Joe Calls Gordon Ryan "The Greatest Jiu-Jitsu Player"

Gordon is undeniably the best pound-for-pound jiu-jitsu player on earth. Not just the best, but pretty... Pretty... It's a pretty good statement to say that you're the best ever. But you're only 25. Yeah. That's crazy! Yeah. How the fuck does that happen? So, I'm gonna go ahead and give credit to Jon. I mean, I think that without him... I maybe would have been successful. I would have been... 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 Jon, 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 Jon's coaching. Yeah. And we're talking about Jon Donner for people who don't know, who is a literal genius and a mastermind in jujitsu 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 Toning, Craig Jones, it's always the full name. Yeah. Why would it... He's such an odd duck. He does it to address us because a lot of times, like, if you've got like Nicky, for example, like there's a lot of guys named Nicky. So he makes sure 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, five, 10,000 people. He's such an unusual human being. There is not a single person on the planet Earth like Jon Donner. One of the most brilliant guys I've ever met, obsessed with jujitsu, mostly. Like, that's... if you got a pie chart of his brain, it would be like, it's like 20% room for other shit. 80% of his brain is jujitsu. Yeah. I mean, it's not even just jujitsu. It's just martial arts in general. Like, I mean, people who know Jon on a personal level and have trained with Jon know that Jon knows just as much about MMA. Or even more about MMA than he does about jujitsu. He's been coaching MMA with George and with Chris, I've been for longer than he's been coaching jujitsu. I mean, he's only been coaching professional jujitsu 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 jujitsu. It's crazy. Yeah. And never walks around without a rash guard on. That's also correct. Which is the honest thing. I've seen him one time ever with a t-shirt on because we went to Long Island to train with Chris Wybman 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 Wybman. 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. Everyone was freaking out about it. Just how crazy is it that he has a street rash guard? Yeah, he's got his 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. He's got it all sorted out. So if he goes out 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 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. Like this guy is like you got to do like this guy means business tonight. 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. He just 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 Donner always has a fanny pack respect. I respect the fanny pack. One of the great mysteries of the world is what he has inside that fanny pack. It's kind of thick. It is. 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 Donner death squad and create like he's unquestionably the greatest jujitsu 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 jujitsu coach. It's it's some 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 like 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 get 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 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, 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 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 for this 10 minutes in the feet. They just hang on each other's collar ties and they win a ref decision and they run around beating their chest like they just they did something. So just the mindset and the mindset for winning in competition is completely different. Catch new episodes. The Joe Rogan experience for free only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips easily seamlessly switch between video and audio experience on Spotify. You can listen to the JRE in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data costs all for free. Spotify is absolutely free. You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes. You just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app. Go to Spotify now to get this full episode of the Joe Rogan experience.