William Dorman is a retired US Navy diver who spent the better part of two decades stationed in Virginia Beach, deployed to Afghanistan, and training Brazilian jiu-jitsu as a discipline parallel to military service. He received his black belt under Gustavo Machado — whose lineage traces to Roberto Gordo, widely credited with making the half guard offensive — after more than fifteen years of serious training across Hawaii, Virginia Beach, and now Sarasota, Florida. He coaches internationally with BJJ Globetrotters, has produced instructional content for BJJ Fanatics, and runs Blue Ring Solutions — a company built around the philosophy of the blue ring octopus: a small creature capable of taking down opponents many times its size. He serves as an ambassador for We Defy Foundation, which provides jiu-jitsu programs to combat-disabled veterans. He also grows his own food, plays didgeridoo for his plants, and has converted a freezer into a cold plunge in multiple countries including Afghanistan.
There is a specific kind of person who shows up to a jiu-jitsu class in Hawaii, gets demolished by a 120-pound woman, and then immediately thinks: I need more of this. William Dorman is that person. He was already a Navy diver. He was already training. He already knew what suffering felt like from the inside. And he walked into a shopping center in Kailua, got handed his credentials by someone he would have underestimated at a glance, and decided on the spot that he had found something.
Two decades later, he is a BJJ black belt under Gustavo Machado, a BJJ Globetrotters coach logging a hundred rounds with a hundred different people in Estonia last week alone, a We Defy Foundation ambassador putting jiu-jitsu in front of combat-disabled veterans, and a man who grows his own food, plays didgeridoo for his plants, and has assembled cold plunge setups in Afghanistan. This conversation covers the technical — top pressure, half guard philosophy, why no one touches his feet — and the philosophical — suffering as the prerequisite for growth, the problem of gyms losing midlife men, why positivity is a practice not a personality trait. And one phrase from a 90-year-old man on a plane that explains how William Dorman approaches everything.
How a 120-Pound Woman in a Shopping Center Changed Everything
The story starts in 2006. Steve Hordinski — a brown belt under Relson Gracie at the time, known in Hawaii as someone with a legitimate reputation — drives William to a jiu-jitsu class at Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Kailua in the Akahi shopping center. Jason Izaguirre is running the class. William, a Michigan wrestler and Navy athlete, walks in and sees a bunch of people in pajamas wrestling on a mat and wonders what he has gotten himself into.
Then he takes the class. Daynin Dashefsky — now running Kahala Jiu-Jitsu in Hawaii with a strong kids program, probably in her sixties and still getting after it — proceeds to dismantle him. Everyone else in the room does too. He cannot figure out what is happening. He came in thinking he was an athlete, thinking the wrestling background would translate directly, thinking he had the physical tools. None of it mattered the way he expected.
"Some people get beat up by someone they didn't expect and they leave and never come back. I went the opposite way. I just got all in."
— William Dorman · @williamdorman_bjjThat split — between the person who gets humbled and retreats, and the person who gets humbled and doubles down — is one of the most reliable predictors of who stays on the mats and who doesn't. William went all in. He started consuming jiu-jitsu full time. The blue belt came from Jason Izaguirre in about six months, which earned him a reputation as a sandbagger from Relson Gracie and sent him to the pans as a newly minted blue belt where he discovered there were 126 people in his bracket, all of them savages, and that he needed to seriously reconsider his approach. Which is how jiu-jitsu is supposed to work.
Top Pressure, the Half Guard, and Why Nobody Gets to His Feet
William's technical identity grew directly from his wrestling background. Take people down, stay on top, control with pressure — that was the entry point, and it made sense given what he brought to the mat. As he encountered better jiu-jitsu and spent years watching Gustavo's instructionals with his training partner Greg Walker in Afghanistan between missions, he built out the bottom game. Then leg locks arrived in the culture and he made a clear-eyed decision: he tried training them, something in his feet would break and he couldn't walk for a week, and he stopped.
The decision to protect his feet has not limited his game. It has concentrated it. His top pressure system — the over-under, shoulder and head to the hip, controlling the space like a koala attached to a tree — is built around making foot attacks impossible rather than just difficult. If you want his feet, you have to go through the position, and the position doesn't give them to you.
The core of William's passing and control game is shoulder to one hip, head to the other, with everything squeezed and connected so that the opponent cannot create the space to scramble or attack extremities. The connection is so tight that movement requires dragging everything with you. This is the position Cyborg Abreu recognised after their match — the same principle of controlling the hip space while staying attached through transition.
Under Gustavo Machado — who trained under Roberto Gordo, widely credited with making half guard an offensive position — William has developed fluency on both the top and bottom of half guard that most practitioners develop only from one side. From the bottom, the lasso-style sweeps transfer directly to no-gi. From the top, the half guard becomes the entry point for the over-under control and the pressure passing sequence. The half guard is not a defensive position in his game. It is an intersection.
One of the details that landed from his BJJ Fanatics instructional: lasso-style sweeps developed in the gi transfer to no-gi with greater effectiveness than most practitioners expect. Get the blade at the hand or the leg in the right position and the sweep completes regardless of sleeve or lapel. The underlying mechanics — weight distribution, hip angle, the moment of commitment — are the same. The grip is different. The principle is not.
His instructional organizes the pressure system around what he calls a funnel: from a given control position, the opponent has three available responses. William knows the answer to all three. The match becomes a cycle — they respond, he addresses it, they respond, he addresses it — until the finish presents itself. This is not complex. It is a system built on understanding the options available from a specific point and having a prepared answer for each one.
His game is now evolving toward scrambling entries into the top position from unorthodox situations — wrestling-style scrambles that feed directly into the over-under doghouse control. A hundred rounds in Estonia last week produced new pieces. That is how his jiu-jitsu grows: constant live rolling against people who are genuinely trying to stop him, watching four or five classes a day at Globetrotter camps, identifying the principle underneath the technique, and building neural pathways by applying it immediately.
Cold Plunges in Afghanistan, Gardening With a Didgeridoo, and the Symbiotic Life
William Dorman's recovery stack was assembled long before biohacking had that name, inside military human performance centres that were better resourced than most professional sports facilities. Float tanks. Mind-mapping devices. Heart rate variability training. Cold tubs running alongside hot tubs. Stellate ganglion blocks for sympathetic nervous system reset. The Navy needed its divers and operators to be able to perform optimally and return to a rested state quickly. The tools they used for that were the same tools the biohacking world discovered a decade later.
The cold plunge has been a constant. He had a chest freezer cold plunge at home in Virginia Beach for ten years until it broke. He built one in Afghanistan — freezer, wood stairs for access, chemical testing kit, someone monitoring temperature — and used it as a recovery tool between deployments. His current setup in South Florida is the same approach: a freezer, cold water, no complexity required.
"Stand in the dirt for 10 minutes and your body goes: oh, okay, now we're over here. I guess we need to recalibrate."
— William Dorman · @williamdorman_bjjThe gardening is not a hobby. It is a practice — and the distinction matters. He grows food in South Florida because the climate allows year-round production and because the therapeutic benefit of growing things is distinct from and additive to the nutritional benefit of eating them. Being outside in direct sunlight with feet in the dirt. Being responsible for something that depends on you. Watching things grow from the seed to the harvest. He waters his plants without a timer because he wants to look at them, check them, observe their condition. He plays didgeridoo for them in the morning.
William's intuitive description of grounding — standing barefoot in dirt to recalibrate after travel and time zone changes — is precisely what the research on earthing and cortisol regulation supports. Direct contact with the earth's surface transfers free electrons into the body, normalising circadian disruption and reducing systemic inflammation markers. The traditional understanding of needing to reconnect with the earth when displaced is not mysticism. It is biology that rural and ancestral populations maintained automatically and that modern indoor living has almost entirely eliminated.
His recovery framework now integrates jiu-jitsu itself as a movement and recovery modality, not just a training one. He approaches the mat — particularly during the week between weekend open mat sessions — as flow and drilling rather than performance. The Budokon mobility system that Steve Hordinski runs at his Colorado academy and that William encountered at the seminar last year is a significant piece of this: movement-first, connection-first, building the neural pathways for jiu-jitsu through flow patterns before submissions become the point.
- Cold plunge — daily when available; minimum 10 minutes; built from a chest freezer wherever access to a commercial unit is unavailable
- Yoga — hot vinyasa initially for the cardio and sweat; now any style for the mindfulness, presence, and shut-off-the-world function; practiced since 2007 through Hot House Yoga in Virginia Beach
- Breath work — Oxygen Advantage protocols for altitude preparation; box breathing pre-competition and pre-performance; HRV training with Warrior Wellness Solutions currently
- Grounding — barefoot direct soil contact daily; plays didgeridoo for the plants in the morning; travels with this as a reset practice for jet lag and timezone recalibration
- Gardening — South Florida year-round production; manual watering with observation as the mechanism; sound frequency applied to plants
- Plant medicine — ayahuasca in Brazil through União do Vegetal; psilocybin, kambo, hapé, and sananga through Rising Ridge retreat in Oklahoma; integration month following each experience
- Weekday jiu-jitsu as movement and flow — Saturday and Sunday as performance and high-volume rounds (target: 10+ rounds each day)
- Budokon mobility — Cameron Shayne's system, integrated as movement and neural pathway building; particularly effective for beginner on-ramping and for veteran athletes recovering joint and tissue damage
Suffering Is the Prerequisite: What the Military Taught and What Jiu-Jitsu Confirmed
William is careful about how he talks about the military's contribution to his mindset. The grinding mentality — push through the pain, keep going regardless, serve the mission — is genuinely useful in a lot of contexts and genuinely counterproductive in others. The military brainwashes you into the grind in ways that can disconnect you from your own body's signals. You stop taking care of yourself because you are working for the mission. That is a liability that follows veterans into civilian life, and it is one of the reasons jiu-jitsu's relationship with suffering is more nuanced than it looks from the outside.
Jiu-jitsu doesn't just teach you to push through. It teaches you to problem-solve under pressure in a bad position while someone is actively making the position worse. That is a different skill. The suffering is purposeful — it produces specific adaptations: comfort with discomfort, the ability to think clearly when physical stress is maximal, the emotional regulation that comes from repeatedly surviving situations that feel worse than they are.
A dominant position gives you options. A bad position gives you constraints. Working within constraints — finding the one or two paths that might be available when everything else is closed — is where neuroplasticity is most active. The brain adapts most efficiently when the problem is difficult and the feedback is immediate. Jiu-jitsu in a bad position provides both.
The sympathetic nervous system cannot distinguish between a real survival threat and a jiu-jitsu roll. Every session in a bad position is a controlled training stimulus for the threat response — teaching the body to activate when needed and de-activate when the immediate pressure passes. HRV training formalizes this; jiu-jitsu does it organically. This is why the military's human performance centres used both.
The phrase is overused and the reality is under-practised. Comfort with discomfort is not a personality trait — it is a trained response. The person who has been in bad positions a thousand times responds differently to bad position number one thousand and one than they did to number one. That difference extends far beyond the mat. It is the capacity for equanimity under pressure that transfers to every high-stakes situation in life.
The phrase that crystallized William's personal philosophy came from Rich Franklin, who heard it from a 90-year-old man on a plane: when you rest, you rust. That is the operating principle. Not recklessness — he distinguishes between hurt and injured, between pushing through the ache and ignoring a structural problem that needs attention. But the default is movement, is engagement, is continuing to show up and compete and travel and roll, regardless of what is creaking or sore or imperfect. Aconcagua with knees that shouldn't have supported the climb. Competing with a hip that needs replacing and fingers with nerve damage and a neck that won't turn fully. You send it anyway because you have jiu-jitsu and five minutes is manageable for any body.
We Defy Foundation: Jiu-Jitsu as the Best Thing for Humanity
The We Defy Foundation came into William's life through Brian Marvin, who he knew from Afghanistan when Marvin was a blue belt and could already beat him all day. Marvin became one of the early presidents of the organization after leaving the military, and it has now operated for about ten years providing Brazilian jiu-jitsu to combat-disabled veterans — almost entirely through volunteers, with the overwhelming majority of money going directly to participants in the program.
The mission premise is precise. Veterans leave the military and lose the four things that gave their life structure: purpose, belonging, tribe, and challenge. They go back into a civilian world where most people have not experienced real suffering and do not have the framework to understand what the veteran has been through. The disconnection is not just cultural — it is experiential. You cannot fully explain what institutionalisation feels like to someone who has never been institutionalised. And jiu-jitsu, in William's framework, provides all four missing components simultaneously: it gives you a reason to show up, a community that depends on your presence, genuine physical challenge, and the particular bond that forms between people who have shared physical difficulty together.
"It's the only place in the world where every religion, potheads, police, lawyers, doctors are all in one room getting along — trying to strangle each other, then hugging and smiling off the mat."
— William Dorman · @williamdorman_bjjHe goes further than just veterans. He believes jiu-jitsu is the best thing for humanity, period. Not because of the fighting. Because of what the fighting requires: radical trust in another person with your body, genuine vulnerability in front of other people, the experience of being humbled and choosing to return. The mat produces a kind of connection between people who should not connect — across politics, background, religion, age, physical capacity — that almost nothing else in modern life produces. It is not idealistic to say the world would be better with more jiu-jitsu. It is a reasonable extrapolation from what actually happens on and off the mats.
A $250,000 media campaign and $80,000 in direct donations came out of a We Defy seminar at Renzo Gracie's in New York. That is what William's presence in the organization generates. One paid position in the entire foundation. The rest volunteers. The model is worth understanding for anyone building anything around jiu-jitsu and wanting it to matter beyond the mats.
Why Midlife Men Drop Off — And What Actually Keeps Them
William turned the question back on me during this conversation: what do you think keeps people on the mat? I started this podcast because I watched the answer to that question disappear in real time — good men, legitimate training partners, people who should be on the mats, drifting off one by one for reasons that were rarely about jiu-jitsu itself.
His answer: culture. The gym's culture — the external activities, the coffee after training, the sense that people are depending on your presence, the feeling that your absence would be noticed — is what keeps people through the injuries, the ego challenges, the difficult rolls, the nights when everything inside you says to stay home. The gyms that lose people fastest are often the ones where training is transactional: pay the fee, attend the class, leave. No continuity between sessions. No reason to come back beyond the technique instruction.
- Show up — even injured, even limited; sitting and watching builds more than not going at all; observation creates neural pathways that live rolling later activates
- Adapt your jiu-jitsu to the body you have today, not the body you trained with at 30 — the adaptation makes your jiu-jitsu better, not lesser
- Find the gym whose culture fits you — a hobbyist gym, an MMA gym, and a sport jiu-jitsu academy have genuinely different cultures; visit multiple and listen to your intuition about where you feel at home
- Stop needing to win everything — the sooner that goes, the faster the development and the longer the longevity; pretend you're rolling with an eight-year-old and watch what your jiu-jitsu does
- Distinguish between hurt and injured — hurt you train through; injured you protect; the line between them is clearer than the ego admits and more important than the ego respects
- Find the movement practice — Budokon mobility, yoga, gymnastics warmups, wrestling movement — that supplements the mat time and keeps the body available for the mat time
- Train like you don't have to get ready if you stay ready — the year-round baseline of fitness, mobility, and mental readiness makes competition and intensity sustainable rather than episodic
Bob — 76 years old, an old judo background, showing up every morning at the gym — is William's reference point for what staying on the mat actually looks like over the long arc. Not winning everything. Not training at a hundred percent. Just showing up. Every morning. Letting it be the best part of the day and letting the rest of the game take care of itself.
Positivity
He thought about it for a moment. Then: positivity.
Not as a passive disposition. As a practice of reframing — the deliberate choice to look at whatever is in front of you and find the angle at which it becomes manageable. A friend at a psychedelic retreat, a fighter pilot named Wiz Buckley, gave him the phrase that organizes this: it is what it is. Not resignation. Recognition. Whatever this is — it is this. And this is not actually that bad. And from this, we go forward.
The garden. The didgeridoo in the morning. Grounding barefoot in the dirt. Floating down the river and saying yes to what presents itself. The plant medicine retreats that strip the noise and get you back to the frequency. The jiu-jitsu that keeps the body in motion and the mind in problem-solving mode. The We Defy work that keeps purpose anchored in something larger than personal performance. All of it is, at some level, a practice of maintaining positivity as a default state rather than waiting for circumstances to produce it.
"Get on the frequency of the world. The secret of life. And once you get there, all the things come to you like you need."
— William Dorman · @williamdorman_bjjWhen you rest, you rust. Stay ready so you don't have to get ready. It is what it is. Float down the river and let things present themselves. These are not contradictions — they are the same philosophy approached from different angles. The steady accumulation of small disciplines, positive practices, and genuine connection that keeps a person capable, present, and useful across decades rather than just years. That is what staying dangerous after 40 looks like when it is actually working.
BJJ Fanatics · BJJ Globetrotters · We Defy Foundation · Blue Ring Solutions
William's pressure passing, control, and submission instructional is available now on BJJ Fanatics — covering the full over-under doghouse system, passing sequences, and submission funnels developed across fifteen years of competition and international coaching. Free content is available on the BJJ Globetrotters YouTube channel. He coaches at Globetrotter camps worldwide and runs seminars through Blue Ring Solutions — reach him on Instagram to book. If you have a veteran in your life or your gym who could benefit from community and free jiu-jitsu access, We Defy Foundation is the organization to direct them to.
Fuel That Earns Its Place in the Stack
Everything we talk about on this show — recovery, performance, staying on the mats for the long haul — depends on what you actually put in your body. Lineage Provisions is built on that same principle: real ingredients, no shortcuts, designed for people who take their performance seriously. Use code JOSHBUTTON for 15% off at Lineage Provisions, or grab the link in bio.
Stay Dangerous. Stay on the Mats. Hard to Kill in Midlife.
