Name: JRE MMA Show #11 with John Danaher
Uploaded: 2018-01-15T22:35:52.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'JRE MMA Show #11 with John Danaher' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-01-15. Transcript available. Joe sits down with Brazilian jiu-jitsu coach John Danaher.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'JRE MMA Show #11 with John Danaher' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-01-15. Transcript available. Joe sits down with Brazilian jiu-jitsu coach John Danaher.

JRE MMA Show #11 with John Danaher

and we're live John Donaher thank you very much sir very nice to see you it's
my pleasure Joe
thank you for having me here nice to be with a fellow fanny pack proponent as
well and now you
you have one of the the beautiful higher primate leather bags like that huh Joe
Rogan has just
given me one of the most beautiful fanny packs that I've ever seen in my life I
wear a very cheap
fanny pack and this this is a thing of beauty I was just telling Joe about my
student Gordon Ryan was
recently given a Gucci fanny pack it's literally the most beautiful thing I've
ever seen in my life
when he wears it around me I get insanely jealous but would you buy one of
those it's like an $800
just on principle just on principle I can't buy an $800 fanny pack but I could
definitely
stab Gordon Ryan in the back with a knife and steal it from and blame it on
Nicky Ryan I could do that
easily blame on his brother absolutely great TV series the fanny pack is making
a comeback it's a slow
comeback that a lot of people are reluctant to join they're they're scared they
they worry about their
position in the sexual food chain and with good reason by the way I don't know
why I feel like
anybody that won't fuck you because you have a fanny pack you don't want to
fuck them they're too much work
Strong point yeah, it's just not essentially it's always a battle over
Appearance versus function yeah fanny packs score very very low on appearance
but very high on function
I feel like that one bucks the trend I think you're right between this and the
Gucci we've got something going on here
There's a video that I put up the other day of my archery game is techno hunt
thing which is this big crazy elaborate
Thing I got more comments on the fact that I was wearing a fanny pack in the
video than anything with a positive or negative comments mostly negative
Yeah, but that's my experience
But that's just the internet the the internet is the internet is extremely
angry. That's the first thing you learn about the internet they
You can you could literally save a baby's life from and the 80% of the internet
will call you an asshole for doing so
It's it doesn't matter what you do the internet is very angry
Well what the internet is is it shows what people are like when there's no
social cues when they're not in front of you
they don't have to deal with like looking you in the eye and what weird little
hidden demons of jealousy and anger and
And resentment and it's a pretty sad stories in it
That's what we're really like. It's it's not looking good for the human
I just think it's the kind of people that comment in general
What it shows you is that 99% of what we call human goodness and politeness
really comes out of fear of consequences?
There's a lot of that for sure because there's no consequences when you talk
online
But I think it's the quality of the people that are making those kind of
comments
Like I would say like if you look at YouTube comments like Michael Jordan is
not leaving YouTube comments
The people that leave YouTube comments and bitch and complain about things
usually everything's not going so fantastic in their own life
Yeah, but they have this forum now when they feel like you know if there's a
video that has 3 million downloads
They also are on that video they are at the they're there in the comments
section you go to that they're a part of that
Unqualified no one asked him to be there literally all you have to do is make
an account
No one has to know anything about your education the way your mind works what
you've done with your life what mistakes you've made
Doesn't matter you are old fuck
66 and that's your name and you can say whatever you want and you your your
comments are right there with everything else
Yes, yeah, it's fascinating to watch it's very egalitarian
But in a lot of ways, it's also it's like
Boy, I don't know if that's the best way to get your information. Yeah, I think
there's a lot of truth to that. Yeah, so John
You are one of the most fascinating
Characters in the world of jujitsu and the world of martial arts and for people
who are not aware of your background
You started out correct me if I'm wrong you started out a philosophy student.
That's correct
Yes, and you were working as a bouncer
And you were jacked right you're a power lifter at the time. Yes, and you
wanted to figure out a way to defend yourself
I wasn't really a question of wanting to figure out it was it was
a pretty simple desire that I had when I grew up in New Zealand
Martial arts was almost entirely based around
Striking prowess you'll back me up on this Joe
We're similar age when we grew up
the
it's no exaggeration to say that the study of martial arts in in
English-speaking countries North America Western Europe, etc
was absolutely dominated by the striking arts and
If you ask the average person who was the best fighter in the world, they would
typically say whoever was the best boxer in the world
So in the 1980s Mike Tyson wasn't just the best boxer in the world. He was the
best fighter in the world people
always equated
prowess and fighting with the ability to strike
I grew up in that time period and so I grew up doing
Studying kickboxing as a teenager in New Zealand. I came to United States and
for the first time there's no wrestling culture in my country
New Zealand has no wrestling culture. It's one of the few countries where there's
no indigenous wrestling culture. There's there were but it was kind of lost in
them
sands of time
When I grew up
Wrestling was something I saw once every four years at the Olympics on TV and
I didn't even associate it with fighting to be honest with you
I just saw it as these strange sport with two guys tackled each other and
So I came to United States and I was working as a bouncer
America has much much more of a wrestling culture in it in
New Zealand when I grew up when you fought you were expected to fight with
fists and if it went to the ground the two guys stood up and they
Resumed fighting you stood up and you fought like a man. That was the idea and
in the United States when I was bouncing I was
Absolutely shocked and impressed by the prowess of judo players and wrestlers
in
Street fighting working as a bouncer. I worked alongside them and I was
massively impressed. What year was this?
This is in the early 1990s. I arrived in the United States in 1991
So I started working late night and late 1991
in New York City
New York was a very very very different city back then. It's it's like a
It's almost like two different cities from what it is to be amazing how much it's
changed the transformation is
Night and day. It's become like a giant TGI Fridays now. That's pretty much
what New York City is
To give you an example
I used to live on West End Avenue on the Upper West Side
When I would come home from working in nightclubs at 5:30 in the morning to go
to sleep
there would be
large numbers of street walking prostitutes on
my block my Avenue if
That if you saw even a single street walking prostitute in that area today
It would be front page news at the New York Times. It would be so
shocking so
completely
Out of people's
Yeah, people's mind time square is the best example time square is an extreme
example because time square used to be all CD peep show
It was nothing but CD peep show and now it's like Guy Fieri restaurants
It's all weird television. So the transformation is huge
So that was the New York that I went into and it was a it was a violent, New
York
1991, I believe was the year with the highest murder rate in
Recorded history for New York City, so it was a very very different New York
City. It's not what you see today
So I came into this environment and I saw these people were incredibly adept
and fighting they were using grappling technique to do so
This impressed me a lot at
Shortly after that time as I was working
I started to hear talk about this show this ultimate fighting show and there
was this Brazilian
guy who had beaten everyone he was wrestling people and
Strangling them and locking their arms things like that's people things that I'd
never heard of so I
I'd heard this and
One day I was teaching at Columbia University and a close friend of mine
Who was also in the PhD program came into my office? It was office hours and he
said John, you know
I know you work as a bouncer and I know
You work at night and I started doing this this martial art. It's called
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu
Jiu Jitsu and
It's mostly fought on the ground and I remember you said
most of the fights you get into people get put down on the ground and they
wrestle and
I was wondering if you would be interested in doing it and I was like Brazilian
Jiu Jitsu
Yeah, I never associated martial arts with Brazil for me martial arts, you know,
Japan Korea, you know, right Brazil like what do they got capoeira, you know,
right?
Who's this guy so I'm like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu isn't Jiu Jitsu like Japanese
like what is it?
Isn't it a contradiction of terms like Brazil Jiu Jitsu?
Um, so this at the time I was around 230 pounds and and this guy was couldn't
be more than 140 and he'd only been training two weeks
So, um, he goes to me, you know, we go on the ground and and we wrestle on the
ground and I was like
Okay, let me put you in a headlock and let's see what you can do
So I shut the door of the office. I cleared out the furniture
This poor kid on the ground now
Um, I had the only thing I knew how to do on the ground in those days was headlock
people and I, you know, I was a strong guy
They're pretty nasty headlock. And, um, so I grabbed my poor little friend and
and throttled him with it
basically a Kezakitame type headlock and
To my shock and horror he started slipping around behind me and I
Started holding harder and harder and they about two minutes went guy
And I really had no real control over him and he was starting to get around
behind me now
I didn't know back attacks where I had complete naivety on the ground, but I
could feel something bad was happening
Someone getting behind you is never a good thing in a fight and I was getting
tired. My arms were getting tired
I had no control over the guy and finally he slipped out and I had to stand up
and run away
I'm twice your size. You've been training two goddamn weeks and then if this
was a real fight
He would have got away from it. I'm tired. That's not good
And I was gonna say if he did this in two weeks
What could you do with some training so I was fascinated I went down
I got completely destroyed on my first day
I was hilarious you know who was there on his first day Matt Sarah was the most
he was a blue guard at the time
so even on that first day you you met people that would become very important
in your life later on and
I vowed to the moon and the stars that I would at least become competent in the
game
I couldn't live with the idea that I was incompetent at an important element of
fighting
I didn't want to be a world champ. I didn't want to just want to be competent
and
And I believed it would make my bouncing work significantly easier
that was
absolutely true
Within a very very short period of time bouncing got massively easier for me
I've all you know, you always hear this cliche jiu-jitsu saves you know
Jiu-jitsu saved my life. How many people in the years people say that all the
time well, I can think of
Without any question. There are four times in my life that jiu-jitsu actually
did save my life bounce. I can say that with complete honesty
Um, uh, it's a cliche for most people for me. It's it did happen
Um, so it made a massive difference
But I still saw it as something that was interesting and something. I just
wanted to gain competence in
That fundamentally changed because it really at that point
I wanted to finish my PhD and become a professor. That's what was my original
goal when I came to the United States
um, but things started to change when
The three senior students at the henzo Gracie Academy
Hikaru Mehta, Matt Serra an