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EPISODE LINKS:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:48 - Road to ADCC
19:20 - Danaher Death Squad
28:04 - Mental preparation
52:49 - Gordon Ryan
1:49:47 - Giancarlo Bodoni
2:14:54 - Garry Tonon
2:28:51 - Nicholas Meregali
2:44:17 - Ruotolo brothers
2:53:56 - Takedowns
2:58:16 - GSP
3:06:44 - Renzo Gracie
3:11:21 - Boris
3:15:12 - Ali Abdelaziz
3:17:38 - Khabib Nurmagomedov
3:21:30 - Joe Rogan playing pool
3:24:43 - Advice for grapplers
3:34:40 - Day in the life
3:41:21 - Bear vs Gorilla vs Lion vs Anaconda
4:19:08 - Tom Hardy
4:30:42 - Emojis
4:33:11 - Love
4:38:35 - Fighting to the death
4:42:22 - Knives

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A male chimp is more than enough to kill any human on the planet, including Gordon Ryan.

No, a thousand times, how many times does he win?

The following is a conversation with John Donaher, his third time on this podcast.

He's widely considered to be 1 of the greatest minds in martial arts history.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Jon Donaher.

The ADCC is the premier submission grappling tournament in the world.

We saw many demonstrations of greatness from athletes you coached.

But a year ago, the team and you were at a very low point.

We had a very, very tight team for many years, which began in New York City.

During the peak of COVID, training in New York became very difficult to sustain.

So most of the team despised the city of New York.

I was the only person in the group that liked living in New York.

I think part of the problem was that I was the only 1 who actually lived in Manhattan.

And there's a world of difference between living in New York and commuting to New York.

So most of them had a very negative view of New York City.

That was compounded by COVID, when even the basic active training became very, very difficult.

And so everyone decided they want to leave.

So there was a prospect of a complete breakup between myself and the team, or I would have to leave New York.

It was a difficult decision for me to make as I'd lived in New York for 30 years.

I'd built my life there and had most of my friends and associates that I know here in America, New Yorkers.

So I thought, you know, these guys have been incredibly loyal to me as students, so I should also be loyal to them, of course.

So I decided that if they wanted to leave, I would go with them.

We decided to go to Puerto Rico because there was a private gym where we could train through the COVID period.

I thought that Texas was a better place for the team to go.

But many of the students, including senior students like Gordon Ryan, Craig Jones, had been to Puerto Rico and stayed with 1 of the head officials of ADCC, Mo Jassim.

So they loved their experience in Puerto Rico and almost everyone wanted to go down there.

So I tried to explain to them there's a world of difference between going to a place for vacation versus living there, but that didn't have any effect.

So the decision was made, a majority decision was made to go to Puerto Rico In Puerto Rico the Conditions in which the team lived Changed significantly When you're in New York, New York is such a big city that if there's any tension between team members and inevitably there will be in a competitive sport where everyone's fighting each other, you can kind of bury them in the size of the city because there's so many distractions in New York.

You come in, you do your workout, you go outside and it's New York City.

In Puerto Rico, we lived in a very small local town, Dorado, and most of the athletes were living with each other.

And so unlike New York where there was always a break, you trained together but when training was over you went about your life in New York and New Jersey.

With everyone living in very close proximity to each other, any tensions got magnified because there was no relief from them.

If you had a problem with someone on the mat, well now you had to live with them for the rest of the day and the night.

And this goes on for long periods of time.

So I believe it had the effect of magnifying whatever tensions there were.

In particular, there was a family tension between 2 brothers which magnified over time.

And you know, as so often is the case, you get 2 brothers growing up, 1 older, 1 younger, and the younger 1 wants to grow and feel somewhat like a young tree underneath a bigger tree.

And sometimes people just need their space.

As a little tree that had to grow up under a bigger tree.

So as time went by, these tensions started increasing.

They came to a point where it was difficult for them even to be in the training room together.

At that point, you're starting to, you know, once training takes a hit, then you got to start to address these.

The attempts at reconciliation fell through and a decision was made to move to Texas.

What I wanted to do was keep the team together as long as the period leading up to 80cc so that everyone could train together.

So I said, okay, there's problems, but let's just tough it out.

1 year, we move to Texas, let's just go there and keep unity.

If some people don't wanna train with other people, that's fine.

But I believe that the team would be weakened by breaking apart.

I believe that they had an excellent rapport as training partners.

Their technical level was increasing dramatically.

Many of the younger athletes are really starting to come into their own and really develop well.

And so my take on it was, okay, if there's problems, so be it.

But let's all just stay together until ADCC 2022 as a unified team.

Go out, prepare yourselves as best you can, and then after that we can make a decision as to whether we break up or not.

But that was rejected and the team split.

We'd made prior arrangements to go to a local gym and they took that gym and we were left with no gym and more or less homeless in Austin.

So roughly 3 quarters of the competitive athletes left in 1 week.

So at that point, that was probably the lowest point because at that point, not only did we not have a place to train, we had very few training partners for the few that had remained.

And the main athlete in the team, Gordon Ryan, was going through a particularly bad spell with his unresolved stomach issues.

And there was doubt as to whether or not he could compete at all, and was actively thinking about retiring from the sport.

So maybe not compete ever again, potentially.

So that was a time when it was like, man, the whole program seems to be dead in the water at this point.

Most of the competitive athletes were gone.

There were very few training partners for the few that remained.

And the main athlete around whom the group had initially bonded was seemingly out of action, possibly permanently.

My thinking is everything bad passes in time.

So my life experience is whenever things seem dark, have patience.

And I'm confident that if you give me a new crop of students, I can produce magic, but it's going to take time.

So that confidence was in part a source of strength.

Yes, it's just like, I wasn't confident that ADCC 2022 would go well because we only had 1 year without a gym and with a team that was completely broken up to even attempt to get into ADCC.

So things looked a little grim, but I was confident, you know, given enough time, I'd get in a new group of students and work.

As it turns out, 1 of the demonstration partners that I used during filming for instructional videos who lives in Boston, Giancarlo Badoni, was interested in the idea of coming down and training, but he'd always felt like it would be difficult because there were people in his weight class who were already there and he felt it would be awkward.

But now that they had left, that opened up an area for him.

It was rather like going back into my earliest days in Jiu-Jitsu.

I went from teaching at the big Henzo Gracie Academy to a tiny school in Puerto Rico and now an even smaller school in Austin, Texas.

And locals would come in and train and I would watch every day, teaching there twice a day, 7 days a week.

And I would see people come in and train and I would say, this guy has some potential or this guy has some potential.

And I would recruit people and bring them to another gym where they would train with the professionals.

And if they proved adept and hardworking and someone who can work well in a team, they would stay and build their skills.

As time went by, more and more such people started coming in and we had some remarkable people like a young South African purple belt, Luke Griffith came in.

He had lost in the European trials for ADCC and he was down on his luck.

He came into Austin, he did a show against a local purple belt and lost again.

So he was feeling bad about his performance and his future.

He came in and I thought he was a lovely kid who worked hard and trained well.

So he became 1 of the main training partners.

He was similar size to Gordon, so I encouraged him to train with Gordon whenever he could.

And more and more people started coming in to train under that kind of basis.

1 day I got a text from Gordon who was filming an instructional video in Boston.

He said, hey, you know, Nicholas Miragalli was training at this...

He was shooting video at the same time as me and we just did some grappling.

He's a really nice guy and he's literally never trained without a gi before.

For those of you who don't know, Nicholas Miragalli is 1 of the outstanding gi jiu-jitsu competitors of his generation.

He has an amazing game and is a superstar with the gi side of the sport, but had never even trained without a gi once in his life.

So his first ever no-gi training session is with Gordon Ryan, the best no-gi competitor of all time.

And I remember Gordon texting me saying, hey, he's really talented, he's a nice guy and he wants to come down to Texas and train.

So over time, just more and more people started coming in.

And I told everyone like, you guys are at a severe disadvantage.

Like you've got very little time to get ready for ADCC.

Luke wasn't even in ADCC, he had to win trials.

Same for Dan Manasoy, he failed at trials and needed to get a win to even get into ADCC.

So around this time, a doctor suggested by Mo Jassum, who himself had stomach issues earlier in his life, began working with Gordon Ryan.

He was able to get Gordon Ryan not cured, but significantly better than he was before.

And to a level where Gordon could train up to 5 to 6 days a week.

And it was a big improvement on what was going on during the end of the time in Puerto Rico.

We had a core group of athletes training at a local gym, which was very, very generously offered to us by the head manager of Roka Sunglasses, a company here in Austin, Texas.

They have a private corporate gym which we were able to train in.

And these talented youngsters from around the globe, essentially, came together and I said, you guys are going to have to train harder than you've ever trained in your lives, because you've got less time to get ready for this than anyone, and you're gonna be going up against people potentially who know exactly what I teach, because I've been teaching them a lot longer than I've been teaching you, in addition to the other best people in the world.

So it was an incredible challenge for them.

And I must say all of them gave literally everything they had, everything I asked for, they gave twice as much.

And we had a crazy training schedule, as many as 3 classes per day.

I know that sounds easy, you know, 3 classes a day, but try doing it sometime.

These classes are not your average classes.

As they can- They're both mentally and physically draining.

And we had many people come in and try to train alongside us and they fell off by the side of the road within days.

Forget about weeks, months, or a full year of this.

I gave a very abbreviated set of skills for the athletes.

I chopped everything down to what I believe were the most essential skills.

Anything that wasn't essential to ADCC preparation was just pushed aside and they had to focus almost entirely on ADCC with 1 exception, I'll come to that soon, over the period of their training here in Austin.

So it was compacted by time and also by the breadth of skill that I taught.

Everything was just purely for ADCC preparation.

In a very short period of time, Dan Manasoyo and Luke Griffith and Oliver Tarza all won European trials and got into ADCC.

Nicholas Miragalli was already a superstar, so he was invited, but he had to show himself.

So we enrolled him in local shows here in Austin where he had his first 3 no-gi matches.

And with each match you could see progress being made.

And so that convinced the ADCC people, okay, he's good enough to compete.

He ended up winning decisively a match against 1 of the greatest American grapplers of all time, Rafael Lovato.

And this was like a clear sign that his skill level and nogi was sufficient to justify an invite.

And by the way, Lovato had an incredible set of matches in this ADCC.

Which is really impressive and heartbreaking as well.

But if you go out, that's a good way to go out.

So there was this long and tough preparation and it was compounded by the fact that as Gordon felt better, he felt a need to build up his own competitive record prior to ADCC because he'd been inactive for so long with his stomach issue.

So he proposed 1 of the most ambitious fight camps that I've ever heard of in grappling, which was he would take on the current WNO champion Pedro Mourinho,

And also I believe the current No Gi World Champion in IBJJF.

Then he would fight his old nemesis, Felipe Pena.

The only man who submitted Gordon at black belt and had defeated Gordon in an ADCC match in 2017.

So there was going to be 3 big high profile matches back to back and very different rule sets.

The fight with Felipe Pena was no time limit, which is a very different format to compete in and then ADCC.

So we had to drag out a 14-week camp covering 3 matches with 3 different rule sets which went in diametrically opposite directions and the entire team had to go through all of this over this 14-week period In addition to the previous year that they had been working hard.

There was a further complication in the midst of all this.

Nicholas Merigali had to go to the Gi World Championships and we had to throw an extra morning class for that to help him get ready.

Nicholas went on to win the open weight gold medal in the competition, and then the next day he had to come back to Texas and begin his ADCC preparation.

It was a crazy, crazy time, But they all came through it so well.

And shockingly, in the space of less than 12 months, we went from rock bottom to having a more successful ADCC team performance than we did the previous 80cc.

It was in fact the most successful team performance of the event and as testimony to how hard those young men worked in in the course of less than a year to prepare themselves.

If we could just linger on the low point, is it heartbreaking to you that the so-called Donahoe Death Squad split, or the team as it was originally called split.

You know, we live a short life on this earth and you put so much of your love and work into this team and everybody put in the work.

It was, you know, I'm not a particularly emotional person, but it was an emotional time for everyone.

It was, it had an element of tragedy insofar as, not only was it a team breakup, it was also a family breakup, which is much more serious.

I do believe that in time, even the most intense family breakups can be reconciled.

And I also believe that once dialogue begins, people will remember just how easy it was for us to get along and how tight we were for many, many years.

It's so easy to let a minute of anger destroy 10 years of friendship.

So, but there's also the weight of those 10 years.

Like when I ran into the old squad members at ADCC.

Yes, yes, sorry, that's a New Zealand expression, yeah.

Yeah, that definitely could've gone the other way, right?

Only a New Zealander would say that as a good thing, yeah.

So there's, I still believe in time things will be fine, but there was an element where youngsters need to grow And sometimes, think about it this way, from the athlete's perspective, there's definitely a generational problem.

And the years and the viewpoint that I have is a reflection of the time in which I grew up.

And they're from a completely different generation with a completely different worldview.

It's gotta be hard from the athlete's perspective when you're training 7 days a week and you're getting very, very good.

You're beating everyone that's getting put in front of you.

You're losing very, very rarely and it's always a tough competitive match when you do.

Everyone around you is calling you a superstar and you look phenomenal.

You check social media, everyone's saying you're a god on the mat.

And then you come into the gym and there's some old guy telling you you're not good enough.

And every day it's like, well, what does this guy want from me?

Like I want you to be the best in the world.

And all of your friends are telling you, man, you're incredible, you submit me so easily to do this, and then this old guy's just saying, nah, you gotta get better, you gotta work more, you're not working hard enough.

At some point you're gonna be like, you know what, fuck this old guy.

You know, mentally I get why, you know, they left.

When I was 20 years old, I didn't get along with authority figures at all.

And to have someone telling you, you've always got to work that little bit harder, your skill set's not complete, you still need this, this and this, when you're already doing very, very well and far better than all but a tiny, tiny percentage of people.

And then you've got this guy just constantly telling you, no, more has to be done.

You can be the best you possibly can or you can go a route where you just get to enjoy life a little more, you do other things.

You know, like there's more to life than just the inside of a gym and learning how to do a better heel hook or a better double leg.

So of course, you know, years go by, you want to try other things.

And you have to make this choice in life between extreme excellence versus being incredibly good, but maybe just enjoying my life a little more.

It's so interesting that incredibly good is a hard thing to deal with.

I saw like when Kayla Harrison won her first gold medal and the Olympics, you know, to go back to the gym and to trust again, maybe the old man, you're being too harsh on yourself, but to trust the old man.

So Jimmy Page, you're on Jimmy Page, you're senior in that case to say, okay, we're gonna go back to this grind.

There's still a lot to grow and still have the humility, even though you've just demonstrated greatness.

So really good is just a stepping stone to true greatness.

Plus there's the personal stuff of depression that comes with that, which is you give so much of yourself to trying to win that.

And once you do, there's a lot of personal stuff you have to deal with, which is like, what do I want from life?

To understand what is exactly what am I chasing?

Is it just winning or is it some bigger picture of excellence that's beyond just winning?

And then when you have to be as a team really close together there's the personal relationships, all of that gets exacerbated.

Do you think the team ever gets back together?

I think there's definitely a chance of that.

Right now, I think they have an excellent team themselves and they're doing very well.

They had an excellent performance at ADCC, so there's not a need for them to come to us.

They still remember everything I taught them.

They still coach and teach with the same methodology that I taught them.

So I don't think they have any need to do so.

If they did, it would be because they wanted to.

I still think many of the same personality conflicts that originated the conflict would reemerge currently if they started training together.

way, to pile on the compliments, they have really nice merch too.

What have you learned from that process about how to have a team with personal conflicts?

Do you have to deal with these giant egos as well.

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John Danaher: Grappling, Jiu Jitsu, ADCC, and Animal Combat | Lex Fridman Podcast #328