35:24.000 Just came up.

02:35:25.000 Yeah, I scratched it.

02:35:27.000 That's a staph infection.

02:35:28.000 You're going to have to leave the meds.

02:35:30.000 So this was a common thing.

02:35:32.000 Anytime you have massive numbers of visitors...

02:35:37.000 You have much less control over who's coming to the gym.

02:35:41.000 The 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.

02:35:51.000 So it is a potential problem.

02:35:54.000 Thankfully, we were able to get around the problem at the end with just a skin infection program where we just looked at people.

02:36:01.000 When they came in to visit, they had to do a full inspection of their skin.

02:36:05.000 So you had a woman's inspection and a men's inspection, and they were inspected, and the problem...

02:36:10.000 That's so crazy.

02:36:13.000 It's kind of awkward.

02:36:14.000 But that's how wild that gym was.

02:36:16.000 That's how wild it was, yeah.

02:36:17.000 Did you guys use anything like defense soap or anything like that?

02:36:20.000 Yeah, I always encourage people to use.

02:36:22.000 There's also other...

02:36:25.000 I always found the best results came with Hippoclens.

02:36:27.000 That's a hospital soap, which is very, very powerful.

02:36:31.000 But isn't that like a serious antibacterial soap that kills all the good stuff, too?

02:36:37.000 Yeah, that's the problem.

02:36:38.000 Well, that's the good thing about defense soap.

02:36:41.000 Yeah, there's very little reputable medical literature on how much defense opens.

02:36:48.000 I mean, they basically use tea tree oil.

02:36:51.000 They're all based around that.

02:36:52.000 Eucalyptus tea tree oil.

02:36:53.000 Yeah, so there's not a lot of hard evidence to show that they do such a great job.

02:36:57.000 There's no incentive to make those studies either.

02:36:59.000 Yeah, so I don't think we're going to get it.

02:37:01.000 Because it's not pharmacological.

02:37:02.000 It's basically, all the evidence is anecdotal.

02:37:04.000 So you guys, I tried this for three months and I never got a staph infection.

02:37:07.000 Yeah.

02:37:07.000 Or how reliable that trial is that?

02:37:10.000 Was it a double-blind trial?

02:37:12.000 I'd have to talk to Guy Sacco from Defense to find out what studies have been done on tea tree oil or eucalyptus oil.

02:37:19.000 But bear in mind always that when they give you a study, it's not just a study, it's a sales pitch.

02:37:23.000 True.

02:37:24.000 They say they're going to give you a study, which is...

02:37:26.000 What about acidophilus and things along those lines?

02:37:29.000 Again, it's all anecdotal.

02:37:31.000 There's no hard evidence.

02:37:33.000 I like to go with evidence rather than just anecdotes.

02:37:37.000 But yeah, it's definitely a problem.

02:37:41.000 But you're not getting those same problems in Puerto Rico, is that correct?

02:37:45.000 No, there's also other reasons too.

02:37:47.000 Puerto Rico has much more sunshine.

02:37:49.000 Yeah, that's what I was going to bring up.

02:37:50.000 Sunshine is a natural antibacterial element and antifungal as well.

02:37:57.000 So it's just a generally healthier lifestyle.

02:38:00.000 As a general rule, wind and sun are good for skin infections.

02:38:05.000 We're also talking about ocean.

02:38:06.000 Swimming in the ocean and that might play a part.

02:38:09.000 These things all are positives as opposed to a sweaty basement with hundreds of people.

02:38:18.000 In a polluted city.

02:38:20.000 That's a tough environment.

02:38:23.000 I do believe that there are things you can do to reduce the likelihood of it.

02:38:30.000 But at the end of the day, there's only so much you can do.

02:38:33.000 And 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.

02:38:47.000 That's when you get into some truly scary stuff.

02:38:49.000 I 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.

02:39:06.000 And they were saying like, you know, the strains we have here are not like the strains you have in a gym.

02:39:11.000 These things will have to take the whole thing out again if it gets infected.

02:39:17.000 So there was like a critical two-week period when the scar goes to close itself where you have to be super vigilant.

02:39:26.000 So 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. 0.71

02:39:38.000 So it's kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

02:39:43.000 How is that hip replacement? 0.85

02:39:45.000 It's magical insofar as it makes you pain-free.

02:39:48.000 But always understand that they cut through 14 inches of the most important muscles in your body, which are your gluteus muscles.

02:39:55.000 And so you feel quite weak on that side.

02:40:00.000 Still?

02:40:01.000 Oh, yeah.

02:40:01.000 How long ago?

02:40:02.000 It'd be like four years now, I think.

02:40:04.000 There's no bringing it back?

02:40:06.000 Think about it.

02:40:07.000 If a guy took a knife and cut you on the hamstring, 14 inches down your hamstring, would your hamstring ever be the same again?

02:40:13.000 No.

02:40:14.000 You could walk, you could run, but it wouldn't be like it was before.

02:40:17.000 It's not like a Hollywood movie where you get cut and you're fine.

02:40:22.000 So 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.

02:40:44.000 More severe dynamic pressure than would be required for a regular hip or the same?

02:40:49.000 Because obviously any hip can pop out. 1.00

02:40:52.000 Any hip can pop out, but significantly less in the case of a hip replacement.

02:40:57.000 Wow.

02:40:59.000 But no pain.

02:41:00.000 Yeah, that's the main thing.

02:41:03.000 Unfortunately, I don't mean to sound like a hypochondriac, but I have a crippled knee on the same leg.

02:41:08.000 So I'm going to get a knee replacement on the same side.

02:41:10.000 And this is all from a rugby accident for people that don't know your history.

02:41:15.000 I had an operation when the surgery was the root cause of the problem. 0.94

02:41:19.000 They did a shitty job. 0.92

02:41:21.000 It was 1980s surgery. 0.97

02:41:23.000 Yeah, my friend Steve, he used to be on the US ski team and he's had some ungodly number of surgeries on his knees.

02:41:31.000 He has both of his knees replaced.

02:41:32.000 They're all resurfaced and the whole deal.

02:41:34.000 but his how old is he 65 I believe He's in his 60s.

02:41:43.000 How's his mobility in his knees?

02:41:45.000 Terrible!

02:41:45.000 Yeah.

02:41:46.000 He's a savage. 0.97

02:41:46.000 God bless him. 0.97

02:41:47.000 He doesn't give a fuck. 0.99

02:41:48.000 He's a guy, he's, I mean, he's had more surgeries than anybody I've ever met in my life. 0.99

02:41:52.000 He's had both his shoulders done, both of his knees resurfaced, he's had retinas detached, he's had everything, yeah.

02:41:59.000 Wow.

02:42:00.000 He's a robocop.

02:42:01.000 Still trains.

02:42:02.000 God bless him, he's a good man.

02:42:03.000 He's an animal, still spars.

02:42:05.000 Even better. 1.00

02:42:06.000 Oh yeah, he doesn't give a fuck. 0.99

02:42:07.000 He goes, I'm not here for a long time, I'm here for a good time. 0.99

02:42:10.000 That's always his attitude. 0.99

02:42:12.000 He's always in pain, doesn't give a fuck. 0.99

02:42:14.000 I like it. 0.99

02:42:14.000 One of the most courageous guys I've ever met. 0.99

02:42:16.000 But he was the first guy that I ever met that had knee replacements.

02:42:21.000 His knees had to get resurfaced.

02:42:23.000 They were just bone on bone, cartilage.

02:42:26.000 So he's got these metal things that it's pretty interesting to look at.

02:42:30.000 And they're going to do that to you, huh?

02:42:31.000 When are they going to do that?

02:42:32.000 I'm hoping to hold it off as long as possible.

02:42:36.000 I would like to see the juniors in the squad get into the mature phase of their career because you just never know.

02:42:48.000 Like, if I got the new replacement...

02:42:51.000 I 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.

02:43:02.000 Gamble in terms of the sizing?

02:43:04.000 Of what I can do afterwards.

02:43:08.000 So I'm hoping to hold it off as long as I can.

02:43:11.000 What are you doing now in terms of exercise?

02:43:14.000 I just do very, very light weightlifting.

02:43:19.000 And you can actually lift a surprising amount and basic lifts like a deadlift or a clean with a hip replacement.

02:43:28.000 You can't go crazy, but you can lift like 200 pounds.

02:43:31.000 It's not a problem.

02:43:32.000 And I just lift enough to sort of I can reduce pain in my body as much as I can.

02:43:42.000 It's all pretty basic stuff.

02:43:44.000 Does it frustrate you to not be able to roll?

02:43:47.000 I can roll very light.

02:43:50.000 At this point, I made a decision when I got my hip replacement that my life would be about my students rather than myself.

02:43:58.000 As long as you keep your mind focused on them, then I don't miss it.

02:44:03.000 I get more pleasure in watching them roll now than I do in rolling myself.

02:44:07.000 But you do always want to be in a position where you can move your body enough to demonstrate.

02:44:11.000 Yes, I'd be heartbroken if I couldn't demonstrate a move.

02:44:15.000 I'd be sad.

02:44:16.000 Yeah, that is an interesting thing, right, about martial arts is it requires the person who's teaching to be able to perform the movements.

02:44:23.000 Yeah, there's literally no other way to do it.

02:44:26.000 You can't just describe it.

02:44:27.000 It's not going to work.

02:44:28.000 After I had my hip replacement, my students bravely demonstrated all the techniques and I would point with a cane.

02:44:36.000 Like master splinter.

02:44:38.000 I don't think that's sustainable over time.

02:44:40.000 You can do that for a couple of weeks, but not forever.

02:44:43.000 What keeps you motivated at this stage of your career?

02:44:46.000 I mean, you've already amassed this incredible empire of killers.

02:44:50.000 You've got these guys to move with you all the way to Puerto Rico.

02:44:52.000 And I wanted to talk to you about that as well, because what is that like to go from crazy, crowded, polluted New York City to paradise?

02:45:01.000 I mean, you're in this gorgeous—I mean, I watch the videos of you guys, like, there, it's a gorgeous environment.

02:45:06.000 No, it's beautiful.

02:45:09.000 While 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.

02:45:15.000 They always told me about their homeland, and they would go back and talk about it.

02:45:20.000 It always sounded intriguing.

02:45:21.000 I'd never been.

02:45:26.000 Gordon, Craig, Nicky and some other members of the squad had gone down there and they talked very highly of it.

02:45:32.000 They loved it.

02:45:33.000 When COVID-19 broke out, it was difficult to train in New York and the local authorities were very much against the idea of gyms training.

02:45:45.000 We had a special ability to train because we only allowed professional athletes to train.

02:45:50.000 It was legal for professional athletes to train in New York.

02:45:53.000 But not regular classes.

02:45:54.000 So I lost 95% of my students as soon as the order to not run regular classes came.

02:46:02.000 So it was just them training in the basement and we got an opportunity to go down there and train in Puerto Rico.

02:46:13.000 The squad was very much in favor of it.

02:46:15.000 Me personally, I know you said New York's a horrible, polluted city.

02:46:19.000 It's a great city.

02:46:21.000 I love New York.

02:46:22.000 It is horrible and polluted, but it's also amazing.

02:46:25.000 I focus more on the amazing parts of it.

02:46:28.000 I loved it.

02:46:28.000 You lived in the city, though.

02:46:31.000 I think most of the students that you have didn't.

02:46:33.000 I think that's the problem.

02:46:34.000 I always tell them, like, dude, you guys literally see the worst parts of New York.

02:46:38.000 All you see is the bridges, the tunnels, and the parking garage that costs crazy amounts of money, and then you go home at night.

02:46:44.000 Like, you need to live in the city.

02:46:46.000 But they never did.

02:46:48.000 So...

02:46:48.000 Well, it's very difficult to do.

02:46:50.000 You have to make a lot of money to be able to live well in New York City, right?

02:46:54.000 I mean, I came to New York with $400 in my pocket, and I lived in the city the whole time.

02:46:57.000 But that was in the 1920s, right?

02:47:01.000 I set myself up for that one.

02:47:05.000 You hit me right between the eyes for that one.

02:47:08.000 1930s, Joe, 1930s.

02:47:09.000 But at the end, you probably had a nice place and you were doing pretty well teaching there.

02:47:16.000 It's a hugely successful gym.

02:47:19.000 But I had no part of the gym.

02:47:21.000 That was my teacher's gym, Henza.

02:47:23.000 So I never took any money from the gym.

02:47:26.000 I only made money on my private classes and seminars.

02:47:29.000 Really?

02:47:29.000 You never got paid to teach at the gym?

02:47:32.000 No.

02:47:32.000 I was paid a little bit, a stipend towards my rent.

02:47:37.000 What?!

02:47:39.000 Really?

02:47:39.000 I'm fine with that.

02:47:41.000 I don't see any reason why you should take money from your teacher.

02:47:44.000 I've always believed in the, I think the Americans, they call it, you eat what you kill. 1.00

02:47:50.000 I've always believed in that.

02:47:52.000 I used to teach privates all day, and that was more than enough for me.

02:47:57.000 I'm not someone who needs a lot of money.

02:47:59.000 That's a very unusual perspective.

02:48:01.000 Your perspective is, again, what I'm saying.

02:48:04.000 Good luck replacing John Donaher.

02:48:06.000 Good luck replicating that because of the fact that you don't need a lot of money.

02:48:11.000 Most people, they want a lot of money.

02:48:13.000 They want a bigger apartment.

02:48:15.000 They want a car.

02:48:16.000 They want a nice this and a nice that.

02:48:18.000 I think money has its value.

02:48:21.000 The prime function of money should be freedom.

02:48:24.000 It gives you freedom to do things, and that's a wonderful thing.

02:48:28.000 Yeah.

02:48:28.000 But I did that largely by the fact that I didn't want many things.

02:48:32.000 And I had many friends who were very successful.

02:48:36.000 Like, for example, when George St. Pierre would call me to train, I would fly up to Canada and he would have a nice hotel room for me.

02:48:47.000 So it wasn't like I lived like a homeless person or something like that.

02:48:52.000 But I just feel like the As long as you have enough money to be free, you're good.

02:48:58.000 And that was always my approach.

02:49:01.000 Living in New York City, what was the big appeal of it to you?

02:49:05.000 Initially, I came there for my education at Columbia University.

02:49:09.000 And you must remember, I was raised in New Zealand.

02:49:12.000 And New Zealand is a beautiful, beautiful country.

02:49:16.000 But it's very small.

02:49:17.000 There were more people in Manhattan than there were in my whole country when I left.

02:49:21.000 And moreover, New Zealand is largely an indigenous Maori population, a Polynesian population, and a European population from our colonial past.

02:49:34.000 So really, there's a fairly limited sort of group of people.

02:49:40.000 It's either Polynesian Maori or...

02:49:44.000 European.

02:49:45.000 When you come to New York, it's literally like the entire world is represented in there.

02:49:50.000 And it's just an amazing experience.

02:49:55.000 People talk about travel being the best educator, and I sincerely believe that.

02:50:01.000 I believe that travel opens your mind in ways that nothing else can.

02:50:05.000 But the problem with travel is that it creates an irregular lifestyle where you can't develop skills.

02:50:13.000 And what makes any human being great at anything is skill development.

02:50:18.000 The only way you can develop skills is by having routine in your life.

02:50:21.000 So where do you go?

02:50:22.000 If you want to travel, you can't have routine.

02:50:24.000 You can't develop skills.

02:50:27.000 And 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.

02:50:36.000 But New York City was the incredible compromise.

02:50:38.000 It had both.

02:50:39.000 You could be in one location.

02:50:41.000 You didn't go to the world.

02:50:42.000 The world came to you.

02:50:45.000 And 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.

02:50:58.000 But it doesn't seem like you really have the time to experience much of what New York City had to offer.

02:51:04.000 With the schedule that you had in terms of being there seven days a week, Training people constantly, doing privates all day, training the squad.

02:51:13.000 Where is all this time?

02:51:15.000 Night time.

02:51:16.000 Night time.

02:51:17.000 So what would you do at night time?

02:51:18.000 Go to different restaurants?

02:51:19.000 Of course, yeah.

02:51:20.000 That was what it was about?

02:51:21.000 And you can go around, meet people you've acquainted, coaching.

02:51:27.000 I had many famous athletes coming in and people from the UFC would come in and work and you would go out at night and talk.

02:51:35.000 So it was easy.

02:51:37.000 Daytime was work and nighttime was relaxation.

02:51:41.000 So you just enjoyed the diverse nightlife of Manhattan?

02:51:45.000 Yeah.

02:51:45.000 Also I worked in the nightclub industry for my first 10 years in Manhattan too.

02:51:51.000 I was very familiar with the nightlife scene.

02:51:55.000 We gotta talk Gordon Ryan into moving to Texas.

02:51:59.000 I think it's gonna be pretty damn easy for you.

02:52:01.000 Like, Gordon, first of all, he loves Texas.

02:52:05.000 Like, loves it.

02:52:06.000 Secondly, he loves cars.

02:52:08.000 And Texas is a car culture.

02:52:10.000 I took him out of my 900 horsepower Dodge Ram.

02:52:14.000 Did he crash it? 0.99

02:52:15.000 Oh, he fucking loved it. 0.98

02:52:16.000 No, he didn't drive it. 0.99

02:52:17.000 I drove it.

02:52:18.000 Okay. 0.97

02:52:18.000 But I have the most ridiculous truck. 0.97

02:52:20.000 It's a Hennessy Dodge Ram. 0.97

02:52:23.000 It's 900 horsepower.

02:52:25.000 It goes zero to 60 in three seconds.

02:52:27.000 That's insane.

02:52:28.000 For a giant truck.

02:52:29.000 An 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.

02:52:50.000 It is literally the most feeble car of all time.

02:52:53.000 Like going up a steep hill is like a total challenge.

02:52:56.000 Like zero to 60, I'm not even sure if I can get to 60. And that's what I learned to drive on.

02:53:03.000 Then I came to America.

02:53:04.000 I went straight to New York.

02:53:05.000 I haven't driven a car in 30 years.

02:53:08.000 That's amazing.

02:53:09.000 So now I'm in Puerto Rico.

02:53:11.000 You have to have a car.

02:53:13.000 So I'm looking around.

02:53:15.000 That's the car?

02:53:15.000 Yeah.

02:53:16.000 That thing has 37 horsepower?

02:53:19.000 That's amazing.

02:53:21.000 Wow, it must be so slow.

02:53:22.000 It's unbelievably slow.

02:53:25.000 Morris Minor.

02:53:27.000 Wow, look at that thing. 0.84

02:53:31.000 Hmm.

02:53:32.000 Good job on the Google.

02:53:33.000 He's the best.

02:53:34.000 I've never seen one of those before.

02:53:35.000 Never even heard of it.

02:53:36.000 So now I'm looking at cars, and cars have completely changed from what I learned in the early 1980s.

02:53:43.000 You know what you get?

02:53:43.000 Get yourself a Tesla.

02:53:47.000 I don't know if I'm ready for that.

02:53:48.000 You're ready.

02:53:50.000 I have one right here.

02:53:51.000 I'll let you drive it.

02:53:51.000 In Puerto Rico, the electricity goes out pretty often.

02:53:54.000 Tesla might not be the right choice.

02:53:55.000 And Texas, for sure.

02:53:57.000 That's a good point.

02:53:58.000 If you get out here, though, get one of them.

02:54:00.000 I'm looking at every car now.

02:54:01.000 It's over 300 horsepower.

02:54:02.000 It's insane.

02:54:03.000 Tesla has 1,000.

02:54:04.000 When I was a kid, automatic transmissions were like three-speed, slow as hell, and ten speeds.

02:54:11.000 They've got dual-clutch.

02:54:12.000 They've got crazy stuff.

02:54:13.000 The automatic transmissions now, they shift faster than a human can.

02:54:18.000 They're better than manuals.

02:54:19.000 It's crazy. 1.00

02:54:19.000 They're all interesting, but they're all stupid compared to electric cars. 1.00

02:54:23.000 Really? 1.00

02:54:24.000 Oh, yeah.

02:54:25.000 Look, I'm an automobile collector.

02:54:27.000 I love muscle cars.

02:54:29.000 I have a whole collection.

02:54:30.000 I have a 1970 Chevelle and a 65 Corvette and a 70 Barracuda, a 69 Camaro and a 69 Nova.

02:54:38.000 I love those cars. 0.99

02:54:39.000 They are stupid in comparison to my Tesla. 1.00

02:54:43.000 My Tesla is infinitely better than them. 1.00

02:54:46.000 Infinitely.

02:54:46.000 They're just amazing.

02:54:48.000 They're art.

02:54:49.000 They're rumble and sound and feel.

02:54:54.000 They're so mechanical.

02:54:56.000 I just love shifting and putting in the clutch and letting it off and go. 0.83

02:55:02.000 But 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! 0.55

02:55:12.000 It's so fast!

02:55:13.000 It goes 0 to 60 in 2.4 seconds.

02:55:16.000 It has a massive screen that shows me the navigation.

02:55:20.000 I talk to it.

02:55:21.000 I'll say, like, boop boop!

02:55:23.000 Navigate to Three Fork Steakhouse.

02:55:25.000 And it's a...

02:55:26.000 And it asks me if I want to navigate on autopilot. 1.00

02:55:29.000 And I go, fuck yeah. 0.99

02:55:31.000 And you hit the button. 1.00

02:55:32.000 And if you want, you go doo-doo. 0.60

02:55:33.000 And it does the whole thing for you.

02:55:35.000 It'll navigate for you.

02:55:36.000 It'll drive for you.

02:55:38.000 It's insane.

02:55:39.000 It's so effortless, the way it passes cars and gets on the highway.

02:55:43.000 You never have to go to a gas station and plug it in at my house or plug it in here at the studio.

02:55:48.000 Jamie does the same.

02:55:49.000 He plugs in here, too.

02:55:50.000 Did you say 0 to 60 in 2.66?

02:55:53.000 2.4.

02:55:54.000 Now...

02:55:56.000 Am I correct in saying at that point, you're starting to deal with g-forces?

02:56:00.000 Oh yeah!

02:56:01.000 That's acceleration where your face is getting pulled back.

02:56:05.000 I'll drive you back home to your hotel today. 0.99

02:56:07.000 That's scary as fuck. 0.99

02:56:08.000 It's hilarious. 0.99

02:56:09.000 And it's quiet.

02:56:11.000 Makes no sound.

02:56:13.000 Because we grew up in a generation where you put your foot down, the faster it goes, the more noise comes out.

02:56:17.000 Oh, yeah.

02:56:18.000 Well, that's with my truck.

02:56:19.000 My truck is really fast, but it's really loud.

02:56:22.000 Gordon loved it.

02:56:23.000 Oh, yeah.

02:56:24.000 He's obsessed with it.

02:56:25.000 He's got a giant automobile boner on that. 1.00

02:56:27.000 But they're stupid compared to Teslas. 1.00

02:56:30.000 Tell me something. 1.00

02:56:32.000 You said you had a 69 Nova?

02:56:37.000 Yes.

02:56:38.000 When you have these cars, are they stock?

02:56:41.000 Are the engines stock?

02:56:42.000 I don't have any stock cars.

02:56:44.000 What do you put inside them?

02:56:45.000 I get modern engines.

02:56:47.000 Really?

02:56:48.000 Yeah.

02:56:48.000 How does that work?

02:56:49.000 You get a company like Roadster Shop is the ones that did my Chevelle, my Barracude, and a couple other cars.

02:56:55.000 And what they do is they'll take...

02:56:57.000 The 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.

02:57:21.000 So all the wheels move independently.

02:57:23.000 They handle far better.

02:57:26.000 Massive disc brakes.

02:57:28.000 Really sophisticated shock absorbers and coilovers.

02:57:31.000 What do they do for transmission?

02:57:32.000 Oh, it's a modern transmission.

02:57:34.000 So it's a modern six-speed transmission.

02:57:37.000 Amazing.

02:57:37.000 Yeah, it's much, much, much, much, much better.

02:57:39.000 So essentially, would I be correct in saying this is a Nova only in appearance?

02:57:45.000 Yeah, in appearance.

02:57:46.000 So you have the best of both worlds.

02:57:48.000 They call them Restomods.

02:57:50.000 And what is the Nova here for horsepower?

02:57:52.000 650 horsepower or something like that.

02:57:55.000 The Nova is still in California.

02:57:56.000 It's still being worked on.

02:57:59.000 Steve Stroop has been working on that car for a couple of years.

02:58:03.000 He's in a very small shop and he has a small amount of people working on it.

02:58:08.000 Roadster Shop is a very large shop and they have a lot of employees.

02:58:13.000 Amazing.

02:58:14.000 They do work.

02:58:15.000 Google Master.

02:58:17.000 What's the word?

02:58:18.000 Google Master.

02:58:19.000 He's asking me a question.

02:58:20.000 Oh, Google Master.

02:58:21.000 What was the horsepower in the stock 69?

02:58:27.000 Chevy Nova.

02:58:28.000 Chevy Nova SS. Look up the fastest one.

02:58:32.000 I'm going to go with 360. First of all, what did it have on the hood?

02:58:35.000 Was that like a 420?

02:58:37.000 It was probably, I don't know.

02:58:39.000 They had the old Hemis?

02:58:40.000 It might have been a 454. You might have been able to get it in a 454. But I don't think it had more than the high 300s.

02:58:48.000 Now that's pre-catalytic converters, correct?

02:58:51.000 Yeah.

02:58:51.000 They probably had some pretty decent horsepower.

02:58:53.000 Maybe, but you know...

02:58:54.000 Did it have a manual transmission? 0.99

02:58:56.000 Yeah, you could buy it in a manual transmission, but you couldn't even lay it down because the tires were dogshit.

02:59:00.000 There were thin, skinny tires and stomped on the gas. 0.99

02:59:03.000 They'd peel out and go sideways and the balance was all fucked up. 0.95

02:59:06.000 It was very front-end heavy.

02:59:08.000 There were terrible cars going around corners.

02:59:10.000 And also the brakes back then were probably...

02:59:12.000 Terrible.

02:59:12.000 Drum brakes in the back.

02:59:14.000 Ugh.

02:59:15.000 Yeah, like barely.

02:59:17.000 Everything now is four-wheel disc brakes.

02:59:19.000 Everything.

02:59:20.000 I understand it.

02:59:21.000 Well, some people like those old cars, though, just because they're kind of like a time stamp.

02:59:26.000 I found something that says advertised power of 300 horsepower.

02:59:31.000 Which year is that?

02:59:32.000 It's like the 69 Chevy Nova SS 350. Okay, that's a 350. That's the one engine you have in it, right?

02:59:39.000 Yeah, see if you can get one with a 454. That's like top of the food chain.

02:59:42.000 I know like the Chevelle, 70 Chevelle had a 454 you could get.

02:59:47.000 I think that was in the 400 horsepower range.

02:59:53.000 But again, they're fun.

02:59:56.000 They rumble.

02:59:57.000 They make noise.

02:59:58.000 They feel good.

02:59:59.000 You're talking about performance.

03:00:00.000 Yeah, performance.

03:00:01.000 It's not even comparison.

03:00:02.000 The Tesla Roadster is coming out.

03:00:05.000 It's going to go 0 to 60 in 1.1 seconds.

03:00:09.000 And it has a jet propulsion system option.

03:00:12.000 It's a SpaceX option.

03:00:15.000 And they've shown it only in CGI form.

03:00:18.000 They haven't, like, showed it in an actual video form.

03:00:21.000 But 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.

03:00:43.000 That's insane.

03:00:44.000 It's insane!

03:00:44.000 Now, wait a minute.

03:00:46.000 Two and a half thousand pounds?

03:00:48.000 Yeah, I don't think it's very big.

03:00:49.000 It's a very small car.

03:00:50.000 Because normally electric vehicles are very, very heavy because of the batteries.

03:00:54.000 Well, 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.

03:01:03.000 Good for stability.

03:01:04.000 Fantastic for stability.

03:01:05.000 In fact, Jamie has the X. And the X literally doesn't get knocked over.

03:01:09.000 You hit them, they're like a weeble. 1.00

03:01:11.000 They bounce back up.

03:01:13.000 I might be wrong about the weight.

03:01:14.000 It might be closer to 3,000 pounds.

03:01:16.000 I'm estimating based on like a very light, like a Porsche.

03:01:20.000 Dude, even 3,000 pounds is incredibly good.

03:01:22.000 Like a Toyota Corolla is 3,000 pounds.

03:01:24.000 Yeah, a Porsche, like a 911, GT3, that's about 3,000 pounds.

03:01:28.000 P100D is 5,500 pounds.

03:01:31.000 Yeah, mine's a big car.

03:01:32.000 Mine's big.

03:01:33.000 And it's still 5,500 pounds goes 0 to 60 in two and a half seconds.

03:01:38.000 Wait till you get in it. 0.99

03:01:39.000 You're going to shit your pants. 0.97

03:01:40.000 You're not going to believe how fast they go. 0.99

03:01:42.000 It doesn't seem real.

03:01:44.000 But 1.1 seconds at that point, that's like fighter jet levels of G acceleration.

03:01:49.000 See if you can find the video, because they made a video recently that shows the Tesla Roadster.

03:01:54.000 And again, it's a digital recreation or a digital representation of what it's going to actually do.

03:02:02.000 That's crazy.

03:02:02.000 That's what you want in your life.

03:02:03.000 You want a Tesla.

03:02:05.000 You have to move to Texas to do it.

03:02:06.000 You're so quiet inside, and you talk to them.

03:02:08.000 You tell them, like, what kind of music do you like?

03:02:09.000 What kind of music do you like?

03:02:12.000 What are you into?

03:02:13.000 They didn't really make a sound.

03:02:14.000 What kind of music do you like?

03:02:16.000 I would probably go with operatic music.

03:02:19.000 You listen to opera?

03:02:20.000 Yeah.

03:02:20.000 Of course you do.

03:02:21.000 You're a fucking dude from a comic book. 1.00

03:02:23.000 You're not even a real person. 1.00

03:02:24.000 But you could say, play Beethoven.

03:02:27.000 Just boop boop, press a button, and Spotify will start playing Beethoven.

03:02:32.000 Yeah.

03:02:33.000 Crazy. 0.91

03:02:33.000 You talk to it. 0.91

03:02:34.000 You tell it to navigate places.

03:02:35.000 You tell it to call people.

03:02:38.000 Call John Donahue.

03:02:39.000 He'll just call you. 0.98

03:02:40.000 I fucking love it. 0.96

03:02:41.000 But again, it's like... 0.98

03:02:43.000 Does that lead to a situation where driving just fundamentally changes to a point where you just become a passenger in your own car?

03:02:51.000 Yes.

03:02:52.000 Yes.

03:02:52.000 And it's going to be that way.

03:02:54.000 Autonomous 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.

03:03:02.000 They're going to be communicating with each other.

03:03:04.000 You're just going to sit in it and you're going to tell it where to go and it's going to do everything.

03:03:07.000 In one way, it's kind of depressing because you would lose a skill, a skill of driving, which is a pleasurable skill.

03:03:14.000 But on the other hand, it's also very liberating insofar as now you have presumably hours of every day.

03:03:19.000 If you commute for two hours, now you've got two extra hours in your day where you could research, learn, study.

03:03:25.000 Yes.

03:03:26.000 Well, I use that time almost exclusively.

03:03:31.000 It's rare that I'm listening to music in my car these days.

03:03:34.000 I usually listen to either a book on tape or a podcast.

03:03:38.000 So I'm usually listening to something entertaining and educational anyway.

03:03:43.000 Mostly books.

03:03:44.000 I really enjoy books on tapes in cars.

03:03:46.000 Because it changes the commute instead of it becomes fixated on a topic.

03:03:52.000 We look upon a commute now as a very negative thing in your life.

03:03:56.000 It's two hours of your day wasted, whereas now it's going to be two hours of some of the most profitable part of your day.

03:04:02.000 Yeah, it's really in all about what you're absorbing during that time, and I think it's one of the things that people really do.

03:04:07.000 Oh, here it is.

03:04:08.000 Watch this.

03:04:09.000 Give me some volume, too, because the volume's kind of crazy.

03:04:12.000 I can't.

03:04:13.000 It's not there.

03:04:14.000 There it goes, actually.

03:04:16.000 It literally sounds like a jet.

03:04:18.000 Yeah, that's the SpaceX package.

03:04:20.000 So that's the car.

03:04:20.000 Beautiful-looking car, but watch this.

03:04:24.000 1.1 seconds zero to 60 with that option, the SpaceX option, which is literally a thruster out the back. 0.99

03:04:32.000 Like, what in the holy fuck is that? 0.97

03:04:37.000 It's like watching some kind of science fiction out there. 1.00

03:04:40.000 It's amazing.

03:04:41.000 And what's next?

03:04:42.000 But what happens in...

03:04:44.000 I'm just trying to throw ideas around here.

03:04:46.000 You want to parallel park that car.

03:04:48.000 Oh, it'll do it for you.

03:04:49.000 Okay.

03:04:50.000 Guaranteed.

03:04:51.000 If you stick on that accelerator, that thing's going to...

03:04:53.000 Yeah, but there's a lot of cars.

03:04:54.000 I don't know if the Tesla has that option, but there are cars that will park for you.

03:04:59.000 You press a button.

03:05:00.000 It goes...

03:05:01.000 Yeah, it has Park Assist.

03:05:02.000 I've never used it.

03:05:03.000 It always says like, it's not available sometimes.

03:05:05.000 I know it has it because I've got the message like, A mind must have it too, probably.

03:05:10.000 I'm sure it does.

03:05:10.000 Yeah, I've never used it.

03:05:12.000 I'm a man.

03:05:13.000 I'm not a parallel park.

03:05:14.000 It's part of being a man.

03:05:15.000 But that thing, how do you parallel park that?

03:05:17.000 If you touch the accelerator...

03:05:18.000 No, but that's the interesting thing.

03:05:20.000 The modulation is very easy.

03:05:22.000 It's very easy to modulate.

03:05:24.000 It's not hard to drive slowly in a Tesla.

03:05:26.000 Ah, okay.

03:05:29.000 When you want it, it's there.

03:05:31.000 Okay.

03:05:31.000 There's smart people.

03:05:32.000 I'm sure they thought of all these things.

03:05:33.000 Yeah.

03:05:33.000 Yeah, and then apparently Porsche has an even better to drive electric car.

03:05:39.000 My 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.

03:05:51.000 Interesting.

03:05:53.000 What's going to happen when all the entrenched car companies, Toyota, Ford, Chevy, start bringing out all their...

03:06:00.000 I presume they're also working on these.

03:06:02.000 They're all doing it right now.

03:06:04.000 They're currently doing it.

03:06:05.000 Like, a GM just released a 1,000 horsepower Hummer.

03:06:09.000 So they have a new pickup truck that's all electric. 0.84

03:06:12.000 It's a Hummer, and it's a ridiculous beast of a vehicle. 0.92

03:06:16.000 These numbers are crazy. 0.98

03:06:18.000 I know.

03:06:18.000 You're saying 1,000 horsepower.

03:06:19.000 Can you please Google...

03:06:23.000 Chevy Camaro 1983. Piece of shit. 1.00

03:06:28.000 Horsepower. 1.00

03:06:29.000 Terrible car.

03:06:31.000 The worst.

03:06:32.000 The horsepower.

03:06:33.000 The dark years.

03:06:34.000 They had like 200 horsepower.

03:06:35.000 Yeah, maybe.

03:06:36.000 How much?

03:06:36.000 175. Literally, this is the time when I was growing up.

03:06:43.000 Imagine, what does a Chevy Camaro put out now?

03:06:46.000 Like 400 horsepower.

03:06:47.000 Oh, you can get one with six.

03:06:49.000 Six plus the ZL1. That is such a piece of shit. 1.00

03:06:52.000 Ugh, look at that thing. 1.00

03:06:53.000 They should melt those and make hammers out of them. 1.00

03:06:57.000 They're so useless.

03:06:58.000 Isn't it crazy to think that was considered a very high-performance car in the early 1980s. 0.96

03:07:03.000 Yeah, it was.

03:07:03.000 It probably had a three-speed auto that was slow as hell.

03:07:06.000 Look at the Mustangs from the 80s. 1.00

03:07:08.000 God, piece of shit. 1.00

03:07:09.000 Less than 200 horsepower. 1.00

03:07:11.000 Oh, they were the darkest years for automobiles.

03:07:13.000 But think about it.

03:07:14.000 Those muscle cars you talked about from the 60s, they had better horsepower than cars 15 years later.

03:07:20.000 Well, it was the gas crisis.

03:07:22.000 Isn't that crazy to think that technology actually went backwards for 15 years?

03:07:26.000 It did, but also they were using leaded gasoline, the terrible polluting.

03:07:31.000 Like, if you look at photographs of Los Angeles from the 1960s and 70s versus Los Angeles in the 90s.

03:07:37.000 It got way better because of the changes in the emissions standards.

03:07:41.000 Isn't it remarkable to think what they've done with petrochemical engines in the 1990s and beyond?

03:07:49.000 The horsepower now is just unbelievable. 0.67

03:07:51.000 Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous.

03:07:52.000 Just petrochemical engines and then electric engines make those... 0.60

03:07:57.000 It's just a whole new level above that.

03:07:58.000 It really does.

03:07:59.000 It makes them obsolete.

03:08:01.000 And all cars will be electric within 50 years.

03:08:03.000 I'm 99% positive of that.

03:08:06.000 I 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...

03:08:16.000 There's no going back.

03:08:16.000 No, the response is immediate, the way they move.

03:08:20.000 There's no gears.

03:08:22.000 Of course there's no transmission.

03:08:24.000 Right.

03:08:24.000 There's no...

03:08:25.000 It just goes.

03:08:28.000 Yeah.

03:08:30.000 Porsche apparently has two gears. 1.00

03:08:32.000 They have one for high-end, for efficiency, and one for speed.

03:08:37.000 So it's a two-speed.

03:08:40.000 It's crazy to think about. 0.94

03:08:42.000 It's ridiculous, yeah. 0.97

03:08:43.000 That's what you need. 0.75

03:08:44.000 I wonder what the great sociological changes will be.

03:08:46.000 Imagine driving coast to coast in America now.

03:08:49.000 You just get in, you fall asleep in the back seat, let the car go, and you wake up 24 hours later, you're in California.

03:08:56.000 I bet when technology does sufficiently rise to the point where that's possible, there's also an issue with charging right now.

03:09:06.000 Tesla has that nailed.

03:09:08.000 They have this supercharger system, so you can find charging stations very easily.

03:09:12.000 These other car companies are sort of catching up and trying to build new infrastructure to make it easier to charge.

03:09:18.000 Whether it's Mercedes.

03:09:19.000 Mercedes has an amazing new...

03:09:22.000 What is that thing called?

03:09:23.000 The EQ something?

03:09:24.000 Mercedes has this incredible new sedan that they just released.

03:09:27.000 It's all electric.

03:09:28.000 And it's like a spaceship.

03:09:30.000 You're inside of the thing.

03:09:31.000 It's just...

03:09:32.000 Lewis from Unbox Therapy has the best...

03:09:34.000 EQS. EQS. It's insane.

03:09:38.000 See if you find a...

03:09:40.000 I wonder if even things like the shape of cars will change.

03:09:44.000 That's the Mercedes. 0.98

03:09:45.000 That thing is fucking spectacular. 0.98

03:09:48.000 I 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. 0.99

03:09:57.000 It's just like, look at that.

03:09:59.000 I mean, you're in that thing.

03:10:01.000 It doesn't make a sound.

03:10:02.000 It looks like a science fiction movie.

03:10:04.000 It's crazy.

03:10:05.000 Amazing.

03:10:05.000 And it's supposed to be incredible to drive.

03:10:07.000 But again, it's also the level of detail inside the car is Mercedes.

03:10:13.000 So it's all top of the food chain.

03:10:15.000 Like the highest attention to detail and quality of build and just amazing stuff.

03:10:21.000 G-Force.

03:10:22.000 Oh, it shows you your G-Force?

03:10:25.000 Because they're so fast.

03:10:27.000 I can't wait to take you on a drive.

03:10:29.000 Try to keep the g-force below, like, 6. No, I don't take it out of ludicrous mode, by the way.

03:10:34.000 There's all these different modes that you can put your Tesla in.

03:10:37.000 There's an actual ludicrous mode. 0.99

03:10:38.000 Oh, yeah, it is fucking... 0.99

03:10:39.000 Like the old movie Spaceballs. 0.99

03:10:40.000 Yes, exactly.

03:10:41.000 Exactly.

03:10:42.000 You know, in Spaceballs, apparently one of the vehicles is called Plaid.

03:10:46.000 That's why his new one is the Plaid.

03:10:48.000 Makes total sense.

03:10:49.000 Yeah, his new sedan goes 0 to 60 in 1.9 seconds.

03:10:54.000 The sedan.

03:10:55.000 Yeah, that hasn't come out yet.

03:10:56.000 But it's got three electric engines, and it has a range of 500 miles.

03:11:01.000 That's pretty impressive.

03:11:03.000 Yeah, that's the most he's ever had.

03:11:05.000 The one I have has a range of like 300 and something.

03:11:08.000 What is it, like 350?

03:11:10.000 What is yours?

03:11:10.000 It's a little bigger than mine.

03:11:11.000 Mine's actually a little smaller, I think, technically.

03:11:13.000 Yours is bigger.

03:11:14.000 Is it X? Oh, smaller range.

03:11:17.000 Yeah, smaller range, I'm sorry.

03:11:17.000 Yours is what, 220?

03:11:19.000 320. 320, yeah.

03:11:20.000 How long do the batteries last?

03:11:22.000 That's a good question.

03:11:23.000 There's also a good question as to what happens.

03:11:26.000 They slowly deteriorate over time.

03:11:28.000 You don't charge them fully.

03:11:30.000 When you charge it, it charges it to 80%.

03:11:32.000 You're supposed to do that with your cell phone too.

03:11:34.000 Most people just charge your cell phone all the way, but really you're supposed to do it at 80%.

03:11:38.000 But over time, the range will lower.

03:11:42.000 But I've had mine for a couple of years and I haven't noticed any deterioration yet.

03:11:45.000 It's nothing where it concerns me.

03:11:48.000 What do they do when a battery expires?

03:11:50.000 That's a good question.

03:11:51.000 I don't know.

03:11:52.000 They probably swap them out.

03:11:53.000 They want to swap them out.

03:11:54.000 They 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.

03:12:04.000 So you'll pull into some station, they'll put a new one in, and then you go, like a pit stop.

03:12:12.000 And so instead of waiting many hours for a massive battery to charge, they'll just swap it out with one that's fully charged.

03:12:19.000 Now, the central component of these batteries, lithium, is relatively rare.

03:12:26.000 It's a conflict mineral.

03:12:27.000 It's a real issue.

03:12:28.000 Yeah.

03:12:29.000 Where does this go in the future if the whole world switches over to lithium-powered batteries in cars?

03:12:34.000 We'll go back to Afghanistan and start bombing. 1.00

03:12:38.000 Makes total sense.

03:12:39.000 I don't think there's a real solution other than maybe some new battery technology.

03:12:45.000 I think not just lithium ion, but I believe there's a new technology that they're working on.

03:12:55.000 I want to say something aluminum-based.

03:12:57.000 There'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...

03:13:08.000 See if you can find that.

03:13:09.000 Some aluminum-based battery technology.

03:13:12.000 I was reading about it just the other day, but I was...

03:13:16.000 Multitasking.

03:13:16.000 They didn't absorb it.

03:13:17.000 But it was something about aluminum-based batteries being the next wave of that they're going to be able to get more range.

03:13:25.000 It'll charge quicker.

03:13:28.000 Aluminum, though, is very common.

03:13:30.000 If that's possible, like aluminum is one of the most common metals that you can find on Earth.

03:13:35.000 Man, there's some pretty exciting developments for humanity ahead between changes in vehicles, changes in currency, like there's big changes ahead it seems.

03:13:46.000 There's a lot of changes.

03:13:47.000 And one of the things that Neil deGrasse Tyson and I were talking about the other day is Neuralink.

03:13:52.000 That's Elon's crazy brain interface technology where they're going to start with people that are paralyzed and people that have spinal issues.

03:14:03.000 And they're going to use it to help them walk again.

03:14:05.000 And it's going to help people with various brain issues.

03:14:09.000 Help 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.

03:14:24.000 Now, most people, they say that to me.

03:14:25.000 It's like, oh, one of my stoner friends.

03:14:27.000 Like, all right.

03:14:27.000 Like Eddie Bravo.

03:14:28.000 Bro, you're going to talk without words.

03:14:29.000 I'm like, dude, I can't wait.

03:14:31.000 Here it is.

03:14:32.000 Aluminum-based battery.

03:14:33.000 Can triple the range.

03:14:34.000 Charge 70 times faster.

03:14:36.000 See, there it is.

03:14:36.000 That's huge.

03:14:37.000 Lithium-ion-powered electric cars.

03:14:39.000 Take roughly 8 to 10 hours to plug.

03:14:42.000 So this is some new technology.

03:14:44.000 There's aluminum graphene batteries.

03:14:47.000 Run on the same voltage.

03:14:48.000 Have similar shape to that lithium-ion batteries.

03:14:51.000 However, these are hybrid battery superconductors which allow them to retain three times more energy and takes up to 70 times lesser times to recharge.

03:15:00.000 Wow!

03:15:01.000 Did they mention how much they weigh?

03:15:03.000 Because lithium batteries are notoriously heavy.

03:15:05.000 That's a really good question, right?

03:15:07.000 Because I would imagine...

03:15:08.000 Aluminum is generally fairly light.

03:15:09.000 Yeah.

03:15:10.000 Interesting.

03:15:11.000 Graphene-based aluminum ion batteries provide major benefits in terms of longer battery life.

03:15:18.000 Oh wow, even more battery.

03:15:19.000 Over 2,000 charge discharge cycles.

03:15:22.000 Testing so far with no deterioration in performance.

03:15:24.000 That's incredible.

03:15:25.000 Battery safety, very low fire potential and lower environmental impact, more recyclable.

03:15:31.000 And it's also like really common.

03:15:33.000 The production of aluminum-graphene batteries, obviously I'm talking about aluminum, not aluminum-graphene.

03:15:38.000 I don't even know what that is.

03:15:40.000 Batteries will not require the usage of nickel, cobalt, and copper.

03:15:44.000 That's extremely important.

03:15:45.000 So it will give sovereign capability and resilience around the energy sector.

03:15:49.000 Aluminum is one of the most recyclable metals and will reduce the stress on mining.

03:15:53.000 Interesting.

03:15:54.000 Yeah, I just imagine that that's what's going to take place in all of these technology arenas.

03:15:59.000 There's just going to be new innovations that just move everything in a giant direction.

03:16:03.000 But that neural leak thing is the thing that confuses me the most because I feel like that is the step.

03:16:12.000 That's the first step.

03:16:14.000 That's going to change what a human being is.

03:16:16.000 Because 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.

03:16:31.000 The haves versus the have-nots, the gap will increase even wider, which will force more people to do it.

03:16:37.000 I think it's going to be like cell phones.

03:16:39.000 Cell phones originally were very rare.

03:16:42.000 Very few people had them.

03:16:43.000 Now everyone has them, and they're very cheap.

03:16:45.000 I 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.

03:16:53.000 A 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.

03:17:01.000 It's going to be just you.

03:17:03.000 You're going to be integrated with computers and the internet.

03:17:07.000 You're going to be a part of this weird grid.

03:17:09.000 You're going to be a part of the system.

03:17:11.000 You're not just going to be a biological entity.

03:17:13.000 We're going to be hybrids.

03:17:16.000 Fascinating.

03:17:17.000 I wonder what the implications of that would be.

03:17:20.000 Well, it's going to change all the unique things about people and the variabilities, right?

03:17:25.000 Because with CRISPR, so with genetic engineering, right, which is, they're already working on that.

03:17:31.000 So they already have the ability to, at least in a small way, manipulate human genes.

03:17:37.000 So they're doing that now.

03:17:38.000 They're experimenting.

03:17:39.000 They're going to innovate.

03:17:40.000 It's going to get better.

03:17:41.000 I think CRISPR is already in its Second form and they're probably going to continue to innovate that and get it more and more efficient.

03:17:48.000 They've already done it in China where they've used human embryos and they've manipulated these human embryos. 0.80

03:17:54.000 So it's become a giant issue globally in terms of ethics and whether or not that's okay to do.

03:18:02.000 Once people start doing it though and they engineer a race of super people...

03:18:06.000 Is that what the implication is?

03:18:08.000 This is about creating super people?

03:18:09.000 Well, right now it's not.

03:18:11.000 Right now it's about stopping diseases.

03:18:14.000 And 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.

03:18:28.000 And then there's just like, once that gets established as something that's possible to do, they're going to keep doing it.

03:18:37.000 And they're going to get way better at it.

03:18:39.000 And also it's a competitive world.

03:18:41.000 Like if there is a means by which one nation could create people, I'm presuming with higher IQs.

03:18:50.000 A billion Nicky Rods.

03:18:51.000 How about that?

03:18:53.000 Storm in the gates.

03:18:54.000 But they can all read minds.

03:18:56.000 Jump over buildings.

03:18:58.000 I mean, what it means to be a human is going to be very different 100 years from now.

03:19:02.000 You said that...

03:19:03.000 Neil said that people can talk without words.

03:19:06.000 That's what Elon said.

03:19:07.000 Sorry.

03:19:07.000 Elon said that you're going to be able to talk without words.

03:19:10.000 And obviously, since this is his invention, I don't think he's pulling smoke.

03:19:14.000 Yeah.

03:19:14.000 Now, how does that apply?

03:19:17.000 Does that mean you can put a chip in it and get people talking multiple languages?

03:19:22.000 I think...

03:19:24.000 What he's saying is you're going to be able to talk wirelessly through some new method.

03:19:30.000 Now, whatever this new method is, whether it's based on icons, like Jamie had an idea that...

03:19:35.000 So it's the transmission of words, not the...

03:19:37.000 Yes.

03:19:38.000 Okay, okay.

03:19:38.000 The transmission of thought.

03:19:40.000 Okay.

03:19:41.000 Like instead of, or maybe it is actual words you can hear.

03:19:45.000 I mean, maybe it'll be like us having this conversation.

03:19:49.000 We'll be going back and forth the way we're doing now, but we'll be doing it entirely in silence.

03:19:53.000 But you and I will be able to hear it.

03:19:56.000 Or maybe somebody could hack into it.

03:19:57.000 But maybe even another step forward would be a much more complex, maybe a hieroglyphic style language of images.

03:20:09.000 That will be universal.

03:20:11.000 So 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.

03:20:29.000 It's happened before.

03:20:31.000 In the old days, Latin was the universal language for European countries.

03:20:35.000 You 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.

03:20:44.000 Well, there's been speculation about the possibility of developing a universal language in the past.

03:20:49.000 It's just never really applied in modern times.

03:20:52.000 Some of them were actually pretty good.

03:20:54.000 Esperanto was a universal language.

03:20:56.000 So there are definitely precedents for it.

03:21:00.000 Man, that's absolutely fascinating. 0.99

03:21:02.000 Wild shit, right? 1.00

03:21:03.000 Yeah. 1.00

03:21:03.000 These are things that are going to massively change the direction of humanity. 1.00

03:21:08.000 But again, one of the unique things about people is the fact that you work with whatever hand you were dealt.

03:21:16.000 You 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.

03:21:27.000 And 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.

03:21:37.000 And in MMA, it's really interesting.

03:21:41.000 Because you have even more variables when you add in striking.

03:21:44.000 And 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.

03:21:56.000 It's weird to see all these different kinds of human beings try to figure their way through life.

03:22:01.000 It's entertaining to me.

03:22:02.000 It's one of the more interesting things about being a person is that we vary so much.

03:22:07.000 So I am...

03:22:09.000 I don't know if it's good to all become the same thing, but I have a feeling that's what's going to happen.

03:22:16.000 As a general rule, once a disruptive technology gets released, there's no pulling it back.

03:22:22.000 Yeah.

03:22:23.000 It's Pandora's box.

03:22:24.000 Unless we get hit with an asteroid.

03:22:25.000 That's true.

03:22:26.000 That can end it all very quickly.

03:22:28.000 Yeah.

03:22:30.000 Amazing.

03:22:31.000 Interesting times.

03:22:33.000 Yes.

03:22:33.000 Well, we just did this for three and a half hours, believe it or not.

03:22:37.000 My God.

03:22:38.000 It's crazy.

03:22:38.000 Time flies.

03:22:39.000 Time flies.

03:22:40.000 So, who's number one is this Friday.

03:22:44.000 It streams live on Flow Grappling.

03:22:46.000 I'll be there live, too.

03:22:47.000 I can't wait to watch.

03:22:48.000 I really enjoy it.

03:22:49.000 It's one of my favorite things about Austin now, is that once a month they have elite-level grappling.

03:22:54.000 That's awesome.

03:22:54.000 Craig Jones will be in the finals.

03:22:55.000 And who's his opponent again?

03:22:57.000 Craig's taking on Louise Panzer, who's interestingly a great leg lock specialist himself, a different form of leg lock attack.

03:23:04.000 He mostly focuses on Achilles locks.

03:23:07.000 He's kind of, as it were, like old school leg locking versus new school.

03:23:12.000 That's an oversimplification, but there's some validity to it.

03:23:15.000 Both of them have a very strong positional game.

03:23:18.000 I think this is a great chance for both athletes to come out in different kinds of ways.

03:23:27.000 Luis Panza can say, hey, listen, old school leg locks have validity too.

03:23:32.000 And 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.

03:23:40.000 Craig has a very underestimated positional game.

03:23:42.000 He's got great back attack, very, very impressive guard passing skills, and he's getting better at takedowns every day.

03:23:49.000 So this match could go in directions that people don't anticipate.

03:23:54.000 And it's a full card, too.

03:23:55.000 There's a bunch of really elite grapplers on the card.

03:23:57.000 Really entertaining to watch.

03:23:59.000 Yeah, these guys are doing a great job putting on stacked cards.

03:24:02.000 Yeah, I agree.

03:24:03.000 I agree.

03:24:04.000 Always a pleasure.

03:24:05.000 Thank you for doing this.

03:24:06.000 Really appreciate it.

The Joe Rogan Experience - June 06, 2011

JRE MMA Show #111 with John Danaher

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Summary

Transcript