JRE MMA Show #111 with John Danaher

**Joe Rogan** (0:15)
So one of the best things about this Who's Number One thing is that I get to see you once a month.
I've been enjoying it, man. We've had some wonderful conversations, and I figured, why not get you in here, and let's put one of these down on recording.

**John Danaher** (0:28)
Thank you.

**Joe Rogan** (0:29)
My pleasure.
This idea, this concept is so fantastic to me to take elite grapplers and pay them for matches, and then stream it online, and Flow Grappling is doing this, and they're very successful. A lot of jujitsu people are tuning into these things, and it's really become a hit.

**John Danaher** (0:51)
A true key in the development of any sport is some kind of organization which showcases it. For mixed martial arts, it was the UFC, and Grappling always struggled with the idea of showcasing the skills of the athletes.
There were local shows. When you and I started jujitsu, there were crazy local shows where people would just informally come in and compete against each other.
But there was nothing that had any kind of overall vision or sustained program over time. And that, I believe, is what flow grappling is trying to do here. They're trying to give something, a grappling version of what the UFC has done for mixed martial arts. And the athlete pay is improved dramatically over earlier years, a few years, and athlete exposure is massively improved. So it's a very encouraging thing.

**Joe Rogan** (1:44)
And the production is excellent.

**John Danaher** (1:45)
Yes.

**Joe Rogan** (1:46)
It's really good. It's great commentary.

**John Danaher** (1:49)
It's something where you could take someone who didn't know much about grappling, a friend of yours, invite them over and watch it together, and they'll be like, hey, that's an impressive sport. And like, as you say, the production looks like it's a legitimate sport, as opposed to like going to the local high school on a Saturday and watching you compete.
Yeah. Yeah. In that fashion.

**Joe Rogan** (2:08)
Well, one of the things that's made this sport more palatable is the approach that your athletes take, and many other athletes are following suit, is that it's a very submission-based approach, instead of just trying to score points.
Because I think there's been a problem with these rule sets where, I mean, even though Abu Dhabi's done an amazing job of showcasing elite grapplers, there's something weird about their score system. So the first, was it first five minutes, there's no points scored?

**John Danaher** (2:37)
That's correct, yes.

**Joe Rogan** (2:37)
And then the next five minutes, you score points. So you get guys stalling out for five minutes. So you almost guarantee a boring five minutes unless you have some sort of Marcelo Garcia attacker who just dives on submissions and goes after it right away. Which is not the norm. The norm is points-based guys who are just trying to win.

**John Danaher** (2:57)
That's correct. As a general rule, athletes are smart and they want to win.
So they will, as a general rule, always try to find the least risky way of attaining victory and doing the minimum amount of work in order to get to a win.
And yet the spectators are demanding something else. They're demanding entertainment. And in the sport of juditsu, the most entertaining thing you can do is to push the action towards submission holds. And submissions function in grappling in the same way a knockout punch does in boxing. And it's the most desired result. It's also the most impressive result. If you think, Joe, back to when you first started jiu-jitsu, what was its primary appeal? Well, I think for the overwhelming majority of practitioners of jiu-jitsu, it was the idea of submission.

**Joe Rogan** (3:49)
I think that's the only appeal. I don't think you could ever say anybody, I find it appealing to win on points. Yeah, or even worse on advantage.
Yeah, you just wrestle if you want to do that, yeah.

**John Danaher** (4:01)
When you look at jiu-jitsu, what makes it remarkable is the idea that it's a form of grappling where the outcome is determined in a way which it's understandable to anyone. It's surrender. You make someone surrender to you. Like, as impressive as judo, wrestling, or sports, the mechanism by which they win, in judo's case, the e-pon throw, they do have submissions in judo, but they're much less emphasized.
And in wrestling, a pin, they're not as decisive. Like, you know, it's easy to imagine someone who got pinned with their shoulders on the mat for three seconds, but came back to win the fight. That's not a difficult thing to conceive of. It's easy to conceive of someone who got thrown pretty hard and still kept fighting and won.