Name: JRE MMA Show #109 with Gordon Ryan
Uploaded: 2021-05-01T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'JRE MMA Show #109 with Gordon Ryan' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-05-01. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'JRE MMA Show #109 with Gordon Ryan' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-05-01. Transcript available.

JRE MMA Show #109 with Gordon Ryan

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Well, welcome, man.
Thanks for doing this.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
Long time coming.
How the fuck did you rise so far ahead of everyone else in the jiu-jitsu world?
Let me just tell everybody before things get started.
And Gordon is undeniably the best pound-for-pound jiu-jitsu player on earth.
Not just the best, but it's a pretty good statement to say that you're the best
ever.
And you're only 25.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
How the fuck does that happen?
So I'm going to go ahead and give credit to John.
I mean, I think that without him, I maybe would have been successful.
I would have been, you know, maybe the best in the world at some point in my
career.
But I don't think that without John, I would be where I am right now.
And I don't think that I would have gotten this good in this amount of time.
You know, I've been training 10 years.
I've been competing professionally for five years.
And I think that, you know, a big part of the reason why I am where I am is
because of John's coaching.
Yeah, and we're talking about John Donaher, for people who don't know, who is a
literal genius and a mastermind in jiu-jitsu and a true mad scientist.
And watching him coach you guys is very fascinating because he's so serious and
stoic.
And Gordon Ryan, pass over the left leg.
Gordon Ryan, post, like the way he talks.
Like, it's really interesting.
He says your full name, too.
It's very interesting.
Gordon Ryan, Gary Tonin, Craig Jones.
Yeah.
It's always the full name.
Yeah.
Why?
He's such an odd duck.
He does it to address us because a lot of times, like, you've got Nicky, for
example.
Like, there's a lot of guys named Nicky, so he makes sure that you know he's
talking to you when he says Nicky Ryan, Nicky Rod, Craig Jones, Gordon Ryan.
So you know that when you hear your name being called, your first and last name,
you know that, okay, this person is addressing you in a room of, you know, 5,000,
10,000 people.
He's such an unusual human being.
There is not a single person on the planet Earth like John Donaher.
One of the most brilliant guys I've ever met, obsessed with jiu-jitsu, mostly.
Like, that's, if you, you got a pie chart of his brain, it would be like, he's
like 20% room for other shit, 80% of his brain is jiu-jitsu.
Yeah.
I mean, it's not, it's not even just jiu-jitsu.
It's just martial arts in general.
Like, I mean, people who know John on a personal level and have trained with
John know that John knows just as much, just as much about MMA as he does, or
even more about MMA than he does about jiu-jitsu.
He's been coaching MMA with George and with Chris Weidman for longer than he's
been coaching jiu-jitsu.
I mean, he's only been coaching professional jiu-jitsu athletes for five years.
And I've watched him personally teach judo privates to judo Olympians.
Watch, teach him, have him, I watched him teach wrestling privates to wrestling
world team members, wrestling Olympians.
You know, he knows just as much about the other martial arts as he does about jiu-jitsu.
It's crazy.
Yeah, and never walks around without a rash guard on.
That's also correct.
I've seen him one time ever with a t-shirt on because we went to Long Island to
train with Chris Weidman one time, and he forgot his change of rash guards.
So he had a street rash guard on, and he didn't have a second rash guard to
change into, and Chris didn't have a rash guard for him.
So they gave him, like, this pink flamingo t-shirt that he ended up.
We did a whole session with Chris Weidman.
It was right before he was going to fight Luke Rockhold the second time, which
ended up never happening.
But we did this whole session with John with, like, this pink tropical t-shirt
on.
And then he changed out of the t-shirt to get back into his street rash guard
and leave to go home.
Like, it was just like, I'm just like, okay, this is happening.
I posted it, and everyone was freaking out about it.
Just how crazy is it that he has a street rash guard?
Yeah.
He's got street rash guards, he's got training rash guards, and he's got, like,
his nighttime, like, dinner date rash guards.
Like, he's got, like, a date rash guard, he's got a dinner rash guard.
Like, he's got it all sorted out.
So if he goes on a date with a woman, he wears a rash guard?
Oh, yeah, he's got, like, he's got, like, this really nice, like, underarm,
like, this gray underarm or sweatshirt that he, or, um, rash guard that he puts
on.
And, like, you know, like, when John comes out in one of his fancy rash guards,
you're like, okay, he's not fucking around now.
You're like, this guy is, like, you go out to dinner, you're like, all right,
this guy means business tonight.
But, has anybody ever asked him what the fuck is going on?
Yeah, I mean, so he just, he just likes to wear rash guards because of the fact
that they dry fast.
The fact that they're cool, they keep you cool, they keep you warm.
If they get wet, they dry fast.
And they're just tight-fitting.
He likes tight-fitting clothes.
So he just prefers to wear them.
He thinks they're more efficient than T-shirts are.
It's just so odd.
But that's part of John Donahue.
Always has a fanny pack.
Respect.
I respect the fanny pack.
I mean, one of the great mysteries of the world is what he has inside that fanny
pack.
It's kind of thick.
It is.
It's a large fanny pack.
He's got a lot of stuff inside there.
He's, it's just, it's so fascinating to watch what he's done in coaching this
Donahue death squad.
And create, like, he's unquestionably the greatest jiu-jitsu coach on earth.
And this is also widely regarded.
Like, the way you're widely regarded as the best pound-for-pound grappler, he's
widely regarded as the best jiu-jitsu coach.
And it's, it's, um, it's really interesting to see that you guys just have been
dominating the grappling scene.
And to watch all this play out and to see people study you guys, but still not
be able to catch up.
Yeah, I mean, what most people do is they just see, like, a general outline of
what we do.
But no one, no one looks at what the specifics of what we're doing.
They say, oh, you know, Gordon's a good lug locker.
Let me try to do lug locks.
Or Gordon's trapping hands from the back.
Let me try to do that.
But they don't see the very specific details.
And the specific details are what's going to be the difference between
finishing a high-level guy and having a high-level guy escape.
So whatever it does is they just see the general idea and have the general
outline of what we're doing.
And they try to just copy that.
But when you just try to copy the best guys, if you just try to copy everyone
else, you get the same results as everybody else.
You have to go further than what the best guys are doing.
And you have to innovate.
And, you know, I look at the other best guys in the world and I say, what are
they doing?
You know, that works against the other high-level guys.
And how can I make that better?
Not just let me try to arbitrarily copy what they're trying to do.
Now, what is missing in, like, if you take the rest of the people that are in
the top 10?
Like, what are they doing differently?
What everyone does in jiu-jitsu is they try to do the least amount of work
possible to win a jiu-jitsu match, right?
So, they try to jump past your guard.
They score an advantage.
They score a couple points.
And then, for the next seven minutes, they do nothing.
Whereas, what we try to do is we try to take the hardest route to a victory and
we try to submit the guy.
So, what you see is a complete, there's just a complete different mindset
between what the rest of the guys are doing and what we're trying to do.
We're trying to go out and we're not satisfied unless we hit a submission.
And in my case, sometimes I call the submission and I'm trying to, you know, go
out and hit a specific submission.
But, you know, they're happy just going out and having a match where there's 10
minutes in the feet.
They just hang on each other's collar ties and then they win a ref decision and
they run around beating their chest like they just, they did something.
So, just the mindset for winning in competition is completely different.
Now, how did that happen?
How did jiu-jitsu get to be this sport where you have so many stalemates?
You have so many guys that do this thing where they run around just collar
tying each other and pushing each other around and no one ever takes a chance.
No one ever realizes that, you know, hey, we've only got four minutes to go.
I've got to make something happen.
I think it's training program.
I think that the rule sets mean very little.
If you look at a guy like Hodger Gracie, no matter what rule set he competes in,
he's trying to finish you.
If you look at me, no matter what rule set you go into, I'm trying to finish
you.
If it's EBI rules, I'm trying to finish you.
If it's IBJJF rules, I'm trying to finish you.
And, you know, I think that most people's training programs are built around
positional control
and doing the least amount of work possible to win.
You know, people train stalling tactics.
You know, we don't do that.
We just try to get better at jiu-jitsu and better at submissions.
Whereas our training program is built around control that leads to submissions.
No matter what rule set we go into compete under, we're always trying to
control the guy and then submit him.
Whereas most people, they have a training program built around positional
advances
where they're just trying to do whatever they can to win.
And a win's a win.
And however they win, they're happy with it.
And what year did you start with, John?
How long ago?
I started training with them.
The first time I ever started training with them was 2014.
Was that the first time you trained?
Or had you trained somewhere else?
No, I started training late 2010, almost 2011 with Miguel Benitez.
He was one of Ricardo Almeida's brown belts owned the school.
And this guy, Miguel Benitez, was a blue belt under the guy who owned one of
Ricardo's affiliate schools.
And I started training under him from like white to mid-level blue belt.
And then Gary actually took over, Gary Tonin took over the school when I was
like a purple belt.
And then purple belt, I started training part-time with John because I just
graduated high school
and I had to go to college and work to afford to get to the city.
But then somewhere around mid-level purple belt, I think it was like mid to
late 2014,
is when I started training with John full-time.
So I've been training with John full-time like six years or so.
And has the training changed since you first started?
And have you discussed this with John?
Because he's got such a complex system of training and taking people through
positional dominance to submission.
Has this evolved during the time that you've been with him?
What was it like at the beginning?
Yeah, at first it was just, he was just trying to get us better at jiu-jitsu,
specifically better at leg locks.
Because the big hole in the high-level competition jiu-jitsu scene was leg
locks.
Nobody really knew how to do leg locks well.
So the first couple of years of us training was just him trying to get us
competent
and then eventually to be the best in leg locking.
And then once we got there and once we could beat the best guys in the world or
at least hang with the best guys in the world,
then it was more specific towards winning under certain rule sets.
You know, EBI came along and, you know, okay, how can now, you guys can do jiu-jitsu,
you're competent everywhere.
How can you succeed and how can you beat certain players or how can you win
under specific rule sets?
So it went from just a broad idea of initially getting better at jiu-jitsu just
as a whole
and then more specifically how can I win ADCC, how can I win EBI, how can I
beat this guy, how can I beat that guy?
But has his training program evolved in terms of, like, how 