May 31, 2011 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:44:59
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! | ||
| Well, uh, welcome, man. | ||
| Thanks for doing this. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Long time coming. | ||
| How the fuck... | ||
| Did you rise so far ahead of everyone else in the jiu-jitsu world? | ||
| Let me just tell everybody before things get started. | ||
| Gordon is undeniably the best pound-for-pound jiu-jitsu player on earth. | ||
| Not just the best, but it's a pretty good statement to say that you're the best ever. | ||
| And you're only 25. Yeah. | ||
| That's crazy! | ||
| How the fuck does that happen? | ||
| So, I'm gonna go ahead and give credit to John. | ||
| I mean, I think that without him, I maybe would have been successful. | ||
| I would have been, you know, maybe the best in the world at some point in my career. | ||
| But I don't think that without John, I would be where I am right now. | ||
| And I don't think that I would have gotten this good in this amount of time. | ||
| I've been training 10 years, I've been competing professionally for 5 years. | ||
| And I think that a big part of the reason why I am where I am is because of John's coaching. | ||
| Yeah, and we're talking about John Donoher, for people who don't know, who is a literal genius and a mastermind in jiu-jitsu and a true mad scientist. | ||
| And watching him coach you guys is very fascinating because he's so serious and stoic and Gordon Ryan, pass over the left leg, Gordon Ryan, post, like the way he talks. | ||
| It's really interesting. | ||
| He says your full name, too. | ||
| It's very interesting. | ||
| Gordon Ryan, Gary Tonin, Craig Jones. | ||
| It's always the full name. | ||
| Yeah, he's such an odd duck. | ||
| He does it to address us, because a lot of times, like, you've got Nicky, for example. | ||
| Like, there's a lot of guys named Nicky, so he makes sure you know he's talking to you when he says Nicky Ryan, Nicky Rod, Craig Jones, Gordon Ryan, so you know that when you hear your name being called, your first and last name, you know that, okay, this person is addressing you in a room of, you know, five, ten thousand people. | ||
| He's such an unusual human being. | ||
| There is not a single person on the planet Earth like John Donaher. | ||
| One of the most brilliant guys I've ever met, obsessed with jiu-jitsu, mostly. | ||
| If you got a pie chart of his brain, it would be like 20% room for other shit, 80% of his brain is jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's not even just jiu-jitsu. | ||
| It's just martial arts in general. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| People who know John on a personal level and have trained with John know that John knows just as much about MMA or even more about MMA than he does about jiu-jitsu. | ||
| He's been coaching MMA with George and with Chris Weidman for longer than he's been coaching jiu-jitsu. | ||
| He's only been coaching professional jiu-jitsu athletes for five years. | ||
| And I've watched him personally teach judo privates to judo Olympians. | ||
| I watched him teach wrestling privates to wrestling world team members, wrestling Olympians. | ||
| He knows just as much about the other martial arts as he does about jiu-jitsu. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, and never walks around without a rash guard on. | ||
| That's also correct. | ||
| I've seen him one time ever with a t-shirt on because we went to Long Island to train with Chris Weidman one time and he forgot his change of rash guards so he had a street rash guard on and he didn't have a second rash guard to change into and Chris didn't have a rash guard for him so they gave him like this pink flamingo t-shirt that he ended up we did a whole session with Chris Weidman it was right before he's gonna fight Luke Rockhold the second time which ended up never happening But we did this whole session with John with this pink tropical t-shirt | ||
| on and then he changed out of the t-shirt to get back into his street rash guard and leave to go home. | ||
| I'm just like, okay, this is happening. | ||
| I posted it and everyone was freaking out about it. | ||
| How crazy is it that he has a street rash guard? | ||
| Yeah, he's got street rash guards, he's got training rash guards, and he's got his nighttime dinner date rash guards. | ||
| He's got a date rash guard, he's got a dinner rash guard. | ||
| He's got it all sorted out. | ||
| So if he goes on a date with a woman, he wears a rash guard? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| He's got this really nice gray underarm or sweatshirt or rash guard that he puts on. | ||
| And you know when John comes out in one of his fancy rash guards, you're like, okay, he's not fucking around now. | ||
|
unidentified
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You're like, this guy means business tonight. | |
| Has anybody ever asked him what the fuck is going on? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, so he just likes to wear rash guards because of the fact that they dry fast. | ||
| The fact that they're cool. | ||
| They keep you cool. | ||
| They keep you warm. | ||
| If they get wet, they dry fast. | ||
| And they're just tight-fitting. | ||
| He likes tight-fitting clothes. | ||
| So he just prefers to wear them. | ||
| He thinks they're more efficient than t-shirts are. | ||
| It's just so odd. | ||
| But that's part of John Donner. | ||
| Always has a fanny pack. | ||
| Respect. | ||
| I respect the fanny pack. | ||
| One of the great mysteries of the world is what he has inside that fanny pack. | ||
| It's kind of thick. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's a large fanny pack. | ||
| He's got a lot of stuff inside there. | ||
| It's so fascinating to watch what he's done in coaching this Don Hurd death squad. | ||
| He's unquestionably the greatest Jiu Jitsu coach on earth. | ||
| And this is also widely regarded. | ||
| The way you're widely regarded as the best pound for pound grappler, he's widely regarded as the best Jiu Jitsu coach. | ||
| It's really interesting to see that you guys just have been dominating the grappling scene and to watch all this play out and to see people study you guys but still not be able to catch up. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, what most people do is they just see like a general outline of what we do, but no one looks at the specifics of what we're doing. | ||
| They say, oh, you know, Gordon's a good leg locker, let me try to do leg locks, or Gordon's trapping hands from the back, let me try to do that. | ||
| But they don't see the very specific details, and the specific details are what's going to be the difference between finishing a high-level guy and having a high-level guy escape. | ||
| So what everyone does is they just see the general idea and have the general outline of what we're doing, and they try to just copy that. | ||
| But, when you just try to copy the best guys, if you just try to copy everyone else, you get the same results as everybody else. | ||
| You have to go further than what the best guys are doing. | ||
| You have to innovate and, you know, I look at the other best guys in the world and I say, what are they doing? | ||
| You know, that works against the other high-level guys and how can I make that better? | ||
| Not just let me try to arbitrarily copy what they're trying to do. | ||
| Now, what is missing in, like, if you take the rest of the people that are in the top ten, like, what are they doing differently? | ||
| What everyone does in Jiu-Jitsu is they try to do the least amount of work possible to win a Jiu-Jitsu match, right? | ||
| So they try to jump past your guard, they score an advantage, they score a couple points, and then for the next seven minutes they do nothing. | ||
| Whereas what we try to do is we try to take the hardest route to a victory and we try to submit the guy. | ||
| So, what you see is a complete, there's just a complete different mindset between what the rest of the guys are doing and what we're trying to do. | ||
| We're trying to go out and we're not satisfied unless we hit a submission. | ||
| And in my case, sometimes I call the submission and I'm trying to, you know, go out and hit a specific submission. | ||
| But, you know, they're happy just going out and having a match where there's ten minutes in the feet. | ||
| They just hang on each other's collar ties, and then they win a ref decision, and they run around beating their chest like they just did something. | ||
| So just the mindset for winning in competition is completely different. | ||
| Now, how did that happen? | ||
| How did jujitsu get to be this sport where you have so many stalemates? | ||
| You have so many guys that do this thing where they run around just collar tying each other and pushing each other around and no one ever takes a chance. | ||
| No one ever realizes that, you know, hey, we've only got four minutes to go. | ||
| I got to make something happen. | ||
| I think it's training program. | ||
| I think that The rule sets mean very little. | ||
| If you look at a guy like Hodger Gracie, no matter what rule set he competes in, he's trying to finish you. | ||
| If you look at me, no matter what rule set you go into, I'm trying to finish you. | ||
| If it's EBI rules, I'm trying to finish you. | ||
| If it's IBJJF rules, I'm trying to finish you. | ||
| I think that most people's training programs are built around positional control and doing the least amount of work possible to win. | ||
| You know, people train stalling tactics. | ||
| You know, we don't do that. | ||
| We just try to get better at Jiu-Jitsu and better at submissions. | ||
| Whereas our training program is built around control that leads to submissions. | ||
| No matter what ruleset we go into compete under, we're always trying to control the guy and then submit him. | ||
| Whereas most people, they have a training program built around positional advances where they're just trying to do whatever they can to win, and a win's a win, and however they win, they're happy with it. | ||
| What year did you start with John? | ||
| How long ago? | ||
| I started training with him, the first time I ever started training with him was 2014. Was that the first time you trained? | ||
| No, I started training late 2010, almost 2011. With Miguel Benitez, he was one of Ricardo Almeida's brown belts owned the school. | ||
| And this guy, Miguel Benitez, was a blue belt under the guy who owned one of Ricardo's affiliate schools. | ||
| I started training under him from white to mid-level blue belt. | ||
| And then Gary actually took over, Gary Tonin took over the school when I was like a purple belt. | ||
| And then purple belt, I started training part-time with John because I just graduated high school and I had to go to college and work to afford to get to the city. | ||
| But then somewhere around mid-level purple belt, I think it was like 2000, mid to late 2014, is when I started training with John full-time. | ||
| So I've been training with John full-time like, you know, six years or so. | ||
| And has the training changed since you first started? | ||
| Discuss this with Sean, because he's got such a complex system of training and taking people through positional dominance to submission. | ||
| Has this evolved during the time that you've been with him? | ||
| What was it like at the beginning? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| At first, he was just trying to get us better at jiu-jitsu, specifically better at leg locks, because the big hole in the high-level competition jiu-jitsu scene was leg locks. | ||
| Nobody really knew how to do leg locks well. | ||
| So the first couple years of us training was just him trying to get us competent and then eventually to be the best in leg locking. | ||
| And then once we got there, once we could beat the best guys in the world, or at least hang with the best guys in the world, then it was more specific towards winning under certain rule sets. | ||
| You know, EBI came along and, you know, okay, how can now, you guys can do jiu-jitsu, you're competent everywhere. | ||
| How can you succeed, and how can you beat certain players, or how can you win under specific rule sets? | ||
| So it went from just a broad idea of initially getting better at jiu-jitsu, just as a whole, and then more specifically, how can I win ADCC? How can I win EBI? How can I beat this guy? | ||
| How can I beat that guy? | ||
| Has his training program evolved in terms of how he takes people through advancements, like how they start out in learning and then get to a place of a position where they're a black belt in competition? | ||
| Does he have this all written out? | ||
| How is he doing this? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he doesn't tell us too much about it. | ||
| He kind of just comes in and he shows up and He teaches moves, and you're like, okay, this is what John's teaching. | ||
| This is what we should be doing. | ||
| But a lot of it has—we used to just do all open rounds. | ||
| Now we have a lot more positional rounds in place where we start in certain positions so that if we get to those specific positions, even though people have been training for twice as long as us, we've been training a lot longer in those specific niche positions. | ||
| Than they have. | ||
| So we actually have a lot more experience in those positions than they do, even though they've been training jiu-jitsu for much longer than we have. | ||
| So our whole thing is to get to our key positions where we know where if we have one breakthrough, if I can get to the guy's back or I can get to the guy's legs, we've been in those static positions a lot longer than the other guys have. | ||
| And even though they've been training twice or three times as long as we have, we have a lot more experience in those domains than they do. | ||
| Now, did that start with EBI, where they have that very specific two option positions after the first initial time period? | ||
| That was a big part of it. | ||
| You know, when EBI came out, we actually came into the gym one day, and we tried to do back escapes, and it was just the worst workout ever. | ||
| Like, we had a zero percent escape rate, nobody escaped, and John's like, fuck, this is gonna be a real problem. | ||
| If someone locks a body triangle on you, you know, like, none of us figured out how to get out. | ||
| He comes in the next day and he finds a match between Hodger Gracie and Tim Kennedy in MMA. And Tim Kennedy successfully escaped Hodger's back control multiple times during the match. | ||
| So this guy went home and spent the entire night looking for matches where high-level guys can escape the back. | ||
| And he came in and he taught us the escapes that Tim Kennedy used versus Hodger. | ||
| And we went from one day having a 0% escape rate to like an 80% escape rate the next day. | ||
| And then we kind of just built it from there and everything snowballed. | ||
| And then, you know, we ended up dominating the EBIs. | ||
| So it really takes a combination of things. | ||
| It takes obsessed athletes and it takes an obsessed trainer. | ||
| And an obsessed trainer, in one way, there's something interesting about John in that he's He's injured. | ||
| Like, his knee's all fucked up, he's at a hip replacement, from rugby, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And, you know, he can't compete, but when he was training early in his career, like, everybody used to talk about what a motherfucker he was. | ||
| Like, I remember it early in his... | ||
| Even being all fucked up, like, he was still beating up, like, the best guys in the world. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| Like, imagine only being able to use one of your legs. | ||
| Like, I tore my LCL, and I was like, there's no way I can train with a blue belt right now, never mind having to train with the best guys in the world. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty remarkable, but his mind is so unusual. | ||
| It's so extraordinary. | ||
| And when you take the combination of that, he's got such a dedicated crew of assassins, too. | ||
| This is also interesting, because it seems like his dedication and his obsession is at least partially contagious. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then you guys also motivate each other and the success, obviously the Donaher Death Squad is so well known and so successful, that must be motivating as well. | ||
| And it's also attracting a lot of other killers that want to be like you guys that come there to train and learn and grow. | ||
| But it's such a unique combination. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you see a guy like John who's injured, and he's just miserable some days because he's in so much pain. | ||
| He comes in every single day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and he gives his best every single session. | ||
| So, you know, you as an athlete, you know, this guy's giving you all that he can for not asking anything in return. | ||
| The only thing he's asking for is that you show up. | ||
| So, like, you have basically a series of cheat codes in front of you, and they're there all year round, every single day. | ||
| You kind of feel like a shitbag if you don't show up to train. | ||
| So it's like, you know, this guy's giving you everything. | ||
| It's like, okay, if I don't show up, like, I'm kind of an asshole. | ||
| We went to dinner after the last event that they had here, when you fought Wagner Rocha, and John was outlining what happens when guys come to train. | ||
| Like, guys have never been there before. | ||
| He's like, alright, I'll see you tomorrow. | ||
| And then, tomorrow? | ||
| Yes, tomorrow. | ||
| Like, you guys train like this every day? | ||
| Seven days a week. | ||
| Seven days a week. | ||
| That's what's crazy. | ||
| Like, there's no days off? | ||
| No days off. | ||
| Is there an argument against that? | ||
| I don't really think so. | ||
| I mean, if we're tired, we just train lighter. | ||
| Even if I feel like I'm just completely beat up and I don't want to get up and go to training, even if I just go there and I train really light and I'm there mentally and you're thinking about the sport, I mean, you're getting better. | ||
| Whereas if you just spend the day on the beach or something, then you're not thinking about the sport and it hinders progression. | ||
| So I think that, you know, some people argue you need a rest day, you need this, you need that. | ||
| I mean, if I have a rest day, I can rest and I can not train hard and I just go lighter. | ||
| Maybe I work on submissions. | ||
| Maybe I'm playing defensive the whole time and I get submitted 10 times during the session. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| You know, you're training lighter, but you're actively resting and you're still thinking about the sport. | ||
| So you're there mentally. | ||
| That's very controversial, though, because most trainers in most sports will tell you that you need rest days, that you need days where you do nothing, and that even days where you don't even think about your sport, because that's actually gonna refresh your enthusiasm. | ||
| Yeah, John's the exact opposite. | ||
| For us, he says, like, in order to stay interested in the sport, you need to be constantly working towards goals and you constantly need to be innovating so that you're working on new things. | ||
| I mean, people get bored with jujitsu when they're working on the same thing for six months at a time, a year at a time, they're not getting any better, they hit a plateau, and then they feel like, you know, I've been doing the same shit for the last two years, I'm bored of it, I don't really want to do this anymore. | ||
| Whereas with us, every day it's something new, you know, every week it's something new, every six months you turn into a completely different grappler. | ||
| So it's easy to stay interested in a sport that you come in and you know that you're gonna show up to a session and if you don't show up to that session that John's gonna teach something that you probably have never seen before or something that's new and you know you're gonna come in the next day and everyone's gonna be trying to hit it on you like what the fuck is this when did you teach this and you go yesterday when you weren't here and it's like okay that makes sense Wow. | ||
| So, it really does demand a synergy between an obsessed trainer and obsessed students. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, John goes home, like, we're like bullshitting right now talking, or like, you go home and watch TV and relax. | ||
| John goes home and he studies tape. | ||
| Like, John just, like, what he does for fun is he studies tape on various martial arts. | ||
| Like, you reference any fight or any wrestling match or any boxing match or jiu-jitsu match, like, John will give you, like, a full background story on the whole thing. | ||
| Like, he just, he knows everything, not even just about martial arts. | ||
| He just knows everything about everything. | ||
| He's, like, the closest thing to Google that you can get, in my opinion. | ||
| Like, you just ask him a question about any given subject, and he knows something about it. | ||
| So, you know, when he goes home every night and he studies tape, you know for a fact that the next day he's coming in and he's showing you something that he watched from... | ||
| Like the other day, he showed us something that an Asian kid hit from the U23 World Championships in 2018 that he was taking people down with in the wrestling championships. | ||
| And it's just like, this guy went home and started watching the U23 Worlds from 2018. Who does that? | ||
| He and Lex Friedman had a conversation while we were at dinner where Lex brought up some obscure wrestlers from Dagestan and John was like, oh yes, yes. | ||
| Oh yeah, he knows all about them. | ||
| Going into detail about these people. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| And also, he studies why they're successful. | ||
| Like, that's a fascinating thing, too. | ||
| You know, he doesn't just study the fact that this is a group of people doing things. | ||
| It's like, why are there outliers? | ||
| And so he analyzes what causes an outlier. | ||
| Why are these guys the best in the world? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And then he applies that. | ||
| And he really does. | ||
| I mean, the crazy thing is that when you look at the domination of your team and you look at it over the course of, you know, six years, it's relentless. | ||
| Like, it's continual. | ||
| It's constant and it keeps going. | ||
| And because of this philosophy of seven days a week training and constant innovation and always refreshing the mind with new techniques and And always stimulating the athletes with new options. | ||
| You're seeing this never-ending progression where, as I look at other teams and you get these elite guys who are at a world championship level, and even elite guys at a world championship level, even though they win world championships and they do really well, they are stagnant in their progress, at least observationally. | ||
| You know, they don't look any different. | ||
| What most people do is they get to a certain level, usually in jiu-jitsu it's black belt, and they coast on that technique. | ||
| And they get a little bit more physically mature. | ||
| The most high-level competitors get their black belt at 22, 23, 24. And they get physically more mature until they're 30. But they don't ever progress technically. | ||
| Whereas with us, like every six months, like if I fought myself a 2019 ADCC right now, I would crush myself. | ||
| So that's the thing. | ||
| It's always constant progression, working towards new goals and new heights. | ||
| What is your ultimate end goal? | ||
| Do you have an ultimate end goal? | ||
| Now here you are so young to be not just the best on the planet, but arguably the best of all time at 25. I just want to finish my career and I want people to think that, okay, there's just absolutely no chance that anyone could ever touch what you've done in your career. | ||
| Like right now, sure, I'm arguably the best of all time, but people can surpass my records. | ||
| When I finish my career, I want people to sit back and think, wow, no one's ever going to get close to that. | ||
| That's a wild goal. | ||
| But that keeps you motivated? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Since you're already the best. | ||
| Because you're in a weird situation, I should tell people that don't understand jujitsu or don't know the landscape. | ||
| You can't get fights. | ||
| You're having a really hard time getting fights. | ||
| I mean, props to Wagner for stepping up because he's a smaller guy and he's one of the rare elite black belts that did choose to step up because you're in this weird position right now where people are worried about their reputation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's crazy because I'm one of the nicer guys to compete against. | ||
| I don't rip submissions. | ||
| I'm not smacking you in the face or poking you in the eyes. | ||
| I'm pretty mild as far as being very physical when I compete against you. | ||
| I'm actually pretty nice when I compete against you. | ||
| If you look at a guy like Tyson, he was just murdering people, and he had no shortage of fights. | ||
| Everyone wanted to fight him. | ||
| It's just so strange that there's not even strikes involved, and I just can't get people to actually step up to compete. | ||
| Do you think that's a financial thing, though? | ||
| Because when Tyson was involved, at least you get a couple million bucks, you get your head knocked off. | ||
| It could be. | ||
| People are fighting me for like $6,000. | ||
| If you're going to get knocked out by Tyson for $10 million, it's a little bit different than getting embarrassed by a shit-talking fucking Gordon for like $5,000. | ||
| That's the other thing that's unusual about you, is that when people think about successful martial artists, they think of these stoic warriors who bow to each other and show respect. | ||
| You talk so much shit. | ||
| And you talk so much shit to people online. | ||
| You go back and forth to people online. | ||
| You post pictures of them looking stupid. | ||
| You make, like, memes. | ||
| You have all these things that you put out. | ||
| You use social media. | ||
| And most people who do things the way you do it suck. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's what's crazy. | ||
| It's like to be the best of the best, but also to be talking mad shit all the time. | ||
| It's one of those combinations where I'm sure your opponents are like, FUCK! Yeah. | ||
| Well, if you talk shit and you don't have the skills to actually back it up, you just look like a clown. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're like a guy like Dylan who just talks shit on Instagram, but then he's like 18 and 16 as a black belt. | ||
| He has two fights against some guys in Bellator. | ||
| But if you can go out and you can talk shit, you can say, I'm going to do this. | ||
| You can say, I'm going to finish this match by triangle and then go out and finish match by triangle. | ||
| People are like, oh shit. | ||
| Even if they hate you, they have no choice but to listen to you and respect you. | ||
| Well, I like what you did with your first, one of your matches that I saw, it was a couple matches ago, you said you were going to finish with a mounted triangle. | ||
| But you said that before the match. | ||
| A mounted arm bar, yeah. | ||
| Mounted arm bar, excuse me. | ||
| And then this last match, you drew a picture of a triangle, put it in an envelope, and then gave it to the commentator and said, don't open this until after the match. | ||
| And you finished by triangle. | ||
| But that time you didn't let him know. | ||
| The first time you said it in advance though, right? | ||
| I said it right before the match, so you probably didn't see it. | ||
| I posted it right before the match, but the chances of him looking at it when he was getting ready to walk out were probably pretty low. | ||
| Whereas the one with Wagner, there's no way he could have seen it because I just put it in an envelope and they didn't open it until after the event. | ||
| Yeah, because there was times when you had him in good positions, where I was wondering if you were letting him go, because you said that you wanted to maul him. | ||
| Yeah, I wanted to abuse him for the first 20 minutes and then finish him with like 10 minutes left, which is what I did. | ||
| If I wanted to triangle him before that, I could have probably done it pretty easily, especially on the back, but that's just not what I wanted to do. | ||
| Why did you want to punish him like that? | ||
| Just because we have some history. | ||
| He used to, whenever we competed, he would always be like super dirty and like, you know, putting his hands in my face. | ||
| And he's just like a very aggressive style competitor. | ||
| And when I was like 18, 19, he would always like walk around backstage and like knock my crowns off my head. | ||
| He used to wear, folks need to know this, he used to wear a Burger King crown. | ||
| Burger King crown. | ||
| And now I've updated to a plastic crown. | ||
| I walk around tournaments with like a robe, like a king's robe and a crown on my head. | ||
| And then everyone's like, who's this asshole? | ||
| I'm like, I'm the asshole who's going to win the tournament tomorrow. | ||
| So I show up and it's just like super obnoxious. | ||
| And then I just show up and I just beat everybody up and everyone's like, wow, that fucking asshole with a crown. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But it's such a weird combination. | ||
| Like the first picture with the robot, I showed up to Nogi Worlds like that. | ||
| And I was coaching the day before. | ||
| So I show up and I'm just walking around the pyramid in California like that. | ||
| And I'm just coaching my blue belt students, the team members, in that. | ||
| And people are like, wow, this guy's really dressed like that right now. | ||
| And I'm like, yep, I'm really dressed like that. | ||
| And then I just show up the next day in double gold and everyone's like, wow, that fucking asshole just did that. | ||
| Have you always been like that? | ||
| Have you always been a guy who talked a lot of shit? | ||
| No. | ||
| It all started when I won my first EBI, and people were giving me shit about how I shouldn't have beat Yuri. | ||
| And when people started hating online, I'm like, you know what? | ||
| Fuck this. | ||
| I'm not gonna be quiet. | ||
| I'm just gonna go back at them. | ||
| Because I realized early on that no matter how nice you are, people are always gonna talk shit. | ||
| No matter what you do, people are gonna talk shit. | ||
| Like, George is the nicest guy ever, and people are like, What a fucking pussy. | ||
| That guy sucks. | ||
| He just lays in praise. | ||
| And people give George shit, and George is the nicest guy ever. | ||
| So I'm like, you know, well, if people are going to talk shit regardless, I may as well just say and do what I want and just be authentic and have fun with it. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| But it seems almost out of place for someone who's as good as you are. | ||
| Yeah, I mean most people with this kind of talent don't do it but it's fun for me and I just feel like it just upsets so many people and they take it so seriously and I don't and I'm just sitting there like I'm sitting there like laughing behind my keyboard and everyone's like pulling their hair out on the other side of the screen and I know that it upsets so many people and you know it's just it's easy to run with it. | ||
| It's just, when you see people react, like Cyborg in particular, the second fight that you had with Cyborg, how many times do you- Twice. | ||
| Twice. | ||
| Okay, the second one. | ||
| The first one you submitted him, but the second one, he's literally swinging at your head, like, making it look like he's touching your head, but he's actually smacking you. | ||
| Yes, he smacked me, like, I think it was 14 times in the match, and then finally, like, the last second of the match, they DQ'd him for it. | ||
| Last second of the match? | ||
| 9 minutes and 59 seconds. | ||
| The Brazilian refs all waited until the last possible second and they DQ'd him for smacking me. | ||
| And then I won by DQ because he was smacking me. | ||
| Did you talk to him about it afterwards? | ||
| We talked, we kind of squashed our beef, and now we're cool. | ||
| I was like, you know, this is all fun for me. | ||
| Don't take it so personal. | ||
| It's just business. | ||
| You can't take it personally. | ||
| Sure, some things that I do... | ||
| First of all, I only attack guys who have started shit with me or started shit with my team or inadvertently or passive-aggressively. | ||
| You talk shit about... | ||
| Our team or myself. | ||
| The problem is I just go way further than is necessary. | ||
| Like they start at like level two and I just go to a level a thousand like right away and I just don't stop. | ||
| Like it's like they like they like they like talk shit about me like 2015 and we're like 2021 and I'm like still just berating them every day. | ||
| So I just go way overboard and that's what people get upset about. | ||
| But I never actually attack someone who hasn't started with me first. | ||
| It's just funny, the dedication to shit-talking. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's a full-time job. | ||
| But now I can't even do it because Instagram just erases all my posts. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, Instagram, I just stopped pretty much using Instagram. | ||
| I just, like, post, like, once a day or once every other day now. | ||
| But Instagram deletes, like, if I go on and I comment something, and I, like, attack a hater who attacked me and retaliate, like, 60% of my posts just get erased now. | ||
| So it's like, I would spend hours a day on Instagram. | ||
| It's like a full-time job. | ||
| But now it's like not even worth my time because I know that if I go on and I write, you know, 30 comments, 20 of them are gonna get erased. | ||
| So it's not even worth my time dealing with it anymore. | ||
| What do you think is going on? | ||
| You think someone's reporting them? | ||
| I think it's a combination of people reporting it, and I think it's just the algorithm has a hit on me, and I think that, like, because it shows you your violations. | ||
| I have, like, hundreds of violations, like 300 violations. | ||
| Like, I tell people to kill themselves and stuff. | ||
| So, like, now they just started threatening to delete my account, and they delete, like, all my comments. | ||
| So it's not even worth going on and attacking people, like, because normally it's fun for me to entertain the fans by attacking the haters. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But, now, it's just like, Instagram just erased like 60% of my shit, so it's not even worth attacking people, because you spend six hours online, and four hours of them are useless, because all your comments just get erased. | ||
| So, even if you just have a post and they leave the post up, if you have comments under the post, they'll delete your comments? | ||
| They'll delete my comments, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I didn't even know they did that. | ||
| Yeah, they delete comments all the time. | ||
| Like, people attack me, I retaliate, and then they start to, uh, and then we go back and forth, and then, like, the whole comment section gets erased. | ||
| So you spend, like, four hours on a comment thread, and then the original comment gets erased, and then, before you know it, like, you just spent four hours on Instagram, and it was all useless. | ||
| What the fuck is wrong with them? | ||
| It just drives me nuts. | ||
| I don't understand why they do it. | ||
| And it's just getting worse. | ||
| Like, it's not getting any better. | ||
| So now I just go on, like, once every day or so, once every other day, I just promote, like, a fight coming up or an instructional that's coming out, and then I just, I don't even bother arguing with people anymore. | ||
| What about videos? | ||
| Can you make videos, like, YouTube videos or talking shit in an Instagram video? | ||
| Will they delete that? | ||
| It depends on... | ||
| I mean, if people report it, they pretty much just... | ||
| Because I have so many strikes against me, they pretty much just... | ||
| If someone reports it, they just instantly delete it, and they don't even give me a chance to fight it anymore. | ||
| They're just like, yeah, fuck you. | ||
| You had so many violations. | ||
| They just erase it. | ||
| But I can do some stuff, but it's getting... | ||
| The window of what I can work with is getting smaller and smaller by the day. | ||
| So, it's just like... | ||
| It's just it is one of the weirdest problems to have to be the best in the world at something and then have someone like Instagram like Deleting yeah comments and I'm like I'm like perma ban on Facebook like I get like 30 ban days I'm okay for like two days, and then they just ban me for 30 days and And they'll go back and they'll find shit from like 2015. They're like, this goes against community standards. | ||
| Banned for 30 days. | ||
| Banned for 30 days. | ||
| I've been like, the last year I probably had like four active days on Facebook. | ||
| And then I'm just banned for the next 30 days every single time. | ||
| It's just like, I can't even use it anymore. | ||
| How do you have time to do that though, with all the training? | ||
| So that's what I do for fun. | ||
| Like, most people watch TV. I just go on Instagram and I attack people. | ||
| Like, I get home. | ||
| I eat my food. | ||
| I'm, like, eating my food. | ||
| And I go on and I'm typing. | ||
| And I'm, like, I tell Nat, I'm, like, man, I just crushed this guy on Instagram. | ||
| And I read her the thread. | ||
| She's, like, yeah, it's going to get deleted. | ||
| And then 30 minutes later, like, oh, this goes against hate speech. | ||
| So it's just, like, I always used to do it for fun. | ||
| But now it's not even fun because I just waste my time doing it. | ||
| Now, obviously, the next course of progression for a guy like you would be MMA. Yeah. | ||
| Now, I know that you had talked about doing MMA in the past, but now it seems like it's actually going to happen. | ||
| Yeah, so John doesn't want me to compete in MMA because he feels like jiu-jitsu is just about to break into that next level of professional sports. | ||
| So for me at least right now, I feel like I need at least someone from my team to be able to do the things that I'm doing before I can kind of move away from jiu-jitsu into MMA. Because right now we have Gary in MMA, he's carrying our flag, our team's flag in MMA. We have me at the top of the heap in jiu-jitsu. | ||
| So like if Craig or Nicky Rod and my brother can start doing the things that I'm doing and they win in ATCC Absolute maybe, or they go out and they start beating and submitting all the high-level guys, then I feel like maybe I can leave jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Because if I start fighting MMA, I'm going to focus on MMA. So I feel like if one of my teammates can kind of take my place, then I can start moving into MMA and then go from there. | ||
| So you really do genuinely look at it as a team effort. | ||
| You're not looking at it just as an individual. | ||
| Most athletes are very selfish and they just take, take, take, whereas we have a very good team cohesion and we're always looking out for one another and I find that that's the way that people operate best. | ||
| If you look at most teams, It's basically just a bunch of tough guys in a room who train together, who have no loyalty, and if someone offers them a better deal, they're going to go somewhere else and train there. | ||
| Whereas with us, we're very loyal to John, and everything that we do is the same. | ||
| My game is very similar to John's, very similar to Gary's, very similar to Craig's. | ||
| We all are taught by John, and we all follow the same ideas and the same philosophy of jiu-jitsu. | ||
| So the loyalty within the team is very strong, and I feel that It's always going to be a team effort. | ||
| Without John, I wouldn't be as good as I am. | ||
| Without Gary, I wouldn't be as good as I am. | ||
| Without Nikki, it's the collaboration of minds in the gym that really pushes you forward. | ||
| I feel like we're different in that sense that we're not a team that recruits people. | ||
| We're a team that builds athletes from almost the ground up. | ||
| You see a lot of the big MMA teams, or even the big jiu-jitsu teams like Atos, for example, they recruit guys. | ||
| Guys who are already successful, they recruit them, they give them a place to live, they give them a training program, and they just recruit tough guys. | ||
| But if you look at... | ||
| A guy like Andre, and you look at his black belts, they all have vastly different games. | ||
| Kynan's game is different than Andre's. | ||
| Hinger's game is different than Andre's. | ||
| Keenan's game is different than Andre's. | ||
| And it's basically just a team of recruited guys who are a bunch of tough guys training in the same room. | ||
| Whereas John, we have a team of homegrown guys who all do the same thing. | ||
| They all have discernible games that all mimic what John teaches, and they just have slight changes and variations due to our physical attributes and personalities. | ||
| Now, when you say you think of it as a team, this is taking it to a completely different level, because you're not willing to progress your career outside the realm of Jiu Jitsu until someone else can carry the crown. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's next level commitment to the team philosophy. | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| Like I said, you have a guy like John who's the most selfless person in the world. | ||
| He shows up every day and he gives you everything. | ||
| I want what's best for the team, even if it's not what's best for me. | ||
| I want what's best for John's team. | ||
| I want him to go down in history as being the guy who had the absolute best team in the world. | ||
| Right now you can make the argument that sure, Gordon's the best in the world, but the rest of the guys don't win as much as him. | ||
| So, I want to get the rest of the guys on my team to my level so that you don't have the argument anymore of, sure, Gordon's good, but he's the only one who really wins when it counts. | ||
| You know, I want to go into ADCC with my team, and I want to win every single division. | ||
| That would be insane. | ||
| You know, that's not outside the realm of possibility, either. | ||
| That's what's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, next year we have... | ||
| Gary might cut to 66 kilos. | ||
| So if Gary's at 66, my brother will be at 77. Craig will be at 88. I'll be at 99 if they let me do the division. | ||
| And then Nicky Rod will be at 99+. | ||
| What do you mean if they let you do the division? | ||
| So, for ADCC, when you win the Absolute, you go to the Superfight. | ||
| So, the Superfight champion fights the winner of the Absolute. | ||
| Now... | ||
| I won the absolute last year, so I'm only supposed to have one fight. | ||
| But I've requested to do the weight division as well. | ||
| Because you normally would just do the super fight. | ||
| But I want to do the super fight, and I also want to do my weight division. | ||
| So instead of having one match, I'd have five matches. | ||
| No one's ever asked to do that. | ||
| People have asked to do the absolute before, but the problem is, if I win the absolute... | ||
| And then I win the super fight. | ||
| The super fight winner is supposed to fight the absolute winner. | ||
| So you can't fight yourself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So it doesn't make sense to do the super fight and the absolute. | ||
| But it does make sense to do the weight division and the absolute. | ||
| So if they let me do the weight division, I'll be the first person in history to ever do the weight division plus the super fight at the same time. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Now, how is Gary juggling training for MMA and jujitsu as well? | ||
| Dude, that guy's a machine. | ||
| He basically just... | ||
| He didn't do less jujitsu to do MMA. He just added MMA on top of the jujitsu sessions. | ||
| So he trains MMA seven days a week, and he spars lightly seven days a week, and then he finishes that. | ||
| And right now, we don't have a gym set up in Puerto Rico, so we're working around the class schedule of the gym owner. | ||
| So he does MMA at 9, and then he trains for like an hour, spars, then he has like a 30-minute break, and then he does jiu-jitsu at 11, and he just adds the session on. | ||
| So he does MMA and jiu-jitsu seven days a week, within like two hours of each other. | ||
| And when he's training MMA, he's also grappling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So he's grappling twice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Most of the MMA training is shootboxing, is standing to takedowns because he's already so good on the ground. | ||
| He needs to work on fence wrestling and shootboxing. | ||
| But he definitely is some grappling when he does MMA. So he grapples and spars, and then he pretty much goes right to jiu-jitsu and has to do that. | ||
| So, I mean, that's definitely not an easy thing to do, and seven days a week is definitely not an easy thing to do. | ||
| And how is he doing in terms of striking coaching? | ||
| Did he bring someone with him to Puerto Rico? | ||
| Was he using a different person in New York? | ||
| What was he doing? | ||
| He uses John. | ||
| John is our striking coach. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I'm telling you, John knows just as much about every martial art as he does jiu-jitsu. | ||
| John is our wrestling coach. | ||
| John's our jiu-jitsu coach. | ||
| John's our striking coach. | ||
| John's our MMA coach. | ||
| John coaches Gary for every aspect of MMA, wall wrestling, everything. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So he coaches him for kicking and everything? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dude, people don't know this about John. | ||
| John's first martial art was Muay Thai. | ||
| John did Muay Thai for over a decade when he was growing up, and he studied all the best Muay Thai guys. | ||
| I mean, John knows a lot about striking. | ||
| I mean, like I said, people don't know this about John. | ||
| They think he's just a leg lock guy or just a grappler. | ||
| He coaches Gary, and Gary's progressing fast as far as the striking is going. | ||
| He's only been trekking for a year and a half now, and he looks comfortable out there. | ||
| He does. | ||
| That's shocking that he's only been doing it a year and a half. | ||
| A year and a half, two years maybe. | ||
| But yeah, John's his coach. | ||
| John coaches everything. | ||
| So does he have different training partners to train with him in the MMA aspect? | ||
| Yeah, so he has a couple guys who live there, and then he has a couple guys who he brings in who stay with him. | ||
| He's got a three-bedroom apartment. | ||
| So he brings in guys from New York, and then he has one or two guys that live there, and he spars with them every day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So that was his approach from the minute he started competing in MMA? Because he's had how many fights now? | ||
| Six? | ||
| I think six, yeah. | ||
| And this is all in one championship, right? | ||
| All his fights are over there? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Which is the biggest thing outside of the United States. | ||
| They're gigantic in Asia. | ||
| Oh yeah, they're huge. | ||
| Are they back to crowds? | ||
| I don't believe so. | ||
| I'm not positive, but I don't believe so. | ||
| When Gary does this, he's still doing it seven days a week and he's still doing jujitsu seven days a week. | ||
| So the same approach that you guys have just for jujitsu training, he's doing with everything but double. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if he's very tired, maybe he'll take off drilling sometimes and just train live in jiu-jitsu. | ||
| MMA is his main focus and jiu-jitsu is his secondary focus, but he still does two sessions a day every single day. | ||
| Every day. | ||
| Now, what are you guys doing for recovery? | ||
| Do you do anything specific? | ||
| Do you have deep tissue massage? | ||
| Do you have ice baths? | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| I get massages sometimes, just when I feel like I'm really tight. | ||
| I mostly just use a guy to help me stretch because I'm not disciplined enough to stretch like I should normally. | ||
| You saying you're not disciplined enough to do anything is fucking hilarious. | ||
| Like to stretch, I hate stretching. | ||
| A lot of people hate stretching. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's weird. | |
| In our sport, we spend all of our time doing this with concave shoulders. | ||
| So anything where I round my shoulders, I can do perfectly. | ||
| But anything where I have to bridge like this, because most people just explode, explode. | ||
| I don't ever explode. | ||
| Everything's always like this, contraction. | ||
| So when I have to open myself up like this, if I try to put my hands over my head and do a squat, my hands end up almost parallel to the floor. | ||
| My shoulders are just the most inflexible thing. | ||
| So I work with a guy who helps me stretch occasionally, and that helps me stretch occasionally. | ||
| But the big thing for me... | ||
| That I neglected for a long time was sleep. | ||
| I feel like that if I can get like six to eight hours of sleep, I can recover, you know, pretty well. | ||
| I feel like for a long time, I would just get like three, four hours of sleep a night. | ||
| And it was okay when I was 19 years old, but now I feel like I need the extra sleep. | ||
| And I feel like if I can get a decent night's sleep, you know, I can sleep forever. | ||
| So it's easy for me to have a good night's sleep and not have to wake up in the middle of the night. | ||
| But if I can get a good night's sleep, I feel like I can recover pretty well. | ||
| So is the issue just going to bed on time? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I usually, we finish pretty early, so, you know, I do the MMA session with Gary either, now since I signed with one, I've been doing a lot of fence wrestling. | ||
| John's been coaching me and Craig with fence wrestling because Craig's competing in SUG and I'm competing at one in the cage, so I want to wrestle people on the fence a lot. | ||
| So, I'd usually do the MMA session with Gary, and then I'd do the Jiu Jitsu session after that, and then we come home, I eat food, I relax for a little bit, I lift weights, and then I'm usually in bed by like, you know, 9, 10 o'clock. | ||
| And the Jiu Jitsu, the MMA doesn't start until 9, so I mean, I sleep for 8 to 10 hours every night, usually. | ||
| So you generally like to lift weights at night? | ||
| Because I've seen videos of you getting up in the morning and lifting weights in the morning. | ||
| I do, yeah. | ||
| Sometimes I go through kind of cycles where I'm like, man, I feel really good when I get up and I lift weights early because then it's out of the way. | ||
| But I'm... | ||
| I've never been a morning person. | ||
| I hate waking up in the mornings. | ||
| So I do it for like three weeks, and then I travel to compete or something, and then the routine gets fucked up, and then I get back home and I'm like, I'm not waking up tomorrow at 5 a.m. | ||
| to lift. | ||
| So then I end up going back into a routine where I lift at like 8 p.m., and I go back and forth between when I lift. | ||
| Sometimes it's before, sometimes it's after. | ||
| So if you train at night, what time is your training over? | ||
| I usually train from like 8 to 9.30. | ||
| Oh, and so then you'll lift weights after that? | ||
| No, so I'll lift weights from like 8 to 9.30. | ||
| But if we train jiu-jitsu at 11 a.m. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Every day. | ||
| Yeah, so we're finished by 2. So you have enough time to recover and eat? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You go home, you shower. | ||
| If you want to hang out at the beach for a little while, you can. | ||
| And then, you know, you eat food. | ||
| When you digest it, you maybe take a nap, and then you wake up and you lift. | ||
| Now, do you do anything else, like ice baths, sauna? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No. | ||
| No, I've never done that. | ||
| Ice baths, I'm definitely opposed to. | ||
| I hate cold water. | ||
| I just will not knock it in anything below 80 degrees. | ||
| But I'm not opposed to anything else. | ||
| I'm not opposed to saunas and stuff like that. | ||
| It's something that I've never done. | ||
| But there's physical advantages of using those things. | ||
| I'm sure there is. | ||
| Do you think that would even take you another level past where you're at now? | ||
| I could, but I don't think the gains are... | ||
| I think the gains are going to be marginal. | ||
| I think that the big thing that's going to take me to the next level is just getting better at Jiu-Jitsu. | ||
| So that's what most of my focus is on. | ||
| That's why I have to hire someone to help me stretch because I'm very disciplined with Jiu-Jitsu and I'm relatively disciplined with weightlifting. | ||
| But with anything else, I'm just like... | ||
| That's like the two things I'm good at in life is like being able to lift weights and being able to do jiu-jitsu and everything else. | ||
| I'm just like a complete child. | ||
| I just refuse to do anything else besides what I have to do for my career. | ||
| But I think it would help you. | ||
| I think ice baths and sauna would help you. | ||
| I know sauna would help you. | ||
| I mean, Dan Gable was in here recently just ranting and raving about what a gigantic impact sauna has had and how he recognized it from all these athletes overseas competing in the Olympics, how they utilized the sauna and had a big impact on them. | ||
| Yeah, I'm definitely not opposed to saunas. | ||
| I actually like sitting in saunas and hot tubs, but it's something that I don't have a sauna, and I've never done them. | ||
| But if one day I have a sauna, if I buy a house again, I'll definitely think about putting a sauna in there, because they're not that expensive. | ||
| You get those barrel saunas, they're reasonably inexpensive in terms of the value that you get from them. | ||
| Yeah, and if it'll help, then, you know, I'm definitely, I have to do some more research, but if it'll help, I'll use it. | ||
| I'll send you the research. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Because I'm a sauna freak. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I live by that fucking thing. | ||
| I'm an old man. | ||
| I always see the Photoshop Steve photoshopping you with your sauna. | ||
| Yeah, he's got a lot of good stuff to work with, but I do it every day, at least five days a week, if not seven. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know many people who use them who swear by them as well. | ||
| I've never done them consistently. | ||
| It's got a host of benefits, but it's really good for your endurance, too, believe it or not. | ||
| It actually has a mild effect that's akin to an EPO. Oh, okay. | ||
| It increases your red blood cell count. | ||
| But the big thing is the heat shock proteins and the decrease in inflammatory markers. | ||
| They can monitor all this stuff and prove it with blood work. | ||
| So I'll look more at Cezanas, then. | ||
| Yeah, it's legit. | ||
| Now, in terms of striking, how much striking have you done? | ||
| A minimal amount. | ||
| I'm a white belt equivalent. | ||
| I've done it, but the problem is when I was getting ready to initially fight MMA, it was like 2018 I started working with John, and then In early 2019, I tore my LCL, and I came right back from that surgery, and I had to jump right into an ADCC camp. | ||
| So my thing was, I had to get my knee better, and then I have to prepare for 2019 ADCC. And I did 2019 ADCC, and then after that... | ||
| I sat down with John, and John's like, you know, this is a huge ADCC. I think grappling is going to start to go into a direction where it's going to start to be like a real professional sport. | ||
| I think you should stick with grappling at least for a few more years before you decide to move to MMA. What John doesn't want is for... | ||
| For me to leave grappling just as it explodes into the next level. | ||
| I was actually getting ready to start talking to promotions about fighting MMA, and then I hurt my knee, and then I had to do the ADCC camp, and then we did the ADCC camp, and John's like, dude, you have a super fight next year, it's gonna be in Vegas, it's gonna be huge. | ||
| So he's like, just focus on that for now, and then see where we go after that. | ||
| Now, you started competing when you tore your knee. | ||
| You started competing before it was really 100%. | ||
| Yeah, so I competed six months to the day after the LCL reconstruction in my first tournament, and then I competed at ADCC seven months to the day after the reconstruction. | ||
| So it definitely wasn't 100%, but it was okay enough to compete at least. | ||
| What did you do for rehab? | ||
| I just work with a with a PT who my surgeon recommended. | ||
| My big issue is that my hip on the one side locked up. | ||
| So my hip on my left hip, I tore my left LCL. My left hip locked up and was like was losing all of its flexibility to kind of overcompensate for the LCL being torn. | ||
| So a big thing was like opening up my hip and my whole left lower back was all tight. | ||
| So a lot of it, like the first few months of rehab, which is him just working on flexibility and getting range of motion back. | ||
| And then they use, for the rehab, they use that BFR, the blood flow restriction, where they put that thing around my quad, and it cuts off 80% of the blood flow. | ||
| And then you do like very mild exercises, like bodyweight squats or lunges and stuff. | ||
| And the idea is that it Stops the blood flow from getting down to your leg and then when you take it off the blood rushes down to the bottom of your leg and it promotes healing so they use that and I use that for a few months and it it seemed to help and then I just was like I actually we do a 12-week ADCC camp and I was just miserable the whole camp like I started wrestling again and my timing was off I was getting exhausted I just felt terrible and Like 10 weeks into the | ||
| camp, I was like, John, there's no way I'm going to be able to do this. | ||
| And then like on the 11th week, I just like from a Friday to a Monday, I just came in and I just started beating the shit out of people. | ||
| And I was like, wow. | ||
| I think I might be able to do this so like like the whole 12-week camp I was just miserable and I was like there's no way I can do this and then like a three-day span I went from like just being terrible and then all my timing started to come back my hand fighting from standing position started to come back and I was like I think I might be able to do this and then by like the time ADCC rolled around I was like all right I'm in and it ended up working out. | ||
| What do you attribute that to like how'd you do that? | ||
| I mean I don't know I think it was just I was doing rehab like I was supposed to, and the knee itself wasn't really the issue. | ||
| It was just my body lagging behind for like, you know, you don't train for four months. | ||
| All your timing, you know, your timing's all off. | ||
| You start wrestling and your hand fighting's off. | ||
| You're a day late and a dollar short in your shot, so you just feel... | ||
| You feel like, you know, there's nothing physically that... | ||
| There's nothing that bad physically wrong with you. | ||
| Like, my knee wasn't, like, gonna buckle or break in half or anything. | ||
| But I just felt like my overall timing for everything was off. | ||
| And then, like, I started wrestling hard for, like, two weeks, and everything started to come back. | ||
| And then, like, you know, from one day to the next, almost, it seemed like I was like, okay, I feel like everything's kind of coming back now. | ||
| And the last, like, week or two before ADCC... It was when I really started to feel like I was who I was before I hurt the knee. | ||
| I think John has a real point in terms of saying that grappling is on its way to becoming a legitimate professional sport, like a much bigger professional sport. | ||
| I think he's right. | ||
| But I think it needs you. | ||
| I think it needs you. | ||
| I think it needs someone like you. | ||
| It needs a big personality who's also doing fucked up things like writing a triangle down on a piece of paper, putting it in an envelope, and handing it to the commentators before the match, and then finishing someone with that. | ||
| The thing is, it needs more of me. | ||
| One guy can only do so much. | ||
| That's the issue. | ||
| Everyone's talking about, oh, you have to be humble and respect. | ||
| Nobody wants to come out and watch an interview where the guy's like, oh, you know, I trained really hard for this fight. | ||
| I'm sure he trained hard, too. | ||
| He's really tough. | ||
| It's going to be a great... | ||
| Everyone says that. | ||
| Nobody wants to fucking listen to someone coming out. | ||
| There's 20 matches and all 20 guys say the same thing. | ||
| They want a guy who's coming out and like, fuck this pussy, I'm going to beat the shit out of them. | ||
| People are like, all right, I can get behind that. | ||
| So, you know, they can kind of live vicariously through you because they want to do that. | ||
| They want to go up to their boss tomorrow and be like, you know, fuck you, I'm going to beat the shit out of you. | ||
| They can kind of get behind that because they can't do that in their lives. | ||
| But, you know, there's always going to be a limit on how big grappling can get as a sport because grappling is a participant-based sport where most people who watch grappling either participate in grappling or they have family members who are doing it and they're watching their cousin compete. | ||
| The NBA or the NFL like most people who watch MMA aren't showing up the next day to get punched in the face Like people are just watching it because they they they want to they want to be entertained It's a spectator sport, so I do believe that it's going to get much bigger in the coming years But I also believe there's gonna be a cap on like it'll never be the size of football for example or the UFC for example Yeah, it might not be but I think it can be bigger than people give it credit for because of the submission Because people are so accustomed to seeing submissions in MMA. Yeah. | ||
| And to see people pull off submissions in Jiu Jitsu. | ||
| It's like a knockout in boxing. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Especially when you have good commentary, which who's number one does, you know, and a lot of these commentators are really educated now because they're such fans of the sport. | ||
| So they can talk people through submissions and let people know exactly what's happening and when someone's in danger and when they're free. | ||
| But I think you're right in terms of we need more big personalities and more competition. | ||
| The fact that you're having a hard time getting matches is weird. | ||
| With all these big heavyweights out there, there's a lot of guys who are your size who they're not stepping up. | ||
| And another thing you need, too, is you need a training program that pushes you towards submissions. | ||
| Like, nobody wants to watch two guys in 50-50 fighting to fucking scissor back and forth until someone gets an advantage, and then you come up, and, you know, people want to see movement, which is exciting, okay? | ||
| Ultimately, what people are looking for is movement, because people aren't moving, there's no excitement. | ||
| They want movement, and they want... | ||
| A submission is equivalent to a knockout. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if you have a training program, like I said before, built around just doing the absolute minimal amount of work to win, then you're going to be boring. | ||
| But if you want to take the hardest route and you say, "Okay, how can I fight to a submission?" There has to be a lot of movement to get a submission. | ||
| You gotta work through various, you know, positional gains to get to a submission in most cases. | ||
| And you submit a guy and you're like, okay, people are like, okay, I can get behind that. | ||
| Like, people see an arm break, people see a guy get strangled unconscious and they're like, wow, that was fucking, that was intense. | ||
| Is John, does he have a game plan to try to elevate the status of grappling or to elevate the profile of it? | ||
| So he's talked about this to us. | ||
| I remember I had one of the most important conversations of my career when John told us that you have to be exciting in one way or another. | ||
| If you look at a guy like Chael Sonnen, for example, he hasn't defended the UFC title for 10 years in a row, but he was entertaining outside of the ring, so even though he didn't have the skills to beat the best guys consistently, people wanted to watch him because he was entertaining and he was different. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Where if you look at a guy like George, George wasn't really entertaining outside of the ring, but he would just go in and just beat everybody over the course of two or three generations. | ||
| And he's like, if you look at notoriously who the most remembered and highest paid people, it's the people that were entertaining in the competition and outside of the competition. | ||
| You look at Tyson, you look at Muhammad Ali, you look at Conor. | ||
| Guys that have the skills to back up what they're saying so that they're entertaining outside before the fight. | ||
| People want to watch that. | ||
| He kind of goes to a press conference. | ||
| Everybody wants to watch it. | ||
| George goes to a press conference and everyone knows what's going to happen. | ||
| George is going to be like, oh, he's very tough. | ||
| I'm excited to fight him. | ||
| But Conor goes to a press conference. | ||
| He's fucking throwing monster cans and shit at people. | ||
| Who would have Who the fuck is that guy? | ||
| People want to watch that. | ||
| But on the same token, the shit talk is the easy part, and it only takes you so far. | ||
| You only get so far with shit talk. | ||
| So that's why you need to have the skills in order to actually be able to back up the shit talk. | ||
| And John told us that we need to be exciting, either on or off the mat. | ||
| We need to be different. | ||
| And we just need to focus on being the best in the world. | ||
| He's like, all the pre-fight antics and all the shit talk and all the interviews, that's the easy stuff. | ||
| The hard part is being the best in the world. | ||
| Like, if you just focus on being the absolute best in the world and that's your primary focus, everything else comes easy. | ||
| So he sat me down when I was like 17, and he talked to us about this. | ||
| And I was like, you know what, that makes sense. | ||
| And then like a few years later, I was like, man, maybe I should create like this King Ryan persona. | ||
| Like it's different, people can get behind it, it's entertaining, and then, you know, it ended up working out. | ||
| So it was sort of a calculated effort. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's got to be so weird to have a guy like that as a mentor. | ||
| Because you know there's only one of them out there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's just like, you know on the mats, it's literally like a cheap book. | ||
| Like you ask John a question about anything. | ||
| You ask him about a striking question. | ||
| You ask him about a grappling question. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| You ask him about a frisbee question, and he knows the answer. | ||
| And then you have a guy who's there all day long, all year long, and he knows everything about everything. | ||
| And you're just like, wow, this is like nothing you're ever going to find anywhere else. | ||
| And he doesn't have kids or a wife. | ||
| He doesn't compete himself. | ||
| So his primary focus is on just making us better. | ||
| That's what he loves to do. | ||
| Like, most coaches, they go home and they're in the camp for one of their own fights. | ||
| They're focusing on themselves. | ||
| They go home, they have a family to raise. | ||
| Like, that's not John. | ||
| Like, John goes home and he watches Tate from a 1956 boxing match. | ||
| And he comes in the next day and teaches Gary something. | ||
| You can't compete with that. | ||
| Yeah, it's tough. | ||
| There's no other guy like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Especially a guy like that who's... | ||
| Isn't he a PhD in philosophy as well? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| From a legitimate university. | ||
| Columbia. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| He was a teacher at Columbia. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's... | |
| Imagine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where are you going to get one of those? | ||
| There's one of those on Earth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's tough. | ||
| He's applied... | ||
| You have an actual genius Competing against, like, most instructors that, like, you know, a lot of the top-level coaches that are coaching jiu-jitsu in the U.S. grew up in, like, a favela in Brazil. | ||
| And there's nothing wrong with that. | ||
| They moved to America, they became successful. | ||
| But, like, to compete against a guy like John, who's, like, a legitimate genius and is, you know, teaching at Columbia University in New York and then just applies that intelligence to the sport of jiu-jitsu, it's just not fair in most cases. | ||
| Like, the The level of intellect, there's just no comparison. | ||
| But it's also the level of intellect and this obsessive dedication to teaching people. | ||
| Like the only thing he enjoys is knives. | ||
| He collects knives and martial arts. | ||
| Yeah, he found one of my knives on my Instagram. | ||
| He's like, I love that knife. | ||
| What are you, a knife freak? | ||
| He gives out knives for black belts, right? | ||
| Yeah, he moves. | ||
| So whenever we win a big tournament, I remember when I won 2017 ADCC, he came in with a katana that's this big, that was custom made by one of the best knife makers in Japan. | ||
| And he goes, this katana is designed to cut the heads off horses in battle. | ||
| And if you lined up three male human beings back to back, it would chop them in half the torso with one swipe. | ||
| And I was like, wow, that's fucking awesome. | ||
| So I just have a collection of knives sitting in my room. | ||
| I have to get stands for them still. | ||
| But whenever we win something big, he gives out knives. | ||
| He's a knife freak. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| So he has knife makers that he hires, commissions? | ||
| He knows all the world's best knife makers. | ||
| He's friends with them. | ||
| He texts them. | ||
| He's like, hey, can you do this? | ||
| He designs his own knives. | ||
| He's crazy obsessed with knives. | ||
| Well, he likes pig hunting knives, those big-ass pig stickers. | ||
| Yeah, because you know he used to hunt pigs in New Zealand, right? | ||
| That was like his childhood pastime. | ||
| He used to go out and used to hunt pigs with dogs. | ||
| That's how they do it in Hawaii, too. | ||
| That's a down-home way to do it. | ||
| They do it that way here, too. | ||
| I got invited to do one of those hunts. | ||
| I asked him one time, and I'm like, John, what was your favorite TV show growing up? | ||
| He goes, we didn't have TV. We hunted hogs. | ||
| And I'm like, okay. | ||
| And he just told me about that. | ||
| But yeah, my friend, I have a buddy in Dallas. | ||
| We went out with night vision goggles. | ||
| And he's like, you want to go hunt some hogs tonight? | ||
| I'm like, yeah, sure. | ||
| And we went out nighttime, and we were looking for pigs. | ||
| Yeah, Hennessy just invited me to do that. | ||
| And Tim Kennedy's always invited me to go hunt them on planes. | ||
| Or on helicopters. | ||
| On helicopters, yeah. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Because then you're like, they're all running through the field, you have like this giant gun. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| But I have to eat it. | ||
| Like, I'm not gonna kill them and leave them there. | ||
| But apparently they're a big problem here, right? | ||
| It's a giant problem. | ||
| It's a huge problem, right? | ||
| But they're still delicious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They are. | ||
| So if I'm going to go out and I'm going to gun down ten hogs... | ||
| You want to eat at least one of them. | ||
| I'm going to at least eat one, and the other ones I'm either going to donate to the hungry. | ||
| There's programs called Hunters for the Hungry. | ||
| You could donate it, but a lot of times they just leave them there and let them rot because their idea is just eradication. | ||
| They just want to eradicate them, and it's really hard to do. | ||
| Yeah, there's so many, and they're pretty smart, too. | ||
| They're smart as fuck. | ||
| They're smarter than dogs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a weird animal, man, because, you know, they were brought over here in, like, you know, fucking 1600s or wherever it was. | ||
| Whenever the European explorers came over here, they brought over pigs, and they've just run amok. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now they're everywhere. | ||
| And, like, Texas is one of the worst places I hear for them. | ||
| They opened up one road in Texas, and the day they opened up the road, like they did construction on this road, the day they opened up the road, they had 40 car accidents with pigs. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| I mean, I was talking to my buddy in Dallas, and he went on a 15-minute rant about how the pigs just destroy everything in Texas. | ||
| And I was like, whoa, that's kind of sensitive for you. | ||
| I didn't realize how bad it was. | ||
| Oh, it's bad. | ||
| I think, overall, let's see, like, how much damage do wild pigs cause in Texas per year? | ||
| I think it's in the billions. | ||
| Yeah, that's insane. | ||
| Yeah, it's definitely in the hundreds of millions of dollars, I know for sure, because I know ranchers who have said, like, on their personal property, it's over a million dollars of damage per year by hogs. | ||
| Because, say if you're growing something... | ||
| That's crazy to think about. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 52 million? | ||
| That's it? | ||
| That's the money? | ||
| That's it? | ||
| Why am I so exaggerating? | ||
| Feral hogs cause more than 1.5 billion. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Click on that. | ||
| I mean, it's the same article. | ||
| I don't know why it says it differently. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I had read. | ||
| I had read that it was hundreds of millions, and so it's actually 1.5 billion each year. | ||
| But the most hated animals in Texas have their charms. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Well, that makes sense, because there are a lot of farms here. | ||
| What are their charms? | ||
| They're delicious. | ||
| Babyback ribs. | ||
| It's one of the most ethical animals to hunt because you literally have to hunt them because they've destroyed ground nesting birds. | ||
| They decimate populations of other wildlife. | ||
| They destroy lots. | ||
| Oh, yeah, man. | ||
| And they ruin people's farms. | ||
| If you want food, if you want people to grow food, if you're a vegan and you love corn, guess what, fuckface? | ||
| You've got to kill those pigs. | ||
| If you don't kill those pigs, you're not going to stop them from eating all that corn. | ||
| Yeah, that's crazy. | ||
| Three, four times a year they breed. | ||
| So I think it's three. | ||
| I think they have litters three times a year. | ||
| And they'll have, you know, three, four babies every time. | ||
| And the next thing you know, you've got a swarm of pigs, just devastating crops. | ||
|
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Yeah, I know. | |
| That's crazy. | ||
| And you can't keep an eye on all of them. | ||
| Have you driven through Texas before? | ||
| I haven't. | ||
| I mean, to some degree, yeah, but not as much as I should have. | ||
|
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It's bonkers. | |
| It's bonkers. | ||
| When you drive, you just go, this is all still Texas, right? | ||
| And you just get six hours later, this is still Texas, right? | ||
| Ten hours later, we're still in Texas? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, what the fuck? | ||
| And so it's just, there's so much land. | ||
| And when you have millions and millions of these wild pigs, I'm going to guess, let's guess how many millions of wild pigs. | ||
| Just in Texas? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I bet. | ||
| Oh, that's a tough one. | ||
| I bet there's 5 million. | ||
| I'm reading through this. | ||
| The 1.5 billion is from the Department of Agriculture, and then it does say 52 million in Texas. | ||
| Does that mean that there's the rest of the country? | ||
| And then there must be somewhere there's more pigs? | ||
| Even if $50 million a year is an insane amount of money. | ||
| That's pretty minor, because this guy was telling me, I think it was 1.4 million on his property. | ||
| Maybe he has a giant ranch, though. | ||
| Or maybe he's a liar. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| People love to exaggerate. | ||
| I certainly do. | ||
| I think California is a giant problem, for sure. | ||
| I know they're in San Jose now. | ||
| People are getting... | ||
| They're having problems in San Jose where they're eating their lawn. | ||
| They're pulling up their lawn in San Jose, like, right in the middle of their... | ||
| It says there's 2 million wild pigs roaming Texas. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Those are 2 million pigs caused the 52 million damage, and there must be... | ||
| 30 million pigs roaming everywhere else. | ||
|
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I don't know. | |
| That's fairly reasonable if you think about it, right? | ||
| Like, each pig is causing about 25 bucks worth of damage. | ||
| That's not that bad. | ||
| That's not too bad. | ||
| Like, really? | ||
| When you put it like that, like, maybe we don't have to kill the pigs. | ||
| Similar. | ||
| Did you see this yesterday? | ||
| Grand Canyon NPCs seek skilled hunters to reduce bison population inside the park. | ||
| They're causing damage there too, I guess. | ||
| Inside the park? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This article, I just was looking at it. | ||
| Those bison have grown from the bison brought 115 years ago and it says that they're causing a nuisance and they're going to have a hunt this year. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| They want to reduce the population by 200. I feel like they should capture them and just move them to other places. | ||
| I think having a hunt on the park, that's a touchy subject because they've worked so hard to make that place a wildlife refuge. | ||
| It's real weird because it's not a hunt. | ||
| You're just assassinating them. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Because I was there, and dude, you could just get right, like, I was real careful that we did it behind a fence, and I was, like, literally ready to grab my kids and run behind a car, because when they turn, if they just decide to turn, like, if the dude has a hard-on, he feels like you're cock-blocking, they'll just fucking come charging at you and send people flying through the air. | ||
| They send themselves flying through the air. | ||
| It says they have moved up to, like, it says 88 of them have been moved on to tribal lands since 2019, so it's only in the last two years. | ||
| Well, that's a good sign. | ||
| It's a good sign that there's good growth. | ||
| Those motherfuckers are so sturdy. | ||
| They're so hardy. | ||
| Nothing kills them other than... | ||
| It's crazy how feeble a human being is compared to the other animals. | ||
| Yeah, even a guy like you. | ||
| We're basically like water balloons. | ||
| Their skin is so thin. | ||
| And to think about the fact that the animals now, compared to the dinosaurs, are just like... | ||
| The hunter, whoever gets this lottery tag, do you have to take it out without motorized assistance, it says? | ||
| Do you have to carry that out? | ||
| Is that what that means? | ||
| Yeah, you can use horses. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah, you want to use horses anyway. | ||
| There's terrain that you really want to use mules. | ||
| Yeah, I'd say donkeys and mules. | ||
| Mules are the best. | ||
| That's a cross between a donkey and a horse because they're like a perfect combination, apparently, for these backcountry hunters. | ||
| They love mules because you could pack a lot of shit on them. | ||
| They don't give a fuck if it's hot out or if it's cold out. | ||
| They don't drink as much water. | ||
| They're just like super sturdy animals. | ||
| And they got useless loads. | ||
| The only way you can make them is you have to have a donkey fuck a horse. | ||
| Mules can't fuck other mules. | ||
| They're going to have a... | ||
| Applicants have to meet some certifications. | ||
| Self-certify a high level of physical fitness. | ||
| Have a firearm safety certification and pass a marksmanship proficiency. | ||
| They should have that anyway, by the way, for hunters. | ||
| They should have to pass a marksmanship proficiency. | ||
| They have that in some states for getting a bow hunting license. | ||
| Three to five shots inside a four-inch circle at 100 yards. | ||
| That's it? | ||
|
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I didn't know if that was good, bad, average. | |
| Well, you're hunting a bison. | ||
| Four-inch circle's pretty good. | ||
| But that's so easy at 100 yards because you're probably using a rest. | ||
| All you have to do is just not flinch. | ||
| And if your rifle's zeroed in, you should be able to put them all inside a couple inches. | ||
| I mean, the only variation is you moving. | ||
| Like, with a really good rifle, you just squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, boom! | ||
| Like, if you just keep, like, with a rifle rest, like a lead sled, which is most of the time, they use a Caldwell or something like that, you're rested. | ||
| You just don't flinch. | ||
| But they should have that, period, for hunters. | ||
| Because there's a lot of places where you don't even have to have a marksmanship. | ||
| You don't have to have any kind of test. | ||
| But a high level of physical fitness implies that they want to make sure these people can carry out these animals. | ||
| So either you're going to carry it out or just be able to hoist it up. | ||
| Like if you're quartering a bison, do you know how much a fucking bison leg must weigh? | ||
| I'm guessing a lot. | ||
| Like it's got to be hundreds of pounds if you kill that, correct? | ||
| Here's a photo of me when I shot a moose. | ||
| It's on the cover of Carnivore Magazine, I think it is. | ||
| I think that's what it's called? | ||
| It's just hunting? | ||
| Oh, Peterson's hunting. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That is not even a big moose. | ||
| That was a fairly small moose, and that was... | ||
| People don't realize how big moose are. | ||
| They're big as fuck. | ||
| They're enormous. | ||
| And that thing on my shoulder is probably 150 pounds. | ||
| It was hard as fuck to carry. | ||
| I had to hoist it up and sling it over my shoulder. | ||
| It was like I had a small dude on my shoulders. | ||
| Now, a bison is, like, probably twice as big as that. | ||
| So, I mean, I would imagine, like, a grown male bull bison is probably a 300-pound leg. | ||
| They're fucking huge, man. | ||
| You don't realize how big they are. | ||
| Do you see them? | ||
| They weigh up to 2,000 pounds. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What in the fuck? | ||
| That's so big! | ||
| But the good news is, you shoot one of those, you eat that motherfucker for two years. | ||
| You know, that's two years of the best meat on planet Earth, and you can give it to a lot of families. | ||
| Like, if you shoot one life of one bison, it will sustain four or five people for two years. | ||
| I mean, really. | ||
| Yeah, that's a lot of meat. | ||
| That's a lot of fucking meat. | ||
| Especially if you use it right. | ||
| Like, you take the bones, and you make bone marrow out of the bones, you make ossobuco out of the shanks, all the parts that people, like, oftentimes leave behind. | ||
| I mean, you can... | ||
| And then you get this fucking crazy rug. | ||
| Because if you shoot them in the wintertime, you have the most amazing fur. | ||
| American Indians, they were pretty goddamn smart in what they hunted. | ||
| They didn't fuck around. | ||
| Shoot one of those bad boys. | ||
| I know. | ||
| That's the thing about, air quotes, hunting them in Yellowstone. | ||
| They're so used to just being around people. | ||
| They just look at you. | ||
| All you'd have to do is just pull out a rifle and just, oh, here we go. | ||
| They're not gonna run. | ||
| I mean, that was a problem when the settlers first started making their way across the plains. | ||
| Like, they didn't know what a rifle was. | ||
| So when bisons were dropping around them, they'd be like, what the fuck is going on? | ||
| They just kept eating. | ||
| And then guys would shoot like 10, 12 bison at a time because they didn't budge. | ||
| They were just in this big pile. | ||
| They're used to seeing people. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And they're not used to being in danger from hundreds of yards away. | ||
| An Indian would have to come sneaking up on them with a bow or a spear. | ||
| They'd have to ride at them with a horse and jab them. | ||
| They'd have to do something to get close. | ||
| Pigs are different. | ||
| When I went hunting pigs, if you were upwind from them, they smell you, they run away. | ||
| They're hard to hunt. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| If they're downwind and they catch your scent, they will fucking haul ass from hundreds of yards away. | ||
| Same with bears. | ||
| They smell you, they're like, fuck this! | ||
| They just haul off. | ||
| They have crazy senses of smell. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| And pigs can't see shit, though. | ||
| If you just freeze, they don't know what the fuck you are. | ||
| Like, if you're walking up on pigs and they just look at you, all you have to do is freeze. | ||
| And they don't see you. | ||
| They have terrible vision, but they can smell really good. | ||
| They smell really good and they hear really good. | ||
| Yeah, we were trying to position ourselves in the right spot and we just couldn't get it and they just fucking kept moving, moving, moving. | ||
| So you guys didn't get one? | ||
| We didn't kill any, no. | ||
| We only saw like three or four, but it was hard to keep track of them. | ||
| And then whenever we would position ourselves, they would move in the opposite direction. | ||
| Yeah, you gotta go to a place that's basically infested. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There wasn't too many where we were. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It really varies, and they move around a lot, too. | ||
| But have you been hunting at all before? | ||
| I just hunted the pigs the one time. | ||
| That was it. | ||
| I didn't grow up hunting or anything like that, but I would love to do it. | ||
| I just never have. | ||
| It's a great way to get meat, man, and the meat is fantastic. | ||
| What does your diet consist of? | ||
| So I actually have a condition called gastroparesis, where your stomach doesn't push the food down to your intestines how it's supposed to. | ||
| So food basically just sits in my stomach for longer than it's supposed to. | ||
| And I've had this for like three years, which is why I'm just constantly nauseous and just can't eat the amount of food that I need to. | ||
| So I'm basically limited to chicken and rice and eggs. | ||
| That's all I can eat. | ||
| I can't eat any red meat because it's hard to digest. | ||
| I can't eat anything fried. | ||
| I can't eat cheeseburgers. | ||
| I can't eat anything spicy. | ||
| There's a very select amount of foods that I'm actually able to eat. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| And when did this start? | ||
| Three years ago? | ||
| Yeah, so I had recurring staph infections, and it was like, I would take oral antibiotics, and then I'd be on antibiotics for a week, 10 days, two weeks, and then like four days later, staph infection. | ||
| Oral antibiotics, staph infection. | ||
| And I just had like four or five staph infections within the course of like three to four months. | ||
| And they don't know what causes gastroparesis. | ||
| They don't really know too much about it. | ||
| But I seem to think it was that. | ||
| And Ever since then, I wake up in the morning, I'm nauseous, I go through the whole day extremely nauseous, and then I just go to sleep nauseous. | ||
| So you're nauseous right now? | ||
| Yeah, all the time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So all the time you're like... | ||
| Yeah, so normally how it goes is there's at least one hour of the day where I'm just so... | ||
| I'm incapacitated from being nauseous that I have to just sit in the bathroom because I'm just so nauseous I just can't deal with it. | ||
| So the problem is when I eat food like you can manage it with diet what you eat and how often you eat so normally what I should be doing is fasting so my stomach is empty the whole day and I just have a meal At nighttime, but I would just waste away if I was fasting. | ||
| So I go kind of in these waves where my stomach's okay for a few months and then it goes into a bad dip. | ||
| And when I travel a lot to compete or to teach or whatever the case is, I'm usually forced to eat at restaurants. | ||
| And what do restaurants do to make all the food taste better? | ||
| They put grease and butter and I end up eating for four or five days at restaurants or all this shitty food, and then I'm fucked up for like two weeks where I just can't eat anything. | ||
| So that's why my weight fluctuates. | ||
| Depending on how bad my stomach is. | ||
| But I have to eat every three hours or else I can't get enough calories to maintain my size. | ||
| So I'm basically just piling food on top of food that's already in my stomach and just not getting pushed through to my intestines. | ||
| And this is just to compete at the weight class that you're at? | ||
| Yeah, I just generally think that it's better for me to be bigger. | ||
| Because my game isn't based on speed or explosion. | ||
| It's based on negation of movement. | ||
| So, you know, negation of movement comes with just being positioned well, having sticky grips, and isometric strength. | ||
| So even if I get heavier and I end up slower, it's not really going to matter for my game. | ||
| And people don't realize, like... | ||
| I'm big, but I'm not crazy big compared to your average heavyweight in grappling. | ||
| Bouchesha is like 6'3", 265. Guys like him, people I'm competing against are like 250, 260, 270. When I fought Bouchesha ADCC, I think he weighed in like 263, and I was 210. So 50 pounds is 50 pounds. | ||
| And I think that... | ||
| If I was able to get up to a weight where I was walking around at 260 and then cutting to 240, I think I would be much better than I am right now. | ||
| But the problem is I just can't get the calories because of the gastroparesis. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So I know George St. Pierre has had some gastrointestinal issues as well. | ||
| Yeah, he had colitis. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is he the one who talked to you about fasting? | ||
| Because I know he's a big proponent of fasting. | ||
| So I talked to him about it, and I've just done my own research. | ||
| And I do think that fasting would help because... | ||
| The main thing that makes me nauseous all the time is the fact that the food is sitting in my stomach longer than it's supposed to. | ||
| So if I just went through my day with an empty stomach and then ate at night time, it would be a lot easier for me. | ||
| But the problem is I would be like 180 pounds if I did that. | ||
| So I have to just wake up and every two to three hours I have to just shove my face of food and try to get the calories in. | ||
| But I actually found out that I had gastroparesis when I did a gastric emptying test. | ||
| And they basically take eggs And they put this radioactive dye in it, and they make you eat eggs and toast. | ||
| And then in increments, it's like a five-hour long test. | ||
| Every hour or so, they put you between this machine, and it takes images of the radioactive dye, and it tells you how long it takes your stomach to empty the food. | ||
| And I was retaining food way more than a normal person should be. | ||
| So my stomach isn't contracting the right way to push this food through. | ||
| So when I go to eat my second meal, I'm already full from the first meal. | ||
| And it's always a big problem with people that have done antibiotics where there's always a rebound period where you have to take a lot of probiotics and your gut biome has to sort of re-flourish. | ||
| Well, that's what I thought. | ||
| I was like, I mean, 2018 and I was just nauseous all the time and I was like, you know, it'll get better. | ||
| I'm young. | ||
| It'll be fine. | ||
| And then like six months went by and I like, at first it was so bad I couldn't even train. | ||
| Like I would just show up and I just couldn't do anything. | ||
| And I got an endoscopy and that was fine. | ||
| And the doctors pretty much just like, you know, you're fine. | ||
| Here's some nausea medicine. | ||
| So he gave me Zofran. | ||
| And I never really thought much of it after that. | ||
| You know, I tried some probiotics. | ||
| Those didn't work. | ||
| I tried some yogurts and what everyone tells you to do. | ||
| Those didn't work. | ||
| Then I pretty much just accepted it because John used to teach privates to a guy who was regarded as one of the top three gastro doctors, either in America or in the world. | ||
| And he told him, like, once the food goes in your mouth and down your throat, we basically have no idea what's going on. | ||
| We just basically take our best guess and we do some trial on our medications. | ||
| So I'm like, I'm not going to waste my time at doctors. | ||
| Hopefully it just gets better. | ||
| So I basically just took the Zofran, the nausea medication, whenever I could, whenever it was unbearable, to get it back to manageable. | ||
| And then I just did it. | ||
| I just managed it like that. | ||
| But then recently, before the Roberto Jimenez match where I called the mounted armbar, It got so bad to where two days before I was going to fly to compete, like four days before the competition, I wasn't able to eat in like five days. | ||
| I could hardly eat anything. | ||
| I had to go to the hospital and get an IV because I just couldn't eat any food. | ||
| So I went to the hospital. | ||
| I got the IV. I competed in the match. | ||
| And then I'm just like, you know what? | ||
| I can't live like this. | ||
| I got to find something that I can do to manage this better. | ||
| So I went back to New York. | ||
| I found a doctor, a buddy of mine who actually cared about helping me and wasn't just like, yeah, you know, you're fine. | ||
| Push me through. | ||
| He was like, you know, we're going to find the cause of this. | ||
| So I started going to a few different doctors. | ||
| They did a few different tests for H. pylori and then they did the gastric emptying test. | ||
| And they were like, yeah, you have gastroparesis. | ||
| So now they're just like, you know, try these. | ||
| They have like some few medicines that they try, and you try one for a few weeks. | ||
| It doesn't work, you try the next one. | ||
| It doesn't work, you try the next one. | ||
| So I've been on this medicine now for like four weeks. | ||
| And it's helping a little bit, takes the edge off, but it could just be a coincidence because I could just be on that kind of up cycle that my stomach's doing okay right now, but in a few weeks it may be bad again. | ||
| So we'll see how it goes. | ||
| Has anyone recommended taking a break off of competing, like a month or so, where you just fast and try to eat at night and rebalance it? | ||
| I actually, I tried, well I didn't compete in like the whole first, almost the whole year of 2018 because I just couldn't even train Jiu Jitsu, I was just so terrible. | ||
| Now, I haven't tried fasting for a month, but I've tried fasting for a week where my stomach was so bad that I just couldn't eat. | ||
| And it doesn't seem to do much. | ||
| I feel less nauseous because my stomach's empty, but then the second I start to eat again, I just get nauseous again. | ||
| So, it's something that I've been dealing with the last three years that's incredibly infuriating, but you just do what you gotta do because nobody cares that your stomach's hurting. | ||
| And there's no, there's no, like, uh... | ||
| There's no cure to it. | ||
| They just have treatments that they use that if it works, great. | ||
| If it doesn't, then you're kind of fucked. | ||
| Have you researched people that have had your same situation that have gotten through it and now they can eat normally? | ||
| Yeah, so I've done some research and just went on some forums, and pretty much what everyone says is the same thing as me. | ||
| Like, I can't eat at restaurants. | ||
| I can't have anything fried or greasy. | ||
| I can't have any red meat. | ||
| All the fun stuff. | ||
| Yeah, all the stuff that you want to eat, I can't eat. | ||
| And then some people have some different... | ||
| Some different experiences with different medicines. | ||
| They have like three or four things that they try. | ||
| And some people say that, you know, this one worked and this one didn't, or that one worked and this one didn't. | ||
| And it basically varies person to person on what helps them. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| The hardest thing for me is just knowing that... | ||
| I believe that I would be better if I was heavier. | ||
| I don't necessarily think that I need to be 240, 250 pounds to beat the best guys, but my goal at this point isn't focused around beating the best guys. | ||
| If I was just concerned with how do I beat the next best guy, I would have had to have done half the work that I've done to get to the point to just be better than the number one guy in the world. | ||
| But my goal now is focused around how can I be the absolute best athlete that I can by the time I hit my prime. | ||
| And I just believe that being a 250-pound Gordon would be better than being a 220-pound Gordon. | ||
| And having to deal with the fact that I may never reach my full athletic potential because of the stomach problem is what's, like, the most frustrating for me. | ||
| And that the stomach problem was likely caused by antibiotics. | ||
| Yeah, that's when I first started having problems. | ||
| I just had recurring staph infections, and it was just oral antibiotics, oral antibiotics, every single time. | ||
| And ever since then, I've just been fucked up. | ||
| Yeah, I've had staph a couple of times, and when I took the antibiotics, I was amazed at how much they wreck your endurance. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Like, especially Bactrim. | ||
| I took Bactrim a few times, and then I never took it again after that. | ||
| But, like, you go to, like, Lyft... | ||
| Lift weights or do jiu-jitsu, your first set on your first exercise, you're 100% exhausted. | ||
| I'm like, okay, I have staff, I can't do jiu-jitsu, but at least I can lift weights. | ||
| And it's like, no, you can't. | ||
| You go into lift weights and you're about to have a heart attack after your first five reps. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy to think that all that is what's going on in your gut. | ||
| Yeah, the gut biome controls so much of the body and that the body really is some sort of weird ecosystem. | ||
| It's like if one thing is fucked up, it just throws everything off. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know you got into kombucha. | ||
| Did that help at all? | ||
| I did. | ||
| I tried kombucha for a little bit, and it seemed to help. | ||
| I actually, I had like two or three months where my stomach was okay. | ||
| It was like probably 80 to 90% better. | ||
| And I could eat food, and I actually went from like 220 to like, I got to like 240, 245. Like, if I can eat food, I get big quickly. | ||
| I just can't eat food. | ||
| But I tried it for a few months and it seemed to be okay. | ||
| And then it started to get bad again. | ||
| I think it was probably just a coincidence because when my stomach started to get better, it was when the pandemic hit and I wasn't traveling to compete. | ||
| I wasn't traveling to teach seminars or film instructionals. | ||
| So I was on a routine where I was eating clean food, like just chicken and rice, plain chicken and rice and eggs at home for like two months straight, and my stomach started to get okay. | ||
| What really messes me up is when I have to travel and eat like shitty foods that's not home cooked. | ||
| So I think that the kombucha helped, but it was just more of a coincidence that I was eating the food that I needed to be eating for a longer amount of time. | ||
| So do you still do the kombucha or do you stop? | ||
| No, I still drink the kombucha. | ||
| I feel like it helps me. | ||
| I feel like the main issue I have is that I get full fast, and I feel like the food's sitting right here, and I feel like I need to burp, but I can't to make room for more food. | ||
| So the kombucha or anything really carbonated helps me. | ||
| The bubbles help me digest it, and it helps me burp, and I can make room for more food. | ||
| Have you thought about traveling with someone who can cook for you wherever you go? | ||
| I could, but the problem is whenever I go to travel, I'm always put in hotels where I don't have kitchens. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| Like, if you want to, you know, get a kitchen in a hotel room, you have to get, like, some crazy suite that, like, costs a shit ton of money. | ||
| What about an Airbnb or something? | ||
| I could get Airbnbs. | ||
| That would make sense. | ||
| I have to maybe talk to Flo when they book my next hotel if they can Airbnb me something. | ||
| But that's the main thing is getting off the routine and eating shitty foods from IHOP or restaurants and stuff. | ||
| Because I feel like There's a lot of Airbnbs in most cities. | ||
| You can get a probably pretty decent house and bring everybody in there, and it might be better anyway because you could bring some portable mats, lay them out in the living room, and maybe go over positions and stuff in your actual house. | ||
| Everybody sleeps in the same house instead of being in a bunch of different hotel rooms, and you could cook. | ||
| Yeah, that might make a lot more sense. | ||
| Like, even, like, yesterday, I taught a seminar, and then I finished, I did an interview, and there was, like, only, like, one place open. | ||
| And I got, like, the healthiest thing I could, I got, like, eggs on toast. | ||
| And it shows up, and it's just, like, loaded with butter, and it's, like, soaking wet with grease. | ||
| And I'm like, if I don't eat this, I'm not gonna be able to go to sleep because I'm so hungry. | ||
| But if I eat it, I'm gonna be fucked up. | ||
| So I eat it, and you're okay. | ||
| You eat it a half hour later, you're fine. | ||
| I wake up this morning, I'm like, yep, my stomach's not happy. | ||
| So we get here, I'm super nauseous. | ||
| Halfway through the podcast, I'm still super nauseous. | ||
| And now it's just starting to wear off to where I'm normal again, and I can talk and not have to worry about it. | ||
| But you're probably hungry again. | ||
| I'm hungry again, and then when I eat, I get nauseous. | ||
| So it's just so frustrating. | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| So was it a series of trial and errors that led you to chicken and rice and... | ||
| Yeah, so what I would find is I would be on an up cycle, and my diet used to be like, first of all, I used to be able to eat an incredible amount of food, like five, six Big Macs at the same time. | ||
| I used to be able to eat more than most people. | ||
| But it used to be just terrible. | ||
| Like, I used to just eat fast foods all the time. | ||
| So I love, like, a nice McDonald's cheeseburger. | ||
| So my stomach would, like, start to get better, and I'm like, you know what? | ||
| I've been feeling good these last few weeks. | ||
| Let me try to have McDonald's. | ||
| And then I'd eat McDonald's, and I'd just be fucked up for, like, next week and a half. | ||
| And, you know, then I kind of realized that anything that's really hard to digest or really processed is not good for me. | ||
| And I would usually find that with eggs or with chicken and rice, things that digest easily, that's relatively easy for me to handle. | ||
| I still can never eat as much as I used to, so I have to eat just in smaller increments. | ||
| So I have like, you know, six ounces of chicken and rice here and then, you know, Two hours later, I have a little bit more. | ||
| And then two hours later, I have a little bit more. | ||
| Sometimes it's really bad. | ||
| I can't even finish a meal. | ||
| I have to eat a few spoonfuls. | ||
| And then 20 minutes later, I go to eat a few more. | ||
| And then 20 minutes later, I go to eat a few more. | ||
| And it takes me like three hours to eat a meal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| That's crazy. | ||
| What about salads? | ||
| Vegetables? | ||
| Vegetables are usually okay. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Vegetables, yeah. | ||
| They're not... | ||
| I usually just mix them up. | ||
| Or Nat cooks my food. | ||
| She usually just mixes them up and chops them up into little pieces with the chicken and rice. | ||
| And I kind of mix it in. | ||
| And it's usually not bad. | ||
| Have you tried hemp protein? | ||
| Have you ever done that? | ||
| I haven't, no. | ||
| That might be a good move because it's easy to digest. | ||
| I've found it the best for me in terms of drinkable protein shakes. | ||
| Hemp protein is the most digestible, real easy. | ||
| It's the one that doesn't give me gas. | ||
| I like whey protein, but every time I do, I feel sorry for anybody who's in the car with me. | ||
| So I'm going to light that thing on fire. | ||
| Your body just goes, what is this? | ||
| How did you get all this stuff in one fucking drink? | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's not in a normal form. | ||
| If you eat a piece of meat, or if you eat a piece of chicken, your body's going, oh, I know what this is. | ||
| You drink a thick-ass whey protein shake, your body's like, what is happening here? | ||
| Yeah, it's like you don't put enough water in it. | ||
| It's like mud. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| You put a little bit too much, and you're eating yogurt, basically. | ||
| Yeah, that's how I like it, too. | ||
| I like it thick. | ||
| But hemp, to me, is the easiest one of all those. | ||
| Pea protein's pretty good, too. | ||
| That's pretty easy to digest. | ||
| But hemp protein seems to be the one that gives me the least problems. | ||
| And it's one of the only ones that I could eat and then legitimately train an hour later. | ||
| Because a lot of times if I eat a good meal, I can pull it off an hour later, but I still feel it. | ||
| You're not happy about it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I still feel it moving around in there. | ||
| And I'm like, asshole, you should have waited. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And that's one of the biggest things for me, too. | ||
| It's like, it takes me so long to digest a meal. | ||
| So I have to try to eat every couple of hours, but you have two training sessions a day and a lifting session. | ||
| So you can't eat right before them because then you're nauseous and you haven't digested it, and it takes you longer to digest the food. | ||
| So you're trying to schedule your day around your nausea and what you can eat and build it into your training sessions. | ||
| Like, if I just had to eat food all day, it's easy. | ||
| But I can't eat a full meal. | ||
| Like, Nikki Rod could eat, like, two steaks. | ||
| And, like, two, like, 24-round steaks, and then next thing you know, five minutes later, he's, like, wrestling as hard as he can. | ||
| Like, I can't do that. | ||
| Like, if I have, like, a lollipop, and then I have to train five minutes later, I'm like, oh, I just can't do this. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So it's like trying to manage and trying to fit as many calories as I can into a day, and having to train three times a day is difficult. | ||
| What about fruit? | ||
| Fruit is usually okay. | ||
| I can do fruit. | ||
| I can do fruits and vegetables. | ||
| The main things I have to stay away from is red meat, steaks, cheeseburgers, anything greasy or fried. | ||
| Fried foods are the worst for me. | ||
| Anything fried just fucks me up. | ||
| So what do you eat pre-training? | ||
| Say if you're going to train in an hour and a half. | ||
| So normally we train in the morning, so I'll wake up and I'll have a light breakfast, like three or four eggs and like two pieces of toast. | ||
| That's usually just plain scrambled eggs and toast. | ||
| And then between the MMA and the jiu-jitsu, I'll have like maybe a protein shake and like a granola bar or something, or I'll have like a little thing of chicken and rice, something that's easy to digest. | ||
| And then that holds me over and then I focus on most of my eating after the jujitsu session where I have the rest of the night to eat and I try to stuff my face from then until I go to sleep. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I'm hoping, this is my hope, that someone's going to listen to this that has a solution and there's someone out there that you haven't been in contact with and they're going to reach out to you and they go, I think I'm going to fix this. | ||
| Yeah, I've been posting and stuff on my Instagram and people have been helping, but obviously this is a much larger platform. | ||
| The medicine that I have now, it's like four weeks in and seems to be taking the edge off a little bit. | ||
| Whenever I eat terrible foods, it still just, it fucks me up. | ||
| Does the medicine fuck with you at all? | ||
| Does it do anything bad? | ||
| No, it's actually a medicine that originally they tested as an antidepressant, like Viagra was supposed to be for blood pressure medicine, but then they just found that it was better for a dick pill. | ||
| So they used this. | ||
| They started testing it for antidepressants. | ||
| I still think they use it for antidepressants, but they also use it in cancer and AIDS patients who can't eat. | ||
| They're so nauseous. | ||
| They use it. | ||
| It's very good at decreasing nausea and increasing appetite. | ||
| So one of the side effects is you want to eat more and you gain weight. | ||
| What about weed? | ||
| Weed is actually an interesting thing. | ||
| Everyone says, smoke some weed and it'll relax you and you'll be able to eat more. | ||
| It's actually the exact opposite for me. | ||
| The second I start to get high, I just instantly get twice as nauseous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I don't know what it is. | ||
| But the second either I eat an edible or I try to smoke something, I haven't smoked in like three years because every time I would get high, I would just instantly be twice as nauseous. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| What a weird predicament. | ||
| Somebody, whoever you are out there, master of the gastrointestinal tract, reach out to Gordon Ryan. | ||
| Let's fix this. | ||
| I mean, it's frustrating, but at the end of the day, no one cares what problems you have, so you just work through it and manage it. | ||
| But it's definitely something that... | ||
| It's been three years now, and I'm just... | ||
| I'm managing it pretty well. | ||
| I can kind of eat my food around. | ||
| I can plan my meals and plan my day around it, but it's still something that you have to deal with every day, and it's annoying. | ||
| Well, it's just one more credit to you that you're able to reach these insane heights in competition while being so compromised. | ||
| I mean, everyone has their problems, but this is definitely something that day-to-day is very, very frustrating. | ||
| So you're on the same training regimen as Gary then. | ||
| So you're doing MMA training in the morning, and then you're doing Jiu-Jitsu right afterwards. | ||
| Yeah, and then I lift weights at night. | ||
| So, this thing with One FC, do they have you set up for grappling matches? | ||
| So, the way my contract works is I'm exclusive for MMA and non-exclusive for grappling. | ||
| So, if I want to fight MMA, I can't fight in any other organization. | ||
| Now, I'm not obligated to fight MMA in my contract. | ||
| My contract is just for grappling matches. | ||
| But if I choose to fight MMA, it has to be with One. | ||
| But I'm not obligated to go out and do any MMA fights. | ||
| So right now my plan is, my focus is the ADCC Superfight 2022, and that I want to use the 1FC deal to rebrand myself as a fence wrestler. | ||
| Right now I'm the best open mat grappler, but I want to be able to put experienced MMA guys on the fence, put them down and finish them on the fence. | ||
| Now, 1FC, with its resources, if they had exclusive grappling matches, maybe they could find you competition. | ||
| Yeah, so I think what they want to do, because they have... | ||
| They don't just have MMA. They have every martial art where they have the belts in each martial art. | ||
| But I think what their ultimate goal is, is they want to make a jiu-jitsu belt, and they want to have divisions for jiu-jitsu, like in MMA. Like, you win a title, you win a belt. | ||
| So, it's gonna be interesting to see what their approach is going to be, because What I think they thought was going to happen was, you know, oh, we'll just sign him and we'll get him to fight guys like Boucher or guys like Andre Govao or, you know, these top-level jiu-jitsu guys. | ||
| But then I think that what they're going to realize pretty soon is that it's going to be incredibly hard to get a jiu-jitsu guy to fight me and even harder to get a guy to fly to Singapore and, you know, fly across the world to compete against me. | ||
| Because the guys just won't compete against me in Jiu Jitsu. | ||
| And now it's on TV. Now they're doing it on TNT. Yeah. | ||
| Regular people in America are gonna get it as well. | ||
| Are gonna watch it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's gonna be interesting now because they're gonna start to realize that the Jiu Jitsu guys just won't fight me. | ||
| And then who else am I gonna compete against? | ||
| I'm gonna do a grappling match against an MMA fighter. | ||
| Especially in these Asian countries, most people are known for their striking. | ||
| Grappling isn't at the level in most of these Asian countries that it is in the US. So what are they going to do? | ||
| Put me against an Asian MMA fighter in a grappling match? | ||
| It's going to be tough to find someone who is really competitive in a grappling match in a cage with me for them because the Jutsu guys just won't do it. | ||
| Well, I know that some people have priced themselves out. | ||
| They've said, yeah, I'll have a fight with you, but I want a million dollars. | ||
| Yeah, that's Andre. | ||
| So the funny thing about that is I'm pretty sure there's an interview of Andre saying, I would fight my grandmother for $40,000. | ||
| And then he's just like, no, I won't fight Gordon for less than a million, which is amazing because every one of his ADCC fights prior to this, the ADCC purse is $10,000 to lose, $40,000 to win. | ||
| So it's like you're looking for a however many X increase to go from $40,000 to a million dollars. | ||
| It's not like $40,000 to $100,000. | ||
| It's like the whole ADCC event isn't even going to generate a million dollars in revenue. | ||
| How did this get started, this beef between the two of you guys? | ||
| Because for people who don't know, there was an event here a few weeks ago, and he came up to you, and what did he say to you? | ||
| So the whole thing originally started when I was petitioning for matches against the top-level guys in 2016 when I first got my black belt. | ||
| And, you know, I was like, I want to compete against Andre or something along those lines, and his wife was like, well, win the ADCC Absolute, and then you'll have your chance to compete against Andre. | ||
| So, you know, I go in, I lose the Absolute 2017 to Felipe Pena, and then I go out and I win double gold, and I win the Absolute in 2019. So now Andre had originally said that he was retiring after his fight with Felipe Pena for 2019 ADCC. But then I win the absolute, so it kind of sparked everyone's interest. | ||
| Everyone wants to see this match now. | ||
| So then... | ||
| I didn't talk shit to Andre. | ||
| I didn't do anything. | ||
| I was super nice after. | ||
| I was like, listen, if Andre wants to compete against me, I'd be more than happy to compete against him. | ||
| He's a legend. | ||
| He's done a lot for the sport. | ||
| But if Andre chooses to retire, like he said he was going to, then that's fine with me too. | ||
| He said he was going to retire, and it's not like he's ducking the match, and now he's just going to suddenly retire after he wins. | ||
| He said before the match, this is my last match, I'm retiring. | ||
| And then he kind of passive-aggressively would start posting videos of him winning ADCC with captions like, I'm the real king. | ||
| Just like passive-aggressively nudging me. | ||
| So I'm like, okay, we can start to do this. | ||
| So then we started going back and forth online. | ||
| There must have been a turning point where he started taking what I was saying personally. | ||
| I knew that in the beginning he knew it was just kind of to build the fight and to hype the fight. | ||
| But then I think it really started to get to him. | ||
| So... | ||
| After the last match where Craig submitted his student, Ronaldo, we went up to shake their hands in the corner after, and John shook Andre's hand, and I went to go shake their hands, and Ronaldo wouldn't shake my hand, and Andre flipped me off. | ||
| So I was like, okay, no, this is fine. | ||
| I just started laughing, and I walked it off. | ||
| And then we go backstage, and I go to walk to do an interview, and Andre's waiting for me, like, past the curtains in the backstage area. | ||
| And I don't think he realized the camera was there, but I saw the camera was there, and I was like, this is kind of... | ||
| Jamie, go find the video, because there's a video of this. | ||
| I was like, this is kind of out of character for Andre to be like talking shit to me when nobody's around. | ||
| Because nobody was there. | ||
| And it was just like one obscure camera way in the back. | ||
| And he started calling me a bitch and a pussy. | ||
| And I just laughed. | ||
| I was like, you know what? | ||
| This is what it is. | ||
| And I think what he was thinking was he was going to come up and punk me in person and be like, look, Gordon's a pussy. | ||
| He only talks shit online. | ||
| So he called me a bitch and a pussy. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Give me some volume. | ||
| Do it from the beginning. | ||
| Then he's like, why are you running? | ||
| Why are you running? | ||
| He's like, why are you running? | ||
| Why are you running? | ||
| And I turn around, he pushes me, and I was like, okay, well, we're going to fight. | ||
| Let's start it off with the smack. | ||
|
unidentified
|
- Yeah. | |
| - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - What, up right here. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. - What, up right here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| What, what? - What? - What? | ||
|
unidentified
|
- See something, please. | |
| Please. | ||
| - So you smack him in the face twice. | ||
| He pushed you. | ||
| He called you a pussy. | ||
| He pushed you. | ||
| You smacked him in the face twice. | ||
| And then it's weird. | ||
| He's kind of just following you. | ||
| Yeah, so I was going to do my interview. | ||
| So I was like, listen. | ||
| Look at this person who grabbed the camera. | ||
| She bolted over there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He looks like he's limping. | |
| You notice that? | ||
| I think he was just really shook from the smack. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| And the only person whose stock grew more than mine was John Manaherz. | ||
| This fucking guy just walked in like a stone-cold killer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at him. | |
| What? | ||
| What? | ||
| Keep walking toward me. | ||
| It's so confusing because now he's saying I want to talk to you like a man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why do you want to do that? | |
| Keep talking. | ||
| You always talk shit. | ||
| You should show respect after he called you a pussy and then you smacked him. | ||
| I think he was rattled, right? | ||
| He didn't expect you to just haul off and smack him in the face and then do it again. | ||
| I mean, reality hits quick. | ||
| If you walk up to someone, call them a pussy, and push them, that's pretty much as far as you can go before you get into a fight. | ||
| So I'm like, okay, there's gonna be a fight, let me start it off with a smack. | ||
| And then I hit him, And I realized that he wasn't retaliating, and I was like, okay, this guy doesn't want to fight. | ||
| So then I went to go walk away a second time, and he started following me, and I was like, okay, maybe he changed his mind and wants to fight again. | ||
| So I smacked him again, and he just backed up, and I was just like, okay, he clearly doesn't want to fight, so I'm just going to walk away, go do my interview, and then he kept walking towards me, and then he started to get more bold when everyone was around. | ||
| So I was like, well, we can fight right now. | ||
| It doesn't make a difference to me. | ||
| And then he just he clearly wasn't interested in fighting and I think what he thought was gonna happen because the Ottos guys are always like you know Gordon always always talk shit online, but then he's nice in person, which sure I am You know, but I'm not like a bitch like if you walk up to me and you start pushing me like we're gonna get into a fight like a You're talking shit online because it's part of your strategy for marketing yourself Yeah, I mean, I want to make money. | ||
| And it's fun. | ||
| Yeah, it's fun for me. | ||
| I want to get paid as much as I can. | ||
| I want the other guys to get paid as much as they can. | ||
| And what I do when I talk shit is I really don't even talk shit. | ||
| I just talk about facts. | ||
| I post things that are just... | ||
| They're just statistics. | ||
| Like, when I talk shit about Dylan and I say, like, hey, this guy's 18 and 16 as a black belt, like, that's not talking shit. | ||
| That's just saying how terrible his record is as a black belt. | ||
| Like, I just, people get upset because I talk about the numbers that I have and the numbers that these guys have, and nobody wants to hear that, and they just get upset about it. | ||
| So, you know, most of what I do, unless someone, like, attacks me personally, is just talking about, like, how everybody sucks and I'm the best. | ||
| You hit him with your right hand. | ||
| That's a hand that's been busted a bunch of times, too, right? | ||
| Yeah, so this one, I broke this one three times. | ||
| The most recent one was a week before ADCC. I had a crazy... | ||
| So this ADCC was like the worst for me because I'm seven months off the LCL surgery. | ||
| I had food poisoning the day before, so I was like all fucked up. | ||
| And a week before the tournament, I lived in New York, and I had Super 73s, the little electric bikes, and I used to ride those to training. | ||
| And it was like late September, so it was getting kind of cold, and I'm like, this is the last time I'm going to use these bikes before I put them away for the winter. | ||
| I was going to take them to the gym, back home, to the shop to get serviced, and then I was going to not use them. | ||
| That was the last day of the year I was going to use them. | ||
| Coincidentally, on the way there, Nat's bike gets a flat tire. | ||
| And I'm like, okay. | ||
| Let's take it to the bike shop. | ||
| So I'm carrying this thing, and my lower back is getting really sore. | ||
| So it's like four blocks away, I have to carry this bike to the shop. | ||
| So I'm like, fuck this. | ||
| I'm like, let me just put it on my shoulders. | ||
| So I pick the bike up by the handlebars and by the back railing, and I go to put it on my back. | ||
| And I didn't realize that it was still on. | ||
| So as I went to throw it on my back, my, like, arm hit the throttle. | ||
| And it sucked my hand in between the fender and the tire and just, like, spun it, like, 25 miles an hour on my hand. | ||
| And it just destroyed. | ||
| My hand was, like, swollen like a baseball mitt for the tournament. | ||
| And I tore some ligaments in my wrist. | ||
| I actually, you can still see it swollen. | ||
| And then I broke one of the bones and I tore a few ligaments. | ||
| I showed up, like, all bandaged for ADCC. And everyone's like, what the fuck happened? | ||
| I'm like, I don't want to talk about it. | ||
| It was a bike accident. | ||
| So that's what did it to your hand? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So you've broken it three times? | ||
| Three times. | ||
| Since then? | ||
| No, no, no, not since then. | ||
| Total. | ||
| So two times before that and then that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| So do you have full use of it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The only time I feel like it's not as strong as my left wrist is when I do workouts where I have like a barbell or any kind of bar and I have weight on it and I have to go do curls like this. | ||
| I feel like it's not as strong holding weight like this. | ||
| But grappling, it's fine. | ||
| Day-to-day, it's fine. | ||
| And it feels just as strong as I need it to be to do anything in jiu-jitsu. | ||
| But it must be hard to get gloves on. | ||
| Gloves and watches. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like to slide over the big scar tissue. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And what are the doctors saying about it? | ||
| It's fine now. | ||
| I got an x-ray. | ||
| Actually, I didn't even get it checked out before ADCC because I'm just going to show up and hope for the best. | ||
| But I got an x-ray and an MRI, and they're like, you know, it's fine. | ||
| It's all healed now. | ||
| It's just insane that you competed with a broken hand. | ||
| I mean, the worst part was I hurt it, and I didn't really train until ADCC. So it was kind of resting. | ||
| But then I had to compete at ADCC. I had eight matches. | ||
| And then a week after that, I had to compete against Paul Harris. | ||
| So I got fucked up from competing at ADCC and I had to try to compete against Paul Harris the week after that. | ||
| And then after that, it got like really bad and I took like a few months off and it healed. | ||
| Other than that and the LCL, have you had any other like significant injuries from Jiu Jitsu? | ||
| Just small things. | ||
| I've always had some neck problems. | ||
| If my neck gets snapped hard in the wrong way, it gets sore for a few days or a few weeks, depending on how bad it is. | ||
| You ever use an iron neck? | ||
| I haven't used an iron neck. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I haven't. | ||
| Oh my god, I'm getting one for you. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Right away. | ||
| Those and saunas, I'll definitely look into. | ||
| I just gave one to Gabe Tuttle from Tenth Planet. | ||
| I fucking love that goddamn thing. | ||
| For grappling, there's no better exercise for your neck. | ||
| You've seen it, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'll definitely try that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's okay. | |
| Most of the time it hurts. | ||
| It hurts to some degree, pretty much just walking around day to day. | ||
| You want to see Braulio esteem his neck? | ||
| This is what I want to avoid with you, and this is what I sent to Gabe as well. | ||
| Because he broke his neck. | ||
| Braulio has two fake discs in his neck. | ||
| And Aljamain Sterling now has a fake disc in his neck, and Chris Weidman has a fake disc in his neck, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I believe Rick Story has a couple of them as well. | ||
| So he had... | ||
| Braulio's had two discs replaced. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not quite that bad yet, but it's definitely... | ||
| It's getting there. | ||
| Fucking number one thing for grapplers is the neck and the back. | ||
| It's like those are the ones that when you fuck them up, you can't really fix them the way they can fix like an LCL. And it's not even, most of the time it's wrestling. | ||
| It's like when I'm wrestling and guys are heavy on the head, that's what fatigues it. | ||
| And other than that, I just had a grade 2 MCL tear when I was like 16. But I've been pretty lucky as far as catastrophic injuries go. | ||
| Just the one LCL was the big one. | ||
| What was that weird match that you had with Pat Downey? | ||
| So I had a... | ||
| You had like a dual match. | ||
| Like one jiu-jitsu... | ||
| So what I proposed was to do an ADCC rule style takedown match. | ||
| Because an ADCC style rules takedown match is... | ||
| Wrestling, but it's not wrestling in a traditional sense. | ||
| There's submissions involved, and the scoring for ADCC, in order to score points by either taking someone down or taking their back, is completely different than any kind of wrestling scoring. | ||
| So yes, he has the advantage in the standing position, he can take me down, but the scrimmage to the first point actually starts when you hit the ground. | ||
| So what I proposed was we do an ADCC takedown match where... | ||
| You have an advantage that you're a better wrestler, but I have an advantage that I know what the rules are, I know how to score under an ADCC. Explain to people ADCC's Abu Dhabi Combat Club, and the way they have it set up is for the first, how many minutes you don't score any points? | ||
| So for the regular matches, it's five and five. | ||
| It's five minutes no points, and then five minutes points. | ||
| And unfortunately, the idea behind that was they were going to encourage people to go after submissions. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But unfortunately, what happens is people stall for five minutes and then the last five minutes try to score points. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So... | ||
| In some cases. | ||
| In some cases, yes. | ||
| And then you have the finals matches, which are 10 minutes, no points, 10 minutes with points, and then two possible 10-minute overtimes. | ||
| So you have possible 40 minutes of wrestling. | ||
| In the finals of ADCC. So the pace is much different, the stances are much different, and the criteria for scoring is vastly different. | ||
| And he's like, no, I don't want to do that. | ||
| I just want to do one match, which is no time limit, submission only, jujitsu, and one match, which is a freestyle wrestling match. | ||
| And I'm like, well, we can do that, but, I mean, it's not going to be, like, exciting because you're clearly going to beat me in the wrestling match, and I'm clearly going to beat you in jujitsu match. | ||
| So I was like, how can I make this more exciting? | ||
| So my goal was to... | ||
| explain who pat downy is so so pat downy is an olympic level guy from the usa he's a wrestler um and he's just like he's just a guy from the usa who he just competed at the olympic trials he lost but he's like a legitimate guy who's beaten legitimate guys and he's won and he's he's operating at a high level in wrestling um and he wants to start fighting mma and he wants to start you know dabbling in jiu-jitsu but um he's known for his wrestling and he's primarily a wrestler. | ||
| So he's like, I want to do one wrestling match and one jiu-jitsu match. | ||
| And I'm like, okay, we can do that. | ||
| So I didn't want to just go out and submit him because that wouldn't prove anything. | ||
| What I wanted to prove was that under an ADCC rule set, I would be able to out—what we call it is scrimmage wrestling, where you scrimmage for the first point. | ||
| Whoever gets the first point or submission wins. | ||
| What I wanted to prove was that he wouldn't be able to score on me under an ADCC rule set, and that I would eventually tire him out, and I would be able to score on him and take him down multiple times. | ||
| And we just got to the tipping point of when he was starting to get exhausted somewhere about 20 minutes in, and I took him down twice, and then I locked in a power half Nelson, which isn't a submission. | ||
| It's very common in wrestling. | ||
| And he tapped to the power half. | ||
| And I just fucking lost my mind because I was just on the cusp of starting to take him down and embarrass him and he just basically gave up and quit in the middle of the match. | ||
| So I was just furious about that because I went out to prove something and I wasn't able to because he just stopped in the middle of the match. | ||
| And then we did a freestyle wrestling match and he teched me. | ||
| He rolled me through a bunch of times and he teched me in like 20 seconds because... | ||
| And tech means 11 points in a row. | ||
| Yeah, he scored 11 points in like 20 seconds because he got behind me, took me down, and then I didn't belly out. | ||
| I was just trying to do what I would do in jiu-jitsu, just get on top. | ||
| So he's just rolling me through, rolling me through, rolling me through, and I'm like, oh, he's scoring this whole time, and then before you know it, the match is over. | ||
| So we did one freestyle match and one jiu-jitsu submission-only match, and obviously he won the wrestling and I won the jiu-jitsu match, but I didn't win the jiu-jitsu match how I wanted to. | ||
| I wanted to take him down a bunch of times and then submit him. | ||
| Yeah, I watched that. | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| What would have made more sense is a rule set like I had with Bo Nickel, where it was you could do jiu-jitsu, but you weren't allowed to pull guard. | ||
| So I had to wrestle him until one of us got a takedown, and I wasn't allowed to sit to guard, and I wasn't allowed to do leg locks. | ||
| So you've got a little bit of jiu-jitsu, you've got a little bit of wrestling, where he has the advantage standing, and I have the advantage on the ground. | ||
| Yeah, that is definitely more interesting. | ||
| Maybe with something like 1FC having you over there, they could entice some elite grapplers in other disciplines like wrestling or maybe judo or something like that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's definitely an option. | ||
| And I think that wrestlers are always out to prove that wrestling is the best. | ||
| But I do think there's something to be said for competing under an ADCC rules. | ||
| Because if you think about it, if you're ultimately looking to transition to MMA... The scoring criteria for ADCC is the most like grappling in MMA. If you take someone down in a normal jiu-jitsu match, there's pretty much an unspoken rule where the bottom guy plays guard and the top guy tries to pass. | ||
| But in MMA, if a guy gets taken down, what does he try to do? | ||
| He tries to stand up. | ||
| So then your whole thing is you have to hold him down to actually score the takedown. | ||
| Or if he turns his back, you have to take his back. | ||
| It's the same thing in ADCC. You have to get held down for three seconds. | ||
| So what everyone does in ADCC is they don't just sit and accept the takedown. | ||
| They try to pop back up to their feet. | ||
| So it's very like MMA. There's just not punches, but there's submissions. | ||
| And guys are trying to heist up and get away from you. | ||
| You have to be able to hold them down or take their back. | ||
| So, I mean, if you're looking to prepare for an MMA career, scrimmage wrestling under ADCC rules makes a lot of sense because it's very similar to what you do in MMA. And there are a lot of guys that are considering transitioning from wrestling into MMA because it's really one of the only viable professional outlets. | ||
| Like, I know Flow Grappling has put on some professional matches for grapplers, and I know Jordan Burrows is making a living just doing grappling competitions, but it's not like MMA. It's not as prevalent. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's very different. | ||
| Like, in freestyle wrestling, if you Granby and expose your back, you get scored on. | ||
| Like, in MMA, you can Granby, you can do all these things, you can do submissions. | ||
| So, you know, wrestling under an ADCC rule set, like, to have a wrestler who practices that kind of MMA wrestling, it's much different than just a traditional, you know, freestyle or collegiate wrestling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What about gi competition? | ||
| I know that you were doing something the other day where you were talking about a gi sponsorship, and you were asking if somebody was willing to do something with you. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Are you thinking about competing in the gi? | ||
| I'm not going to compete in the gi, but I'm going to teach in the gi, and I just basically wanted a sponsor to... | ||
| To sponsor me to wear their gis during what I'm teaching. | ||
| For me, I'm not opposed to competing in the gi, but the thing about the gi is it's just not as fun for me to train in the gi as it is to train no gi. | ||
| I find it's much more enjoyable for me to train no gi than it is in the gi. | ||
| I feel like if I don't enjoy doing it, why am I going to do it in the first place? | ||
| I'm already so good, no Gi. | ||
| I feel like I'm the best in the world, debatably the best ever. | ||
| Why would I take time away from that legacy to pursue something that I'm not even really particularly interested in? | ||
| And honestly, that's dying in America. | ||
| In the next 10 years, the Gi is pretty much going to be phased out as far as competitions in America. | ||
| It's going to be like a novelty where They have some competitions here and there, but Nogi, as far as numbers support, Nogi is the way of the future as far as professional grappling goes. | ||
| Well, it translates to MMA. Everybody understands the grappling in MMA. The same grappling applies to jujitsu with no gi. | ||
| And you see people with the gi and they're doing all this crazy shit where they're pulling the collar around the back of the head. | ||
| Nobody understands that. | ||
| And matches end up boring where people just have grips, nobody moves, and the scoring is strange. | ||
| It's hard to watch. | ||
| Even as a fan of jujitsu, it's hard to watch some of the matches. | ||
| But it is, even Jean-Jacques said that to me. | ||
| It was like, you know, done it forever. | ||
| He's like, these guys, you know, like a lot of them, that's what they do. | ||
| They play that kind of game where they stall out. | ||
| But that might be a place where you can get competition. | ||
| Oh, if I competed in the Gi, I would definitely have a lot of competition. | ||
| But that's the argument nobody understands is, everyone's like, oh, he can never be the best, you know, unless he competes in the Gi. | ||
| Well, that's not what I'm trying to do. | ||
| I'm not trying to be the greatest of all—Hodger's the greatest of all time. | ||
| I'm trying to be the best no-gi submission grappler of all time. | ||
| I'm not interested in doing both. | ||
| And everyone's like, well, the only reason why you're good at no-gi is because you train all the time no-gi. | ||
| And I'm like, yeah, that's the point. | ||
| That's the point of specializing in one domain so you can be better than the rest of the guys who don't do that. | ||
| It's a pretty fucking dumb argument against you. | ||
| And the best is, the argument now is, you are only good no-gi because you spend all of your time training no-gi. | ||
| But what did everyone tell us coming through the ranks? | ||
| If you want to be good at no-gi, you have to train the gi. | ||
| Where did that argument go? | ||
| That argument's gone. | ||
| If you want to be good at wrestling... | ||
| You don't train Judo. | ||
| If you want to be good at Judo, you don't train wrestling. | ||
| If you want to be good at Nogi, train Nogi Jiu Jitsu. | ||
| And so specializing in Nogi Jiu Jitsu, yes, of course, I'm going to be better than the rest of the guys because I specialize in this. | ||
| That's the whole point. | ||
| That's why I'm doing it. | ||
| Yeah, Eddie Bravo was always like, I'm furious with that argument that if you want to be better at no gi, you have to train the gi. | ||
| He's like, that doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Like, they're saying this because they're good at the gi. | ||
| He was like, they're only saying this because they're good at the gi and they don't want to give up the gi because they give up the gi. | ||
| They lose, whatever, 40% of their game. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if you look at like the old ADCCs, it was basically just an unspoken rule where it was dominated primarily by Brazilians. | ||
| They would train the gi, they would show up, and they would take off their gi, and they would just hope for the best. | ||
| But then you have a guy like Dean Lister who comes in who's a specialist, who only really trains no gi, who comes in and starts heel hooking people, and you're like, oh shit, this is different than what we're doing. | ||
| We have to either adapt or we're going to lose. | ||
| And, I mean, people have done a pretty poor job overall at adapting, to be honest. | ||
| That's one of the other things I was going to get to. | ||
| Has any other team sort of looked at the system that you guys have put together and adopted something similar or quasi-similar? | ||
| I mean, you have... | ||
| You have some guys who try to emulate what we do with leg locks. | ||
| You have some guys who try to emulate what we do with back attacks. | ||
| But it's a very rudimentary version of what we're doing. | ||
| They copy just a general outline of what we're trying to do. | ||
| Like I talked about before, it's nothing specific. | ||
| Everyone just looks at... | ||
| Okay, these guys are doing leg locks and they're great at attacking the back. | ||
| Or they're great at body lock guard passing. | ||
| So they start to play around with it. | ||
| But they don't see the nuances that make the difference between hitting on the best guys in the world and having it completely fail on the best guys in the world. | ||
| They just look at the general outline and they try to copy it the best they can and they fiddle around with the position and they hope for the best. | ||
| But no one's really even doing a good job of not even just copying us, but No one at all is going beyond what we're doing. | ||
| Like what John does, he looks at the best guys in the world and he says, okay, this is a great move. | ||
| How can I make it better and how can I go beyond what they're doing? | ||
| What everyone's just trying to do is just a shitty version of what we're doing. | ||
| They're not trying to look at us and be like, okay, this is good what they're doing, but how can I make it even better than what we're doing? | ||
| But Craig Jones was the only guy that before he was training with you guys was looking at what you were doing and figured out a way to successfully emulate a lot of it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, Craig was very successful before he started training with us. | ||
| I remember Craig may be one of the dumbest people I know because he lived in beautiful, sunny and beachy Australia, and he moved to this shithole that is New York to just take a train or a car through the Lincoln Tunnel every day. | ||
| And he would come to that basement and train with us. | ||
| And when he first got here, we'd do a lot of positional rounds. | ||
| So he wasn't used to doing that. | ||
| So he just moved to this miserable city to just get beat up every single day by all the guys in the room. | ||
| And I'm like, Craig, I'm like, why... | ||
| Would you make a move to New York? | ||
| Like, why would anyone move to New York City? | ||
| And he's like, he's like, I just want to get better at jujitsu. | ||
| I'm like, okay, got to respect that. | ||
| And now he's far better than he was. | ||
| But he was already doing some of the stuff that we were doing before he started training with us. | ||
| And then he came to train with us and he just instantly picked up all the other things that we were doing. | ||
| So he was one of the smarter guys who, you know, he fully, he's like, these guys are doing something different. | ||
| I want to fully envelop myself in what they're doing and I want to be a part of that. | ||
| And he's had a lot more success than, he's had a lot more success now than he did when he was, when he wasn't with us. | ||
| Have you always hated New York City? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| So I'm originally from central Jersey. | ||
| I grew up in Monroe Township. | ||
| And then my parents got divorced. | ||
| And I was driving an hour and a half, like a thousand miles a week, to get to the city with Gary. | ||
| A thousand miles a week? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was far. | ||
| And... | ||
| So my parents got divorced, and then the house got sold, so I'm like, let me move to New York. | ||
| So I was like, kinda, I was against it at first, but, you know, I got convinced to move to New York, and I was like, let me give it a try. | ||
| So I was in New York for two years, and I just absolutely, I hated it. | ||
| I just could not stand the city. | ||
| And, you know, for me, you pay all the New York City prices, but you don't get to enjoy any of what New York is. | ||
| I never got to go to sightsee. | ||
| I never went out partying or to the clubs. | ||
| New York is famous for the nightlife. | ||
| I get to wake up at 6am and go to training the next day. | ||
| I'm not going out and partying. | ||
| So I'm paying all the New York City taxes. | ||
| I'm paying all the New York City prices. | ||
| I'm dealing with all the crazy homeless people on the subway. | ||
| I'm not getting to enjoy any of the good parts of New York. | ||
| So I hated New York from day one. | ||
| And then I actually ended up moving back to North Caldwell, New Jersey. | ||
| I bought a house in New Jersey. | ||
| And that was when I was convinced that John was never going to leave New York. | ||
| So I was like, let me just buy a house. | ||
| I'll be here for the next 10 years of my career. | ||
| And then like eight months later, he's like, all right, we're moving out of New York. | ||
| And I'm like, great, let me just put my house up for sale that I just bought. | ||
| So, New York was... | ||
| I've never jived with New York. | ||
| It's something that's okay to visit here and there, but I never liked the big city. | ||
| I never liked that everyone was always so pissy and aggressive. | ||
| I never liked being verbally and physically attacked by homeless people on subways, which I think is pretty normal for anyone to not want to be... | ||
| 50% tax and not, you know, not go out of your house and have a homeless guy shitting on your sidewalk. | ||
| I think it's a pretty normal thing to request. | ||
| I think it's reasonable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so John, his response was to the way New York City was treating the pandemic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, so, I mean, you basically have a city that comes out and they're like... | ||
| You guys cannot train. | ||
| Like, it was crazy when the lockdown first happened because, you know, we were still training, and we would drive into New York City, and there was just nobody there. | ||
| Like, to drive into New York City and just see zero people, besides the homeless people, on the streets was just, like, it was, like, almost surreal. | ||
| Like, you walk into Times Square, and there's just nobody there. | ||
| Like, it was like a ghost town in New York. | ||
| Everyone was afraid to leave their houses. | ||
| And we were like, yeah, we're just going to keep training because what else are we going to do? | ||
| So they're like, you guys can't train. | ||
| You've got to shut down the gym. | ||
| And by the way, we're raising taxes and everything's going to cost more money because now we need to make up for the lost money that we have in taxes because... | ||
| We shut down all the businesses. | ||
| So it was just like every business was getting shut down. | ||
| They kept making more and more rules. | ||
| They kept raising prices on everything. | ||
| And it's like, why am I going to stay here if I can't even legally go to train jujitsu and I'm just paying all these absurd prices for no reason? | ||
| It just doesn't make sense. | ||
| And so John came up with the idea to move to Puerto Rico? | ||
| Like whose idea was it? | ||
| No, I came up with the idea to move to Puerto Rico because... | ||
| So the biggest thing for us was that we weren't sure how COVID was going to affect opening up a school. | ||
| So originally what we planned was to move to Puerto Rico as kind of a semi-permanent location because we had a friend in Puerto Rico who had a private mat space like in his house that we could train at if we needed to. | ||
| So we were afraid of—we were looking at Puerto Rico, Texas, Florida, but we were afraid to move to Texas because there were so many uncertainties at the time. | ||
| We didn't want to move to Texas, spend $200,000 opening up a school, and then having the government be like, you guys can't run this school, shut it down. | ||
| And then we're like, well, what the fuck do we do? | ||
| So we kind of use Puerto Rico as an intermediary step where we move there and worst case scenario, we would still have a place to train and mats to train on at a friend's place so that the competition guys could train and get ready for competition if they needed to. | ||
| And now we're working on opening up a school there and it's a little bit more permanent for now. | ||
| And so where are you guys training now? | ||
| When I see you training, it looks like you're in a gym. | ||
| Yeah, so we're in Combat 360, a buddy of ours, Juan, that we know through one of our mutual friends. | ||
| He has a school down there in Guayanabo, and we're currently training in his gym. | ||
| The problem is it's pretty much only big enough for just the competitors. | ||
| So everyone's asking, oh, when can we come train, when can we come train? | ||
| Well, whenever we get the school opened is when you guys can come train. | ||
| Because right now it's a relatively small mat space and you put 15 people on the mat and it's crowded. | ||
| So right now we're just working on a friend's gym. | ||
| We're working on opening up a gym for us and then once the gym gets open it'll be a lot a lot easier. | ||
| What led you to Puerto Rico versus New York or versus rather Texas or Florida? | ||
| For us, it was just originally the COVID restrictions. | ||
| Like I said, there were so many uncertainties as far as moving, like, you know, was Biden going to win or not? | ||
| If he got into office, what was he going to do with the COVID restrictions? | ||
| And we didn't want to move to Texas where... | ||
| And have them shut everything down. | ||
| But Florida was pretty open at the time, right? | ||
| Yeah, Florida was starting to open, but I think it was still closed at the time. | ||
| They still had masks going on, and we didn't know if Biden got elected, would governors listen to whatever he was trying to make them do. | ||
| So we didn't really know. | ||
| We didn't have any close friends in Texas or Florida that had a private space for us to train, provided a school wasn't going to be an option. | ||
| But in Puerto Rico, we had friends there that just said, okay, we can lay mats down in my house, my garage, or wherever the case is, and we have enough mat space for 20 people to train on if we need, if a school isn't an option anywhere in the country. | ||
| So the fact that we had a surefire place to train, even if gyms were getting shut down, was the reason why we moved there. | ||
| So how many months went by before a competition was held? | ||
| So everything shut down in March. | ||
| When did you guys start competing again? | ||
| I think it was probably... | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I think it was probably five months. | ||
| I mean, they were talking about doing it, and... | ||
| They couldn't find venues to allow anyone to... | ||
| Even with no crowd. | ||
| To put 50 people in a room, you have all the production team and the referees and the athletes in the corners. | ||
| It was hard for them to find a venue to allow them to do that. | ||
| And then the first events that started popping back up, I'm pretty sure, were the Flow Grappling events. | ||
| And the Who's No. | ||
| 1 came. | ||
| And then I think it's like somewhere... | ||
| Five or six months into the lockdown, they started doing no spectator shows, and then it kind of just kicked off from there. | ||
| And where do you anticipate, like, so the regulations, the way they have it set up in Puerto Rico, you can kind of do whatever you want, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They're still kind of... | ||
| I mean, we have our buddy who we train with is very good. | ||
| He teaches all the police. | ||
| He's like the instructor for the police there. | ||
| So they kind of leave him alone. | ||
| But they're sticklers for masks. | ||
| You need to have masks everywhere. | ||
| They actually have a law where you need to wear masks outside. | ||
| And if you don't have a mask outside, you can get fined $5,000. | ||
| What? | ||
| $10,000 for the second offense. | ||
| You need to have masks on the beach, provided you're not swimming. | ||
| I mean, nobody listens to these rules and they're not enforced, but those are the actual rules that are in place right now. | ||
| So they're pretty bad as far as masks go, as far as what their actual rules are, but no one enforces them. | ||
| Everyone pretty much does what they want. | ||
| You still have to wear masks inside all buildings and stuff, but other than that, it's not really that big of an issue. | ||
| What does it feel like living in Puerto Rico? | ||
| I mean, it's awesome. | ||
| It's definitely a huge change of pace. | ||
| If you go anywhere in the country and you're coming from New York, everything seems slow. | ||
| But going to an island, going to Puerto Rico, it's like 10 times worse. | ||
| You feel like it's almost a joke. | ||
| Everyone just moves so slowly there. | ||
| Everyone shows up late. | ||
| You've got to get used to it. | ||
| If you don't accept that this is the way that things work, you're just going to drive yourself crazy coming from a place like New York. | ||
| Yeah, I was talking to Craig about when he bought a car and the brakes didn't work. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So we've had like four people buy cars from there, and they've all just fallen apart in the first three days. | ||
| So if there's one thing I can recommend to anyone, if you're moving to Puerto Rico, buy a car new or have it shipped in from the mainland. | ||
| Don't buy it from one of the locals there. | ||
| And do what you did and get something that's Japanese. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I bought that little Miata, and I shipped my truck, my Tacoma there, so I've had no problems yet so far. | ||
| Well, that's the thing is those cars are pretty bulletproof. | ||
| Yeah, so I have like this little Miata that's a convertible with a six-speed in it, and I just like beat the shit out of it. | ||
| I mean, I only have a thousand miles on it, but it's going to be rock solid. | ||
| Those are the most underrated little sports cars in the world because they're so small and they're so fun to drive. | ||
| They're so light. | ||
| Yeah, everyone knocks on them, but until you drive one, you can't really talk shit about them. | ||
| They're by no means fast, but it feels like you're going fast no matter what speed you're going because it's so tiny. | ||
| It feels like a go-kart. | ||
| It has just enough power to where if you pop the clutch at 8,000 RPM, you can get the tires to break loose. | ||
| And it's perfectly balanced 50-50 with the weight in the back. | ||
| So if you pop the clutch and you get the tire spinning and you want to do a little drift, you can hold the drift easily without any experience because the car is giving you everything that it has as far as power go. | ||
| So you can't overshoot it and spin around. | ||
| It's like just impossible to do and it's perfectly balanced so you can like hold it in drifts You can do burnouts with it. | ||
| It's like the best fuck the best car ever reporter Have you ever seen the company that's called flying Miata? | ||
| I have yeah, they're ridiculous Yeah, what I wonder what those are like to drive because it's got upset the balance of the car a bit No, yeah, they put they have all kinds of crazy stuff They put Hellcat engines in the front of them like it just have like a 2000 2000 pound car at 700 horsepower Yeah. | ||
| The fucking engine must be so much heavier than the... | ||
| What is it? | ||
| A four-cylinder in the Miata? | ||
| I think it's a four-cylinder. | ||
| I think it's a 2.5 liter. | ||
| 2 or 2.5 liter, I believe. | ||
| I'm not positive. | ||
| But it's got like 181 horsepower. | ||
| But it's actually pretty quick. | ||
| It's got like a 5.70 to 60. Really? | ||
| Yeah, and it actually is faster than that because you have to shift into third gear in order to actually hit 60. So if second gear carries you through 60 miles an hour, it would be like a mid-five, like a 5.4 or something like that. | ||
| But you have to shift into third to hit 60. So it's quick, but it's definitely not fast. | ||
| You're not going to get in the car and be like, oh my god, this car's fast. | ||
| But it's fun to drive. | ||
| The engine, though, in comparison to, like, I wonder what those flying Miatas are like to drive. | ||
| Because it's got to fuck with it a little bit. | ||
| It's got to make it like an old muscle car. | ||
| It's way heavier in the front, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it has to be, right? | ||
| Unless they do something to the rear, like, is there a way to do that where they could beef up the rear end? | ||
| I'm not sure, but I mean, if you drop a huge engine in the front of it, it's going to be heavier in the front. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, I mean, a Miata with 500 horsepower, 700 horsepower is a Miata with 700 horsepower. | ||
| It's just so ridiculous. | ||
| It's going to be fun no matter what. | ||
| Well, it seems like maybe a turbocharged 6, you could kind of get it closer. | ||
| Get away with it, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, whereas... | ||
| But people are, like, dropping huge V8s into them. | ||
| I would like to see what... | ||
| I want to see what that looks like, because they must do something to the tires as well, right? | ||
| Do they flare the wheel wells and put larger tires? | ||
| They put a lot of wide body kits on them. | ||
| They put, like, the extra fender. | ||
| They either bolt on or weld the fender so that you can get wider tires in the back. | ||
| A friend of mine had one of those Honda, what were they called? | ||
| The S2000s? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that was an interesting little car, too. | ||
| Super underrated. | ||
| That's what everyone told me to get and told me if I was a real man, I should have got an S2000 and not a Miata. | ||
| And I'm like, yeah, but does the S2000 have Apple CarPlay? | ||
| Oh, good call. | ||
| I'm like, the Miata is like... | ||
| It's just modern enough. | ||
| It has Apple CarPlay and has all the things that you need, but it still gives you this raw driving experience of an older 80s or 90s car where you feel like it's just you and the road and there's not much else to be distracted by. | ||
| A mechanical feeling. | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing. | ||
| It's hard to get a mechanical feeling with these newer cars. | ||
| One of my favorite cars that I have is a 2005 BMW M3. The old M3s are amazing. | ||
| It's not nearly the fastest car that I have, but it's so mechanical. | ||
| Everything about it, you feel everything. | ||
| When you're shifting the gears and you're driving it, you feel when the tires are about to break, you can really feel it. | ||
| There's nothing better for me than the old muscle car feel. | ||
| I have the CTS-V that I bought from my dad, the 2017 CTS-V, and just the fact that if you just stomp on the gas, you're not sure whether or not you're going to die. | ||
| Oh, Matt Farah has one. | ||
| Look at that fucking thing. | ||
| 520 horsepower in like a 2,000 pound car. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| That is so crazy. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Give me some juice on this. | ||
| Let's see what happens when he takes off. | ||
| Go from the beginning when he takes off. | ||
| God, listen to it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it's a crate engine that GM sells. | |
| We're not going to go on the super. | ||
| - Yo, I gotta see what that's like. - We're gonna go this way. - That's gonna be like me in three weeks. | ||
| - We're not gonna go on the super million, million mile an hour road. | ||
| He's a good guy to listen to because Matt really understands cars. | ||
| Sounds amazing. | ||
| Okay, so they adjusted a lot of shit with those cars. | ||
| And they overbuilt it, yeah. | ||
| So it's got a 520 horsepower LS3. Wow. | ||
| That's the goal. | ||
| This is fantastic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The shifter even feels nice. | |
| That's wild. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I wonder how much one of those costs to do that kind of a swap. | ||
| Right away, this feels like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, it's not crazy expensive, but it's not cheap. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, I mean, it's worth it. | ||
| I would imagine. | ||
| That seemed like me in three weeks. | ||
| Yeah, well, if it's 2,000 pounds, even if you add a couple of hundred, with that kind of power, that must be preposterous. | ||
| They make, like, supercharger and turbo kits that get it up to, like, 250, and you have, like, a sub-5, 0, 60. Like, it's... | ||
| They get pretty quick. | ||
| Yeah, well, I'm imagining that's probably quite a bit quicker than that. | ||
| Yeah, I was going to bring in a muscle car, but... | ||
| I know it's raining today. | ||
| Yeah, it's... | ||
| That's the one thing about this place versus California, is it rains all the time. | ||
| But it's also why it's so fucking pretty. | ||
| Everything's so green. | ||
| Like, when I go back to California, I'm like, what is wrong with you people? | ||
| Why are you all still here? | ||
| The TRX is a good replacement. | ||
| Ever since they announced that, I've been in love with that thing. | ||
| And I don't want to trade my truck because... | ||
| I just love driving manuals. | ||
| My truck's a six-speed. | ||
| But the TRX is definitely a truck that I... If I ever moved to a place like Texas, I'd definitely want one of those big trucks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a ridiculous car. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And when Hennessey takes it and makes it even more ridiculous, it's like... | ||
| Like, Dodge is amazing. | ||
| They're just putting Hellcat engines in everything. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| Like, they're like, let's put it in the Wrangler, let's put it in the Jeep, let's put it in the truck. | ||
| They haven't put it in a Wrangler yet, like a Jeep Wrangler. | ||
| No, but they put the SRT one in the Wrangler. | ||
| It's like 470, but there's some guys that'll do that. | ||
| They do Hellcat conversions for two-door Wranglers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, that's insane. | ||
| It is insane, but... | ||
| I just love the fact that people are doing that. | ||
| I'm like you. | ||
| I love all cars. | ||
| I'm a fan of cars. | ||
| I'm a giant fan of the old muscle cars. | ||
| I was talking about just the fact that the CTS-V, where if you get into a nice Mercedes or a BMW or an all-wheel drive Audi and you stomp on the gas, It's fun, but you know what's going to happen. | ||
| You're going straight line, it's going to be fast. | ||
| With a Cadillac, you hit the gas, and you're like, at any moment I could die. | ||
| That's what I like. | ||
| You have 700 horsepower rear-wheel drive, and it's like, this bomb's gone off behind you. | ||
| I have a Corsa exhaust on it, and the tires are spinning, the car's moving everywhere, and you're just like, wow, this is what I signed up for. | ||
| LAUGHTER It's just so funny that it's a Cadillac. | ||
| If anybody from the 1960s could see a Cadillac today, they'd be like, what the fuck happened? | ||
| Did you see the new CT5 Blackwing? | ||
| No. | ||
| So they're coming out with the new CT5 Blackwing, and it comes with 670 horsepower. | ||
| It's like GM's last shebang with a big supercharged V8, I think. | ||
| And it comes in a 10-speed auto or a 6-speed manual? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And a six-speed manual and a luxury American muscle car is fucking awesome. | ||
| How many doors is it? | ||
| It's a four-door. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You can get that in a manual. | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
| 2022. That will be their last shebang because they are going to move to electric. | ||
| Everything's moving to electric. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's definitely the future, but there's nothing like a fucking... | ||
| Look at that fucking thing. | ||
| Like an old V8. That is crazy that they're doing that in a manual. | ||
| I wonder how many they're going to sell. | ||
| Well, if they're going to sell any of them, they're going to sell them here in America. | ||
| The only other company that is hanging in there with manuals other than American cars is Porsche. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're the only ones. | ||
| Those motherfuckers are still going strong with manual transmissions. | ||
| 668 horsepower. | ||
| That's bonkers. | ||
| Top speed, over 200 miles an hour. | ||
| And you know the 10 speed is way faster, but a 6 speed is a 6 speed. | ||
| It's just more fun to drive. | ||
| It's way more enjoyable for me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Most of my cars are manual transmission. | ||
| It's just way more fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| People want convenience, but I always feel like those are people that don't truly appreciate cars. | ||
| Yeah, like you just want to get in a car and go to work point A to point B. Yeah, I get it. | ||
| You want a nice car, and you want to be able to do that in a nice car. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But when you're doing... | ||
| Yeah, like when you get in a car to drive it, it's different. | ||
| Yeah, you feel like you're on a fucking movie. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I'm a giant fan. | ||
| Have you taken your car to a track ever? | ||
| I haven't, no. | ||
| I haven't either. | ||
| One time I did back when I was doing Fear Factor, but not for a long time. | ||
| It's on my wish list. | ||
| I actually have a buddy in Puerto Rico who's gonna, you can rent a track for like 200 bucks a day or something in Puerto Rico, and when I get back, actually, like one of the first days I get back, I'm gonna take the Miata to a track, and I'm gonna try to see if I can fuck around a little bit there with it. | ||
| But it's definitely something that I want to do, I just have never done it. | ||
| What do you think you're gonna be doing when you're done with all this competing? | ||
| When I finish competing, I don't really know. | ||
| When I finish competing and when I finish my competitive career, I want to compete until I'm 35 to 40. That's what my goal is now, as long as my body and my stomach are okay. | ||
| But... | ||
| Maybe I'm going to be – I'm definitely going to have enough money where I don't need to have – need to open up a school to support myself, but maybe I'm just going to be bored and maybe I just want to run a school to help other people and just because I love jiu-jitsu so much, I just want to teach. | ||
| Or maybe I'm just going to be like, you know what, I've done jiu-jitsu for the last 20 years, fuck this. | ||
| I don't want to have anything to do with it. | ||
| And I just buy a house in the middle of the woods somewhere and not have to deal with anybody. | ||
| So it could go either way. | ||
| Right now, with the current series of events that's happening in America, I feel like I'm just going to want to buy a house in the middle of the woods in Montana that you can't get to unless you helicopter and not be surrounded by anybody. | ||
| But it's tough to say. | ||
| Don't you think you're going to get bored? | ||
| Yeah, I would. | ||
| But I think one of the things I also want to do when I retire, it's like on my bucket list, is I want to have like a rooftop tent on a truck, and I want to travel around teaching seminars to all 50 states and see which states I want to buy houses in, like see which states are the most enjoyable. | ||
| So that's one of the things I want to do when I retire. | ||
| That's not a bad move. | ||
| Yeah, the retirement thing, how much money can you make doing jujitsu right now? | ||
| How much money can I make or how much money can most people make? | ||
| Can you make? | ||
| A couple million dollars a year. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Is that what you're doing right now? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And is that seminars as well as... | ||
| It's mostly instructionals. | ||
| Most of my money... | ||
| Well, actually, most of my money comes from a series of investments that I have. | ||
| But as far as just jujitsu, most of the money I make comes from instructionals. | ||
| Probably... | ||
| Probably about 90% of my income in the sport of jiu-jitsu comes from instructionals. | ||
| Instructionals make far more than sponsors, competitions, and seminars all put together. | ||
| Really? | ||
| So your competitions, in a sense, are like an advertisement other than your career in defining your legacy. | ||
| They're an advertisement for your instructionals. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For example, I'm going to be releasing a series called Attacking from Top Pins with BJJ Fanatics. | ||
| That's my next instructional coming out. | ||
| So my last couple matches, I've hit attacks from top pins. | ||
| I hit the Kimura from a top half guard. | ||
| I hit the mounted armbar. | ||
| So I basically just use my matches now to market whatever instructional I'm going to be coming out with soon. | ||
| And these instructionals, here's the big question. | ||
| How come people aren't seeing these instructionals and then utilizing your system and then why don't we see like a bunch of clones of the Don of Her Death Squad out there? | ||
| You see them in the up-and-coming generations. | ||
| The guys who are already established are too arrogant to watch them. | ||
| And it's just like I talk about, like, most people get to a certain level, usually it's black belt, and then they coast with that level of technique and they don't really get any better. | ||
| So if you go to, like, ADCC Worlds, you see your typical 2010 Jiu-Jitsu. | ||
| If you go to ADCC Trials with all the up-and-coming guys, you see pretty much just a mimic of what our game is. | ||
| Everyone uses Ashigrami's into leg locks. | ||
| People are trapping arms from the back. | ||
| So you see a lot of the younger generation and the new school guys trying to do what we do, but the old school guys, the guys who I'm competing against currently, won't even bother. | ||
| They're too lazy to watch an 11-hour instructional on back attacks. | ||
| And they just were like, you know what, fuck this guy. | ||
| I'm gonna do the same shit I've been doing for the last, you know, 25 years. | ||
| How long do you think they can last doing that though? | ||
| It seems like with the new guys coming up, you do see these more complex games. | ||
| You do see these more diverse games. | ||
| Well, you see a general pattern in jiu-jitsu. | ||
| You see a guy get to a certain level, he wins a few competitions, or a few big competitions. | ||
| Then he coasts on the technique he has, and the only progression that he makes from the age of 25, where he wins his first ADCC, to the age of 35... | ||
| Everyone just takes more steroids so they just get bigger and stronger and they just coast in the same technique they have and then by the time they're 35 to 40 they peak physically and then after that they kind of degenerate and then that's the end of the career. | ||
| So I mean What we're focused on is rapid progression over a small amount of time. | ||
| Myself at 35, I won't even be competitive with myself now. | ||
| Whereas most guys, a 25-year-old competitor versus a 35-year-old competitor, they're relatively the same in technique, but the 35-year-old guy has just 10 more years of juice, and he's just a little bit bigger and stronger. | ||
| So he's going to win the match. | ||
| Yeah, that is a problem with jujitsu today. | ||
| Whatever drug testing they do is basically an intelligence test. | ||
| Yeah, and there's none. | ||
| I mean, if you look at actual jujitsu, In most competitions, there's not even a rule where you can't use steroids. | ||
| Like, it's legal. | ||
| And then if they do have testing, it's like the UFC. Like, the IBGGF tests for—they don't do random testing. | ||
| They do one test on the day of the event for every other division winner. | ||
| So they test one weight class, and then they skip one weight class, and they test another weight class. | ||
| And no one says you can't use steroids. | ||
| They just say you can't get caught using steroids. | ||
| It's a big difference. | ||
| Do I think that everyone who passed suicide tests are natural? | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| So the competition to do tests I used to think naively that USADA had basically cleaned up the sport. | ||
| And then I watched this video from this guy. | ||
| Derek's YouTube show is More Plates, More Dates. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know that guy? | ||
| Yeah, he did a thing on me. | ||
| Did he? | ||
| Yeah, he did a video. | ||
| Natty or Not, is that what it is? | ||
| What did he conclude? | ||
| Well, actually, he did a thing about me and Lachlan Giles because we were arguing about him being on steroids. | ||
| And I forget what he actually concluded because it was more about, it was like a natty or not, but it was also like talking about the argument between me and Lachlan and, you know, building, gaining mass in a sport where you're basically just doing cardio all day. | ||
| So it was like a natty or not, but it was mixed with some other arguments that I had with some guy online. | ||
| But his argument, well, his video about Paulo Costa and John Jones and all these guys that have either failed tests or had issues in the past was very enlightening because I didn't know how much wiggle room there was. | ||
| There's a lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, like, if you think about it, like, USADA has a certain amount of resources, and WADA has a certain amount of resources, but beating drug tests, like for the Olympics, is like a multi-billion dollar industry, and you have countries behind beating drug tests. | ||
| Like, your country wants to win the Olympics. | ||
| Like, you have the country of Germany, the country of the US, the country of Russia. | ||
| Dedicating scientists and billions of dollars to getting these guys to pass the drug test to win the Olympics. | ||
| The industry for beating drug tests has a lot more money going through it than the industry for drug testing itself. | ||
| Yeah, well, if you've seen the documentary Icarus, have you seen that? | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's a documentary that they basically got very lucky. | ||
| And the guy, Brian Fogel, who's the director of the documentary and he created it, he was going to do a bike race clean and then do it the next year juiced and document it and see how much of an effect it actually has on cycling. | ||
| So he does it clean, and then he hires this guy who's the head of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency. | ||
| Well, when he does that, it is right at the same time where they get busted for the Sochi Olympics. | ||
| So what they did with the Sochi Olympics is the Russian team had this really elaborate scam where they put a hole in the wall, and they were passing clean urine through and taking the dirty urine. | ||
| So they had all the urine stored in this one room. | ||
| And they had figured this out by doing a microanalysis of the glass that the urine was in. | ||
| They found scratches that indicated that they figured out a way to get past this very sophisticated locking mechanism that was previously thought to be impossible to open up. | ||
| And so these guys had done that, and they had swapped urine out, and then they got busted, and now this guy, Gregory Rechenkov, had to escape Russia in fucking the cover of night and come over to America. | ||
| They did this now. | ||
| He's under witness protection program right now. | ||
| They want to kill him. | ||
| They've targeted his family back in Russia. | ||
| They took all their funds away. | ||
| They took their house away. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And he went into detail about how... | ||
| The Russian athletes, all of them, across the board were juiced. | ||
| He said the only people that weren't juiced were the figure skaters, because they didn't find any benefit in juicing them, and with their fine motor skills deteriorated, and they also found that the females looked too manly. | ||
| It's always funny to see guys that are competing at like 35 years old that are like twice as jacked and twice as cut as they were when they were 25 years old. | ||
| Like that's not supposed to happen. | ||
| What about UL Romero? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's the freak of all freaks. | ||
| I mean, he's twice as big and twice as cut as he was when he was an Olympic-level athlete. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, it's insane. | ||
| And it's the same thing like Lance Armstrong. | ||
| If they wanted to give the prize to the next guy who wasn't doping, it was like a 76th person or something. | ||
| Something crazy. | ||
| It was way down the line that it didn't even make sense to give it to the next guy. | ||
| So it's really interesting how everyone thinks that if you can pass a USADA test that you're like 100% clean and I just don't believe that's the case at all. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yoel Romero just got pulled from his fight with Rumble Johnson. | ||
| I saw that. | ||
| They said that he failed some sort of pre-fight medical, but I wonder what that would be about. | ||
| Have they released that yet? | ||
| What do you think is going to happen? | ||
| Do you think that you're going to continue with John Donahue's plan and go into just jujitsu from now on and just dominate jujitsu? | ||
| Or do you think there'll be a time where you're going to be tempted enough to compete in MMA? If you had a guess. | ||
| It's too early to tell yet. | ||
| You know, I've always wanted to fight MMA. I think it's going to be a big deciding factor is going to be how 2022 ADCC goes. | ||
| You know, How big is the sport going to be after that event? | ||
| Who's going to win the absolute? | ||
| Where are they holding that? | ||
| Vegas. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Thomas and Mac. | ||
| No shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What month? | ||
| September. | ||
| Late September. | ||
| It's in the Thomas and Mac Arena. | ||
| They're gonna be huge. | ||
| They're getting... | ||
| I think they want to get billboards, like in the strip. | ||
| Real? | ||
| Like a whole ADCC poster on there. | ||
| It's gonna be a big event. | ||
| I would say I'm definitely gonna be there, but September's elk hunting season. | ||
| Okay, so... | ||
| September's tough to give up September. | ||
| You can make two days. | ||
| Ah, I don't know if I can. | ||
| 24th through 26th. | ||
| Oh, that's a terrible time of year. | ||
| That's when they're screaming. | ||
| That's when the elk are screaming. | ||
| What the fuck are you doing, ADCC, you non-elk-hunting motherfuckers? | ||
| It's always September. | ||
| Always late September. | ||
| Oh, that's literally prime elk hunting time. | ||
|
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Shit! | |
| So yeah, that's going to be a big one. | ||
| And there's a good chance, like my brother or Craig, there's a good chance that one of my teammates wins the absolute. | ||
| So what am I going to do? | ||
| Am I going to fight him? | ||
| Am I going to relinquish the title and move to MMA? Am I going to relinquish the super fight title and move back to the division and do the absolute? | ||
| It's kind of hard to tell. | ||
| Have you ever gotten to a situation like that where you had to compete against a teammate? | ||
| I had to compete against Gary Tonin at the last ABCC. That's right. | ||
| Everybody thinks that match was fake, but that was the most heartbreaking. | ||
| That's the thing that annoys me the most is everyone thinks it was fake, but it was 100% real, and it was the most heartbreaking thing I've ever had to do because Gary is one of my first coaches. | ||
| Gary was a black belt when I was a blue belt, and he was one of the first guys who really helped me move up through the ranks. | ||
| He introduced me to John, and he was a big part of my career, my early career, and even my career now. | ||
| And that was the first year that they allowed two people from the same team to be in the absolute. | ||
| But the way the ADCC does it is because there used to be so many fake fights in the semifinals or the finals that they make all the teammates fight second round now. | ||
| So you can't fake a fight and then go to the finals being fresh, or you can't fake a fight in the finals. | ||
| So they make all the teammates fight second round. | ||
| So I had to go out and compete against Gary second round. | ||
| And everyone thinks it was fake because it looks like he just gave me his back. | ||
| But Gary knew that his one chance of definitively beating me was to leg lock me. | ||
| So he tried to back step into my legs. | ||
| I knew it was coming. | ||
| And then I just exposed his back. | ||
| I took his back and I had his back like the first minute in and I ended up finishing him. | ||
| And everyone thinks it was fake, but I'm like... | ||
| I did this to everybody else in the tournament. | ||
| I submitted to everybody else up until this point. | ||
| Why did you guys think it was fake? | ||
| Well, they think it's fake because so many of them were doing it fake. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| Yeah, that's always been the case when jiu-jitsu teams meet up. | ||
| I mean, they would make agreements. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And now they have, like, what they do is they have, like, three-way agreements where, like, not even guys on different teams will make agreements to, you know, to beat one guy on the other side of the bracket they don't like. | ||
| Like, who has the best chance of beating a guy we don't like? | ||
| Or if it's this guy, then we'll do two fake matches and this guy will go to the finals. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Like, it's crazy, yeah. | ||
| So they'll do two fake matches so the guy's fresh when he faces that other guy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Ugh. | ||
|
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Why is... | |
| How did jujitsu fall short in this way? | ||
| Like, what is... | ||
| What went wrong? | ||
| It's so crazy because... | ||
| First of all, everyone talks about, you know, you need to... | ||
| You need to follow the roots of jujitsu and they talk about, you know, being humble and having respect. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| You know where Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu started from, right? | ||
| It started from, like, the Gracies, like, fucking going in and beating the shit out of karate instructors for fun and taking over their schools. | ||
| Like, what are you guys talking about? | ||
| Dojo storming. | ||
| Yeah, like, what are you guys talking about? | ||
|
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And, you know, it's just... | |
| It's a group of guys and a crowd of people fighting over peanuts. | ||
| So, every promoter, for the most part, in jiu-jitsu, every high-level athlete, for the most part, in jiu-jitsu, are just scumbags. | ||
| They're all fighting over a small amount of money, and they'll do anything they can to get that small amount of money. | ||
| So it's like you have 10,000 people fighting over $1,000, and everybody wants $1,000 to do whatever they can to get there. | ||
| So there's a lot of scumbaggery that happens, both in competitions and both in negotiations, on the mat, off the mat. | ||
| It's the complete opposite of what most people tell you Jiu-Jitsu is. | ||
| You have to be hardworking and be humble and respect and all this shit. | ||
| It's bullshit, most of it. | ||
| So it's just funny to watch coming up to the ranks and seeing all the crazy shit that happens when people are either competing or negotiating to do competitions. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| It is funny when you go back and look at the old school jiu-jitsu matches or just old school fights like when Hicks and Gracie fought Hugo Duarte on the beach, smacked him in the face and started the fight and then they're fighting on the sand. | ||
| And then the camera cuts out, next thing you know he's on top of them. | ||
| That was like a normal day for those guys. | ||
| And now I smack Andre after he assaults me and everyone's like, Andre should sue him. | ||
| How do we get from here to where we are now? | ||
| It's just insane. | ||
| There's a video of him pushing you first. | ||
| If you could go back in time and compete against any jiu-jitsu player, would it be Hickson? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, the best Gracie by far is Hodger. | ||
| And not even competing against him. | ||
| I've never trained with Hodger. | ||
| Hodger is by far the most accomplished Gracie as far as jiu-jitsu goes. | ||
| And I think that Hodger is also by far the best, technically, as far as not even just the Gracies, but just competitors in general. | ||
| Like, Hodger... | ||
| Hodger went out, and Hodger finished people. | ||
| Consistently went out, and he mauled people like I'm mauling people today. | ||
| He just went out. | ||
| You know he's going to cross-collar, strangle you from mount. | ||
| He goes out, he passes your guard, he mounts you, and he finishes you. | ||
| It looked like a guy who was just far ahead of his time competing against guys from that era. | ||
| Hodger is someone that I really respect, and I would really love to... | ||
| He's retired now, but I'd love to train with him one day at least. | ||
| Yeah, is he still training on a regular basis? | ||
| A lot of these guys, they get to in their later years, and their bodies are so fucked up, it's hard for them to actually train hard. | ||
| Yeah, most of the... | ||
| I don't know about Hodger, but most of the competitors, even active competitors, are just fighters. | ||
| Like, they just... | ||
| They do a camp. | ||
| Whereas, like, you know, if you're a real martial artist, like, you train full-time. | ||
| Like, most of the guys that compete at the highest levels... | ||
| Train less than some of the hobbyists I know. | ||
| They do four or six-week camps, then they do an ADCC, and they take two months where they just don't train at all. | ||
| Not training for two months is the most insane thing ever. | ||
| This is your job. | ||
| They don't treat it like a job. | ||
| They treat it like a hobby where they want to make money doing it, but they don't actually put in the work to be able to achieve the things that they want. | ||
| And maybe they win a tournament here, maybe they win an ADCC there, but in order to make money doing jiu-jitsu, there's a lot more to it than just going out and winning a few tournaments. | ||
| You have to market yourself well, you have to be present on social media, you have to be able to teach people, you have to speak well. | ||
| There's a lot more than just winning competitions. | ||
| I couldn't agree more. | ||
| And I think that your drive and your accomplishments and the excellence that you're pursuing, it doesn't just apply to jiu-jitsu. | ||
| I think there's a lot of people that don't even plan on doing jiu-jitsu that are going to get a lot out of this conversation. | ||
| Because I think to be a person like you, you have to be a person like you. | ||
| There's no half-stepping. | ||
| There's no part-time savages. | ||
| It's like all or nothing. | ||
| It's all or nothing. | ||
| And look what it's accomplished for you. | ||
| I mean, it's pretty extraordinary. | ||
| And you've also set a pace and a workload that it's so daunting, there's a lot of people that are not gonna even try. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's hard to keep up, and that's one of the things I pride myself on the most is that I work harder and I work smarter than all the rest of the guys, and it shows. | ||
| And I just feel like I'm at a level now where I'm getting better faster than I ever was, and I feel like the more time that goes on, it's just going to get worse and worse for everybody. | ||
| Why are you getting better faster? | ||
| Because the more you know about the sport, the more you can understand the mechanics and the biomechanics, the easier it is to go back and fix mistakes from day to day. | ||
| Like, when I was at Brown Belt, for example, if I had a problem from mount, I would either have to sit in the position and try to... | ||
| I'd figure it out. | ||
| I'd be there for 30 minutes or an hour trying to figure out what the best options are, or I would go to John and I would ask him the question. | ||
| But now I understand how everything works. | ||
| So if I run into an issue, I can just think about, okay, what are the rational ideas I can play with here that will get me to a solution that works? | ||
| So the more you know about jiu-jitsu, the easier it is to go back and kind of reverse engineer what issues you have, and you can solve problems by yourself. | ||
| So that you're an independent problem solver rather than someone who just has to go and ask somebody else a question and you get an answer from the guy. | ||
| So you can innovate stuff and you can create stuff on your own and you can go beyond, like John's whole thing is he wants to go beyond what he teaches us. | ||
| He doesn't want to create a bunch of robots who just try to copy what he says. | ||
| So he gives us an idea and then we run with that idea and we innovate on our own and we end up creating something completely different, completely new from what he was originally showing us. | ||
| Well, whatever you do, whether it's MMA or jujitsu, I'm gonna watch. | ||
| I appreciate you. | ||
| I love that there's people like you out there. | ||
| I think it's just cool as fuck. | ||
| I love people that are all in on anything. | ||
| It's hard to find authentic people nowadays. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's very hard. | ||
| And do you have a scheduled match coming up? | ||
| Yeah, so I actually have a match on this upcoming Who's Number One on Flow Grappling. | ||
| It's May 28th. | ||
| They haven't released the name yet, so I'm not going to release it here. | ||
| But I do have a match coming up, and then I have a match in July, which is verbally agreed upon against an ADCC champion. | ||
| So that should be fun. | ||
| So I have a few matches coming up. | ||
| They're trying to gather people to compete against me. | ||
| But I have a few things coming up, and I'm excited. | ||
| I hope the guys actually sign the contracts and show up and we can have a match. | ||
| But I've got a few things coming up, and then the big one's ADCC next year, obviously. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Well, I can't wait for all of them. | ||
| Thanks, brother. | ||
| I appreciate you very much, man. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks for coming in here. | ||
|
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All right. |
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