Kind: captions
Language: en
humans are fascinated by violence and
you've got to ask yourself why is it the
rash guard yes
and i talk so much shit that i'm like
man if i lose this is going to be rough
you're learning this shut the fuck up i
got you man you were powered by
mcdonald's and coca-cola i want more and
then i smacked him and he didn't want to
fight anymore uh i'm not impressed
if george st pierre
and khabib nurmagomedov face each other
in their prime who wins
i'm here with three individuals each of
whom are considered by many to be the
greatest of all time in each of their
respective disciplines
the greatest mma fighter of all time
george saint pierre
the greatest martial arts coach of all
time
john donahue
and the greatest submission grappler of
all time
gordon ryan
so let me ask the first question
you guys didn't see the question no
preparation here what is the key to your
success each of you one thing or
multiple things that come to mind
john go first
[Laughter]
um
is it the rash guard
yes
[Laughter]
i like that you choose john right off
the bat you seem the most nervous please
inspire us to
give the right
answer for for me it's about um
finding a way to work
in a world where
most of the answers are already known
okay in any developed sport by the time
you enter that sport most of the basic
precepts the the
the major techniques the major
mechanical understandings of the sport
are long since worked out
and so
in a highly developed world
the key to success
is to be able to identify
some area of the industry that you're in
which is currently
undervalued to do what the other people
are not doing
deeper than that
your
everyone has a view of okay these are
the the main skills of the industry i
work in
at any given time some set of skills
attributes
um
will always be somewhat undervalued
they're underappreciated by the people
in the game
you see that at any in any given
industry there are always trends
which
change
uh the nature of the industry over time
so
uh fashion trends
in the clothing industry you'll see at
any given time there's a a a general
wave of fashion which pushes most of the
people in the industry in a given
direction at a given time
what makes people stand out is the
ability to
look at the various possibilities out
there and say here is something which is
genuinely useful
but which is currently being underused
underutilized
and i want to bring that back in
and develop it
and because it's an inherently useful
product it will be very very successful
in its initial applications against
people who aren't currently using it
um
if you can do this in whatever industry
you're in i believe you'll be highly
successful
so this implies both for actual specific
like techniques
and the also tactics as well in the case
of of jiu-jitsu so for example
in my sport leglocks have always been
around okay there's
no shortage of people you can look back
in history who are applying leg locks
nonetheless as in
across the industry
leglocks were undervalued and
underappreciated there was a general
sense in which most of the leading
figures of the sport
uh
for most of the history of the sport of
judas who tended to de-emphasize
leglocks and uh
when i looked at them i said there was
there was immense potential but it
wasn't being realized and needed to be
changed um
since then that
has more or less occurred now most
people coming into the sport understand
that leglocks are an important
aspect and they're no longer undervalued
if anything it's gone too far the other
way and now perhaps they're a little
overvalued
um
and then
this kind of
fashion trend exists in every industry
and
the job of anyone who wants to excel in
a given industry is to be able to
identify okay what are the things that
are currently out of fashion and
undervalued and then
look at what is their actual objective
value
and then work uh to to
to bring them back to the forefront so
john brought up fashion uh george is
wearing a really sexy shirt so
assuming that's not the reason is there
um
is there something that comes to mind as
the key to the success of your
incredible career well of course
everybody knows the famous sensor that
every athletes are saying oh it could be
genetic i was maybe gifted i had certain
predisposition i worked really hard
but i think
something that
people don't talk enough is when
everybody sometimes go right
i was never afraid to try to go left
and i felt many times
trying to do things that were not
uh
known to be things that would br
brought me success but i i i tried it
you know i was very often i was the
first of trying new things
and i felt many times but certain times
it gave me a certain advantage and
for example
i was sometime fighting guys that had
much better wrestling background than
than me on paper and nobody before that
fought those guys never nobody had there
to try to
take them down because their wrestling
pedigree were so good and i didn't have
on paper like wrestling pedigree to take
these guys down in a fight but
when everybody
tried to go right i was going left i i i
fought them in a different way and that
was
the blueprint to beat cert some of these
guys you know what i mean you know what
i mean so yeah so we'll actually talk
about a few fights where you did just
that this is fascinating um but let me
let's stay at the high level so gordon
again sticking on fashion
may compliment your
incredible badass hat trying to fit in
here
we should say we're in texas now so he's
uh
become a texan overnight uh so what is
there something you can speak to that
you would attribute to as the key to
your success yeah so first of all it has
to be a rule where you don't ask us all
the same questions because
how am i supposed to compete with the
answer john just came that was like
there's nothing i can do that's going to
top that yeah um but uh i think it's uh
there's many things but i think the
number one thing is just is john
when i came in i was a blue belt and i
was beating brown and black belts in
competition already
uh but he really changed my way of
thinking about the sport i would just
come in and if something wasn't working
i would just do it harder and faster and
more aggressively and that just
degenerated me into degenerated into
me spastically knee sliding into cross
hashigarami against eddie cummings for
six months and then just getting heal
hooked repeatedly
and uh i'm like this is not working and
eddie like when i met him was like a
chubby librarian looking guy and i'm
like there's i'm like six to like a
jacked like 170. and i'm like there's no
way i'm losing to a guy who looks like
this but he just kept healing me so i
would just go harder and harder and it
wouldn't work and then john's like well
if you learned leglocks you might you
might have some more success and then i
was like yeah that probably makes sense
and uh from then on i kind of just
changed the way i thought about the
sport instead of doing doing things
harder i would actually try to get
better at jiu jitsu do you remember like
a turning point where
you became as opposed to being mediocre
not just in technique but an approach to
uh to great um i think it was somewhere
around brown belt level when i was
training consistently i started training
full-time with john when i was purple
belt mid-level purple belt
and towards the end of my brown belt
days i was beating up like legitimate
like adccc champions in the gym
so i think like brown to black belt was
a big thing for me and then when i won
my first ebi and i was i submitted yuri
who won abcc and i beat roostam so i
think that was like my turning point as
a competitor
but i think i started to to reach world
level a little bit before that i think
somewhere around brown about mid-level
to late level brown belt so is some of
that mental like
it was there a moment when you like
after a training session
you realize
i could actually do this
like i could be at the top of the world
like world class the critical moment for
me was when uh i think it was right
right when i got my black belt maybe a
few months before i got my black belt uh
we had a former adcc champion come into
the gym and uh we did a hard round
together and i think i submitted them
like four or five times and uh no one
who i was i never won anything up until
that point and i was like okay like if
this is like one of the best guys in the
world and i could submit him multiple
times around i think that this is like
something that i actually could do
professionally and make a make a career
out of this
okay so the actual performance was the
like you didn't need to uh believe
before you could perform like a lot of
olympic gold medalists
they they have to believe before they
can perform because like they're they're
getting their ass kicked for a long long
long time yeah i think but the best way
for me to believe in something is to
have repeated success doing it against
high level guys like i'm not gonna just
believe i can do a double leg if i can't
hit a double egg on anybody um so for me
the the belief came from the repeated
success in the gym
yeah but to get to the point where
you're submitting somebody like yuri
samoa is like one of the greatest
grapplers ever
it's like a long journey
yeah but i i had the confidence i had
the belief in myself because of the
success that i had in the gym prior to
that got it to that event even and it's
one step at a time first it's the brown
bell it's not it's the black belt it's
world class okay um george was there a
turning point for you when you you
thought like i can actually do this
yes i um
i always dreamed to become champion
but i think the turning point that there
was there was two turning point
and and there were my two losses
uh
first
my losses to matt hughes i went into
that fight
just
to not lose i i was not fighting to win
and it's after the fight when i watched
the
the replay of the fight i realized i was
like i was doing pretty well but during
the fight in my own mind
i was not seeing it that way i i thought
i was getting dominated by use like a
hundred percent but when i watched the
replay
i was like man i can i can beat this guy
i was beating him until i made that
stupid mistake so
it was very frustrating but but
that's what gave me the mentally the the
championship level mentality and then i
became a little bit overconfident
because i start beating everybody after
that
and
i start to believe the hype of people
when they look at me they were like oh
he's the new upping coming superstar and
he's going to be unstoppable and
and then when i became champion i
i lost to to to matt to matt sarah
so
before i i believe
my first failure was because i had a
lack of confidence
and
and my second failure was i was because
i was overconfident so i think it's
there's a perfect uh
center of confidence i mean i mean it's
good to be confident
because john taught me like confidence
it's it's like money in your bank
account if you you can have all the
skills in in the world right and and if
you're uh if you don't have the
confidence it's like you it's like you
can you can be a millionaire but you
don't have access to your bank account
so so it's that's a little bit the
analogy that john told me so that's how
i feel confidence plays for an athlete
but to be overconfident i think it's
always good to
to be aware to be afraid
of what can happen
so to have a perfect balance of
confidence and fear
to me
that's what mentally gave me the edge to
become i believe successful in my sport
playing off that uh john gave me a
speech one time and he was like you have
to be able to
like flip a switch and turn it off where
like a guy like mayweather or someone
who goes out who's super confident
and he plays the character of someone
he's like no one can beat me i'm the
best that there ever was and that's it
but if you look at me actually trains
very hard you can't you can't play the
persona of no one can beat me and have
it translate into your life and just
think that you're so good that you don't
have to do anything and no one can ever
beat you you have to be able to play
that public persona of no one could beat
me but then you have to actually do the
training to make that happen you can't
just you can't believe your own hype and
say say that you know i can just do
whatever i want no one's ever going to
beat me you'd be able to switch between
the persona and the actual athlete and
that made a big difference for me
it's tough because uh like you're
you you dominate
such a large fraction of the world in in
grappling
and george too just the perfect
dominance after those two
um it's hard for the confidence not to
just
like how do you avoid the confidence not
becoming a thing that weighs you down
where you completely um
deludes your mind
um for me it's just well number one the
guys in the gym are so tough so the guys
and the
guys in the gym that i train with are
always like nipping at my butt and
always giving me new problems to solve
um and for me it's really just about
trying to learn new stuff over time um
so that keeps it interesting for me and
it's not really about
um you know no one can beat me i don't
have to train i have to do it i can do
whatever i want uh it's more
what keeps me in the gym is more about
the fact that i'm learning new stuff all
the time i'm working on something new
and progressing to new levels at all
times it's not i don't just come in and
do the same thing over and over again
and uh that gets boring you just come in
and you don't learn anything new and you
just do the same stuff for years at a
time and okay okay this is boring but
when you have new stuff to work on and
new goals short-term and long-term goals
to reach then it makes it interesting
it's uh
for me it's a little bit like uh gordon
says is is the fair because sometime in
the gym i even before when i was
competing i was i was getting my butt
kicked
but i don't care what happened in the
gym i mean it it hit my ego of course
because i'm a proud person i'm a
competitor even in the gym but it's not
a malicious competition competition in
between each other when you fight you
have to be malicious you go there to
hurt the guy
but it
it hit it hit me in terms of my pride
when i get
beat in a gym of course
but
that fear
that
i don't want it to happen in public
especially not during a fight that what
keeps help me keeps the balance between
confidence and and and and fear you know
what i mean it's kind of weird it's a
mix
it's a mixture of both that
i believe
i to me it
helped me uh succeed to have the right
mindset to fight
and i talk so much shit that i'm like
man if i lose
this is gonna be rough so yeah you put a
lot of i mean that's that's the hard
thing to do when you talk shit when you
when you play the heel
is so much to perform the pressure is
i mean you have to be good under
pressure it's the conor mcgregor thing
you know the reason i actually started
talking shit was actually like
indirectly because of george
because
because i would become the opposite of
george
i won my first ebi and i i didn't talk
shit and everyone was like being like oh
you know he only beat yuri because uh
because he was tired or uh
you know this or that and if they have a
rematch under any of the rules that he
would have lost
and am i trying to figure out what i'm
going to do so i'm scrolling through
george's feed one day and he posted a
clip of him beating someone and i look
at the comments and i'm with this in
mind now my george is the nicest person
of all time and if you look at the
comments it's like ten thousand comments
and like nine thousand and nine hundred
are just people calling him like all you
do is lay and pray you pussy you suck
you can't finish anybody and i'm just
i'm looking at this and i'm like people
are to say what they're going to say
regardless they're going to talk shit
regardless so you may as well just say
whatever you want and then just be
yourself
is there some aspect that's mentioning
conor mcgregor he uh he crossed the line
with khabib
at least in the eyes of khabib is there
something you ever regret about crossing
a line or does that you ever feel like
there is a line or do you just keep
pushing the line
uh i i basically play it per per person
i just i basically fire back with like
one step above what what they do it's
always plus one yeah yeah okay
um so i go i usually go hard like they
fire a bullet then i drop a duke
and then and then after that initial
shot then we go back and forth and i'll
just keep one upping them
so you know there's a lot of people that
love you
but there's also a lot of people that
love to hate you yeah it's so
like what
do those people like energize you or do
you just
uh or is it funny to you like what as an
athlete as a performer you should not
think about them it's like a fun thing
it's like it's just like a fun thing
that keeps me occupied
like because like because most of them
that like talk shit they like just say
stuff that's factually incorrect so then
i just argue with like actual statistics
yeah it's just like
you suck or you're not gonna beat this
person i'm like i've already submitted
that guy um so it just it riles them up
and
it's just it's just a fun thing for me
to do my down time yeah your responses
are usually very factual it's very
scientific
i appreciate
like you actually you start by talking
trash but then you respond with science
yeah it's great okay it's good mix
that's a good mix um
i mean on topic of haters are more
specifically sort of
doubts within yourself adults around you
as you're coming up um
maybe george you can comment and we'll
just ignore john completely in this
conversation
i was going to ask you another question
but let me just ask you on this on this
topic um are there times in your life
yet uh
you were surrounded by people that that
doubted you
all the time and so what is there
something you could say as in by way of
advice how you overcome
the doubt either yourself or others
around you i all the time
the first time i i manifest my desire to
become a professional mixed martial art
athlete everybody doubt me
just not even i'm not talking about ufc
just to become a professional fighter
everybody doubt me
and i became a
i became a professional fighter i had
few amateur fight i won them all
then i i fought my first fight in in
montreal i won and i became a
professional
then i i told people that i wanted to
fight in ufc everybody doubt me again
so
it's a normal thing
so i worked my way up i beat a few guys
then i
at the time uh pete spratt was uh
just knocked knocked out robbie lawler
with leg kick and uh
the person who was my agent at the time
did a great move uh for me so he brought
peace pratt and montreal to fight me
pete spratt came to montreal and i
believe
he didn't know who i was so he thought
that he was coming to collect an easy
paycheck and i and i end up beating him
so that
gave me the opportunity to fight in ufc
then after i was in ufc i wanted to
become champion of the world you know
but matt hughes was there and he seems
invincible at the time so
everybody doubt me again and i became
world champion and after when you when i
was world champion i wanted to be
i was competing against other world
champion of other weight class
for
the title you know for the legacy and
everything so i was not no longer
competing against my opponent i was you
know as a competitor you always you
never wanted to be you never want to be
satisfied because when satisfaction is
the death you know when you're satisfied
you better retire because it's over so
always i have to find motivation what
you can have more i want more don't be
satisfied in life so i wanted to be
like the best you know i was i was
competing you know like to become the
best and and you know of course people
doubt doubt you all the time every time
you say something that it's outside of
the norm of the normality and when i say
there there's nothing normal but i'm
talking about
when you
you manifest your desire to do something
that
takes special attribute to to to succeed
or that is something that is hard to to
do it's for sure you're gonna always
have people that doubt you it's so
strange that people don't
they don't lean into supporting like
people that love you too yeah even
people that love me used to doubt me and
i believe i i you need to use that as
a positive positive thing as a
motivation to prove them wrong yeah so
for me that was a thing when someone
doubted me nothing gave me more
this more energy because i want to prove
him wrong i want to look at him in the
face and say hey you see
i got you man i i did it
so uh john do you ever use this in one
way or the other by saying i don't think
you can do this to motivate them to to
prove you wrong or
more general question
of you know uh the the mental toughness
required to achieve
or confidence required to achieve
greatness like what's your role as a
coach when you have these two athletes
with regards to your your first question
would i ever say to someone
you can't do this
as a kind of reverse psychology i know
my job is to prepare people first and
foremost with their skills and
as gordon pointed out earlier if you're
in any way a rational human being and
you're noticing that you're getting
tremendous success
with a given move in the gym against
high level opponents who
give a good read on what your actual
opponent in a competition is is like
you would have to be a moron to
not recognize that kind of success and
say this is something i should be
building into my game and you will carry
the confidence that you earned in the
gym into the arena
so i never try to use
reverse psychology i build up
everything i do in terms of confidence
is to give people physical skills i know
people say oh this physicality on the
one hand is mentality on the other and
confidence is
squarely in the the mental aspect of the
game
but all the underpinnings and beginnings
of confidence are physical
okay a rational human being will see
where they're having success and where
they're having failure and confidence
will
uh surround those areas where they're
having success and will degenerate in
cases where they're having
failure
so my job as a coach is to set them up
for success in the gym
with a given set of skills
and
i don't have to do anything
psychologically after that
i just
if i can set you up to be highly
successful with a given move or a set of
tactics 10 times in a row against
quality opposition in the gym
i don't have to do a damn thing when it
comes to instilling confidence
i i will tell people hey you're doing a
really good job with that move it's
working well for you
but
when they're not in agreement i'm not
trying to force anything on them they're
recognized they were they already
recognized that long before the words
came out of my mouth
but on the other hand intelligent
rational people will recognize when
they're failing with given moves and no
amount of talk on my part can ever
change that
if i teach gordon
uh a given arm lock and
15 times in a row he tries it over a
month and all 15 are failures there's
nothing i can say verbally to come up
the goal and say hey you're really good
at that move he's going to look at me
and say bullshit i'm terrible at it. and
that will create a crisis of confidence
where gordon no longer believes the
words coming out of my mouth
so i will never compromise that but
isn't there a lot you just said 15
you have to believe
that uh
doing this arm lock 15 times over a
period of a month is worth it because
eventually you might get it like yeah
that's a separate issue that that's a
separate issue
there are times where i've
more or less pushed athletes to
go in a certain direction for example um
when i first met gary tonan he never had
a guillotine strangle and i i would say
don't gary you know
you're a scrambler like one of the
greatest weapons a scrambler can ever
develop as a guillotine like it should
be in your arsenal
and he was like no i just scrambled for
the back and i said well there's gonna
be a day you can't take someone's back
and it's always good about a strangle
from front and back okay of course we
all prefer strangles from the bank that
makes sense but there's going to come a
day where it's going to be useful for
you and so that was one of the few times
where i put my foot down and said you're
learning this shut the fuck up
and um uh he like literally wouldn't
teach him any anything else until he got
a guilty and you know gary would like
ask him a question he's like let's see
your guillotine
and um for the first three months
as gifted as as gary tony is in learning
most moves most moves gary gets it like
in in minutes
there was something going on with gary
just couldn't get a guillotine on people
and uh finally after around three months
he started having some success until
ultimately became one of his best
weapons
um we had to go through like 15
different variations of guillotine until
he found one which actually worked
reliably for him
and that was one of the few times where
i put my foot down and said no
you you have to learn this so the long
search had to do more with the physical
characteristics like you couldn't figure
out the right like it made sense it made
sense in the case of gary tony because
there were more opportunities per minute
of his grappling for guillotines uh that
the investment in time was worth it for
another athlete i might have said well
he hardly ever gets in the situation but
front headlocks are guilty so it's not
even worth
investing the training time
let me ask you a question on the on the
competition side you mentioned haters
and
do you think about this aspect of the
competition with the athletes is this a
great question and um the answer is no
um
uh
i'm
you can see that you could you couldn't
find two more polar opposites
psychologically than
george st pierre
and this monstrosity on my left
and um
i've i've never said to my athletes hey
i think this is the
sort of demeanor you should carry
yourself with i'm myself a very flawed
character and i'm the last person on
earth who should be delving out moral
advice to other people um the only thing
is that i i you know of course i believe
some things are off limits but as long
as it's done in the context of sport
where no one's physically attacking
people or doing anything crazy where it
just goes completely over the top then i
give almost zero
moral advice to my athletes i'm a
jiu-jitsu coach not a preacher
alex i i if i can if i may
we we are entertainers
you know we're athlete we're
professional athletes but we make
we make
a living because of people or
want to see us perform
same thing an actor or something a
singer
and a lot of the time
especially in the fight game
an event is promoted it needs to be
with emotion
love me hate me but do not ignore me
um
and
you know it
when it's authentic
it's done well i think me my personal my
my favorite fighters to watch are the
one that are that
that that have a
some sort of a bad persona
i really enjoy watching those guys
because
they bring an emotion element into a
fight which is great you know i i i feel
to me it's more interesting to watch
when there is an emotion involved
and i believe that's why
some fighters make more money than
others you know you know what i mean
that's the reason why we may we can make
a living out of this yeah they're better
entertainers but you're right the
authenticity seems to be really
important
there's actually something very
interesting then um it's time to break
out some some secrets
do you know who like like you think of
george st peter you think of like the
highly technical polished
martial artist that's just gonna be
great do you know
who his favorite fighters to watch
were
you'd probably be thinking oh probably
someone who's really technically
advanced
actually
it was mark coleman i don't know kevin
randleman and phil baroni
he used to love watching that was a
hammer house that was his favorite he
would love those guys and uh whenever
their fights were on georgie watching
the hammerhouse crew and uh
it's funny what you said about how those
guys brought an intensity to
to mma that was off the charts have you
ever met those guys in
uh in their prime let me tell you it was
it was something to behold and um i had
this crazy larger than life personality
most of the things they did made no
sense whatsoever but i mean technically
but that was their appeal yeah and and
these guys and george would love to
watch them more than anyone else you
never knew what could happen with these
guys i remember when mark coleman won
the pride grand prix it wasn't my living
room i was jumping i was so happy i was
like yeah
he beat igor varchar chef chin i was
like
like for to me it was amazing you know
what i mean
because of the emotion that they they
brought into the fight george is
actually very um interested by something
you said that normally when i
um
ask what is the appeal of a given
fighter um and what makes people watch a
fight you talked about the idea that
fighters are entertainers and that's
absolutely correct they are
um
it's this weird weird industry where
you're
both an athlete and an entertainer and
you need to be successful in both
regards to become
financially successful
insofar as
uh
your favorite athletes
to watch at least were people who are
almost like the polar opposite of who
you are
um i've always said that most people
if you look at
uh say a million people watch a
pay-per-view event
what percentage of those million people
have a genuine technical understanding
of what's happening as they watch a
fight
it's tiny
it's absolutely tiny the vast majority
of people who watch a professional fight
have almost no technical understanding
of what's going on in front of them so
how do they relate to the fight
what's the only way they can
it's through emotion
and so when they get a sense that these
two don't like each other
then they can relate to the fight
but only a tiny percentage of people
watching a given professional fight can
relate to it on a technical level
the overwhelming majority will always
form an emotional attachment to the
fight that's why when you see things
shows like ufc primetime they never
focus on
the tactics and the techniques of the
fight they focus on the emotional
elements the preparation the view of
their own family members as athletes get
ready it's always an emotional pull
because that's how 99 percent of the
viewers relate to the fight if i even
think about chairs okay
if i have minimal knowledge of two world
champions
coming to to fight each other and
or match up against each other in a game
of chess i know so little about
chess tactics and i can't really form
any kind of technical
appreciation of what's going on on the
board
but if you tell me that these two chess
players hate each other's guts and
they've got a rivalry which goes back
five years and they've said this and
that about each other in public then
suddenly my ears prick up and i'm like
oh okay this sounds interesting um
because i just don't have the the
knowledge to appreciate what's going on
on the board in a chess game to be able
to to appreciate the uh the technical
nuances of what they're doing so any
interest that i have in the chess match
is going to have to come from some kind
of emotional level because i'm just not
qualified to make technical assessments
and that's exactly how it is in the case
of both grappling and mixed martial arts
that's why the ones who evoke the most
attention are always the ones who can
form some kind of emotional appeal conor
mcgregor was the all-time master of this
i i believe also
uh emotion can be used as a weapon
for example i've learned i've learned
this from my favorite boxer is sugary
leonard
sugary leonard i remember i was very
young so i watched his fight later when
i was older but i know that sugary
leonard
was the best boxer of his era to me
personally
and i don't think nobody could
beat him i think it was skill skill wise
it was the best
however when he fought in montreal
roberto duran
roberto zuran
made it in a way that leonard became
very emotional he wanted to stand in
front of duran and fight a different
fight that
that he normally does because he wanted
to show that he's a man
and he lost that fight which was a
mistake
so by by
then later on he beat roberto's around
in
quite easy you know the if the fair
everybody remember the nomas thing but
my point is
emotion can be used
in a way
that it can make your derail your
opponent
out of his game plan and i felt a lot of
my opponent trying to do that with me so
that's why i never got involved that was
my way to defend myself against
some kind of bullying to put like a like
a shield in front but some other guy
like uh
gordon he expressed himself differently
of course there's a language barrier but
for him he's better at
giving giving giving back that's his
he's a better counter attacker you know
that's the way you respond to to to the
aggression of of a
of an emotional attack i think everybody
is different in that regard what's
interesting that john said that he
doesn't
uh study the tactics of this game or
maybe you're not interested in the
tactics of this game because it seems
like this is more than just being an
entertainer it seems like it could be an
effective part of the match yeah i just
feel like whatever investment you make
in that
is
it's going to get negligible rewards
first of all it's probably only going to
pertain to one match in front of you
rather than the totality of your career
and
whatever gains you get out of
psychological trickery and play
typically
don't last long you raised an excellent
example with sugar ray leonard he did
fight outside of his usual
manner in that regard but rather than me
try to tell
someone hey
uh behave like this before a fight i
would have been probably more forceful
between rounds with an athlete and
saying no no you're fighting this right
the wrong way and that would have a much
more beneficial impact on my athlete
than
psychological trickery before a fight
i believe another example of
emotion that leads to failure is
jose aldo against conor mcgregor i think
it was
it was uh on purpose that conor mcgregor
did this try to bait aldo to become over
aggressive to open him himself because
he's an excellent counterpuncher puncher
that's what i believe and made a mistake
there's another great one my match
against cyborg
2018 nogi worlds where he didn't even
try to win he just like wanted to smack
me in the face the whole time because he
was so angry that was talking shit to
him before the match and uh it was like
the finals of the absolute it was like
the biggest
match of the weekend and he just didn't
even try to pass my guard to do anything
he just wanted to hit me in the face and
i was like sick i just won
it was incredibly frustrating it's
fascinating to watch like a grown man
sort of lose composure
um gordon one thing i've always
been very impressed with you and that's
um
no matter how heated torque gets
before a match with you
when you go out to grapple you're
absolutely cold
like i've you've never gone into a match
carrying anything other than just
cold-blooded calculation
and you've always been able to separate
very well
the idea of words and deeds and i think
that's always been one of your um one of
your strongest assets a way i often
measure this is when a match is over i
will ask the athlete questions about the
match
and if they can't answer the question
what were you doing in the fourth minute
okay what was that setup you used in the
in in the third minute that got you into
the kimura along if they can't answer
that that tells me
they were just fighting on instincts and
emotion but with gordon it's like a log
book you see
it's like okay in the seventh minute you
went for that uh
judy gutami set up from
on the left side
what were you thinking he can always
give an answer he's absolutely stone
cold
speaking of emotion
gordon you will potentially if you're
healthy face andre galvao in the adcc
coming up super fight
uh who is andre galvao for people who
don't know can you tell the story of
your beef with
uh the the emotional interaction with
the man yeah so uh andre is uh
he's considered the greatest
adcc competitor of all time uh multiple
time blackbaud world champion uh
winningest abccc champion every has six
six gold medals and uh
i've been trying to compete against him
pretty much forever like since i got my
black belt in 2016 i've been trying to
get matches with him uh he was in the
first ebi that i did and he ended up
pulling out and that i've been trying to
get matches with him
and uh he would always say no and give
one reason or another and then uh
after the last adcc
i was like hey andre said he was
retiring after this after this uh this
competition so if he wants to retire you
know he's he's the greatest adcc
competitor of all time and
i think it's great but if he wants to
compete and that's great i was like
super nice and then he started like
posting like passive aggressive
instagram
uh
uh captions and uh then we started going
back and forth on the internet and there
was like one point where i saw him in
person when he
acknowledged he's like i understand like
what you're doing like we're gonna pump
this fight up and he was like totally on
board but then there must have been
something that happened where like it
changed from like him like going along
with it to be like actually pissed
and then uh there was that one night at
flow where i went to go shake his hand
and he he flipped me off and then he
followed me backstage and started to try
to fight me and then i smacked him and
then he didn't want to fight anymore and
then we've been going back he's actually
blocked me on instagram now so he will
he just won't engage no one from athos
will engage now but
it's gonna be interesting how he shows
up if he can keep it under control or
not do you think how do you explain that
level of emotion is this fear of losing
your throne is it
or is it just a human being like with
cyborg just
just becoming emotionally unstable it
might just be me i just have a way to
get and get under people's skin it's
just i don't know uh he's he's
he was he was cool for a while and then
i just i don't know it just
everyone gets like this they're all so
emotional by the time they actually step
up to compete that it's pretty easy to
read them they're either so emotional
that they want to actually come forward
and and beat me like like tim spriggs is
a perfect example at abcc i posted like
uh
on my story on instagram like 10 minutes
before a match uh i said like what i'm
going to do to tim spriggs is going to
be criminal and he's like a very staley
guy and he came he saw that and then he
came out and actually tried to fight me
like he came and actually engaged my
guard and i ended up submitting him so
it either has that effect or it has the
effect where they know i've talked so
much shit leading up to the match
that they're so afraid to lose that they
just get super stally and they move away
so it either has one effect where they
come forward and they want to they want
to beat me beat me or they want to just
they're so afraid of getting submitted
that they know if they engage they're
super cagey and they just back away and
don't really do anything
do you think this match happens
there's a lot of variables what i have
to see how my stomach is and two
if i'm actually going to show up and
compete my stomach's healthy i doubt
that andre will actually show up to
compete i've been trying to compete
against him for six years and he hasn't
done it so there's no reason to think he
would now is it possible for you to
speak to where like your estimates are
about your stomach or is it too unclear
for now still too early to tell i have
this round of treatment that i'm doing
until late february and i'm pretty sure
that i need to do the same test i did
initially to retest all my levels and
then go from there so i've been feeling
a little bit better like it's not nearly
as bad as it used to be i was explaining
to someone the other day like for the
last four years i would be so nauseous
that every time i would walk into a new
room i'd have to actively locate a
garbage can in case i have to throw up
so i'm like one step above that right
now i'm like doing a little bit better
than that um so it's definitely getting
a little bit better but it's not it's
not where it needs to be
can we talk about diet for just a sec
because uh both of you uh george and and
gordon
like suffered from stomach issues
different kind
and have arrived for now for different
places so can you maybe george speak to
um
the general question of what is the best
diet for performance for training like
what have you learned through your
career about this well i i think
everybody is different um to me
personally
uh
i implement fasting
um
time restricted eating and and
prolonged fasting
what's the longest you've done so far
the longest i've done is five days
you've done i do it quite often i do i
do four times a year i do
three to five days
uh water fast
and i i liked it it helps me with
inflammation i think it boosts the
immune system
and uh that that's about the i read
papers about about this and i it helps
me also feel
feel good it's kind of
very therapeutic
physical and mental just mental
mental and physical because when i eat
my when i break my fast and i sit at the
table with with other people
it doesn't matter what i eat if we all
eat the same thing i always tell them i
said my my food right now tastes better
than all of yours you know because i you
know i i have this
thing that i i believe sometimes you
need to put yourself into suffering to
realize how
pleasurable something is
and
i uh
tend
personally like diet wise i eat whatever
i want
whenever i want i don't i no longer have
any problem with this
but if i would have a competition coming
up like
knowing that i what i know now about my
body i would
orient myself
more towards an animal based diet
that's because i've tried different
things and that's the kind of diet that
i believe helped me
having less inflammation and feel better
in terms of performance for for for
doing something physical so high protein
high fat low carbs
well
this is is different between
animal-based diet and keto
i mean there's carbs there's a lot of
fruit i get a lot of the the the carbs
from the fruit okay uh a lot of organs
organs um
i know a little bit about paleontology
and in the the past
on
about prehistoric human and i i know
that
um and not not only about that i know
because i have traveled
certain places in the world i want to to
visit the maasai in africa the
hunter-gatherer tribe and i know that
when they kill an animal
they go for the organs first and i know
i pray most predatory animal they do the
same thing so organs i believe is
something that normally in in our
culture in the western part of the world
we don't really eat but it's something
that is very nutritious
have you been able to convince gordon to
try fasting
we always talk about diets
it's a different situation i think for
gordon because he's a heavy weight he
doesn't want to lose weight you don't
want to heavy weight the range of uh
like my range was like i was a
welterweight and middleweight but
heavyweight it's like some of the guys
that you compete can compete against
their they might be 300 pounds so
if you lose weight
it's a it's a big problem you know what
i mean so it
and there's things that will work for me
that might not works for gordon you know
so you have to make his own experience
and and i told gordon sometimes when
everybody goes left try to go right see
how you feel with certain things
experiment
not not a topic uh
that's part of your optimization
optimal performance formula well uh what
i used to do before my stomach issues
and for those of you listening who don't
know i had recurring staph infections in
2018 and i took a bunch of oral
antibiotics and it just completely wiped
out my stomach so
i just was diagnosed i was misdiagnosed
as gastroparesis so for those of you
messaging me on instagram who are just
watching rogan asking me about my
gastroparesis that's not what i have um
they misdiagnosed it and uh i did some
other tests and for four years i didn't
even know what it was
and then i got this uh i went to this
doctor in california who
uh diagnosed me with i have h pylori and
then a fungal and a bacterial overgrowth
of my small intestines so the issues in
the small intestines um so what i used
to do was i used to do like seasons
where i'd have a very clean season when
i was competing and i would have a lower
body weight and i would do like an off
season kind of like a bodybuilder where
i would eat a lot more food and a little
bit dirtier food and i would have
cheeseburgers and pizza at night time to
have the extra calories
but now i can't eat those foods because
they upset my stomach so now i pretty
much just try to eat whatever i can and
maintain the weight the best i can
based on how my stomach feels so right
now it's like
rice chicken
eggs fish
vegetables fruits
and pretty much nothing else like
anything hard to digest
anything spicy red meat
fast food all that's all that's hard for
me
which sucks because in texas
barbecue
and i mean this diet is really important
for you john i can tell um
like is it is that something you think
about for athletes at all again this is
part of the i've um to be honest with
you um i've never seen
any measurable
improvement in sports performance in
jiu-jitsu by change of diet
i do believe that diet is important for
longevity
in human beings and i do think it makes
a difference especially once you get
past the age of 40
with regards to longevity
for older athletes i do believe it makes
it some difference but my observation is
in athletes and
in their youth and working up into their
prime
i've seen athletes have the worst
diets
god bless travis stevens but that guy
won an olympic silver medal basically on
mcdonald's and candy yeah um
uh george st pierre for 80 of your
career you were powered by mcdonald's
and coca-cola eugenia alfredo that was
my yeah yeah my meal of choice before a
championship fight uh gordon for him his
youth was just five guys hamburgers gary
told the same thing
i've worked with japanese judo players
who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day in
one olympic gold medals
i've worked with russian wrestlers who
just
ate
whatever was put in front of them and
their athletic performance was
outstanding
i've worked with other guys who did have
what would be considered a very clean
diet and
their performance was no better than
anyone else on the mat so i've i've
never
i've never seen someone say okay i
changed my diet and because of that
there was a measurable improvement in
sports performance another way to phrase
it though is um i have noticed with a
lot of lead athletes what they eat
they begin to believe that that
either is not a hindrance or it's
actually good like travis steve is an
example of somebody who eats shitty
because he believes
it's like it's like a power because
whatever he's traveling across the world
he can't rely on healthy good food to be
there so i'm going to eat shitty
so that that's that like my body knows
how to perform under whatever skittles
or whatever everybody's got mcdonald's
everywhere's got mcdonald's so that
makes like and they've convinced
themselves and you talk about russian
athletes a lot of them have very strong
beliefs about like this
a particular food being good for them
but there's no agreement among them
exactly there's no agreement yeah so
belief is more important than the actual
diet yeah
if i can
after
you know after a a night out when you're
hanging over
i think the best thing and i'm saying
this in all certain sincerity i think
the best thing to eat to me was like
like
cheeseburgers with it's we call that a
puts in back home because it's very fat
it's greasy so that so the next day
when you wake up i think you feel better
because it absorbed the alternative
there you go
but you
my mom told me the same story once and
then i tried i was like i was hungover
for some party and uh i woke up i was
like probably i don't know 19 or 20 i
woke up and uh my mom's like yeah just
have it have a cheeseburger go go go eat
something greasy and i did and i was
like oh i feel kind of better now
i do not know the science the exact
science behind it but i i i always
notice and i don't know if it's
plausible but i always notice that if i
if i'm if i'm if i party hard and i've
been drinking a lot
if i don't eat before i go into bed if i
don't eat shitty food the next day will
wake up and feel worse than if i eat
shitty food i feel better i know it
sounds crazy i don't know why but it
works for me
yeah but it's also hard to do science on
extreme performers so the discussions
we're having is amongst the very
you know that this might not apply to a
general like recreational athlete but
for the elite i've just seen champions
in every kind of combat sport and i've
never seen a correlation between dietary
habit and performance in people under
the age of 30.
i do believe that diet is important for
longevity however and
for that alone it may well be worth
investing time in it but with regards to
sports performance at least in jiu-jitsu
i've never seen any significant
difference well we had a little bit of a
a difference of opinion on this i think
what about strength training and muscle
building or at least we had a discussion
about this so what do you believe is the
value of
um
of you know training outside of the
sport so fitness
lifting heavy lifting explosive
all kinds of lifting
personally for me i believe and i've
learned that from from john
i used to to do like
to train like a bodybuilder before
because i thought in my early days of
competition that was
the most efficient way to do things to
because it was like i was watching
jean-claude van damme
arnold schwarzenegger we thought back
back in the day that was the thing
that that's how we should do it you know
for to get ready for a fight
but i realized
later on
uh
that it's all about efficiency
and some guys they don't lift at all and
they're doing pretty well so i
do cross training mostly for longevity
more it's mostly for the rapid to rep
like a therapy it's more therapeutic
than for performance it's to keep my
body healthy to do a certain movement
that are different than what i do every
day in the gym in combat sport to keep
me
healthy and and
athletic so all the interesting movement
stuff that you've done outside the sport
that was for
the therapeutic mostly the reputation i
think it does it could
transcend to performance but it's mostly
the republic i do not believe that
squatting
five plates or bench bench pressing
three plate will make me a better
fighter i do not i believe actually it
could hurt me more it could damage me
more than than benefit me
so
according to somebody who on instagram
posts
a lot of pictures of you being shredded
and huge
uh what's the value of of strength so i
do like a combination of uh
john got us big into like gymnastics
type movements like toes to bar and
muscle ups and things like that when we
were young
like toes to bar because that's like the
exact motion you have to do when you're
retaining guard is knees to chest
so i do a lot of that stuff
in combination with i do a lot of
opposite of george i do a lot of
bodybuilding workouts um where i do like
a basic split like a chest and triceps
back and biceps day
and my idea is that
weightlifting should always be a
supplement to jiu-jitsu so you shouldn't
be missing a jiu-jitsu session to lift
weights um so i don't do i do probably i
train jiu-jitsu every day and i lift
three to four times a week um i feel
like lifting seven days a week for me is
is too much and the lifting takes a lot
of energy when you do like hard lifts
like that um but my idea is if you want
to get good at jiu jitsu do jiu jitsu
and if you want to be bigger and
stronger lift weights and uh and eat
food and um
i i generally don't go super heavy when
i lift you start putting crazy weights
then start tearing muscles and stuff um
so i usually do moderate weights with a
with a very high rep rep range like four
sets of 20 with a drop set at the end to
fatigue the muscles break the fibers and
grow
okay so
four sets of 20 that's interesting so
that that's more for endurance and raw
strength yeah and also i think
close to the competition i'll pick the
intensity up and while there's no real
way to get significant gains in vo2 max
i think that lifting and just getting
used to mentally redlining
gets me kind of in competition shape
because a lot of times in jiu jitsu the
guys i'm training with
they're not on a technical level where
they can
physically exhaust me to the point where
i feel like i'm gonna die
but uh i get most of that like when i'm
wrestling because i'm not as efficient
in wrestling so i get a lot more tired
and lifting when you do like if you do
like four sets of 20 leg press to squat
and you go back and forth like you're
like about to die at the end and
i think i feel like gets me in the
mental habit of redlining before
competition but does muscle help you
it's like the actual mass of muscle
like this so i think being stronger will
always help in a combat will always help
yeah
to some degree it's not going to be
to a degree where
it overrides efficiency but i think that
they can't help being strong or can't
hurt being stronger well there's a bunch
of people who believe depending on the
sport that um
strength can quickly become uh
that have detrimental effects to
efficiency
i like it i agree with that certain kind
of
i mean if strength is purely is like
very cleanly purely applied to the exact
movements of the sport so in judo the
explosiveness you need is very difficult
to replicate in any kind of way except
by doing judo yeah i mean
for us uh
you always have to understand there's
only so much technique that can overcome
a certain amount of strength like if we
all try to fight a silverback gorilla
it's going to kill us
um but that that being said um i do
think that
like for example heavyweights are
usually the least technical because they
rely on their size and strength to beat
smaller people um but i think that if
you stay with this with the discipline
of doing everything very precise and i
train with a lot smaller people most of
the time so
i get out of the habit of using uh using
my strength um i think if you're very
precise with the way that you train i
think that the extra size and strength
can help you quick question how would
you fight a silverback gorilla
i mean is that which animal do you think
you can actually defeat that would be
impressive that most people would say
you can't
you know i actually
i don't have an an answer to this i
thought you got to say i want i want i
want to say that me and john had like a
four hour discussion on this one time
i'm like what would win bear or gorilla
and he went like this whole dissertation
about how like jaguar spin underneath
and like baron barambolo silverbacks and
kill them and like rip their rip their
artery and their legs out it was amazing
i guess okay so before we talk about
strength john let me ask you what
do you think people would be surprised
by if two animals faced one of them
would win and people wouldn't predict
that
so they would be surprised by the
effectiveness of certain animal at
fighting
in the whether it's in the forest in the
jungle so let's
slow down
so there's two animals of different
species fighting and most people would
pick
so for example the lion gets a lot of
credit for some reason i'm not exactly
sure why the king of the jungle
well
you know a lot of people told me that
the lion
for example the tiger can
be a lion yeah this is one of those
age-old debates
in grappling in fighting it feels like
some animals use
teeth
and some use
other parts of their body also like bear
actually i don't even know how they
they have extraordinarily powerful
and long claws and in addition they're
powerful biters as well so i wonder and
the same with the silverback
i don't know how much there i love that
we're having this discussion
we need joe rogan for this discussion i
think so yeah i think so um
so
uh
your your question has gone in in about
five different so it started with
strength uh and let's go back there
which is
do you think
for for an athlete and you just let's
let's stick to grappling
uh do you think strike strength is
helpful or detrimental uh i've always
believed that
two things
will
create whatever
whatever effectiveness you have in
grappling those are
your skill set and your attributes
and the best athletes are those who
excel in both
um
don't kid yourself if someone gets twice
as strong
by some kind of magic potion they're
going to be a more effective grappler if
someone gets
twice the level of endurance that they
had previously they will be a more
effective grappler these physical
attributes have a very important outcome
on the uh sorry a very important effect
upon the outcome of matches
um it's always a good thing to be
stronger it's always a good thing to
have better endurance it's always a good
thing to have better balance or whatever
other attribute you throw out there um
gordon's point was okay everyone agrees
on that but there's a problem in order
to build these things
you have to carve into other elements of
your training regimen and then it
becomes which becomes more important
increases in strength or increases in
skill
there comes a point where investing
in strength training starts to get
diminishing returns
i can't tell the difference between
someone who bench presses 300 pounds on
the mat versus someone who bench presses
400 pounds but that's a big difference
that's a hundred pound difference and
for an athlete to go from bench pressing
300 pounds to vulnerable that would
require a great deal of
of training effort and focus
but if i can't tell the difference when
i grapple and then why bother okay once
you get to a certain strength level
it doesn't really help that much to go
from a 400 pound bench press to a 450
pound bench press at that stage you're
really getting a diminishing returns on
your training investment
now skills on the other hand
experience far far less in terms of
diminishing returns every new skill
you develop
can translate
very very well into big increases in
performance look at the example of gary
tonen that we talked about earlier
investments in guillotine
made a significant improvement in his
effectiveness in matches and led
directly to some of his most important
victories
um
but if he had invested the same amount
of training time in developing a bench
press that was 25 pounds more than
previously that would have had no
outcome no
influence on the outcome of those
matches
so the question always becomes yep
everyone acknowledges that these
physical
uh
attributes are important and everyone
understands that becoming stronger or
fitter is a desirable thing and every
athlete should work on them the
interesting question becomes okay at
what point
do you start to say
i'm not going to be helped by further
increases
in in strength training or endurance
training
and my point with my athletes is in the
overwhelming majority of cases
if there's any kind of doubt invest more
heavily in skill training than attribute
training especially once you get to a
certain level on the attributes well the
interesting thing that i think you
should account for with strength
training
is um
there's instagram
there's the world
it's uh it seems to be more fun
to build muscle mass it's like an
addiction yeah people have
there's also economic elements too like
most people i i hate to say this but
it's true
most people are more concerned with
image
than function and
it's hard to sell
a fighter or a jiu-jitsu athlete who
doesn't look like one looks like fedor
yeah it's it's a tough sell now you can
do it in fighting and jujitsu because
ultimately it's about whose hand is
raised at the end of the match and you
could even use it as a selling point you
can be
a guy that doesn't look like you should
be winning but he is winning that is a
selling point but if you give most
people a choice between
looking like arnold schwarzenegger and
winning matches versus looking like
fader and winning matches most people
will select i wish i'd rather look like
arnold schwarzenegger and so most
athletes feel almost like an economic
compulsion to be in good shape and in
order to advance their marketability
yeah nike's not gonna sponsor fedor or
tank abbott
yeah tank habit
no
fatal maybe
but yeah yeah we need at the very top
there's there's something about
aesthetic
like image of strength and power it's
also an also a personal thing if you
look at yourself in the mirror do you
like what what you see you know what i
mean yeah do you find yourself
attractive you know what can you do to
make you look better and i think to me
to me it was something one of the
reasons i work out it's also for that
well i'm sure if fedor looks in the
mirror he says i look damn good today
it's also a genetic factor some people
you know it's harder for them i mean
yeah
all right so the question on training
you guys john gordon trained
often three times a day every day
um georgia had a different
like um
a different approach to training so like
what what is uh for no i don't mean that
in a kind of the opposite or something
it's just not every single day so
and obviously you are
legitimately at the very top
uh in terms of performance
accomplishment in in the field so what
have you learned about
what it takes to train
to become not just the lead but the best
well i i um
a lot of people when you say train they
they see training hard
i believe you need to be very constant
and very disciplined you need to train
but you don't need to train hard every
day that's what john taught me
um
for me is the nervous system sometimes i
feel if i
load it up too much it comes to a point
that you're
it's too much there is no no more
information that i can absorb
so
uh
and i do believe that it's something
that you can train to your the capacity
your capacity of being able to learn of
absorbing certain thing
and uh i did a lot of volume of training
but when i when i was getting ready for
a fight especially during sparring day
i like to do it quick because my when i
fight it's five round of five minute
i don't like to to spend um
[Music]
an hour or two hours in a gym because
i need to know how hard i can be
going for 25 minutes you know not for
two hours for 25 minutes
and my last fight
john and i we we
we were thinking of how could we
make me more
uh
of a better finisher you know more
opportunists
and then john i remember we when we were
training with gordon jake shill came
gary tony
my round of grappling were different
than if i would be training for uh
abu dhabi you know for for ebi or like
some like in grappling the round or
longer but
in a mixed martial art fight
it's very rare that you're gonna spend
more than
four minutes or four minutes and a half
on the ground it's it's very unlikely i
mean it couldn't can happen but
so
i
do you remember we did the around three
minutes we did all the round i was doing
were three minute round so it gives a
different
rhythm to the training it forced me to
be more opportunist
to be more of a finisher because i had
only three minutes to to do what i
needed to do
so if i if i see something i need to to
go for the kill right away i cannot be
too over patient you know what i mean
and it it serves me well in my last
fight and i think it that's a good
blueprint to follow
um when you're a mixed martial art
fighter i if i would if
the result was great and i think
maybe i should have done that before it
was a great great idea that we had not
to do uh be very careful and doing too
much volume
yeah just try to get out and then try to
focus on finishing and getting getting
out of it i mean
to build up your foundation i believe
you need a lot of volume but yeah when
you get ready for competition you need
some to be something that replicate
what you're gonna be facing what are you
what are we talking about what do you
think
like is there rest days five days a week
twice a day once a day is there any one
formula like that or no this this i
don't i do not believe in over training
i believe in under arrest
i believe
you can be under arrest and
people
always link that immediately to the
volume of their how much volume they
they train
which it could be something else how are
you feeling um emotionally are you are
you having uh
problems uh personal problem do you ever
have a hard time sleeping because you
have a like someone died or yeah i don't
know like
you hold money you're broke or what like
you know what i mean it could be
anything
uh there's something that can affect you
psychologically or emotionally
that made it in a way that you cannot
sleep well because you're your stress
your cortisol level is high
you're you know what i mean all these
factors need to be take taken in
consideration it's not only about the
volume of training people
always think
the volume of tr the training is not the
only thing
that can affect recuperation which is
not you know yeah he said to minimize
the amount of stress from all kinds of
factors it's a very stressful job to be
a professional
combat athlete whether you're a grappler
a boxer a kickboxer a fighter and you
need to be taking
as a
into account
is it more or less stressful than
marriage just kidding
uh next question uh
um
so
i don't know how to ask this question
given what george just said but you're
training three times a day
and finishing and what what have you
learned about what what brings out the
best in you as as the elite level
grappler um so over the recent years
i've actually changed it up a little bit
when i was
coming up through
from white to black belt
i felt that the volume was the most
important so it would be anywhere from
like three
to seven sessions a day
um
going from school to school from new
york to new jersey
and i think the volume was very
important to build the skills
where i just
didn't know how to move my body at
purple belt the way that i should um so
i think that building the skills
is uh is super important i think that
early on volume is very important
now that i already have the skills built
i think that acquiring more knowledge is
the most important
so i find that if i do
so many sessions a day like if i do
three sessions a day
i feel sometimes by the third session
i'm just like so mentally like there's
just there's so much information that's
went through my head the first two
sessions that i feel like i'm not even
there mentally on the third session
so i feel like doing less volume now but
having more mental clarity per session
is more important because i already have
the foundational skills acquired
so a lot of your training is almost like
just thinking
like learning a lot of it yeah so i'll
do like i mean our schedule has been
messed up since the pandemic because
henzo's got shut down and they were
using a french gym in puerto rico and
now we're using a french gym in our in
in austin but once we have our own
school we'll have a setup schedule where
i can pretty much just be there all day
long
right now i do like a lifting session in
the morning and then i'll come in and
help teach
at henzo so i'm there mentally i'm
seeing what's going on and i'm playing
around with ideas in my head
and then i'm there physically and very
sharp mentally for the competition class
during the 1pm session and then after
that i'll go home i'll rest and get
ready for the next day
what have you learned on seeing all
these different athletes is there a
a universal rule that applies or is it
um athlete specifically uh
first one thing you need to address is
that george and gordon play very
different sports with very different
athletic demands um gordon can be in
matches that range from anywhere from
six
minutes to
literally hours long
as a result uh the overall
uh pacing and intensity of matches is
massively different most obviously there
is no striking in gordon's sport
striking by its very nature is a much
more explosive physical action than
grappliness grappling is primarily an
isometric
kind of sport based around isometric
tension and endurance
georgia sport is
does feature a significant amount of
isometric tension but
the majority of it is based around
explosion so the physical demands of the
two sports are radically different
in addition the time of application is
is radically different george raised a
very interesting point his matches seem
long 25 minutes for a championship match
um but always understand that
a mixed martial arts fight at
championship level
if it goes the distance is really
five five minute matches each round
is a match in itself and that's exactly
how you're scored you're scored by who
wins the most matches over five matches
as a result the application of the
techniques especially the grappling
techniques has to be done at a certain
pace as george pointed out realistically
the maximum application time you're
going to get in most situations is
somewhere between
15 seconds and three minutes
even for a specialized grappler like
damien meyer there's still a significant
part of each round which is spent in
setup time to actually get the match to
the ground
um it's very likely that at some point
your opponent will stand up out of
grappling and you'll have to reinitiate
the entire process again so that even
for specialized grapplers you might be
spending only
three minutes out of a five minute round
uh
on the ground
and as a result you've got to get your
work done
in a very short time frame
gordon ryan
once it goes to the ground and it can go
to the ground because he chooses to sit
to the ground
may spend the entire match in ground
positions
um
as a result the matches have completely
different pacing and completely
different physical demands and the
preparation that the two athletes go
through will reflect that
uh
if george st pierre in training for
mixed martial arts becomes fatigued to a
point
where he's no longer physically
effective and able to defend himself the
consequences for that and mma training
can be very deep indeed
okay if you make a mistake in mixed
martial arts because you're fatigued and
tired and you take a full power
roundhouse kick to the head
that's some deep consequences a grappler
doesn't have to face that you can be
completely exhausted and grappling and
just sit in the bottom of the mountain
just practice just survival skills we
just don't get submitted from bottom out
and that can still be an effective
training session
complete and utter physical breakdown of
fatigue
can be
can end an athlete's career in mixed
martial arts
the consequences of training through
fatigue and mma are
potentially very deep and very
disturbing
the consequences of training through
complete physical exhaustion and
grappling aren't really that severe okay
you just tap whenever there's a problem
just tap
um
and so they're very very different
sports in the way you you prepare for
them
um and a grappling
athlete like gordon ryan we can take
many more liberties with physical
exhaustion and the amount of hours a day
you spend in training than you could
with a mixed martial arts athlete like
uh exhaustion as a
as a framework of learning so like from
a place of exhaustion
is there any benefit do they you want
you said being at the bottom of mouth
sort of understanding jiu-jitsu or
grappling somehow deeper because you're
physical absolutely absolutely because
then the only thing you have left in
your favor is your technique and then
you'll see how technical you are in
addition you'll get to explore realms
inside your mind that we don't spend a
lot of time in and you'll learn a lot
about yourself and your ability to
endure which will
have uh
potentially great benefits in similar
situations and matches yeah there's uh i
mean for me for a recreational person
getting
exhaustion allows you the great benefit
to experience what it feels like to
really get dominated
at an even greater frequency than you
otherwise would
and that there's something there there's
some animalistic thing that's very
unpleasant
and then afterwards it takes you to a
nice to a place of
like um humility and
and you get it forces you to rethink
life in positive ways
there's something about dominance it
gives me if you get dominated a few
times you can uh rationalize it somehow
you say okay well i've screwed this up
but when you're exhausted and you have
to do like 30 minutes or 40 minutes or
an hour of just being domi over and over
and over being submitted
it uh i don't know it's a very good
process for
for other avenues of life i find
i can't explain why because i'm i'm i'm
uh driving home
crying afterwards listening to bruce
springsteen but afterwards
you this
afterwards somehow you can think clearly
you can see clear about what is the
right path through life in all walks of
life like relationships work but also
the grappling
actually the grappling is the hardest
one to see what you have to do
it clarifies other avenues the humility
it removes the bullshit
it's like we see
the world through some kind of fog and
it just removes it and now you can see
things clearly i don't know what that is
i think i think it's important like you
mentioned to push yourself like
sometimes
to see
how far you can go because sometimes you
you can go further than what you think
and it can boost your confidence you
know you can push yourself through a
certain limit
and maybe you thought your limit were
was before that point and you pushed to
it
but
like john just mentioned
it's a risky thing to do in
striking because if you're exhausted
you're gonna get brain damage
and grappling it's
you know you tap if something wrong but
you can do it also in strength
conditioning i like to run track i do it
all the time and track and fill
it it helps me to
to to know myself better i think it's
important so it's a good point uh
it's like it's like the scrimmage
wrestling rounds we do it's like you
know if you stop moving
that you're gonna get scored on and you
know in your mind like there's no
mechanical reason
why i am why i should give up a score
here
but you're so exhausted that you're like
oh man this is terrible if i if i stop
moving i'm a pussy
if i don't stop move if i don't stop
moving i'm going to be twice as
exhausted when we actually do stand up
so it's an interesting game you have to
play inside your mind it's your pride
very often that that
keep you
that keep you
sharp you know what i mean because you
just want to lay down and beat it
because you're completely exhausted you
know
what do you think uh is the connection
john between this ego pride thing
martial arts and actual violence in our
with our ancestors
do you think
you ever plug into that you think
there's echoes of something going on
there or like you mentioned you have
flaws and demons
is it
deep in there somewhere do you think
we're struggling with those demons
yeah
you'll need to patch up your question a
little bit though it's going in several
different directions wow that was
not only am i being dominating jiu jitsu
i mean dominating in interviewing no no
no no no no no no no
like okay now we interview you yeah but
you you went down the evolution
i mean do you think
do you um
i don't mean just the line between what
is what is martial arts and what is
violence i mean there there seems to be
a gray area
that connects us to
the the evolutionary ancestors
absolutely yeah yeah i mean i i think
there's a deep
recognition in all of us
that
um and this is
the evidence for this is is so easy to
uh to see in in daily life um
if you're walking down the street
and suddenly you hear a commotion and
two people are fighting
you will see
literally everyone on that street stop
whatever they're doing
and watch the fight
humans
are fascinated
by violence
and you've got to ask yourself why and
of course it's a recognition
that for a significant part of our
evolutionary history
violence was one of the most important
elements
in human existence
as much as we curse it as much as we
talk badly of it um
the juxtaposition between humans social
nature and their their need to for each
other to get along and to express
love amongst the
the various members of a given community
there are
disputes between humans that can't be
resolved and ultimately
throughout history violence has been the
number one method of
conflict resolution
um
for better or for worse and there's a
recognition in all of us that
this is where we come from
and there's a reason why
combat sports have this
thing where
people will watch them and they might
even be repulsed by them but they find
it difficult to take their eyes from it
and
[Music]
i do believe that most combat athletes
carry that sense
of their
even if it's on a subconscious level
this kind of
belief that
this is who we are um george you use the
word pride and i believe that's a big
part of it i believe that
um
most
humans have this sense of self-worth and
pride which they're willing to fight for
and uh if it gets crossed by someone
else they're willing to stand that
some people will stand more early and
some people could be pushed further back
but everyone's got that line
beyond which they won't be pushed
and there's some kind of deep
recognition in all of us that we have
that somewhere within us no matter how
hard we try to bury it or what have you
and that's why i believe there will
always be this eternal
interest in combat sports
um
now
i don't believe that most people today
have any kind of respect for
unrestricted violence or
non-consensual violence
um i think most people most good people
are repulsed by that now i'm
i'm sure that as humanity
improves out into the future that will
become more and more widespread
but that's not to say we we can't
exercise these these
old evolutionary demons inside of us and
um
and
sometimes there are just disputes
between different people different
cultures different nations where
ultimately it's going to come to
into into a shoving match and that will
degenerate further into violence there's
always going to be
a need for humans to be able to
to uh express themselves
through violent methods and to use
physical force to get to their their
goals and objectives
um
our
our need as humans is always to find a
balance between
the two forces of conflict and
cooperation
we need cooperation because humans
isolated from each other
more or less helpless and useless
in order to
advance human communities need to build
and grow
and so that sense of cooperation
occurs in most of our daily lives
but there will also be irresolvable
conflicts where physical force has to be
used to form a resolution and so most
human beings find themselves
swinging like a pendulum between
conflict and cooperation
and
and that is something which
really gives birth i think to combat
sports because sorry
well i really have to ask you about this
then there's a guy in harvard
uh named richard rangham and there's a
lot of people that believe this he wrote
this book that um
basically there's a lot of people
studying is what happened how do we get
from apes to humans like what was the
magic thing right a lot of people
attributed to fire and ability to cook
meat
there's a lot of different theories
so
he actually um
his theory
how do i describe this is basically that
that the beta males one
that the the
the
apes that were able to cooperate
so you you the way you develop
cooperation is that there's a big bad
leader
that uh the the alpha male
that you can only
um knock off their throne if you
cooperate and so we built big tribes
that just excelled the cooperation by
practicing the overthrowing the leader
and so
and anytime an alpha male would rise up
they would get we would we would uh
develop our skill further and further of
cooperation
and so we're all just beta males uh the
descendants of beta males that's his
kind of theory that cooperation is
fundamental and it's so distinct to the
the rest of the
neighboring animal kingdom
so fascinating i i wonder what you think
about this tension of violence and
cooperation how important is this
cooperation to the core of yeah uh
if you you can look at it in the uh in a
given training room um
jujitsu and mixed martial arts is solo
sports a solo athlete steps into the
cage or steps onto the mat
but all of your preparation is done in a
cooperative training environment with
many peers and
as much as it's an individual sport
all of your preparation is done as part
of a group
um
there's a sense in which that's
an interesting metaphor for humanity
itself everything we do in life we do
alone but we grow up in this given
community and and what have you
um
with regards to the whole
alpha male beta male thing um
humans are
it's true this fellow is correct we you
know
most
primates do have very strongly defined
alpha males who
rule the roost and determine the entire
direction of the um
uh
of of
the community they build around
themselves
humans on the other hand
don't have
an alpha male in that strict biological
sense of someone who's responsible for
the next generation dominates all the
female population etc
physically dominates but we do on the
other hand have our own version of alpha
males as far as we have political and
sociological leaders who have a
disproportionate impact on the direction
of a community
so was the cooperation allowed us to
to have a greater scale of hierarchy
with the alpha male on top or the alpha
creature on top yeah yeah
no that's a fascinating theory
okay in in nature were were very weak as
a species so we needed to cooperate
cooperate in order to
to evolve that i think
made us uh the
top of the food chain if you look at um
humanity in in nature
really the two things that seem to
more than anything else determine
whether or not a given human community
will be
successful in a predatory world on
numbers and technology
okay the more your numbers increase and
then the higher the technology of the
weapons and support systems you have
around you the more successful you'll be
in a predatory world um
so it's not clear that just
killing off the idea of an alpha male
was the the single biggest thing
the rise of technology uh and the growth
of community
after the imposition of language these
are other things that would have been
very very important factors and and
humanity's rise
george you made an interesting point if
you look at humans
just the raw material of humans we're
we're fucking pathetic
in a predatory animal kingdom we're just
the absolute bottom of the food chain
we don't have a single
effective
weapon other than better than average
endurance that's about it
but you put us in a community
who can talk to each other with language
and give us the time
to come up with technological advances
such as metals
and suddenly a human
will go from
no combat effectiveness in the animal
kingdom to a a human armed with a simple
metal tip spear can kill
damn near any animal in the uh
in the animal kingdom and working as a
group
i'll beat your silver back you know how
oh i'll fight him in a deep water pool
because he cannot swim so i don't have
to touch him
you'll drown and i i can't get him into
the pool you know why because someone
told me because if we live in a
community someone told me that
information so i know he passed it on to
me
yeah
he taught you
well you have to convince him too
you have to somehow convince him to join
you in the pool which is very difficult
yeah yeah exactly it's a very problem
very very difficult um
from a
technical perspective john you've looked
at
mixed martial arts fighting in general
and grappling what's the difference
between fighting and grappling
that's something i'd love to
ask all of you maybe john you can start
like um well uh
when you talk about fighting you mean
unrestricted
uh mma tough time fighting yeah well
this is funny you said unrestricted mma
type mma type fighting so there's
there's there's stream fighting yep yeah
there's mma fighting and then there's
grappling that's really the sport of
grab you're saying okay what's the
difference between mma and grappling yes
okay um see that would have been a much
better question yes um well the uh uh
the single
when you talk about grappling you're
talking about jujitsu rules or
yeah i mean you could maybe also mention
different rule sets that somehow
fundamentally chan challenge that
changed the sport you know
in the sport of mixed martial arts
uh
you've got two
ways to inflict damage on the human body
you've you've got kinetic energy which
is done through striking
kicking knees elbows fists
and you've got
isometric tension used along the lines
of
lever and fulcrum
which can be used for strangulation and
joint braking
in grappling you lose one of those
you're no longer allowed to hurt your
opponent with kinetic energy you can do
it accidentally through a throw but
you're not allowed to just
you know knock someone out with a throw
in most grappling spots it can happen
but it's relatively rare and it's it's
not encouraged by the rule set
so um cyborg with uh
yeah he got close um uh
so
there's a sense in which in mixed
martial arts you got twice as many
problems to deal with
and
and they occur
in
a much shorter time frame the single
biggest difference between grappling
technique as a weapon
in human combat versus striking
technique is time
grappling technique takes a huge amount
of time to apply
okay
the great advantage of grappling
technique is certainty of outcome once
you get there
it takes a huge amount of time to
set up a takedown
physically take them down
work their way work your way towards a
dominant position culminating in your
opponent's back and then apply a
stranglehold that's a long chain of
events
as opposed to
a strong punch or kick which can take a
quarter of a second an application from
start to finish and the match is over
um
and so
there's a sense in which uh grappling is
is
it's
it's fighting for the patient and the
calculating
whereas striking
is much more for
in this short time frame where
everything gets done and
in the blink of an eye there's a sense
also in which grappling is a much more
forgiving sport you can make a terrible
mistake
end up in a terrible position and still
fight your way out and win
in mixed martial arts it's
much much less forgiving
if you get hit and stunned your chances
of recovery are minimal you're going to
get swarmed on and unless it's right at
the end of the round you it's very very
hard to recover from getting hit and
swarmed on
um
so there's a sense in which
the biggest difference between them is
time for application of technique
in mixed martial arts it's incredibly
unforgiving in terms of time even the
smallest error can have the deepest
consequences
in grappling you can make massive errors
and still come back and win
um
grappling will typically be won
in a much higher percentage case by the
more skilled and conditioned grappler
whereas there is
much more of what they call a punches
chance
in mixed martial arts where
there's a much higher likelihood of a
lesser athlete defeating a greater
athlete in mma than there is in
grappling simply because of time of
application of the techniques even the
smallest period of inattention in mma
and the match is over gordon ryan could
fall asleep for 30 seconds
have his opponent mounted on and wake up
and finish him five minutes later it's
not going to happen in mma
okay so the the stakes so much higher
you could do a lot of damage in a very
small amount of time and just the
dynamic the temporal dynamics of how
things happen is very different
everything you'll see will be a
reflection of that then you go further
into things like rule sets
in the sport of grappling if gordon ryan
comes out and sits down
in the middle of the mat his opponent
must follow him to the ground and engage
in mixed martial arts
if you come to the center of the cage
and sit down
the other guy can just walk away from
you they're completely
oriented in different directions
grappling is ground-centered mma is
typically standing centered at the
beginning of every round you have to
start standing again if i disengage from
a ground grappling situation stand up
and walk away from my opponent my
opponent must follow me up to the feet
in grappling it's the exact opposite if
i sit to the ground my opponent must
follow me to the ground it's written
into the rule set and so one is
inherently ground oriented and one is
inherently standing oriented so it's
more it's more difficult to dictate
where the fight happens in mixed martial
arts yes you have to be able to impose
where the fight is whereas in grappling
you can simply choose it
so
george what is uh your sense of the the
difference in terms of how you
approached it
uh between the two sports so you also
are a student of wrestling and grappling
so in preparing for fights
what parts of grappling purely the sport
that you have to leave behind
well i i uh
i'm very lucky i had the opportunity to
i i trained with i consider the best
mentor trainer i ever ever had and i
have
some the best grapplers that i can train
with they were they were there to help
me through my career
so
for my training is
of course because i do not dedicate as
much time in one specific area it's hard
to be
you know
a world-class athlete and that in in
only one particular area always
for me
like the idea to be more well-rounded to
be very competent in every of those
areas striking grappling uh
takedowns and and all those areas then
being just
very good at one
and not as good at as as others you know
because i like the idea that
it gives me more option when i fight
someone
i can
mold myself to become the perfect
nemesis to
that person better if i'm more
well-rounded
if i do not have those well-rounded
skill
i don't have that option you know
you have less tools to work with less
technology
what about you gordon what um
you know what do you think is very
distinct about grappling in the way you
approach it versus fighting i think most
of it was covered but i think that
though the one one of the big things is
the fact that when you're looking at mma
you have a pretty general agreed-upon
and unified rule set where
if you look at ufc versus bellator there
they have slight differences in the
rules maybe um but it's pretty much the
same thing whereas in grappling you have
ebi rules then you have adcc rules you
have ib gf rules you have no time limit
rules
and
each rule set will play to the skills of
different athletes
if you have if you do adcc rules
it generally is slightly biased towards
wrestlers or if they can stall to the
overtime
and then hit a takedown in the overtime
and not really do any jujitsu but they
score a takedown they're going to win
whereas if you have like an ebi for
example you have to finish the guy in
regulation or you start in a jujitsu
position with your back taken or
in an arm bar
so i think that you have
certain rule sets that play in the favor
of certain athletes um and certain
athletes can win in one rule set but
then they just have no chance of winning
in the other like when i fought yuri the
first time in ebi i beat him in ebi the
chances of me beating him on that night
under an adcc rule set were probably
pretty low um when i fought leandra lowe
under an adcc rule set he beat me that
day but the chances of him beating me in
the same day in an ebi rules that were
like next to zero
so i think it's interesting that
in mma you have one unified rule set
which have small differences but they're
all generally the same
and in jiu jitsu you have a wide variety
of different rule sets that
have
biases towards
certain athlete skill sets you mentioned
andrew lowe
i gotta ask you again about adcc
you have lost very very few times in
your career
uh one
i mean this is the same is true for
george and uh the only person who has
ever submitted you is felipe pena black
belt yeah at blackboard
he is a dcc world champion multiple time
ibj jjf guillotine world champion
you may face some adcc or elsewhere in
the future
um
will you beat him
uh yes i mean i have to say yes right
but uh
i fought him initially when i first got
my black belt that i fought him a year
later so 2016 and 2017 um and despite
what people remember about the match
and whenever people talk about it like
oh yeah the guy who strangled gordon but
no one remembers that the first match
was like a 45 minute war
um and then the second match with the
full 20 minutes of adcc and if i didn't
get my back taken in like the last
minute and a half two minutes it would
have went into an overtime that could
change the outcome of the match
i think that if you look at felipe's
performances especially nogi
specifically nogi since then it looks
like he's almost gotten worse whereas
since that match
uh in 2017
uh the only match i lost after that was
against vinny magalesh by my points and
uh
i'm on like a 55
match win streak um over the course of
four years um winning all the major
tournaments nogi and uh felipe since
that match i think is like five and two
uh nogi
and he's lost his last two match matches
one was convincingly where he was
dominated by andre and one was by
submission so i don't think that he's
progressed nearly as fast if anything he
looks like he's worse than he was when
he beat me in 2017 based on his previous
performances
that being said i know he's going to
come in
training very hard for this one and he's
going to be prepared but i just don't
think
that
in terms of technical ability he's
anywhere near my level and
he was much bigger than me
both times we fought um the first time
he was much bigger than me the second
time he was one-way class above me
so now there's not going to be an
advantage in
technicality and it's also not going to
be a physicality advantage so i think
he's just going to be beat everywhere
this is uh this is a good example of the
scientific response to a um
to a comment to a question yeah so he's
not um
that that's a match you're you're not
deeply concerned with
in terms of the set of opponents because
you have and you will be facing a lot of
really difficult
that's actually in my opinion one of the
easier matches because of the fact that
we're relatively the same size
um if i show up at 230 pounds like a lot
of the guys are
260 270 plus so that extra weight does
make a difference i think out of that
entire bracket
felipe is probably going to be the one
of the easiest matches because of the
fact that i can easily take him down and
if i take him out i'm going to pass his
guard whereas i feel like the other guys
because they're so much bigger and
they're very cagey
it may take me a while to actually
take them to the ground
and get on top of them and i think it
may be they may be longer drawn out
matches because of the fact that they're
so much bigger and stally it's hard to
take them down but felipe is relatively
my size and as wrestling is atrocious so
and i've already taken them down in the
last adcc match so i'm pretty sure i can
just easily put them down pass them and
then finish them
well i'm not sure what response i was
expecting but uh that was
that was phrased beautifully um
we talked about the thiago alves fight
that george had
and john barred up in class yesterday
i believe but the point is we're talking
about wrestling and i think that that's
a fascinating fight that um
there's an incredible display of
strategy of skill of heart
uh george could you maybe
talk about that by john maybe too what
lessons you gained from that fight
go ahead it was your fight not mine
well oh maybe it also tell what happened
in terms of your injury i think they're
around oh yeah um
so i was fighting tiago alves and uh in
the third round i um
tear my adductor muscle
um it happened when i was on the bottom
and he i think he pushed my knee down
tried to pass my guard and i heard a pop
i don't know what i think you were going
for an umba
you were on his back you switched to
armbar and he cleared the leg by pushing
on your leg and you went in with the
pre-existing injury and it tore
yes and and it it it got worse and and i
heard a pop i don't know what it was but
i know it really hurt so i came back
standing up and
there's a
famous video one that goes on the
internet about when i go back in the
corner and i tell my coach i'm like i
don't know what it is i think i tore my
my my adductor muscle and greg jackson
is like i don't care hit him with your
groin
i was very worried because i wasn't pain
but i didn't i did not know what what i
had
so i didn't know the gravity of it and
it it plays on your mind so but i had to
bite down my mouthpiece and finish the
fight you know i knew i was ahead on the
on the scorecard and now i need to
finish finish strong so what was your
strategy there in terms of strikes in
terms of wrestling so he's exceptionally
difficult opponent to take down yeah
well at first i i i knew i would had a
good jab a good you know to stay always
from the outside you know fight him from
the outside and use my footwork because
he was like a tank he was much bigger
and much
stronger than me
and uh
i didn't want never wanted to stay in
front of him so it was all the way out
or all the way in and when i was coming
all the way in it was with my uh
proactive or reactive takedown
where i
myself initiated the takedown by uh
using a distraction like a jab to make
it is
and goes up and then i go with a
single double leg
or uh to react like baiting him for him
to come hit me and then
while he's coming to hit me i go change
level and
that's the way i like to take my
opponent down you know some guys for
example like like uh cabbie for example
he is very good at at
bringing his opponent to defense and use
chain wrestling to to take his opponent
down i find that for me for myself i
specialize more into
explosive take down in the center of the
actagon because i found it
more economical for me
what did you see you were you're
commenting john about the wrestling
those that was quite interesting i mean
also can you generally comment on the
fact that george saint pierre who don't
i don't think you wrestled
i wrestle i started saying i was 19
years old but i wrestled some very good
russian guys so they took me underneath
their wing and but
my ability to cover distance
come from karate does not come from
wrestling wrestling is how i finish once
i get the leg how i finish the takedown
so the the timing and the movement and
the explosion required for the squad
yeah
i think an important distinction to make
here is um one which
george
uh made throughout his career and i
believe george you were the greatest
innovator in mma history
with regards to this
and this is uh
the creation of what george calls shoot
boxing which is the amalgamation of
striking technique in george's case
mostly karate because that was his
martial arts background
into grappling and in particular
takedowns
uh
when most people say
so-and-so has better wrestling
in mixed martial arts
you have to be very careful what they
mean by this there are many highly
credentialed wrestlers
in the early days of mixed martial arts
who went in and truly struggled to hit a
takedown
now these are very very good wrestlers
who in a wrestling match would easily
put down their opponent
but
in a striking situation where the ranges
are completely different and the setups
are entirely different the stances are
different even the
the overall conditions are different
you're no longer wearing shoes people
underestimate just what an impact it is
for a wrestler to take the shoes off you
lose like 20 of your forward drive the
minute you take off the shoes
all of these make massive differences
in whether or not you're going to be
able to even make contact with an
opponent for a takedown
as george pointed out the true value of
wrestling in mma is finishing the
takedown once you've established contact
but that's only about 20 percent of the
action of a of a mixed martial arts
takedown 80 percent of it is an
understanding range rhythm set up
opportunity
etc etc
and
that's not part of wrestling at all you
even the overall conditions are
completely different in the sport of
wrestling you start at very close range
in a very bent over stance and you're
expected to wrestle for in international
styles for three minutes at a time
um now suddenly you're completely
upright
uh
and
you're not wearing shoes all the
conditions the the the rhythm and speed
of it is different the counters are
completely different it's just an
entirely different animal
and so george was an early recognizer of
this
and started to put the emphasis on
direct training for shoot boxing
in addition to wrestling so he practiced
with very good wrestlers in the montreal
wrestling club
just the sport of wrestling and that's
what made him very good at finishing
takedowns but it was in a shoot box in
training
which he himself largely developed
remember george started at a time when
mma was pretty damn young
and um
he we were when when you entered the
sport of mixed martial arts george it
wasn't even allowed on tv
like it was completely banned it was in
his country it was physically banned uh
they had to fight on indian reservations
and oh and this is way back in the wild
west days of mma
and so as a as a young developing
athlete he had to
more or less do this by himself if you
ever want to hear some incredible
stories talk about teenage george st
pierre
had a coach who used to make him
put on boxing gloves now he was 16 17
years old and just put him on a hardwood
floor against a professional boxer who
was in his
late 20s at the peak of his career and
he said george you're not allowed to
punch you just got to take him down
while he tries to knock you out
and there was a it was crazy like
darwinism yeah he was like
it's like you're gonna you're gonna
adapt or you're gonna die
literally and he could have been very
bad but it turns out to be great it
admitted
but there's a sense here in which
people think oh you know what determines
your takedown ability in mma is your
wrestling skill
that
your wrestling skill will determine your
finishing ability on takedowns but
there's so much more to it than that
um
whenever people say you know what what
are the broad
elements that determine the outcome of a
mixed martial arts fight okay on the
broadest possible level i always give
the same three things
the athlete who can dominate the pace
of the match
the athlete who can dominate the
direction of the match and the athlete
who can dominate the setups will win the
vast majority of fights they're in
those three things
the direction the pace and the setups
you dominate all three of those
you're going to win 90 of the matches
you're in
um george could always dominate the
direction of the fight because he could
stop the other guy taking him down
and he could impose his own takedowns at
any point in a match so whether it went
to ground or whether it stayed standing
was always up to him
george had the most sophisticated array
of setups into takedowns
that i've personally ever witnessed
the whole distinction between reactive
and proactive takedowns came very early
in george's career and he excelled in
both most people tend to favor one or
the other
most athletes have a very hard time
imposing
their setups on an opponent and as a
result they have to use
the cage as a crutch for their for their
setups where they just pull someone
towards the cage and then put them down
on the cage george is one of the very
few people who was equally good against
the cage or in the open and could do so
in both proactive and reactive
situations
and the scary thing is that as good as
all of you saw him look in the octagon
anyone who knows george
as a coach will tell you he was twice as
good as that in the gym where he would
often go against people's several weight
divisions above himself i could sit here
all day i won't name names but i always
laugh when people say oh this is the
greatest
uh pound for pound guy of all time and
i've personally seen george
take that guy down and crush him in the
gym and i can't say anything because
it's rude to talk about that in public
because it's just training but i've seen
george go with people all the way up to
light heavyweights some of the greatest
names in the history of the sport put
them down
advanced position on the ground and
dominate them in training it's it's what
he did during that time i uh george i
gotta say i deeply admire
many of the things i saw you do not just
in the octagon but
in training as well it's um
the the the impact that you had
on
uh
the degree to which
takedowns where we use this sport was
absolutely inspirational that's why one
of one of the reasons why i always say
you're one of the only athlete i ever
met who taught me
more than than i taught you because you
opened my eyes to a whole new world of
of shoot boxing and how
i grew up in a time when uh you i was
laughing before when you talked about
sugar ray leonard i was a kid watching
that match and
i grew up in a time where there was
boxing and there was kickboxing and then
i came to america and i learned
grappling and
this young man here was the innovator
when it came to the integration of the
two
well then i have to ask because george
sits here uncomfortably being
complimented
um
if george st pierre and khabib
nurmagomedov face each other in their
prime who wins
cool that's it very very loaded
questions how yeah like what are the
different trajectories you see
okay how does each one win in your view
if one wins or the other one with what
happens interestingly they're actually
very similar in size despite the fact
that
george fought it welterweight and could
be fought at a lightweight if you
actually see them stand next to each
other they're of similar height khabib's
actually a little more thick set
yeah he's actually heavier than you
walking around um
george walked around most of his career
between 188 and
191 pounds
and so khabib actually would ironically
have
a kind of size and strength advantage uh
despite being in the lighter weight
division that's been the general trend
as mma
has grown is that athletes will come
further down and wait to make weight
divisions um
uh
i believe that george has the best
takedowns in history
uh in the open in the cage
um khabib was his great strength was
using the fence
to facilitate takedowns
um
khabib's
other great strength was not only his
ability to take people down but to keep
people down for extended periods of time
both of them were
powerful strikers on the ground and
could do terrible damage to opponents
on the floor so
they're both very similar in that regard
khabib was mostly a
puncher from the back george is mostly
an elbow from the front
but both of them could lay waste to
opponents
with strikes on the floor
um both of them were highly competent
with submissions on the ground there
weren't submission specialists in the
sense of someone like gordon ryan but
they were
certainly um
no slouches with submission holds
um
yeah it's just a fascinating idea so
it's almost like who gets the first take
down yeah i do believe
that
they could probably stand up on each
other
i don't think either one of them would
be able to hold the other down for a
whole round
um both of them are notoriously
difficult people to hold down so i don't
think that whoever won the first date
and wins the match i don't think it's
like that
um i do believe that george would hold a
decisive advantage in striking and
distance management um the few times
that khabib did look shaky is
when he
could be was either advancing forward
menacingly but when he had to
to fight moving backwards
there was a definite asymmetry between
his ability to fight going forwards
which is very good and his ability to
fight going backwards which was
noticeably
weaker
um george would often fight both
forwards and backwards and with thiago
elvis fight
most of the standing time yeah was was
going backwards
um
that's
probably the the single biggest
difference between that two athletes and
skill level would be in the standing
position
um
on the ground uh
khabib slight edge and takedowns on the
fence george slight edge and takedowns
in the center
um ability to inflict damage on the
floor roughly equal ability to fight off
the back roughly equal
ability to stand up from bottom roughly
equal it's a very very hard match
in terms of the biggest
difference in skill level is going to be
in a standing position and so it would
come down to
um that doesn't necessarily mean that
khabib would lose in the standing
position he might just push it to the
fence and just use match tactics where
he
kept the fight on the fence for
significant periods of time
and you can win rounds in that fashion
so it's a match that could go either way
both of them are uh absolutely the best
that you'll ever see i've always
believed the three greatest mixed
martial artists i've ever seen in my
life were
george st pierre khabib nurmagomedov and
jon jones
the three of them have some interesting
similarities and differences
all three
beat every single person they ever faced
i i know john jones officially has a
loss by dq but no one believes that was
a loss um
uh george does have two losses but he
uh
defeated both athletes decisively uh in
rematches gabe did it by having no
losses
interestingly all three athletes have at
least one match which is controversial
in terms of who won and who lost um
jon jones has had several matches which
could have gone either way on the
judge's scorecard khabib's uh
match against grayson thibault could
have gone either way uh george's match
with hendrix was could have gone either
way they all had matches that they won
which people would dispute the outcome
so that was a similarity between the
three of them
um
all three of them
have had the ability
to dominate the direction of fights when
they want it to go down it goes down
when they don't want it to go down it
doesn't
um
that's why i put such a heavy emphasis
on that idea that a mixed martial arts
champion must be able to determine the
direction of a fight it's the single
most important attribute that they all
must have
um
as to which of the three
is the best it's going to come down to
criteria
you you can't pull them apart
which answer you give as to which of
those three is the greatest of all time
will come down to the criteria that you
use
okay is it being undefeated
um
is it the amount of time was it the
quality of the opponents that they had
if you do it by quality of opponents i
think you probably have to give it to
george if you do it by
um uh measured dominance through not
being defeated and it has to go to
compete
arguably you could say the same with jon
jones since his won
losses
by dq but then you could also say the
last three or four fights that john's
had haven't been the same measure of
dominance as as we saw previously so
ultimately
you've got those three guys in my
opinion and which one you choose will
come down to who it says more about who
you are as a viewer than it does about
the respective level of the athletes you
could throw a blanket over them the
three of them are just that good and um
uh and which one you select will
probably say more about who you are as a
viewer than it does about them
as athletes
i i believe the best fighter the goat is
not even born
because
the generation
that is
present
benefit of a huge advantage
they have knowledge technology that we
didn't have before
and we had the the knowledge that the
other generation did not have before
but
i believe the best the goat is not even
born yet as good as they are today i
think you
in sport where you can measure the
performance uh track and field
olympic lifting you can you know someone
is better than the other one because you
can measure the performance fighting
it's all subjective we always debate of
who would win
but
10 the tendency in sport
is that
performance get better i don't think
it's because the athlete necessarily get
better is because they have access to
better technology knowledge
and they learn from their predecessor
as long as that knowledge is transferred
forward
something tells me that the greatest of
all time lived a few thousand years ago
and it's forgotten some of the greatest
warriors like you imagine the kind of
grapplers we just the history didn't
record them
there could have been small tribes where
they developed many ufcs and they've
developed the kind of things we you have
to think of like uh the gracies just a
small family was able to develop so much
so quickly i i often
as this this discussion with johnny i
think it's very important like to
mention i asked you very several times
like what would happen if we would take
a fighter of modern days facing the
champion of pancreation this is an
interesting question and you you brought
something incredible good point and and
people don't don't realize it you know
yeah no i think um one of the great
tragedies of martial arts history is our
loss of
uh the historical records of pancration
like most of what we know was uh from
what i'm told is actually lost in the
fires of the library of alexandria and
we're left with only a pitiful amount of
information on uh pancreation managers
but what we do know is that there was a
very
large
uh participation in the sport and that
it was
widely considered the most popular
sport in the ancient olympics and that
it was represented in the ancient
olympics for many hundreds of years plus
a long period of time before its
introduction into the ancient olympics
and so the development time
that it may have had would have been
very significant it
uh as far as we know most of the
development would have been in the major
greek city states for
uh literally hundreds of years of
development um given its prestige as an
olympic sport then the best athletes
would have been doing it some of the
sharpest minds that we know of
in human history were involved in the
sport
um plato the great philosopher
was a pancreaticist in his youth in fact
his name plato is a nickname
platus is like plate it means broad or
big guy like
the big guy and um
uh he spoke often about pain creation
and his written works
um imagine people with the intelligence
of plato
thinking about
grappling technique for hundreds of
years in the most popular olympic sport
of that time
significant numbers of people with
financial backing as city-states put
great prestige upon olympic success they
would have funneled athletes in
bought in the best coaches and they had
that for many hundreds of years like
it's quite conceivable that the best
pancreasian athletes were of the
absolute first quality
and um uh it it's
it's so sad to think we'll never know
what was their skill level and
it's interesting to think about what
kind of techniques that developed
whether
there's stuff we haven't discovered yet
in class you were talking about the most
effective
takedown strategy in wrestling in
collegiate wrestling so maybe let me ask
first because we offline talked about
this too
what is the highest percentage
submission in grappling overall you have
to go with the rare naked strangle
strangles from the back
if you look at most tournaments in most
rule sets
it has success across all rule sets um
all weight divisions
all body types it doesn't require any
kind of specific physical advantage such
as height
in order to be effective
it works equally well in both fighting
and grappling um
it will work regardless of how
physically and mentally tough your
opponent is okay a heel hook is a very
high percentage technique in in modern
day competition but if your opponent
simply makes up his mind that he's not
going to tap and is willing to take the
physical damage
it won't result in the end of a match uh
a stranglehold by
contrast will always end the match
regardless of your opponent's mental
toughness
so
um i believe it's fair to say that at
the end of the day the single most high
percentage
method of uh submitting people and
grappling is a rare naked strength so
when you look at an athlete maybe gordon
you can speak to this like what
what's the best uh you mentioned gary
with the guillotine
what's the best submission to really
invest in is it the rear nicky choke
to really invest your development like
understanding the entirety of the system
that leads into that
i think that i mean you have to do them
all obviously but if i had like one
submission that i would only one
submission i could pick for the rest of
my life it would definitely be a rear
naked
can you explain maybe some of the actual
technical details of why that's the case
well as john spoke about they're
different in joint locks whereas
you don't have to tap you can just let
your leg break and then keep going with
the strangle there's there's no uh
there's none of that um and then it's
just an inherent
advantage you have being behind someone
um whereas if you go for an armbar you
stop you start from top mount and you're
facing the guy and then you put them
down and you're not directly behind them
with leg locks you're facing the guy
whereas when you're on someone's back
you have them in a pin where you can
your chest to back you have a body
triangle and you you're pinning the guy
in place you can't explode out he can't
grease his way out most of the time
and there's an inherent advantage you
have being behind them due to the fact
that we're poorly set up to deal with
threats behind us
so would you say that's the most
dominant position jiu jitsu like more
than mount
more than yeah
side control more than i think uh if you
look at most matches historically
most guys who get stuck in positions for
long amounts of time are guys that
they're back taken um if you get
an explosive guy from bottom mountain he
can bridge and he can off bound to you
and lock half guard maybe and then work
back to guard but someone locks a body
triangle on your back that's where you
see most guys getting pinned in place
for long amounts of time
was uh was the body triangle like a well
understood thing
was that an invention at some point like
it's just as a system as a as a um
perhaps some of your your listeners can
correct me on this but i believe there
was a technique banned in judo called
doji main which involved crossing feet
or locking a triangle around the
abdominals from the back and it was
banned in judo i believe because
of intestinal injuries which occurred in
the early developmental days of of of
judo
and
in the modern era when i first began
jujitsu body triangles were relatively
rare they were not a standard part of
class
um
and sometime around the late 1990s early
2000s people started to realize hey this
is a stronger method of control
um
it
it greatly increases the amount of
control you have of your of your
opponent's hips and torso over regular
hooks
uh it's not for all athletes it's
difficult for most people who are of
shorter thicker statue
to
employ on on on big people if your
opponent is very broadly built through
the stomach it's almost impossible to
apply
and so because it can't be applied by
all people it tends not to be taught
much at beginner level
and
so as a result it was always seen as a
kind of a specialist move for taller
athletes at a higher level of
competition rather than a broad-based
move for everyone or every body type in
every class to employ so it just didn't
get emphasized that much but in top
level competition now i think you would
see that it's very apparent that the
vast majority of athletes whenever they
have the opportunity or a choice between
body triangle and regular rear mounts
the majority of modern athletes would
choose a body triangle
so we also had this conversation about
wrestling and maybe george you can
comment on like what's the uh the
highest percentage
not statistically speaking perhaps
that's also interesting as john talked
about but just for you
in terms of mastery of the takedown
what's what's the best way to take down
a human being
in wrestling well i i
personally for me it depends
for every fighter are different they
they have a different set of skill
for me i
when i look someone
want to bring down a tree
a big strong high tree
he cut it from the base
so
the legs that that's what we stand
on so it was to attack the leg but is it
single leg double leg is it we talked
about like uh well there's also the the
john smith low single
actually i don't even know if that's
applicable for jiu jitsu at all
you can use it but it runs the problem
with submission halls yeah it's it's not
impossible to use but without shoes and
in a situation where there's a whole
plethora of submission holds in the
scoring that
it's a little more difficult to use you
know
it is interesting something being a high
percentage in terms of effectiveness
tells a story you're saying that every
athlete is different but
if it's more effective for most people
i mean it's interesting it's it's
interesting what john talked about is
that
the highest percentage thing
is actually
in collegial wrestling that he was
talking about is
on the defensive side so blocking your
takedown and spinning around to the to
the back
so that's an interesting idea then also
there's all of these kind of going in
for a single and switching to a double
or
wizard position and doing knee tap like
there's all these kinds of combinations
that seem to be effective when you look
at the statistics and it seems like
there's maybe it's a scientific way of
thinking but it seems like there is some
conclusion to be drawn there oh yeah i
believe you need to the high percentage
move there's a reason why it works i
think it's
it's made
for a bigger amount of people um
for example i i one of my main
strength
uh athletic strength is i'm i'm an
explosive person so i'll use technique
that are explosive if i get a single leg
my my one of my thing i like to do is to
go for the double power double but for
uh
someone else who got for example in a
single leg position maybe he likes
like body true better he's more a greco
guy like so he or he's a judo guy he's
going to go for some something else so
but there is move that are i would say
like you just mentioned are universal
like statistically speaking they're
the highest percentage move that works
for pretty much everybody everybody
pretty much can do a an adequate jimmy
you know it's very easy
but it's not everybody that can lock a
triangle with their legs so
so those move like a rear naked choke a
dakajimi is the highest percentage move
because it's maybe more accessible
it's accessible for a bigger range yeah
based on the physical characteristics of
the people do you draw in your wisdom
from these high percentages john uh for
like in terms of what to focus on yeah
absolutely um jiu jitsu has an ocean of
moves and you can get lost on that ocean
you can drift for a long period of time
and and end up with very little to show
for it so my whole thing is focus we
only live one lifetime
and your training lifetime is even
shorter than your actual lifetime
so
in that time
i must die on the mat
that's just the same
um
uh i i put a very high
value on
choosing what i believe to be the most
high percentage
moves and putting an extraordinary
amount of focus on them
the only problem is that in one
generation a move which can be
considered low percentage might actually
turn out to be high percentage in
another generation for example we talked
earlier about leg locks when i was first
started you said they were considered
the ultimate low percentage move and
a big part of my career has been
convincing people that in fact that was
that was incorrect that they can be a
high percentage move if we just change
our approach to them
um
so we can't just
follow tradition
and say oh this is low percentage this
is a high percentage it has to be part
of
a fairly systematic study where you
investigate
what are the reasons why it's high
percentage or low percentage with
regards to takedowns
if you look at what
we can consider the most high percentage
takedowns if you're in front of someone
the single most high percentage way of
taking them down is to get a hold of
both of their legs and push them
backwards
okay if you get a hold of one of their
legs and put a force on them they can
use their other leg to defend themselves
and hop around and funk their way out of
takedowns and cause all kinds of
problems for you i don't care how
athletic your opponent is if you get a
hold of firm grip
of both of his legs and start pushing
him backwards he's going to fall down to
his butt
now he might be able to recover from
there but he will fall down
even easier than that is to be behind
someone
take downs for in front of someone are
difficult you go right into their hips
their head their hands you go into all
their defensive weapons if you're
already behind someone and you're doing
what in america they refer to as a matt
return this is significantly easier than
taking someone down from the front
if you have control of their head in a
front headlock position
you've already closed distance on your
opponent you already have close contact
you don't have to worry about shooting
anymore there's no sprawl out of that
you don't have to worry about
guillotines kimuras or the
standard defenses those will
intrinsically be easier takedowns out of
front headlock and so if we're going to
talk about high percentage technique i
always go back to the mechanics of it
rather than just historical tradition
because historical tradition can be
wrong it was wrong about leglocks it
could be wrong about other things too so
my primary thing is okay talk to me
about mechanics
that's what ultimately is going to
determine whether something is high
percentage or not um
gordon pointed out earlier that when
you're behind someone you have innate
physical advantages over the other guy
the human
the human body is set up entirely to
defend threats from the front
we are poorly adapted to defending
threats from the rear we don't have eyes
in the back of our head we can't apply
pushing strength backwards
if you get behind someone take downs are
ten times easier from behind someone
than they are when you're in front of
someone
if you have to take someone down from
the front get a hold of both of their
legs
if you can get a hold of both of the
legs and a part of pushing force you
will almost always knock them down
if you can get a hold of their head
and work take downs from there again
it's much easier because most of the
defensive apparatus has been taken away
from them before the takedown even
begins and so
for me the most high percentage
takedowns will always be from the front
double legs from any takedown from the
back is going to be significantly easier
than any takedown from the front so all
manner of mat return takedowns are going
to be very high percentage
and takedowns done out of situations
where the opponent is broken down in
front of you and you have either front
headlock or front chest right position
are going to be significantly easier
than takedowns from the open
of course
you have to consider the full
spectrum of mechanics involved here it's
possible that an outside low single
leading to a double leg is much higher
percentage it's like there's a lot of
chain wrestling yet you know that needs
to be considered as a possibility maybe
a straight-on double and part of this
cultural too
are people afraid of this kind of thing
that they came to be the case with
leglocks are people aware of this
are they worried about this are they
training for this to defend this
and then his opponent specific of course
that um
you know with jordan barros people are
preparing for the double which is why he
had to develop
a whole other kinds of different stuff
and then the head to all the different
controls all the different ties
within the rule set
and that's where it's so fascinating to
see the effect of rule set and all this
judo over the past i think 20 years went
through this every olympics different
changes to the rule set like
fundamentally different in terms of
what's allowed to grip whether you're
allowed to touch the legs at all that
was a big one in 2012 i think
and and that changes the sport
completely and so interesting it's so
interesting to watch how tiny change in
the rule can change in sport
at the highest when you're talking about
people competing at the highest level
and the cool thing there is
the rule change happens on a scale of
every four years
so you get to see people that are at the
top of their game
have to like recompute
so it's not like you have a new
generation of people coming up with the
rules they have to figure oh shit you're
not allowed to like it's it's the
equivalent of saying you're not allowed
to kick anymore in mma
because you were not allowed to grab
legs anymore in judo
interestingly if you look at the
case of judo
if you look at the world rankings
of athletes when they went through one
of the most significant rule changes in
judo history where they banned any form
of grabbing the legs
the ranking of athletes didn't change
much
yeah that tells you that they're um
there's a reason why those guys are at
the top yeah and it doesn't have to do
that they're specific to a rule set
yeah think about that in terms of
imagine for example in mixed martial
arts if they just said hey
starting next week
instead of having three five minute
rounds it's going to be 15 minutes
straight
that would massively change the
preparation of the athletes
it's a different game at that point and
judo literally was a different game
before 2010 and after 2010
and yet
the international rankings didn't really
change that much the countries that were
dominant before
remain dominant the athletes that
remained before largely remain the same
you would think with such a massive
change all the rankings would have been
thrown upside down but they weren't and
uh again it goes back to this idea that
there's a reason why the guys at the top
are at the top
and now for something completely
different we talked about aliens earlier
say uh george brought up bob lazar i i
um
we'll likely probably talk to bob lazar
on this podcast and then
[Music]
and then john had a skeptical look on
his face about about aliens so let me
ask uh john and gordon
uh do you think there's intelligent
alien civilizations out there in the
universe outside of our own the universe
is unimaginably large the idea that we
are the only life forms in a cosmos as
large as this
is
i think naive and foolish
um
there's a very high likelihood that if
life could evolve on this planet that it
could have done so on many many other
planets around the uh around the
consoles i think anyone who puts even a
moment's thought into this would realize
that there's
almost certainly other forms of life out
there
the real question with regards the alien
community is um have they got here and
are they surfing our planet
in um little silver sources and making
observations and periodically stealing
people
for experimentation purposes doesn't
have to be silver saucers it could be
different other color saucers um and
that question i'm i'm i'm not all
convinced no i didn't recently um navy
footage
has come out showing
some very interesting phenomena if you
talk to almost any experienced pilot
they will tell you they've seen things
in the upper atmosphere that are very
difficult to explain uh i'll be the
first one to agree with you on this
there are some things out there that are
extremely difficult to explain like
literally ufos unidentified yeah i mean
we just don't know what they are but to
go from the idea that there's things out
there that we don't understand to
this
like
little creatures running around and um
and these somehow exist
uh
i just reserve judgment i just say i'm
agnostic about these things i think it's
possible but
all the evidence that i've been shown so
far was insufficient to come to any kind
of definite conclusions until
aliens land in central park on tuesday
afternoon at 3 p.m and get out with
little alien ray guns and start shooting
people i didn't believe in
many of the stories that get told
well what about if it's not little
aliens with ray guns but something very
different very very difficult to detect
for us humans that's very human
at that point it's a it's a fascinating
idea and it's certainly possible but
show me the evidence
all right what about you gordon
do you do you uh look at the cosmos and
ponder the stars often i think it's fair
points john raised
something really interesting i saw the
other day was uh
someone posted like
if an alien organ or civilization
65 million light years away somehow
managed to look
at earth
they would theoretically see the
dinosaurs because they're 65 million
light years away so like imagine us
looking at
galaxies that are 100 million light
years away that's 100 million years ago
you have no idea what it looks like now
so that's what's super interesting to me
about it
yeah the the expanse is huge
and so much cool stuff could be going
out there
the scary thing of course is if they
haven't visited us yet the
there has to be a good reason for it
and the the set of scary reasons of all
the fact that they maybe once you get
sufficiently advanced in your
development you destroy yourself
naturally as humans seem to be
approaching now
we more and more have the tools to
distort ourselves completely
in terms of our weapon systems
um and we're developing them more and
more and they're becoming better and
better
and we're starting to get angry and
angry on twitter and instagram with each
other
those are good points you're raising
history has taught us that
everything that lives one day will die
so we will we will perish one day yeah
there's also just the the sheer
difficulty of um
of
of travel through space like space is an
unimaginably inhospitable environment
and to the best of our knowledge
this even the theoretical speeds that we
can attain in space even if we could
travel at the speed of light we're not
even remotely close to that
still the distances that need to be
traveled to get to even relatively close
solar systems are
very very long if you look at astronauts
who have spent significant amounts of
time and space just orbiting the earth
it has severe health effects on them
which is not built for space we're
supposed to be
in a gravitational environment but we
you're referring to your biological mean
bag that's containing the essence
of the mind that is john donahue maybe
we can transfer the mind
alone so the the the the bag the me the
meat bag is not designed for space but
maybe the game this is all confidence of
the mind that's
that's possible but what do you think of
concrete evidence you folks who like
difficult things
uh what do you think about elon musk
going to colonize mars
is this something you find an
interesting or
a um
pursuit i think it's a must or a
salvation we need to leave at some point
the planet because historically in the
past we know that we've been bombarded
by asteroid volcano
their crazy things happen here it's very
unstable you know we
if you look at it to
through a lifetime of a human being it's
nothing but just look 12 000 years ago
what happened you know so there is
cataclysm that happen all the time it's
very unstable so
if we want to survive as a species i
think it's it's we need to get out to be
able to get out and
spread our seed
so these are the early steps on on a
really long journey but is there
something about like
you know we don't get that exploration
from most modern society you know the
kind of exploring that people did
throughout the centuries of uh you know
coming to the
north america just throughout we were
shrouded in physical uncertainty of
what's out there
and now we get to do the same kind of
exploration with mars
is there so i mean is there any aspect
of you that wants to
travel out to space that wants to travel
to mars
there
you know the goal is to allow civilians
to travel
perhaps in our lifetime
meaning affordably you can do so now
unaffordably
traveling to space and traveling to mars
are
two different things i think i would
like to travel into space
i don't know if i would like to travel
all the way to mars because of the risks
involved
just because
boring
is there some part of you that enjoys i
think that if i was like towards the end
of my life i would like to travel to
mars because that's just just the
experience yeah but if i go to mars i'm
not coming back
like that's it
one-way ticket
with the technology we have now maybe in
the future maybe our
the children of our children will will
be able to to experience that to go to
well the the weekend
on mars
uh well the whole design of the starship
that the spacex is working on is
supposed to come back
it's supposed to be reusable so it's not
it's not a one-way ticket that's the
whole point just it's always going back
and forth back and forth what's the time
frame between two planets like to travel
from i think the current thing you'd be
stuck on mars for two years
but how long does it take to get from
earth to mars oh it's pretty
i'm not exactly sure but it's pretty
quick
that's pretty quick like i don't know on
the scale of months not scale of years
you might not be healthy when you come
back you know all the astronauts they
experience health issues you know they
lose a lot of muscle mass bone density
so
yeah i don't think the technology is
good right now i mean
let's say that if it is i would love to
be doing it for a weekend if it's safe i
will
or a professional fighter who sacrificed
his body for something so there's some
sacrifice we do in life right i don't
want to be there first i wouldn't want
to i leave the other one but when i know
it's it's safe
okay count me in so one of the things
that people say and this is something i
wonder about is
it's like having children or something
once you see once you're out in space
and you look out and you see earth you
look back at earth that's an experience
it's unlike anything else like you can't
replicate it here
um is is to look back at that like blue
dot
and that's nerve-wracking
you see like earth disappear into the
distance
yeah yeah disappear into the distance
and then you get this actually stand on
mars and see
and just to look you're standing on the
ground and you're looking out
and you see the planet from which you
came and
where you might not be coming back but
there's a challenge to the whole thing
whereas the risk is tremendous
and
i don't know i find that risk really
compelling for some reason but that
could be just the exploration
i guess that's a genetic thing too how
much do you want to explore
there's a sense though in which even in
the best case scenario where they did
get the technology to whisk you to mars
and
in a fairly short period of time
it's kind of an inauthentic sense of
exploration because
your participation in it is
no more exciting than
your participation in an airline flight
to a foreign country you basically
you didn't have anything to do with the
creation of the of the vessel you're not
in command of the vessel you're not in
any way shape or form important to the
mission you're just the person sitting
in a passenger seat and you get off in a
destination the same way you would if
you flew to singapore or london or some
place like that well there's a hierarchy
of there's a leadership and then there's
a bunch of people and they all have
roles you don't get to go to mars
without having a skill set but
you made it sound like space tourism
where you just pay a ticket i don't i
think it's a long time before you have
space tourism to mars where you have
nothing to contribute
okay like you will have to what do you
do you go through like a training
program you go training program and then
there's uh there's technical things
you'll be contributing so there they
would bring
people
you know in terms of agriculture i don't
know okay so this is this is better this
sounds like they're actual they're more
like explorers like if you you talked
before about explorers and and human
history where magellan sets off on his
boat and every person on the boat had a
specific function they were they were
all
into the mission in a very authentic
fashion if they weren't on the boat the
performance of the crew would somehow
suffer so this sounds much better and
with just with like with magellan i
think most of the crew died
a significant number did yeah
and from uh yeah from bacteria i mean
from things that are unexpected and so
on and if we discover life on mars i
mean who knows what that entails because
that's like a manned mission to mars
would likely be very driven by the
research to do all the kind of
exploration required to define life
now from
mr musk's
point of view as a developer presumably
there has to be some kind of financial
incentive here too
is there
some kind of financial benefit to mars
missions is
presumably
um
there wouldn't be that many people on
earth that could afford a ticket to pay
for the kind of research and development
that would require this is there some
kind of mining on mars of minerals that
would be useless i think there's a lot
of answers to this but the only honest
answer is the one that looks back into
human history where we did a lot of
things just because we
could
a lot of hard things just because we
could and that led to a lot of
innovation that ultimately made our life
better so this is more this is why you
have nasa this is why you have
government organizations like what's the
purpose of nasa nasa would answer that
by saying okay well we're helping
launch satellites up there all they'll
have a bunch of answers but the reality
is the programs
were
funded in large part by our desire to
explore the unknown
and um there's some aspect to which we
have to all invest into that because
historically speaking
that has produced a lot of cool things
along the way they were totally
unexpected like uh but nasa is funded by
public funding the taxpayer uh how is mr
musk going to fund this well currently
most of the funding was the spacex is
nasa giving
money
uh to so they're making a competition
who can who can get our satellites we
need to go to
um
you know was for the space station to uh
resupply the space station or we need to
launch satellites up who's going to
carry those quote-unquote payloads they
just need so nasa is paying whoever the
heck wants to
uh get
kilograms of thing up into space
why did this is nasa's specialty why did
they just give up on that well they why
are they realizing where mr musk came
along and then bezos and others that
said we can do it for one tenth the
price
so why did the why should the taxpayers
pay for the why don't you nasa do what
you do well
which is like test out cutting edge
stuff make sure they're safe
and now
that we've developed
a car
let us let us ups and fedex take care of
doing this at scale doing it cheaper
doing it better
i mean that's the argument
and nasa took what they realized is it
took way way too long to do stuff
when you're investing millions as
billions of dollars into a project
the
the bureaucracy builds up
and the conservatism builds up to where
you're i mean you really have to test
everything out so projects take years
and then you have somebody like elon
musk coming along and says well let's do
launches every
every week
and as opposed to
just throwing away the rocket will reuse
the rocket that was one of the sort of
cutting edge inventions
it's a dumb obvious idea
like elon says why do you throw away the
pla it's the equivalent as if you flew a
plane every time you threw it away why
are we every time throwing away the
plane but nasa's tried that kind of
thing with the space shuttle since the
1970s yes well they did that with the
space shuttle but not not at the scale
here that uh it was the space shuttle
was seen as this
like majestic amazing thing that
requires a huge amount of investment but
the elo musk is like no every basic
rocket
should be reusable
cut cost
do you do you think like
the more technology we have the more
advanced we become the more specialized
we need to be like is that for that
reason that now they
there is different branch like you just
explained now nowadays there's precise
in this but they're left you know other
branch yeah there's there's greater and
greater specialization as we build up
more stuff which is fascinating because
is is it making us
more
dumb in a way do you think like
like yeah i don't know like
you you know
i use a cell phone but i don't know how
to build it up from yeah
i mean it's that beta male is building
up this whole society um because we're
this collective intelligence we rely on
each other more and more
and
it
i do also see sort of the rise of
conspiracy theories and all those kinds
of things because
like i've been talking to a few folks
about flat earth recently it's
fascinating
it's fascinating there's a large
community of people that believe the
earth is flat and
that idea takes hold in this day and age
of all the ideas that's the one that
takes hold for a large number of people
and
i think that's the consequences this
kind of specialization where it's just
huge amount of experts
but if you look out into our world and
try to reason simply about our existence
we we are losing the skills to do that
because more and more people are
specialized as opposed to general
thinkers we're like extremely good at
specific things are we capable now to do
uh a robot that is self-aware
that's that's one the legged one i need
uh it's self-aware like it's not
self-aware it's been listening but it's
it's not self-aware but do you think a
human being is self-aware or that's a
good question
i mean i ask this question all the time
when the robots move there's a sense of
when they turn on
something entered that robot
wow and when it turns off something left
if they move in a certain kind of way
and if they're if they surprise you
there's certain elements
that enable us
to see the magic in
in a living being and some of them i
mean we can character we can maybe list
them
but it's the ability to surprise you
it's the
ability to make mistakes and learn from
them visibly there's a bunch of things
that you just
i don't know it just feels
like it has the magic of what is a
living being and which is what humans
have and i try to think about how do you
replicate that into a machine so so when
you turn it on enough you feel like it
dies every time and it re reborn right
so for most machines we don't feel that
way we don't when we unplug things
we don't feel that way i don't know why
we don't feel that way that's an
interesting question
but i think when
when the robot has certain qualities
like memory
like ability to recognize you
yeah you start to feel like you're
turning off an organism
so so whenever i have like the robots
that recognize me
and remember
this is important that all the things
we've experienced together
then it's like holy shit
that's a that's a living thing but does
he really feels it feels like a living
thing does he remember
your robot does he remember things that
happened before you unplugged in is it
like he's sleeping
like is he wake up or is he like that so
right now start to zero everything uh no
it doesn't start at zero remember it
remembers everything that's the key
every time you like you you unplug wow
it's storing the story in the memory but
the memories are basic they're like okay
we walked around the kitchen and then
um you looked at me i mean the memories
it's like data it's just
it's not like we've experienced it's
able to actually
uh experience anything deep like we
humans can but just the fact of memory
it's like the toaster or the microwave
don't don't give a shit about me
they don't know me they don't know me by
name they wouldn't recognize my face
as being different from gordon's they
wouldn't know the difference and they
wouldn't
remember
the microwave currently doesn't remember
you know the times i've been sad or
happy like what food i put into it it
doesn't remember this
when i was being a fat ass or what i was
being in good shape and all all just
those memories are enough to make you
feel when you turn a thing off
it's like
shit wow that's a little that's that
that's a living thing disappearing of
course that's kind of an
anthropomorphism we do to each other
but uh that's something
it's you know that
that's some that makes me believe it's
possible to create um
systems with which we can have a
connection that are non-human
like similar to dogs and cats and so on
it just makes me
and that's what's interesting to me
because ultimately i feel like they'll
help us understand
ourselves
and maybe practice grappling moves
anyway um
well let me ask the uh advice question
uh now that we're together i've asked
i've spoken to john i spoke to george
what what advice would you give to young
folks whether
we're talking about
sport like excelling becoming great at
grappling becoming great at fighting
becoming great at whatever sport they
take on or life in general whether
they're maybe in high school or in
college
what advice would you give them to uh
excel
at that thing they take on i don't know
if i'm qualified to answer this because
i'm only 26 so
you're at the top you said giving advice
to young people um
for me i think the two biggest things
are
find something that you're both talented
in and you enjoy um i think that if you
enjoy something but you're terrible at
it it's going to be hard for you to be
successful
in life at that given in that given area
and it's going to be hard to do
something for long amounts of time
if you're talented at it but you don't
enjoy doing it
it's easy to come in
and
train
hard for a month or two months or for a
year
you can be very talented at it but if
you come in it's but it's a different
story to come in every day for five
years in a row for 10 years in a row for
15 years in a row so i think
i think finding something that you're
both talented in
and something you enjoy are probably the
two biggest things for me how do you
find the joy in it so you've been
training insane amount you know a lot
you've been doing it for a long time is
there's is there ways to rediscover the
joy in it
yeah for me initially
it was just
learning new stuff you know you come in
as a white belt and every day you learn
you see a different move and you're like
oh man that's that's awesome
um
and then when i started to compete more
seriously towards my professional career
it was
uh the joy of doing camps and seeing the
result of those camps and beating
high-level athletes
and then i got to a point where
i've beaten all the high-level athletes
already so
who am i going to compete against
so now for me the joy is just
being
the best athlete i can possibly be until
i reach my prime which i'm hoping is
somewhere between 35 and 40. um so
instead of competing against the other
athletes
i'll be bored already because i already
beat all the rest of the guys
um but
i know that now i know that i can be
better in a year from now or two years
from now than i am today and that for me
is exciting
by the way is there some aspect of
teaching that's exciting to you yeah
yeah because you've become a
better and better teacher over the years
yeah yeah i i definitely uh i enjoy
teaching and
i used to teach um
a lot before i met john and then i met
john and i was like yeah i just have no
idea how to teach um so that's like a
completely different element
of the sport um you know doing things
and being good at doing things or being
good at winning
and actually being able to communicate
those skills and knowledge to to a vast
amount of people is two completely
different things
george advice for young people
like yourself
well
first i was i would tell them find
what you want to become what you want to
do
and long term
use certain things maybe sometimes you
don't love but where you want to propel
yourself at the future not what your
parents your your friend wants you to
become what you you you want to become
so one once you find it
you cannot
doing it by yourself everything better
that is big achievement in life we
cannot do it doing it by ourselves so
what i would say is second thing is
try to build up your team and try to
build up your team to be able to achieve
your goal
of people that are competent
and people that you trust
you need both competency and trust
i sell a lot of people sometime in
business for example they hire people
they
that are that they trust but they turns
out to be incompetent
so now you have to fire a friend or
otherwise your business going down the
same problem if you do the opposite uh
you're someone that is competent but you
cannot trust is gonna it's gonna screw
you you know
so it's very important to stay away from
the negative build up your team people
you trust and that are competent
and i would say the third one is to work
to work hard to sacrifice yourself yeah
you have to go through hell sometime but
yeah you have to see the light at the
end of it you know to
keep your dream in mind it's going to
give you the motivation to go through
the tough times nothing easy to go work
work work is nothing you can accomplish
without hard work
the fourth one i would say
to invest on yourself constantly
if you do not invest on your cell phone
whatever you are in which business and
sport
the game will catch up to you
for example if you're if you become
champion at something and if you stop
improving the other guys that are trying
to be champion are going to catch up to
you
so you need to invest on yourself and
most people
most athlete they make the mistake when
they start to having money
they buy luxury stuff
and that's one thing i didn't do when i
started making money i was investing of
on traveling to new york training with
john garden and the guys to learn
what is new in the the game of jiu jitsu
i used to go in thailand train muay thai
in los angeles to perfect my boxing
skill
so instead of taking that money to buy
me jewelry cars and to do what a lot of
guys do because it's a mistake
i i invested on myself because i know
there were people coming they don't want
my place so i want i didn't want them to
catch me
and the last one i would say it seems
weird
i would say
to give back
and it's not because i'm a nice guy and
it's not that
i don't say that to look good i say that
when you you make it
it creates opportunity where you can
help certain group of people
but when i say give back not give back
to everybody to anybody give back only
to the the cause that you want i give
back
not because i'm a nice guy i'm kind of
it's kind of selfish i only give back to
the people that i want to give back
because i give back to them and i know
that if i'm more successful i'm going
gonna be able to give back to people i
loved the cars that that that count for
me so it's it brings me more motivation
because i don't compete
for myself anymore i compete to help
people i love in a way
so when you you reach the top in your
game you need to find new motivation if
you satisfy is
is the end of it your success will go
down so you need to
to find new motivation what can motivate
you you know what do you want i want to
help this so i need to to be successful
i want to
you know you need to find reason who you
what do you want to do with your success
so when i say give back it's not because
i'm not because i'm necessarily it's not
to be to look like a nice guys to keep
your motivation
to be able to
keep climbing the ladder even more
that's beautiful george um
john
um
first off the two responses given so far
covered i think the most important
things or already um
gordon talked about the the need for
an underlying passion and enjoyment if
you don't have that
you're not going to have the longevity
that is required in order to build
skills which is ultimately everything's
going to come down to your ability to
build skills you've got to have some
kind of underlying passion and enjoyment
which will keep you in the game long
enough
to build world championship skills it's
going to take a minimum of five years
and quite possibly considerably longer
than that
george talked about the idea of
community you're not going to make it by
yourself so you've got to be able to
build people around you and
and build a trusted environment around
you to develop those skills
um
what i would add to the the excellent
points that both already raised
alludes to what i said at the start of
this podcast you've got to be able to
identify
some kind of undervalued
elements in whatever industry you're in
and show the world what their true value
is
in addition
you can't go through life
doing the same things as everybody else
and expecting to get different results
this is straightforwardly irrational and
worse it's even arrogant it's
essentially the statement that i'm going
to do the same thing as everyone else
but i believe i'm different
and so they'll work for me
but they didn't work for everyone else
that's like saying no i'm special
no you're not special we're all pretty
much the same
and
in order to be special you're going to
have to exhibit skills that other people
simply don't have
thirdly i would say if you want to
become something truly impressive in
life you've got to be able to focus on
one or two things
that you do better than anyone else in
your industry
you can't learn everything but you can
take one or two skills and the more
innovative those skills are the better
and you can truly excel at them for
example at the peak of his career
no one in the world was better than
george st pierre at integrating striking
and takedowns
no one in the world was better at
integrating grappling and striking on
the ground
he had two things that he could
confidently say he was the best in the
world at was he the best at every mma
skill nope
but he was
absolutely the best at those two skills
and those two skills were skills which
he used throughout his career to win the
vast majority of his matches
gordon ryan at the onset of his career
could confidently say
there's no one in the world better than
me at leglocks
he could also say there's no one better
in the world than me at late stage
defense
to submission holds across the board
as he went through his career he started
adding more and more elements it's
gotten to an extraordinary degree now
where you could absolutely say he's the
best at guard passing the best of guard
retention
the less this keeps going on and that
goes back to what
um
gordon said earlier about keeping things
interesting over time because we're
always introducing new skill sets the
day you start saying
i'm satisfied with my skill set is the
day you get bored
and bored boredom to an athlete is a
precursor to
death by boredom um
as long as you're still growing in those
directions you'll stay in the game
for very long periods of time so the
main thing i would add to these uh
statements by gordon and george is this
idea of
finding something which is currently
undervalued and showing the world what
its true value is
understanding
that you can't just use the same
training methodologies as everyone else
and somehow expect to be different from
everyone else you've got
almost every great rise in human
civilization whether it be groups of
people or individuals requires some kind
of innovation you've got to look for
that new angle okay george st pierre
found it with shoot boxing early on in
his career
uh gordon ryan found it with leg
leglocks early on in his career and they
branched out from that
from that angle
add to this the idea that you want to
become the absolute best in the world in
your industry and one or two things that
make a difference
find out what they are and focus on
those things and you'll go far
john
gordon george this is an incredible
conversation thank you so much for your
extremely valuable time george as
somebody
who's become famous in part
by commenting on people's performance
um
how do you think
we did
how would you evaluate our performance
today
i'm not impressed
thank you i love that i i've learned all
the time i've talked to you guys
it's great i loved it it was very
stimulated i and really enjoyed it yeah
it's uh it was it was something i really
was looking forward to i was hoping that
we'd get together
it's so rare that at the same time in
history there will be some of the greats
together and the fact that you guys
would be willing to come together and
talk like this this is awesome and that
gordon would even wear a cowboy hat i
mean this is just historic this is like
churchill getting together with whoever
you know this is great and all but the
next one is just going to be us just
quizzing john on which animals would win
in fights yes for the whole three hours
it would be just so we'll invite joe and
it'll just be we'll we'll make it a
systematic it'll be announced between
joe and john on which animal would win
john and i we have a thing that we send
each other
footage all the time of animal fight
were
we are
very intrigued about animal fight
i guess you guys i get until like 3 30
a.m on instagram he's like check this
out like a rhino taking a like a pig
like poor like like like literally it's
not always fair no no it's not ever but
interesting stuff if you people would
see what we send the stuff that we
they would judge you harshly yeah
all right all right thanks so much guys
this is awesome
thanks for listening to this
conversation with george st pierre john
donahue and gordon ryan to support this
podcast please check out our sponsors in
the description
and now let me leave you some words for
miyamoto musashi
there's nothing outside yourself that
can ever enable you to get better
stronger richer quicker or smarter
everything is within
everything exists
seek nothing outside of yourself
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time
you