Gordon Ryan credits John Donoher’s hyper-focused leg-lock coaching and relentless submission training—starting late 2014—with his dominance, despite 10 years of jiu-jitsu. His ADCC-style takedown matches (like the proposed one with Pat Downey) and no-gi specialization outpace older fighters stuck on physical advantages, exposing jiu-jitsu’s steroid-testing loopholes. Gastroparesis and injuries (broken hand, LCL tear) force brutal discipline: 3 daily sessions, 6–8 hours of sleep, and minimal striking. Post-competition, he may retire by 40 to teach nationwide or buy Montana property, but his future hinges on outworking rivals while monetizing instructionals—like Attacking from Top Pins—over matches. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.