約翰·達納赫：降服纏鬥、ADCC、動物搏鬥與刀具

Lex Fridman Podcast #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives Machine transcription by Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (MLX, local, Apache-2.0). May contain recognition errors. The following is a conversation with John Donaher, his third time on this podcast. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest minds in martial arts history. And now a quick second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description, it's the best way to support this podcast. We got Audible for audiobooks, Calm for meditation, Indeed for hiring, MasterClass for learning, and Aidsleep for napping. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Audible, an audio book service that has given me thousands of hours of education, enlightenment, inspiration, wisdom. 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Please check out our sponsors in the description, and now dear friends, here is John Donaher. The ADCC is the premier submission grappling tournament in the world. We just had it a couple of weeks ago. We saw many demonstrations of greatness from athletes you coached, but a year ago. The team and you were at a very low point. Take me through that journey. What was the lowest 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 one who actually lived in Manhattan. The others had to commute to New York, and there is 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. There was a difficult decision for me to make because I had lived in New York for thirty years. I had 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 unstain 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 personally wanted to go to Texas. 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 one of the head officials of ADCC Mojazim. So they loved their experience in Puerto Rico, and almost everyone wanted to go down there. So I tried to explain to him there is 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 are in New York, New York is such a big city that if there is 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 is so many distractions in New York. You know you come and you do your workout, you go outside and it's 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. You didn't get to get away from people if you had a problem someone on the mat or now you have to 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 two brothers which magnified over time. And you know as so often is the case, you get two brothers growing up one. Older one younger and the younger one wants to grow and and feels somewhat like a young tree underneath a bigger tree, and sometimes people just need their space. So there was there was some unhappiness and. As a younger brother, I can understand. Yeah, yeah, as a little tree that had to grow up under a bigger tree. Yeah, so fuck the big tree. There is a lot of aggression. Have to work out. I am sorry unresolved family issues coming out here. That's your turn. I am just kidding. I love you. He doesn't. He's lying. 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 are starting to you know when once training takes a hit, then you you got to start to address these. The attempts at reconciliation fell through, and a decision was made to to move to Texas. I wanted everyone to move as a team. What I wanted to do was keep the team together. As long as the period leading up to ADCC, so that everyone could train together. So I said okay, there is problems, but let's just tough it out one year. We move to Texas, let's just go there and keep unity. Some people don't want to 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 were really starting to come into their own and really develop well, and so my take on it was okay if there is problems. So be it, but let's all just stay together until ADCC twenty twenty two as a unified team, go out, prepare yourselves as best you can, and 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, and they moved to Austin. We had 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 in Austin, so a year out from ADCC. Yes, this is one year out. So roughly three quarters of the competitive athletes left in in one week. So at that point, that was probably the lowest point because at at that point not only do 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, yeah, yeah. So that that was a time when I 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. What was your mind? What were you mentally? My my thinking is everything bad passes in time. I've had a lot of bad points in my life, so my life experiences whenever things seem dark. Have patience. Time will ultimately cure most ills, not all of them, but most of them, and I am confident that if you give me a new crop of students, I can 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 twenty twenty two would go well because we only had one year without a gym and with. A team that was completely broken up to to to even an attempt to get into ADCC, so things looked a little grim, but I was confident you know given enough time I get in a new. Group of students and work, as it turns out, one of the demonstration partners that I used during filming for instructional videos. Who lives in Boston, John Carlo Bedoni was interested in the idea of. Coming down and training, but he had 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. So he was the first one to come down. He moved from Boston to Austin, Texas. I began teaching at a local school. It was rather like going back into my earliest days in judo. So I went from teaching at the Big Hensokrace 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, seven 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 an another gym where they would train with the professionals. And if they. Proved adept and hard working 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. I feeling bad about his performance and his future, and he came in and I thought he was a lovely kid who worked hard and trained well. So he became one of the main training partners. He was similar size to Gordon, so I encouraged him to train with with Gordon whenever he could. And more and more people started coming in to train under that kind of basis. One day I got a text from Gordon who was filming an instructional video in Boston. He said, "Hey, you know Nicholas Miragali was training at this. He was shooting video at the same time as me, and we we just did some grappling. He's a really nice guy, and he's literally never trained with without a g before. He's. " For those of you who don't know Nicholas Miragali is a one of the outstanding g judo zoo competitors of his generation, has an amazing game and is a superstar with with the the g side of the sport, but had never even trained without a g once in his life. So his first ever. No g training session is with Gordon Ryan, the best no g 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 yeah, sounds great. " 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, 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 Manassou. He had failed at trials and needed to get a win to even get into ADCC. So around this time, a doctor suggested by Mojazim who had himself had stomach issues earlier in his life. Began working with Gordon Ryan. And Mo's the organizer of ADCS. Yes. Yeah, he's the the head organizer. He was able to get Gordon Ryan not cured but. Significantly better than he was before, and to a level where Gordon could could train up to five to six days a week. And that was a big improvement on what was going on during the end of the time in Puerto Rico. So things started moving. 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 Rocasunglasses, 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 life because you've got less time to get ready for this. Than anyone and you are going to 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 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 many as three classes per day I know that sounds easy you know three classes a day but. Try doing it sometime. These classes are not your average classes. These are preparation for ADCC. They're both mentally and physically very very hard 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 believed were the 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 one exception I'll come to that soon. Over the the period of their training here in Austin. So it was. Compounded 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 Manassouy. And Luke Griffith and Oliver Tazza 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 three. Nogi matches and with each match you could see progress being made and so that convinced the ADCC people okay he's good enough to to compete. He ended up winning decisively a match against one of the greatest American grapplers of all time Rafael Lavato and this was like a clear sign that his. Skill level and Nogi was sufficient to to justify an invite, and by the way Lavato an incredible. Set of matches in this ADCC. Yes, that was actually very impressive and retired. Yeah. Which is really impressive and heartbreaking as well. But if you go out that's a good way to go out. Indeed, 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 had been inactive for so long with his stomach issue so he proposed one 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 Marino. Who's number one is WNO. And also I believe the current no Nogi world champion and IBJJF as a tune up match as a warm up match 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. And then ADCC itself so there was going to be three big high profile matches back to back. And very different rule sets so WNO was a 15 minute match the fight with Felipe Pena was no time limit which is a very different format to competing and then ADCC. So we had to drag out a 14 week camp covering three matches with three 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 that's Nicholas Miragalli had to go to the Nogi 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 Nogi competition and then the next day 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 I'm immensely proud of what they did 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 ADCC. It was in fact the most successful team performance of the event and as testimony to how hard those those young men worked in in the course of less than a year to prepare themselves. If I can just linger on the low point, is it heartbreaking to you that the so called Donaher 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 does it break your heart. It was a sad time yeah it was it was a. You know I'm not a particularly emotional person but it was 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 of friendship, so. But there's also the weight of those 10 years. They when I ran into the old squad members at ADCC we got along like a house on fire it was like we never. Had a problem. A house on fire is a good thing. Yes yes sorry that's a New Zealand expression yeah. Yeah they definitely could have gone the other way right so only a New Zealander would say that is a good thing yeah. So there's there's I still believe you know in in time things will be fine but. There was an element where you know youngsters need to grow and sometimes. Think think about this way from the athlete's perspective. There's definitely a generational problem. I'm much older than my students. Okay and the the the years and the 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 world view. It's it's got to be hard from the athlete's perspective when you're training seven days a week and you you're getting very very good you're beating everyone that's getting 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 saying you're 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 what does this guy want from me how how hard do I have to work like you're not good enough like I want you to be the best in the world I want you to be good I want you to be great. And all of your friends are telling you today man you're incredible you submit me so easily do this and then this old guy is saying that. You got to get better you got to work more you're not working hard enough. At some point you got to be like you know what fuck this old guy. Like it's it's tough you know mentally I get I you know they 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 no 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 constantly telling you no more has to be done you're not there yet. I can you know of course I understand you just want let me just enjoy this more like it's always a choice in life you. 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 the 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 the 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 Caleb Harrison won her first gold medal. And the Olympics, you know to go back to the gym and to trust again the maybe the old man you're being. Do questioning yourself but to trust the old man so Jimmy Page on Jimmy Page senior in that case to say okay we're going to go back to this grind and there's still. A path to improvement there's still a lot to grow and still have the humility even though you've just demonstrated greatness. So really good is just the stepping stone to to to to true greatness. That's really tough for athletes like winning is actually very difficult gold medal is a very difficult. 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 once you do. There's a lot of personal stuff you have to deal with which is like what 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. So that that's all all of that mixed up together 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 a you know 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. To come to us is not like they they lack anything 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 if they started training together by the way to pile on the compliments they have really nice merch to the t-shirts are just excellent. 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? Yeah, ego is is in part of superpower too so you don't want to yeah you you don't want to suppress egos like I always laugh and people say leave your ego at the door. Like what do you think drives competition like if you want to be good at anything in life you got to have an ego. No, I don't believe it's good or even a healthy thing to suppress egos. I'm a realist and I understand that this is a sport where they make one gold medal per weight division. As guys get better they're going to be looking at their training partners and thinking like. I'm going to have to fight this guy one day and they're training next to each other of course there's going to be tension there's always going to be. Disagreements about you know what's the right way to act around certain people certain issues and people are going to come into conflict everyone's. Being programmed to be a an alpha competitor and you get a room full of people like that there's going to be conflict. Now your question was well is there a way to resolve this yeah there was and for. Eight to nine years I was very successful with this but there's also a tipping point where things can flare out of control and there will be periodic breakdowns you know they're not the first students I had that that left I've been coaching a lot longer I've been coaching the squad. And I'm sure in the future there will be other students who leave me like. That's just nature of the beast it's sad when it happens but life goes on. Like Bukowski said love is a fog that fades with the first daylight of reality or something like that so even love. Is temporary. Let me ask you about leading up the the preparation. For the athletes I mean this is such given the darkness from from a year ago from which you had to find glimmers of light and try to get greatness out of athletes. What was the mental preparation like for Gordon for Nicholas. For Giancarlo for the other athletes what was the mental side of things like is there some key insights you can give to their mental preparation. I really think that people when they talk about mental preparation need to take a step back and realize that almost every element of what people describe as mental preparation has physical underpinnings. Literally 95 percent of what I teach the athletes is physical skills and it's my belief that every. Mental aspect of competition the most important which will be confidence on stage is a direct result of the the accumulation of physical skills. People tend to see things like confidence as a mental state. It is, but it comes out of. The performance of physical skills. All my life I've seen sports psychologists try to. Create confidence in athletes through non physical means and it always ends up being the same kind of cheesy motivational speeches, highlight video reels where they try to pump. Artificial confidence into people and I've never been impressed by this nor have I seen have any kind of positive effect on on athlete performance. What I do see build confidence is the sense that athletes are developing skills and using them successfully under conditions that closely mirror. The event they're preparing for once they get this down that's where true confidence comes from confidence doesn't come from words it comes from accumulated skills which experience shows you have. Been responsible for successful performances in the past and if you accumulate enough of these your confidence rises. So when it comes to the mental aspects of competition I created a program where everyone had was given a set of skills that they had to work on skills directly related to what I believe is the most important elements of success in ADCC competition. In the gym they accumulated those skills over time. I do it in two different ways depending on whether these are offensive skills or defensive skills. For the accumulation of offensive skills I like to have my athletes work with athletes who are lesser than themselves in ability so they start to. Gain confidence over time just as you would never send a beginner into a weightlifting gym and put 500 pounds on the bar and tell them to lift it rather you would start with. A wooden bar then the metal bar and then gradually accumulate weight over time so you get a progression in weightlifting so too in judo too you don't. Take a brand new move and say okay do it on Gordon Ryan never going to succeed. I have the athletes practice their offense on blue belts and work their way up. Defense on the other hand. You've got to start them in the deep end of the pool so that they start to see what are their vulnerabilities. Okay so I put them with highly competitive athletes at the start so they can see okay there is a problem here and then even in defense they start off with lower belts and build up their confidence over time. So just as a weight lifter builds up his ability to build weight, so to a judo player does it by gradually increasing resistance. Now in judo resistance is not done by weight it's done by skill level and so over time they started to accumulate this experience. In time, they we were able to switch off and have them go against. Very very tough athletes each other so you know Luke Griffith will do a full power match with Gordon Ryan now. They're fully aware that there's no one better in the world than Gordon Ryan. So if you have a competitive match with Gordon Ryan that's a very very healthy sign. So they went from the start where they were being programmed going against relatively mild resistance and building up over time and then building up to the greatest resistance possible in the sport of judo too. And their goal is not to win obviously but their goal is to. Provide a competitive match. Now Gordon doesn't have any confidence issues, so for him it's just good hard competitive training against people that are. In some ways better than those he'll be facing in competition. For the other guys, it's getting a clear assessment of what their current skill level is. By going against the best there is, then we add to this a competitive schedule where the athletes have to go out into competition so they get used to the idea of performing in front of strangers. On stage, getting used to the the strange elements of going out being observed and judged by people you don't know in a performance atmosphere. And so they were all given matches in WNO competition leading up to the event, ADCC trials local grappling events here in Austin and given a competitive schedule to fight and prepare them for ADCC. Obviously as ADCC got closer and closer this was pulled back because of the danger of injury so within. About three weeks out was the last time we had a competition, and by this method confidence starts to grow, and and so the mental preparation came out of those physical underpinnings the idea of progressive resistance increasing over time. For both offense and defense, building up to a peak where they're going against the best athlete in the world so they can get an accurate assessment of where they stand. Once you give in a competitive match to the best guy in the world, you know damn well that when you go out in ADCC you are ready to fight anybody. And defense is broadly defined, so defense in in symmetrical positions like positions like guard, and then defense also includes escaping from horrible positions. Yes, we're big believers in the idea of depth of defense, the idea that you should be able to mount defense all the way through from early stages based mostly around anticipation of identifying danger visually before it emerges and all the way through to the deepest levels of defense where you are 100 defensive and terrible positions and you have to claw your way out and over time and get back to a neutral position or even better back to an attacking position. You have an Instagram post on this topic. When you get ready to step out for the biggest moment of your life, ask yourself one question: How different is this really from what I do every day? If the answer is not very different at all, then step forward with confidence and do what you do every day in the same manner and ignore the hype and distraction. You are ready for action. By the way, for people who don't know, you need to follow John Donner Donner John on Instagram because you have nuggets. Or large buckets of nuggets of wisdom often which is quite profound even bigger than jujitsu but anyway so there is some aspect where you want to mimic the conditions of your daily training. In intensity in in what for so physical to that of the actual matches. You ask the question about mental training for me. The central focus of whatever small amount of mental training I give my students comes down to a very very simple concept to understand. This is the idea of identifying competition in terms of its normalcy. Most people see training and competition as two different things. Training is normal activity that you do every day, and competition is the exception. Okay, it's different. You are going out. There is people watching you. There is a big crowd. They're making lots of noise. Um. In fact, the promoters of shows go out of their way to reinforce this. Look at for example ADCC when Gordon Ryan went to fight Andre Galvon. Okay, do they just come out on the mat and fight each other? Absolutely not. There's music. There's pageantry. There's fireballs. They're literally shooting fireballs. Some dude in a tie sitting with Joe Rogan. I heard about that guy. Head, uh, podcaster comedian whatever. Which one was the meathead? Well played John Donner. Well played. But you see what they're trying to do. They're trying to create theater and pageantry when in fact it's just a grappling match. It's just two athletes, a referee and a ruleset. That's the reality. Now what they try to sell you is something which is not reality, which is this is somehow bigger and different. And they reinforce this with pageantry and theater so that it becomes not just a grappling match but a grappling performance the same way you have a