451: Jiu Jitsu on the Mats and In Life. With Miha Perhavec

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 451 with Kerry Helton and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Kerry. Good evening. Is war an art or a science? This question has been debated amongst military professionals and academics alike for centuries. And there's good cause for debate. On the one side, the science of war is evident. The use of empirically tested strategies, tactics and techniques are required for success. Planning based on detailed analytics and systematic lessons learned allow for the execution of methodologies that are backed by historical evidence. The science of war is real.

• 0:45Jocko Willink?

  But so is the art of war.

• 0:49Jocko Willink?

  Great military leaders do not solely rely on data analytics and proven methods. Instead, they use their own experience and judgment. They apply their own imagination to create innovative approaches in order to solve complex problems. Solutions are applied that allow their forces to outmaneuver the enemy. So, solid arguments can be made for both cases, but in my estimation, after decades of studying, training for, or fighting in wars, war is actually both an art and a science.

• 1:31Jocko Willink?

  A student must understand both the art and the science of war in order to be truly proficient.

• 1:38Jocko Willink?

  And it is the science that must come first. In order to break the rules, a warrior must first know the rules. In order to utilize the freedom granted by creativity and imagination, you first must master the fundamental discipline of combat.

• 1:59Jocko Willink?

  The same is true for the incredible skill of Jiu-Jitsu, which I have also had the good fortune to study, train, and fight in for decades. With both these fields, the science must come first. In war, is it impossible to create an unexpected attack if you don't understand what is expected? You cannot deceive the enemy if you do not understand what it is he anticipates. And you cannot foil an attack with an innovative defense if you do not foresee the attack in the first place. In order to create, fundamental frameworks must be understood. The same is true in Jiu-Jitsu. While creativity and innovation is treasured,

• 2:44Jocko Willink?

  they cannot exist without a solid comprehension of the fundamental concepts, positions, and progressions that are the building blocks of Jiu-Jitsu. Only when these essentials of the science of Jiu-Jitsu are understood, can the art of Jiu-Jitsu be unleashed. And that is an excerpt of the foreword that I wrote for the book called Modern Submission Grappling: A No-Gi Jiu-Jitsu Manual, that was written by my training partner, coach, and friend, Miha Petavitz. And the book captures and explains the fundamental frameworks that I talked about in the foreword, the disciplines of grappling,

• 3:29Jocko Willink?

  so that we can develop our freedom. And it's an honor to have him here with us tonight to share his Jiu-Jitsu journey and his knowledge with us. Miha, welcome.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thanks for having me. Your honor is all mine.

• 3:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, you sent me a Twitter message that I found recently in 2016, letting me know that you were coming to San Diego and you wanted to train. And I don't even think, I don't know if I saw it, or did I reply to it?

• 3:56Speaker 01

  No, you probably didn't see it.

• 3:58Jocko Willink?

  I didn't, but I found it. I was looking for something else the other day and I found this old, because I didn't meet you until 2021?

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, 2022 maybe.

• 4:07Jocko Willink?

  2022. So it's just a little follow-up. You did some follow-up.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  I just showed up at your door.

• 4:14Jocko Willink?

  Right on. Well, let's, before we get into the book, which is outstanding, and I think it's going to help a lot of people at every level of Jiu-Jitsu. Let's start with your whole gig, because clearly your name's not American. And I guess it's weird to say American names. Is that such a thing? I mean, because we're from all over the place. Kerry Hilton. Is that an American name?

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:34Jocko Willink?

  Even though it's grounded in what?

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Sounds a little ironic.

• 4:40Jocko Willink?

  It's grounded in a freaking head shake over there. Don't know.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Well, my father's side, yeah, I had no idea, but my mother's maiden name is Strohmeyer, and that's obviously German.

• 4:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I guess. Well, we know you're not from America. We know that much. So you're born in Slovenia.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:00Jocko Willink?

  So, um, growing up in Slovenia, Slovenia is a lot of people, and we were joking about this before we hit play. I'm like, a lot of people might think Slovenia, they might hear Slovenia and think, oh, isn't that by Jersey? Or is that, is that west of Michigan? Like, people are just not gonna know. So Slovenia, um, population 2.1 million. It's ethnic 83% percent Slovenes. Is that, is that what you call yourselves?

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Yes, Slovenians, Slovenes, both.

• 5:30Jocko Willink?

  Slovenes, both work. Um, then it's got some Serbs, some Croats, some Bosniaks, and then, you know, some others. But, and it's in between Italy, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, and the Adriatic Sea. How far from the ocean did you grow up? How far from the Adriatic Sea?

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Probably like 150 miles, I would say.

• 5:50Jocko Willink?

  Did you go there?

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, we have a really tiny piece of coastline, but Croatia's super nearby and they have plenty. So in the summer, when June hits, all of Central Europe basically just goes down to Croatia. Their, their seaside is pretty top notch, honestly.

• 6:05Jocko Willink?

  I've seen pictures of it and it does look pretty top notch.

• 6:10Jocko Willink?

  1918.

• 6:12Jocko Willink?

  The state of Slovenes, Croats and Serb merged with Serbia and became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:23Jocko Willink?

  That's the name of the country?

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:25Jocko Willink?

  They just called it the Kingdom of these groups.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it actually switched. I think the order of it switched. Uh, but yeah, that was basically up until, um, I think the First World War. I would have to brush up on my history a little bit. For a long part, we were a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and then kind of succeeded to become, um, this kingdom. And then, uh, after World War Two, Yugoslavia.

• 6:49Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm. You guys were Yugoslavia got occupied and partitioned by the Axis Powers.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:57Jocko Willink?

  Um, Tito Communist took over and that was kind of a, you know, they, they were doing basically, um, a war. I mean, a war against the, uh, the Nazis and the

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:12Jocko Willink?

  And you were telling me your, so your great grandfather was killed

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 7:18Jocko Willink?

  by the partisans, which were the communists that actually won the war.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:22Jocko Willink?

  And he got executed by his, which he was a part of them.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 7:25Jocko Willink?

  And they killed him.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was, uh, so it was basically a guerrilla force, the partisans. I read a, a long time ago, I read a big book about Tito and yeah, there were super small guerrilla force, basically just a couple of guys in the forest with guns. And then as World War Two was starting to progress against Germany's favor, they started to get a lot of weapons and stuff, a lot of support from the Allies. And they kind of miraculously won the war and, and helped drive out the Germans, but they were kind of like a ragtag group still. So yeah, my great grandfather, he was, he spoke German super well. And that's not really that, I mean, it, it's not that much of a clue because, uh, he lived 20 miles from Austria.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  And they just built a new house basically. So the guy who was in the, one of his comrades kind of had a liking to that house. So they, uh, accused him of being a traitor, a collaborator. And then they took him to this hillside, shot him in the back of, in the back of the head from what I hear. So every November 1st is kind of Remembrance Day and my family would go up to that part of that random hill and, and just pay our respects and stuff. Uh, and yeah, that kind of stuff did happen a lot. On my other side, for example, my grandmother. She's one of thirteen kids and if I remember correctly, she had one brother who was fighting with the partisans and the other was fighting with the other side, which was more the like right wing collaborators who were

• 8:54Speaker 01

  basically collaborating with the Nazis. So it was, yeah, it was a strange time, I guess.

• 8:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I'm, it's interesting because I've, I've fought in a counter insurgency and I've like always looked at different counter insurgencies and insurgencies. And I'm going to have to dive into that one. We'll have to do a podcast about that one. Um, because it's definitely a pretty interesting one that they were able to drive out the Nazis and they were getting a lot of ally support. So it's kind of, it's kind of a, it's kind of a foreshadowing of some of the mouter, m- modern counter insurgencies that took place.

• 9:25Jocko Willink?

  Nazis get driven out nineteen forty five, obviously they get beat and then from nineteen forty five to nineteen eighty, you got this communist republic, basically until Tito dies.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was technically like more socialist and you know, a lot of people say that, hey, is Slovenia a part of the Soviet Union and stuff? And I always say, no, actually, Tito and Stalin tried to kill each other multiple times. They had a big beef from, that's a funny way to put it, from nineteen forty eight onwards, I think. And Yugoslavia was actually a part of the unaligned movement. So I think Egypt, I want to say India, Indonesia were countries that basically didn't pick sides during the Cold War. They tried to do their own thing. And yeah, it was slightly milder communism. A lot of people actually look back at it kind of fondly to that time. All the older people and then like the others, mostly like the Catholics, they, they're not such fans.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, but Tito, because of his background, he was, I think he had parts of everything, parts Croatian, parts Serbian, parts Slovenian. He was holding the country together and then once he died, all hell broke loose, basically.

• 10:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And that's when you get by the nineties, you get different groups declaring independence from the Yugoslavia. And you end up with the, the Slovenian. Do you what, what do you guys call this war?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Independence war, but it was like, it was, I think it was a couple of days, it was two weeks or something. A couple of people that died, um, and obviously we gotta pay respects to them, but it, we got off very, very lightly, yeah.

• 10:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, June 27th, 1991 to July 7th. So yeah, pretty, pretty short war and 19 Slovenians killed, 182 wounded. The JNA, which is the, the Yugoslavs people, people's army had 44 killed, 146 wounded. But that's pretty amazing to have a war end that quick.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:23Jocko Willink?

  Normally those, you know, you just get into these escalations where it's an eye for an eye for an eye for an eye for an eye for an eye. And you end up with, you know, the Israeli and Palestinian conflict over, or the, it just like lasts forever. So to have this thing end that quickly is pretty quick, pretty amazing. Again, I think I'm gonna have to look into that region a little bit and study those wars because I haven't done too much of it.

• 11:47Jocko Willink?

  So that was in 1991. Also in 1991, Miha was born.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:51Jocko Willink?

  So when you were born, were you born after the war, before the war?

• 11:55Speaker 01

  After, yeah, like a half a year, uh, later. My mom was actually pregnant with me while it was going on. There was actually one crazy moment that she described. So where in my, um, in my home, we have this view of the very last bit of the Alps, right? Just mountains. And on the edge of it, there's actually a ski resort that you can see. And on top of that ski resort is, um, a radio communication tower. And she said that she saw basically a fighter jet bomb that tower. Wow. That was probably pretty scary during, during that war. Uh, but yeah, I was, I was born after in, uh, Slovenia.

• 12:32Jocko Willink?

  And, and what did your mom and dad do?

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Um, my mom is still an accountant, uh, and she's worked at the same firm all her life. And my dad used to be a salesman in a printing factory. And then he became the CEO of a small printing factory and now he's retired. Yeah. That was my first job as well. When I was 15, I worked in the, in the printing factory. 6 a.m. start time, basically just loading paper into machines.

• 12:58Jocko Willink?

  Good times.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:59Jocko Willink?

  And you start, what, what, how'd you get introduced? Cause you started with Judo, right?

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:04Jocko Willink?

  How'd you find Judo?

• 13:05Speaker 01

  So my, first I did a little bit of tennis, a little bit of soccer, wasn't that good at either. And then I think a family friend of ours did judo. So my dad took me to the police station in my hometown and the town I was born in Kran. And it's the fourth largest city in Slovenia with a whopping population of 50,000. So at the police station, there was a judo, judo club. And yeah, I remember getting there and the guard, the guy at the reception would buzz us in. We would go up to the second floor and there was a little dojo there and I met my coach, coach there. And basically a small group of kids just started training.

• 13:45Jocko Willink?

  And how old, you're 10 years old?

• 13:47Speaker 01

  I think I was 10 years old at the time.

• 13:48Jocko Willink?

  And did they issue you a gi?

• 13:51Speaker 01

  I, one way or the other, we procured a gi somehow. Yeah, I think they gave it, they gave it to me or something.

• 13:56Jocko Willink?

  Cause you, there was no like, hey, just train a little bit without a gi. That's not really a thing with judo.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  No, not really. No, we, we started with the gi right away. Yeah.

• 14:06Jocko Willink?

  I kind of got into no gi a little bit just from the fact that I would train with other SEALs. And it was, I wasn't going to be like, hey, wear a gi. I would just be like, yeah, we'll just wear your t-shirt.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:21Jocko Willink?

  I, I've spent a lot of time training with a t-shirt and cami pants. And then occasionally I'd be like, oh yeah, wear your camouflage top.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:29Jocko Willink?

  But that was kind of weird too, cause it has buttons on it. It was just, but I, I kind of always had a little bit of no gi experience just from training with t-shirt, cami pants, which is kind of a hype uniform to be honest with you. It's sort of like an action movie. So are you into it? Is it addictive? Does it like hit you with the bug? Like jiu jitsu hits people with a bug?

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:55Jocko Willink?

  Did you get submitted? Did you get choked?

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Not for a long time. So I didn't see my first submission until, um, six, 15, 16. They didn't, they didn't show submissions right away. Just a lot of throws, a lot of drills. And then a lot of games because you're a kid. But I, I remember progressing through all the belts. So white, white and yellow, yellow, yellow and orange, orange, orange and green, green, blue, brown, black. Yeah.

• 15:22Jocko Willink?

  No purple belt in judo?

• 15:23Speaker 01

  There's no purple belt. No. Um, so yeah, I, I just.

• 15:26Jocko Willink?

  Did jiu jitsu jack those kids' belts?

• 15:29Speaker 01

  No, they're a little bit different, actually. So in Jiu Jitsu is

• 15:31Jocko Willink?

  It's gray now.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  It's white, white and gray, gray, gray and black. White and yellow, yellow, yellow and black. And then I think it's orange, same thing with orange. And then it's blue after orange, I'm pretty sure.

• 15:46Jocko Willink?

  The kids' belts did not exist before. Like, when I started Jiu Jitsu, there was no kids' belts. There was, I looked, there was no different colored kids' belts. We didn't have that. At least, I didn't know about it at all. Even though I had kids, and it kind of came around. So we must have jacked that somehow at some point from Judo. So you're doing all just takedowns?

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, mostly takedowns and pins on the ground. Uh, so they just didn't show too many submissions. I remember the first time I learned an armbar, I was like, this is freaking amazing. So I can throw people and I can break their arms?

• 16:18Jocko Willink?

  How old were you when you submitted someone for the first time?

• 16:21Speaker 01

  I think probably around that time, like fif- fifteen years old, yeah.

• 16:24Jocko Willink?

  So that's like five years of training?

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And Judo is, uh, compared to Jiu Jitsu, it's honestly like, pretty boring because there's a lot of drilling, just a lot of entries, a lot of uchi komi is what it's called. And then nagikomi is just practicing throws over and over. And yeah, it was, it wasn't a while until we started doing submissions. And then those are also limited because it's different in the sense that if you if you're in a Judo competition, especially now that they've changed a lot of the rules, you fail a throw, people will typically turtle up because all you need to do is wait for ten seconds and the ref will stand you up. So really, you're limited to like a clock choke, which is very rare in Jiu Jitsu. You can do some ar- you can pull out some armbars and then some

• 17:07Speaker 01

  triangle chokes that we don't really do in Jiu Jitsu too much. That's all you're gonna be able to pull out.

• 17:12Jocko Willink?

  And you gotta pull them out in ten seconds?

• 17:14Speaker 01

  In ten seconds, yeah. It's, it's pretty difficult, yeah.

• 17:16Jocko Willink?

  Wait, is that a new rule?

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Um, no, that's, I think that's been, that's been the case for a while. They're still very lenient. If you get on a submission, they'll let you work until you're You stop continuously progressing to it, but if there's any kind of stall in the action, they just send you back up. And that's actually because Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo, he obviously took jujitsu and he was looking at it from a different light. His idea was that judo should be used as a self-defense tool and that it has to be effective against multiple opponents. So in order to do that, you should be throwing people quickly and focus a lot on your, on your throws. So they purposefully kind of stayed away from groundwork.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  And then other schools, other judo offshoots in schools, they focused more on the ground. Of course in judo, for example, they, if you look at some old pictures and stuff, you'll see them doing hill hooks, you'll see them doing x-card and stuff like that. There's a whole offshoot of judo that, that kept doing that.

• 18:15Jocko Willink?

  But yours was more not like that.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  No, we, we had some groundwork, but not, not, not that much. It wasn't until I got linked up with the Slovenian national team and we started to do camps with that group, where we started to do like more serious judo, a lot more submissions.

• 18:32Jocko Willink?

  How old were you when you started going with the judo or the Slovenian national team?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  About fourteen, fifteen, I think those are some of my happiest childhood memories would be doing camps. And I don't wanna like steal anyone's valor. I wasn't a, a part of the national team, like competing. The best I ever did competition wise was I got second in the national championship as a junior and third as a cadet. But some of those, uh, people went on to win Olympic gold medals. So I was just fortunate enough to train with them and do some, some pretty crazy camps. There were mostly two. One was at the, at the seaside and I remember how, so it would be like six AM, wake up, go for a run, then eat the least healthy breakfast you could possibly eat, like bread, butter and jam, fuel up.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  And then the next class would be like a two hour session with, I don't know, there was probably two hundred people there, just a huge gymnasium full of mats. And then go take a nap, eat something and then a two, three hour session after that for a week. And I remember my, my wrists and my neck being so scratched from, from just the abrasion of the gi that they would constantly feel like they're on fire. And honestly, that's, those are some of my, um, best childhood memories is just going through that.

• 19:48Jocko Willink?

  So I used to train when I started jujitsu for real. Uh, I trained with this guy Fabio Santos. That's where Dean was. That's where I was. And we would do these drills where you're just like, you'd stand there on other opposite end of the mats and you'd run across, throw the dude and then get to the end of the line and you just rotate through like that and do that for, you know, like 20 minutes, but you'd get thrown, I don't know, 20 times, right?

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:11Jocko Willink?

  And even that kinda sucks. You know what I mean? Like, let's be honest, you're getting hacked and you know, I'm sure our break falls weren't up to like judo level of break falls. But man, it's punishing just getting tossed like that all freaking day.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  I had back issues for sure. I had kinda like sciatica back pain because I did that, a lot of that. And then also I was sitting in school for a lot of the time on those like wooden, the least ergonomic chair you could possibly design. I think Satan designed them honestly. Just, just like the worst possible posture. So that didn't, uh, didn't feel too good. And yeah, I, I remember doing a camp with the, there's one team that got probably, I wanna estimate like three Olympic gold medals and a couple of silvers and a, and a bronze under one coach. His name is Mar- Marian Fabian and, um, he had this, at the start, it was like a little dojo, Japanese style dojo on top of a hill.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  And I remember the first time I went there, it was in the middle of winter. It was snowing outside. And this guy opens up the doors. So we were running and warming up, but ironically, I couldn't feel my toes. It was just so cold. There was, there was a lot of that mental toughness thing. There was, there were whispers that the guy trained in North Korea and stuff like that. Yeah. So I remember one time me and a teammate, we, we got dropped off there. There was a house that was probably a hundred years old. I think someone who lived there passed away recently and they just had it on that property. In the living area, it wasn't really cleaned out or anything. They just threw tatamis on the mat. And we bought, we brought a sleeping bag and they just said, yeah, this is where you're staying for a week.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  And then same thing, six AM and at six AM, they would wake us up and do drills in the parking lot. I don't know if this was on purpose, but it was kind of like asphalt and then gravel on top of it. And they had us doing, you know, those wheelbarrow drills and stuff like that. I think it was all like mental toughness building and then go up, run into the forest, jump across logs and stuff like that. Very Rocky IV uh type exercises. And I think that was actually successful because a lot of those uh those, especially the women who were training there. It feels to me like they got their personality erased and all their desires and everything just replaced with just being a machine. Just like this, there's no, there's no stopping them. Yeah.

• 22:32Jocko Willink?

  Did you, did you have the goal of like making the Olympic team or anything like that?

• 22:37Speaker 01

  To be honest, at that time I was just, I was just kind of happy to be there. I, I honestly, I didn't have that many goals. I just wanted to be the best I can be, but I didn't, I didn't aim that high. It wasn't until jujitsu where uh at white belt, I, I started competing and I was like, oh damn, like I'm, I'm a lot better than these guys. I can, I can do something here. With judo, I was just like, man, there's so many people, everyone's so tough. I just wanna do the best that I can.

• 23:03Jocko Willink?

  So when was your introduction to the jujitsu?

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, when I was eighteen, after I got my black belt in judo, I, I made a really difficult decision to, to quit. Cause obviously I, I put a lot of time into it, but at one time at training, I was, I caught myself looking at the, at the clock. And I was like, when is this gonna end? And I was like, this, this isn't good. And it was a combination of two things. One was the place where I was training was lacking the, my size of training partners and there just weren't that many of them. And then the second thing was.

• 23:35Jocko Willink?

  Were you too big or too small?

• 23:37Speaker 01

  I was uh.

• 23:38Jocko Willink?

  Or just unlucky?

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was a little bit too big at the time. I think there was a lot of younger people and just the number of people there wasn't that big. So the other thing was judo changed the rules a lot from where you could do double legs, you could do drop techniques. You could do a little bit more stuff on the ground. And really, it's because they wanted grandmas on NBC every four years to understand what's going on at the Olympics, right? To for it to be less complicated. So that I I really wanted to find out if I can actually fight, right? And I decided that the best thing to do would be to try some MMA, yeah.

• 24:14Jocko Willink?

  How popular was MMA? Well, it was in Slovenia at this time.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  It was pretty popular. It kind of had a couple of waves of popularity in Slovenia. The first one was, I think, uh, Žakare. You remember Žakare Solz. I think he fought in Slovenia. There was a promoter who put in some some put on some big fights there. And then I came in a little bit after that. There was a Slovenian MMA league that was starting at the time. Basically, I went on Google and I searched for the teams in my hometown, and there were two. One of them was kind of like a McDojo place, honestly. So I was like, no, let's not do that one. So I found one and I I messaged the uh, the coach and I was like, hey, I wanna train this. I think I I I sent him a message. I can be really good. I I I'm a blackboard in judo. I I know all the jujitsu guys and stuff like that.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  So I get to training and it's in this community fitness center in the back. Uh, I think they had like a little basketball court and we had to put down puzzle mats every single time. And it was a really ragtag group of people. I remember actually the first time I did MMA sparring, I brought gloves that had gel in them, not foam. You know, like those crappy crappy MMA gloves. And we did stand up sparring and I went with kind of like the math enforcer guy, who was actually a really good boxer. Uh, and he hit me so hard that I I just saw everything turned green for a little bit. And the next day, I actually had the high school final exams in my school. Thankfully, it was history, which I'm good at. So I still I still did well, but I remember just coming home. I was planning to study. I just went to sleep.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  I was like, I probably got a mild concussion going on. But that team that uh, I think it had three classes a week at the time, two were MMA and one was jujitsu. And the first jujitsu class was the coach, who was a blue belt, showing a del hiva sweep that he just learned. So, yeah, it was it was not the most structured for beginners, but I I really started to enjoy it. I was like, this is actually what I wanted judo to be, yeah, so.

• 26:15Jocko Willink?

  So was it possible for you to like get focused on jujitsu or was there enough access to it?

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Not, I couldn't really get too focused on it. I think the uh schedule expanded a little bit, but my focus was split at the time between competing in MMA and Jiu Jitsu. I would basically compete in whatever was coming up. So for the first three years, I was training maybe three, four times a week, uh and then doing some like weightlifting on my own. Uh but yeah, I was competing in both. So yeah.

• 26:43Jocko Willink?

  So what was your first, what did you, what did you compete in first, Jiu Jitsu or MMA?

• 26:47Speaker 01

  I think it was actually Jiu Jitsu. And I competed at the same time in MMA that had a rule where there were no strikes to the head, which I don't count as MMA. That's some weird Jiu Jitsu. Uh but yeah, I had the first, both my first uh Jiu Jitsu match tournament and my first MMA fight were kind of crazy stories. For um, for the Jiu Jitsu match, it was in Serbia, it was in, in Belgrade. And I was competing in white belt. I didn't actually know. I think now, if you're here in America and you're like a black belt in Judo or a wrestler, you have to go start at blue belt. So I, I signed up as a white belt and they call my name and then they call the other guy and he's Serbian. And there were a couple hundred people in the stands.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  We're the first match. So they say my name, they say his name, and they say that he's from Belgrade. And the stands just go crazy, like, like hooligans. They're like, they start cheering, they go nuts. And I'm like, wow, I did not expect this. But then the match starts, I get grips and I threw this guy with the harai goshi, which is one of the most high amplitude throws you can do. And just the entire place went quiet. You could hear a pin drop. I was like, alright, yeah. And then um, I remember winning that tournament. Um, in the final, I think I scored early on. And then the guy had me in a triangle for four minutes and I could see the tunnel like closing, but I just had enough space to uh to survive, yeah.

• 28:10Jocko Willink?

  So you won the big white belt tournament?

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I won right, right off the bat. I was super proud.

• 28:17Jocko Willink?

  And what about your first MMA match?

• 28:19Speaker 01

  So my, my first MMA match was actually supposed to be

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Also some kind of weird hybrid rules where you can only strike to the head when you're on the ground. And I was like, hey, that actually suits me pretty well. And it was supposed to be after a grappling tournament. So we go to some middle of nowhere place in Croatia, like three hours away. And it's not the best organized tournament. So the grappling part is going on for like eight hours. And I competed. That was my first nogi competition. I won that. But the entire time I see this guy who's not doing grappling. He has a broken nose. You know, like how boxers have the broken nose. He's got like connected to just like the meanest looking guy. He's just like mean mugging me the entire day. And I'm like, what is, what is going on? Why, why is this guy doing

• 29:07Speaker 01

  this? So they call my name to go to the, to the podium to pick up my medal. So they say, first place, Miha Berhabits. Next fight, mat number one, MMA, Miha Berhabits versus. So I have a shin pad on, and I have one glove on, and no time to wrap my hands. And as a by the way, the promoter explains that actually it's just MMA. It's punches to the head and everything. So I didn't actually wrap my hands. I just threw shin pads on. And we also had helmets. So Like headgear or helmet? Headgear, yeah, sorry. Yeah. So we, we start fighting. And guess who my first opponent is? The dude.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, the dude. So the second punch that I threw, I hit it from the side like this, and I broke this bone right under my thumb. And then I was, he hit me with some better shots, nothing that would like rock me or anything. And I was taking him down consistently, but he would get guillotines on me, and the headgear would turn. So they, it would be, it would be kind of like suffocating me and keeping me in there. So I lost the decision. That was the only amateur MMA fight that I lost. And then I went to the side, and the organizer comes up to me, and he's like, your next fight is gonna be in 10 minutes. I'm like, bro. So yeah, I just, I just put a wrap on,

• 30:29Speaker 01

  on my, on my hand, and I arm triangle choke that guy in a couple of minutes. And then I remember going home. We stopped on the way, got some food, and my hands started throbbing. And I knew at that point that if if it's throbbing like that, it's broken. So yeah, I I got a cast for a little while from from then on.

• 30:47Jocko Willink?

  And what were you doing like as far as the other track of life as a normal human? Or was MMA now good? Were you trying to be a pro MMA fighter? Or were you trying to actually be a normal human too?

• 31:00Speaker 01

  I saw I was I've always had this strategy. I don't know how good it is, but I've always kind of hedged my bets a little bit. And I was doing that with school. So in that period, in that period of my life, my parents were were supporting me a lot as long as I was doing my schoolwork. So I was a pretty good student in like elementary school. I had straight fives, which is like A's. It goes from one to five in Slovenia. And then for um high school, I went to this private Catholic school. They had us learning Latin and stuff. So it was like, it was pretty, it was very serious as far as the the teaching goes. So I

• 31:36Jocko Willink?

  Was it taught by nuns and?

• 31:38Speaker 01

  No, not really, um, except for some of the religious classes. But honestly, they taught us a lot about other religions too. It was actually kind of kind of cool to learn and have a better perspective of the world. And it also turned me into an atheist for a while, just being a part of the Catholic school. Now I would say I'm more agnostic at this point, but uh I was doing that. And then um I think at the time when I started MMA and Jiu Jitsu, I was basically studying in college. I was doing international relations. I picked that just because it was kind of difficult to get into that program. So I like that part that it was kind of competitive. And I've always done well with social studies, like history, languages and stuff like that.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  So I was like, if I have to pick something, I'll do I'll do this now. But I I remember in high school and people would ask, what do you want to do for work for a living? My answer was actually the thing that I'm gonna do doesn't exist yet. And it's not, I read it somewhere, I didn't come up with it, it's not that profound. But it actually turned out to be absolutely true because what I do currently did not exist at that point. Yeah, so that's what I was doing, basically studying in school, um, just trying to pass everything.

• 32:51Jocko Willink?

  And so do you go to college when you get done? Is that how your program works?

• 32:56Speaker 01

  It's a

• 32:57Jocko Willink?

  In Slovenia?

• 32:57Speaker 01

  It's a university, so you basically live at home and you just you just drive there.

• 33:01Jocko Willink?

  And then what age does that last until?

• 33:04Speaker 01

  So that was a four-year program. So I was doing that until I was 23.

• 33:09Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  In 2013, when I was a blue belt, I realized that the level of competition and my training partners, they weren't as competitive as I was because I had the ambitions to be, after I did my MMA, like 12 fights, I won 11 of them after that loss. And I had to make a decision, do I want to go pro MMA, which I'm gonna get sent to the shadow realm at least once or twice? Or do I want to, because I really wanted to do something with my mind later in life. So that was kind of precious to me. And around that time, I was starting to see the jiu-jitsu is becoming a little bit more professional. And maybe in a couple of years, it's going to become something that you can actually.

• 33:51Jocko Willink?

  This is like 2013?

• 33:52Speaker 01

  2013, 14.

• 33:54Jocko Willink?

  So did you kind of foresee all like the CTE kind of brain trauma?

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I was, I was kind of aware of it, that that's a possibility, even just from, from training hard. Yeah. And yeah, I basically decided to.

• 34:09Jocko Willink?

  I think that's gonna make jiu-jitsu way more popular. I think that is making jiu-jitsu way more popular. Because if you're a parent right now, I mean, I know people that played football, American football, and loved American football, and they won't let their kids play. They won't let their sons play American football because like the CTE and the, the brain damage. And, you know, if you were a dad in 1975 and you wanted your kid to know how to fight, you'd bring him down to a boxing gym. Then maybe if it was 1985, you'd bring him to a kickboxing gym. Now, you might be a little bit hesitant to do that. You might be hesitant to have your kid sparring boxing or sparring Muay Thai. But you can have them do that jiu-jitsu all day. So I think jiu-jitsu is going to become more and more popular. I mean, obviously,

• 34:53Jocko Willink?

  we don't know where the peak of popularity is. It's definitely been on the rise for a long time. But I think that, that definitely to me has something to do with it. The fact that if you're a kid, you can train hard as you can, and you're not going to end up with any kind of CTE. So, sounds like you foresaw that a little bit. I didn't foresee it at all. I was over here like an idiot sparring with freaking people, like Tom, you know who Thomas Trival is?

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, like, because I know you were in Poland, like, I would spar with that guy. And a bunch of other guys yawn. Those guys. Yeah.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he, he did camps out here. He's what a, what a, I mean, awesome guys, but like. To be sparring with those guys and I think by that time we had moved to using big gloves and a lot of times I would be uh sometimes I would be the grappling part you know so we'd have like a striker do the striking and then a wrestler would get in there to get the takedown and then I'd kind of be but still we're hitting each other on the ground and all that stuff so I took I took some blows from them boys not to mention I don't know how many rounds of MMA sparring I did with Dean Lister and Brandon Vera I mean back in the day and we

• 36:08Jocko Willink?

  did it with little gloves like that's what we did and I took you know I took a lot of shots to the head and it wasn't until yeah probably when Yan and those guys and Thomas Traval we started using big gloves more part of it was like bro you have Tom you have Thomas Traval or Yan freaking hit you in the head with small gloves said that that shit up real quick boy

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it still ended up working out for you because you are about as sharp as these knives yeah I think it's it's definitely a risk you know that and Jiu Jitsu has a lot of the components that you would look for in MMA as far as like mental toughness goes and hey if you want to get bonked on the head a couple of times it will happen too you know like you'll get kind of I don't know like you'll hit the mat here and there so yeah that was that was a decision I made in 2013 14 that was around the time when guys like Keenan were were coming on the scene and and showing that there is a path toward professionalism so at that time yeah I was looking for a way to train with better people and I found that my school has this program

• 37:13Speaker 01

  and was called Erasmus European Union organizes it to promote diversity and merging of cultures and stuff like that basically it's a subsidized party yeah people go drink and uh socialize you know uh in different places and I remember going to my coordinator he had a list of European cities and I was like No one wants to go to Warsaw, Poland, right? Everyone wants to go to the coastal Spanish cities. Send me to Warsaw, please. And he was like, alright, cool, you you got it. So I went over there and um there was a gym that I knew. So the gym that I was a part of was Alliance. And I knew that the Alliance in Warsaw has a couple of guys who have already done ADCC. Uh Kameluminski is is one of the guys, I think, did it a couple of times.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  And the coach, his name is Radek Turek, he's uh.

• 38:00Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  He's he's.

• 38:02Jocko Willink?

  I remember that guy.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was uh he was really good. And his gym, so he's a PE teacher or was at the time. So in the school where he taught, he got them to give him a room that just had puzzle mats on the floor. And basically, he would teach school all day and then teach jiu jitsu. And it was some really, really good people. I was getting my butt kicked quite a bit, which was exactly what I was looking for at that at that point in time. And also, he was pretty ahead on on leg locks. So two thousand fifteen sixteen is when the Danaher that squad kind of blew up leg locks for everyone to see. And obviously, Dean was doing them before and people knew about them. Those guys had a lot as well.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  And then even Wormguard, for example, when Kenan started debuting that in about a week, we we were learning that from Radex. He's kind of a socially a little bit peculiar guy, but as far as like uh knowledge goes, that was really, really good training. So for a year there, I was mostly ignoring a lot of the partying, training twice a day. And my grades went up because the standard dropped a lot for like everyone to do well. And they yeah, my grades went way up. And that was where I finished that my bachelor's degree, basically.

• 39:12Jocko Willink?

  Didn't you get your ankle broke or something in Poland?

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I.

• 39:16Jocko Willink?

  What happened with that?

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Uh, so.

• 39:18Jocko Willink?

  The classic mistake, wasn't it the classic?

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Someone someone made it for me, actually. So it was this tournament, remember when Abu Dhabi was doing those tournaments where they did trials for the G World Championship? And they would pay your trip out to Abu Dhabi? So I was doing one of those. I think I won my division and then there was the absolute division, which was the one that actually paid for the ticket. And in the first match, I'm finding this Italian guy and I I took his back. I didn't cross my ankles. I knew not to, but I had my feet kinda stacked on top of each other. And this guy did something I've never seen before. I've never seen since. He leaned forward, he kinda pushed my legs.

• 39:57Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Crossed them for me and as he did that, immediately he had the legs crossed over. So he just hips in and there's just this slob pop and I see the, the ref is holding his head. He's like mouth open. And I opened my mouth to scream, but I realized that that would be a verbal tap just about, just when the sound was about to come out. And I, I kinda gritted my teeth. I pulled the leg out and I just got my, my hand up the collar and I bow and arrowed the living hell out of this guy. And then because I was kinda broke at the time and I really wanted to go to Abu Dhabi and because I-

• 40:32Jocko Willink?

  Was that in the finals of that tournament?

• 40:34Speaker 01

  It was the first, the first round. So I had three more, two, I think two more matches. It might've been the second round.

• 40:40Jocko Willink?

  Did you pull guard or something?

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I taped my ankle. I could still walk. So it was like probably a sprain. Turns out broken fibula, but it's not a weight, weight bearing bone. So I taped my ankle and I, in the next match, the guy's uh passing my guard, he's actually a really, a really good black belt now, a friend of mine. He goes past the guard, he falls into a reverse triangle with the broken leg on top, safe. So I squeezed that and he taps. So I win that match and I'm like, this is wild. And then the next, uh, the next match was six minutes and I just couldn't do much to the guy, but I, I lost on, on points. I think he had another match after that, so it would've been hard to win. But it was, it was honestly a pretty good experience in hindsight, cause it's a good story that I got out of it. And I also learned

• 41:27Speaker 01

  that in those situations, if like, eh, if I have to fight with a broken bone, I can, I can totally do it. And I learned a lot about the mental toughness that I can call upon if I, if I absolutely have to. And then after I was, I remember just being at home with a cast. So I would just mix Greek yogurt, protein powder and I got a pull-up bar. I got freaking jacked. My upper body was huge after that, yeah.

• 41:52Jocko Willink?

  And so what happened after, what did you do after you got done in Poland?

• 41:55Speaker 01

  After Poland, I went back home to Slovenia for a little bit and I kinda did a a little bit of a gap year. I think it wasn't a full year, but I was basically trying to come up with a game plan of what I'm gonna do next because that that ended and that was like a little bit subsidized, I think. So I was doing some weightlifting during the day. I did a couple of jobs during the day as well and then I would go train. And I started to write a journal during the day because what I noticed was happening was a pattern of me not feeling good about the situation that I'm in, uh, as far as like training goes and where I'm at. And then going to training, getting some endorphins and then feeling fine. And going to bed and just repeating the cycle. So I started to write down the journal and I was like,

• 42:40Speaker 01

  I have to do something to to break this pattern and go somewhere else. So I was looking for masters programs, again, to kinda use school as an as a an excuse to to go somewhere else. And I was looking at English speaking countries and I found Ireland. So before going there, because I knew I was gonna need some money, I I met this guy online and at some tournaments who ran this company called Yoga for BJJ. His name Sebastian. And he said, uh, bro, just come out to Norway. Norway has the highest standard of living in, uh, in Europe. Uh, and he said, I'll get you a job at like a cafe or something. You can make decent money. And you can also train here. There's a team called Frontline Norway, really good team.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Uh, Eduardo Tetarios is the, he's the coach. Um, they're really, really welcoming. They have a pretty cool school in a bunker, like a literal, I think it's like a nuclear bunker in a, in a basement. So that was the primary goal as always. I would do jujitsu first and then everything else kinda like a second. I went there. Basically pretended that I knew how to cook to get a to get a couple of jobs there. Which thankfully, I really like cooking, so I could pass it off. But got some really good training in, uh, lived at the gym for a little while. And then as as I was there, uh, this guy Sebastian, he showed me how his website works and

• 44:02Speaker 01

  the platform that it's built on. It's a subscription website, uh, where people basically sign up to do yoga videos for jujitsu. And I'm not involved with the company anymore. I haven't done it in a little while, but the the product was solid. I've always been super inflexible, so it helped me a lot. I think it has a lot of merit. So he showed me that I remember being there and trying to figure out how this thing works. He gave me the login. He was like, I need some help. You might be able to help me out. And for two days I was looking at it. It didn't make any sense. I just couldn't figure out how the structure works or anything. And then on the third day, it kind of clicked. So I started to help with him after that.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  And basically make some some money with that, which was much better suited for what I was doing, which was school and jujitsu. And I could make a little bit of money on the side. But, um, at that time, I was also already in a relationship with my wife. So we both moved to Dublin. She went ahead of ahead of me. And, uh, as you, as you probably know, Dublin is kind of like the Silicon Valley of of Europe.

• 45:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I've been over there working with companies and it's it's pretty awesome, actually. Like, uh, they changed their tax laws and squared everything away. And if you want to look at the right way to do that kind of thing, look, go look at Dublin and Ireland and they just made things very, made the environment very good for business.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:24Jocko Willink?

  And when they did that, the business just poured in. So they should, California should take a look at those protocols. Because right now, there's a lot of businesses leaving California because it's not a very friendly environment for businesses. And even though you think, well, the state needs money, so we can get more money from these businesses. But businesses go, well, we actually need some of that money too, so we're just gonna leave. And that's a lot of what's happening, unfortunately, in California. But Ireland did the opposite. And it works.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it definitely works really well. The only downside is that the housing market was very saturated because a lot of people were moving there. So Emma found us an apartment that was probably twice as big as this room. I was, I was in my room at home. We have like a two bedroom and I was like, this room plus the bathroom, plus the little hallway in between is bigger than that apartment. And it was in a bad part of town. I saw just across the street, I saw a couple of arrests made where there was a drug dealer outside, letting people into the, into the drug house. So, yeah, not, not the best, the best place to live, but it was, uh, you know, there's a certain point in your life, I feel like where you really have to put your head down and grind. Some would say that's like basically all your life.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Probably I would agree with that, but that, that point was where we, we would base, I would go up north uh, to my college, do a couple of classes. And honestly, that master's program, it was international security and conflict resolution. A little bit woke for my liking, so I didn't really pay a lot of attention. I kind of just wanted to pass all the classes because we had one that was called political terrorism. I saw that on the list and I was like, I like that, I want to learn that. And then the guy had us read like a full assignment was feminist theory of terrorism. And I remember not reading the material because I was like, I'm not going to read that.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Sorry, I mean, that may be a little bit, I don't know, like maybe discounting the, the merit of feminist theories when it comes to terrorism, but I didn't want to do it. And then I just remember working on my newsletter and a guy in the class, he went on this rant of how useless this was to read and I was like, oh man, I wish I read it too, so I could, I could chime in a little bit, but it was a lot of stuff like that. So I was working on newsletters and stuff like that, uh, during, during that time.

• 47:43Jocko Willink?

  Were the newsletters for BJJ for yoga?

• 47:46Speaker 01

  For yoga, for, for BJJ at the time, yeah. And then I would get on a bus, it would take an hour and thirty minutes to get through the entire city, all the way south to East Coast Jiu Jitsu Academy. Uh, that's, um. The best jujitsu academy in Ireland, one of the best in in Europe. Uh, Daryl Connell is is the coach there and it was just super good training. So I would be. I would be training with those guys uh with some really solid sessions and then I would make my journey back like forty five minutes up to my apartment. And that was that was like a pretty.

• 48:19Jocko Willink?

  How many, so were you training every day?

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, every every day.

• 48:22Jocko Willink?

  So you're spending like three hours a day transiting?

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I spent a lot of time on the bus, but I could turn on a hotspot, do some of my work, read read some stuff on there. Uh, yeah, that was that was a a fun period and how unfun it was. And then the next year, the next year, we we moved into like a proper apartment, got a car and everything. But uh, actually, something really important happened then. In two thousand six, that was two thousand sixteen. I remember finishing my master's thesis. And I realized that for the first time in my adult life, I can read a book that I want to read. So I got two books. One is this one, Extreme Ownership. The other one was uh Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield.

• 49:05Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  And I don't know what was guiding my hand through Amazon at that time. But I think I selected some some really good books um at the time. And I also, that that was also when I heard you on, I think, uh, Ferris and Rogan. And I think I had found this podcast when it was on app- episode three or four. And I was like, this is, this is exactly what I want to listen to because not only, not only did I want to hear like more about what what you were doing and leadership in general, but uh, especially those episodes where you were going over the like, I don't know, um, I don't have any example, like Band of Brothers, for example, or those old old school Vietnam War books.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  As far as entertainment goes, that's that's what I want to consume, like history, war and knowledge out of that. Yeah, so probably I don't know which episode is this on, like four fifty or something?

• 49:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, this is four fifty one.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say I probably listened to like three hundred fifty episodes of this, yeah. And when you have that much of something in your brain, it it reprograms you to a degree. And I would say that it was like a positive direction.

• 50:10Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's good to hear. Uh, what like what impacted that actually have on your decision making process for life?

• 50:18Speaker 01

  I would say just having a better understanding of how to become even even more disciplined and how to one of the key components, I think, is just like how precious time is. I know you talk a lot about how you found that when you um when you lost your friends in in the war and how to honor them you you make sure that every moment that you use, you use it in a in a wise way. I think that was one of the key the key things. And then at the right now, I have I basically I'm involved in a company that has a lot of employees. So I mean, for a jujitsu company. So leadership is obviously really important, but at the time, it was more like the the personal development and growth. And I think

• 50:59Speaker 01

  one of the most important things that you can get from this podcast specifically is some of the things that are in between, like scenarios, how to interact with people and just like how to be as humble as possible, which I'm still very much working on.

• 51:16Jocko Willink?

  Where so then you get your master's degree.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 51:19Jocko Willink?

  You what's your next move? What do you do?

• 51:22Speaker 01

  So the next move is.

• 51:24Jocko Willink?

  What do you go and take ownership of in the world?

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, nothing, nothing really my suitcase. So after that, my wife and I basically embarked on a two year journey around the world where we were just traveling basically all the time. So the reason behind that was my parents, they took me and my sister to a bunch of different places during our childhood. So my parents are very middle class. They've never upgraded their lifestyle, their house, their cars. They spent all of their extra income, the right amount on traveling, right? So we I think before I ever moved here or traveled through America myself, I've already been to like at least fifteen states. We went to America three separate times, just as as tourists.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  We I've been to every continent with my parents except for Antarctica, basically. So we traveled a lot and I always wanted to see the world and go to a lot of different jujitsu schools. Again, the traveling was an excuse to do jujitsu with a lot of people. Because I I imagined that my wife and I are going to have kids and then you traveling is not as fun with with your kids until they're a certain age. So basically, we started in in Miami, spent a week training there at Fight Sports. Then we went to Costa Rica. Then we went to San Diego. That's where I met Keenan for the first time and Sebastian from Yoga for DJ introduced

• 52:52Speaker 01

  me to Keenan and Keenan had a company called Keenan Online, subscription website for Jiu Jitsu videos. So I started to help him out as well and it did really well. So we had a relationship where I could pay for the entire trip by basically being a digital nomad and working on my computer. So when we were here, that's when I trained at Atos with him a little bit. And then we went all across America before getting on a plane and flying to New Zealand. That was the, that was a stop as well.

• 53:28Jocko Willink?

  When you met Keenan, did you guys like have like an immediate kind of bro out kinship?

• 53:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would, I wouldn't say bro out, but we definitely, Keenan's kind of like, he's a, he's an interesting guy. He's not the most social. When he is social, he's like so cool to interact with, but he does enjoy his like private time as well. So in the beginning, I think it was more of like a business relationship. At the time, he was also training so hard and then competing so hard that that was basically all he was doing. And then he was kind of holed up in his apartment, just trying to recoup himself to the point where he could go battle again. So my job at that time was to get him out of the apartment and into the studio to film content and, and to promote it. But then after, I mean, we definitely

• 54:20Speaker 01

  became really good friends as we continued working together, which I think now is like on year seven, six, something like that.

• 54:28Jocko Willink?

  Do you remember the stuff he was doing with Echo back in the day?

• 54:31Speaker 01

  I remember. It was actually, it was some really, some really good stuff, some really funny stuff. The one where he went to Shanji's house, which might be Echo's house or something? Yeah. Yeah, that was some really funny stuff.

• 54:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. It's, because that's, I was kind of like adjacent to that, right? Because I was friends with Echo. Like Echo is one of my main training partners back then too, like even. Well, I guess no, at that time we were doing the podcast. I don't know, were those, were those Keenan things predating the podcast?

• 54:57Speaker 01

  I, I would believe so.

• 54:59Jocko Willink?

  I think they were.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they were, they were. So, you know, Echo and I were friends, but like, he was more kind of in the scene of things, you know? Than I was, I was not, you know? I was kind of, I was doing more like what Keenan was doing, which was hiding from people and just training.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:21Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so then it's New Zealand?

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, New Zealand for a couple of, uh, probably like eight weeks. Everything, I think we spent about six to eight weeks there. So, New Zealand, Australia, Bali, Singapore. And then we went from Singapore back to Europe, Dublin, Slovenia, New York. So, uh, even before that, when I still lived in, uh, in Ireland, I would go and do some camps with the Danaher that squad. So that was one of my primary destinations was go and train with them. So we, we got through there again, San Diego again, all across America again. And then when we flew to New Zealand for the first time, we flew through Hawaii. And when I saw Hawaii, I was like, we need to come back here.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  And we, we got back to Hawaii, um, did Oahu, Kauai, Maui, and the Big Island for a couple of days. And then we flew to Japan for almost two months. And that was, that was really, really cool. Uh, the highlight there was for sure, getting invited to train with the Monari in a pro wrestling academy. Like a huge building that's just dedicated to pro wrestling. And it was actually some really good, some really good people training there. And then back to Europe again. And then back, back to New York. And on the previous trip there, that was when, uh, I basically had a, another split in the path to see like where I'm gonna go.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  Because, um, John had actually pulled me and Craig Jones aside and he asked us if we were, if we would become the, a part of the team. Cause he's looking for more international people. I think he probably just wanted Craig, but he just, I was like, I was, uh, yeah. I was just like the, the side.

• 57:04Jocko Willink?

  When you first show up, like, what's it like, like the very first time you went to?

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:09Jocko Willink?

  DDS, so you go to Henzo School?

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:11Jocko Willink?

  And you roll in there and you say, hey, what time of the, cause? I guess, I guess you've competed at that point. If people, is your name out there enough where you can roll in and kind of, because if people that are listening that don't know jujitsu, you can't just roll in and be like, hey, where's the pro team because I want to train with them?

• 57:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:27Jocko Willink?

  I mean, you can, but.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  At that point, I've traveled so much with jujitsu that I had kind of gotten a standard operating procedures for what to do to have the highest chance of having a good reception and all of.

• 57:40Jocko Willink?

  That's what I want to know.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  All of the Danaher death squad guys were incredibly welcoming to me and they were all, they were all super, super cool. Us, I've never had a bad experience honestly in any gym. So the first thing you do is you show up, you show respect to everyone. Uh, and like whatever hierarchy they have at the moment, you're, you pay attention to that. And then you shut the hell up. And you train super hard without injuring anyone and doing the very best that you can. And you show up to every training session. With that recipe, there is not really an option for you to, to not have a good, a good impact on, on the academy. And then if there's.

• 58:20Jocko Willink?

  What mistakes can you make? What mistakes have you seen people make?

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Just like, uh, let's say after training, everyone already knows each other. They're like, one of the best things after training is, you know, like how you talk after class with people in like a circle. If you just come in there like crash that and like start telling your people, start telling people your life story. Or someone's rolling, that's like a star in jujitsu and you interrupt, interrupt their roll to take a picture with them or something like that. Those are all bad ideas. Or yeah, just coming in, mean mugging everyone from the side without shaking everyone's hand, things like that, you know?

• 58:59Jocko Willink?

  So just be cool.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  Just basically, basically be cool. And if you, if you train hard, then if, even if you, if you're not beating people, uh, if you train hard and you're a safe training partner, people will want to roll with you. So that, that I think is kind of, uh, kind of the key. Yeah.

• 59:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's huge. Um, getting into level 12 death matches with people that you've never met before is just, look, man, it's just, just.

• 59:27Jocko Willink?

  You know, like, don't do that. You know, just don't do that. Cause you you don't know where like you show up to my gym and you're like, hey, I want to train with you and you try and kill me. Well, you don't know that we know what's going on in my world. You don't know what's happening. And now you're having a death match with me. It's just like, hmm, hey, bro, you whatever. We'll have death matches. You and I have had a countless death matches at this juncture in time. But yeah, just be respectful and don't be an idiot, I think, when you show up to one of these, when you show up to someone's gym.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  And I don't think it's even just jujitsu. It's any kind of situation, you know, just just roll up and build some trust, build a relationship before you go into that. Like, I don't know, in business, let's say you get hired by a company and you're, if you come in and you're like really sharing your thoughts and ideas.

• 1:00:12Jocko Willink?

  I know a better way to do this, guys.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:00:14Jocko Willink?

  Hey, guys, I know a better way to do this. Yeah.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  It might be a good idea to first learn how they do things, you know?

• 1:00:19Jocko Willink?

  So it applies in all aspects.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:22Jocko Willink?

  If you know the way Broadway broadly, you'll see it in all things. Okay, so now you and Craig Jones.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:27Jocko Willink?

  Get asked to become the international representatives of DDS.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:32Jocko Willink?

  And it's probably because Craig.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think John said they were they were trying to do like a documentary or something for Netflix where that where that would be good. And I mean, what a bad idea to invite Craig Jones to the Danaher's last squad in hindsight, but at the same time, Keenan flew to to New to New York to train and we went up to J T Torres's academy to do a session. And we actually took a train ride back into the city and he basically popped the question. He was like, I'm gonna open a gym in San Diego and I can do it on my own, but I'll probably it probably won't be as good as if if you're involved as well. So he invited me to to come do that with him.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  And I basically had to decide again. And on one, on one hand, it was. The potential glory of becoming a really good competitor. And on the other side was like a slightly safer path with the business of building a big academy. And again, I kind of hedged my bets. It's not, I don't think I'll have regrets. I may, but I went with that option. Because at that time, I had traveled with my wife for two years straight. And that means that you're together 24/7, basically, when you go to the toilet. That's the only time when you're, when you're not together. So I had realized that since we had not killed each other, that we may be highly compatible.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  So I wanted to make sure that financially, we have, we have resources when, when we get to the next stage of our life. So after that, I went back home, got, took care of some visa stuff, got back to America. And then we actually did the, Keenan was not quite ready to open the academy. So we did a camp before ADCC 2019. And then we both got a massive eye infection. And at that time, he also got into a spat with Gordon Ryan a little bit. So at that point, the decision was already made and it was like super clear that we're gonna, that we're gonna open Legion, yeah.

• 1:02:39Jocko Willink?

  So what year was that?

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  It was 2019. So we started.

• 1:02:43Jocko Willink?

  Did you do, did you do ADCC that year?

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  No, I wasn't, I didn't qualify. I was just there for, for the camp and to pick up the eye infection.

• 1:02:54Jocko Willink?

  So you open Legion in 2019?

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:57Jocko Willink?

  You call Legion, Legion American Jiu Jitsu?

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:01Jocko Willink?

  Is that Keenan driving that?

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  I mean, Keenan is definitely the driving, the driving force behind that. And he could go in depth on it.

• 1:03:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I saw some of his posts about it. He was going in depth on it. It's pretty, it's very interesting stuff.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  It is very interesting, yeah. And obviously, the Brazilians absolutely love it. And as we call ourselves, Legion American Jiu Jitsu. But really, what it comes down to is just, it's the, the main thing is, it's just a cultural difference. And how we run the academy is very different from how I've seen Brazilian Jiu Jitsu academies around during my travels and everything. And it's just, the main thing is with Brazilian Jiu Jitsu academies, they're very hierarchical. So there's one person at the top, Marcelo de Galvao, Pereira, Souza, whatever, the guys at the top.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  And then everyone has to call him master and it's of basically it seems like the members are kind of serving the person at the top. So what we decided to do is have it diff have it be said differently where the coaches are serving the students and we don't try to make it seem like the academy is some like family because families actually have a lot of drama and a lot of a lot of disputes and stuff like that. It's it's a business and it's not I don't think that's a negative thing to say about it. It just means that we provide a service with the highest possible value to our members and our instructors are coaches. They're not masters professors. That actually kind of makes me cringe if

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  someone comes in from another academy and calls me like professor or whatever. So that's that's the main thing. Cultural differences, differences in in how we do business. And then as far as like, for example, Keenan, a lot of the stuff that he developed on the mats, lapel guard and and other moves, that's pretty much all him. That's like an American American thing as well and other instructors that we have as well. So we also make sure to do gi, nogi year round and nogi also you could you would have some issues tracing it back in its current form all the way back to Brazil. And jiu jitsu has evolved a lot through the world. And I mean, you have to give Brazilians credit where it's due. Personally,

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  I think the biggest the biggest positive influence that they've contributed to jiu jitsu was the precursor of the IBJJF. I I forget the name, I would kind of butcher the pronunciation. The rules of that were giving points to mount back control, the heaviest point. So that kind of formed jiu jitsu in a way where people started looking for the back a lot more and it transitioned away from the judo style, which was more like side pins and and stuff like that. But yeah, that's that's the main thing people ask all the time. It's just a cultural difference.

• 1:05:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I people always ask me, where should I go train? Or, you know, I live in such and such a town. And I always go, I always tell them, Google, first of all, Google and find what's close to your work or close to your house. Because proximity matters and if you have to drive forty eight minutes to train and forty eight minutes to get home. There's gonna be a lot of days where you're not gonna be able to make it, you know, like you just don't have an extra hour and a half to be driving in your car. And so you can't make it. So proximity kind of rules. And and then go to a couple of different gyms because there's some people that want a traditional martial arts. Setting where you're bowing before you get on the mat and they wanna have, they wanna bow to their sensei and that's cool and.

• 1:06:28Jocko Willink?

  Roger that, go do that. And some people want something that's more like what you're talking about. Some people want. Like super chill and there's jujitsu academies that are just like, you might as well be going in there and uh. I don't know what's a super chill sport. What's a super chill sport? Where like people are just going in, I mean, never even like some of them are like a cigar joint, you know, like you're just going in there.

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  You have to smoke weed.

• 1:06:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you got everything.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  I'd say surfing maybe is like a kind of chill sport.

• 1:06:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's definitely, um, there's definitely. Places, jujitsu academies that are super chill, like, hey, we don't care what you wear. You don't have to wear and there's some places where you gotta wear matching gi, you gotta have to wear the gi from that academy. And again, if that's what you're looking for, go get it. If you're looking for something that's on the other end of the spectrum, cool, go get it. There's. One thing that's beautiful about jujitsu right now is there's so many different options. And what's what's interesting is like both those schools, both those types of schools, they both produce champions. You know, they both will have people that excel. So, uh, yeah, you gotta kind of find what you're looking for.

• 1:07:36Jocko Willink?

  But you guys open and it's, what is it night twenty nineteen when you open?

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we, I think we got the keys August, July, we opened on November first. Yeah, those, I think we got like we pre sold a hundred memberships, so we started with a hundred people. And then, uh, nothing bad happens in the coming months and, uh, everything was great and we just had a linear growth and life was beautiful.

• 1:08:04Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys shut completely down for COVID? Did you guys paper the walls like most gyms did? Or what'd you do? Paper the windows?

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  A little bit of both, yeah. At first, we, um, we locked, we basically closed down. And that was honestly, like in hindsight, when I look at it, I think Keenan and I, we both kind of agreed that we made a mistake there where we were both vocal without knowing, you know? We kind of couldn't know that COVID might have been a bioweapon. There was some way or the other escaped the lab and, you know, that there's some, uh, odd things behind the whole situation. We were more like, hey, this, this is like a serious thing. We have to, like, read a little bit too much of the media. And, um, we basically decided to, to lock down, uh, pretty, pretty early on around the time when Tom Hanks got COVID, which was a big turning point in, in the world.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  And NBA shut down, I think it was like mid-March. So, uh, for a couple of months, we closed down and then we realized like, hey, this is, there's some weird stuff going on with this. And maybe if the, if the liquor stores and the dispensaries are still open, maybe places where you can get healthier by working out should still be open as well. And a lot of our members were asking to, to train. So, yeah, we, we put some, um, some stuff on our wall, on our windows. But honestly, in our location, no one was really bothering us too much. So, yeah, in hindsight, I definitely learned a big lesson there, which was stay quiet until you know what's going on. And now, as from then on, and anything that's like political and stuff like that, I don't voice my opinions publicly anymore.

• 1:09:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  Unless, I, I think there might come a point with something where it's gonna be worth talking about it. But, yeah, that was, that was definitely a mistake.

• 1:09:46Jocko Willink?

  Oh, did you, were you like talking about it a bunch?

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  Not a lot, but I, I definitely expressed my opinion at, at the time, based on the information that it's like probably better to, to close down for, you know, whatever, flatten the curve or whatever was the, the line. Um, but, yeah, not, not since then.

• 1:10:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of, I think a lot of people learned a lot of lessons around that whole thing. Yeah, it was very strange to watch, that's for sure. Uh, okay, so now you get back open, um. You got your black belt in 2021?

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:22Jocko Willink?

  From Keenan?

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  From Keenan, yeah. I think, yeah, I'm definitely his first black belt. And then I think Sloan is the second.

• 1:10:30Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. At that time, we were still doing some gi. And then after, we transitioned more to no gi. And we also, so with Keenan, as far as like business goes, we had that Keenan online website. And then he is known for his lapel guard. So we did a separate course, the Lapel Encyclopedia, which was like, I think, eight hours of instruction when it launched. And then we updated it several times. And that did really well. It was basically how we got our capital to start Legion without getting like a sugar daddy or an investor. So that's, that's how we got started.

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  And we transitioned that into a company that did Jiu Jitsu X that did videos for other people as well. But at like in 2022, we had some, some headwind going against some really, some really good competition in that space. So we kind of realized that that's, that's not going to work super well. And at that point, I transitioned from doing like a lot of digital stuff for, for that company to looking at Legion, which was doing really well. Kind of not because of our efforts, but despite our efforts. We were just kind of like, you know, this, we had the classes, we did things in the way that we thought was good, but not really putting a lot of thought and effort into it.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  So at that point, I took a month where all I did besides training was looking at what is the best thing that we can do to grow Legion more and faster and make it better for people? And I realized that the free trial system that everyone's doing might not be the best idea. And that just, that everyone's doing it because everyone is doing it. And we decided to do this five week beginner course, which is not a new concept, actually in the gym in Ireland. They were doing the beginner courses. I was teaching some of them actually. But it was new in the sense that we didn't really allow people to go do our classes unless they did the beginner course first, kind of like a bootcamp.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  In the military, I guess you guys don't get a rifle and a tank and a helicopter and be like, hey, figure this out. So the course basically.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Starts in, they start in waves, they have different start dates. And then we get a group of people together, start them on day one with a highly proprietary tweaked curriculum that starts from the beginning. And then at the end, they are fully capable of rolling safely. And then we have a bunch of things that we, that we add. So there's five Judo for Jitsu classes that I teach myself still. Uniform videos of the curriculum, access to the weight area and like a bunch of other things so that people have the best like starting point. And just right now, we're actually doing our 50th course. So we've been doing that consistently for two years now.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  And that's been, sometimes I, I ask myself, what would happen if we didn't do that? Because we would kind of be like every, every other Jitsu only academy. So that, that's been working out super well because all of our students that graduate from that, they go into the next courses and they have this basic knowledge, plus the instructors in the other classes, they don't have to go to a new person and explain how to shrimp or how to fall or how to, what mount is. They all come in with that knowledge. So it's, it's pretty efficient. And I like to, I like to basically explain it as the Legion, for, for example, the, the Roman Legion, one of the best fighting units of all time.

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  And they fought all kinds of different enemies across, across the, across Europe. In Britain, they had guys with chariots. In Germany, they fought giant barbarians. In Parthia, they had guys that were like horseback archers. In Greece, they had the phalanx and so on. And they won most of those battles, almost all of them. And they didn't have AK-47s, they had swords and shields. And they were guys. And the thing that made them different was their training, their structure. And then a lot of the boring stuff, which is like the logistics, everything that's behind the, the, everything that was a part of the society. So that's kind of the approach that we, that we like to think, to take and think more about

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  the structure of the classes, the curriculums and how everything is done. And it's, it's a really rewarding process, plus we have a good team to work with. So they, they can get people as good. As possible, as quickly as possible. That's kind of.

• 1:15:05Jocko Willink?

  If someone shows up there and they've been like, hey, I've been training for six months. I'm still a white belt. Can I skip this program?

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  We would, yeah, we would basically do an evaluation or typically take, take their word for it and then they can go into the fundamentals class. Because I would say that the five week course is about equivalent to five weeks of training twice a week at a, at a more unorganized program. Because I make, I can't do, I used to teach a lot of those courses. I can't make all of them anymore. But when I, I make sure to.

• 1:15:37Jocko Willink?

  How many times a week is it?

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  It's two times a week plus the third class is the judo class. So the, the five judo classes are there. So that we can, uh, teach the ground positions and still have a lot of takedown skills. Cause that's, that's how people get confident. Plus, let's say someone does the five week course and they're like, I don't wanna, the jujitsu is not for me or whatever. They, if they get jumped in the parking lot right after the course, they have a much better chance of defending themselves. So that, that's why it's in there as well. Um, so yeah.

• 1:16:11Jocko Willink?

  So if I show up and I've, do you test me? Do you, do you like, hey, let's roll?

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  Typically, no, we will like believe people, but then if we, if you, the coaches will be kind of paying attention to how you're rolling and maybe suggest like going and doing the course.

• 1:16:26Jocko Willink?

  What if I'm super fired up and I want to train five, six, seven days a week?

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  Um, you'll still have to do the beginner course first. Um, and like if you're super fired up, let's say at week three or four. We might give you a, a pass to go into the other classes, but we have like, there's an example, there's one guy.

• 1:16:44Jocko Willink?

  What if I wrestled?

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  Uh, you still have to do the, the course. Actually, like sometimes I will, if I'm in the right mood, I will roll with people like that. The other time I had a situation at open mat where. Uh, there was a, one of our members was like, hey, uh, I've got this guy here. He's a friend of mine. He wrestled before. He did a little bit of jujitsu. And I've been telling him to sign up, but he, he doesn't want to. So, uh, he said, kind of, you know, like, tell him some things that will convince him. And I look at the clock and it's four minutes twenty to go. And I look at him and I say, hey, instead of me selling you on, on a membership or whatever, let's roll. And if I tap you eight times in four minutes, you sign up. And he looked at me, looked at the time and he was like, he shook my hand.

• 1:17:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  It took two minutes, two minutes and twenty seconds. Yeah. I was just like, basically just like going as, as, as fast as possible, not as hard as possible. Just like, I realized that he was shooting single legs. So it was like three kimuras and a couple of foot locks and stuff like that. But sometimes for wrestlers, for Marines, for, for people that are a little bit more gung ho, that is actually a really good approach. You have to, uh, have a hands-on approach and, uh, explain, you know, that, that there's something they can gain. But we have a guy who, he wrestled before. He did, uh, CrossFit. Like I've seen videos of him lift clean and jerking like hundreds of pounds. And he came in and did the, he did the beginner course and then he went into the other programs, a little bit more nogi focused now.

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  Got his blue belt in six months because he went to a tournament and he, uh, I think he submitted to purple belts. So we were like, for the sake of all the white belts, you, you should do this. But he was a good example of someone who still benefited from doing the course. And it's also good if you want, I've seen a lot of people go super hard and then kind of burn out or get injured. So sometimes it's better to hold people back a little bit. And then when they understand how everything works, unleash them to, to go twice a day or whatever.

• 1:18:46Jocko Willink?

  So is this, did this lead into you writing the book?

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  It definitely, it definitely helped.

• 1:18:53Jocko Willink?

  Well, what was the genesis of the book then?

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  So one was just wanting to encapsulate everything in a similar way that we'd done with the beginner course for nogi. The other was a little bit of hubris, honestly, because I was looking at all the books that exist right now. And I didn't see anything that I, that I liked too much. A couple of books that have been very well received and are quality, but a little bit outdated. So I was a little bit like, if not me, then who's gonna write this? And also I've, I think I've listened to you talk about writing a book before. And it was kinda like, it was a little bit dismissive in a, in a good way of how everyone has an idea. Everyone wants to do something, but no one really does it.

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  And I think you recommend writing a thousand words a day. Yeah, I went, I went five hundred words a day at the start. Cause I, one book that I like a lot is Atomic Habits. It says, make the habit like as easy as possible. So I, I did that and the first month was just useless. I discarded everything and just sucked. And at first I wanted to write a book about gi jujitsu. Then I wanted to write a book about transitioning from gi to nogi, to be a little bit more specific. And then I started writing that and at some point it kind of like dawned on me that this book would be better off as a manual, as a general manual that goes over all of, all of nogi.

• 1:20:21Speaker 01

  And the key thing was what not to include. Cause this book could be an encyclopedia, it could be a shelf of books, you know? If, if I tried to include everything. So that was the main, the main challenge there. And yeah, it kind of, this guy Stephen Pressfield, who wrote those books. I've been listening to them again and he kind of speaks a little bit, it's a little bit metaphysical. He speaks about the muse and how like the muse will come in and tell you what it needs to be. That's basically what happened with the book. The main thing was he has this concept of resistance and using resistance as a guiding force. And whatever you don't want to do, whatever seems hard is probably the thing that you have to do. So once I realized that this is gonna be really difficult because.

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  I didn't want to write the book and not do research because let's say I put in a, I don't know, anaconda choke. Maybe the way I do the anaconda choke works for me, but like, what is the universally most accepted way of doing it based on like high level people? And what was the best for everyone? So I had to do research of like matches, some instructional to make sure that every technique was was solid. And then, and then there's some things like passing, for example, I have my passing style. The body lock pass is not a part of it. So I have to do enough research to make sure that I include the right thing for body lock passing, despite not doing it too much myself. So yeah, it took a lot of research and then

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  the writing part was actually reasonably easy. Once I had a list of what I wanted to include. And then the thing that made it difficult for the first book were the pictures because we took thousands of pictures and then editing them down to a couple of hundred, hundreds still, putting them in the right places and so on. That that took extra time.

• 1:22:08Jocko Willink?

  All right. Well, let's get into the book a little bit, man.

• 1:22:14Jocko Willink?

  Surprisingly, very entertaining book. That was, you know, you got a pretty dry sense of humor anyways, but this shit's funny. All right. I'm gonna go to the book here. To the untrained eye, jiu jitsu can look like just some dudes rolling around on the floor, but it's one of the most complex and expansive sports in existence. Chess, for example, has a finite number of 10 to the 40th starting positions. The total number of possible game sequences 10 to the 120th. Those are such large numbers that they are almost meaningless because we're not equipped to think on that scale. With chess, we're talking about a board with a limited number of pieces that can move in specific ways. In jiu jitsu, also sometimes called human chess,

• 1:22:58Jocko Willink?

  the number of possible moves dwarfs the, those of the popular board game. After all, we are operating in a 3D space, making important decisions quickly. Additionally, our bodies come with different proportions, weights and abilities. One of the best things about jiu jitsu is that even people who have been involved for the sport for decades can always find new things to learn and explore.

• 1:23:20Jocko Willink?

  Did you get that from me?

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  I I don't think so, maybe.

• 1:23:25Jocko Willink?

  I went on a big, well, it was on the Underground Podcast, where I started talking about finite games versus infinite games and how those two different games are played. And I used the example of chess, sixty-four squares, you know, pieces on number, certain number of pieces, what is it, sixteen pieces on each side? They they can only move certain ways. And then, of course, I went like jujitsu, and then, of course, I went to like the world, right? And so it's finite games, which, by the way, that's not my idea either. This is there. That's a thing. Finite games versus infinite games. And I've, I would have to go back and listen to the podcast that I did because I can't remember right now. But there's, that's a school of thought.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:00Jocko Willink?

  So it is a completely true school of thought.

• 1:24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's one, it could be possible that I, like I said, I've listened to a lot of your stuff. It could be embedded in there typically.

• 1:24:10Jocko Willink?

  Well, even if you jacked it for me, I jacked it from someone else. So it's not, I'm not like making accusations here, but I was like, oh, yeah, hell, yeah, that's legit.

• 1:24:17Speaker 01

  The way I I like to explain, the way I use chess a lot is when I'm explaining the beginner course to people, for example, I say that if you know how to play chess, but I don't, I have to, we have to put down the board and then you have to tell me what the pieces are, how they can move. And then you have to tell me what the end game is, like how to get to checkmate. And then if we start just playing there, you don't have any fun. I don't have any fun. I don't know what's going on. And eventually I'll get good at it, but not super fast. What you should probably do is put scenarios on the board, like, hey, in this situation, what would you do with the rook? Where would you move it? And yeah, just human chess is, I think it's one of the best metaphors for jujitsu because

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  that's one of the funnest things about it. And one of the reasons why it's worth investing in it enough to get reasonably good at it, because when you're going against other people that are high level, you're playing this game where you have to think three steps ahead. I'm terrible at chess, but decently good at human chess, where you have to think about the other things that are coming down the road and and all the rules and everything. Yeah, definitely one of the best metaphors, I think.

• 1:25:26Jocko Willink?

  You talk about, kind of describe the way you write the book in here. It says, "The chapters "follow the same progression as a jiu-jitsu match or sparring round. It starts on the feet, "where we grip and use a blend of wrestling, judo, and jiu-jitsu specific techniques. It "follows with chapters on playing and then passing the guard. Front headlock and turtle "positions follow, as those can occur from the battle between the guard player and passer, "as well as straight from standing. Next, we look at the dominant positions. Side control, "north, south, mount, and back control. All get their own chapters. Finally, we'll recap "upper body submissions and look at leg locks in detail. This fits the mantra of position "before submission."

• 1:26:02Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. "This structure can be used by beginners to build a mind map "of common positions, techniques, and patterns that will lead to faster improvement of their "nogi jiu-jitsu. For intermediate practitioners, this book has information that will help organize "existing knowledge and identify gaps that have to be filled. For advanced practitioners "or black belts, this guide will provide an opportunity to think about teaching jiu-jitsu "in a more organized way."

• 1:26:27Jocko Willink?

  And then you also make this note, which is, fast forward a little bit. Remember that "all the techniques pictured in this book have been professionally recorded in video "form and are available at nogimanual.com/videos." And there's a QR code in the book. So, "if someone has the book, they can go watch these videos."

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, there's two kinds of videos that I just recently finished the recording. One are the demonstrations. And every, so pictures, we did a lot of, a lot of work to get the best ones, from the best angles and everything. And they do a decent job of displaying how the technique is performed. And then I describe it with text as well. But for those people that want to see them, you can go and watch all the demos. Every single technique that's in the book has demonstrations. And then one thing that I really enjoy doing is teaching jiu-jitsu, like verbally. So, we recorded a full nogi video manual, which is

• 1:27:24Speaker 01

  going to clock in at around 11 hours of content. So, every chapter has about an hour. And obviously, because I'm speaking, I can include a lot more. So, in some cases, I didn't use, I didn't show defenses or certain things that I like to do personally. So, that's all in the nogi video manual, which is on that same website.

• 1:27:46Jocko Willink?

  Echo, yeah, that's gonna be, it's gonna be very helpful. Echo and I, this whole thing reminds me, Echo and I, when we, at Echelon Front, we do this thing called the muster and we do like an intro, the, the, when the muster's over, we do an intro to jujitsu and Echo and I kind of have this little methodology where we kind of just, because these people have never done jujitsu before, like zero. And so we'll kind of, and we do the same structure, like, okay, you're both standing, we get to fight to the ground, once we're on the ground, here's the things that can happen. And we kind of just break it down like, okay, you're in the guard, you're in the half guard, you're across side, you're in the mount, and now you got their back. And we kind of just show these different positions. But it's a good methodical way to introduce this stuff. Going back to the book here, one of the most popularized side

• 1:28:27Jocko Willink?

  effects of jujitsu is an ego death. A fit man consider, who considers himself to be tough and capable in a fighting situation, gets submitted repeatedly by a purple belt woman, or even a blue belt woman. When this happens, there are two possible reactions. One is an immediate obsession with learning submission grappling. The other is an avoidance of it for life. The latter often comes with olympic, Olympic level mental gymnastics necessary to protect the ego while it is on life support. So, totally true. I, I definitely, unfortunately, I saw this in the SEAL teams, I introduced hundreds of SEALs to jujitsu.

• 1:29:12Jocko Willink?

  And there was a little bit of the bell curve, you know, there's some people that were like, just in a hundred percent. Some people like, yeah, it's cool, you know, I'll put it in the list of things that seems cool. And, you know, when you're a SEAL, there's a long list of things that seem cool. Shooting, jumping, diving, rock climbing, the hunting, archery, like, there's a whole bunch of things and it kind of, for, I realized this more recently that, like, there's a certain group of people on one end of the bell curve that they're gonna be immediately obsessed with jujitsu. And there's people on the other end that are gonna never, they're gonna avoid jujitsu at all costs. But there is a group of people in the middle that are kind of like, seems cool, kind of like it, you know?

• 1:29:53Jocko Willink?

  But the people on the far end of avoidance, yeah, that's some serious mental gymnastics. Back to the book, back in 2010, when I walked into a community fitness center to learn MMA, my ego was flanked and assaulted. After all, with a fresh black belt in judo, the rank of master, what could a collective of white and blue belts do to me? The answer is to choke me from my back brutally and repeatedly.

• 1:30:17Jocko Willink?

  That's the way it goes down.

• 1:30:20Jocko Willink?

  You get into break falls and then you know, you talk about judo, takedowns, wrestling takedowns and, and explain those things and kind of what's important about them. And, and you talk about, one of the things that's different about jujitsu. Look, in judo, you've got ippon where if you get thrown, it's game over. If you get thrown on your back, it's game over. If you get pinned on your back, it's game over. In wrestling, how long do you have to hold someone on their back in, in wrestling, in judo?

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  It's, uh, it used to be 25 seconds. Now it's 20 seconds unless you've scored a wazari, which is a half point and then you have to hold them for less time, but I don't know exactly how much.

• 1:31:01Jocko Willink?

  So it's pretty quick.

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  It's pretty quick. It's hard to get out of. Yeah.

• 1:31:04Jocko Willink?

  So in judo, your back's on the ground, you're done. In wrestling, you have three seconds, by the way, you're of your back being on the ground and you're done. In boxing or kickboxing, if your back's on the ground, it means you just got knocked out and you're done. And you explain all this stuff in the book. And then you say this, when you compete in jujitsu, you can instantly collapse like a Jenga tower and no one bats an eye. Often they expect it. Go ahead, lie down. Not only are you not losing, you could very be well be on your way to winning. How is this possible? Well, there's the obvious reason, the rules. Unlike judo or wrestling, you're allowed to. But why are you allowed to? You're allowed to because the guard can be so dangerous when played properly. It is a both a defensive and offensive tool.

• 1:31:48Jocko Willink?

  The best guard players use layers of guard angles, elevations and off balances to present an impenetrable barrier.

• 1:31:56Jocko Willink?

  Once the right moment comes, they can look for submissions of all kinds, sweeps that bring them to the top, shortcuts that bring them straight to the back. Alternatively, they can stall and let the passer get tired before making their move. The guard is the biggest technological advancement that the fighting world has seen in recent years. The speed at which these techniques are advancing is staggering. Over the last 20 years, entire guard systems have been added or thoroughly refined. Just in the last decade, the widespread adoption of leg locks started a gold rush, accelerating the development of new attacks. This can be a hard pill to swallow, but you can get very far in jiu-jitsu without ever investing in your takedown skills. Even with a recommended, well-rounded approach, it is critical to learn how to play guard because

• 1:32:39Jocko Willink?

  everyone ends up on their back, even if your entire goal in life is to, quote, "just stand up", and understanding of the guard is still crucial. So, this is why, and I would, you know, I give a lot of this credit to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Ali O'Gracy of The Guard, of working from the bottom and being on the bottom and using that to win fights. And this is something that I have had an argument 10,000 times with people that, you know, self-defense, you know, why would you want to be on your back? You don't want to be on your back. You don't want to be on your back. And if you don't know how to do, if you don't know how to fight from your back, you're going to be stuck on your back. That's why you learn the guard. That's why you learn jiu-jitsu, because then you

• 1:33:23Jocko Willink?

  can utilize it, the guard, and the techniques of your guard to get away from someone, get back to your feet and run away. So, at a minimum, you need to understand how to do that. And that is part of the thing that you explain in the book. I have to go into this here. Single-leg X-me more because we're talking about the guard here.

• 1:33:50Jocko Willink?

  You say Single Leg X or Ashi Garami, which one is it? Both of these names describe the same position and they both have their proponents advocating for using one name or the other. So if you're a jiu-jitsu player, you're gonna find this interesting. The Single Leg Xers will say something like, "Ugh, more Ashi Salami." This has been called SLX forever, Single Leg X forever, since Marcelo Garcia's been wrecking people with it at ADCCs of the early 2000s. We've got X Guard, and if you go from that to just one leg, it's Single Leg X. Donahue's cringe for having a Japanese name for everything. The Ashi Garamis will say something like, "These uneducated peasants don't know that

• 1:34:35Jocko Willink?

  this leg entanglement has been used in Japanese dojos when the only color option for photos was still black and white. Single Leg X has nothing to do with X Guard. It's not even a guard, it's a leg entanglement. Sorry for trying to have a unified naming system for jiu-jitsu." Moderates, like the author of this book, will say something like, "While the name Ashi Garami predates Single Leg X and is more scalable, we can't deny that Single Leg X is the predominant way to describe this guard, for better or worse. However, we can limit the use of Single Leg X to the supine guard and use Ashi Garami to describe leg entanglements when both people are seated and exchanging leg locks. This is the only approach that can appease both groups and bring peace to this divided world."

• 1:35:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, lay down your AKs, put down your Uzis, let's just, uh, let's be chill about it.

• 1:35:28Jocko Willink?

  And there's all kinds of like, little, uh, things like that in the book that make it a lot, a lot of fun to read.

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  The reason why I did that is because inherently a manual is going to be pretty dry, right? So I've read this book five times, which is about four times more than I would. That I that I would like to, but it's really important to. It was really important for me to do repeatedly and in different ways because I wanted to see how long will someone who's not the author read this thing concurrently, right? And I I realized that the best thing I can do is throw in a little bit of humor just to make sure that everyone is is paying attention still, you know? It kind of like brings their attention back up. Cause I wanted people to be able to consume it in different ways. One is cover to cover, that's fine. The other is to have it on your coffee table, open it up.

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  Today, a training I got wrecked from whatever position. Go to the table of contents, find that position, read it and then put it back. And you can kind of jump around, but yeah, I think humor is important.

• 1:36:28Speaker 02

  The the other thing I noticed in the book too, is the images aren't bordered color background images, they the background's been removed. So the images of the people practicing the technique are jumping off the page. You can actually see what's what's going on with the two figures interacting, which is super cool.

• 1:36:48Jocko Willink?

  What did you do in this, a white background?

• 1:36:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, the studio that we have at Legion. Yeah, it's basically completely white. I I don't think a lot of them, I didn't even remove the background. It's just that white, yeah.

• 1:36:59Speaker 02

  That that's awesome, man. It it really, again, flows with the text too. You've got four or five images right next to each other with the figures showing you the technique, which is super, super helpful.

• 1:37:10Jocko Willink?

  Kerry chiming in.

• 1:37:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, man.

• 1:37:12Jocko Willink?

  Because Echo Charles wasn't here.

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:14Jocko Willink?

  You know, we were talking, I was telling you guys before we kicked this thing off, this would have been the one of the seven podcasts we've done where, you know, Echo Charles might have added something.

• 1:37:26Speaker 01

  I might have to.

• 1:37:27Jocko Willink?

  He's not here.

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  Might have to write another book.

• 1:37:28Jocko Willink?

  He's on vacation in Hawaii, damn.

• 1:37:32Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, passing the guard. I'm just hitting some highlights of the sections here. This chapter will have a little bit of theory and strategy followed by a lot of weapons that we can use to enter this war on our terms. Before the defenses or an ambush are established, you'll learn a combination of tools that will work against open guards as well as approaches to specific guards for when we are unable to outright prevent them. Certain guards like closed guard have a very simple user manual. Others come with an option exerting vicious pressure on the bottom player by negating their positions. And I actually.

• 1:38:06Jocko Willink?

  I wanted to read this little section here. An ode to pressure passing.

• 1:38:10Speaker 01

  I already knew it was gonna be that.

• 1:38:14Jocko Willink?

  When you use a nice chain of distance passing attempts to defeat your opponent's guard, for example, a tornado attempt to a near leg drag to a quick knee slice cut finish, you achieve the objective. You have a pin and you're, and you're competing, and if you're competing, three points for the pass as well. However, your opponent is not maximally demoralized. His spirit is not particularly drained. He may brush off your beautiful technique as a fluke. He may still be motivated to fight back, recover guard, and perhaps turn the tide. Now let's compare this to pressure passing. Let's say you fight your way into a strong top half guard with a solid pin. You get a vicious cross face that's making it almost impossible for your opponent to breathe.

• 1:38:55Jocko Willink?

  He definitely cannot turn and you recover, he can definitely cannot turn into you to recover guard. You have a strong underhook, a good base, and you're getting heavy on his chest, taking your time, calmly breathing through your nose, you're slowly inching your leg out from the grasp of his legs. Your opponent pinches your ankle with his thighs, holding on for dear life, gasping for air. You're in no hurry. You know that not only are you passing, you're controlling and you're cooking him. At the end, you may not even have to add the finishing touch to remove the leg because he just wants the pain and discomfort to stop. As you can see his soul leave his body toward the ceiling of the academy or gym, or gymnasium, you pass. This is very true.

• 1:39:39Jocko Willink?

  Greg Train passed my guard today and he, cause I had just been reading this yesterday, and Greg Train is like super tight passer and he, he, he take, he passes your guard one millimeter at a time and it takes him four minutes and 50 seconds of the round, but it, damn, it sucks.

• 1:39:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. One of the biggest thing, biggest mistakes people make with pressure passing is just hurrying through it. There's no, there's no rush at all. You actually want to spend a little bit longer in it if you have the control. It just, yeah, I've, I've had a lot of situations in competition where like good competitors, I could feel this like exhale that happens after you pass the guard, especially if it's deep in the, in the tournament. It's just like feel their body relaxing and like, okay, this is, this is a wrap, that we're done.

• 1:40:28Jocko Willink?

  Next chapter is chapter five, front headlock and turtle.

• 1:40:33Jocko Willink?

  Here's your comments here. One of my main training partners at Legion is a gentleman named Sloan Climber. His nickname is Caveman. And if you've ever gazed your eyes upon Sloan, you probably understand why Sloan and I have an interesting dynamic when we roll. The dynamic goes as follows. If he gets me in front headlock, I lose. Mostly gets me in front headlock from a standing position, or when I play seated guard. I stopped shooting wrestling takedowns on him in 2022 because I was just making it too easy. The first way in which I can lose is a one-handed guillotine, the co, the co watcher that he specializes. Oh, cow catcher, sorry. The cow catcher that he specializes in.

• 1:41:12Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes it's an arm in guillotine or even anaconda choke. If you've ever watched a YouTube video of a Finnish guy crushing stuff with a pneumatic press. That's about what I'm experiencing several times per week. The second way in which I can lose normally occurs when my ego gets bruised from tapping. And I stopped caring about my head potentially getting detached from my upper torso. Sometimes I escape, but then my massage therapist has to get involved and I can't really check my blind spots. When I drive my car for about a week. Yeah, Sloan is a freak and. I was talking to him and Paige, his girlfriend fiance. And we were just kind of like talking about. Head and squeezing and.

• 1:41:52Jocko Willink?

  I was, you know, saying that sometimes I know he's, he's like, yeah, you know, sometimes I'm thinking, damn, you know, like, is Jocko going to tap to this thing? And I was like, yes, you must be also thinking like, do I want to permanently injure this dude right now? Like, hey, he's not tapping. It's kind of on him to tap. Do I, do I just go ahead and break his freaking neck right now? Cause that's what if he's been doing this thing lately where I don't know if he's done it to you, but he kind of gets his. He kind of goes underneath your head with his armpit. From top position and then like grabs your lap and just starts torquing your whole. Like my whole spine has been cracked.

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:28Jocko Willink?

  My head, my whole, probably the top, upper two thirds of my spine were all sore.

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. He also does this thing that I haven't really seen too many people do the south, north choke.

• 1:42:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:40Speaker 01

  It's, it's crazy. So you get north, south on him and then he chokes you from the bottom.

• 1:42:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. He, he did that to me the other day. I was like, I'm gonna stop doing jujitsu.

• 1:42:49Speaker 01

  Yes, I've rolled with every everybody, pretty much, and Sloan is like right up there with as far as like squeeze goes and front headlock. I don't think too many people compare, you know?

• 1:43:00Jocko Willink?

  Bro, I got a guillotine on him today and like had a little bit of half guard, a little bit like he like he was terrible. And I was cranking as hard as I can. And we got done. He's like, I'm like leaving. He's like, yeah, man. And like I tried everything, like just trying to rip his head off his body. He's and he's like, yeah, dude. No, that was good, man. That was uncomfortable. I'm like, cool, bro. Cool. I'm gonna go kill myself.

• 1:43:25Jocko Willink?

  And I actually laughed. He goes, yeah, that was uncomfortable. I go, oh, yeah, sure. Real uncomfortable. Don't patronize me, bro. I would never tap. Discomfort was there. Yeah, you made me uncomfortable. Good job.

• 1:43:40Jocko Willink?

  Side control in North South. Our friends down in Brazil refer to side control as sem kilos, which means a hundred kilo kilograms in Portuguese. That's because this position to feel like something really heavy got rolled on top of your chest. Now, a hundred kilograms is a 220 pounds, so it's not even an absurd amount of weight to expect from an opponent. It can get worse. However, the name carries a meaning. Side control should feel heavy. Good position, goo- good opposition. Perhaps your coach or resident mat enforcer will feel twice as heavy as they actually are. That's why defense, starting with guard retention, is so important. If that fails, the secondary line of defense will fall on frames and hip scaping ability. So, a little bit of side control activity, being heavy.

• 1:44:26Jocko Willink?

  You know Megaton?

• 1:44:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:27Jocko Willink?

  I always thought that was gonna like one of the best nicknames because Megaton is not a big guy.

• 1:44:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:33Jocko Willink?

  And and everyone said when you roll with him, there's a reason why his nickname is Megaton. He's probably what, 155, 165, maybe?

• 1:44:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say 155, probably, yeah.

• 1:44:42Jocko Willink?

  The the stories I would hear about Megaton was just like, yeah, if he gets across that.

• 1:44:46Speaker 01

  He's the first guy who competed as a coral belt in the adult division.

• 1:44:50Jocko Willink?

  That's right.

• 1:44:50Speaker 01

  Which is pretty, pretty wild.

• 1:44:52Jocko Willink?

  Dude, yeah.

• 1:44:53Speaker 01

  Mackenzie Derns, that, yeah.

• 1:44:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:55Speaker 01

  Gotta give it up to the Brazilians. They don't like us for the American jiu jitsu, but I'll I'll admit their nicknames are top notch. Like, you know, Buchecha?

• 1:45:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:03Speaker 01

  That means fat cheeks, because he used to be a little bit chubby. And now he's just like this heavyweight monster. So, yeah, they have really creative nicknames. Gotta give it to them.

• 1:45:11Jocko Willink?

  There's some cartoon character in Brazil, whose name is Pede Pano, which means cloth foot. And there's a guy who who looks like that cartoon character. Marcio Cruz. Yeah, yeah. Then Dean fought him and I was reading some old like translated thing when Dean was competing in Brazil. And it was translated into English. I didn't, it was translated in English, but it was translated like literally. And it's, it said, um, like, the American is caught in his, in, in the cloth foot. And I'm trying to make sense of it. I'm like, what is this? Like, how is he, how's he got his foot if he's caught in a choke? And, and finally figured out, oh, the cloth foot. Got it. Yeah. They're good with them damn nicknames.

• 1:45:57Jocko Willink?

  You go into the mount. And again, you got, I'm, I'm obviously I'm not going over all the detail of the, of the positions that you go through. But they're useful. They're useful. I like doing a little, uh, mental priming, you know, taking a look at like before, actually was feeling this today. I went to train. I was like thinking about various things in the book when I showed up to open mat, you know, like get a little bit of that thought process going. Uh, mount position, fast forward a little bit. Oh no, you no longer see the lights on the ceiling. His sweat soaked rash guard is just a half an inch away from his chest as it starts to move closer to your face. Panic is starting to set in. Next thing you know, you're struggling to breathe. Your nose and mouth are covered in a sweat drenched polyester cloth.

• 1:46:42Jocko Willink?

  If your opponent whispered, where are the documents? You would think you're under advanced interrogation, but this is just a gym. You're just being sweatboarded by one of your friends. You committed no crimes or act of terrorism. You simply made the mistake of becoming subjected to the worst part of a dominant grappling position. And you do have a note that says you've committed no crimes or act of terrorism. The footnote is that we know of.

• 1:47:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, the mount is, I've talked about this with one of our instructors, Andrus Bronoskis, he's a gi master. I talked to him about the hierarchy of positions. Typically, it's like mount and then back, right? The back is at the top of the hierarchy of positions. But we were talking about how we both actually prefer the mount. If I had to choose, like, let's say I'm going with someone that's better than me and I can start in the best position if I wanted to, mount would be my selection. And there's different degrees of mount. I was just talking about this yesterday when I was teaching class. There's the mount where you're like sitting on someone, it's not that tough to escape. But mount where

• 1:47:53Speaker 01

  you have one head trapped together with, one arm trapped together with their head, that's brutal. And then if you have two arms trapped, double underhooks, that's just hellacious.

• 1:48:04Jocko Willink?

  We call that snow angel.

• 1:48:06Speaker 01

  Snow angel.

• 1:48:07Jocko Willink?

  Snow angel, like Dean calls it when he gets both of those under there. You know, speaking of waterboarding, freaking Dean Lister, and I would do it to him, but he did it to me more, would like, literally be mounted on me and have like me in double snow angel or snow angel or whatever weird position, and he would be directing the sweat off of his chin, like into my ear. Bro, this is the most freaking savage, hostile asshole thing to do. So humiliating.

• 1:48:45Speaker 02

  I've heard him talking to you.

• 1:48:47Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:48Speaker 02

  Like while he's doing.

• 1:48:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, we'll talk smack for sure. And I, look, and I get payback on him. But yeah, he just, he has better control from that position. And so he can like get really specific when the freaking sweat drops, literally aiming for my freaking ear hole. You know how much it sucks to be like a grown man that's been training jiu-jitsu for 30 years and just have another dude just. Controlling you to the point where he can aim the sweat off of his chin or off of his nose into your ear. Dude, that's just, I bet there's a bunch of people that were fired up for jujitsu until I just said that.

• 1:49:33Speaker 01

  But it's good that you revealed your weakness because now next open mat, I'm coming in water loaded like I'm. And I'm gonna put that sweet sweating on my face, just so it sweats more.

• 1:49:43Jocko Willink?

  The funny thing is, I will show no, you echo can like, I will show no reaction. Like he'll be doing that and I'll just show no reaction at all. And I'll just sit there and, you know, but you gotta give up something. You gotta give up like a temptation of, you know, an arm lock. And, and, and then you gotta hope that he's gonna go for it. Cause a lot of times he'll be like, I'm not taking your arm.

• 1:50:08Jocko Willink?

  He's like, I'm not taking your arm, sir. He called, when he's, whenever he's freaking fired up, he calls me sir. Like, he'll be like, no, sir, I can, I cannot do that. I have to stay here, sir. I have to make sure that this protocol gets completed, sir. I need to make sure that you are prepared mentally. It's freaking, what a freaking jerk. But, um, I'm trying to think of the, the thing, I, I will get, I will, when I get like in a good. If, if I have the upper hand for a day, cause that's usually what happens, you know, Dean will beat me up five days in a row. The sixth day, I'll get the upper hand for whatever reason. And when I get the upper hand, I just, I just like, um.

• 1:50:51Jocko Willink?

  Grind, like just smash and just, just torture him that way. I'm not as accurate with the sweat drops either, so.

• 1:51:00Speaker 01

  I think the longer it goes, like the older you guys are, the bigger upper hand you're gonna have because of how much healthier your lifestyle is.

• 1:51:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, no, that's, that's, that, that is, I, I look forward to every year that passes.

• 1:51:14Speaker 01

  Every birthday is just a celebration of your power ranking going up.

• 1:51:18Jocko Willink?

  The only problem with that is it's the same thing happening with like my kids, you know, where I'm like. You know, my kids are just, they're also celebrating each birthday. They're like, you're getting old, old man. And they freaking go hard in the paint too. Damn trying to rip my legs off, but you know, it all comes out in the wash.

• 1:51:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's crazy how much that impacts like that when when if I can get Dean tired, you know, then I'll then I'll have a chance. When he's fresh, it's actually the one of the worst things in the world is if he's fresh and dry, like no sweat is just it's one of the worst. It's one of the worst, like six minutes or eight minutes. It takes me about eight minutes to start sweating. It takes me eight minutes, but when he's dry and I'm dry, God, it's freaking awful. That's one of the only things I've noticed about getting older is I used to not warm up. I would literally like, like, oh, what's time to train? We're gonna go and just go.

• 1:52:21Jocko Willink?

  And now I do around to get I want to break a sweat because I feel so freaking it feels so gnarly to not break a sweat. I don't know how I used to do that for so many years.

• 1:52:31Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm I I noticed that before we do like a J flow class at the academy, I have to show up like 20 minutes, 30 minutes earlier and do some mobility, just get my my body ready. Our around the warm up round is good, but sometimes it's not good enough if you have you're gonna be snapped down and stuff.

• 1:52:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, if I was doing stand up, no, that's different. If we're gonna roll, cool. You know, I'm good with a five five minute warm up round. If I'm going to like, we're gonna start standing, I'm gonna be deep into so I'm gonna be like three rounds, four rounds deep, you know, like 20 minute of warm up before that activity is going down. Damn, that's just freaking gnarly. That dry, that's another thing is people like, oh, yeah, Dean Dean with the G like whatever. No, dude, Dean Dean trained with a G forever. And it's worse because now he's like gripping and there's no slippage. It's freaking awful.

• 1:53:26Speaker 01

  The G is like harder. I I have no problem admitting it. I'm more of a no G guy now myself, but the G is harder than no G because there's first of all, there's more techniques. There's more that you have to know. And then there there's also so many more guards that you have to pass if you're not a guard player. The only thing that it has going against it, in my opinion, is the there's way more guard pulling and butt scooting and double guard pulling and. I just kind of refused at a certain point to be involved in that. And honestly, in my division like

• 1:53:59Jocko Willink?

  Moral, made a moral stance.

• 1:54:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh, like medium, heavy, heavyweight. Typically, you have, you don't have that much of of that. But in like featherweight and so on, you have a lot of that double guard pulling. And then you have to get really good at inversions and bimbolos and so on, which is, it's totally expected. Because jujitsu, the, one of the best things about jujitsu is that it's undergoing this constant evolution where, hey, if you have an idea of a guard that's gonna work, come on, test it. Test it in, in training with good training partners, go to a competition and test it. And if it survives the test, it's valid. We'll, we'll, other people will start doing it immediately. Cause everyone wants, it's kind of like an arms race. And that's one of the best things about jujitsu and one of the things that makes it so effective against

• 1:54:43Speaker 01

  other martial arts in a one-on-one fair fight scenario is that constant evolution. But it just goes in direction sometimes that for some people, just like personally, you don't like that much. That my example would be that like featherweight division from even blue belt up now, purple, brown especially. You're just gonna get a double guard pull and then there's gonna be a play for advantages. Someone's gonna invert and then there's gonna be a counter to an inversion that's countered with another thing. And that's gonna result in something. But yeah, and the gear, I think is just like honestly harder to master. So we just, I, I would just abandon it and the easier thing, which is still plenty hard. But just the, the thing that's hard, personally, I enjoy more, which is like stand up, like wrestling and Judo.

• 1:55:28Speaker 01

  And I mentioned, uh, Justin Flores, J Flo earlier. It's crazy to me how much I learned about Judo from him just doing those training sessions. Cause I, I was a black belt before, but I had like mostly tricks that I was good at and some, some big throws. But yeah, there's so much to, to incorporate into Nogi, I feel still when it comes to Nogi Judo especially. That's kind of like a frontier that's very exciting.

• 1:55:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. When I watch, uh, J Flo's like, uh, Instagram and see clips of what he's doing and how he's doing it. Um, it's such good three, four setups going on. And this is something I always explain to people. Is is like you gotta do two, three, four things to get the reaction that you want. You can't do one thing and generally speaking, it's hard to just do two things. You can get lucky sometimes and do two things and it works, but you gotta set things up. Things gotta happen. And you can see that he's got like whole freaking series of movements that all cause reactions. And and they're not, they're not a voluntary reactions. It's like if I do this to you and you don't defend it, you're going to fall.

• 1:56:35Jocko Willink?

  So you have to do this other thing, which I'm ready for you to do. And if you, and if you don't defend that, you're going to fall. And by the way, if you do defend it, I've got another thing and he can just get a quarter second or a tenth of a second or a hundredth of a second head, three times, four times in a row. And then your head.

• 1:56:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's got that that unique combo of competing in in Judo at a high level, division one wrestling, and then learning a bunch about MMA. Cause people started to seek him out like Ron DeRozzi is his most famous coach. But he's one of the only people that I see do something like a move, like let's say a double leg with the setup. And I'm like, did this guy just break physics right now? Cause you're not supposed to cover ground like that, you know? And when I roll with him, he's much smaller and his knees only work on two days of the week. I think he would, he would agree with that. He has to like really pick the days when he's gonna battle. But man, he, he puts it on me. It's like he'll snap me down and like start circling around.

• 1:57:34Speaker 01

  The only thing that's saving me is like my submission defense. I've seen him, so I don't know exactly how old he is, but I'm pretty sure he's like around 40, somewhere around there. I saw him spar with a ranked UFC flyweight. Obviously I won't mention who, but he beat the brakes off this guy. And he, they're the same weight class. So I think legit, if you put him in the UFC in that, in that division, he could actually, he could beat some people. It's, it's pretty incredible, honestly.

• 1:58:03Jocko Willink?

  Going back to gi, no gi, I've always, my opinion has always been that no gi is harder to do offense, gi is harder to do defense. So like when I'm across side on you and I have a gi on, it's harder for you to get out. With no gi, it's harder for me to hold you down. So that's one of the, I think, benefits of doing both is that you, you like escaping an arm lock with no gi is a lot easier than escaping an arm lock with a gi. And just like you said, there's chokes that you can do with gi that if someone's on your back, it's going to be, you have to defend, be much more defensive. So I've always found that

• 1:58:48Jocko Willink?

  to be a reason that training both is beneficial and for self-defense, like you can use people's clothes against them. And if you are not used to someone grabbing your clothes and they're grabbing your clothes, it can trip up your game. So I, I've always liked training both. I think right now I'm just, there's just a lot of, there's a lot of no gi activity going down.

• 1:59:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. It's, it's, it's definitely fun. Actually, we spoke about the beginner course earlier. We purposefully do the beginner course in the gi and there's two, two reasons to it. One is that, like you said, self-defense. San Diego, everyone's rocking around in shorts and t-shirts or no t-shirts. There's not that much to grab, but if you go, we've done, with Keenan, we've done this a couple of times. We actually rolled in street clothes and you can choke someone with a hoodie very easily, very similar to, to how you would do it with a gi. But the other more important reason is the, having the gi on, especially in the early going, slows everything down. So when you're doing the sparring, you're

• 1:59:55Speaker 01

  spending more time in those positions that you have to recognize. Like at first, you just have to recognize the position and the best thing you can do as a beginner, I feel like is like, say, let's say you, you get to your back, you're looking for half guard, you're looking for close guard, just recognizing them, knowing what to do, half guard, get that leg through, lock, lock their leg up, get an underhook and so on. That is like a key thing. And then we say, we typically tell people like now you have, you can either go the fundamentals curriculum route, or you can go, you can do no gi fundamentals because it's kind of like. If I have a ribeye steak at home and a New York strip, I like both a lot. On some days I'll have one, on some days I'll have the other, but why would you limit yourself to one?

• 2:00:40Speaker 01

  And even to this day, like you said, we do a lot of nogi, but every now and then it's actually super fun to pop in in the gi and just do a couple of rounds with that as well. Just at the current time, if you're competing at a high level, it's, I actually admire the people who can do both, who do seasons and then they'll be top, top level at both because it's getting so difficult. You have to split your focus a little bit and you kind of just have to pick the one that you like.

• 2:01:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Have you ever seen that choke, I think Henner, Henner Gracie's wife, they're showing this choke, it's like a self-defense choke where the person's got a t-shirt on and you roll the t-shirt up on their back, you pull it up on their back. I always thought that was like awesome little move.

• 2:01:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's definitely an interesting one.

• 2:01:19Jocko Willink?

  Cause if you're in San Diego, you're in a t-shirt, you can still get choked with a straight up gi, cross collar choke using someone's t-shirt.

• 2:01:27Speaker 01

  T-shirts don't rip us as easily as you would think. Yeah, it's, yeah, we did some, um, during COVID, actually, the month when we were closed, Kino and I did some live streams where we were fighting in street clothes. One move that we developed, developed, I discovered actually, that's crazy is how someone has a hoodie on, you grab both sleeves at the end, kind of like a spider guard grip. And then, uh, let's say that you're playing guard, which for self-defense is probably not the best idea. But with these grips, what happens in the gi, they kind of stay where they are. Because hoodies are so stretchy, you will actually end up being knuckle to knuckle, still holding the grip. So we were kind of playing around, Kino got this grip on me.

• 2:02:10Jocko Willink?

  Wait, knuckle to knuckle with their knuckles?

• 2:02:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, cause, cause the sleeve will pull past the hand, right? So you'll be knuckle to knuckle and then if you're on bottom, there's not much defense for the person on top, you can start up kicking them effectively. I'm super excited in the UFC every now and then there's like a good up kick. It's, it's kind of cool to see, but, uh, the only defense there would be, uh, to remove the hoodie. Basically you slink out of it and you get out of it. But yeah, there's some, there's some funny, fun stuff in there.

• 2:02:42Jocko Willink?

  Uh, fast forward a little bit, getting into back control. Anyone that has studied combat in any form, from historical, large scale battles to one-on-one fights, will know that outflanking the opponent and getting behind them is a great way to go about it. In grappling context, getting on your opponent's back is highly effective because of how asymmetrical the position is. Our bodies have evolved to be effective in movements that have us facing forward. Until we start evolving another set of eyes in the back of our heads and our joints become omnidirectional, we will continue to have trouble defending chokes from the back. So, gotta pay attention to that. Um, get your priorities straight. One of my training partners wrote a book called Extreme Ownership.

• 2:03:25Jocko Willink?

  It features lessons and principles that he and his colleague learned during their stint as Navy SEAL operators and later leaders, both in the military and the business world. All of the laws of combat highlighted in the bestseller apply to jiu-jitsu, but the one called Prioritize and Execute might as well have been designed for thinking about defending the back. Because our opponent has such a compromised spot with full control over our lower and upper body, we need to archive, uh, need to achieve several things to escape the back. We need to clear the hooks, get the back to the ground, break the seatbelt, create distance from them, avoid them out while not getting submitted in the process. If we fail to prioritize moves properly, it's very easy to get submitted. Priority, don't get strangled.

• 2:04:09Jocko Willink?

  To escape the back, we need to get rid of the hooks, but if you reach down with your hands, your neck gets exposed and you're toast. So, what an incredible concept you have there.

• 2:04:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:04:19Jocko Willink?

  I got asked-

• 2:04:20Speaker 01

  I steal from the best.

• 2:04:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I got asked, I was talking about, uh, or no, someone come up and asked me about, "Hey, you know, you say that the four laws of combat apply to jiu-jitsu." And- I get cover and move because you've got to set up one thing and hit them from somewhere else. I get simple because you've got to have the good solid fundamentals. I get prioritized next because what I just read there. And they're like, but how does, how does decentralized command fit into jujitsu? You got any guesses, Miha?

• 2:04:49Speaker 01

  Actually, out of all of those four, that would be the one that I, that what I would have to think about a little bit more.

• 2:04:55Jocko Willink?

  I've got the answer for you.

• 2:04:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:57Jocko Willink?

  So the answer is, just like if you're my squad leader, I want you to be able to make maneuvers out on the battlefield without me having to tell you what to do, without you having to come back and check with me. So in jujitsu, you want to get good enough that you don't have to think about the movements that you're making. You want your, you want your arm to move to escape the, the triangle without having to tell your arm to move. And so you have to train and put trust in your limbs that you don't have to worry about it. And so it becomes decentralized command where you, I mean, I, I get done rolling sometimes. I don't even remember what happened. It's just all decentralized command. My body's operating in a zone without my, without me commanding it what to do.

• 2:05:40Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes I can go to the extreme where it can become bad, just like freaking real life leadership. So yeah, all the principles apply.

• 2:05:50Speaker 01

  I just, I just remembered that was actually my answer as well. I did the exact same thing. No, you're, you're spot on there. And in competition, it's even more important. Because you're, yeah. I, I know that like when I, when you compete in nogies especially, and you're going against a leg locker, you kind of have to make peace with the fact that there is a chance that you'll be just ending up with a limb, limp, because in those exchanges, your body is just doing, you're autopilot. You're just doing things. You're just reacting. And typically, even if you, if you go into the match and you're like, oh, if this guy grabs my leg and I tap, you're, you're really handicapping yourself because now you're thinking about the wrong thing. But yeah, you just have to make peace with the fact that when you're going to be in that firefight, like

• 2:06:34Speaker 01

  your body is just going to be doing things. So that's where, where you have to derive a lot of confidence from your training.

• 2:06:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. You have to, just like in combat, just like in a leadership position, I have to make sure that we've trained to the point where Miha knows if he gets flanked, he's going to do this and doesn't need to come ask me. That's my goal. I know that if we're training and my foot goes in a certain position on you, before I think about it, I've gotta already be swinging my other foot in sides, whatever, peeling it away. I gotta do those things without thinking about them because if I gotta think about them, it's gonna be too late. That's why we train.

• 2:07:08Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward to the submission section. What is a submission? Submission is the ultimate goal of jiu-jitsu, both in the gi and without submission grappling is the best grappling. In wrestling, you're not allowed to go for a submission. God, I wish they just would unify everything together and there's just one freaking thing. That'd be so awesome. In judo, you're allowed, but you're not allowed to spend any reasonable amount of time working towards a submission before you get stood up by the referee. In jiu-jitsu, we use wrestling and judo throws as just the starting point in a hunt for the tap. We want to secure a choker joint lock and force our opponent to tap out, AKA submit. The tap out is the ultimate escape in every submission, provided that it is applied in training or competition.

• 2:07:49Jocko Willink?

  Getting out of a submission by tapping out is not guaranteed on the streets. In the gym, cranking on a submission after someone taps out is a good way to guarantee yourself a bad time. The trust that originates from knowing that our training partners will respect the tap helps us train safely and at a higher intensity. This is crucial as it keeps jiu-jitsu evolving and grounded in reality. And it goes even one step beyond that, where if you have a really good training partner and they're, they have you in a spot where you're gonna get hurt, it might not even be a submission, it might just be like a transition. But even like a good training partner, oh, you got a big ego today? Or I got a big ego and Miha catches my arm? He's like, oh, well, if Jocko's got a big ego today,

• 2:08:33Jocko Willink?

  he's just never gonna be able to train again because I'm about to career him and wreck his shoulder. It's like, no, you're like, hey dude, okay, cool. And you let go because you're a cool dude and you want to be able to train with me tomorrow.

• 2:08:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm like a pretty stubborn guy, but sometimes I'll find myself in that situation and be like, why am I, why am I being addicted to this guy? Because I'm putting him in a position now where he has to decide to pop my, my joint or not, you know? Like, it's kind of, it's not really a nice thing to do to a friend.

• 2:09:06Jocko Willink?

  We have the benefit of not having strikes and head trauma to worry about, so practice can be pretty intense. The objective is jiu-jitsu, and that is, you know, Rogan says this all the time. He's like, that's what makes jiu-jitsu so awesome, is you and me can train at, basically at 100%. I mean, I'm training at 100% with you until it's time to break your arm, or until it's time for you to break my arm, and it's like, you stop. And that's what makes it so awesome. The objective is, of jiu-jitsu is to launch someone into the ground, or find, and find a way to break or choke them into submission. Despite that, we strive, we need to strive to keep good care of training partners. One of the best ways to do that is to apply submissions with care and control, especially when going against smaller or less experienced training partners. I know when I, when I trained with Dean all the time, back in the

• 2:09:51Jocko Willink?

  day when he was competing, one of the things that we would do is like, if he got me in an arm lock, or he got me in a foot lock, or heel hook, or whatever, he would hold it, and it would give me time to like, work through escapes, that neither one of us knew. It was like, oh, what if I moved over here? Oh, what if I moved over there? And, and that's also improving his ability to hold someone and see what weaknesses there were to this submission. So, doing that can be very helpful as well. And speaking of leg locks, you've got a section in here on leg locks. If you liken leg lock technique development to the development of leg locks, then you should know that the Manhattan Project unfolded

• 2:10:34Jocko Willink?

  over the last few years. Not by physicists in a secret compound in the desert, but by a dedicated man and a group of athletes in a blue basement in the middle of Manhattan. No atoms were split as a result, but they did split a lot of ankle and knee ligaments, that's for sure. Leg lock use exploded in gyms and competition arenas around the world, with an arms race unfolding, during which athletes rushed to catch up on the newest technology, to not get their legs broken. The biggest advance in the understanding of the mechanics and submissions came in the form of systemized leg entanglements, and a particularly devastating and feared set of submissions, heel hooks.

• 2:11:15Jocko Willink?

  As mentioned, heel hooks have had a complete renaissance since about 2013 and have become a mainstay in submission grappling. Just like with all grappling techniques, it's likely that someone tried to bend someone's leg in a painful way thousands of years ago, perhaps in a bout of Pancreas in ancient Greece. As far as modern martial arts are concerned, they were first documented on a big stage in the 1990s in Japan with the legend Yuki Nakai using one in about 1993. They were used in other bouts in Japan, often with what could be considered inefficient mechanics by today's standards. This changed when the American grappling star Dean Lister began using them to great effect throughout his career. He scored no

• 2:11:58Jocko Willink?

  less than nine heel hooks throughout his several ADCC runs. His now famous saying, "Why ignore 50% of the human body?" caught the attention of John Donahue, who is responsible for making heel hooks a mandatory tool in the kit of any high-level grappler. The Donahue Death Squad, which he started once he shifted his attention from coaching MMA stars Chris Weedman and George St. Pierre, used heel hooks to great success. His athletes went on an absolute tear, mostly of ACLs and ankle ligaments belonging to their opponents, and this piqued the interest of any aspiring or even established no-gi grappler. Eddie Cummings, Gary Tonan, and Gordon Ryan and other athletes used heel hooks to great success as if they were sponsored

• 2:12:42Jocko Willink?

  by an orthopedic surgeon organization. As a result, grapplers from around the world began intensely studying and copying the system and the defense to these formidable leg locks.

• 2:12:56Jocko Willink?

  You were talking about Yuki Nakai. If you go watch Shamrock versus Hoist Gracie, and Shamrock sits back on his leg, and Hoist Gracie, this is 1993, does like picture-perfect defense. It's pretty surprising and pretty awesome that even back then, he...

• 2:13:18Jocko Willink?

  Knew what was up. It's pretty impressive. Do you recall that?

• 2:13:22Speaker 01

  I don't actually recall that. I would have to go look.

• 2:13:23Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, go watch it.

• 2:13:24Speaker 01

  I watched the fight, but I don't remember that moment.

• 2:13:26Jocko Willink?

  If you go watch it, if you go watch it, you'll go, oh, yeah, Jocko was right.

• 2:13:31Speaker 01

  What did he do? Like, peel the foot off and kind of like?

• 2:13:34Jocko Willink?

  No, he defended even before that. Like, you could see Ken Shamrock sits back, starts to sit back, and Hoist grabs his head and sits right up on him and ends up in top position. But it's the kind of thing we were talking about where he was decentralized command. Like, someone had tried that enough to him that you could see, just boom, it was like an instinct. It was very impressive to think that even in 1993, he had enough familiar. If you go watch it, you're like, oh, yeah, this guy is defending it the way anyone today, any high-level grappler today would defend that, and it's very impressive to see. And Ken Shamrock was freaking no joke on those, like, heel hook submissions.

• 2:14:15Jocko Willink?

  Because, you know, he's coming from Japan and Pancreasian and all that, and they did, a lot of those were being utilized back then.

• 2:14:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. With, yeah, with leg locks, the development is super interesting. And I, that was one of my primary reasons for first going to Warsaw, because I knew that those guys were good. I actually finished some MMA fights as a white belt with a heel hook. I remember we brought in this guy who won the ADCC trials. He was a Finnish guy, and he showed us some heel hooks that by modern standards are not the greatest. But I was like, this is, this is awesome. I've always liked the approach of, it's kind of like a guerrilla tactic, or it used to be. Now, it's very much conventional, but it used to be a guerrilla thing. Like, I'm going to just attack your legs. I'm going to do something that's quote-unquote dastardly, but I'm going to win, because that's what we want to do.

• 2:15:08Speaker 01

  So, when I was training in Warsaw, I remember just taking pops every second training. That's how I learned, but I was also... Twenty-two, so I healed pretty rapidly. Now, I don't take that approach anymore. But that's, that was what attracted me to the Danaher guys as well, because I was like, this, uh, seems the math is pretty simple here. Either you leg lock the guy, or you get leg locked. And I wanna do things with my legs for a while. So, um, yeah, that was super interesting. And the, the speed at which everything developed, and how quickly people caught up. And then, um, at the time, when I was there, the, the last, and this was now five years ago, or even more, I remember them saying like, John kinda said just to the, to like, the, the inner group, he was like, look, uh,

• 2:15:53Speaker 01

  we're actually going to not really use leg locks as much anymore, because other people have them as well. So, we're going to let them attack the legs themselves, and then just be so much better at them that we get counters to go to the back. So the counters, uh, actually became the techniques. And then it, I'm sure, that was the last I know of it. And honestly, I use a lot of the leg locks that I use, especially the outside heel hook, which I like. Those are mainly what I learned back in those days, but ju- just performed so many times, that it's still my, my best attack. So I'm sure they moved like that further along. But yeah, the, those counters are, are kinda the key now. Cause you, as, one of the things that I tried to do with this chapter is really explain the leg entanglements,

• 2:16:37Speaker 01

  and kinda demystify the, the heel hooks, because there's so much going on. And in the first part, we go into the theory of the, all the ashigaramis, which is actually, I would imagine confusing when you read it for the first time. But that's kinda the point, because you have to understand what exists out there. And then I tried to make it simpler by explaining, like, look, you have outside heel hooks, you have inside heel hooks. And then when it comes to inside heel hooks, you have them from the saddle four-one-one honey hole position. That position has way too many names. We need like a conference where all the black belts come together and we're like, we're gonna call it this from now on. But, uh, that, and then you have fifty-fifty, right? And then you have variations of the fifty-fifty, backside fifty-fifty, you have eighty-twenty scenarios.

• 2:17:21Speaker 01

  And those are pretty much it. And then from there, it's really about, uh, What are the braking mechanics for each of those? And how do you deconstruct the braking mechanics in the opposite way? I think I mentioned that in the book and I tried to say this as much as possible. If you wanna get better at jujitsu, like let's say you're a beginner. The best thing you can do is just be more focused than everyone else is training. Cause I know, cause this sometimes happens even to me, but I'm sure it happens to a lot of people. The instructor is explaining something and people kinda trail off in their mind. They don't really pay attention. So being focused on what the instructor is telling you. And then being focused on how you're performing it, that you're practicing it deliberately is huge.

• 2:18:02Speaker 01

  And then on top of that, you just reverse engineer everything that's being done to you as well. Cause that's how you can learn defense to a lot of, to a lot of attacks is you literally just try to deconstruct it. So with the heel hook, typically you get control of the, of the hip. You get control of the knee and then you get the bite on the heel. So if I'm defending a heel hook that I haven't seen before, if I immediately start clear, hiding my heel first. Prioritize and execute, get the control off of my hip and then remove my knee from past the knee line. I've just performed maybe a defense that no one's shown, no one's shown me. And in jujitsu, we talked about like all the different permutations that you have of all the different moves.

• 2:18:45Speaker 01

  It's impossible, even if you have the best coach, even if you're trained twice a day. That you're going to see a solution to every single problem that you're going to face. Some things are just going to be weird. Like today, uh, when you had me in that, Jocko tapped me with a half of a triangle today. Which I've been doing grappling for like over 20 years, never happened before. I really don't remember it. So I, I was being a little bit careless going for an over under pass. I got stuck in a half a triangle. The other foot was kind of like a butterfly hook still. And I was holding it on purpose so that he wouldn't be able to close the triangle. But he pulled my head down, I was too deep and then I guess lifting every day for 30 years kinda kicked in as well. And I, I just, I just had to tap out, but.

• 2:19:30Speaker 01

  When I was going through the solutions for that, they were different than most, and they didn't work. But they were different from what most triangle solutions would be at that point, right?

• 2:19:39Jocko Willink?

  You didn't stack me, which was weird.

• 2:19:41Speaker 01

  I honestly, I couldn't as much as I wanted to.

• 2:19:44Jocko Willink?

  You did a little bit, and each time I kind of extended my hips a little bit. But yeah, the thing that made that, well, made that work was it was like insanely deep.

• 2:19:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:54Jocko Willink?

  Like it was an insanely, like your arm was so far across your neck. And then I had just a great like gable grip on top and I was like, hmm. This seems like it could be a really bad position for you to be in right now.

• 2:20:07Speaker 01

  And yeah, it was on one side of my neck was still not super closed off, but I was getting like literally choked. And then I had a little bit of like, a little bit of snot from my nose go in between into my arrow. And I had to, I had to tap, but yeah, my, when I defend triangles. One of the things that most people actually kind of dismiss is a triangle is occurring because you have one arm in, one arm out. I like to call it the Superman like flying through the air. So that's because you're, that's why you're getting triangle. And what you can do is you can either pull that arm out and posture up and get out, which is kind of difficult to do. The other thing that people don't do enough is punch the other arm in. So typically, let's say you had a more conventional triangle.

• 2:20:51Speaker 01

  I may have had an easier job escaping it because what I do typically is get the other hand in, in the gap that's still there. Kind of flail my, my upper arms to, to be, I mean, my shoulders to be as wide as possible. Get a grip, kind of like, you know, that jack that you use to, to fix a tire. Expand the arms and then at the same time, get the top of my head on the bottom of your chin stacking. And the idea is you think I'm uncomfortable, like watch how uncomfortable you're going to be right now. And then like slowly work that open and then get the arm in and now you're in close guard, which is, which is better.

• 2:21:27Jocko Willink?

  Boy, you wanted to get a triangle me on for the rest of that round, didn't you?

• 2:21:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like, I like to do that. I like to do that. On you, on you, it won't, it won't work. But I like to do that against colored belts. There's two things to do to protect your ego if you get tapped by a lower belt. One is you let them tap you two more times because if they say, hey, I tapped Miha once, that's believable. If they say, I tapped Miha four times, no one's gonna believe that. So that's one option. The other option is that I like to do personally is just go for the exact same submission. Because if I tap you with whatever after you tapped me, I died first. So it's kind of, it doesn't count. Like, it's not one, one. It is one, one, but it isn't. You know what I mean? But if I get the same submission back, then it's like, I could have done this to you whenever I wanted.

• 2:22:13Speaker 01

  So that's what I do. But it was a, it was not a, it was not gonna work.

• 2:22:19Jocko Willink?

  You know what's interesting too is, so I've got this thing that I talk about when it comes to jujitsu is, let's say, the number, number I always use is 10. There's 10 things that you have to do correct to make a move work. And I can teach you like five of them. And the other five, you have to learn for yourself. You have to try it. You have to, you know, where does, what does it feel like to put the pressure? Because when I explain to you, hey, you need to put the pressure here, that's, I can only explain it so well. You have to actually do it. So I can explain five things to you. The other five, you got to figure out on your own. But actually, a little bit more detailed explanation is that different moves have a different number of components that need to be correct.

• 2:23:01Jocko Willink?

  And I always use the example of a straight arm lock. A straight arm lock is pretty easy to teach. There's not that many components that you have to do as far as finishing it. Like, look, you keep the thumb pointed away from your chest. You squeeze your knees together and you lift your hips. And you can kind of teach that to someone in, in 10 minutes. Like, in 10 minutes, someone can learn and finish. Trying to teach someone to finish a straight foot lock. is going to be more difficult. And now, when you start getting into like a heel hook scenario, there are a lot more components that you have to pay attention to, especially when you get down the more advanced chain. Look, a simple heel hook, if you don't know any heel hooks, and I know, and I teach carry a heel hook,

• 2:23:44Jocko Willink?

  you'll be able to finish it like, yeah, it's not that complicated. But once you start putting in the defensive elements, and now there's a bunch of little things that have to happen before you can get that thing. And also, when you know those 14 or 18 components that have to be in place to make a heel hook work, well, now I can negate three of them. If I'm defending, now I can negate three of them. That gives me another second to negate two more. And if I get half of them negated, well, now I'm out. So that's what I was thinking about when you were talking about, hey, it's the knee line, it's where my ankle is. It's like all these little components that you have to get right. And that's what I think is good about the book is it starts to break down some of these components where you go, okay, I know what I need to do here. And if I'm aware of them, I can survive them

• 2:24:29Jocko Willink?

  or I can apply them more correctly.

• 2:24:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think jujitsu is this like interesting intersection of engineering and art. You know, I typically find that engineers take to jujitsu really well, software, the mechanical, doesn't matter because it's kind of like solving this puzzle in real time. It's very similar to engineering. But the idea with this book is as well to get people to the point where you understand the mechanics and the key things where you can start doing art as well, because it is martial arts at the end of the day. And you mentioned that you can teach people a certain amount of moves, the rest they have to do on their own. That is where I see a lot of room for art. And then you develop your style, your expression. Like personally, I am horrible at every other artistic thing possible.

• 2:25:16Speaker 01

  Like music, I once, like 10 years ago, I sang in my car and was like, shut the hell up, dude, like this is horrible. Don't ever sing again. Like I don't play any instruments, drawing, not super good. I guess writing could be one thing, but jujitsu requires so much artistic expression. And it's also the funnest one that I think that's, that's something that's super fun, but you do have to. Get past a certain point before you can really start like expressing yourself with your own stuff.

• 2:25:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know I told you this before when I was thinking of what the forward was gonna be this book. I had a couple of different things that I was gonna put in it just ended up being too long. But one of the things I was gonna talk about is Jimmy Page, the guitarist from Led Zeppelin, who, if you watch him during Led Zeppelin, it's almost hard to comprehend what, how he's making these noises with his guitar, right? But the guy was a studio musician for decades where like since he was like, like a teenager, which is you go in, they tell you exactly what to play and you play exactly what they tell you to play and you become a,

• 2:26:23Jocko Willink?

  a mechanic, you know, you become a, a person that's doing mechanical moves and you just follow the protocol that is in place. And that is, he was so highly disciplined and so highly technical that once he was let out into the free world. You know, Led Zeppelin's around, it's like, yo, what is happening? So it's the same thing with jujitsu. And, and listen, there's gonna be different people that have, you know, more artistic minds in jujitsu and, and people that have less. There's people that are, there's people that are champions that really aren't very creative at all. They're just really good at these fundamental moves. They're strong, they're athletic. They're not gonna, they're not gonna win with a surprise move that no one's seen before. Other people,

• 2:27:05Jocko Willink?

  very radically artistic, they kinda understand the fundamentals for a little while and then they're just off in their own world. Dean's definitely like that. I mean, for, I was, if you think about what Dean was doing, like, with leg locks, he had an understanding that was, um, it was like a quantum leap ahead of everyone else. And I remember, this was a few years ago now, but it was after John Donner and the Donner Death Squad was just full core. And it was kinda after they peaked and the split up had kinda happened. And it was, I, I asked Dean, I was like, hey, have you seen anything that you don't know? Or when, when, when did you start seeing things that you didn't know? And he was like, I was like, I forget what it was, but he was like, oh, it was about,

• 2:27:51Jocko Willink?

  nine months ago. He saw something that was like, oh, I didn't know. And have you ever talked to Dean about jujitsu? Or like sat down and gone through moves with him?

• 2:27:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, a couple of times. We were on the mats. I would, I would honestly pick his brain. I was like, hey, what?

• 2:28:04Jocko Willink?

  It's weird, right?

• 2:28:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:05Jocko Willink?

  It's weird because he knows about moves that. Uh, uh, that he, I always give the example of, um, Darce chokes. He never does Darce chokes. He doesn't really like Darce chokes. I was in a class with him one time and somebody's asked him about Darce chokes and he showed thirty nine freaking details on the offense, on the defense. And I was like, how does this dude know this much about a move that he doesn't use? So, yeah, he's got that, that vibe of just super creativity. And there's a bunch of people like that now in jujitsu that they're, they're making stuff up. I mean, look at the stuff that Keenan made up out of thin air.

• 2:28:44Speaker 01

  I was gonna say he's like a good example of that. I mean, he's, he's a genuine jujitsu genius. I think in, in general, his IQ is like super high, but, uh, to come up like, I've never, I've come up with like three moves of my own, you know?

• 2:28:57Jocko Willink?

  I'm the same. I got like four moves. I think I'm one better.

• 2:29:00Speaker 01

  I've just been squeezing people for a long time in the, in the right ways to be decent at it.

• 2:29:06Jocko Willink?

  Isn't it weird when they come up with something and it seems so obvious? And yet you've been doing jujitsu for thirty years and you're like, oh, I've never done. Dean showed, Dean was teaching a self-defense class a couple of months ago and he showed some defense to the guillotine. To like a standing guillotine and I was like, but I've been doing this for thirty years and I didn't think of this dumbass move that you just showed. Like, it's crazy.

• 2:29:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 2:29:30Jocko Willink?

  Art, science, that's what I ended up going with in the, in the, in the forward, but all these ideas were in my head because it's true. And if you don't know the fundamentals and if you don't have the framework too, a lot of learning is about context. And this is one thing that's very, the better you get at jujitsu, the quicker, quicker you onboard new moves. Because when you're teaching someone, whatever, when they're a beginner, there's no framework for them to put that thing into. It's like a brand new seed that has to be planted and grown. Once you have context and you're just putting this into the matrix with everything else, you can just pick up new moves. There's times when you got a good student that you're teaching and you teach them something and they go use in a tournament like that day.

• 2:30:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:30:09Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome, but that's someone that has some experience and they already have a good framework to put the moves on. And that's what I think is going to be very helpful about this book is giving people this really solid. And and pretty intricate framework that then they can just use to post moves on to and apply the the art to to the science.

• 2:30:31Speaker 01

  You know, it just gave me an idea because I um referred to this like a sort of a mind map. What I'll do uh before this book even comes out, I'll actually make a mind map that follows the structure of the book and put it on the website with those videos because I think that's useful because you, for example, guard, seated guard, and then it has offshoots, seated guard, uh supine guard, it has different offshoots. That is, that's how I like to view it and having that blank to start, you go to class, let's, regardless of how good your instructor is or the kind of environment that you have, you can go and take those moves and put them in the right spots on that mind map. I think that could be, could be useful.

• 2:31:13Jocko Willink?

  Very beneficial. Uh leg lock safety here, going back to the book, leg locks, especially heel hooks, get a bad rap as dangerous techniques. This leads some, this leads to some avoiding them because of fear, simply never engaging in sparring or competition where heel hooks are allowed as a strategy, but will make you less complete grap- grappler. I started training heel hooks because of how scary they are. When they started to get popular, I was a blue belt, and even as a relatively immature grappler, I realized that avoiding them will not be a strategy I can use. I deduced that since I'm terrified of getting my legs twisted and mangled, I should learn these techniques early and use them against my opponents first. Start practicing them with trusted training partner, with a trusted training partner, preferably someone that has versed enough to tell you when to tap. If you are first in leg locks, reserve cranking on them for competition.

• 2:31:58Jocko Willink?

  In training, you should be locking the submission up, for example, control the leg and capture the heel for a heel hook, and then look your training partners in the eyes. This is one of the few times in jiu jitsu when you can uh make eye contact. If they are completely obvious to the danger they're in, let it go of the submission, move on to something else, perhaps get on top and pass their guard. After the round, you can explain how you save them uh a trip to their favorite orthopedic surgeon. This method of training is some kind of terms called catch and release. And I, I, I wish I would have caught this. We, maybe we can add it now. Here's another thing about leg lock safety and heel hook safety.

• 2:32:35Jocko Willink?

  Arm lock, when someone gets an arm lock on you, it hurts.

• 2:32:38Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:32:38Jocko Willink?

  When someone gets a straight ankle lock on you, it hurts. When someone gets a straight knee bar on you, it starts to hurt. The thing that, one of the things that makes people consider heel hooks dangerous is they actually do not hurt.

• 2:32:51Jocko Willink?

  They, they actually don't hurt.

• 2:32:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:52Jocko Willink?

  They, they don't hurt. And so there's no, you don't go, oh no, this is hurting, I better tap now. They just don't hurt and then they go pop. And so

• 2:33:03Jocko Willink?

  that's why you really need to be careful with them. Because I actually

• 2:33:09Jocko Willink?

  I, I, I hurt one of my buddies um doing a heel hook. This was like, I was a blue belt. But I put a heel hook on one of my buddies and, you know, we had been training and he, I trained, he didn't really train. And so I arm locked him, I went, he was tapping, tapping, tapping, tapping. And I get a heel hook on him and he's not tapping and I'm like, start cranking a little bit and he's not tapping. And it popped. And I didn't even crank it hard, but you know, it popped. And I was like,

• 2:33:35Jocko Willink?

  uh, that's not good. And it wasn't his ego, because I'd already tapped him out nine times. And what it was, and that's when I realized, oh, these things don't really hurt that much.

• 2:33:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:46Jocko Willink?

  And so you gotta be careful with that.

• 2:33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, we like to teach Sloan, for example, he does a lot of the nogi classes. He, we typically put in, in the curriculum for beginners, heel hooks as well. Because it's important for people to know the positions and then also know kind of like when it's going to end. And I think it's actually better to do it that way than to have uh, kind of like an avoidance, they, they don't get mentioned. And then someone's gonna go on YouTube, they're gonna see a highlight, they're gonna maybe try it on their buddy, uh, their roommate or whatever, and then come try it in, in training. So I think it's kind of like, uh, maybe gun safety where I think it's really beneficial to, to do a little bit of training, just to understand the, the normal stuff, you know, like keep your finger off the trigger, don't point it at

• 2:34:34Speaker 01

  anything, you don't wanna shoot and so on. Um, so yeah, that, especially how big they are now in nogi at all levels. I don't really like to see them banished to the upper belts. Um, it doesn't make as much sense anymore, I think, to do that.

• 2:34:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I'm a full supporter of heel hooks. As, as long as people understand them. Uh, another thing is sometimes I think people, if they aren't well versed, they see heel hooks as A solution to the game as opposed to part of the game. And for me, heel hooks like that you're gonna meet someone that doesn't, that's gonna be very good at getting out of heel hooks. And if you don't know how to pass their guard, it's not gonna work and you're gonna be stuck. So you, it's part of the game. It's not a game changer.

• 2:35:19Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, you'll get a big dopamine hit if you specialize in heel hooks and you get better than most people. You'll be tapping, you'll be tapping people that are better than you. That's how I, I got started in, in heel hooks because I realized I did a couple of competitions. Oh, and I was a blue purple belt. And I would tap black belts with them. And I was like, this is awesome. But luckily I had the, the type of mentorship as far as coaches go, where they were uh, telling me to not just do leg locks. There's actually a really funny, uh, there's a clip of me doing a knee bar. Have you seen that one where it's kind of like a quick sit back? It's uh, it's on my Instagram somewhere. Every now and then it goes viral because it's the guy pulls the laheva. He doesn't have good grips. And then I basically just like super quickly sit into a knee bar and it goes viral every now and then a page will post it.

• 2:36:03Speaker 01

  And uh, after the, the match and the clip, I stand up and I kind of nonchalantly do like a shrug. And I look at my coach and everyone, I saw comments a few times. They were like, this guy is so cocky. What is he doing? Like the, the reason was my coach was telling me, don't do leg locks in this match. Develop your passing. And the guy just made it kind of easy. So I could, like, I literally couldn't help myself. But I see a lot of people who do that type of thing where maybe it's not even leg locks. Maybe it's like some kind of different trickery that isn't like fully understood by everyone just yet. But you really, really have to um, have the, the coaching to tell you, hey, you need to develop all of this. Like, for example, in the book, every

• 2:36:47Speaker 01

  area that's in there is something that I would recommend people develop at the same pace, not, not focus on one, even though you're gonna get a reward. Cause in the long run. You'll kind of prevent yourself from having solid fundamentals if you just go for leg locks. Plus, someone, you're gonna run into someone who's better and they're just gonna smash you. Cause the thing, especially if you're going from bottom, if you put so much effort into heel hooks, you're gonna have to take some training away from somewhere else. And typically what we see is it's from stand up. So you're gonna pull guard, you're gonna be on bottom. And then the other counter to leg locks besides sticking the back is just vicious smashing. Just getting into like a leg weave position and just smashing people. So yeah, it's not gonna work out super well.

• 2:37:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and it's good what you were pointing out about Donahue. Like, obviously, it's real obvious now, but for a little while it wasn't that obvious. It's like, oh, these guys don't just do leg locks or just do heel hooks at all. Like freaking Gordon is badass all over the damn mat. And Dean's the same way, like Dean was very good. I mean, he was exceptional at everything, but he was like you, like dude's putting his foot out there. He's gonna rip it off. So yeah, you gotta be well-rounded for sure. Um, getting to the conclusion here, you can only fight the way you practice. That's Musashi quote. Uh, you've got some notes in here. Find a good academy. And we've talked about how to find a good academy on this.

• 2:38:15Jocko Willink?

  Um, yeah, for sure. It's easier now than it ever has been. But like I said, there's different vibes, by the way. There's different vibes, there's different types of schools. Maybe you just wanna, uh, maybe you wanna compete. Maybe you don't, maybe you wanna do gi, maybe you wanna do no gi, but you gotta, you gotta find the right place.

• 2:38:31Speaker 01

  I would mention one thing on that is the, the whole proximity of the academy to you. I think the jujitsu, I think jujitsu near me is the most searched keyword by people when they're looking for jujitsu. I had to do a little bit of research on that. And jujitsu near me is a continuum, right? Let's say you have, uh, I don't know, you wanna play basketball. There's a YMCA next to your apartment that has basketball. But also, I don't know, Kobe Bryant, R I P, has his own Mamba Academy twenty minutes away. Now, two minutes versus twenty minutes. The decision is like, are you gonna go for quality or are you gonna go for proximity?

• 2:39:11Speaker 01

  And look, like, the main thing, again, with doing jiu-jitsu is you're not gonna get better if you don't go to classes. So you have to build the habit of going to jiu-jitsu. That's going to be a lot easier if you find something that's either near to your work or to your house. So there is a question to be asked there, but you really wanna think about the quality and like seeing. Like you said, different people are attracted to different things you wanna find.

• 2:39:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you gotta put it in the calculus, you know? Put it in the calculus, like, two minutes? Bro, that's hard to walk away from. It's hard, it's hard, even if it's like, you know, the high school coach is like teaching the basketball there. And you're like, cool, I'm gonna go learn from him, but I can train for an extra forty minutes a day. Or I can go to the Mamba Academy. Now, listen, let's face it, if you got like exceptional training, it's gonna be worth that. So, but you gotta put it into the calculus, you know? Usually it's something, you know, like, you gotta put in the calculus. If you're going to a place, like what you said, this kinda struck me when you said you were looking at the clock to see when your judo practice was gonna be over. If that's how you're feeling at your academy, that's probably not a great sign. You wanna be like excited to go there.

• 2:40:20Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, when your wife's like, hey, what time do you give me home from training today? And you're like, well, I'll try and be home by such and such a time, but there ain't no guarantees. Cause not only am I gonna just keep doing rounds, but then when I'm done doing rounds, like, we're gonna be hanging out. Cause I just, that's what we're doing.

• 2:40:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:35Jocko Willink?

  So, that's, um, you gotta put in the calculus, finding a good academy. And, and, and I always say, try a couple of different academies, you know? Cause you gotta find the one that you're looking for. Also, um.

• 2:40:49Jocko Willink?

  Just, just go in there with an open mind. You know, I don't think jujitsu should be a religion. Uh, and I've said since the beginning of this podcast, like your instructor is not a god, it's a person. So don't, don't, just watch out if it gets a little crazy. Like we're not, we're not trying to get you into a cult here. We want you to learn a cool way to work out and train and stuff. We don't want you joining.

• 2:41:13Speaker 01

  If washing your instructor's laundry is a requirement for the purple belt, maybe switch it.

• 2:41:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Hey, unless you're um, a person that can't afford the tuition, right? Cause sometimes people get breaks because they're in there cleaning the mats and, and you know, like that's the way it is. Okay. Well, there's something to put in the calculus, but you shouldn't, yeah, you shouldn't be pledging allegiance. Just be careful of that kind of thing. Uh, practice on your own. If you're truly committed to the progress, just showing up to class, even the top line academy will not be enough. Regarding practice methods, a fierce debate exists in the jujitsu community. It is those who believe in technique repetitions, also known as drilling, versus those who believe the ecological approach, which relies on games and situational training. In my personal opinion, a combination of both is optimal.

• 2:42:03Jocko Willink?

  Explain the ecological approach, because this is kind of a rage right now.

• 2:42:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's super, super popular at the moment. So it's a, there's a couple of people that are proponents of it. And I think they make, they make really good points as to the merits of it. So it would be the main thing about ecological approach to my understanding, I don't want anyone in the comments to go nuts at me here, but is to uh, teach through constraint-based games, right? So you, and those games with every, pretty much every academy that's any good does some specific sparring. But this goes beyond that. So it's like a little bit more specific because specific sparring will be, all right, we're doing a round, we're starting from mount. If you get to a submission of the back or if the person escapes, the round is over, restart there.

• 2:42:49Speaker 01

  Um, but yeah, you can go deeper. You can be in a position just like, hey, the objective is fight for the underhook. Whoever wins the underhook here wins. And uh, I think there's a lot of merit to it, but it does. I do get a little bit of a vibe from the ecological people, kind of like the vegans of jujitsu, where it's like if someone's into the ecological approach, you'll know when they tell you, they'll tell you for sure. So I don't wanna, I don't wanna diss them too much because I think this is, look, I'm all for talking about methodologies in jujitsu and a lot of the coaches uh at my academy, they are actively studying the stuff and and they're incorporating it into the into the lesson. So it's it's definitely really good, but and maybe because I'm coming from a judo background where it's too much drilling,

• 2:43:34Speaker 01

  uh, I see some some merit to it. I think certain things you have to perform first a couple of times.

• 2:43:41Jocko Willink?

  You can take anything. If you take it to an extreme, it can become a negative. Um, one of the things you got in here skipping warmups, warmups and technique, then mindlessly going to war in sparring has got to be the worst way to practice as it does not include the vital component, problem solving. Um.

• 2:43:56Speaker 01

  I'm super hypocritical here.

• 2:43:57Jocko Willink?

  This is, well, no, I feel, I felt like this was actually directed at me. I took this personally. Cause as you know, I just love to roll uh and.

• 2:44:06Speaker 01

  If you've put in more than 10 years, let's say you get the opportunity to do that. Yeah.

• 2:44:09Jocko Willink?

  Do you think that's a, like, I know you say that jokingly, but is there, how much merit is there to that?

• 2:44:13Speaker 01

  I think there's there's some, right? Like you've, the warmups, after you've done more than 10 years of jujitsu, you probably understand how your body works, which you need to warm up. And if you know that two rounds of going kind of easier and then you can ramp it up is what you need, that's probably solid. Uh, as far as the technique portion, it's definitely good to still participate, especially if you're learning from some good people, but it it kind of depends. Are you doing jujitsu uh to prepare for a competition and get it a lot better? Or are you doing it because it's your favorite hobby in the entire world and you want to get a little bit of fun in? You know, in that, in that case, I think you're you're fine just doing that. But also it helps if you bring some kind of intent to to the training. I I try to do this is like.

• 2:44:55Speaker 01

  I'm maybe trying to play a different guard and I'll try to do use this guard a little bit more. If I end up on top, I'll try to use this type of passing and from the dominant positions, I'm looking at maybe one submission that I'm trying to do. So I have some intent coming in. But yeah, it's it's definitely, I'm always impressed when I see higher level people go participate in someone else's class. Uh, yeah, I kind of use time as a, as an excuse sometimes, but definitely, definitely worth it as well.

• 2:45:23Jocko Willink?

  My recommendations, do it all, you know, do the drilling, do the training, put them together. Yeah. Um, jujitsu is to paraphrase 10th planet black belt Joe Rogan, high level problem solving with dire physical consequences. Jack, think about this stuff on and off the mat, staying focused and thinking about ways to improve will help your progress, help you progress faster than others. You can repeat movements in your mind when you're in a boring work meeting, when your boss is talking about the TPS reports, you can identify patterns in your training that present the biggest room for improvement. That is pretty impressive how thinking about jujitsu can make you better at.

• 2:46:04Jocko Willink?

  Enjoy the journey. Don't feel pressured to rush towards mastery in jujitsu. Everyone I know who's achieved the highest echelons of the sport agrees that there is no finish line. You're always learning new things as the evolution of the sport is rapid. The best black belts of the 1990s would have a terrible time against the purple belts of the 2020s. Yep. Most of them. What do you think about Roger Gracie though? Hodger Gracie?

• 2:46:30Speaker 01

  He's not 1990s. He's, he's 20, 2010s.

• 2:46:33Jocko Willink?

  I guess if you went back to 1990s.

• 2:46:35Speaker 01

  I think, uh, Keenan got into a little bit of controversy at one point where he said that a purple belt would build, would beat Hickson or something like that. And honestly, like I haven't, Hickson is one of those guys, like obviously I know him, obviously I respect him. I, I know what he's done and so on, but I haven't really studied him that much. I, I just wasn't in that era where he, where I would get a lot of his stuff. So I don't know how much of the mythology to believe, but what I have experienced are top level purple belts of highly competitive academies who live in the back of the academy. They have nothing else to do. And maybe they're also from

• 2:47:18Speaker 01

  like a poor socioeconomic background where this is their chance. And I know how good those guys are. And it it would be, and I know that they got that good because of the level of training that they have right now. So I think, plus they have like Beren Bolos, they have all kinds of techniques that just didn't exist back then. So I think that would probably be accurate.

• 2:47:39Jocko Willink?

  Honestly.

• 2:47:42Jocko Willink?

  Did Keenan ever train with Hickson?

• 2:47:43Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 2:47:44Jocko Willink?

  I trained with Hickson.

• 2:47:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:46Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna say that I believe Keenan is wrong.

• 2:47:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:47:50Jocko Willink?

  I had not felt anyone that felt like Hickson.

• 2:47:54Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 2:47:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he he was a different, and I mean, he's obviously not in his prime anymore. He he was a different kind of human.

• 2:48:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:48:06Jocko Willink?

  Felt like

• 2:48:09Jocko Willink?

  oh, um, weird, like, um, drowning scenario where no movement is doing anything, no, none of my movements are doing anything. No progress of any kind, only, only, only falling and drowning deeper. Hickson was Hickson, there's a reason that Hickson has the aura that he has.

• 2:48:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:48:34Jocko Willink?

  He's not, he's not normal. And and I think, you know, when you have people, there's people that are gonna be naturally gifted at certain things. And and they're they're mutants, and he's one of those people. And then he happened to grow up in the Gracie family, you know what I mean?

• 2:48:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:48:54Jocko Willink?

  It's like, wait, how how do you, oh, you're one of those people that's a mutant who has this physical capability? And this mind body connection?

• 2:49:05Jocko Willink?

  And like a deep understanding? Cause there's some level of understanding the way the body works, the way they, the way the movements work and having a really deep understanding of that. And and you have all those things? And then you grow up in the Gracie family. So, yeah, my experience would be I'd be very impressed with anyone.

• 2:49:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, like a purple belt?

• 2:49:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49:34Jocko Willink?

  And I know, hey, and all you purple belts out there? Props.

• 2:49:37Speaker 01

  Here's, here's the thing. I, I do think obviously like you have firsthand experience and I so many people have said that Hickson is different that like I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't negate that. I would wish I had the opportunity to roll with him at his prime. That would be an awesome experience, but uh, the purple belts, the best purple belts of today, some of them you could put in the black belt division of today and they would win matches for sure. That's yeah, I can only speak to that, but uh, yeah, it's just, is it true? You think that Hicks, that they put Hoist in to the UFC instead of Hickson? Cause he would have made it look too easy. I heard that, that they put Hoist in because he was a little bit lighter, a little bit, uh, yeah, less intimidating.

• 2:50:17Jocko Willink?

  Hoist, you know, Hoist was smaller and, and I think it was probably a little bit of, uh, and Hoist was just on Rogan's podcast and he kind of talked about this and I forget exactly what he said, but part of it was also in my opinion would be like, hey, look, if anyone happens to beat Hoist, we're going to bring out Hickson.

• 2:50:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:50:37Jocko Willink?

  And we'll bring out Hickson and then it's like, you know, we'll watch, we'll watch what happens. Uh, yeah. Even like Hickson was, he was on the podcast, uh, was maybe like a year ago or something like that. And we were just playing around afterwards and you know, he's, he's got some pretty significant physical ailments right now, but like, you know how when you train with someone that you don't know and as soon as you lock up with them, you kind of, you can, you could make a really good prediction of what's happening.

• 2:51:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:51:05Jocko Willink?

  Like as soon as you lock up with them. So Hickson's, what is he now? Maybe 60? 60 years old, something like that. So we're, we're just like kind of talking through some stuff and, and, and you know, like we're, we're starting to grip up a little bit. And I got that feeling like, yep, like I, you know, look, he's older, but you, you can still feel that he has some, um,

• 2:51:30Jocko Willink?

  Some understanding, some connection, really, that's what it is. And actually, let's face it, he calls it invisible jujitsu. He talks about invisible jujitsu. He has some connection to the whole thing that's different.

• 2:51:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, how how crazy it is is it? And most people that don't don't do jujitsu can understand that that within 10 seconds of gripping up with someone, you can kind of know. And let's say it's stand up. I get an underhook on you and you do something 10 seconds. I have a really good estimate of how good that person is. And it's I don't know how that works, like how that information gets transmitted. But even in matches, I I've had situations where I was like, I grip, I gripped up with someone and I was like, either like, oh, okay. Or I was like, oh, okay. You know? Yeah, that's that's wild. But yeah, you can see that even in training, you lock up horns with someone and you kind of know.

• 2:52:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's weird too. Like, I mean, I would, I I trained with Hickson and like I'd watch him train with other guys. And everything that you like, the way he treated me, he would just do with everyone. And it was like, oh, he's not, this is just different to watch. Hey, how much how much of that is like, for lack of a better word, aura, right? Because he at the time is the god of of fighting and jujitsu. And you're like, oh, but then you're like, oh, no, this dude over here, that's a brown belt is going crazy. And Hickson's like, unfazed.

• 2:52:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:53:00Jocko Willink?

  Oh, this dude that's a black belt, he's unfazed, like he looks the same. It's pretty, pretty freaking crazy.

• 2:53:05Speaker 01

  It's impressive when you can handle anyone at any time. The the one person that I felt like that was Gordon, because I did quite a bit of training with him. And I just like never got close to submission. One time he let me extend his arm and kind of like an arm bar and it. Didn't work, couldn't couldn't make it happen. So yeah, it's it's crazy how yeah, you do build an aura from just like doing that to so many people because it's it's really difficult and a lot of these these guys like the highest level guys will do seminars and then roll with everyone. I try I try to do that when I teach seminars just to like give people more more of a more value as well. And the being able to handle anyone on every day is like

• 2:53:49Speaker 01

  super difficult because if you do it long enough, you'll have a bad day.

• 2:53:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, Gordon looks very unfazed when he does jujitsu.

• 2:53:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:53:58Jocko Willink?

  I mean, he looks very unfazed. He looks very just like he has a deep, deep understanding connect and connection to the game.

• 2:54:10Jocko Willink?

  You say, don't quit. And then close I'm gonna close out the book here. And you say, in my book, which I thought was funny. You say, in my book, meaning like the proverbial, hey, in my book, we say, in my book, you can't go to the grave without a few scars to show for a life well lived. But more importantly, if you stick with jujitsu long enough, it will show you who you are, who you really are. Through dealing with arm bars and cross faces and heavy mounts, you will subconsciously learn many things beyond the physical movements, lessons you wouldn't expect to learn in a padded sweaty room filled with strangers and your best friends

• 2:54:52Jocko Willink?

  alike. See you on the mats. So that's how you wrap it up. And I was thinking, when I saw that, you know, when I read that, you will learn many things beyond the physical movements. And that is certainly true. I know I've talked a lot about them, about the things that you learn from jujitsu beyond the physical movements. Maybe that's your next book.

• 2:55:14Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:55:15Jocko Willink?

  Jiu Jitsu will help you with everything.

• 2:55:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've I've had, I've been thinking about what to, what to write about next because this, the writing this whole book was definitely like the, the, I was trying to compare it to my master's thesis when I wrote that and I think that was, I thought they were, they were gonna be comparable, but I realized that this is probably, the master's thesis was a fifth of this and it was, it was a lot more difficult, but I mean, you've had so many people on here that have, that make that look like a post-it note, so I don't wanna be like some kind of like know-it-all author, you know, like it's not even out yet, my first book. But I realized that, that I really enjoy that suck of writing it where you know you have halfway to go,

• 2:56:00Speaker 01

  but you kind of enjoy how much it sucks and how much more there is to do that like grind or like going against resistance as I mentioned earlier. But yeah, I was thinking about what to, what to write about next. One thing that I wanna write about as at some point are the concepts of Jiu Jitsu because there are concepts as far as like what you can learn from Jiu Jitsu that goes beyond the mats. And then there's also concepts that can help you with everything that's in this book. This is a position-based book, so you go based on a position. So what are the concepts that you can apply to any position? Just to give you like two examples. One is, and most people don't know this until someone tells them,

• 2:56:42Speaker 01

  use all of your limbs at all times. Very hard for some white belts to understand, especially in the early going, like one arm won't be doing anything. At all times in Jiu Jitsu, you should be doing something with all of your limbs. And then your head as well, because especially if you have a thick neck, that's like a, a fifth limb. Alright, so that's one thing. The other, for example, is-

• 2:57:03Jocko Willink?

  That's actually a, a, a stage of progression. Like, a person that-

• 2:57:09Jocko Willink?

  Uses their arms and is then their legs go limp is a different person than someone that's using their arms and while they're using their arms are also using their legs to get out like

• 2:57:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:57:18Jocko Willink?

  Of the mount, right? There's even the basic like when you first learn the mount escape, it's like do this with your arms, then do this with your legs, then do this with your body. Someone that's good is doing all those things at the same time. And that's it. That's like a step change in how you're playing the game.

• 2:57:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's say you're the you're escaping the back. Someone has a body triangle on you. You have to do so many things at the same time. So first have, uh, obviously you're controlling the choking arm. You're thinking about what the other one is doing, because typically when you have one kind of under the chin, you can swap it with the other. And then with the lower body, you have to use your your legs and your feet like arms to disassemble the body triangle and you have to do everything at the same time. So there's a lot, a lot of, it's actually really fun.

• 2:58:04Jocko Willink?

  It's another example of decentralized command, by the way. Like I've got one squad moving forward. I've got the other squad moving to the flank. And this is what we're doing on jujitsu. You got your arms doing one, you got one arm doing one thing, one arm doing something else. And your leg is doing another thing and your other leg should be doing something else. Either supporting the other one or what? So there's a lot of things that have to be happening.

• 2:58:22Speaker 01

  And this is also one of the biggest benefits of jujitsu beyond like just being able to defend yourself or whatever is that you are so in the in the state of no mind. You're so in the flow when you're engaged at that level, you can't think about any anything else. And we all have this piece of silicon and metal in our pockets where teams of engineers that are the most highly compensated people on the planet, they're using psyop level technology to addict you to not be present in the moment and just be scrolling through it. So I think everyone that that goes on the mats and starts doing jujitsu. When someone's choking you, you can't think about your taxes, your relationships, your boss,

• 2:59:05Speaker 01

  and the war in insert place here, you can't think about any, any of it. So that gives you like a little reprieve from that craziness. And especially the way things are going with like AI and all that stuff. It's just gonna, I think it's just gonna get crazier. So. Doing something primal where you can go to the mats and you just hang out to get that sense of community of a tribe. That's why I think in the Jiu Jitsu Academy, the vibe is so important. It's hard to put a finger on what it is, but if you're an academy owner, you have to create it so that people enjoy being there. So yeah, that's I think one of the biggest benefits that comes from that engagement. And then the other example of a concept that I would give is, for example, if we're in a scramble and I want to prevent

• 2:59:48Speaker 01

  you from standing up, I need to grab your feet and make sure that you don't put them on the ground. It's impossible for you to stand up if you can't put at least one foot on the ground. And that can be from the guard, that can be from a scramble, that can be from a takedown. So yeah, that's where I think there's room to write something, something new.

• 3:00:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, conceptual Jiu Jitsu. I know that's something that Dean was always very focused on. Everything to him would be, like, he would be teaching a class and he'd tell me, like, hey, here's the thing going on over here, like this four corners principle. He had all kinds of little 50 cal, he had all kinds of little principles that he would talk about a lot.

• 3:00:28Speaker 01

  I might actually have to talk to him about that.

• 3:00:30Jocko Willink?

  No, he would be, he would be great for that because that's the way he thinks. So, is that getting us up to speed? It's kind of what we're doing?

• 3:00:38Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah.

• 3:00:39Jocko Willink?

  So where can people find you? You got LegionSanDiego.com. That's for the academy.

• 3:00:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:00:45Jocko Willink?

  The book, nogimanual.com.

• 3:00:50Speaker 01

  Yep. As people heard, I've had some experience making websites, so I made that one. You can get all the info, even a free chapter. I would recommend just grabbing the book, but you can get a free chapter if you don't trust that it's good after us talking for hours here about it. And that's where the videos are going to be. So two different kinds of videos, the demos, and then the full nogi video manual where you can actually see me teach. And I'm also, I noticed that I've been building this at the moment, and I noticed that the video manual course software thing also has the option to create a community. So for those people that get the nogi video manual, you have the option to ask questions about it as well and get some extra insight.

• 3:01:35Jocko Willink?

  Instagram Legion underscore AJJ and you're on Instagram as well at Mihajj J. Um, we're training, we're getting after it. We're going to need some fuel. Some Jocko fuel. Jocko fuel. Carrie, come in. Carrie, welcome aboard. Uh, Jocko Fuel, official sponsor of the Craig Jones Invitational. Indeed. There's going to be some broken activity. Miha, what's your, what's your protocol? What's your Jocko Fuel protocol?

• 3:02:03Speaker 01

  Um, well, today we trained and I had the trifecta after training. Hydrate, milk, and then doing the podcast to go. I'm highly caffeinated today. Um, yeah, I've been, um, ever since you came out with the drinks, which honestly, I think it's kind of funny because in those first podcasts, I think there was a question where I think Tim Ferriss asked you if you ever do caffeine? And you said something like, I might be completely getting this wrong, but something like, yeah, when I would drive through the desert in a Humvee, I would have a Red Bull or something. And now you have like one of the fastest growing energy companies, which is kind of, kind of funny. But, um, yeah, I've been buying these for the academy for a couple of years now.

• 3:02:46Speaker 01

  And, uh, we consume a lot of them. In my office, actually, I have a corner because I got lazy throwing all of the cans away. I have a corner, a corner tower of empty cans that's like three, three wide, going all the way up to the ceiling. Uh, so yeah, definitely, definitely a fan of it because caffeine is cool. I typically, what I typically do in the morning, I wait, uh, an hour to 90 minutes before I have some caffeine. So typically, uh, get some water electrolytes, like maybe the, the powder and then put some creatine in there just so I don't forget.

• 3:03:26Speaker 01

  During the day, drink that, drink some more water, then get some caffeine in. I'm a big coffee guy, a coffee snob, so one of, I tried to do two portions, like two hundred milligrams of caffeine, I don't really wanna go beyond that. So coffee, and then when I get to the academy, typically before training, do a go. But never, never really after, after noon.

• 3:03:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:48Speaker 01

  Cause then I can sleep. And yeah, I've been smashing the RTD mulks for a while now.

• 3:03:53Jocko Willink?

  Have you tried the coffee RTD milk yet?

• 3:03:55Speaker 01

  I have, yeah, actually.

• 3:03:56Jocko Willink?

  You like it?

• 3:03:57Speaker 01

  I actually like it, so I don't typically drink that one because I, I like my coffee.

• 3:04:02Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 3:04:02Speaker 01

  You know, from like the, in the black.

• 3:04:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you're doing some kind of like coffee snob scenario?

• 3:04:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I used to do like the pour-overs, but I got a machine now that does, it's very important to do the bloom first. If you don't do the bloom, you get a really bad coffee. So the bloom, the bloom is where you put the, you put the ground coffee in, and then you pour just a little bit of water over it, you wait thirty seconds, it lets the coffee bloom, and then you pour the rest over. So I used to do that by hand, but then I, I did the math of how much time that takes me every day, and then I did the math of how much the machine costs that does that already, so I just bought that. So that's, that's how I get my, that's how I get my coffee, and it has to be single origin, it has to be from Costa Rica or like a place like that. But, um, yeah, that, that's typically the coffee, but it tastes super good.

• 3:04:51Speaker 01

  If I was the type of person who would go to Starbucks and get like, I don't know, like whatever, cold brew latte or something, it tastes, it tastes really good, yeah.

• 3:05:00Jocko Willink?

  People, like coffee, even coffee snobs dig that mulk, so, yeah, Jocko Fuel, JacoFuel.com, check it out.

• 3:05:08Speaker 02

  How, how's that hydrate situation at your house now? Have you like stabilized the consumption?

• 3:05:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's like, when we first started getting the bottles of hydrate. My whole family was just going ham and it was, you know, like everyone drinking, cause everyone, quite frankly, everyone in the family is getting after it. I mean, everyone's training jujitsu, everyone's lifting, everyone's working out, everyone's like sauna activities. So everyone's, so you know, we got, we got a lot of people in the family. So if everyone's drinking like three, four of these things a day, that's like 15 to 20 hydrates getting drank a day. And I had to put the kibosh on my family. Be like, yo, like use the powder, cause we have hydrate powder. If you're at home and you're going to be at home, just what we're doing,

• 3:05:55Jocko Willink?

  right? What I'm doing right now is I'm saving the bottles and just putting them in the, putting, filling with water, put them in the fridge and then pull out the powder. Cause bro, you know, like the world's not made of money. You know what I'm saying? So if you've got a family that's consuming like two cases of hydrate a day, that's a little out of control. Get them on the powder. But yes, we got it. We got it contained.

• 3:06:16Speaker 02

  Right on.

• 3:06:16Jocko Willink?

  Scenario contained.

• 3:06:17Speaker 02

  Full pallets.

• 3:06:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I mean, you might, you know, Rand and my daughter, she's training, she trains in the morning at Victory. She trains at lunch at Legion. She trains at night at Victory. She works out in between those things. She'll drink four or five of these things herself a day. And I get a text from her at eight o'clock at night, can you turn on the sauna? Like, oh, you're going to come home in sauna? What are you going to do when you need that? She's going to have a hydrate on the way when she's walking up to the sauna, gets done, have another one. Freaking losing her mind.

• 3:06:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:06:48Jocko Willink?

  Bro, put me bankruptcy over here.

• 3:06:50Speaker 02

  I had to put the kibosh on myself. I'm limited to two now, two a day.

• 3:06:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:55Speaker 02

  After the gym, I'll usually smash one, like, you know, cause I, I do the sauna after the gym. So I gotta get that hydrate when I get home. And then in the afternoon, you kind of want that, something tasty to, you know.

• 3:07:06Jocko Willink?

  See what's getting you is the, the fruit punch one.

• 3:07:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:07:09Jocko Willink?

  The fruit punch one is so good tasting that that's like a post dinner. What are the, you're European. What do they drink? They have like a special wine that they drink that's sweet. At night when they get done with the meal, it's like, see, that's what my hydrate is for me.

• 3:07:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:07:25Jocko Willink?

  That's my high class, you know.

• 3:07:27Speaker 01

  I forget what that thing's called. I'm not into into alcohol.

• 3:07:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's they've been really popular at the the gym, especially in the in the summer. You have to you have to get electrolytes. And I think a lot of people know that now.

• 3:07:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And the electrolyte we put in there is perfect. And and you know, look, doing the doing the no artificial sweetener is such a big deal. It's it's a game changer. So I got interviewed the other day by like an industry magazine or an industry website. And they're like, well, how don't you think you're going into a saturated market with these problems? I was like, no, we have monopoly. We have a monopoly on these markets because we make products that no one else is making anything close to. So I'm not worried about it all. We have monopoly and people. And especially because more people are reading ingredients now. Read the ingredients. And get yourself some Jocko Fuel. By the way, pretty soon you're going to be able to get Jocko Fuel in Walmart.

• 3:08:21Jocko Willink?

  Mid August. So we want to get this stuff into as many people's hands as possible. Give them a healthy option. One of the best ways to do that is going to the biggest retailer in the world. So go into Walmart, get some.

• 3:08:34Jocko Willink?

  We got hydrate, we got greens, we got milk, we got joint warfare, krill oil, super krill. Check it out. Go to jockofuel.com or go to Wawa, go to Walmart, go to Vitamin Shop GNC, Military Commissaries, Afees, Hannafords, Dash Stores, Wake Fern, Shop Right, H B Meyer, Wegmans, Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness Shields, and of course, small gyms, jiu jitsu gyms. Like Miha. Hey, if you're a jiu jitsu gym owner, you want to supply your people with the goods so they can keep training, keep getting after it. If you're a CrossFit gym, if you're a powerlifting gym, if you're a Globo Gym, doesn't matter. Email J F sales at jockofuel.com. And if you go to one of those gyms and you don't own it, but you go there, let them know you want to get the goods.

• 3:09:18Jocko Willink?

  That's what we're doing. Also, if you're training jiu jitsu, you need some clothing to train jiu jitsu in. OriginUSA.com, American made goods. What are you wearing? You've got some Origin shorts on over there?

• 3:09:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was telling you earlier, complete truth. This summer, I have three pairs of these shorts. I don't know what they're called. I know they're just extremely comfortable. Not a single day have I left the house wearing anything else because first of all, why would I? I've constructed my whole lifestyle around not wearing constricting clothes. When I was traveling around the world, uh, I did not have a pair of jeans on me, I believe. Or maybe I had one just in case I had to get in, in somewhere. So not a big jeans guy. And when you guys came out with the jeans, I bought them for the, for the first time and then, um, incredibly comfortable, like as, as a guy who kind of doesn't like jeans, I thought they were crazy comfortable

• 3:10:15Speaker 01

  cause I could do all of the things that I can do in my, like, I don't know what they're called, like joggers slacks. I just wear black joggers in, in the winter when it's kind of colder. So they, they had the same range of motion. For me, it's really important. If I need to do squats in jeans, I can do them. If I need to get into a fight, I can get into a fight the same way. It doesn't happen. But yeah, then I forgot that, that pair of jeans in Slovenia and then I bought another, another black pair. So now I have two, but yeah, really quality.

• 3:10:42Jocko Willink?

  That black denim's legit. The black denim, that stuff is, what's weird about that is the thread itself is dyed, so it doesn't really fade. It's like normal jeans, if they were normal denim black, that means the denim is dyed black, but these are like dyed to the core, the black denim. To the core. Yeah, to the core.

• 3:11:01Speaker 01

  I also, you know what? I also bought the, the wool, uh, shirt, the sweatshirt. That's, that's also super nice. Very, very comfortable.

• 3:11:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, those, we really did some good stuff with that wool. So anyways, that's what we got. By the way, the new RTX, did you get the new, you don't have it. I don't have it. Yeah, it's called Burr, but this stuff is like, we, it's like silk weight. It's just perfect. It's just perfect workout gear. It's also perfect, like just wearing around, um, whatever you're doing, cause it's just light, like silk weight. So it's a base layer, wicking, quick drying, all that stuff. So originusa.com, made, stuff made in America. Even the Slovenians.

• 3:11:46Jocko Willink?

  Want stuff that's made in America when they live in America, right?

• 3:11:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 3:11:50Jocko Willink?

  Vouching for it right here.

• 3:11:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm all about it. I'm all about that. I think manufacturing, like even in Europe, it has to return to America and Europe. It can't all be going to China, I think, in other places.

• 3:12:05Jocko Willink?

  So check it out, originusa.com. Built by freedom. That's what we're doing. Also, we have a law enforcement first responder training camp, August 27th through the 31st in Maine. Get up there and check that out. Get the skills you need to keep yourself safe out on the streets. We also have a store.

• 3:12:23Speaker 02

  Jocko Store.

• 3:12:23Jocko Willink?

  Look at you, come in. What do you got?

• 3:12:25Speaker 02

  Jacostore.com. That's where we can get our Discipline Equals Freedom gear, our Get Some gear, our Good gear, or Get After it gear. That's where you can represent on the path. Mihad, do you have a favorite, like, not Jacostore or Origin anything, but a rash guard that you train in that makes you like, makes you feel just a little bit of an edge when you put it on, when you go to train?

• 3:12:46Speaker 01

  I like, I have a couple of Origin rash guards. I like them a lot, but I would say the quality of the stuff from the Jocko Store. In 2019, when we didn't have mats at Legion yet, we came to Victory for a couple of classes. I don't, you weren't there, I would definitely remember, but Echo was there, and Dean was there as well, and Echo gave me two, two t-shirts. One of them is Back to the Book. That one's kind of my favorite, because I'm a big book guy. But those t-shirts, so five years ago, washed a million times, they're, they're the same as they were.

• 3:13:21Jocko Willink?

  Why did Echo give you t-shirts? Because you're friends with Keenan?

• 3:13:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so, yeah.

• 3:13:25Jocko Willink?

  And he just kind of brought you into the fold?

• 3:13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Very nice guy. I wish he was here.

• 3:13:29Jocko Willink?

  No, it's cool that Echo just carried.

• 3:13:30Speaker 02

  No, no, none taking, none taking me out. Yeah, the reason I ask is, you know, we've talked about this before on the podcast. You put something with that Discipline Equals Freedom on it, with the X flag on it, and you put that on, something changes a little bit, maybe go a little harder in that sesh, maybe go a little, little harder in training. But in any case, that's where you get it, jacostore.com. We've also got the Shirt Locker subscription situation. New shirt every month from Jocko Store, from the mind of Echo Charles. Pretty cool designs. And now, I've gotten so many now. That I've got shirts that I train in shirts that I go to the gym in and I've got like my

• 3:14:08Jocko Willink?

  Going through the protocol.

• 3:14:09Speaker 02

  My alphas. Yeah, like my, my, uh, the nice shirts that I, that I

• 3:14:14Jocko Willink?

  When you dress up. That's one thing that's sick about San Diego and California in general. Like, oh, we're taking you to the best restaurant in town, darling. Let me put on my nice T-shirt.

• 3:14:27Jocko Willink?

  Check out jocko store.com. Also, you need steak primalbeef.com, colorado craftbeef.com. You need ribeyes. How many ribeyes did you cook when you were you weren't you cooking ribeyes? Wasn't that your primary day deal?

• 3:14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that in Norway, I got, I got this gig at this really nice restaurant and I basically brought this somewhat enhanced TV in there to the head chef. And he was, he was like, uh, he gave me a chance, legendary guy. But when he hired me, he gave me a chef's jacket and I didn't actually know how to put it on as I was never, never a chef or a cook. But they put me outside in the grilling station, which had like this breathtaking view of all of Oslo. Uh, and I was just slinging ribeyes, probably did like, I don't know, 500 to a thousand of them. So now one of my superpowers is just like seeing when a ribeye is done, you know, and when it's, when it's proper. But yeah. Uh, definitely like the best cut of beef. Uh, maybe, you know, piccantea is also really good.

• 3:15:24Speaker 01

  Piccantea is kind of like a ironically a Brazilian cut. It's got that, um, that's something cap, you know, it has that like one layer of fat on top of it. Yeah, fat cap.

• 3:15:36Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna have to look into this.

• 3:15:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's very, very good meat. Yeah. Yeah.

• 3:15:40Jocko Willink?

  Because you can get the rib eye, you can get the rib, the rib eye cap, which is just that piece. That if I'm not careful, my freaking children will steal off of my steak.

• 3:15:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:15:53Jocko Willink?

  Like

• 3:15:53Speaker 01

  That's actually

• 3:15:54Jocko Willink?

  Dude, like

• 3:15:55Speaker 01

  That's good. I mean, that's impressive that they know that. Yeah.

• 3:15:58Jocko Willink?

  They're adults, you know, freaking savages.

• 3:16:01Speaker 01

  I typically get like a ribeye roast or something and then cut them myself. It's typically a little bit, a little bit cheaper than just buying ribeyes that are pre-cut. But yeah, that's, that's one of my favorite fuel sources.

• 3:16:13Jocko Willink?

  Well, if you need steak, go to colorado craftbeef.com or primalbeef.com and get some freaking outstanding steak. Also subscribe to the podcast. Also jocko underground.com. Also YouTube channel. We got. We got this YouTube channel. We got the Clips channel now because Echo Charles got busy. We have the Jocko Fuel YouTube channel. We have Origin USA YouTube channel. Do you guys have a Legion YouTube channel?

• 3:16:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, we do. We mostly post shorts on it, but we're gonna put some long form.

• 3:16:40Jocko Willink?

  What is it Legion AJJ?

• 3:16:42Speaker 01

  Legion, at Legion AJJ, I think.

• 3:16:43Jocko Willink?

  Cool. So check that out. Psychological Warfare, Flipside Canvas, Dakota Meyer making cool stuff to hang on your wall. Books. We've written some books. Obviously, Modern Submission Grappling, A No-Gi Jiu-Jitsu Manual by Miha. Check that one out. It's available right now. So go order it. We'll put a link in the show notes.

• 3:17:04Speaker 01

  Indeed.

• 3:17:05Jocko Willink?

  I always say that, but Echo doesn't do any of it because we don't really have show notes. There's, it's not hard. Do you know what I'm talking about?

• 3:17:14Speaker 01

  Some would say it's very easy.

• 3:17:16Speaker 02

  Like with the timestamps?

• 3:17:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. For sure. Yeah, yeah. But, but all you need to do is put a link in there that says, here's the book. So we'll put the link in the show notes. Do you think we can do that?

• 3:17:25Speaker 02

  Make it, you see this?

• 3:17:27Jocko Willink?

  Bro, you're writing it down. Consider it done. Bro, maybe, maybe Echo doesn't really need a job anymore.

• 3:17:34Jocko Willink?

  Creating show notes and everything.

• 3:17:38Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so check out that book. I've written a bunch of books too. I'd say right now, you said, you know, you don't want to sound like an expert because you've written one book. I think one book, you're, I think when your first book gets published, you're a blue belt. That's my opinion. And then probably

• 3:17:56Jocko Willink?

  two books, no, three books, purple belt, five books, brown belt, 10 books, black belt.

• 3:18:07Speaker 01

  I've actually written two books. Um, one I, I wrote while this one was being published, but it's not. I literally self-published it just for the gym, just for the beginners. It's a little bit similar to that one. 70 pages shorter. 16 main techniques that everyone has to know. The idea is for the people that are like a little bit too intimidated to start. You know, there's a gap like where you're ready to go. Something has to happen or you have to hear it on a podcast for the end time. Or someone has to shove you. You feel a little bit intimidated. So something has to happen and a lot of it is just intimidation. So I wanted to, um, Put a little bit of like a perspective on that, yeah.

• 3:18:51Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 3:18:52Speaker 01

  That one is not, it's not really for sale. It's just for, it's just at the academy. I might put it on Amazon at some point, but I'll probably refine it a little bit. It's just essential jujitsu skills. I'm just giving it out to people who come to the academy.

• 3:19:04Jocko Willink?

  Well, there you go. So does that book and a half, does that mean you want your, your purple?

• 3:19:08Speaker 01

  No, I'll just take a stripe on the blue.

• 3:19:11Jocko Willink?

  You got a stripe on the publisher on the right, on the author blue belt. Uh, Echelon Front. We have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com. If you need help inside your organization, you want to get your team aligned around leadership and their principles and how to interact with each other. You know, you know, when you get to work and you're like, I can't, I don't want to have to deal with Mary today. Or Fred's really been causing problems. Those are leadership problems. Those are problems that you can fix. Oh, your boss is like really putting a lot of pressure and he doesn't understand what he's doing to the team. Yep, that's a leadership problem. All these, all these little problems. By the way, also when you're like, I can't believe my wife or can't believe my husband. I can't believe my kid.

• 3:19:52Jocko Willink?

  All those things, they're leadership problems. That's what they are. So if you have leadership problems in your workplace, go to echelonfront.com. We have a consultancy. We'll come and help you square those problems away. If you have leadership issues that you want to work on as an individual, go to extremeownership.com. It's an online training platform where you can learn how to interact with your boss, how to interact with your peers, how to interact with your subordinates, how to interact with your spouse, how to interact with your kids, how to interact with your nephew, how to interact with your mother-in-law.

• 3:20:29Jocko Willink?

  Right? Cause that causes problems with people. That's part of your family. What are you doing?

• 3:20:35Jocko Willink?

  Well, she acts this way. Okay, cool. How do you interact with her? Go to extremeownership.com and figure that out. Just like jujitsu is a skill. Leadership is a skill. Human interaction is a skill. Learn how to do it. Go to extremeownership.com. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, want to help Gold Star families. Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an incredible charity organization. It is changing people's lives. And I know this because I've seen it. I've seen it. And it's unbelievable what she is doing for our veterans. So if you want to help, you want to donate, you want to get involved, go to Americas Mighty Warriors.org. Also, don't forget about Heroes and Horses.org. Micah Fink up there in the mountains, in the wilds.

• 3:21:21Jocko Willink?

  Taking our veterans out there. Where they can lose themselves and find themselves. So check that out. And also Jimmy May, he's got an awesome organization, BeyondTheBrotherhood.org. Helping SEALs transition into the civilian sector and bring productivity and expertise into the civilian world. And if you want to connect with us on the interwebs, you can go to LegionSanDiego.com. You can go to NoGeeManual.com. You can go to Instagram. Even though as Miha warned, there's the highest compensated engineers in the world that are trying to get you just to freaking waste your entire life scrolling.

• 3:22:05Jocko Willink?

  That being said, Miha's on there. He's at MihaJJ. And Legion is Legion, at Legion underscore AJJ. I'm there as well, also participating in the downfall of the world. I'm at Jocko Willink. Kerry's there, doing his part to destroy your life. He's at Kerry Helton. I've also got a website, Jaco.com. So check any of those things out if you want to just waste a bunch of your time when you should be training. So that's what we're doing. Kerry, you got any questions from this whole gig?

• 3:22:38Speaker 02

  I do have one question.

• 3:22:39Jocko Willink?

  As a freaking white belt, white belt, two year white belt you are?

• 3:22:42Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I get to shoot you guys a lot, you know, shooting video you guys.

• 3:22:46Jocko Willink?

  So you're learning by, you know?

• 3:22:47Speaker 02

  I'm just saying, I get to see some cool stuff, you know, which is pretty rad.

• 3:22:51Jocko Willink?

  What's your belt level in photography, in video right now?

• 3:22:54Speaker 02

  Video, I'm probably a solid, I would say I'm a solid purple belt, you know? I think that would be fair. Black all day.

• 3:23:01Jocko Willink?

  You think so?

• 3:23:02Speaker 02

  Full, full on black belt.

• 3:23:03Jocko Willink?

  Black belt all day.

• 3:23:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, he's, you know, he's gone into so many, like, he's, he's, if you ask me, he's been a black belt in video. He's cruising in some other belts and some other, you know, like the judos of videography and some of these other things now too. Or a video production, rather.

• 3:23:19Jocko Willink?

  You know what's fired up as I was talking to you that he says, he goes, we can do anything.

• 3:23:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:23:23Jocko Willink?

  He's like, hey, we can do anything, which is pretty wild. Like, we can make anything in terms of video.

• 3:23:31Speaker 02

  And he means it.

• 3:23:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:23:32Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 3:23:33Jocko Willink?

  I mean, you want to have, like, anything we can come up with, we can do it.

• 3:23:36Speaker 02

  We could do that.

• 3:23:37Jocko Willink?

  So I guess that is black belt scenario.

• 3:23:39Speaker 02

  Oh, he's a hundred percent black belt. No doubt. Yeah.

• 3:23:41Jocko Willink?

  Well, props to Echo Charles.

• 3:23:43Speaker 02

  Well, speaking of video, though, we were, I was looking through some footage of yours. Miha hit me up the other day. He was like, hey, do you have some clips from this training session? I was like, yeah, bro, I got you. So I was shooting up some, some of those clips. This was, it was a little while back, but it was, you know, some clips of you guys and.

• 3:23:59Speaker 01

  It's to promote the book.

• 3:24:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was looking through some of these clips, though, and I saw Miha hitting some trips. And I was curious when, like.

• 3:24:09Jocko Willink?

  Judo, dude.

• 3:24:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Was that all from judo or did that come in during the MMA stuff too?

• 3:24:14Speaker 01

  No, that's, that's pretty much all for, from judo. Look, like wrestling has some trips too.

• 3:24:19Jocko Willink?

  Dude, he did a freaking, you did a little freaking judo, little J foot sweep on me today. I was just like, okay.

• 3:24:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you're just like circling in the right direction. I want, I was still like focused on the triangle kind of to, to get something that's going to lead to a triangle. But I was like, that's actually, this is the.

• 3:24:38Jocko Willink?

  PTSD, bro, PTSD.

• 3:24:42Speaker 01

  Trips, there's nothing like judo for, for trips and there's so many different kinds. I actually like to say that a foot sweep feels better than a submission when it's performed properly because.

• 3:24:53Jocko Willink?

  See what he's doing right now? See what he's doing? He's trying to say, he's like, oh yeah, but I felt even better than if I could try and you caught me.

• 3:25:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, not, not that, not that kind of trip, to be honest. That was like a little bit between a trip and a foot sweep. Foot sweep, I'm talking when you like, kind of like initiate a movement. And then you extend the movement so that the person is horizontal to the mat. Without you knowing. So you're like, they're horizontal and you're like, how did this happen? That, I'm talking that, where it surprises you and it surprises the other person. Those are like the cleanest foot sweeps and those feel better than a submission. There's also some ways to kind of like force certain foot sweeps. I think the one today was like somewhere in between. So no, you're still up on the scorecards. Uh, but yeah, that's all, that's all from Judo. And then you have trips.

• 3:25:41Speaker 01

  Uh, like Ochigari, Koichigari, and then there's the Osotogari, which is um, honestly my favorite takedown throw. Also, I think it's like, I teach it a lot when I teach like law enforcement people and like military people because it's very effective. If you have to like grab someone, throw them to the ground, it's super good. And you can um, you can either, if you have grips, you can pull up right before the person hits the mat, you pull away a little bit. Or if you want to send them to hell, you know, you can also push in and, and throw someone super hard. Uh, you did that podcast on Kimura, the, based on the book I gave you and

• 3:26:19Speaker 01

  he was notorious for concussing people with Osotogaris. It's like just that throw. So yeah, that, you have various things, but they're all from Judo, pretty much.

• 3:26:28Jocko Willink?

  Right on. Those are, those, is that your only question?

• 3:26:31Speaker 02

  Well, that was the one I was most, most curious about. Yeah.

• 3:26:35Jocko Willink?

  I went skiing with Miha. And you grow up skiing in Slovenia. It's kind of one of those things, I could see that ski thing. So my sister is uh, like a savage skier. And she's like, she's lives in Montana. She just skis all the time and she's badass skier. And so Miha shows up and we're going, gonna go skiing together. It's the first day of going skiing. And I go, hey, like, how good are you at skiing? He goes, you know, I'm pretty good. I grew up in Europe, in, you know, Europe. And I go, okay, cool. So he's, I'm just like, okay, so he's just ready to rock and roll. So I haven't been, this is, I think it was, like, I hadn't been skiing in a bed either. But you know, when you're with my sister, she's just, she's going. And so I'm uh,

• 3:27:21Jocko Willink?

  We go and it just so happens there's we're in Big Sky, Montana, and there's this tram. There's a tram at Big Sky, Montana. And for whatever reason, the tram was empty. The weather conditions were terrible. There was no visibility, dumping snow. And but my sister, you know, she's just like, oh, yeah, no line.

• 3:27:40Speaker 01

  So this is the best.

• 3:27:41Jocko Willink?

  So we go, we start doing tram laps. And like the and I just assumed that Miha was kind of

• 3:27:50Jocko Willink?

  for lack of a better word, like a black belt in skiing, like a high level black belt, I guess. Cause my sister is like a high level black belt in skiing. And so we start skiing these laps and we're doing these gullies and crons and just really steep, chaotic things. And I'm following my sister and Miha's following me, but I'm not watching him because I'm not, you know, I'm not, you know, just like skiing. And and finally, we do like four of these laps. And he's not saying anything, he's not saying anything, but but I'm like assuming that he's just hanging. Right. And everything's cool. And finally, like the fourth lap, I like look up at him and I and

• 3:28:33Jocko Willink?

  look, he obviously grew up skiing and he's a very good skier, but he hadn't skied in a long time. And he was hanging on by a freaking thread. And he'd been just, just freaking manning up and just being like, yeah, let's do another one. I'm like.

• 3:28:49Speaker 01

  For some reason, I'm not like as intimidated by skiing as I should have been. And like on one of those runs, I think on the second run, I fell like right on the steepest part. Kind of like rocks were to one side. And then like, I was like, man, what are we gonna do here? Like if I slide down, I'm probably going into the rocks. It was like, it was extremely steep to the point where I couldn't really like kick my, my snowshoes, I mean, the skiing shoes into the, into the mountain enough to go higher up to grab my, my ski. And then eventually I put it on and got on there. But yeah, I don't know why I'm just like easily peer pressured. But if you were like, hey, let's go, let's go surf Jaws. I'd be like, hell no, dude. I'm like staying here. I'm gonna watch you guys.

• 3:29:34Speaker 01

  We're skiing, I don't know, I'm not, I'm not that intimidated by it. But the ski conditions, like the snow was pretty good.

• 3:29:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the snow was good, visibility was bad. Also, my sister has a good way of like, like level 12 positive peer pressure.

• 3:29:49Jocko Willink?

  Like um, like, hey, let's just go get one more like super excited. And so there's no one's gonna be like, well, no, like she's calling you out, you know, basically. So that was a

• 3:29:59Speaker 01

  It was fun. I enjoyed that a lot. Yeah.

• 3:30:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And then we were good. That was cool. Cause we just ended just training.

• 3:30:03Speaker 02

  Just get training in like

• 3:30:04Jocko Willink?

  It was pretty good. For mayhem up there.

• 3:30:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. We mentioned kind of traveling. There was like a couple of places where I trained that were like exceptionally cool, like in the jungle in Costa Rica, but also Jocko's mountain garage.

• 3:30:16Jocko Willink?

  Math. That's like not a huge math space. We were having death matches too. You know, when you completely do not want to train, well, that's what every day that we were there, I neither one of us wanted to train. It was like, get off the mountain exhausted and just be like 20 minutes. Like, yep. Okay.

• 3:30:35Speaker 02

  That's a different kind of beat.

• 3:30:37Jocko Willink?

  And then just death match.

• 3:30:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. Getting off the mountain beat. Quad's all fired up like, yeah.

• 3:30:43Jocko Willink?

  Good times. Uh, so no more questions, Kerry?

• 3:30:45Speaker 02

  Negative.

• 3:30:45Jocko Willink?

  Miha, any closing statements?

• 3:30:47Speaker 01

  No, I think we're covered at all. Yeah. It's like I said during the, during the podcast, like I've listened to a lot of these and before we started, I wanted to be, I wanted to not think about the caliber of person that sat in this chair, uh, before, you know, like medal of honor winners and stuff like that. So yeah, it's been a huge, huge pleasure to be, to be invited and hopefully entertaining to some degree.

• 3:31:11Jocko Willink?

  Right, old man. Well, uh, thanks for joining us and thanks for all the training over the years and the death matches over the past few years and, um, appreciate it. Thanks for writing the book. I think a book's really going to help out a lot of people at all levels. I think it's gonna hopefully, you know, I always get someone that'll say like, you know, it was on podcasts, such and such, you did this, or you had Hickson on, or you had, you know, they'll name something and it was like, that was finally it. And I went and started training. So if you're out there, hopefully this will push you over the edge. And of course, thanks to all the men and women around the world in uniform right now, we get to pursue our dreams here. We get to train.

• 3:31:51Jocko Willink?

  Because you put your dreams on hold. You put your dreams on hold and in some cases you sacrifice your dreams for our freedoms. And we thank you all for your service and also thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all other first responders. You sacrifice also to keep us safe here at home and we thank you as well. And everyone else out there. I say you listen to Mihang's advice. Find a good jiu-jitsu academy.

• 3:32:26Jocko Willink?

  Go start training there. Practice on your own. Think about jiu-jitsu, think about how it applies on the mats and think about how it applies to your life as well. Enjoy the journey because it doesn't end. So you might as well enjoy it and of course.

• 3:32:43Jocko Willink?

  Don't quit.

• 3:32:45Jocko Willink?

  And that's all we've got for tonight and we will see you on the mats. Until next time, this is Mihang and Kerry and Jocko. Out.