399: Live With The Confidence of a Black Belt, Learn With The Humility of a White Belt. With Rener Gracie

Rener Gracie is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_jiu-jitsu (BJJ) black belt instructor, coach and entrepreneur. One of the most recognizable figures in modern Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He is a well-known and popular coach who has helped develop some top UFC competitors and has also trained celebrities. As co-owner and head instructor at the Gracie University of jiu-jitsu headquartered in Torrance, California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrance,_California Gracie is known for his initiatives training Police officers in jiu-jitsu based self-defense and his advocacy calling for a nationwide police reform. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

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 399 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening.

• 0:08Jocko Willink?

  Jiu-Jitsu is life.

• 0:11Jocko Willink?

  This statement is often made by practitioners of the art of Jiu-Jitsu. Some mean it in a playful way. Jiu-Jitsu is so fun and engaging that it seems to permeate every aspect of life. Others mean it in a more serious way. The power of Jiu-Jitsu becomes an obsession and every waking moment is spent trying to learn, develop and improve Jiu-Jitsu skills. But for me, the statement Jiu-Jitsu is life has always been about the actual correlations between Jiu-Jitsu and life. Yes, the struggles, trials, tribulations and triumphs that are part and parcel of Jiu-Jitsu also reflect what we all experience in life.

• 0:51Jocko Willink?

  I was introduced to Jiu-Jitsu in the early 90s by revered Navy SEAL Master Chief. I was a young SEAL at the time and I was overseas on my first deployment. During our morning muster, the Master Chief asked if any of us wanted to learn how to fight. I raised my hand and my life changed forever. A few hours later, this lanky Master Chief, who was much older and smaller than I was, was tying me in knots, placing me in positions where I had no other option than to tap out, to surrender.

• 1:26Jocko Willink?

  I was dumbfounded. It didn't make sense. No matter what I did, I could not survive for more than 30 seconds with the Master Chief. I tried over and over again, doing something, anything to survive, but I could not. Neither could any of my fellow SEAL teammates, who had also joined me for the lesson. After almost an hour, the Master Chief looked at our exhausted faces and said, "Welcome to Gracie Jiu-Jitsu."

• 1:53Jocko Willink?

  I had no idea what that meant at the time. But it seemed like I had been exposed to some kind of magic. A magic power that I did not understand. But I did understand one thing. I needed to learn this magic power, this power of jiu-jitsu. The master chief, whose name was Steve Bailey, had trained in the legendary Gracie Garage in the late 80s and early 90s in Torrance, California. He was no, by no means, a master of the art. By his own admission, he was just a beginner. But even with the most basic jiu-jitsu moves, he was able to completely dominate and easily make my teammates and me submit over and over again.

• 2:37Jocko Willink?

  So began my jiu-jitsu journey. I continued to train with Master Chief Bailey on deployment. When I got back to the States, I found a jiu-jitsu instructor named Fabio Santos, whose jiu-jitsu lineage traced directly back to the Gracie family. I trained as often as I could, sometimes speeding to the Jiu-Jitsu Academy for lunchtime training, then returning at night for more classes. I was obsessed. I learned the basic positions of jiu-jitsu. The mount, the back, the guard, the half-guard, and side control. I learned the basic submission holds of jiu-jitsu, the moves to actually make opponents tap out, the straight arm lock, the kimura, the Americana, collar chokes, the guillotine chokes, the rear naked choke, and foot, ankle, and knee locks.

• 3:22Jocko Willink?

  Over time, I learned how to fight. But I also slowly began to recognize that jiu-jitsu was not just a catalog of individual moves. Instead, all the moves were interconnected. They worked best when combined together in sequence to support each other. That lesson soon led to the realization that jiu-jitsu was not just a combination of moves either, but that there were underlying principles of jiu-jitsu that made the entire system work. But most importantly, over time, I realized that the principles of jujitsu were not just a way of fighting, they were a way of thinking. I saw the correlations between the principles

• 4:07Jocko Willink?

  of jujitsu, leadership, combat, and life itself. I began to apply these principles to everything I did. And the more I applied these principles in other aspects of my life, the better I was able to execute. I became a better SEAL, a better leader, and a better person.

• 4:32Jocko Willink?

  So, that right there is an excerpt from the foreword of a book. It's a foreword that I wrote for a book which is called "The Thirty-Two Principles: Harnessing the Power of Jujitsu to Succeed in Business, Relationships, and Life." And it's written by Henner Gracie of the renowned Gracie family, who have had the most significant impact on martial arts in the modern era. And I owe that family so much. And it is an honor to have Henner here with us tonight to talk about

• 5:12Jocko Willink?

  his life, his lessons learned, and his book, "The Thirty-Two Principles." Henner, thanks for joining us.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Thank you, guys. What a pleasure to be here after seeing you guys do so much good work with the podcast and everything else you guys are doing. So, thank you, Echo, for helping pull this one together. And thank you, Jaco, for that amazing foreword.

• 5:33Jocko Willink?

  Well, it's an honor to be able to write it. And as I was telling you before, jujitsu gave me so much in life. And it's an honor for, for me to have the opportunity to give back. And it's also kind of weird for me to say that jujitsu gave me a lot in life because, for you, I can't even imagine what it's like growing up in your family and, and with your last name and doing what you've been doing your whole life. And I'm very curious to hear what that sounds like from the inside. So uh, let's get to it, man. Let's get to it. Let's talk about you. Let's talk about how you got here and let's start at the beginning. So

• 6:13Jocko Willink?

  Horion Gracie, your dad, son of Aleo Gracie, Aleo Gracie, the creator of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

• 6:24Jocko Willink?

  A significant part of that is that your grandfather, Aleo, was kind of a small guy and kind of a sickly guy. I don't mean to be disparaging, but he was like a frail looking guy. And he had to take what came to Brazil in the form of Japanese Jiu-Jitsu, maybe Judo-ish. What came in that form, he had to take that and turn it into something that worked for him. What do you think?

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're spot on. So when the Gracie brothers, my father, my grandfather being the youngest one, were introduced to Jiu-Jitsu in Brazil in the early 1900s. My grandfather was actually restricted from participating. So only his older brothers were allowed to practice these Japanese techniques that they had learned. And he suffered from vertigo, dropped out of school in the third grade, convinced his mommy couldn't go to school. So he was a frail young man, was not really allowed to participate in any type of physical strenuous activity. So he would watch his brothers practice Jiu-Jitsu. Several years passed watching his brothers practice and teach.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  And one day, his older brother Carlos, the oldest of all the brothers, was scheduled to teach a private class to a student. And Carlos was absent. The student had showed up to participate in the class. And Ellyu, my grandfather, had showed up to observe the class, but Carlos wasn't there. So Ellyu at that time offered to teach the class in his brother's absence. And he's, you know, 16 years old, give or take at the time. He says, you know, so would you like to go through the class with me to the gentleman who was an influential banker in Brazil? And the man said, of course, kid, let's go. He had known the kid from watching so many classes. He's always around the mat, you know, little mat rat, but not one who had practiced. So my grandfather at that time went through a class with this student purely based on what he had memorized from watching his brother's practice.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  And they were successful. By the end of the class, Carlos eventually showed up late, apologetic. The student said, no worries. I actually had a class with your little brother. And if you don't mind, I would like to keep taking classes with him from now on. And the student in that moment promoted my grandfather from nothing to being a teacher of jiu-jitsu. So my grandfather was thrust right into it. Of course, loved that he was able to perform what techniques he was able to perform, but then realized soon thereafter that there are many techniques that were not suitable for his limited physical ability and began modifying and adapting the techniques. His brothers were involved in this process as well, but he just dove in headfirst. It's almost like one of those things where because you can't have it, you want it more, right? You're in the desert dying of thirst. The water tastes a lot better.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  So for him, I feel like the deprivation from not being able to participate in it made him go gung ho. Turns out he becomes the champion of the family. He starts fighting in challenge matches as an older teenager and becomes the guy of which basically they're organizing now valle-tudo challenge matches for my grandfather. Carlos being kind of the manager, older brother figure, coordinating these fights. And then my grandfather's out there fighting anyone they can get their hands on to demonstrate the efficacy of jiu-jitsu. And like you said, he was a small guy, right? I guess five nine, 140 pounds, give or take. And he's defeating giants with these techniques. And that's really the beginning. If you want to go all the way back, that's really the beginning of, you know, MMA and valle-tudo and these Gracie challenge matches in Brazil. And he was successful and the name became very, the Gracie name.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  My grandfather and his brothers became very well known in Brazil at this time. Fast forward, you know, 20, 30 years, 1950s, when he fought Kimura. My dad was born soon thereafter. And now October 23rd, 1951, I think it was when he fought Kimura. And I think my father was born in 52, born into this legacy of fighting. And this is what we do. Everyone does jiu-jitsu. And my grandfather had nine children. His brother Carlos had 21 children. So the only thing we're better at than jiu-jitsu is reproducing. And these like rabbits everywhere, like Gracie's being born, like you can't believe it. And all of them are just kind of on the mat from day one and learning this thing. And my father grows up in that environment of jujitsu for everyone from day one. Everyone's choking each other all the time from as early as they can remember.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  And then, you know, he decided to bring it to America, 1978. He landed here in Southern California and everyone he met, he invited for a free class. If they told their friend, the friend got a free class and the referring person got another free class. So everyone told every friend so that they would get all these free classes. And before you know it, 1978 through 1989, they're in the garage. And before you know it, there's not enough space, right? I think there's like 130 people on a waiting list to get into the garage. And throughout this entire time, there are challenge matches happening in the garage. These original Gracie challenge matches in America where, you know, these students of the garage would go out to their professors of other disciplines and say, hey, to their karate coach

• 11:14Speaker 01

  or their taekwondo or kung fu coach, I'm training this jujitsu stuff in the garage with these Gracie brothers. And it really works and you're gonna, I think you would love it. And of course, in their ego and pride, the instructor of the other discipline says, no, I don't think that works. And in fact, if they tried it on me, I would just knock them out. And then the student would go back to them and say, hey, you know, to Mr. Gracie, this karate teacher doesn't think it would work. And then that would go back and forth two or three times before eventually my dad says, look, if they want to test it out, they can show up whenever they want. We'll be happy to just see what works and what doesn't. And those happened and many of them were recorded and they're on YouTube as Gracie challenge matches. And that was really the precursor to the actual creation of the UFC, which was of course, my father and Art Davie, his partner, who were like, dude,

• 11:57Speaker 01

  if this is so powerful, the display of jujitsu in the garage, when you have these masters of other disciplines getting strangled unconscious or tapping out in 30 seconds, 60 seconds, if we're doing this in the garage and everyone who watches this is just absolutely enthralled by the display of truth and effectiveness, what if we put this on pay-per-view television in UFC One, you know, November 12, 1993? And the rest is history.

• 12:21Jocko Willink?

  It is crazy to watch and those, the first video Gracie in action. I think, I think that's fully on YouTube, by the way.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:29Jocko Willink?

  I think you can watch it fully on YouTube, but it was, look, you watch it now and you go, oh, of course. But you watch it back then and it, it was mind blowing. Mind blowing and I I was very lucky in that I saw I did jujitsu before I ever saw any video of jujitsu before the first UFC. So I knew what was gonna happen. But if you didn't know any of that and you're watching, it would be hard to believe. You know, I've always found that if someone doesn't know anything about jujitsu, they there are three to five submissions before they even think that this is real. So like you'll get a wrestler, you know, that has never seen jujitsu before. You can't really find a wrestler like that anymore, but in the 90s, you could definitely find people that would be like, oh, what's this bullshit? This doesn't work.

• 13:14Jocko Willink?

  Be like, okay, cool. And you roll and you tap them and then they're like, oh, oh, but let's go one more time. And you go again, you tap them again. And then they go, oh, oh, oh, let's go. And it took like three to five times before they'd go, holy crap, there's something here that I really don't understand. So, yeah, that must have been crazy for people to watch in the garage in Fabio Santos. He had a bunch of those videos and he was in a bunch of them too. Yeah, we'd sit around and watch those things and you could see the disbelief in people's eyes after they got tapped once, twice, three times. After they threw those devastating, what they thought were devastating punches, what they thought were devastating kicks and the Gracie Jujitsu practitioner just closes the distance, takes him down and chokes him.

• 13:58Jocko Willink?

  So this was like a, this was like a revolution, a true revolution that hasn't really, I don't know, I can't think of any other sports that have had such a dramatic change in them as martial arts because of this phenomenon of Gracie Jujitsu. It's, it's an unbelievable change in the course of events.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. And people ask like, what do you think the biggest impact was? And I think that if I had to sum it up, I would say the Gracie family changed the

• 14:32Speaker 01

  A distance from which a fight is fought.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Right. When you talk about Hollywood and you talk about Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris and like the era of the seventies, the eighties, early nineties, pre UFC, there was very much a belief of flashy punches and kicks from that range, that striking range, and that's where men fight. Stand and trade blows and you hope to get one on them before they get one on you. And what the Gracie family kind of came and said was, no, you know, intelligent people don't stand and trade blows fifty fifty and risk getting knocked out. We stay too far where you can't hit us. And then when you think you're gonna hit us, we get too close where those hits have no more power. So we changed the fundamental distance from which a fight is fought. And it was cheating. It really was cheating because once the person who doesn't know jiu jitsu is in that close range, not only are they not effective with

• 15:17Speaker 01

  the strikes that they learn from watching television or from years of practice, right? Depending what their source was. Not only are they not effective, they're actually counterproductive because there's nothing more energy depleting than throwing strikes that don't land. That's like one of the most exhausting things imaginable. And yet, when you're in a close range and you pull someone, even if you're on the bottom, you pull someone on top of you, they're striking and not landing, they're depleting so fast. And then it's thirty, sixty seconds later, we just pick up the pieces and decide what opportunity we want to take advantage of. And, um, you know, so that's, to me, that was the biggest shift. It changed what was acceptable in terms of the distance, what a fight looked like, changed. Um, and to me, it's like, when you talk about what makes jiu jitsu so

• 16:01Speaker 01

  addicting, what makes jiu jitsu so powerful, right? Like, we're in, right? We're sold, it'll be part of our lives for the rest of our lives. Yeah, there's a massive population out there that know nothing and have no participation and have nothing to do with jiu jitsu, but the people who are in are all the way in. And when I think about why that is, I feel that it's because the practice of jiu jitsu changes our operating system as human beings more profoundly, and I think we would all agree, in less time than any other activity

• 16:42Speaker 01

  we can think of. Right? And why is that? Because when you practice jiu jitsu, there are three distinct and incredibly profound psychological shifts that happen in the practitioner.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  The first is how they deal with problems. The second is how they deal with other people. And the third is how they deal with themselves, how you face yourself. When you talk about how we deal with problems, conventional wisdom says, if two people get into a fight and the fight goes to the ground, the person who is on the bottom is losing the fight, right? But in jiu-jitsu, not only is that not true, in many cases, the opposite is true. If you were to send someone down the street to the nearest bar and find the meanest, baddest beard you could find, 300-pounder,

• 17:40Speaker 01

  drag him over here, put any one of us on our back, and put him on top of us, and then let the world take a survey and say, "Who's winning?" Everyone who doesn't do jiu-jitsu and doesn't know of our skill sets would say, "That guy's, the beard is winning, that guy's losing." It's automatic that that would be the assessment and the conclusion the world would come to.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  But we know that the moment that guy lays on top of us, his life is in danger. That's crazy. And a matter of 30 to 60 seconds, he's tapping out with any number of choices that we make from underneath him to end his life or to, you know, dislocate a joint if we go all the way with it. But we wouldn't because we're compassionate human beings. So with jiu-jitsu, we often hear this saying, and why we love it so much, it teaches us to be comfortable in uncomfortable positions, right? It's a very common one. But I think it's much bigger than that and much more powerful. Jiu-jitsu teaches us to win in worst-case scenarios. So what the world perceives as unwinnable worst-case scenarios,

• 18:47Speaker 01

  we look at as absolutely winnable situations that we can optimize to our advantage. So that affects the practitioner in a very profound way. The second one is how we deal with other people, right? And when you talk about kind of the evolutionary way of things and you look at members of a species.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  A larger, stronger member of a species will consistently defeat a smaller, weaker member of the same species, right? The larger silverback defeats the smaller silverback for a mate or for territory. The larger squirrel defeats the smaller, weaker squirrel for the nut. But humans are unique in their ability to kind of go against the natural order of things and learn skills and process information that will give them a strikingly consistent effectiveness against members of their own species who are larger and stronger than them. And jiu-jitsu is the fastest way for a person to accomplish that.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Such that if two people saw, if people, the world saw us standing side by side with the with the monster beard that we recruited and stood us next to that person, they would go, "Oh, man, the same way we looked at Hoist in UFC 1, what did you feel? Poor Hoist." But if you were in the family, what did you feel? Poor Taekwondo guy, poor Art Jimmerson, poor Gerard Gourdeau. Because he simply doesn't have the resources to deal with the techniques that we will bring to the equation. And the fact that humans can do that, we can learn and violate the natural order of things. Once you tap into that, you're on the inside and you don't leave because it's too rewarding and it's too special and it changes the way you deal with adversity in every aspect of your life.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  And then the third one is how you face yourself, right? 99.9% conservative estimate of the world has never tried a jiu-jitsu class because they don't feel capable. "I'm too old, I'm too young, I'm too old, I'm too, I'm too tall, I'm too short, I'm too fat, I'm too skinny." You name it, they've used it as an excuse not to do jiu-jitsu, even though they've heard you about it ad nauseam over so many podcasts, right? Like, they hear about it, but they're still, "I'm not good enough."

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Now, what's crazy is for the lucky few who take your advice and venture on to the mat.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Not only do they realize that their initial fears were almost entirely unfounded, but they realize that their body is so much more capable than they ever imagined. You unlock your secret potentials when you do jiu-jitsu. And the best analogy I've come up with, and there may be others, but it's a Swiss Army knife. Imagine if everyone was equipped with a Swiss Army knife. 99.9% of the world is only using the knife blade. People who do jiu-jitsu know that there are... I looked last night, what's the Swiss Army knife with the most instruments? It's 33 instruments, so the knife plus 32 others.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  And I'm like, wow, so they don't know they got the tweezers, the magnifying glass, the nail file, the Phillips head screwdriver, the scissors, all these other tools. You don't even know you've had those available to you all your life, but they're right there. Your body is the Swiss Army knife. And when we do jiu-jitsu, the ways in which we connect with other human beings to increase our effectiveness and decrease their opportunities against us, it's infinite and it's amazing to tap into that. So, I look at the world of people with Swiss Army knives only relying on this blade, and I go, man, what a sad existence. You only lived your entire life only using the knife function? So, it makes me so happy when someone starts doing jiu-jitsu and they realize that they are too a Swiss Army knife.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  They aren't too old, they aren't too young, they aren't too fat, they aren't too skinny. So, for me, every single time you step on the jiu-jitsu mat and you practice this incredible art, you're reprogramming your brain in these three significant ways. Number one, the problems you thought were insurmountable are fully surmountable, and in fact, they're simply techniques waiting to be discovered. Number two, the people, the opponents you thought were unbeatable are beatable. And number three, the body that you have, that you thought wasn't capable, is capable. And that's where the rewiring happens, every single class. And then naturally, that does something to a human being,

• 23:26Speaker 01

  and then it changes eventually how they live their life.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Initially, you're learning techniques. Every technique you learn, it's exciting because you see a new move. It's a new solution to an old problem. You're like, wow, that's awesome. So the addiction is to individual techniques initially. And you learn hundreds, eventually thousands of moves. But somewhere between Blue and Purple Belt, maybe a little bit after Purple Belt, a dedicated practitioner shifts. And their obsession and their focus goes from technique obsession to principles of the art. Right? A rather limited list, a relatively small number of principles that make all of those thousands of techniques possible. And once you tap in and you have a relationship with these timeless and universal principles that make everything possible in Jiu-Jitsu,

• 24:16Speaker 01

  you separate from that obsession with individual techniques. And then, once that relationship with those principles is true, profound, and labeled, and totally real for you, then it starts to translate into your everyday life. And at that point, Jiu-Jitsu isn't just a fighting system for you anymore. It's now an operating system for your life. And that's why I chose to write the book. Because I realized that these 32 principles were not limited to my combat effectiveness. They were as relied upon in my own life. And as effective entrepreneurially, right? From a family perspective, relationship perspective, business perspective. In every aspect, they were as reliable and effective in these realms as they were in combat.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  And I thought, man, what if I could write a book where the reader doesn't have to go through that first three, four, or five years, which can sometimes be unforgiving, right? There are times in that journey where it just kind of sucks, where you're having to sort it out and figure it out. So how sad that people who don't want to go through the grind will never get to the glory land of these 32 principles being available for them as life tools. So I said, what if I could write a book that makes those principles, right? It kind of distills the art down to those principles and gives someone with no martial arts experience the ability to understand what they are and how they apply personally and professionally. And then hope that after they read a book like this, we bring them in the back door and we go,

• 25:43Speaker 01

  "Hey, you now love the principles, so let's go do some jujitsu." I'm just saying, the last page of the book might nudge them in that direction.

• 25:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I think it's Miha, the other day, one of our jujitsu training partners. He had been asked something about, and he posted a video about, um, you know, what's the hardest belt to get in jujitsu? And, you know, he had his black belt in his hand. He's like, "No, this is not the hardest belt to get in jujitsu." The hardest belt to get is the white belt. The, the, the biggest step you're gonna take as a human being is actually showing up at the jujitsu academy with a, with a soul full of humility and put on that white belt and step out on the mat. That's the hardest one. Now, what you're talking about, about this different bodies and people, we all adapt our bodies to jujitsu. So my jujitsu is a little bit different than Echo's jujitsu, a little bit different than yours.

• 26:35Jocko Willink?

  We all, we all develop our own jujitsu and it all works for our, our size and our shape. And it's classic, your grandfather, he had to focus a hundred percent on being on the bottom. Not a hundred percent, but like a vast majority, being on the bottom, being overpowered, being out-strength. And he had to use these very technical maneuvers from his back. You know, I think the guard is the most prominent thing that, that really stands out from your grandfather for Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. It's like, "Oh, you can be on the bottom and win. You can be on the bottom and win." I mean, even judo, you can get, you can get, you can get pinned, you know? It's a thirty, it's a long pin, but you can get pinned. You can't get pinned in jujitsu.

• 27:18Jocko Willink?

  If you're down there and you're still breathing, you can keep fighting. And that's a huge difference. I mean, wrestling, you get pinned for, for three seconds and it's over. So he had to figure that out. He had to do exactly what you said, like open up all the other tools in the Swiss Army knife to make it work and clearly created a system where that's the foundation of the system is no matter who you are, you're gonna learn leverage and you're gonna learn these techniques that are functional regardless of how big that other person is. Because no matter how big you are, there's always gonna be someone bigger. There's always gonna be someone stronger. So you've gotta learn to do the technical moves and that's what's so powerful about it. The other thing that's interesting about jujitsu.

• 28:02Jocko Willink?

  Is when, when, and I don't see you don't, you don't get to have these memories because you grew up in jiu jitsu. I get to have these memories. Echo will have some of these memories. When, when we were kids, we looked at martial arts as this mysterious thing, right? As this thing where when you watched a movie about martial arts, you saw some things, right? And some of the things that you'd see would be like this, this, this discipline, right? Oh, you have to have discipline. You'd see like the, the karate school with everyone training and, you know, punching boards and getting hit in the back of the neck with a cane or whatever and having to stay still. It was like this rigid discipline and this humility, being humbled and you have to be, call the master, master, and you have to humble yourself.

• 28:48Jocko Willink?

  And then you got to win fights because you could kind of have this magic power. But then if you really started exploring the martial arts, like some of that stuff just ain't true. You know what I mean? Like some of that discipline you got from the master down at the strip mall? That guy was full of shit, right? And, and some of that humility that he was talking about, he wasn't humble at all. And some of that fight winning that he was talking about wasn't a real thing because he'd never been in a fight before. What jiu jitsu brought was, I say this all the time, like you will learn discipline in jiu jitsu because there's going to be nights you don't want to go down and get on the mat. There's going to be nights, there's going to be, you worked a nine hour, 10 hour, 11 hour day. You get home, you're tired, you're, you're sore from the two days of working out and you don't want to go train.

• 29:32Jocko Willink?

  You have to have discipline to go and train. You have to. You have to have humility because you're 100% going to get submitted by people. People that are smaller than you, people that are weaker than you, people that haven't been training as long. He's going to catch you in a move, you're going to have to tap. So you will be humbled. So these things that seemed like magic, but didn't really exist. Now they existed and then finally you get into a fight. Like Master Chief Bailey, like here's a guy, I'm looking at him and he was tall, but he's not a, you know, he's a pretty skinny guy and he was super old too. He must've been at least 40 at the time. So I'm thinking like, who's this old man? What's he going to do? And he could win and he could win every single time. It wasn't like a chance. No, he was going to win.

• 30:16Jocko Willink?

  So these, these things that when Echo and I were growing up watching martial arts, thinking, oh, it's discipline, it's humility, it's winning fights.

• 30:27Jocko Willink?

  They were all not 100% true in a lot of cases. Look, I'm not trying to take any look. There's, you know, a lot of great things that come out of Taekwondo, a lot of great things that come out of karate and there's schools of those, uh, of those disciplines that are squared away and, and, and respect to them. But there's also a bunch of bullshit. You know, there's a bunch of schools that don't have that kind of stuff and Jiu Jitsu had it and it had it in spades. So that's what I think the appeal was. It was like the answer to the question that all these young people grew up going, I want that magic power. I want that mysterious power. I want that discipline and I want that humility and I want to be able to win. And with Jiu Jitsu, you could

• 31:10Jocko Willink?

  actually have it, but you had to earn it. You had to earn it. Um, so your dad moves up here, 1978. He's growing that gym to 120 students. They have a waiting list. This is the, the SEALs used to go from San Diego, from Coronado, go up and train. And I know a bunch of them. It's awesome to talk to those guys about those old days and Master Chief Steve Bailey was one of them.

• 31:37Jocko Willink?

  You're born in what? 19?

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Eighty-three.

• 31:39Jocko Willink?

  1983, you're born, um, how old are you? Okay. So you're, you're age zero when you start doing Jiu Jitsu. You're just doing Jiu Jitsu from birth. How old are you when you realize what your last name is and what it means?

• 31:59Speaker 01

  UFC one.

• 32:00Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So 1993.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Ninety-three. Cause prior to that, when you're born in a house and in the garage is the thing that's happening. I think this is happening in every house, right? Like everyone just does, they wear pajamas and they do Jiu Jitsu in their garage. This is a normal family thing. Little did I know that was totally not the case. And, uh, growing up around this and seeing these challenge matches when I'm seven years old and there's guys fighting in the garage and I'm just standing there by the rabbit, like this tiny little rabbit car that brown rabbit that we have, and I'm just watching and. People are fighting and it's totally normal and we're desensitized to that very early. And um, then we moved to the school in 1989, we outgrew the garage, we moved to the school and in 1993 when the UFC hits and this is gonna be on television and I'm like 10 years old and I remember begging to go to the UFC, UFC 1.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Hidon was 12 years old, two years older than me and was invited to go to UFC 1, so I'm like, "Let's go, this is my right, all my life I've been waiting for this." And it was very contentious and boom, Hidon got to go and Henner stays home for his 10th birthday, which was two days before UFC 1. And I was watching at home with my mom and I was so pissed and I'm like, "This is whack", you know, so Hidon's over there and then to make the matters worse, in between the fights on UFC 1, um, Hidon and Hikson, Hikson's older son, were in the ring with rags and little spray bottles and they were cleaning the blood off the mats between the matches. And I was so pissed, I'm like, "They got to bleed the blood, boys."

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Ah, and then, um, after UFC 1, a bunch of parents called in saying, "This is crazy, you have children wiping blood of grown men off the floor, that can never happen again." So when I finally got allowed to go to UFC 2 several months later, um, I did not get to be a blood boy, I just got to walk around and get a bunch of autographs backstage. But anyways, after UFC 1 and 2, those early UFC's, I'm at school, it was on TV and then like a substitute teacher comes to school and is like, reading my name off the list and goes, "Gracie", he's like, "Yeah, I just saw the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Who was that?", I was like, "Yeah, that's my uncle." So then I'm like, "Alright, this is cool, like, some people know who I am, this is crazy." So little by little I start to realize it, this is a real thing and like as a real 10, 11, 12 years old, you really start to say, "Okay, something's happening here

• 34:16Speaker 01

  that is shocking everyone else, even though it's totally normal for us." The world is waking up to something that is not familiar to them. Because our magic, what we've been doing as normal for the last eighty years, seventy years. It's magical to them for some reason. And everyone thinks Hoise is gonna lose, but then he defeats these larger opponents. That's normal for us. We expect him to win. We would be shocked if he didn't. But to everyone else, they're shocked that this little, you know, pretty Brazilian guy in a gi, six one, one hundred and seventy eight pounds, is defeating Ken Shamrock. They don't understand that. And that's when I realized, okay, this is a special family. This is crazy. Not all families are doing what we're doing.

• 34:54Jocko Willink?

  How many hours a day are you training jujitsu? At ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen years old?

• 34:59Speaker 01

  So yeah, as a kid, it's an interesting thing. It's a, and I'm dealing with this with my own kids right now. We're careful because, because you're born into it, it's easy to overdo it, right? It's one thing for a parent to bring their child to the school at eight years old and the kid's motivated and wants to go do it and falls headfirst in love with it. It's another when you're born without a choice to be around this thing. And this thing is to some degree what takes your dad away all the time to go to work. And what keeps your parents from being around you and playing with you. It's kind of the culprit on the other side. So it's this give and take relationship, but eventually, around ten, eleven, twelve years old, I'm training, you know, every day, an hour or two, doing a class, a kids' class. But there was, around twelve years old, there was a time where I would go to the class

• 35:42Speaker 01

  and there was one other student in the kids' classes who would consistently beat me. And it really made it hard for me because in my mind, I'm UFC two, UFC three, like Gracie family legacy, I gotta defeat everyone. This is crazy. No one can beat me in the gym. I gotta be number one. And her name was Terry.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  So my nightmare is a girl named Terry, who's kind of stocky, athletic girl, and she was just a little bit bigger and had trained consistently and just had my number. So I would go to class and it would be a bad day if Terry was there. So there'd be times where I'd say, Dad, I don't wanna go to jujitsu. And he says, Henry, you have two options. You go, or you sit in your room until I get back in six hours. Because he goes and works all night and then comes back at ten o'clock. You guys know how that is. One time I'd stayed home, no video games, no console, no phones, no nothing, right? So I'm sitting at home in my room, oh my gosh, go to the bathroom, come back. And then finally he comes home and I'm like, man, I can't do that anymore. I'm gonna go to class, even though it sucks, get beat up, get beat up. And then everything changed at 13 years old. When there was a man who came in with his son, his son's name was Robert Mendoza Jr.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Five-year-old kid getting bullied, like a targeted bullying case, right? Not a general thing, but a specific incident this boy was dealing with. And my dad said, okay, let's do some private classes with Henner. And I'm 13 years old, right? Never had a job, never really just training and just doing my thing. Still in school, the whole thing. Henner, you're gonna be his teacher. It was like $10 a class to train with Henner for a private class. So I start teaching this kid, Robert Mendoza Jr., and it's successful. And we build this kid up and he no longer has problems with bullies and he's confident. And several months passed and I'm like, wow, this is awesome. And I'm having this rewarding experience as a teacher. And that's when I found my other wings, right? One is the technical proficiency, self-defense, my own ability, you know, to be effective in jujitsu. The other is what I can do to empower other people.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  So now I'm like, I kinda got that addiction where I'm like, this is crazy. I can be a source of improved quality of life, of confidence, of really rebuilding someone from the inside out. I could be the architect of that. This is amazing. Let's go for this. So more students, more students. Before you know it, 14, 15, 16, more students privately. Eventually I'm teaching kids group classes at 14, 15. I'm teaching adult group class by 16 and 17. I'm teaching Delta by 18 years old, my dad, you know, in North Carolina at Fort Bragg. So like it went all the way, you know? And I'm like, this is wild. People aren't doing this. Kids of my age are not having this opportunity. Um, and then soon after, uh, around, yeah, 18 years old, Hidon was 20. Is when my Hoist and my father split. Hoist decided I'm gonna go do my own thing, have his own organization and move on.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  They were teaching kind of shoulder to shoulder that whole time. Uh, supposed UFC all the way until like 2001, 2002. And then when Hoist went to do his thing, now it's me and Hidon, who are 18 and 20 essentially, who are thrust into leaderships of head instructors of the Gracie Academy in Torrance. And we're kids, I was still a brown belt. And there's, you know, 200 students and I'm like, this is crazy. There's guys who've been training here who are black belts since I was seven, six, five years old. And now they're supposed to trust me as their new leader? How is this gonna go over? So naturally, we lost a couple of students, but it was a, it was a very testing time for me and Hiron and for the business for Hoyes to leave.

• 38:52Jocko Willink?

  Were you going to school, like, high school and stuff like this?

• 38:55Speaker 01

  So.

• 38:56Jocko Willink?

  So you're doing normal.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Normal school and I was wrestling in high school, you know, my junior and senior year.

• 39:01Jocko Willink?

  Did you only wrestle your junior and senior?

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Yes, I played basketball for two years and my wrestling coach, who's Tom Hazel, who's a Oklahoma State stud, like, you know, All-American several time. Tom Hazel is the wrestling coach of the school, but also fought Hickson on Gracie Jiu-Jitsu in action. He's the wrestler in El Camino College who Hickson him grapple. He looks like a grizzly bear.

• 39:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Love the guy and he ends up in Hickson's guard and Hickson arm, boy, he had Hickson in a front headlock on turtle. Hickson slips out and pulls guard and then Tom is in the guard, natural wrestler equation. He's, we're gonna be on the bottom, they're gonna be on top and Hickson arm bars him from the guard. And anyways, it was, it was not a striking challenge match, but it was a challenge match of like this amazing wrestler in the South Bay against Hickson. Hickson defeats him. All respect, all good. Fast forward, I don't know, 20 years and Tom Hazel is the wrestling coach at West Torrance High School where I go to high school. And so I'm over there playing basketball for two years. I was tall. I could dunk as a freshman, so they liked that. And then after two years of wrestling, every single day, Coach Hazel saw me on campus. He would come to me and say, Henner, when are you gonna play a man's sport?

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Every single time he saw me, because he wanted me to wrestle. Henner, when are you gonna play a man's sport? Just always digging in and finally after two years, I, I'm like, all right, let me give this a shot. I shifted to wrestling, did two years of wrestling. And that was a change of pace for sure.

• 40:14Jocko Willink?

  How'd you do in wrestling?

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Good. I, I won first in CIF, right, Southern Section, third place in Masters and much as most of Southern California. And then ranked fourth in state, went to state, lost to some stud, went to Nationals. I think I got like ninth in state and then went to Nationals. And then got rolled up by like a two-time Nevada State champion. I got crated all that. I'm like, dude, these guys know what they're doing. So at the, at the local and California and Southern California level, I was able to hack the whole system because I'm over here with my butterfly guard. My hooks and my guard and my mount control and my back control. So I was able to put a spin on wrestling that really they weren't used to. It was like wrestling in Alien. And I told Coach Hazel, I said, here's the problem. I'll wrestle. But I can't practice every single day because I'm running the family business.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  I leave school, I have lunch and I go to class at four o'clock. I'm teaching kids all the way till nine o'clock. Group classes and private classes. Cause I'm running this business with my brother. And he goes, all right, Henry, as long as you keep winning, you don't have to come to practice. Just show up at the meets and if you win those meets, you just keep showing up to those. And I said, we got ourselves a deal. So I did two years of wrestling with no wrestling. Jiu Jitsu and hooks. And there were many times where I would pull guard. He's like, don't lay on your back. And I'm like butterfly sweep into mount. And he's like, yeah, hold him. So I basically just kind of hacked that whole my whole way through that. I didn't really take the wrestling serious. I just applied my skills in that environment. And I was happy with it and it really taught me how to turn the switch on because wrestling pace and Jiu Jitsu pace.

• 41:39Jocko Willink?

  Totally different.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Jiu Jitsu, I'll lay down for 90 minutes, bro, and I'll just choke you at the very end. Wrestling is like six minutes. If you don't mount on this guy in six minutes, you're going to lose by points. Go. So it taught me, it was, it was a beneficial shift in my timing and my energy and my explosiveness. Um, that I was, I was grateful for that to show up when it didn't.

• 41:55Jocko Willink?

  When you go to a wrestling tournament in California right now, like this, this day and age, you will see Jiu Jitsu.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:03Jocko Willink?

  Like the kids just, there's so many kids come from Jiu Jitsu and they go into wrestling. And so you see a lot of butterfly sweeps. It's kind of crazy. You see mount pins. Like that's not a normal thing in wrestling.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:14Jocko Willink?

  But it is in Southern California. You see people get mounted pins. It's kind of ridiculous. So you're working all day. I mean, all night. You're going to school all day. Are you, what are you, are you have any, uh, normal, norm, normalcy in your life? Do you, are you into music? Are you?

• 42:32Speaker 01

  No music.

• 42:33Jocko Willink?

  Nothing else?

• 42:33Speaker 01

  No music. Uh, it was that, that particular time as Hoist kind of stepped out and me and Hedo took the lead. It was crazy. Like I didn't even do homework at home. I would go at lunch. I would go to the library to do my homework. Because I knew I had to go run the family business at night and I took pride in getting good grades in school. Hedo, not so much, but that was his choice. So I like, I cared about doing well. So. I just had to make things work and then I would go teach for five, six hours a night and then go to school the next morning and do it again and know that that was the routine. So it was like a full-time school and really a full-time teaching job. Um, and then I graduated and the idea of going to college or not was a very tough decision as well because here I am

• 43:14Speaker 01

  running this family business, but also I'm in a position where academically I would qualify, got several colleges interested in scholarships for wrestling. Because my academics were there and the wrestling performance was there. So I was like, man, there's opportunity to go to college. I'd be the first one here in the U S to do it. My dad went to college in Brazil. Should I do that? So there was all these mixed feelings about it, but the conclusion was that I know what I need to do.

• 43:37Jocko Willink?

  The conclusion was jujitsu.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  I hadn't, yeah, you can't, I couldn't leave for four years. At that critical time, the whole business would have suffered and and, and might've been, it might've, might've been the end of the rainbow there for the Gracie Academy as a standalone jujitsu business. So I chose to stay. I learned everything just running that business. I made every mistake imaginable. Um, and then, you know, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, after four or five years.

• 44:01Jocko Willink?

  Wasn't your dad like overseeing the business side or was he kinda like?

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's tough, right? Because it's such a, it's such a human interaction-based business that he was already, I think in his fifties or late forties. Hoise and Kaiki were the ones teaching most of the classes. So when they stepped out, he was not really a figure on the mats in a prominent way. So the people aspect of our business was really just a void. So me and Hidon filled that void. And then since we were the ones interacting with the students, he was largely on the administrative side. He's there. But really it's a people business, right? We're in the people business. We just happen to teach jujitsu and those connections matter so much. So he was there as a supervisory role, but in terms of what are we gonna do to grow this business to a level? That it will allow us to stay together and prosper compared to what you see so often in jujitsu, which is like

• 44:49Speaker 01

  splintering, splintering, everyone do their own thing, everyone spread, everyone move off and leave each other. So that was my thing. I'm like, look, eighteen years old, we started running it. By twenty-two, twenty-three, I had kinda popped my head up. We had built our confidence. I was a black belt now. The students who stayed loved us and the students who left, left. But after three or four years, we were still around two hundred and twenty-five students and that's when I was like, hold on. It really kind of rattled me because I said, we took over, we had about 200 students when we started running this. We're at about 225, but several years have passed. What is going on? So that's when we started asking all the right questions of saying, wait a minute. How is the student experience in this building? How are we treating these students from the first phone call, from the first interaction, the first class certainly? And how are, where are we losing them?

• 45:32Speaker 01

  So we started running the business like an actual business and really asking ourselves the right questions. And then everything started to change. We rewrote how we teach beginners, we rewrote how we teach kids. We rewrote how we introduce people, how we talk to people on the phone, everything. And then in 18 months, we were at 750 students pushing beyond that. Once we decided to start asking the right questions and we grew out of that location, we moved to the Artesia Boulevard location. After 17 years in the first location, we moved to Artesia. And it was a larger school, a larger mat, we needed the space. And then we kind of found our rhythm and we were so successful in our revamping of how we run a jujitsu business that we finally decided to start licensing our programs and our methodology to schools all over the world.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  And that was in, you know, 2008, 2009. And now we're 250 schools deep and our school in Torrance has 2,000 students. So we figured out, we, we, we jujitsued jujitsu school operations, right? Like we really just started to be analytical and technical and seeking more efficient processes and learning from our mistakes and I'm very happy with where it's landed.

• 46:38Jocko Willink?

  So your competition life, I think, did you really compete that much before Brown Belt? Cause I know kind of the first big, as far as I know, the first big win you had in competition was as Brown Belt in like IBJJF, right? Is that, or did you compete before that, but it was just kind of?

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, there was.

• 47:00Jocko Willink?

  Were you competing the whole time and I just don't know about it?

• 47:02Speaker 01

  I competed, I competed at Blue and Purple Belt and Brown Belt, different regional, different tournaments. Jeff Higgs, I think I competed against Jeff a couple of times.

• 47:09Jocko Willink?

  How'd you do?

• 47:10Speaker 01

  I beat him. Oh. Yeah, he was cool. He was really kind, but I think I choked him a couple of times. He was a strong guy, man. He's awesome. Great face and just like so stable. Um, so Jeff a couple of times and then uh Pan Ams, I fought a former world or world champion Fabio Leopoldo. Beat him as a black belt very early in my black belt career. So nothing too crazy. Um, you know, I I scratched that itch. Uh, and then it was interesting because around nineteen years old, I actually suffered a herniated disc from uh training incidents. And in my L five S one lower back and I had surgery and then that prevented me from doing Jiu Jitsu for ten months. So that was kind of for me a big paradigm shift where I said, wait a minute.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  I suffered an injury as a teenager, as a late teenager here, that will affect me for ten months. What happens if this happens when I'm thirty or when I'm forty? Where I suffer an injury or something happens in my life that will prevent me from using this Swiss Army knife to make a living every single day? Like I believe I need to. So for a Jiu Jitsu teacher, your body is the only tool you need and the only tool you can't be without. So I really, at a very early age, I started asking questions about, wait a minute, this is, this, this, this doesn't work. Like I can't get injured and be sidelined. This is crazy. And that's when I realized, okay, what's the landscape right now? Because remember, growing up in the UFC.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Kind of the reality of our families fighting, Hoist is fighting, UFC is going. My dad was involved in all that. My dad sold his part, but it was still happening and all these people are fighting. Very much the question in my head was, is my future? A fighter? Do you go fight? And that's how you pay your bills. That's you entertain and you fight and you train every single day to go fight some other guy and you beat him. Is that my destiny to do that until I'm forty and then retire and hope to have enough money? And. When you really assess the landscape, two factors played it. Number one was this injury. I went, man, this is crazy because if you get injured, you're out of the game. And number two was when you look at the landscape of who was fighting in the UFC when I was 19, 20, 21.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Now, we're talking 10 years after the UFC's inception. When you look at who's fighting now, it no longer was a matter of karate versus taekwondo versus jiu-jitsu. It was karate, taekwondo, and jiu-jitsu, and wrestling, and kickboxing, all blended into the same person, fighting each other with all very much the same skill sets with slight variations from person to person based on their historical upbringing in martial arts. So I'm fighting against guys who very much believe what I believe, which is jiu-jitsu is the best. And historically, in the Gracie family, going all the way back, that really wasn't what the fight was about. It was about proving that jiu-jitsu is better than whatever else you're doing. But if we both believe in this religion of jiu-jitsu, then we're good. Like, yo, I believe too. Cool. Unless it's a personal thing, right? Unless there's a bad blood and there's a personal thing.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  But really, when it comes to the Gracie Challenge matches, it was bring me someone who doesn't believe that this is the best, and let's prove it to them. So once the MMA and the UFC was absent of that reality, I went, man, so I'm not even fighting for jiu-jitsu anymore. I'm fighting for me, only me, to make my money, to pay my bills. And I thought, listen, that's commendable. And the people who do that requires a level of discipline and dedication and expertise in their craft. That is, right, it's unbelievable what it takes. We've all seen that. But I don't know if that's gonna be, if that's the end of my road here, if that's the path I want to live. So instead, I looked at the landscape and said, man, jiu-jitsu is known worldwide,

• 50:42Speaker 01

  but there is no really structured dissemination of this art. Anybody can teach, anybody goes this. If I know a friend who has a friend from Brazil, he'll teach you over here. This guy knows that, right? Back in those days, it was just like wherever you could get it. So it was clear that there was a demand for jiu-jitsu, but there wasn't a supply, an effective supply chain. So I thought, man, if we could really organize, right? In the wake of this accident as well, if I could organize jiu-jitsu in a way where everything that I've ever learned could be put online. In linear fashion, so that anyone, anywhere in the world could log on and watch lesson one. And once they finish lesson one, watch lesson two. Which builds on lesson one. And do that all the way through every skill that I've ever learned in this family. I would be doing a great service, because if I get hit by a truck.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Then someone can log in and see Henner's path through jiu-jitsu and Hiron's path through jiu-jitsu and learn the art very much the way we learned it. And it's forever, right, immortalized in this, in this online linear curriculum. And that's where Gracie University was born, but it was fueled by this fear that if something happens to me where I can't do jiu-jitsu anymore, how can I preserve everything that I've ever learned? Um, especially in the wake of that accident and that, uh, that injury that sidelined me for so long. And today, you know, Gracie University is really the central communication medium, this website. Where all of our certified training centers, that's where they get their information. People who don't have a school near them are learning in their garages. For all over the world, three hundred and ninety thousand students in a hundred and ninety-six countries. Learning, they've opened up a room, they put some mats down, and they do jiu-jitsu.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  And that all came out of this realization that someone's got to be responsible for organizing this and letting people have access all over the world. And if I get injured again, at least I can say I documented everything I knew.

• 52:23Jocko Willink?

  So you focus, you decide to focus, and you just explained, you decide to focus on being a teacher and spreading the word of jiu-jitsu and spreading the knowledge of jiu-jitsu. And so this starts in your academy. The Gracie University, it used to be the Gracie Academy, right? And now it's Gracie University. The headquarters is up there in LA. And, and so then from there, what came? Did you start with the, the, uh, training centers? The Gracie Training Centers, the Gracie Certified Training Centers? And then the Gracie garages, what are the, what are those two things about?

• 52:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so once we refined the curriculum internally for one school in Torrance to a degree where we felt comfortable, this is how beginners should learn jiu-jitsu for the greatest retention and for the greatest preservation of these, right, fledgling jiu-jitsu journeys where they're so fickle, right? Someone has a bad experience, they're gone. You see it here, I'm sure, where it's like, one bad training day on a third or fourth class, and you'll never see that person again on the jiu-jitsu mats. So once we cracked the code on how to avoid that high attrition so commonly associated with jiu-jitsu. Then we began licensing those programs out to these other schools, these certified Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Training Centers.

• 53:29Jocko Willink?

  Now, were those, were those things that you first? Gave out, like, let's say it was 2006, is that, were these things going on in 2006?

• 53:36Speaker 01

  2008 was the problem, yeah, we changed it internally, 2005, 2006, we changed it, it was successful for a couple of years, and then we licensed it out.

• 53:43Jocko Willink?

  So 2008, if I'm, wanted, I want to be a Gracie certified gym or whatever, how do, how do you teach me, do I have to go to your academy, how does that work? Because we don't have online yet, right?

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Yes, initially, the very, very beginning, we didn't have online, so we said, look, we want to certify some people, and a lot of these people had other martial arts backgrounds, you might own a karate school, we want to certify you to teach just a curriculum for beginners, 36 techniques, very much like we do with law enforcement, right? You're not a master, you're not a black belt, but you can teach someone a beginner curriculum, and then as you involve, as you evolve your skillset and grow, you can grow your level of certification. So someone comes in, says, hey, I want to, I for jujitsu at my karate school, you learn 36, Gracie Combatives is this beginner program, 36 techniques. Once you learn those 36 techniques, we then teach you how to administer and teach that program, and only that program. And then they learn that material, they go back, and now they're teaching it.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  In the very beginning, they were white belts, we, people left us as white belts with a few stripes, and say, hey, just go teach these beginner techniques, and nothing else. But what happened is, once Gracie University, the online came into play, we said, look, instead of someone coming here, spending, you know, 80 hours to learn these 36 techniques, learn them on your own, learn them wherever you are, because then you don't have to leave your family for so much time. Once you learn the material, demonstrate proficiency, either by going to an existing school, or by sending in a video where you show me that you know these 36 moves, and then you come to California only to learn how to teach them. So now someone can take a year, six months to a year, to learn this little basic curriculum, and then they come to California to learn the teaching methodologies, and then once they do that, they're Level 1 Certified Training Center. Now, many of these schools are brown and black belts, much higher skill level, but

• 55:23Speaker 01

  they don't have the structure, they suffered from what we suffered from, which is, Henry, I've had a school, I've been under so-and-so, member of the Gracie family, affiliated for the last 17 years, and I have 112 students. How is that possible? You're teaching Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in America, the hottest martial art in the hottest market, with the number one promotional vehicle, the UFC, and then you and Joe's podcast, number two and three, right? In terms of like, bringing attention to Jiu-Jitsu, and you can't get more than 112 people to want to practice this art in your community? Something is wrong, not with Jiu-Jitsu, but with how you're delivering it. So many guys would come in with lots of Jiu-Jitsu background, but no business acumen, and no knowledge of how to deliver Jiu-Jitsu

• 56:07Speaker 01

  in a way that makes it safe and structured for beginners. So they would come get certified, and they would go back, and someone like that could be a higher level of certification because they had that previous knowledge. So on the website, they'd be listed differently than someone who's only teaching Gracie Combatives and only teaching children Gracie Bullyproof, like simple, basic beginner curriculums.

• 56:25Jocko Willink?

  So, so then, once you have that thing going, well, so, hold on, what's a Gracie Garage?

• 56:30Speaker 01

  Gracie Garage, so people, Gracie University online, hundreds of thousands of people want to learn from home. Most of them don't have a school near them, right? Some of them will go to just a random local BJJ school, right? Where they'll go in and say, "Hey, I want to learn. I watched the Gracie University online. I want to train with you guys. Can I train here?" "Yes, great." They become a student, and we never hear about them. Some of them see what we do online. They like the methodology, they like the safety, they like the self-defense emphasis in the beginner program. Then they go to a BJJ school, and they go, "Man, this is not resembling what I saw in those videos." And I want to do that, because that's what I believe Jiu-Jitsu should be for me. I'm older, I'm out of shape, and it feels safer. Or the curriculum emphasizes what I care about. So then they'll say, "Hey, even though there's a BJJ school here, I want to learn on my own because I want to follow this curriculum."

• 57:14Speaker 01

  So they don't have a training partner. So what we created was the opportunity for anyone at home, anywhere in the world, who has access to the curriculum, who has training mats 10 by 10, 100 square feet, which is smaller than this room, 10 by 10 mats, the curriculum, and a poster of my grandfather in their garage or in their room. If you have those three things, you can apply for Gracie Garage status. Now, what is a Gracie Garage? It's an unofficial at-home training center for like-minded Gracie University members who just want to collaborate to learn together in the absence of an instructor, but they just need a body because their wife isn't interested in rolling with them on the floor outside of the bedroom, right? Like, that's it, like, so...

• 57:55Jocko Willink?

  So it's like a networking?

• 57:57Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a, it's a, yeah, it's a totally networking play, and it pays homage to the Gracie Garage, but none of these have certified instructors. Now, the beautiful thing is... It's a great way for someone to say, "Man, I need a partner." So they list themselves and then they get inquiries from people. Now, their address isn't publicized, but there's a comment and like a direct chat feature where I could say, "Hey, Chaco, I see you have a Gracie Garage. Can I come out?" And you would go, "Well, I don't know you, so let's go meet for coffee." And we sit down, or "Let's go meet for some Chaco Fuel." And we sit down and we have a conversation and you feel my vibe. And if you like it, you invite me to the house for a training session. And before you know it, not only are we best friends, we're recruiting other people. And now there's 17 people in this Gracie Garage doing Gracie combatives in the absence of a school that they want to train at and they're building. And then in many cases, this has happened, where these garages exist for 12 months, a year,

• 58:42Speaker 01

  year and a half, the people who run these garages become so fanatical about the curriculum and about their progress, and they actually make measurable progress. And they become good at jiu-jitsu in their house. Then they apply to come do the instructor certification program. Level one, basic. They go back, they open a school, those 17 garage members, they get a discount on the membership for the first year, and then they start paying full price after that. They have all these built-in students, they tell all their friends, and it turns into a for-profit business. So Gracie Garage has become, that Gracie Garage classification has become the seeding program for so many certified training centers today that started. And then guys grow their businesses like this. Apple Valley, California, Johnny Vazquez is a great example.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  Corporate America, full-on, well-paying job, starts a Gracie Garage, starts training, moves out of it to open a school once he gets certified as a Blue Belt. And then in the first three years as a Blue Belt, after opening his certified training center, surpasses 350 students as a Blue Belt. Then he gets his Purple Belt, continues to grow, changing locations. And now, I just talked to him last week, he's pushing 750 students as a Brown Belt. And he had to quit his job because the amount of time that work took was taking him away from growing the school, and now he's making more money than he ever has. But he's running a jiu-jitsu business, doing what he loves, and he has like 10 or eight other instructors who've been through the same certification process, and he's scaling his business and growing it. Next for him is going to be to open multiple locations.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  And he's in a neighborhood with UFC fighters, other Black Belt gym owners, BJJ schools. He's not out in the middle of nowhere. There's actual schools within miles of his location, and he's the most successful school in Apple Valley, the most successful martial arts school as a Brown Belt. So, all of this because... Not only Johnny's hard work ethic and dedication to the process, but these systems that we developed that then we said, hey, we can't be the only ones. And I gotta say, like, coming up in this family, there's very much a feeling of if we don't do it, it's not right. Only we can do it right. Only we can do it the best. Only we can deliver. So I have to say that there was certainly some mold breaking that me and Hidon had to do

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  to get those who came before us to agree. Number one, to do online learning, right? Because there was some heavy scrutiny there. And number two, to allow other schools to be certified with our name and with our programs. Because, oh no, they're never gonna do it right. They're gonna violate this. They're gonna break that. They're gonna do it wrong. They're gonna water it, everything down. And I said, unfortunately, if we have that mindset, we will remain as one school forever. And other organizations which trust in the other people more are gonna grow more effectively. And then at the end of the day, we just box ourselves out of the entire jujitsu growth opportunity because of this feeling of if it's not 100%, no, they can't do it. My theory is no. If they can do it 80% in the beginning, they'll reach their 100% over time.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  And we have to delegate, and we have to permit, and we have to trust that they're gonna do the right thing. Now, in these 250 schools, we've been burnt sometimes. We've had people who've made terrible mistakes as leaders, and we've had to terminate those relationships. But would I take it all back? No way. Because the tens of thousands of students at these schools who are benefiting from our processes, right? And all the lives and the letters and all the happy changes that have happened as a result of us trusting in these instructors all over the world, many of whom are the same taekwondo, karate, kickboxing instructors who 20 years ago were on the other end of the challenge match. But now, they're not only not our enemies, they're actually our needed allies in the global expansion of the way that we teach jujitsu.

• 1:02:16Jocko Willink?

  How did you come about with the online Gracie University? So gracieuniversity.com?

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:23Jocko Willink?

  This is your online training protocol. The one thing I will say is, you know, from the perspective of the rest of your family looking at you like, you can't teach this stuff online. This is before people understood what you can get online and you can get all kinds of stuff online. There's people that have fought the UFC that only, I mean, even Evan Tanner, remember Evan Tanner?

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:45Jocko Willink?

  Evan Tanner, they're like, hey, where'd you learn jiu-jitsu? He's like, the videos, like the Gracie in action video. Like, he was a wrestler, but he learned jiu-jitsu from watching those Gracie in action videos. That's where he learned from. And so now, and then you've got other, other fighters out there that have learned moves and learned jiu-jitsu. And they, where'd you learn that from? Oh, I learned it from YouTube. So I think there was a, maybe a lack of vision. And I can put myself in this category. You know, you think, how did I learn jiu-jitsu? That must be the only way to learn jiu-jitsu is to have somebody grab your arm and put it over here and grab your, yeah, put your weight over here and physically do it with you. Not understanding that you could sit down, you could watch a video and you could go, hey, come here for a minute, buddy. Let me do this, do it to me, do it, try it again. Oh, they, they said, oh, they're real specific about putting your wrist over here. Okay, how's that feel?

• 1:03:30Jocko Willink?

  Oh, oh yeah, that definitely, okay. So you can do it. It takes a little bit more effort. Takes, it almost takes a more studious mindset, you know, to learn that way. You can kind of be a knucklehead like me and go to a jiu-jitsu class and you're gonna learn. Like, you're gonna, you're gonna learn it. When you start, cause I do this now too, obviously. Look at videos, go online, look, dissect what's happening. You have to be more engaged mentally to learn that way. But there's no doubt that you can learn by watching videos. So how did you come to that conclusion to start the Gracie University online?

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question. And when it all began, there was a lot of scrutiny, whether or not you could actually learn online. And The need for the online university I have explained, which is I got injured. And I said, if I don't document this stuff forever, it may never be documented. And if I can't train for the rest of my life. So it was more of like a fear, right? Like a productive paranoia. What if I can't teach anymore? So let me capture everything I've learned and leave it for my kids and their kids and their kids and their kids. Preservation of history was my mindset because my grandfather didn't document everything he learned. My dad did not document everything he learned. My uncles were not documenting. In fact, they were very anti-video of any sort. Not my father.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  He had some VHSs, instructional and Hoist was in on those. But I have other uncles who were, not only were they not producing videos, they believed that no, there's only one way for this information to be transferred is by touching another person. And there's an honor and there's a humility and there's a respect in that engagement that can never be violated.

• 1:05:08Jocko Willink?

  There, wasn't there also like, let's keep this stuff for us.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  Well, let me tell you. So there was. So let me tell you about this one. So Gracie Combatives is, was our, is our beginner program. The first iteration of that program was produced in 2009, 2008. And we just right now finished production and we'll be releasing in the next two months. Gracie Combatives 2.0, after 13, 14 years, we're reshooting that program. What makes Gracie Combatives so unique is it's the first attempt at an instructional series that is a complete like closed system that is linear and builds off itself, right? People do a lot of instructional and most of them are online now. This is even DVDs when people did them even during DVD era and still online to this day. What are most websites? A bunch of videos, you log on. Do you want to learn sweeps or do you want to learn arm bars?

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  And you click a little filter, you write something in, it pops up sweeps or arm bars. And then you see a group class of an instructor teaching a technique in front of 20, 30 students. And you're just happen to be a fly on the wall, watching that instruction to a group. That model, the problem is it doesn't consider the student who is actually using this material as their sole source of instruction. It's ideal for students who train somewhere else, who want to supplement their training with additional details that you're specifically good at, you know, guillotine shows. I'm going to watch Jaco's tutorial and learn guillotines. You already know what you need when you went to Jaco's website. So for us, I went, no, that's not good enough. We need to create a curriculum that anyone who is intrigued by jujitsu, for any of the avenues and the marketing and the UFC, who says, I'm going to go learn jujitsu online.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  Lesson one has to be, hi, welcome to jujitsu.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  Teach the trap and roll. Lesson two has to build on that lesson one. So that linear progression was very, very new. It's very, and the reason why other people don't do it, I'll just put this out there. Is it's so much work. When you film a group class, I'm already teaching that group class. So it's much easier to turn on a camera and just film what I'm already gonna do for a room full of paying students. When we filmed our linear curriculum, me and Hedo had to budget time separate from all the classes we ran every single day. We had to budget standalone time to film classes that were only meant to be watched in order by a global audience of students who wanted to learn where they didn't have accredited schools that they believed were gonna offer what they needed.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  So it was so much, it's like having another full-time job versus double dipping on my existing full-time job by just filming the classes. So that's what we aimed for, that's what makes Gracie University unique is everything is in order. And that's what makes Gracie Combatives at the time unique. So when we came out with Gracie Combatives, the original DVD program.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Members of my family. The feeling was, you don't need to do this. This is too much. If you do this program with this level of guided clarity and linear learning progression opportunity for a student with this much detail, why would they come to our schools? That was said to me. And I went, holy cow. Here I am, all I'm trying to do is do this family proud and like teach jujitsu in a way and get it out to the world, right? Do what my grandfather wants, just share jujitsu with the world, empower the weak against the strong. And I got an uncle saying that they don't want, I have a lot of uncles, so I can say that and no one knows what I'm talking about, okay? And I won't tell you which one. He was a badass though, and they all are.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  So I have an uncle saying, hey, Henry, this is too much. The detail and the clarity of the curriculum is too precise. They don't need a teacher with this level of clarity. And all of a sudden I was conflicted. Cause on one hand, I don't wanna disappoint my uncles and like feel like I'm the black sheep that's doing something that's gonna take food off their table. No way. I just want people who don't have access to my uncles to be able to learn jujitsu also. So it was such a crazy dilemma. And there was enough support and enough in the family as well. There was enough support for the curriculum and the way we approached jiu-jitsu online and on DVDs at the time, that we went ahead with it. Now, what I now know in retrospect,

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  and to all those people who said, "No, you can't learn online and this is crazy." And I think some of them really believed that you couldn't learn online. Others were fearful that if it's true that you could learn online, then why would you ever go to a school? There's this mixed bags and some people will say, "You can't learn online." But really what they're feeling is, "Please make it so that learning online is impossible." Because if it is, why would anyone go and just not learn online with you guys? I know it was mixed emotions for everyone, but here's what I now know after the fact in retrospect, is that 5% of people are capable of learning on their own, at home, with a training partner that they found on a website, off a website, through a linear online curriculum.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  1 out of 20 people have the discipline, the studious personality, engaged ability of block it out and I'm gonna do this. I now know that to be a fact because I know the numbers of our website and I see how many people sign up and I see how many people stick it through all the way. It's 5%, give or take. So, 100 people go to the website, 5 of them see it through and go all the way. 95 out of those 100, many things happened to them, but it's my belief that they watched the first 3, 4, 5 lessons that are free. We make the first ones free, you walk on, you say, "Oh, this is awesome." We try to hook them and then they sign up for a membership. The 95% of those people say, "This is amazing, I want more of this, but I want to learn in person because my wife doesn't want to train or my husband doesn't want to do it, or my sons don't want to do it, or my daughters." So, "Let me go find a school."

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  And they show up at their local BJJ school, largely because they liked what they saw, and we don't have a school in their area, if they did, they'd probably go to that, but we only have 200 schools and in the whole world, that's very little. So, 90, I would say 95% of the time, there isn't a certified Gracie school of ours there. So, they go to the random BJJ school, they show up saying, "Yeah, I've seen some Gracie videos over there and I want to learn jiu-jitsu." "I got my introduction with Henner and Hidon online, but I want to sign up for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu because you're in my neighborhood." Right? Proximity matters in this case. And they sign up. So not only is it not true, you can actually learn online because I've seen those who've committed to the process. Not only was that not true, it also wasn't true that we were stealing

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  students from the brick and mortar schools. The opposite was true. We became, I think, pre your podcast and pre Rogan doing what he's doing, we were a top driver of people into jiu-jitsu with the Gracie breakdowns from YouTube where we would break down these UFC fights and draw people in, and then we'd send them to the website. They'd watch the lessons online, and then right after, they'd go find a school near them. So I took great pride in being an ambassador for jiu-jitsu who sucked people into the art with very good breakdowns, and then guided them on how to solve, see these first few lessons and where to end up. So, and many people in the time since then have come to me and said, Henner, man, I started with your breakdowns and I started online with you and I found a school nearby. Which school? A random jiu-jitsu over here. And I'm like, dude, that's freaking dope. I'm responsible. I got you in. And I never got a letter from the owner of that

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  school saying, Henner, thank you for this student. And maybe it was the same guy who was saying, you can't learn online, but I'm okay with that because I know what I've done and I know where I sit. And the irony in all of this is today, every one of my family members, everyone has a website, everyone's teaching jiu-jitsu online, and I'm just like, cool, alright, they came around, especially post-COVID, right? Post-COVID, everyone was like, Hedo and Henner, we're on to something. Let's build these websites because we can't teach in brick and mortar. This is crazy. So thankfully, everyone's on that page now, and learning online is one of the most reliable ways, and everyone agrees, and happy to say, we still do a great job in terms of presenting it linearly, but there's a lot of other great resources. You can find whatever you're looking for now. And our focus,

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  right, if for those who don't know, is really that beginner experience, whether it's a woman, whether it's a police officer, whether it's a child, whether it's a man, anyone who wants to learn jiu-jitsu, that first six to 12 months, if it's done correctly, will set them up for, train for the rest of their life. If it's not, they quit, they don't give it a second chance in most cases, and we never hear about them. The, I believe, the skeletons in the jiu-jitsu graveyard, the volume of those skeletons are greater than the number of people who do jiu-jitsu today. More have tried and stopped than who currently practice. And I'm trying to, I'm trying to change

• 1:13:31Jocko Willink?

  So you keep talking about Gracie Combatives. Well, explain Gracie Combatives.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, um, post UFC, one, two, uh, US Army Rangers, right? They recruited the Gracie family to go down there and to begin teaching these soldiers, right? And at that time, very much like military things are, it's a one-week thing. Let's go do jiu-jitsu for a week. Let's go do this shooting for a week. Let's go snipe for a week. So jiu-jitsu for a week, my dad, Hoist, other members of the family are going down there, teaching these Rangers. And low and behold, right, as you know well, over time, the entire US Army, modern Army Combatives program is rewritten to incorporate, um, you know, the Gracie jiu-jitsu techniques that were taught to them in the early 90s there. And when we're teaching in that type of constrained environment, where you only have so much time to teach a soldier,

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  you can't just say, "BJJ, vast art, thousands of techniques, let's just do jiu-jitsu." You can't do that. You have to say, "Wait a minute, you only have 40 hours? What can we teach you in 40 hours? That if you get in a fight six months from now, and all you have is that, you're gonna survive that fight." And that is the essence of what the Gracie Combatives program is. It's a mindset of, number one, the adversary is not a jiu-jitsu chess player like you, right? We're not playing the game of jiu-jitsu, because that takes, you know, countless years to prepare for, and there's infinite techniques, and there's always new ones being invented. What does a beginner need to learn in the least amount of time, that if they get into a fight six months from the date of commencing their jiu-jitsu practice, they're gonna survive against someone 20 pounds heavier than them, who's trying to just punch their head into the pavement?

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  So that same mindset that we had with the Army, um, we decided, "Man, let's make a program for beginner civilians, where they can learn," and we named it Gracie Combatives, because the mindset was the same, and many of the techniques, I'd say 90% of the techniques in Gracie Combatives are the same as the ones we originally introduced to the Army in the early 90s, in this mindset of, "Least amount of time, maximum preparation. If that's all you have, you're gonna be okay." You're not a world champion, you're not competing in jiu-jitsu, but you understand distance, you understand leverage, you understand timing, in a way that the average person who does not know these tools won't have the resources to hurt you. Right, in any significant way. That's it. So then when we started teaching this to the civilian sector, we made a very specific curriculum.

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  And people, that's what we did in 2005, 2006. When I realized, man, this is crazy. Like, we're not growing as a business. We put in Gracie Combatives, this beginner program, these 36 techniques, and we put them on a card system. And every time you did a class, you got a checkmark for that particular class. And there was three boxes next to every class, and you wanted to do each class three times. And the genius of the program was, you didn't have to do those 23 classes in order. You could do them out of order, any sequence. Every class you came to, if it's class 17 today, we're gonna see the leg hook takedown from standing clinch, and we're gonna see the kimura from the guard. Done, that's the curriculum. And if you've already done this class, great, you're gonna get it again. If you haven't done this class, we're gonna teach it in a way that requires no prerequisites to make sense of that class.

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  So now you have this beginner program where someone can show up anytime into this curriculum, never feel confused, overwhelmed, left behind, incapable, because we're speaking a language that we call LCD language, lowest common denominator. So everyone in that class is being spoken to as if they've never seen the class. And those who know the class knew what they showed up for, because it's on the schedule. And to make matters even stronger, every single one of our members has access to the Gracie University online curriculum. So students can preview that lesson in full detail, or review it after the fact if they forget a detail. And that reduces anxiety so much, because we're in a very, uh, kind of educationally stimulated society. Brazil wasn't like that. Brazilians go to the beach, feet sandy, show up, you know, white dust them off on the mat and do some jiu-jitsu,

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  and whatever we learn tomorrow, doesn't matter. We do something different than we did today, it's all no big deal. But in America, if you have a beginner show up somewhere in a place of study, of educational pursuit, and you say to them, hey, in order to move on to the next level, just keep showing up. One day I'll let you know when you're ready. Which is how 99% of BJJ schools function. Just keep doing the thing, and then one day I'll let you know when you're ready for the next thing. No, imagine going to Stanford and they just said, "Keep coming to classes and one day you'll get your degree." No, you have to tell them what they need to do and they will commit to that process. So Jiu-Jitsu was largely absent of that. And our good friends, the Valente brothers in Miami, had their own version of a beginner curriculum like this,

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  where it was clear what you needed to do, there was a set number of techniques, different techniques than Gracie Combatives, but a curriculum nonetheless. And they had success with it and that's when I was like, "Man, let me try that with Gracie Combatives, these military kind of rooted techniques and let's offer this to civilians." And it worked and that, putting that program in for beginners, is what took us from that 225 to the 750 plus in 18 months. And that's when I went, "Holy cow, if a beginner comes in and sees this and knows what they're gonna get and is this stimulated to show up?" And it's almost like it gamified it, because there's a check mark, there's a box, and every class they come to, we check the box for them, the receptionist does. So they see their card filling up and then once you fill up this column over here, 20 classes or more, you're eligible for a stripe on your white belt.

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  And you keep filling all of this up and at the end of this, once you complete all of this, which is typically 8 to 12 months, there's a test you can take demonstrating proficiency in these 36 techniques. And if you pass that, you earn your Gracie Combatives belt, which is a white belt with a blue stripe through the middle. And then we added this into the equation and it became so clear for the student what they had to pursue. And then once they earn that, then they move on to the advanced Jiu-Jitsu class, where now they're rolling intensely with other training partners, blue belts and beyond, and they're kind of figuring out the deep waters of Jiu-Jitsu. And for the best analogy, you go from playing checkers to chess. You go from Gracie Combatives for another beginner, someone who doesn't know Jiu-Jitsu, to the complexities that we love so much about infinite Jiu-Jitsu and that chess match that we're so addicted to.

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  But the mistake that 99% of BJJ schools make is that that beginning doesn't exist and the chess match is the beginning. So when someone comes in, they're immediately thrown to the trenches of survival, sink or swim and you just go and figure it out? And only the strong survive and when you roll, because think about it, two grown men sitting at a desk 8 to 10 hours a day, joints are stiff, ligaments are like, they're aged ligaments. And then they sign up because they see a possibility. And they hear you enthusiastically praise jiu jitsu. They go to their local BJJ school and the coach goes in and says, and I've heard this story a thousand times. All right, guys, you're you guys about the same size. Cool. Welcome to jiu jitsu first class. We see a technique, maybe second class, third class. They might delay a little bit. Some do it on the first day. You two, we're gonna spar now. What does that mean, coach? Well, just try to beat him and you try to beat him.

• 1:20:11Speaker 01

  But I don't understand, like, I don't, how do I do that? Just don't tap out is what I've heard coaches say to beginners. So then it's and now the thing is this, you guys wanna care and you wanna go win in that engagement because the coach is watching. And it cares to be effective and you wanna be successful. But your joints aren't ready. You're not 12 years old. You're not 15 years old. You're not 21. Where those joints are just kind of pliable still, right? You're you're stiff, you're old. So now you're sparring two grown adults. Recent situation in Santa Monica, one of the cops who we know was recommended by one of my friends. Go train BJJ. Go cops need to learn jiu jitsu. He goes to the local school because everyone says to. First day they're sparring standing startup, roll. The guy falls down, posts his arm.

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  Dislocates and damages his labrum and he's gonna have to have surgery. So this is his first day trying jiu jitsu. And to me, this is where it's so sad because the art that is for everyone. Is taught in a way that makes it for the elite. And that's the saddest part. And my grandfather's not here anymore. But I always try to channel what he would want. And in my belief, it's like. He was the small, the weak, right? Jiu jitsu is the triumph of human intelligence over brute strength. But if we're not able to give it to the small, the weak, the unathletic people in society, then what service are we providing? We're giving jiu jitsu to the people who don't need it. We're giving it to the people that we need to prepare for. Instead, we're giving the, we're giving wings to the rattlesnakes. They don't need wings. They're rattlesnakes.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  So this is kind of something that I struggle with today in jiu jitsu and. Why I do the work that I do. To just try to tip the scale back because. If you're one of those people who wants to learn, but you don't feel like the school near you is safe to do so. You'll go in, you'll try a class and then you'll never do it again, you know, but if we can make sure that that initial landing is soft and so and so forgiving. And so and so contextually relevant. That's another thing. BJJ class, first day, X guard. Lapel feeding through the leg and doing this and and a beginner is saying what to themselves?

• 1:22:06Jocko Willink?

  I don't understand what's happening.

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  What does this have to do with UFC One? What does this have to do with HOICE and the Gracie Challenge matches and all the fight prowess and effectiveness that the Gracie family is known for? I don't see the connection. So for me, I'm a big one on safety. If they cannot get hurt in the first several months, you cannot. Number one. Number two is contextual relevance. It has to make sense. Every class of beginner comes to, every single word that comes out of your mouth, they have to say, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, makes sense. Give me more. I love this. I'm so glad I didn't spend time with my family tonight to come be here with you guys. I'm so glad I chose this hobby after hearing a podcast. I'm so, this is it. I want nothing more than more of this in my life.

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  Contextual relevance, and that's what the Gracie Combatives Program does for our students, is it like, it makes every class like, yo, you're in a fight. Manage the distance, manage the damage. We want to avoid the knockout, close that distance, get a hold of every fight. Every class starts with the same discussion. So everyone's being framed constantly about why we're doing this thing. And then if you shift to Women Empowered, right, Gracie Bully Proof, these other programs, all of them, there's contextual relevance with every technique taught. So the kid who's nine years old, hears a discussion about a bullying encounter or an exclusionary bullying situation, or cyberbullying, which are discussed in the classes. They role-play these scenarios in addition to doing Jiu-Jitsu.

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  And so many schools, they teach Jiu-Jitsu and then no context, just do Jiu-Jitsu and get really good. And the hope is that the child will give it the contextual relevance if they need to one day, even without being instructed on what that contextual relevance would be. Same is for women. The act of doing Jiu-Jitsu is beneficial, of course. But in the very beginning, every day they're asking themselves, should I come back tomorrow? And if the answer is, I don't know why we did this today, then you know the answer to the first question.

• 1:24:02Jocko Willink?

  How long is the bully proof program?

• 1:24:05Speaker 01

  So Gracie bully proof, we split into Matt munchkins, which is three to four, three to five years old. And then beginners, all beginners, and then five to seven is little champs. And then seven to 12 is junior grapplers. These are all entry level beginner programs. Kids come in, of course, the Matt munchkins are just playing with their parents on the mat, having fun. But five to seven and seven to 12, they're learning, they're engaging in discussions about bowling. Every class, different scenarios, what if the guy does this, what if the guy does that? What if the opponent does this, what if the bully does that? What if you're at your house and they're playing and they say, do this or you're not my friend. Let me write my name on your forehead with a sharpie or you're not my friend. And then you look straight at them, say, hey, I guess we're not friends then. Kids need to role play this.

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  Kids need to hear their voices saying these things. Because to assume that they're gonna muster up the courage and the clarity in that moment, just because they learn a few arm bars and some sweeps. There's no guarantee that that connects. But if you can have them role playing these and they're getting that same as the arm bar and a trap and roll escape or an elbow scape, those are rehearsed techniques to build muscle memory and confidence in their execution. The verbal aspect of jujitsu and boundary setting is so critical, but it's largely completely untouched in 99% of schools. So you're expecting kids to make these connections that they don't make. So in terms of the length, they stay in these entry level programs until they six, eight, 12 months, a year and a half sometimes. And then they evolve out of that to what's called the black belt club.

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  And it's a kids' club. Now you have your more advanced kids who've learned several techniques, 20, 30, 40 techniques. They've done all these role playing situations that make perfect sense for the lives that they're living. And they love them, Jaco, they lean into them. They're like, we're like, yo, the kid who's the bully? You know, pretend like you have this sharpie and like you're about to write it. And then the other kid knock it out of their hand and say, yo. If that's the case, I guess we're not friends then. So they lean into these situations and yes, you might feel silly as adults talking about this, but what's crazy is that for them, this is normal because it actually happens. Same is true for women empowered classes. When we talk about someone encroaching on their personal space. And we teach these women like, look, when someone walks towards you, you have to look them dead in the eye and say, don't get any closer.

• 1:26:17Speaker 01

  If they take one more step, you triple your escalation and your intensity in your voice. And I'm not going to do it to not pop the audio, but you freaking rip them and you say, I said back up. And you look them straight in the eye. And here's the thing, a woman might know jujitsu, but if she's never heard her voice say that. And I'm telling you right now, it's class number six in our curriculum. Is this called stop, block, frame. And my wife is the head instructor of the program. I just there to get beat up by her and play the perp. And we're doing these classes and these women, bro. We have a class of 70 women on a Tuesday night. Like tomorrow night, there'll be 70 women doing beginner jujitsu in women empowered. Role playing these situations. And I'll tell you, it's the hardest technique in the whole curriculum. For a woman to hear her voice.

• 1:26:59Speaker 01

  Uh, objecting someone's encroachment and speaking assertively and potentially disrespectfully to another human being. Cause all their lives, they might be taught, don't ruffle feathers. Don't do this, don't do that, don't be, don't cause a scene. Be pleasant, be kind, be right, be all of these things. And they're being boxed in. And for these women, they get very emotional about expressing themselves like this because they've been holding it in for so long and no one ever told them, when it comes to your person, be polite, be friendly, be cordial. And this is true for all of us. But when it comes to your personal safety, screw politeness. Do what you have to do, but someone had to teach them that. And some women are 40 years old and never were told that they're allowed to be disrespectful, they're allowed to be assertive, they're allowed to look straight in someone's face and tell them, don't take one more step.

• 1:27:43Speaker 01

  And here's the point with kids, with women, and even with men. Boundary setting is the number one self-defense tool all of us must master. Because how many fights have we avoided? Just by using our voice and saying, "Hey, listen to me. I can see you're upset. You think this was your parking spot. Do me a favor. Don't get any closer. I'm gonna move my car, but stay where you are. Don't take one more step towards me." When you can assert like that, what do they think? Number one, right, this guy's a ninja, or he's carrying a gun. It's one or the other, because there's that level of clarity and precision. Now, here's the problem with this formula of boundary setting. People typically only set boundaries that they're capable of enforcing.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  That's the truest self-defense statement, if there is one. People only set boundaries they feel capable of enforcing. You're not gonna say, "Don't take one more step." If they take another step, you don't know what the hell you're gonna do. You're completely like, "Oh, my God, panic. What are we gonna..." You don't do it. You don't do it. You never set the boundary. In fact, you never look at the person. What do they normally do? They look down, they pretend like they're on their phone, they grab their keys, they fidget, they do anything but engage with this person because they don't want, and they don't know what they would do should things get out of hand right here. But when you know what we know, and we know that we can handle this 300-pound beard from the bar down the street, gently and effectively, he's not gonna get hurt, I'm not gonna get hurt, and we're gonna take care of business. Once you know that, you can talk to the beard and say, "Listen, man, I can see you had a few too many drinks,

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  but do me a favor. Stand right where you are. Don't take one more step in my direction." And you can say it calmly. You don't have to even yell at the top of your lungs. And he goes, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm drunk, but I'm not that drunk." I know this guy means what he says right now, because the power of a boundary is directly correlated to the ability to back it up, right? You learn how to fight so you never have to, right? We built... I went to the US Air Force Base, Minot Air Force Base, one time to go teach a huge course of 100-plus airmen, sexual assault, awareness, prevention, defense techniques. And I went to the base of the commander, the office of the commander, and he shows me the map on the wall. And I see all these red dots, like chickenpox. And I said, "Commander, what is all this?" And he says, "Each one of those is like a silo, right,

• 1:29:56Speaker 01

  or whatever it is in the ground, with a nuclear warhead ready to be deployed." And I'm talking thousands of dots on one base. It's all of like Minot, right? And I go, "But Commander, like, how many of these would it take to like end mankind?" And he was like, probably like six, whatever the number is, like a nominal figure. And I said, "Why so many?" And he said, "This is why we don't have World War III." And then it went jujitsu. Bro, you learn how to fight, you prepare for war so you don't have to go to war. Right? And that's such a massive component in all of this. So when we talk about kids, when we talk about women, there's an initial threshold of time that someone needs to spend

• 1:30:38Speaker 01

  building their confidence, learning this idea of boundary setting for their own safety. Once they find their voice, they're safe. We have a kid Max who just came to me two days ago, his mom Patricia. And Max is 10 years old, kindest little boy. And too kind, right? And it's one of those things where respect and kindness and politeness. And the parents raise their kids to be so sweet and so kind, and which is what we all want for our kids. But the bully sniffed that out. And the bully sniff out the weakness and they sniff out the kindness and they go, oh, there's my target. So Max was at junior guards, right? This beach thing where they swim, he's a very good swimmer. And a joke was being made. Uh, this is literally last week and a joke is being made about him. And the guy says, yeah, I have a YouTube channel. I'm going to call it Max is an idiot or whatever he says, you know? And then a friend of Max's actually said, hey, man, leave him alone.

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  And then the bully starts shoving this friend who stood up for Max. The bully starts kind of sweating him. And then Max, in this moment, and never ever has used his voice. And the mom is tormented because this guy is a chronic bullying victim. Never spoke up ever. So Max's, his friend is now being targeted. And in that moment, Max says, wow, this, I have to do something because he stood up for me. And it's not right what he's doing. So he stands up, he puts himself between the two kids. And Max says, as instructed verbatim. If you have a problem with him, you have a problem with me.

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  And the bully goes. And he just turns and he walks away. And Max's mom came to me the next day with her private class in jujitsu and she says, Henry, you have no idea what this means. We celebrated when we got home. And you have no idea what this means for me. I've put on 60, 70 pounds in the last year dealing with the bullying issues because if I have to worry about him every single day, I can't worry about me. So the fact that he did what he learned 100% as taught and it worked perfectly. He found his inner strength. He found his voice. And now that he can focus on him, I can focus on me. So this is why we do it, right? But the contextual relevance mattered to Max because it was so specific. The struggles he was having and then his ability to overcome that, his life will never be the same.

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  He now knows that on the other side of asserting yourself verbally to a bully. Most likely will be not a fight, especially if you bring the fire and you bring the conviction and the skills that he brings. Most likely, the bully doesn't want to fight because if they did, they would have just punched you in the face. They're gonna go, they want the easy target. So when you show that you're that hard target, it's not gonna continue. And in Max's cases, that's what happened. The mom was like over the moon. So that's what I hope to provide every beginner. It's not like, and you see in BJJ, there's this attitude of, oh, survival of the fittest. If you can't hang, then it's not for you. Jiu Jitsu is not for everyone, right? These are all random projections on the art that people who've joined the train along the way are making up about this. Like, yeah, this is only for the, only the strong

• 1:33:25Speaker 01

  survive. And I'm like, this is crazy. The very art that was designed to empower the weak. Those people are precluded from learning it largely because of the culture that exists in so many of these schools. And it's, again, it's kind of sad when you think about it because who really needs it isn't getting access to it.

• 1:33:45Jocko Willink?

  A lot of times when I talk about Jiu Jitsu from a self-defense perspective, one of the things that plays a huge part is if you do Jiu Jitsu, you are used to people grabbing you, you're used to the physical contact, you're used to the grind, you're used to, and if someone grabs you, you're not used to that, you don't even know what to do. Like, you're, it takes you seven seconds just to contemplate and comprehend what's going on. Whereas if you do Jiu Jitsu, someone grabs you, you actually are 100% comfortable and okay with it. And you have a plan, you know what you're gonna do, you're gonna make something happen. There's no, there's no psychological barrier that you have to break through to

• 1:34:26Jocko Willink?

  start reacting to it. So that's a huge part of it. I mean, a lot of times, I'm sure if you've never been grabbed by someone before, your immediate response is just to freeze up, mentally freeze. The other thing that I like to say, you know, I'll get asked this question, you know, okay, if you are a 110-pound woman, and you get, you get assaulted by a 220-pound guy, can that woman really stop that guy from, let's say, dragging her into a van, right? The classic, whatever horrible scenario. Can this 110-pound woman stop this 220-pound guy from grabbing her and pulling her into a van?

• 1:35:06Jocko Willink?

  First of all, what you already mentioned is part of it. If that guy approaches her and he sees that she's gonna be a problem. He's probably, when they do interviews with perpetrators, they always say they're looking for a victim that looks like a victim. That's what they're looking for. They're not looking for a hard time. Number two. Can a 110-pound woman stop a 220-pound man from grabbing her and pulling her car?

• 1:35:35Jocko Willink?

  There's a decent chance she can't. There's a decent chance she can't, but let me tell you what she can do. First of all, she can make it a problem. He's probably gonna avoid her. If he decides, no, this is the one. She is going to make that evolution last 12 seconds longer. 19 seconds longer. 7 seconds longer. 30 seconds longer. It is going to be a totally different story. And that 7 seconds is what it took for a passerby to see a license plate. That 20 seconds is what it took for a police car to roll by. That 9 seconds is what it took for a bystander that was watching, that saw this suspicious thing happening, go and intervene in the situation. So that time that you will by yourself,

• 1:36:20Jocko Willink?

  it could literally be the difference between being abducted or not being abducted. And it's the same thing with a little kid. You know, when you've got little kids, when they know what they're doing, it can take an extra... Like, go try and grab my daughter. Like, go try and grab my daughter and pull her into a van. Good luck, dude. You're gonna have problems. You're probably getting choked, to be honest with you. So, that, just to let people know that, yes, it gives you, because it gives you the confidence. And you talked about, hey, it's this sort of confidence that you have and the way you carry yourself, which, you know, I remember seeing, um, you know, like, self-defense videos in the 80s, right? And, you know, it'd be a woman that would be, you know, "No, no, no."

• 1:37:04Jocko Willink?

  It was kind of a, kind of became like a thing, right? This loud voice, this assertive voice.

• 1:37:10Jocko Willink?

  And yeah, sure, that's gonna work some of the times, but you need to have more than that. And, and that's what these techniques will give you. Maybe, look, there's a decent chance that someone, you know, you, you react correctly. A perpetrator just goes, I'm out of here. I don't, this isn't what I'm looking for. But if they are determined, it's going to cost them time. And that time could very well be the difference between a license plate being seen on someone else intervening, you, that person just saying, oh, I'm not putting up with this. So, very important to think about that. Is the woman empowered? Is that a course? Is that a, is that the same thing? Are we talking checkmarks?

• 1:37:49Speaker 01

  Yep, exactly the same. Every beginner course is the same in the sense there's a card, there's a 20 techniques, women empowered is 20 techniques, four checkboxes next to every class, and your goal is to fill in those boxes over time, every month, the lessons cycle again and again. No experience for any one of these classes. It's available online for those who don't have a school near them. And we have women all over the world doing it with their sisters, their mom, their husbands, learning these techniques as early as 12, 13 years old, 14 years old, they're doing this because that's how early this is a problem, right? For these young girls. So 100% it's the same thing, but I love what you're saying. Because there's an absolutist, kind of cohort of men online, largely men, who go, that would never work. Like, we'll show a self-defense technique of me and Eve on Instagram and like, try that against a 200-pound guy, that would never work. And there's like an absolutist

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  approach, which is if you can't beat up this man and submit him and tie him into a pretzel, then what's the point of learning jiu-jitsu? And I love what you're talking about because we explain this concept of the bystander intervention score. In fact, when a perpetrator is selecting a target, he's selecting the target as much as for who the target is, as what the opportunity around that target presents. So he's looking for the low chance of bystander intervention. If you're in a grocery store, and I'm standing shoulder to shoulder to someone, and the perpetrator is right there, and there's people walking by, the opportunity to carry out that assault is so limited because the chance of bystander intervention is so high. Same exact perpetrator, same exact potential target, put them on

• 1:39:15Speaker 01

  the path to the car, from the grocery store to the car, and he's waiting in the car right next to her. No one else is there, it's 10 o'clock at night, there's only the checkout guy and you in the parking lot. That's a whole different opportunity, so he's more likely to act in that situation. And you're right, his determination to take action in that moment is a function of his belief that the chance of bystander intervention is very low. And if that's the criteria for why he's choosing to attack in that moment, what you're saying is accurate in the sense that you don't have to beat him up. You simply have to delay his successful strategy, whatever he has planned. You have to delay that long enough to where he concludes that the chance of bystander intervention is rising by the second. For two reasons, number one, you're slowing down the progression of the assault by making base,

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  by going to the ground, by tangling up his legs, by tripping him in the process. Again, I'm not beating him up, I'm just preventing his outcome from being achievable. And then number two, you're drawing attention by yelling at the same time. You don't even need a bystander to come, you need that attacker to conclude that intervention is highly likely, and if he concludes that, he's out. And this is the best advice for women, is like you don't have to beat the guy up. You simply have to convince him in that moment that you're more headache than what he expected. He wants the attack to be fast and quiet. So what does that mean? Let's go slowly and let's go as loudly as possible. And a lot of the techniques we teach are based on this understanding.

• 1:40:41Speaker 01

  And just think of what a reduction in burden this places on the student, right? In this case, we're talking about women and sexual assault. But think about what a reduction in burden this places on someone. When they understand that victory in a fight isn't necessarily beating someone up. Victory is preventing effectiveness against you. That's a big difference, that's a big change in like the marker. Because people think of martial arts historically, what do they think? Haya, punch, kick, annihilate, chop, poke his throat, rip his heart out of his chest. You gotta annihilate and kill someone to win that fight. But what we learn through jiu-jitsu is, right? If you don't lose the fight, if you didn't die, if you didn't get abducted. And it's someone larger and stronger than you, then you won.

• 1:41:26Speaker 01

  If two people fight and nobody wins, who won that fight? I ask this question to group classes all the time. Two people fight, nobody wins, who won? The smaller person. The person who was supposed to be annihilated prevailed in preventing the larger, stronger attacker from accomplishing their objective. And most schools don't teach this mindset. The mindset is, go, go, go, go, go. Submit, annihilate, sweep, get on top, dominate, even within jiu-jitsu. Such that you're creating this mentality around people learning it for self, or applying it in self-defense, where if they don't win the fight, they lost. Where no, I think people should start with, no, if you survive and you don't lose, you won. Over time, you develop your skills so highly that you can tie someone in a pretzel with one arm and it's no big deal and he can be a big guy.

• 1:42:11Speaker 01

  It's just, it's a joke, right? At the level that we're at. But early on, think about what a reduction in burden that is for a practitioner to know that the bar for success in this martial art is simply survival in the ways that you're talking about. I love that.

• 1:42:26Jocko Willink?

  So that's the, that's the women empowered. We have the, the Gracie Survival Tactics and, and, and then the, the Bully Proof. Now, the Bully Proof, that's a curriculum as well? Like that's a card type thing?

• 1:42:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a card type thing. It's an online course, all the same, these, all these beginner programs. It's the entry portal to jiu-jitsu for people in our brick and mortar school in Torrance at all of our certified training centers. And, um, and hundreds of thousands of people online learning. Parent, teaching, child. The Gracie Bully Proof online curriculum is very much teaching the parent how to interact with the child, the way that I was interacted with, with my parents growing up. It was a game. We call these the Gracie Games. These techniques that kids learn very early on. And then what happens is you learn these Gracie Games, you start building playfulness about jiu-jitsu. Once you have that relationship with it, now we teach you really the use, the rules of engagement. Because it's one thing to teach kids techniques and not know when and how to use them. Rule number one, avoid the fight at all costs. Rule number two, if physically attacked, defend yourself.

• 1:43:25Speaker 01

  Rule number three, if verbally attacked, follow the three T steps. Talk, tell, tackle. Rule number four, never punch or kick the bully. Control and negotiate. Rule number five, when applying submissions, use minimal force and negotiate. They have to memorize and internalize this. And once we see a child has that, then they go into the junior combatives program, which is also online. They do these techniques at home. They're learning more advanced adult type techniques. And then they're just growing. And then eventually, when the parent thinks the child is ready, they evolve into our Gracie combatives and then our master cycle, kind of advanced adult curriculum. And that kid could be 12 years old and is learning adult curriculum with their parent from home.

• 1:44:00Jocko Willink?

  Now, now, hold on a second. How do you know anything about getting bullied?

• 1:44:03Speaker 01

  Holy cow, bro. Good question.

• 1:44:05Jocko Willink?

  Or is this inherent in the Gracie household?

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so people think that because I'm a Gracie, that, oh, you guys, family of legends, fighters, you never got bullied. And they're wrong. They're wrong. And, and, and the reality is the bully was in the house. Hidon was the bully. My older brother, two years older, bro.

• 1:44:25Jocko Willink?

  Cause he seemed so super freaking nice.

• 1:44:27Speaker 01

  Listen, they explained the keep it playful movement, okay? This came way later in his life. He was not playful when he was 11, bro. He was nuts. So he comes out of the womb. 23 months later, I came out. That's a big difference. That's a big advantage. That's a big head start in the race in a family of intense physical practice and jujitsu and fighting from day one. So he has essentially two more years of jujitsu at every phase of my life. So we're growing up in this crazy family, fighters everywhere, um, doing our thing. And he's just beating me up, you know, normal brother stuff. And then we're getting older and it's happening, you know, whatever, kind of frequently there and everything's kind of okay. Just beats me up when he gets mad. He gets pissed off, let it out on Henner.

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  Because how like the next brother in the lineup was just too much younger. It was like abusive, but we're like, I was tall and we're kind of, you know, whatever, close in age. So he would just beat me up. There was a time when our uncles were there. There's a very famous picture of all the uncles in front of a house on the grass in front of a small little garden. That's the Torrance Red Beam House. We're talking the Machados, the Hanzo, Hoys, Hoiler, my dad, when they all came here for the famous Chuck Norris seminar, where Chuck recruited my dad to bring some Gracie and they all went and they were all staying at our house on Red Beam. And they were all there. It was so cool to have all these legends, right? Most people have idols they admire and heroes. They were all my uncles. They were my grandfather. They were in my family. So the guys I admired most were all there.

• 1:45:54Speaker 01

  And you guys, Hidon freaking got me and beat me up so bad. And I don't know if it's because, you know, they were there that he like felt this testosterone bump of like, yeah, I'm badass too. Like, these are my uncles, but I'm the man. And I got the short end of the stick and he just ripped into me and beat me up and sadly.

• 1:46:12Jocko Willink?

  Hold on, hold on. So what is this? Like you guys are having, but you guys are having like lunch. You guys are all hanging out and all of a sudden he just hits a double.

• 1:46:19Speaker 01

  So here's the thing, here's the thing, here's the thing.

• 1:46:21Jocko Willink?

  And how old are you?

• 1:46:22Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm nine, he's 11, right? So, or like 10 and 12. So the problem is, is that I'm pretty sharp intellectually and verbally. Hiron is less sharp in both of those categories, but more physical. Very sharp and very athletic and very strong and very good at jujitsu relative to me at the time. And just older and stronger and heavier and bigger. But the point is, the way these things kind of went is there was, I was not innocent in every encounter. I wasn't just minding my business, doing homework and I get beat up, right? Like I was a little sharp with the tongue and I would say, and they're bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. But at the end of the day, my final, my final play was always one of intellectual, you know, like making him feel stupid, right?

• 1:47:06Speaker 01

  And then his final play was, all right, you want to do that and you're going to get it.

• 1:47:09Jocko Willink?

  Cool.

• 1:47:10Speaker 01

  So I wasn't entirely innocent, but the point is it escalated and I got beat up so badly and they were all there. So the shame was 11 times what it would have been because all my idols were there. And I was laying on the floor and he's beating me up and I'm just, he left and I'm laying on the floor crying, like in the fetal position. And I remember thinking to myself, I have been beaten up many times and he's done this other times for different reasons and to different degrees. But I will never forgive him for this one. It's one of the most profound feelings I've ever had as a kid, like that I wanted to hold forever.

• 1:47:43Jocko Willink?

  Nine years old.

• 1:47:44Speaker 01

  I will never forgive. I will forget a lot of things. This one, I remember thinking on the floor crying, there's nothing that will happen ever that will allow me to forgive him for this incident right now in front of my uncles at the house on this fateful Tuesday morning on Red Beam Avenue in Torrance, California. And you know, that was it. And I held on to that. And I held on to that. And I held on to that. And you know, we fought many other times. Nothing as remarkable as this one. Although there was one time when we were like thirteen and fifteen, we were playing on this trampoline before they had the nets, right? The crazy trampolines back in the day didn't have the nets. And we were fighting and he freaking let me have it on the trampoline, thought it was cool, like a UFC octagon, and he beat me up on the trampoline. And then he jumps off the trampoline to leave after I'm crying on the freaking trampoline lane there.

• 1:48:29Speaker 01

  So as he's getting off and he just let me have it relentless beating me up. Cause older brothers can do that. He's walking off. I run from the trampoline. He's on the grass walking. I run, I jump off the trampoline with both legs horizontal. And I spike him in the back between his shoulder blades, sending him flat onto his face on the grass. Full face plant and shock, like whiplash like you wouldn't imagine. Falls on his face and I let him have it with everything I had. And by the time he got up, I was in the kitchen hugging my mom's leg.

• 1:49:07Speaker 01

  Mom, he don't. And she turns around and goes, he don't stop. And she yells at him in the kitchen and he freezes and like you can see it in his face. And it was one of those, but I just, that was one where I came back with a vengeance and violence. And, uh, and then our parents divorced. And he, they, mom, they said, who do you want to live with? And I said, I want to, this is like months later, years later, like it was this thing, right? They divorced and I said, I want to live with my dad. And all other four of my siblings chose to live with my mom. So I move out with my dad, move out with them. And that's kind of the end of us beating each other up because there's not one on each other's neck all day. So we're still working together, teaching every night, right? And I'm do, at the, at the academy, we're doing our thing. And then one day we're training, I'm seventeen, he's nineteen. Downstairs, old, old academy, Carson Street, the original Steve Bailey Academy.

• 1:49:52Speaker 01

  And we're freaking doing our thing over there. And we're sparring, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And this is still when we think like, we're going, this has got to be fighters. This is Gracie family. We got to go hard. And we're training crazy, just him and I in the room completely alone. I had never once submitted him in my whole life, ever. So we're training seventeen and nineteen and I'm freaking going hard and he freaking guard. I jump up, I try, he pulls, I go for an arm bar, he jumps up, he pulls out of an arm bar, leaving one arm in for the triangle. I lock the triangle, but I have long legs and he's kind of thin like I am. So he goes to pull out of the triangle, hiding his arm, like shrugging to slip that out of the center area. And it gets stuck and I grab his wrist like Fedor Verdum and I arm bar him in the triangle and he quick tap.

• 1:50:36Speaker 01

  And I swear to God, I looked around. Nobody was watching and there was no cameras, right? So I was like, did anybody see that? Nobody. And I was like, no. And right away, didn't know emotion on his face, shake hands, bump fist. He beat me ten more times right there in ten minutes. And then, but what was impossible was not possible. Everything changed. Haven't you rolled with people that were unbeatable to you and in your mind you thought, they're simply unbeatable and then you cracked the code? And then, just once, and you go, holy cow, and you roll with them differently on the other side of that momentary victory, where you go, okay, it might not be all the time, but it's possible. And then the ratio started changing, ten taps to one. And then out of ten, I would get two, and then out of ten, I would get three.

• 1:51:21Speaker 01

  And now out of ten, like, nobody wins five times. And of the five where somebody wins, he'll get me three and I'll get him two. You feel me? Like, we're close. Like, I'm, I'm pretty good. So, and then what happens is I'm just waiting now. Because there will come a day where two years advantage becomes two years disadvantage. Over like fifty-seven and fifty-nine, I'm like, let's go. And I'll get him. So I got bullied in the household and when I got bullied at school, to Hedo's defense, he did help back me up when it happened. And Hedo will say, like, I tell this story all the time and he go laughs and yeah, now Henner's tough because of all that beating and this and that and the other. But I know a thing or two about, you know, having what you feel is you violated and the importance of setting boundaries, standing up for yourself and it's a real thing for me.

• 1:52:06Speaker 01

  And by the way, the whole not forgive him forever.

• 1:52:11Speaker 01

  Once we freaking took the helm of the ship together when Hoist left and we took over the family business and we were running it and we created Gracie University and we write these curriculums and we're spending countless hours together documenting all of the jujitsu that we've ever learned, it became clear that it was freaking him and I and we're taking this all the way, you know, and he's been such a loyal and hardworking and reliable pillar and I feel like we were up against so much scrutiny with a lot of these initiatives online licensing, doing these things, you know, Gracie Combatives Belt, who are you guys to change the way things are, like, there was so much scrutiny from the outside that I strongly believe that even though these were all great moves and I, in many ways, I was, I was, I was kind of the, the, the, the, the brain behind the engineering of some of these, if not for Hiron standing right next to me saying, "Hell yeah, let's

• 1:52:55Speaker 01

  go, I got you, this, I love this, let's do this together." I don't know if my standalone pole in the wind would have been able to withstand that level of public scrutiny, um, but two of us, it was like, "Wow, yo, it's not, is he right here, let's go." So, knowing that all we've built would only be made possible with both of us, I went, "No, we're good, like, we're good, we're good."

• 1:53:16Jocko Willink?

  So, did you, did he ever say anything about it, or did you just have the mutual understanding?

• 1:53:19Speaker 01

  Of what, the tap out or the beating me up?

• 1:53:21Jocko Willink?

  Uh, the beating you up and being like, "Hey, man."

• 1:53:24Speaker 01

  He never apologized, but he'll very, make very clear that I'm as tough as I am because of him today.

• 1:53:30Jocko Willink?

  So, he's actually, he's actually taking credit for it, that's classic.

• 1:53:35Speaker 01

  Hiron's not very sentimental, so, the point is, but it's all love and man, I just, he's everything and more that I could have asked for in a brother and I, I, I just, I feel, I'm so lucky and I feel like, people who don't have what we have, you know, it's, it's, it's just a different existence, it's, it's, now we have kids together, so when we first shot Gracie Bullyproof, the DVDs 14 years ago, the first kids program that we put out, we borrowed other kids, like, five-year-old, a seven-year-old, a 12-year-old, an eight-year-old, so we literally last week, and that's why-

• 1:54:03Jocko Willink?

  Borrowing kids.

• 1:54:04Speaker 01

  So, now we have children, I have a four and a seven-year-old, he has an eight and a 10-year-old, so literally when Jack asked me to do the podcast with you guys or reached out to schedule, last Friday is what he proposed, I said, "Jack, I can't, we're filming, we shot last week after 14 years, Gracie Bullyproof 2.0 with our own children." So, the whole program revamped and we did it together and the kids had the best time and it was just a big bonding for us as fathers now of kids, he has two daughters, I have two sons, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

• 1:54:33Jocko Willink?

  Uh, speaking of principles, I learned a principle from Jeff Higgs, who you apparently defeated by choking, but Jeff Higgs is awesome. But one of the things he told me one time is like, if you ever catch someone that you don't normally catch, you have to, like, next roll, you gotta be going 110% because they are gonna freaking go ham on you. And it sounds like that's what Hiron did to you.

• 1:54:56Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And there was nothing I could do about it. Like, it was straight up. And, you know, I just, I found the kink and I just, I knew it was possible. And there was a big change in the psyche right there. When I knew he was beatable, I was like, dude, that's crazy. 17 years? Like, you guys started as adults. So your races are with other adults who are other athletes. It wasn't even in my makeup that this would ever happen. So it was a big breakthrough and, um,

• 1:55:20Jocko Willink?

  That's hard to imagine because

• 1:55:21Speaker 01

  Honestly, that's, I think that's when I forgave him. Honestly, I think I forgave him for the beating. When I became, boom, I'm here. I'm tough. I'm badass too, like you. And he started respecting me and he never beat me up. There's no more of it. At 17, 18, 19, we were already older. And we had so much other things to worry about as a united front to, to run this business and take it to the world. That I think that was the moment, honestly, where I went, holy cow, he's, he's human like me and it's all good.

• 1:55:48Jocko Willink?

  We mentioned Gracie's survival tactics, and I think this is important. A lot of law enforcement listen to this podcast and this is a huge topic. And in, in the current environment that we're in right now, where did Gracie's survival tactics come from? Where is it right now?

• 1:56:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, honestly, it traces back to the Rodney King incident, right? Early 90s when, um, you know, that happened. And then LAPD right afterwards contacted the family and said, hey, we need help kind of revamping our defensive tactics program. So they created a civilian expert panel of civilians, uh, to come together of different disciplines, my father being one of them, and to suggest that different ideas and what can we do? And of course, um, you know, law enforcement use of force became under high scrutiny, not just for LA, but nationwide. And at that point, there became this demand for, hey, how can We control people in less violent ways and with greater degrees of effectiveness. So jujitsu happened to be kind of on its rise, right then UFC won like ninety-three, ninety-four,

• 1:56:52Speaker 01

  ninety-five, and it was a known thing. So it got us into some rooms and my father started, it was called grapple initially, Gracie Resisting Attack Procedures for Law Enforcement. And it, uh, the police officers started going for it and little by little, uh, I was brought up around that era, teaching a lot of classes, assisting a lot of classes, and then one day my father and I were set to schedule, or scheduled to teach a course in the early two thousands, scheduled to teach a course in Texas, Arlington, Texas, uh, near Dallas, and, uh, he couldn't make it, was, had a situation with, health situation with his family. And he said, "Henry, you're gonna go teach us." And I was like nineteen years old. And he's like, "Henry, you're gonna go run this," yeah, nineteen, two thousand and two. He said, "You're gonna go run this GST, uh, this Gracie Survival Tactics course," had since changed the name.

• 1:57:37Speaker 01

  And I'm like sweating bullets. I'm gonna go to a room full of law enforcement trainers in Texas. They expect Horion Gracie, the creator of the UFC, to show up, and some kid's gonna show up, teenager, to run a class full of grown men who've been teaching in law enforcement for decades, some of them. And I think it was like sixty, fifty, sixty guys in the room. And I'm like, "Oh, my gosh, this is the worst thing imaginable." So I show up in Texas, the host is Charlie Fernandez, great guy and still works with us to this day. Um, and I say, "Charlie, you know, my dad's not coming." He's like, "Huh?" I said, "Yeah, you know, he had to stay home, so I'm running it." He goes, "All right, Henry, let's give it a shot. Let's get out there and see what they say." So I show up in front of everybody and I say, "Guys, I know you were all expecting my father

• 1:58:21Speaker 01

  here. He's not coming. There's a health condition for his family and he had to stay. So here's what I promise you. This will be the most productive and rewarding training course you've ever taken of any kind in your entire law enforcement career. And if not, you just tell me on the last day and I'll give you your money back. Doesn't have to be second day."

• 1:58:51Speaker 01

  Let's have some fun. Bah bah bah, by the first day, I learned everyone's first name in the room by literally the first six hours. So I was connecting with everybody full, full, full force. Go, go, go, go, go. Amazing techniques, amazing week, the whole thing, taught the class every day, connecting more with them. They're accepting me. They love the teaching. I knew what I was doing, right? And these, these are all white belts, right? They're a girl, they're adults, but they're white belts and I'm a black belt at the time, so life is good. So I teach the whole class on the last day. I line them all up and I spar with all of them. I think it was 50 guys. I spar with every single one of them. Everybody taps. And it was like 30 seconds, 14 seconds, 27 seconds, one minute, right? Back to back to back to back to back. It was a good workout. Tap all these guys and then after I do that, and then I say, "Okay, guys, thanks for coming. You know, here's your certificates.

• 1:59:35Speaker 01

  Does anybody want their money back?"

• 1:59:40Speaker 01

  Not one claimed their money back. And that was the last GST course my father ever taught. So from that, at 19 years old, I'm taking over this program that is kind of the, the teaching of jiu-jitsu to law enforcement. And it just, it just ramped up. I'm traveling every month, typically every single month, a week a month to go teach a course to some state in the union here and teaching techniques and certifying trainers. So for those who don't know, we train the trainers. Every agency has a defensive tactics instructor or two or five or 20, depending on the size. And then we go certify these instructors in about 40 hours. They learn these core techniques. 23 techniques in level one. There's a level two course that teaches additional 17 techniques, 40 techniques altogether. So I'm teaching these courses, certifying these trainers. But what the world doesn't know, what America doesn't know

• 2:00:25Speaker 01

  is that once a trainer gets certified by someone like us, they go back to their agency and then they train their colleagues. But the amount of training permitted in police agencies across the country

• 2:00:39Speaker 01

  is disastrously, embarrassingly low.

• 2:00:44Speaker 01

  In most agencies, if you had to average the whole country, I would guess just from anecdotally, I would guess it's about two hours a year that the average police officer, the end user, not these trainers that we're working with, but their colleagues, it's about two hours a year of training that they're getting in these hands-on skillsets. And that's laughable. It's barely even laughable. Some states have a zero annual training requirement. California's requirement, for example, is four hours every two years. Horrible. So what the problem that this creates in law enforcement is that when a use of force incident occurs, and you have an officer that engages with a subject, goes hands-on,

• 2:01:26Speaker 01

  and quickly escalates their level of force to what is often perceived as excessive force.

• 2:01:35Speaker 01

  The general public is very quick to make the determination that that was an abusive escalation and a deliberate escalation of force based on their power advantage that this officer has. But what I'd caution everyone to kind of know and consider is that in many of these cases, the officers are escalating their level of force, not in all of them, right? Because there are some bad apples. There are officers who shouldn't be police officers, who do abuse their force and the power that they have. But in many cases, the officers are escalating because they're having an amygdala hijack, right? They're losing control of their prefrontal cortex, and they're operating in their lizard brain, fight, flight, freeze. And they're panicking. And when they panic,

• 2:02:18Speaker 01

  because they only got zero, one, or two hours a year of a skillset designed to mitigate this type of physical encounter, when they panic in that situation, they're going to escalate very rapidly to the levels of force that they train more regularly, right? So many agencies have their officers qualify with their pistol every month, or at least every quarter, right, to hit the target and make sure they're on point. For liability purposes, they want to make sure that those officers are dialed in there. So naturally, when push comes to shove, what are you going to resort to? Your taser, your baton, your pepper spray, your firearm? You're going to resort to those tools that you're training more regularly. So it's just so sad that, right, in all these cases where these officers are escalating their force so rapidly, and the public is now scrutinizing them so heavily

• 2:03:03Speaker 01

  because every incident is being recorded on seventeen cameras.

• 2:03:08Speaker 01

  So to be clear, officers have always been this poorly trained, right? It wasn't better 17 years ago. It was worse. We just didn't see it. 25 years ago, it was worse. We just didn't see it. So now that we have this wave of new accountability from the general public and visibility for the general public, right? There is what the general public perceives as an appropriate level of force based on the threat the officer is presented with. And, and listen, people aren't saying that cops should not be using force and people should, that, that suspects and criminals do not need to be handled sometimes aggressively and sometimes with high levels of force. No one's saying that. But there is, when you see an incident take place and you have a teenage girl who's 14 years old, who's proned out outside of a mall that she was accused of shoplifting,

• 2:03:53Speaker 01

  and you have a cop on her back punching her in the side of the head because she wouldn't pull her arms out and put it behind her back. And this cop is 240 pounds and the woman, the girl is 110 pounds. And he's punching her, or an elderly person in a similar situation. When people see this, what do they feel? They feel that the cop is, right? Deliberate and excessive and abusive with their power. And in some cases, they are. But I would go so far to say that in many of the cases, these officers who escalate this level of force are doing so because they don't have lower, less violent, less aggressive means of accomplishing the desired outcome because they're panicking. And for all of us as well, right? We train so that we don't panic.

• 2:04:37Speaker 01

  But all of us are in, in areas where we are not experts and we are not investing in those skills. We're all equally prone to panic in some other environment. If you ask me to cook Thanksgiving dinner for 20 people, I'm gonna start sweating bullets because I don't have the training in that capacity. But to know that we're sending officers into these physical encounters, but yet we're giving them two hours a year? It's the biggest lie in law enforcement that these officers are sufficiently trained. And it's a terrible disservice to the officers because now they're, they're not equipped to go out there and do it safely for them and their families. For the agencies, it's an incredible liability. And for the civilians, you're now getting arrested by an officer who, and literally, all you have to do is rip away from a grip and you just flipped that officer's switch because they're panicking.

• 2:05:20Speaker 01

  And now they're gonna do everything necessary within the law to neutralize and subdue you. And this all came to a head in Marietta, Georgia, a couple of years ago, when there was an incident at an IHOP where an officer... A number of officers were trying to arrest the guy who was unhappy with the breakfast experience there. Push came to shove and they dog piled the guy and they're ripping away and they let him have it, right? The typical dog pile but excessive force in the pile punching him from every angle. And even though he was resisting arrest, right? Like it was justifiable that they had to go hands on, they had to take him down. It didn't look good. So there was an inciting incident on the watch of Marietta Police Department in Georgia. And this is an agency that we had been, we had been interacting with from a GST, Gracie

• 2:06:04Speaker 01

  Survival Tactics, trained the trainer perspective for 11 or 12 years. So their trainers were trained by us, but it fell apart when they go back and they teach their officers an hour a year or two hours a year. So it's one thing to say the trainers have been trained, it's another to have the officers be prepared in this capacity. So this inciting incident happens in Marietta, Georgia. The command staff initial knee jerk reaction was what? What the heck is wrong with these officers? Why do they do this? Why do they do that? So they want to get upset at the guy, but the problem is they looked in the mirror and they said, wait a minute, the guy got two hours of in-service. Last year, 18 months ago was his last in-service block, whatever, 12 months ago. How can we hold them accountable for what the training that they never received?

• 2:06:49Speaker 01

  Let's be honest. So at that point, they said, let's pilot something. Because I had been advocating for as long as I've been running this program, I had been advocating saying, look, it's a joke. We're all here doing this and I'll sit in the room with 100 officers who are trainers and I'll say, guys, this is all a joke, right? We all know that you guys are going to get certified, go back and it's all going to fall apart because you're only going to be given two hours because your chief is too scared to, and always the excuse is what? We don't have the money. We don't have the money to train these officers two hours a week. We don't have the, and workers comp, we're scared of injuries of the officers on training. So we don't want to put them in any physical encounters, not realizing that if they don't train, when they get in the use of force in the field, they're more likely to injure themselves. So it's, it's one of these. So I have always heard the reasons why command staff will not approve regular weekly training.

• 2:07:34Speaker 01

  My recommendation is the minimum one hour per officer per week in America everywhere. And that's like barely scratching the surface. Twice, two hours a week is what it actually. Actually should be, let's be honest. You lift twice a week, you, you, you, everything you do, if you do a thing, you better do it twice a week, or you don't do that thing, right? That's just a known, you don't, if you don't surf twice a week, you're not a surfer. You know how to surf, but you're not a surfer. If you don't do jujitsu twice a week, you're not doing jujitsu. So anyways, I've always said this, but I've always get roadblock, click, Henner, they won't never approve, they'll never approve. So Marietta, who'd been known as for 11, 12 years, decided, we're gonna pilot a program where we're gonna get new police recruits, and we're gonna allow them to train at a local civilian-owned Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu school, carefully vetted Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu school where they can do regular classes a couple nights a week,

• 2:08:19Speaker 01

  after their police academy training throughout the day. And let's see how this goes. They put these recruits through that. The recruits that came off the line were very clear. The most confident, the most mentally prepared and well-adjusted, right? To deal with altercations than any class that had ever come off the line. They go out in the field and within weeks and months, they're using the techniques that they had learned in Jiu-Jitsu. Simple, clean takedowns, arrests. And, and senior, senior officers are looking, saying, yo, where'd you learn that? And they're like, yo, that's, that's practice last week. Like, this is, this is what we do. This is Jiu-Jitsu, super chill. So it was so successful with the recruits, this kind of pilot study, that they said, let's open this to the entire agency. Let's let every officer who wants to train Jiu-Jitsu on the department's dime. And they did it.

• 2:09:04Speaker 01

  Ninety-five out of 145 officers opted in to this training program at this Jiu-Jitsu school in Marietta, under the command staff there. And the data that came back 18 months later is the data that I've been waiting for, for 25 years, since we've been teaching law enforcement. It's the data that every police chief in America needed to hear

• 2:09:28Speaker 01

  to neutralize their very much closed-mindedness to Jiu-Jitsu. So 95 out of 145, 18 months pass. The injuries, officer injuries in the 18 months following the commencement of BJJ as a regular supplemented practice every week. 18 months, the workers' comp injuries for officers in use-of-force encounters in the field went down by 48% agency-wide. So you have historical workers' comp data, 48% reduction in the following 18 months. Number one. Number two. Oh, by the way. Of the 95 officers who opted in and the other 50 officers who did not,

• 2:10:08Speaker 01

  100% of the workers' comp claims came from the non-jiu-jitsu training officers. So the 95 officers who opted in, in that 18-month window, no workers' comp claims, zero were attributed to their injuries. There weren't any to report. So what does this tell you? All you gotta do is get the other 50 officers on board, like, and you should pull no punches to make that happen because that's how much safer it is. 53% reduction in injuries to civilians in use-of-force encounters when the officer was one of the BJJ population. The untrained officers were more than twice as likely to hospitalized a civilian in a use-of-force encounter. This is common sense to us, but there was never data to substantiate it

• 2:10:51Speaker 01

  to the chiefs of America who need numbers to make actions, right? 59% reduction in use-of-force encounters at all. They studied a shift of officers where it went from officers who knew no jiu-jitsu and they completely switched out that shift with officers who practiced jiu-jitsu, the entire shift, and the use-of-force incidents overall went down by 59%. So anecdotally, they're saying, wait a minute. So you're saying not only are they less injurious to themselves and to civilians, they're less likely to have a use-of-force encounter if they know jiu-jitsu? Of course, for all the reasons we already explained. You can de-escalate verbally and you can set boundaries when you're capable of enforcing them. So they're like, cannot believe this data.

• 2:11:34Speaker 01

  Now, it's only 145 officers, so we'll call it a relatively small. I've seen six officer agencies and 12 officer agencies, but this is a relatively small agency. $66,000 in change saved in workers' comp claims that never happened. This is one of my favorite numbers because this was the number that I can now go back to every police chief who ever said, "Hannah, it's too expensive." Because the cost of the training during this same period was $26,000. 2,600 classes at $10 a class for this particular relationship. $26,000, they had taken 2,600 classes. One reported train- Training injury was a cracked nose when one of the guys was rolling.

• 2:12:16Speaker 01

  Zero workers comp claims attributed to the training at this agency and on in the in the civilian sector and the civilian training. And they're in there with civilians in the regular classes bonding with civilians, building that community relationship. So all kinds of unintended and we don't know what lawsuits were avoided. As a result of this training being in place. So what additional savings? This is only the measurable savings. So now $26,000, take it off the top of the 66K that you saved from fewer injuries to officers because they're not clumsy in their uses of force. And we look at a net savings, a net profit of $40,000 for the agency at the end of all this and more than paid for itself. So this is the type of relationship.

• 2:13:00Speaker 01

  Police department, civilian owned jujitsu academy, where the officers need to be sent to train with civilians. On a regular basis funded by the agency. This to me is the future of law enforcement in America. Every single, I think between 10 and 15 years from now. Any agency that is not engaged in a privatized partnership like this. Is is we're talking archaic. It's like, yo, you guys are still on the two, four, six hours a week. What's wrong with or six hours a year? Crazy like so. And what's wild is we just signed contracts in Southern California. Manhattan Beach Police Department is the neighboring city of Torrance and El Segundo Police Department, two neighboring cities.

• 2:13:40Speaker 01

  May 1st, they both started on this exact same deal. All of their officers permitted to train at Gracie University, our headquarters. Paid for by the agency. Every officer shows up, they're wearing a gi, they're in classes with everyone else. And within, I think it's May, June, July. So we're just two or three months in. Over 33% of the agency officers have already opted in this short, this chief is blown away, cannot believe it. And it's like, Henner, the people that are opting in because of the safety, because of the structure, because of the curriculum design. They feel safe. They're having a fun time learning. They all get video access. So these officers are engaging in that, but what's wild is the chief didn't want to do it in the beginning. The chief said, Henner, this is goes every against everything I feel to outsource this type of training because.

• 2:14:22Speaker 01

  Historically in law enforcement, it's a very like closed off, no, everything's behind closed doors. How we train, what we do, what we know, who we let teach us and who we let influence us. Very closed society. And he said, Henner, we would rather have, this is in the initial negotiations. Why don't you send me an instructor and do the training in my agency? He asked, send me your best guy. It's only down the street. Let him train my officers at our police department. I said, Chief, listen to me right now. If we send you one of our officers, best, I'm sorry, one of our best instructors, we have many, a dozen good instructors. If we send them every week, twice a week to teach your guys and gals, here's what will happen. Because the room is full of police officers who know each other and they're training in an environment familiar to them. And they're training with people familiar to them.

• 2:15:08Speaker 01

  There's going to be this cop culture that infects and permeates the mat. And it will prevent the progress that is, the type of progress that we want for these officers, for the officers that need it most, is not going to be possible. They will infect their own environment, cop culture, the profanity on the mat, the disrespect. One guy's a wrestler in high school, he's going to walk in and say, hey, show, you try that on me, it's not going to work. And there's going to be this attitude, the whole program's going to fall apart. So let me just say this right now, please try this in this civilian partnership kind of form. Give me six months. If it's not the best thing you've ever done for the agency, I will send you one of my instructors six months from now and we'll do it from that point on. If it works, we keep going. He said, deal. We're three months in.

• 2:15:52Speaker 01

  We're three months in and last, last Saturday, two Saturdays ago, Chief Jaime Bermudez of the El Segundo Police Department came to Torrance at the academy on a Saturday morning.

• 2:16:04Speaker 01

  And he authorized the pinning of a Gracie triangle, pin, a bronze Gracie triangle, pin on the right.

• 2:16:17Speaker 01

  Pocket, uniform, duty, uniform of Officer Sergeant Alex Levitt. The first officer of El Segundo to complete 100 classes in this partnership. Bronze pin is 100 classes, silver pin is 200 classes, gold pin is 300 classes. We agreed there should be some extrinsic motivator, the same way they have marksmanship pins, or your sergeant, or your SWAT pin. Recognize the thing that you want people to care about, and they will care about it more. So the pin got awarded to Officer Levitt two Saturdays ago. And he said, "This is the best thing we've done." He couldn't be more excited about the partnership, he's excited for more. Officer Levitt's working on his silver pin now, it's a little Gracie triangle, nothing on it, just a triangle.

• 2:17:02Speaker 01

  And it's on the pin, and he got this approved by the city, the whole thing, this chief, everything's official. So now you have El Segundo officers wearing a Gracie pin, driving around, and I call it the Gracie de-escalation pin, and they're so proud of it. So, this is the future of law enforcement. Any agency that's not doing this, to me, they're pretending, right? They're like playing, they might be saying, "Okay, we're doing our two hours a year, and we're doing jujitsu, and we're touching it." But until you enter this type of partnership with a civilian-owned school, you're never gonna get the officers, the culture, and the training environment that they need to get these skills sharp, so that when Officer Levitt encounters, it's just another day of class. It's the only way. So, we couldn't be happier with it, and I look forward to more of these partnerships, and more agencies all over the country.

• 2:17:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, this is so badly needed across the country. I've been begging for this for years now. Especially like after the George Floyd incidents and all these things that happened. Man, police need jujitsu, 100%. There's a, um, I also wanna say this. You know, I started off reading my little excerpt, and I described jujitsu as magic, right? "Oh, it's just magic," and I truly believe it's magic, but guess what? You have to learn it, you have to train it all the time. It's not magic that you can learn one time, and now you got a magic trick, now you can use it, it's gonna work. Like, no, you actually have to practice this magic in order for it to work. You can't just take two hours, you can't just take four hours, you can't just take six hours. You have to train on a regular basis.

• 2:18:30Jocko Willink?

  You know, you put it out there as, uh, two hours a week? I've been saying that police officers should train...

• 2:18:38Jocko Willink?

  20% of their time. And that's not just pure jiu-jitsu. That's de-escalation. That's weapons. That's legal procedures. You should be training 20%. In the SEAL teams, we would train for 18 months to go on a six-month deployment. Police officers train two, four hours a year. When you say defensive tactics, by the way, that, a lot of time, that includes like their weapons handling. They're cuffing people. When you're learning how to cuff people, that's not easy. There's techniques to learning to cuff people and to cuffing people properly. When they say four hours, it includes cuffing. It includes like weapons retention. It includes all kinds of stuff. Then you get this thing where, you know, people would ask me like, oh, have you ever used jiu-jitsu in combat? And I'm like, oh, yeah, of course. People are surprised by that.

• 2:19:22Jocko Willink?

  And they're surprised by that because you know, oh, I've got a gun. I've got, you know, a primary gun. I've got a secondary gun. I've got a bunch of friends with guns. I've got knives. Why would I have to use jiu-jitsu? Well, it's because when you enter into a building in Iraq, there's civilians in that building. There's people that are unarmed. You can't just go in and shoot everybody. So you've got to deal with these civilians. How do you deal with civilians? Well, you ask them to get down. Sometimes they don't get down. Sometimes they resist. Sometimes they're scared. Sometimes they're frozen. You have to be able to put hands on people and get control of them in a way that doesn't hurt them. That's what jiu-jitsu does. There's a scary thing going on when it comes to trying to subdue somebody with strikes. We, we were taught a, a technique called a muzzle strike.

• 2:20:06Jocko Willink?

  The muzzle strike is you basically, you have your weapon and you, you hit them in the face with your muzzle of your weapon, which is a very like sharp point, right? It's putting a lot of intense pressure into a very small area. And when we were taught this, and look, I was already jiu-jitsu. I already understood all this stuff. They're teaching like, hey, when you do this to someone, they're going down.

• 2:20:31Jocko Willink?

  And I knew that that was not true because I punched a lot of people and I've hit a lot of people and I've hit people with blunt instruments before and you don't always get a knockout. In fact, you rarely get a knockout. You very rarely get a knockout. So if your method of subduing someone is to hit them in the face with the muzzle of your weapon, or to hit them in the face with a baton, or to punch them in the face, or strike them in the face, and you think that's how you're going to get control of them, it just doesn't work. And what was really horrible about those muzzle strikes is when that muzzle would hit somebody, it would cause this acute, really heinous acute damage. So they'd get big, massive cuts, they're bleeding all over the place, they're scarred for life. By the way, it didn't knock them out. Now they're actually pissed and scared and now they're fighting back even harder.

• 2:21:13Jocko Willink?

  So what does the practitioner do? Muzzle strikes them again. So you end up muzzle striking someone five, six, seven times. All they're doing is bleeding all over the place. Now you still have to tackle them and try and get control of them. You don't know jiu-jitsu, so it's just a disaster. Jiu-jitsu, you don't need any of that. You can get control of people without striking them because striking is totally unreliable. Now where are you at or what are you hearing about chokes? Because there's been a lot of departments that have completely banned chokes of any kind. And part of this, actually would say the vast majority of reason for this is because you have untrained people that were trained for two hours, they were taught a choke, now they're panicked because they really don't have the skillset.

• 2:21:57Jocko Willink?

  But they remember how to put that choke on and they put it on, they squeeze it as hard as they can, they break somebody's high-waisted bone and they die. That's terrible, right? If you know jiu-jitsu, you know exactly what's happening when you're choking someone. You feel them submit. You feel them say, "Oh, I'm going to lose this fight." Or you feel them pass out. And by the way, I've been choked out, I don't know how many times.

• 2:22:22Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 2:22:23Jocko Willink?

  This is a normal thing. You get choked out. The most beautiful thing about getting choked out is you wake up and everything's fine. You can do it. Absolutely, you're normal. You're 100% normal. You're a little more humble, but everything is the same. You get hit in the head with a baton seven times before you finally get knocked out. You have concussion for sure, obviously. You have whatever kind of brain contusion. You have all kinds of risk of getting killed by that. You hit someone wrong in the temple. You can kill somebody very easily doing that. If you kill someone with a choke, you really made a huge mistake and you don't understand what's happening.

• 2:22:59Jocko Willink?

  Or you intentionally did it. It takes a long time to kill someone with a choke. You can't kill someone with a choke in five seconds. They go to sleep in five seconds. They go to sleep in seven seconds. To kill them, you have to purposely choke them aggressively for a couple minutes. That's what you have to do. So what are you hearing right now? There's obviously a lot of resistance against chokes. What are you hearing right now on the front?

• 2:23:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:20Jocko Willink?

  From police?

• 2:23:21Speaker 01

  So I was very active in the defense of vascular neck restraints. Right? Choke is a bad word in law enforcement, but we're all talking about the same thing, right? Restricting the blood flow to and from the brain. Loss of consciousness is met. You let them go. You cuff them up. Best thing imaginable. The most valuable tool imaginable for law enforcement. Please don't take it away because you can take my gun away in a fight, but I can still get your neck. And I can still save your life and my life if you allow me this proven effective and very safe technique. So, but that's spoken from a room of jujitsu practitioners, right?

• 2:24:01Speaker 01

  And it's always the, that's always the message from people who train regularly to invest in this skillset and know this technique intimately. The problem is, we're talking about a population of, you know, however many, you know, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of officers in the country. Right? Hundreds of thousands, millions who are getting that hour or two hours a year. And if one of those hours is here's how you choke someone and all they remember is wrap the neck and pull as hard as you can. When does it work? What happened? What are the effects? What is the result? What's the aftercare procedure? If they don't have those things dialed in, it is more a liability than an asset. So for the longest time, I was of the opinion that because I'm speaking from this silo of jujitsu expertise and, you know, how many times, how many chokes that we see on a regular basis and how safely are they used?

• 2:24:45Speaker 01

  Because we live in that world and we see the millions of chokes on a daily basis that are completely no long-term adverse effects. And are safely deployed and, and, and released when they're effective. It's a whole different perspective, you know, so I just seen the amount of chokes that were used incorrectly. And I just generally, listen, what I've learned with law enforcement is. You know, they can't change too quickly, right? That's kind of what I've learned the hard way is like 25 years ago, I was like, yo, we gotta be training twice a week. No, nobody listening. You know what I'm saying? So instead of saying, screw it, I don't want to deal with you guys anymore. I'm not going to go teach law enforcement anymore. We kept doing it. And then Marietta a couple of years ago has this thing. They finally do the model that we've been touting for however long in terms of regular weekly practice.

• 2:25:29Speaker 01

  And they have this glowing success. And now this influences others. So the point is you kind of have to move at the speed of law enforcement, which is a massive institution and, and it's very gradual. So, um, my point is I advocate, I, I used to advocate much more strongly than I do now. And now I fall into the lineup. For example, chokes for offensive application, these vascular neck restraints are not part of GST anymore. Because what I don't want is the chief to come say, ah, GST, they teach vascular neck restraints as an offensive tool, can't do it. In fact, in California, uh, I was on a, I was on a zoom call with the California post police, uh, peace officer standards of, uh, training commission about precisely this. They said, now that we're taking out vascular neck restraints by law, you cannot teach them

• 2:26:12Speaker 01

  as an offensive tool in California, what can we do instead of that? And we were there talking about like over, under, like seatbelt grip. And there was like seven or eight guys. And on the call, I was like this, you guys, we're here all, and I'm a civilian, everyone else is a cop. And I was invited by LAPD, who we have a good relationship with. And I said, you know, commission, I said, we're here talking about choke and over, under instead, and take this technique out. Why is nobody talking about the real problem here? Which is the fact that post this California commission mandates only four hours every two years. Who are we fooling by pretending like that is the acceptable training minimum for an officer in California to go hands on with a civilian?

• 2:26:54Speaker 01

  And we expect them not to escalate their level of force unreasonably in a moment of panic? Can we shift the conversation away from replacing the choke with an over/under and shift it to, and the guy said to me, he said, "Hener, thank you for being here on this call today." He said, "If you want to talk about that, it's a much bigger question and we should talk offline." And then boom, we stepped offline and we spoke privately and he said, "Look, Hener, like it's a gradual thing, it's a slow-moving ship." And basically, and we were not post-certified at that time, which means, Gracie, our program was not endorsed by the state. And basically, without so much, without so many words, he said, "Hener, listen, if you want to make a difference, get post-certified for your current program and then, once you're in, you can make the change from within."

• 2:27:37Speaker 01

  And I talked about this in the book. And I did just that. And I got California post-certified for Gracie Survival Tactics. Soon after, we got state certified in about 41 other states. And it's just been amazing because, once you're state certified, based on the state commission, officers can come do your course without any problem. It's like, yo, if you go ask your chief, say, "Hey, I want to go to the Gracie course." Their first question, "Is it post-certified?" If the answer is yes, go get it, have fun. If it's not post-certified, which we weren't for 20-plus years, "Oh, but we don't have the budget and this and that." But if it's post-certified, it checks so many boxes in the state's requirements. So, to answer the question, chokes, neck restraints, I strongly support them, but I've kind of put that sword down.

• 2:28:21Speaker 01

  And I said, "Man, it's not worth the fight." The whole country's moving one way and public opinion as well, by the way. Public opinion supports a lot of the changes that are being made. You don't got the public screaming out, saying, "No, let all officers use neck restraints because jiu-jitsu is safe and we need them to strangle us instead of punching us in the head or beating us with a baton." They're not saying that because they aren't educated. So, you have an uneducated civilian population, you have an uneducated law enforcement population about the safety and effectiveness of these moves, and then you have the little jiu-jitsu community in law enforcement, or guys like us, who are kind of on the edge of that community, saying, "This is an amazing technique, please keep it." It's like, the wave came and went and now it's not even talked about anymore. It's not taught in any of our programs as an offensive tool, but we do teach the defenses to it.

• 2:29:03Speaker 01

  So, in that sense, they're doing it, but they're doing it in the, right, under the...

• 2:29:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, they have to learn to defend themselves because people know how to do it.

• 2:29:10Speaker 01

  That's exactly right, MMA, everyone's watching it. So, everyone, and we've seen chokes, I've seen officers get choked and rear naked and the officers don't know what to do. So, we teach the defense and in that sense, it's part of the discussion, but in a very much the other side of it.

• 2:29:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:22Speaker 02

  I have a question, real quick. Is that... For all chokes, like all, what do you call it?

• 2:29:27Speaker 01

  Vascular neck restraint.

• 2:29:29Speaker 02

  Is that for all of them, like a, like a head and arm choke, for example?

• 2:29:32Speaker 01

  Anything, yes. Now it's the case where anything that prevents blood flow to and from the brain is considered a vascular neck restraint. If that's the intent of the move, like an arm triangle, a triangle, triangle, a Darcy choke, anything, if it's, if this intent is to stop blood flow and to make them go unconscious, you're not seeing it taught in law enforcement. Now, there are a few states in the middle of nowhere, like out there, that they still have chokes at what they call like an intermediate level of force, where it's able to be used before firearm. It's not considered deadly force.

• 2:29:57Jocko Willink?

  I, I've worked with some departments where it's lethal force.

• 2:30:00Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 2:30:00Jocko Willink?

  If you're gonna choke, it's lethal force.

• 2:30:02Speaker 01

  And that's kinda, and that's the thing, is it's lethal force and like, I would be okay with that. I would be okay with the tool being permitted to be taught so that if we're in a fight and the suspect has a knife or takes my gun, that I could wrap his neck, put him to sleep, handcuff him and wake him up and save his life and save my life in the process. But there's some agencies now in many states where they say, no, you can't even teach it. So you could, you could, if the guy has a, takes your gun and is running towards someone else, you could run him over with your car before you could neck restrain him. Like it's crazy how restrictive it is. Do you understand? Like it's, it's nuts.

• 2:30:38Jocko Willink?

  Well, there's a huge uphill battle to re-educate the world on the, the safety of neck restraints. And what's happened in the last few years has done nothing to help that because there's been people that have died in terrible situations. And it's like, oh yeah, there's no one that's standing up and saying, no, that's, that, that looked great. That, that was a super move. But if you have to come and arrest me, or you have to arrest someone I care about, please just choke me.

• 2:31:03Speaker 01

  So here's, so here's the thing we don't hear about you guys. We don't hear about the unremarkable uses of force.

• 2:31:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:10Speaker 01

  Right? We hear about the crazy, this guy killed this guy. What about all the neck restraints, which there are countless in law enforcement, where they were successfully used to not just the person stayed alive, but it saved lives. It saved my life, saved the suspect's life. Because we use that tool, Arlington has a great example. They enter a house, they're clearing rifles out, SWAT team. The guy jumps on his bed, the suspect, reach, crawling towards his headboard to reach in and Get a hold of something. The SWAT officer throws, he slings his rifle, he jumps on the bed from turtle position, sinks in the vascular neck restraint, rear naked, squeezes, puts the guy to sleep, wakes him up in cuffs. There was a gun in the headboard equation over there and he saved both of their lives as a result of not shooting them. So we don't hear about that. That didn't make major news that this guy's life was saved by a neck restraint. So,

• 2:31:56Speaker 01

  um, yes, in terms of re-education, when might this happen? 10 to 15 years from now, when every agency has every officer training two plus hours a week and they're learning these in the civilian sector and they're learning them safely and how to deploy them and they're capable. Someone in law enforcement is going to bring back the discussion to say, look, lives are being lost because we're not having this tool. Can we please get it back at an intermediate or even at a lethal force level, but let us learn it? And let us have our own judgment as to when we use these techniques.

• 2:32:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And if you learn them correctly, you'll know what's going on and you'll be calm and you won't be freaking out. Because you're training all the time and that's what we're doing. Also the secondary effects of this, like you take a normal cop who's under all kinds of stress, his family's freaked out, like things are going on and you send him a jujitsu class? Three times a week, his whole life got better. He became a, he's going to become a better, more relaxed, more confident, more competent human being across the board. This is going to have so much impact in, in anywhere that picks this up and starts moving in this direction. And you know what? This, my theory of 20% for training, that means, you know, you, you work for, you work five days a week. And that means one of those whole days, one of those whole eight hour days is training.

• 2:33:08Jocko Willink?

  Who, and people say, well, we can't afford that because you know, we, we, we can't afford, we need people on the streets. Who would you rather have on the streets? Who would you rather have on the streets? A hundred cops during this shift that never get trained? Or 80 cops that are highly trained, highly proficient, highly competent. Who do you want? There's something bad happening in your house. And you're going to have 10 officers respond that haven't trained in three, in nine months? Or eight officers that have been training 20% of the time? It's a no-brainer. It's not even a question. Everybody knows the answer to that. So there needs to be a mind shift that it's not just about quantity getting people out there

• 2:33:50Jocko Willink?

  to the street, it's how well are they trained and training has to be happening all the time. It has to be sustained and I'm happy to see what you're doing.

• 2:33:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and listen, it's just a numbers game now, you guys. Every single agency, like we have Marietta, we have El Segundo, we have Manhattan Beach, we have other agencies around the country that are engaging these partnerships, all of them. Marietta was first, the first that I know of with this type of prominent data, but all of them are producing data. So naturally, what's going to happen is you're going to be, eventually, you're going to be a chief that looks at this and it's like deliberate indifference, right? You're going to be, you're going to be guilty of not taking action when you could have taken action to provide ample training to your officers. And this idea of two hours a week, to me, is the biggest lie in law enforcement is that cops are amply trained to handle hands-on encounters effectively. And because the lie is so widespread and the general public

• 2:34:41Speaker 01

  thinks that officers are training, I think if you were to ask, survey the general public, right, this is, and the very general public and say, hey, how much training would you say in a police officer gets per year with their gun? They're going to say, I don't know, 10, 20 hours a month? How much training would they get on hands-on arrests and control tactics? Same thing, 10, 20 hours a month? That's the problem because when the public expectation is that they're amply trained in that field or that activity or that, that, that skillset. But then the reality is so far from what they expected to be. Do you see how you set up the public for such a massive disappointment when the officer's performance doesn't match their expectation of what a, because when you look at a police officer, what do you see?

• 2:35:24Speaker 01

  Nice boots, nice uniform, shiny stuff, nice car, nice guns, everything is in high-quality stuff. So it's natural to think they must have money to spend on the things that matter. Boots, uniforms, cars, training, learn how to use hands-on skills so you don't have to rip out your taser too soon or your firearm too soon. That's the, it's a reasonable expectation from the public. But what we see is that's not the case. So the disappointment factor when an officer does escalate their level of force, whether it's right through abuse of the force or whether it's through a Hijack, the panic that ensues when you simply aren't prepared to handle a situation. That disappointment gap is so massive and that is why the relationship with,

• 2:36:04Speaker 01

  between civilians and law enforcement right now is at an all time low in the history of the world and America for sure. Never has there been so much distrust and and and just um lack of faith and belief in what law enforcement is capable of. And a lot of these are rooted on these violent videos where we look at it and we go, man, that cop could have handled that better.

• 2:36:24Jocko Willink?

  Every jujitsu guy watches those videos and goes, you gotta be kidding me. Um, at some point, you know what's gonna change? At some point, some civilian whose family member was killed, shot, whatever, run over, is gonna sue their police department because their police officers weren't trained.

• 2:36:42Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 2:36:42Jocko Willink?

  And and once that happens and I I would, if I was on a jury, I'd give that all day long. Like, you know, your your mother, father, brother, son, whatever, you know, drunk, shoplifting, mouthing off, all of a sudden gets shot and killed. Somebody's gonna go, hey, why did you, the kid wrestled in high school, of course, you pushed him, he did a double leg, what do you think he's gonna do? Like, there's gonna be a lawsuit like that and the the the police should lose that lawsuit. Because if I was in charge and I had police officers going out that were supposed to be responsible for being able to handle these scenarios and I didn't train them, I didn't role play them, I didn't put them in scenarios where they're using simunition and figuring out when they can actually pull their weapon out or when they shouldn't, all those things.

• 2:37:22Jocko Willink?

  The people are going to, it's someone, someone at some point is going to sue these police departments for not training their personnel properly. And there's gonna be a seismic shift in what's going on, at least they're shifting.

• 2:37:33Speaker 01

  I agree, and the more this data exists with more agencies, the more, the stronger the case, right, the plaintiff will have in that um in that situation. I agree a hundred percent. It'll come to a head, you know, but luckily, there's progress being made, little by little, ages. And what's crazy, this is one last thing on law enforcement and then we can move on, is that there's this general belief, lack of awareness, I would say, in the general civilian community regarding what law enforcement is as an institution. People believe that law enforcement is like a federal thing, like there's like police in America. And like military, right? Or like the FBI or like a federal agency?

• 2:38:12Speaker 01

  A lot of people have no idea that every single agency is its own independent entity. Every single one. So that means that Torrance, Manhattan, El Segundo, Hawthorne, California, within five miles of where we are, there's seven different agencies. All of them have their own chief that decides what their own officers are gonna do. So literally, whatever is 18, I don't know how many, 18, 20,000 agencies in America, every single one of them has to make the decision to step in this direction. And I think it's important that the general public know that. Because then they realize that when one officer in the middle of nowhere in Iowa does something wrong and excessively, you know, uses force excessively in a use of force encounter that

• 2:38:54Speaker 01

  goes viral on some video, that we don't villainize all of law enforcement and say, "Police in general are bad." I think it's so important that civilians know, "Okay, well, no, that agency is not providing ample training to their officers." But Marietta's doing a great job, since their incident and IHOP went viral and they've tightened that up. Now, they have no remarkable incidents, because everything gets put out quickly. They're putting out fire with water. Like, they're doing a good job. So, I think it's a disservice to law enforcement, to the communities, to the civilians nationwide, to think of law enforcement as this one big thing. And we definitely have seen that, right? In the wake of, you know, viral incidents that have, you know, in terms of, have really rattled the country. This generalization of law enforcement, I don't think it's fair, it's not true, it's not the fact. The fact is, because one agency performed poorly and has zero hours of in-service a

• 2:39:39Speaker 01

  year, doesn't mean an agency that's doing two hours a week for every officer isn't doing an amazing job. And there are agencies in America today that are doing amazing work, and they should not be bundled in with the rest of these agencies who are stuck in 1980 and who still don't even do any jujitsu, even in that two or four-hour block, they're not doing jujitsu. But then you've got other agencies, many of which I can think of, Bellevue, Washington at the top of the list, these agencies in Southern California. So, there's all these agencies where it's like, very progressive, lots of jujitsu, lots of great training, and I just, it's sad to think that because they're wearing a blue uniform, the general public sees them in many cases as the same as wherever, middle of nowhere. Officer who uses excessive force and I think that's wrong and I think that the public should be aware

• 2:40:22Speaker 01

  that it's not all the same and the chiefs and the police chiefs out there need to know that it's up to them to carve out their own identity as a police department and they have to hold themselves accountable if they don't want to be bundled in with the rest of American law enforcement which is so highly criticized by the general public today more than ever.

• 2:40:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:42Jocko Willink?

  Well, glad you're doing it. Um. Before we get into the book, because in the book you refer to some of your business practices, one of them obviously being Gracie University. You also have a couple other companies that you talk about in the book. The first one is Quick Flip. Quick Flip hoodies, which I gotta break down, man. Freaking outstanding idea. And, and when I saw that thing, I was like, dang, that's a good idea. Did you, did I tell you about that?

• 2:41:10Speaker 01

  You did many times.

• 2:41:11Jocko Willink?

  I did. I was like, yo, this dude thought of a good idea. It's a hoodie that turns into like one of these string backpacks. What do you call those kind of backpacks?

• 2:41:19Speaker 01

  Drawstring backpacks.

• 2:41:20Jocko Willink?

  Drawstring backpacks. Um. You made this hoodie. How do you, I mean, I, I, I take 20 seconds to tell the story of how you thought of it because it's so obvious if you, especially, especially if you live in Southern California.

• 2:41:32Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 2:41:32Jocko Willink?

  In California, in, in Southern California, you, when you leave, you bring a, you bring a hoodie with you because as soon as the sun goes down, it gets cold. It gets cool. Let me say, it gets cool.

• 2:41:43Speaker 01

  It cools off.

• 2:41:44Jocko Willink?

  It cools off because we're in a semi-arid desert, what's known as a semi-arid desert. So as soon as the sun goes down, it goes from 80 degrees to 54 degrees or 70 degrees. So totally comfortable in a t-shirt, sun goes down, 20 minutes later, you're chilly. You break out a hoodie. That's what everybody does. That's what I do. Been doing it the whole time I've lived in California. You figured out that everyone has to do that and they don't have a cool way of carrying their hoodie. So you came up with this idea.

• 2:42:09Speaker 01

  So yeah, it's in the book. It's the river principle. And in jujitsu, the river principle, which you guys know well, is this concept that right, when an obstacle presents itself, right, when you're, the water's flowing down the river and the rock presents itself, the water doesn't bother with the rock. The water simply flows where the rock is not. Whereas the opportunity ignores the obstacle and on it goes. And in jujitsu, We're moving a thousand miles a minute, right? So we're just constantly, things are always changing. And when there's an opportunity, we go. The second that opportunity is gone, it's what is now available as a result of that opportunity no longer being available to me. It's such a fast, and this is constantly reinforced on the mat. So it was December 27, 2016. I was with my son, who was then two or one, at the park. Uh, he's now seven or whatever. And I was at the park, he's chasing squirrels, I'm chasing him, I'm wearing a hoodie, because

• 2:42:54Speaker 01

  in the morning it's cold, the same way at night it's cold. You leave the house in a hoodie, but at 10 o'clock, the sun came through and I'm like, "Damn it, why did I bring the stupid hoodie?" Like, it's sunny now, the morning layer had burnt off. So I'm carrying my hoodie with me, I take off the hoodie, I was about to tie it around my waist, and this is for the viewers, for the listeners, I'll just kind of describe it. I took off my hoodie, I was about to tie it around my waist, right? And I was gonna go fanny pack style, but I swear to God, as the hands came together, it was like it was the magnet, opposite ends of the magnet where they don't want to touch, right? The two negative sides? And I couldn't connect my hands. And all I thought was, "I'm a cool dad. I can do this." I swear to, I just was like, "No, I'm a new dad." And I was like, "I don't want to be that dad who just..." So anyways, I was pissed off, I threw it over one shoulder like this, I did like the lofty

• 2:43:39Speaker 01

  toss over. And then, when I bent over to pick Haven up, it slipped off the shoulder and it fell onto the wet grass. So the moment of frustration right there was so pronounced, because I tried to be cool, and then when I bent over, it got wet in the little kind of slightly muddy wet grass. And I was like, "That's so stupid, I tried to be cool and I paid the price." So I pick up my son, we take a hoodie, we go home, it's two days after Christmas, in December 27, 2016, I lock myself in the office, in-laws are there, all doing whatever. I come out of the office, after 30 minutes, I went in with shoe strings, paper clips, duct tape, scissors, and the hoodie that I was wearing at the park. I come out 30 minutes later with a prototype. And I say, "Guys, look at this." And everyone's like, "Where were you?" They're all confused.

• 2:44:23Speaker 01

  And this is what they come up to. Inside goes my hoodie, one turn, out comes my fully functional backpack. And they're like...

• 2:44:34Jocko Willink?

  What just happened?

• 2:44:35Speaker 01

  So it functions as a backpack. You can put things inside of it. It has an extra little pocket for your wallet, keys or cellphone. This goes on and you can wear it. And then I was like, dude, it's too loose. You know how sometimes you bounce around those little drawers and back because they hang too low and you're always like, man, I wish it would hang a little tighter. That's a function of the string length based on the circumference of the opening of the pouch. So I invented the world's flattest cord lock and you can see it shaped like a paperclip because that's the tool that I took in. This is a Christmas tree lock. It locks up and then you go here and on the same thing on the other side. And now you can go to any height with this and now you can run, bike, hike, parkour, jujitsu. This thing is not coming off no matter what.

• 2:45:10Jocko Willink?

  You can even shadow box because I watch your videos.

• 2:45:12Speaker 01

  I did it on Shark Tank. I did it on Shark Tank, dude. They loved it. So I did jujitsu with Hiron on Shark Tank with it. So then it goes in and now when you get cold, my, my son's hoodie, when I leave the house right now, even if it's sunny, when I leave the house, I'm in a quick flip. My son's hoodie is inside the quick flip and we're enjoying our time at the park, at Disneyland, whatever. So I'm going out the house and it gets cold in three hours. I reach in, take out his hoodie. Here, son, take this. Reach in, count to three, please. Too slow. We're already back to the hoodie and I don't have a backpack to lug around. The just in case backpack that you bring just in case you need a hoodie. It is the just in case backpack. So I did this. I did a video. I went to Santa Monica or sorry Venice Beach and everyone I walked by, I said, yo, is there a better way to carry a hoodie? And I recorded 30 interactions of these people. It went viral, this video. Shark Tank

• 2:45:57Speaker 01

  called when they saw the video and said, yo, this is amazing. We want you to come on Shark Tank. So I did season 10 of Shark Tank, episode 23, went on there, got offers from Lori, from Robert and from Mr. Wonderful. And it was a great experience. It freaking blew us up. The next day we're selling, we're doing a bunch of that. And then low and behold, we're selling direct to consumer, doing a great job and things were awesome. And then we started getting calls from Google, from Intel, from Warner Brothers, different technology and large corporations saying, hey, that's cool. We want to do Warner Brothers for all producers all across America, 3,500 hoodies with our logo on it. And I was like, pivot principle, principle 21. I'm like, of course, right? It's not just the hoodie that they want to buy a quick flip hoodie.

• 2:46:38Speaker 01

  Let's put their logos on it. So then I realized the real opportunity was in the custom labeling of these hoodies for these different organizations. And that kind of kept going and kept speeding up until eventually Disneyland called.

• 2:46:51Speaker 01

  And look at this Avengers hoodie. Avengers hoodie, fully dialed in, fully sublimated. And of course, you're at the park, one tuck and roll. And it's your Avengers backpack. Of course, you're at the parks, on, off, throughout the day and every line. So then, I thought that was the Holy Grail. But it went one step further. Which is the first ever Jaco Fuel.

• 2:47:17Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:47:19Speaker 01

  Quickflips. So inside goes the Jaco Fuel. And once this tucks in. One turn. And look at that, what's gonna happen on the outside.

• 2:47:28Jocko Willink?

  Look at that. Came prepared, man. Came prepared.

• 2:47:34Speaker 01

  Boom.

• 2:47:34Jocko Willink?

  Hard work, clean field, no excuses.

• 2:47:36Speaker 01

  That's good. One for you.

• 2:47:37Jocko Willink?

  Oh, man, thank you.

• 2:47:39Speaker 01

  One for you. And I made one extra, since this is the only Jaco Fuel.

• 2:47:43Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I get the extra for sure, 100%.

• 2:47:45Speaker 01

  For your number one Jaco Fuel slash Jocko Podcast fan in the world. You guys figure out who that is? And this goes to them, the only Jaco Fuel Quickflips out there. Freaking awesome. So cool. So anyways, that's the River Principle. And this idea that I could have, I'm not an apparel guy. I have, you guys have to understand, jujitsu is the only thing I know. So when I dropped the hoodie and that frustration moment hit. It was the same as like any one of us being on the mat and being in an armbar situation. And all we're asking is, okay, this sucks. But hold on. Let's feel, let's analyze, where is the opportunity in this adversity? Where is the flow potential around this obstacle of this rock? And I jujitsued the hoodie.

• 2:48:26Speaker 01

  And that's what's so wild, how interesting that you have an apparel industry of billions and billions of dollars. And all kinds of people focusing on technology there. And on a fateful Tuesday morning, I invent the best hoodie on the planet in terms of just functionality. And I go, wow, that's crazy. But it makes perfect sense that it came from outside the industry, it often does, right? The innovation. Um, and I attribute it 100% to jujitsu. That I didn't accept that rock and say, okay, well, this sucks, like, life just sucks. It was, no, no, no, there's a problem. No one's thought of a solution. Where are we gonna take this? And a company was born and now I have a guy who runs the whole thing. His name is Jordan, does an amazing job. And it's my side hustle, there's just a thing that was born. And it's like, we have a dope hoodie.

• 2:49:09Jocko Willink?

  And it's a similar story with sleeper hold, right? Which is your travel pillow.

• 2:49:13Speaker 01

  Yes, a sleeper hold is freaking nuts.

• 2:49:16Jocko Willink?

  So. Dude, you're like a comedian with a prop comedian over here, just whipping out your stuff.

• 2:49:21Speaker 01

  So again, sleeper hold was crazy. I'm flying, traveling GST courses every month I'm flying. And my wife Eve worked for the WWE, Vince McMahon, the whole, that whole show. She did that for five, six years, traveling every single week with no like seasons. It's the craziest traveling job of any profession I've ever seen is WWE. And they travel every Wednesday, come back every, or travel every Friday, come back every Wednesday. So we're both traveling every month for several, for several flights. And I'm sitting next to a guy one flight and he's just boom. And we've all experienced it, the freaking bobble head. And I'm sitting next to this guy and I took a little selfie footage of that. And I, when I landed the flight, I texted it to Eve and I said, babe, we're going to solve this problem. We're going to invent the solution to this because he was wearing one of those conventional U shaped memory foam pillows.

• 2:50:04Speaker 01

  And I said, we're going to solve this and I ordered two airplane seats on eBay. And within three days, they're in my garage. Airplane seats are actually in my garage and we go to work with every strap, every rubber band, every mechanism you can imagine to connect to the seat back slash headrest of that airplane seat. Tinkering, messing around for several months, come up with the first prototype. It's all, this is awesome. So it's all about supporting because every pillow on the market tries to support bobble head at the neck. Right? So basically as your head bobs, they try to say, okay, we're going to put something under here. The problem is from a pure jujitsu standpoint, supporting at the neck is the shortest lever. Because you're going from the base of the neck to your jawbone and that's a very short lever. The way to stop a head from bobbing is you need the longest lever, which is right here.

• 2:50:49Speaker 01

  That's a much longer lever and will require much less force to prevent the head from bobbing. The problem is there is no mechanism that holds your head up in efficient and, and acceptably socially acceptable way that looks okay when you're using it. So we went to work on these straps and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And fast forward, you know, six months, we finally figured it out. We patented it. And then we got busy with Quickflip around the same time I invented Quickflip and I had to choose which invention am I going to take to market and I chose Quickflip. I felt it had a more widespread use. So we sat on sleeper hold for three or four years and then Quickflip blew up, did his thing, and then COVID struck. And then I'm like, thank God we didn't launch Quickflip because now no one's traveling. This thing has completely fell asleep for

• 2:51:30Speaker 01

  a year and a half or so. No one was traveling. And then post COVID, we finally said, man, I'm gonna do this. I was using it traveling to Cincinnati for a keynote at Procter and Gamble, a leadership jujitsu keynote. And on the flight, a woman behind me sees me strap in basically this contraption that holds your forehead, covers your eyes, pillow behind your neck, and completely eliminates bobblehead with perfect head support, right? So I strap in and she literally touches my shoulder, random woman in the class, in the airplane. Her name was Patty, and she said, sir, I just have to ask you, what is this? And I said, well, I'm so glad you asked. And I had my videographer there because we're going for this keynote. So I'm like, Cole, record this right now. Everything you hear, put the mic on, let's roll. We film our first infomercial in flight, in a commercial flight,

• 2:52:15Speaker 01

  on the way to Cincinnati, all these regular passengers whose face I kind of blurred out, and me and Patty are interacting, and she gets the full spiel. We show it to her. She can't believe it. And she says, Henner, this is crazy. Why don't you produce these? Because this is, everyone needs this. And I said, well, Patty, I'd just been sitting on it, and then COVID. If you make this, I'll buy it. And we filmed this whole interaction. I sent that to Eve when we the flight landed. And this is five years after we invented it. So I sent that to Eve. I said, babe, we're gonna take this to market. Now's the time. Patty is ready. The world is ready. Let's go. So then we did six months of preparation. We launched it on Kickstarter four months ago. And we sold thirty-two thousand, thirty-one thousand pillows in forty days on Kickstarter, a million dollars raised, and it's the number

• 2:52:56Speaker 01

  one travel pillow ever crowdfunded. And we just, the shipment of fifty thousand pillows just landed last week, and we're shipping this week to customers all over the world. And another company is born, again, out of necessity, jujitsu. And in this case, you know, just timing the release properly and stop, go, stop, go when it comes to COVID. And anyways, so I don't know, you guys, I don't know what's going on with my life, you know? I teach jujitsu. I teach police officers. I invented a dope hoodie, and I solved in-flight sleep deprivation. And These are my side hustles. So anyways, you have his pillow or do I need to? Yeah, yeah. Okay, if you need another one for your daughter. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, sweet.

• 2:53:34Jocko Willink?

  Uh, at what point, so you did, you did a video about jiu jitsu that is called, also called the thirty-two principles, right?

• 2:53:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:53:43Jocko Willink?

  That was, now was that on Gracie University?

• 2:53:47Speaker 01

  Yes, it's an online course and this was, um, during covid. We all know that there are principles on which all of jiu jitsu is based. We all know that because there's so many similarities with so many different techniques. But even without naming them and identifying them and like classifying as a curriculum, it's just a known thing.

• 2:54:06Speaker 01

  But I feel like they were largely unclassified, especially on the micro level. What are the macro principles? Leverage, timing, control, efficiency, which is a blend of leverage and timing and control. The efficiency is probably the apex principle, all jiu jitsu. And then the kind of the, the macro principles are leverage, timing and control. What we realize is that there are micro principles, right? And, and what we found where there are thirty-two micro principles, um, you know, the clock, so clock principle, distance principle, detachment principle, connection principle, uh, reconnaissance principle. There's all these ones that are talked, that are communicated in the book that are all like, it's almost like

• 2:54:49Speaker 01

  they're the nitty gritty of the principles because these macro principles are almost too broad for them to be actionable in a very specific way. And when me and Hiron kind of realized that there were these thirty-two micro principles, we thought, wow, this is beautiful. If, if we can classify these, we can teach them, visually teach them, we could really impact Brazilian jiu jitsu because it's almost like we would give all of the people who practice jiu jitsu kind of like the alphabet on which their language is based. Because it's one thing to learn a language through osmosis, right? You grow up in a household speaking Portuguese, you learn Portuguese. Imagine if you spoke Portuguese, right? And you just heard the language your whole life. And by the time you're twenty years old, you realize there's an alphabet that makes sense of all of that.

• 2:55:32Speaker 01

  I feel like these thirty-two micro principles are the alphabet for jiu jitsu. There is no jiu jitsu technique that doesn't rely on one or more of these. In most cases, jiu jitsu techniques rely on two, three or four, or sometimes more. And for students to have that level of clarity on what those principles actually are, and call them out of their jiu-jitsu, changes everything. Because what happens is when a student knows the principles that make their jiu-jitsu possible, they can lean into them more deliberately, and they can make deposits in those principles more deliberately. Because at the end of the day, when any one of us is doing jiu-jitsu, and you guys are rolling with each other or anyone else,

• 2:56:14Speaker 01

  and you land in a position that you don't know a technique for. It happens to us every day. "I've never been here before. What the heck is this position? What do I do right now?" What happens, whether it's a conscious effort or not, for all of us who've been around the mat for years, decades or more, is what I call a 32 Principles Diagnostic. Your body pulls from the principles that you've immersed yourself in for any number of years, and based on all of your experience, you create a solution, a unique solution to that unique situation that you've never experienced before. And it's magical, right? Haven't you seen anyone you admire in jiu-jitsu come up with a solution for a situation that you just asked about? And you're like, "How the heck did he make that up right now?"

• 2:56:59Speaker 01

  And the answer is, it's not that he had that in the catalog. He didn't have that in his database. He puts himself in the position, "I don't know, let me see. Lay down. Get on top of me. Let me see." We always hear the masters do that, right? And then in that moment, they just make it up. So what they're doing is they're calling on all these principles. And when I lay down in a position of a foreign position for me, I'll lay down and I'll just get someone on top of me. Here's the threat, or it's happening while I'm rolling. My body automatically scans all 32 principles for their efficacy and validity in that situation. And then let's say these four are possible. It's a rapid process. These four are possible, but these two are going to require too much strength. This one is going to require me to expose myself to punches in a way that I don't think is favorable. So this is the remaining principle, or two, whatever's remaining after all that,

• 2:57:43Speaker 01

  that I'm going to use to create my solution right now. And you invent a technique that is based on that principle or two. And that diagnostic happens every single day on the mats in real time. That diagnostic process and your diagnosing capabilities is increased exponentially if you know what those principles are by name, right? You have a curriculum, you have a relationship with each one of those principles. When you get in those unknown situations, you can create solutions rapidly and on the fly, exponentially better than if you don't have a deliberate and a really a true relationship with those principles. If it's just kind of esoteric and it lives in the background and you've never really studied it. And this is the reporting that we're getting from people who have taken the video course

• 2:58:28Speaker 01

  and have watched the 32 Principles on video, the jujitsu-based course, is that it just added clarity. For black belts, it added that clarity. For white belts, it taught them that it's not about techniques in the beginning. Learn the techniques, but instead of fixating on them, try to extrapolate the principle in every technique, because that principle will be applied over and over again, whereas the technique can only be applied in a particular situation for which that technique is singular, right? It's for one specific situation. So, this is true in jujitsu. We all do it. And what I realize is that I do this in my life. When I drop a hoodie, when I see a bobblehead, or any other thing that I've had major challenges or major milestones or major victories, it's always, what's the situation?

• 2:59:12Speaker 01

  Diagnose the situation, the threat, the concern, the challenge, and then run a 32 Principles diagnostic. Now, for a large part of my life, this was unconscious effort. It was just the natural way I operated because jujitsu was my DNA. Now that I've classified these 32 Principles with my brother and created this published curriculum, and they all have names, I look back and I went, holy cow. The extent to which these 32 Principles played a part in that milestone, in that negotiation, in that victory, in that invention, it became so clear that that's when I became very committed to the process of saying, man, I think I could teach people these principles and then give them the context personally and professionally where they could be applied and let them

• 2:59:56Speaker 01

  have my operating system without having to spend 30-plus years doing jujitsu. I think it'd be a great service. The big challenge in all of this is that jujitsu is something so physical and so visual. And when I first contemplated writing the book, I felt limited by ink on paper and I went, I don't know, dude. To communicate the detachment principle with written word on paper?

• 3:00:20Speaker 01

  I might lose some in translation in that interpretation there. So I asked the publisher, I said, "Look, I only want to do this if you'll allow me to add a QR code at the beginning of every chapter so that the reader can scan the QR code before reading the chapter and visually and auditorily hear and experience the principle in combat as demonstrated by myself and my brother. And it's like a five to seven minute video explaining a technique or two that encapsulates that particular principle of interest for that chapter. If they can understand conceptually that physical application of that principle, then the soil is fertile for me to then take them into the ink on paper in the chapter and communicate

• 3:01:05Speaker 01

  the personal and professional application of the same principle, you know, in life and business. And they said, "Hunter, we've never done that. That would be awesome. Let's go." And I'm like, "Great." And it was more work for me because now I gotta produce 32 videos on top of writing a book. But I was happy to do it and this is the result. And, you know, I'm very happy with it and I think it's a completely different experience for a reader than what they're used to. Because by the time they're done with this book, they will not only understand how these principles apply to life and business, but they'll also learn several jujitsu techniques and these principles in a combat application. And even if you're not a practitioner, by the time with this book, you're gonna walk a little bit taller, you're gonna understand some concepts of personal protection and self-defense that could effectively save your life in a fight.

• 3:01:50Speaker 01

  Not that you have the muscle memory in their movements, but you'll know about distance, you'll know about timing, you'll know about leverage in so many different ways as communicated in these 32 micro-principles.

• 3:02:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:02:04Jocko Willink?

  Get the book. I was, I can't read this whole book on the podcast. Did you do the audiobook too?

• 3:02:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, bro, that was the worst experience of my life.

• 3:02:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, some people have a real hard, I'm surprised you didn't just love that thing.

• 3:02:14Speaker 01

  Don't give me a script. I'll talk for three days straight.

• 3:02:17Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 3:02:17Speaker 01

  Give me a script and watch me struggle.

• 3:02:19Jocko Willink?

  Was it painful?

• 3:02:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sitting in this studio, one quarter this size and I'm reading the page. "Hunter, go back, do that again. Every sentence, every period, every letter." They're scrutinizing and I'm reading 70,000 words in two days, 20 hours in two days, 13 hours on day one, seven hours on day two. I had to do it in two days because I had other things going on. And I may never write a book again because of the audiobook experience.

• 3:02:44Jocko Willink?

  So get the book and there's a ton of good information in here. Obviously, I just do want to take the opportunity since you're here just to burn through these things. I got so many notes, but I'm just going to burn through these things and go through these principles. Chapter one, which is, which is rule one or principle one, the connection principle, optimizing your success by constantly evolving the tools and tactics you use to connect with others in the world around you.

• 3:03:09Speaker 01

  Gracie University.com is the example I talk about in the book, how, right? I broke my back. I want to reach the world with jujitsu and I use these different tools to not only connect myself with the world, but connect them with each other. And in jujitsu, like I mentioned about the Swiss Army knife, right? Our body is a tool and it's capable of much more than we imagine. We have really 32 different distinct body parts that we've counted thus far. Calf, knee, ankle, instep, toes. All of these are little tools in jujitsu, right? But normal humans don't use all those. So this is the idea that in life, are you optimizing all the tools available to you to connect with people and the world to optimize your effectiveness? So really, are you, are you optimizing what's available?

• 3:03:49Jocko Willink?

  Two, the detachment principle, recognizing when holding on does more harm than good and when letting go does more good than imagined.

• 3:03:58Speaker 01

  I think everyone can relate to that, right? Like it's a pretty universal life principle, but in jujitsu, right? How common is that where you want to hold, hold? No, there's some times where let go right now and the choke becomes available because you let go of something else, right? With my brother, I was going for the arm bar. He's pulling out and because I let go of the arm bar, he ripped it out and threw himself into a triangle. So that's the detachment principle. I tell the story of my mom's, you know, untimely passing a couple of years ago and how after she, she struck with a form of cancer and literally was, everything was fine, stomach, a little bit of pain. One night she was going to babysit our, my sons, mine and Eve's sons. Henry, my tummy hurts a little. I don't think I can watch the boys tonight. Like straight up, we live next door

• 3:04:40Speaker 01

  to her, adjacent. We shared a wall. So my house and her house are like this. So going to grandma's house that night, she's like, I don't think I can watch them, Henry. And lo and behold, a couple days passed, she goes over, gets some scans, gets some things. Couple of weeks passed, she thought it was gallstones, you know, thing, let it pass. She finally goes and gets the scans and she has bile duct cancer, like a really rare and very aggressive form. And I'm like, holy cow, so massive and rapid decline in her health in a matter of the next couple of months. And what's interesting is, of course, what we all, as problem solvers, we all go into save mode, right? Like, let's protect, let's save, let's go. And everyone's thinking of every, going to Chippa in Mexico and do this alternative therapy and everyone kicks into gear. And my mom, she really rapid decline and real discomfort.

• 3:05:24Speaker 01

  She comes in and talks to me and my siblings, she says, you know, you guys, I've had a really good life, I'm very happy. It's all good. In not so many words. And that's when I realized that we were holding on for us, not even for her. So the type of love and support that she needed at that point wasn't the love and connection, it was the detachment. And the hardest was her, um, her husband, my stepfather in that case, who equally was so committed, no, no, no, no, we gotta do everything with her. And as long as he needed her, she would not let go. So the talk with him to say, hey, Mark,

• 3:06:07Speaker 01

  what she really needs is freedom from us right now, she's made that clear. So this was like, and he eventually came around and said, okay. Uh, and stepped back in his desire to offer, go, go, and so proactive. And it was the most significant use of the detachment principle in everyday life. And once he stepped back, then she was able to pass away and she did so peacefully and we were all there and of course, timing couldn't have been worse. In general, she was still, you know, sixty, mid-sixty, sixty-seven, sixty-five years old. But, um, it was so interesting to realize, holy cow, we're doing it not for her, but for us. And when she made clear that she was okay, I'm good, you guys. I saw my grandbabies, spent so much good time with them, I'm okay.

• 3:06:51Speaker 01

  Then I went, wow, we gotta shift everything to now support her the way she needs to be supported, not the way we want to support. And detachment principle made that possible because so many times in jujitsu, letting go, when I didn't think it was the right play, was the right play.

• 3:07:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a powerful story that you write in the book. And again, that's what the book is. It's various stories, either from your personal life, you also have stories in here from other people, what they've been through, how they utilize principles. So, a lot of these stories are told that really reveal how the principles can be used, not only by you, but by people around you. That's what the book is. Yeah, and that one's extremely powerful. Number three, the distance principle, understanding the impact that distance has on your effectiveness.

• 3:07:37Speaker 01

  Jiu-jitsu, this is the one, right? As we say, we changed the distance from which fights are fought in America and around the world when UFC one hit. And this is true in relationships as well, right? You gotta be careful because in a fight, the way we explain it is jiu-jitsu strategy. You want to be all the way out, or you want to be all the way in. And if you're not careful, you end up in what's called the red zone in a street fight, or in an altercation, where the red zone is where you're not all the way in, you're not all the way out, and you're punchable, it's the tip of the punch.

• 3:08:13Speaker 01

  And in life, this exists as well, right? You want to be either in relationships that are close and meaningful and rich, where you're all the way in and you're invested in that relationship, or you want to be all the way out, where any wrongdoings of the other person in the relationship don't profoundly affect you in a negative way that you had no control over. Because if you exist in the red zone, where you're in, but you're not all the way in, then you expose yourself to that relationship red zone where damage can be done, serious damage can be done. And I tell a story about relationships where my failure to manage the distance effectively caused some people that existed with my brother and I

• 3:08:54Speaker 01

  in the relationship red zone to do damage, irreparable damage, that I, you know, I to some degree take some ownership of, even though I had nothing to do with it. The fact that this person used our reputation, and the fact that there was a relationship, but the fact that we weren't close enough to mitigate the damage and to prevent it from furthering. I have some sense of ownership of that. So, it was a chapter where I talk about a failure to manage the distance effectively, and the price I paid as a result.

• 3:09:23Jocko Willink?

  Number four, the pyramid principle, investing in a strong foundation. You got number five, the creation principle, beginning with the end goal in mind and then using targeted actions to make your vision a reality. One thing I found interesting about that one is when I teach kids, when you teach an adult like how to pass guard, you need to tell them like, okay, put your hand over here, you gotta get in posture, you gotta push that thing down, you gotta, once you get there, you gotta staple that, you gotta give them all these little specific, you can tell a kid, get out from between their legs. And they like, you tell them what to do, where they're trying to go, and they'll just figure out a way to get there. It's pretty neat, reminded me of the creation principle.

• 3:10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%. And in jujitsu, right, we talk about this concept of you want to be first and you want to be third.

• 3:10:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:11Speaker 01

  You know, so this idea of deliberate targeted actions to get the reaction from the opponent that you're looking for and then capitalizing on that, that reaction of theirs and it's, it's a, it's a powerful concept there and it's a powerful concept in life and business as well.

• 3:10:28Jocko Willink?

  Uh, number six, the acceptance principle, recognizing when it's better to yield than to resist.

• 3:10:36Speaker 01

  Big one. Bro, the example in the book was marriage.

• 3:10:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:41Speaker 01

  Right, so, so for me, it was, um, you know, I tell the story about my wife and I, my now wife, then girlfriend, and the struggle that we had regarding my beliefs. And this is, this is like generational beliefs, Brazil, macho, Gracie family, women do dishes and stay in the kitchen and don't ask questions, like, that's what I kind of grew up with. And, um, you know.

• 3:11:03Jocko Willink?

  That's not what you married.

• 3:11:04Speaker 01

  That's not what I married, dude. Holy cow, you called it. So, so I marry and Eve says, Henner, like, so I'm like, when I'm starting to even think about a family, I'm like, babe, you know, like, you're not going to work, right? You're just going to kind of take care and do this. And she said, well, I have different beliefs about that. My mom, she's like, her mom was ICE, right? Immigration, Customs Enforcement Attorney, like a federal ICE Attorney, high level, like a senior attorney at ICE in Colorado. Her dad's a psychologist. Her sister's a psychologist. Her brother is a scientist, right? A biologist. All successful family, everyone's successful. And she says, well, all I saw was my mom work forty, fifty, sixty hours a week, every week of my life. And I had nothing but admiration.

• 3:11:48Speaker 01

  It's all I grew up with. And we're perfectly healthy and we grew up and all of us are successful. I'm over here thinking, my mom didn't work at all. She's in the house because she had to be and she's cleaning and she's mopping and she's doing this. And they divorced after twelve years, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years and her parents are still married after fifty years. So I'm in a tough situation. I have a belief about what it needs to be because the Gracie family says it needs to be this way. And she's like, well, let the numbers speak for themselves. Bro, we started talking at eleven or twelve. That went till four thirty morning, morning time, eleven or twelve PM to four thirty AM. Fair to say, I tapped out. And the result is now evident.

• 3:12:33Speaker 01

  I have a wife who not only works, but she's integral, running the whole Gracie University, Chief of Operations, sorry, Chief of Staff there, putting all the right pieces in place, overhauling all the systems and has an incredible impact on the business, is the head of the Women Empowered Program, a figure for self-defense, women all over the world. And we have two sons, they love it, they see her go to work every day, she comes home, she loves them when she's there. And our marriage is amazing because she gets to live her legacy and she's doing what she wants to do. And acceptance principle saved my marriage. Big time, Jiu-Jitsu 101.

• 3:13:12Jocko Willink?

  Number seven, the velocity principle. Adapting your speed to maintain balance and optimize outcomes.

• 3:13:19Speaker 01

  How much in Jiu-Jitsu do we go, stop, go, stop? If you're fast, always fast, you're predictable. If you're always slow, you're predictable. Right? It's the velocity principle, the constant changing of our operational speed to disrupt our opponent. So this is the idea of, you know, knowing when to go, knowing when not to go. And I use the example of sleeper hold, this pillow. Right? Launch, don't launch, launch, don't launch. And there were so many factors coming into the public launch of this pillow that COVID came in and then we stopped and then I planned on going. And then Kenny, my marketing director, who actually trains here with you guys, he lives in San Diego, Kenny Wang. He was like, Henner, no, we can't launch right now because it's the wrong month and timing of when to go and when to... And when you go, go. But when you're not, when it's not time to go, pull. Right?

• 3:14:02Speaker 01

  And just being able to be flexible in the velocity. And in jiu-jitsu, we do so much of the changing of our pacing.

• 3:14:09Speaker 01

  And I talk about that in great length there. And it's a critical principle and it comes into the clock principle, which is the kind of the other side of the timing principles. Clock principle, right? Recognizing that the right move at the wrong time is the wrong move. And the clock principle also talks about disrupting the other person against you. So if you're going to do a technique and you have your anticipated timing, my job is to disrupt your anticipated timing of your move to throw the whole thing off. And in the, in the book, I talk about an example of a, of a young man, a 16-year-old boy named Shane. There was a psychologist who trained with us and called in and said, Henner, I have a kid who had suffered from the most severe case of social anxiety I've ever seen. Right? He vomits profusely in any type of social encounter. Going to school, he vomits every morning before school. It was crazy.

• 3:14:54Speaker 01

  I think he would love jiu-jitsu. So I said, great, I would love the chance to work with this and if I can help change his life, by all means, let's do this. So we set it up for a Thursday and I set it up for a time where I knew no one would be in the building so that he wouldn't feel this anxiety. So at four o'clock class, it's like four, five, four, 10, and the mom calls me from the parking lot and says, Henner, we're not going to make it. I said, what do you mean? She says, well, we're outside parked in front of the building, but he's not coming to the class. We tried and we want to thank you for allocating the time and I'm sorry. I said, you're outside my building right now? Can I come out and say hi? She says, of course. So I walk out in my gi, I walk out and I hear the most abdominally enforced cry I've ever heard in my life.

• 3:15:40Speaker 01

  Screaming cry. The mom is standing outside the car, passenger side on the curb. He's sitting in the passenger side backseat. Mom is outside. I say, can I go inside? She says, "Yeah, of course." Like, I kind of mouthed it to her, and I go around the passenger, to the driver's side. I get in the car and I sit down. And he's crying, you guys.

• 3:16:02Speaker 01

  Folding over with every breath and crying and punching it out. And I'm like, "I've never seen this before in my life."

• 3:16:11Speaker 01

  This is a situation like jujitsu. I don't have the technique. I don't know the answer. The move for this submission that this guy has me in. So I sit down like this. And I don't say a word for 20 minutes while he cries. Depletion principle.

• 3:16:32Speaker 01

  It's in the book, it's later. He then sits up. He runs out of steam. He sits up, he looks at me. And now he's not, he's breathing normal and he's not hysterical anymore. And I said, "Hey Shane, what do you like to do for fun?"

• 3:16:47Speaker 01

  And he says, "Video games." I said, "Tell me more." Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 15 minutes asking him questions, and I don't know anything about these games. And he's over here telling me everything. And at the end, his normal conversation with me. I said, "Hey, bro, thanks for making it in today. If you're open to it, I'd like to give you a tour of the facility. Beautiful mats, beautiful facility. I think you really enjoy it. We have a museum. Come check it out. Can we do that?" He went, "Yeah." I said, "Cool, let's go." We walk out, we go in there. Empty building, just a receptionist, hi, we walk by. Tour of the mat. All I'm thinking is, there can be no chance that he leaves this building without doing jujitsu.

• 3:17:31Speaker 01

  Zero, because the chance that I get him back a second time is zero of zero. So there's no way. So I'm walking and I'm nervous because how am I gonna get this guy on the mat and not cause a vomiting fit in the middle of this building? So I'm giving him the tour. Go to the locker room. We come back by the private rooms right there. Room number one. I open the door to the private room. I walk in and I step on the mats. And I say, "Shane, these mats are so soft. Take off your shoes so you can feel them." He walks in with his shoes off. Mom walks in, goes to the side. Small room, this exact size right here. Green mats on every wall. Looks like an insane asylum. Padded walls, padded floor, no, nothing else, no exit.

• 3:18:15Speaker 01

  He walks in, I shut the door. Mom's in the corner, she sits down. I say Shane, do me a favor, lay down right here in the middle of the mat. The classic 10 minute intro of Gracie Jiu Jitsu. I mount on top of him. And I say, how, we're bros now. I said, how would you escape? Well, I push you off, I said, go give it a go. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. I'm laughing, I'm keeping the energy very like friendly. Pop, pop, come on, bro, give it a chance, let's go, my friends are coming, ha, we're just playing. I can't get out, I said, switch, hold me down, boom, one second, trap and roll. Wow, that was awesome, do it again, I do it the other way, oh man, you lay down, you do it, he does it, he does it. Two, three, six techniques, one hour later.

• 3:18:57Speaker 01

  Mom doesn't say one word throughout this whole time. I look over in the corner and she's crying. Silent tears falling down her face. And me and Shane are all in, I don't even think he noticed. But I was seeing that, we're having the best time doing these techniques. We wrap it up, amazing job, bro, we get up, we go out. I'll see you guys on Tuesday. On Tuesday, it only takes 15 minutes to get him out of the car. On the next class, he comes in, after the Tuesday class, we do the whole routine again, we train, all good. The next class, he comes in, Henner, I need you to use the restroom, he goes, he throws up. He comes to the mat, we train again. Eventually, I hand him off, once he's ready, to another instructor. He starts doing private classes with him, and then he transitions into group classes, doing Jiu Jitsu in a group.

• 3:19:42Speaker 01

  He eventually graduates high school, his dad is a captain at LAPD. And so he's dealing with this, couldn't be more grateful, the mom can't believe he graduates high school, earns his blue belt eventually, goes to college, lives a normal life. Shane's gonna be okay, clock principle. The right move at the wrong time is the wrong move. I didn't know what principle I was gonna use for Shane in that moment. But I depleted his resources in the car by patiently waiting. And then, when we got to the actual door, and I opened it, and I said, now's the time, I'm gonna call him in, I'm gonna shut the door, we're friends, he's gonna trust me, this is gonna work. Jiu Jitsu worked in that situation, I had faith, I threw my, my chance, I threw my opportunity.

• 3:20:25Speaker 01

  I mounted on him, I didn't know what reaction it was gonna be. And today, he's a different man because of it. And the doctor cannot believe it, who referred him. Henner, I've never seen this before, this type of transformation, on this type of social anxiety. It's almost incurable, because it's so pronounced and it's so deep. Jiu Jitsu saved him.

• 3:20:45Jocko Willink?

  Clock principle. Um, number nine, the river principle, which you already talked about overcoming obstacles by flowing around them.

• 3:20:51Speaker 01

  You got it.

• 3:20:52Jocko Willink?

  Number 10, the frame principle, increasing effectiveness by enhancing systematic efficiency.

• 3:20:59Speaker 01

  So in jujitsu, we aim to substitute

• 3:21:04Speaker 01

  muscular strength with skeletal structure everywhere we can. It's helpful to be strong, right? It's, it's, it's never a liability, really. It's there, it's added, it's an asset. But what strength we have has limitations and how far it'll take us. So when you substitute your skeletal structure, which doesn't require the physical muscular strength, you can accomplish more with less. It's efficiency at its finest. My grandfather loved this principle. And I talk about this idea of operationally in a business, for example, how changing the operational framework of a business can drastically increase your effectiveness, right, in terms of what you get out of your human resources, what you get out of your mechanical resources.

• 3:21:45Speaker 01

  So I discussed some examples for Gracie University of how changing the structure of the business, changing the framework of the business, just exponentially grew our potential and our impact in the world. Um, and it's one that, again, found it's, it's, it's rooted on the mats, but is equally effective in life and business.

• 3:22:06Jocko Willink?

  Number 11, the kuzushi principle.

• 3:22:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the kuzushi, uh, seeking first to understand, then to be understood. That's the life application of the kuzushi principle, uh, that I, my kind of definition that I gave it for jujitsu. This is the kuzushi, the, the, the term kuzushi is literally the breaking of balance, right? It's a known principle in judo and jujitsu. And, right, every sweep, every trap and roll, every takedown, you're breaking the balance and then you're driving their weight in a direction where they don't have the appendage to balance themselves. So when you talk about the pyramid principle, you talk about base. When you talk about the kuzushi principle, you're essentially breaking the pyramid of the opponent. In the life application of this, and remember, as I'm writing this book, I'm really reflecting on my life. And I'm saying, okay, where in my life did I?

• 3:22:52Speaker 01

  What, what does breaking balance have to do with dealing with people and businesses and family and relationships? And then I realized, well, you can't break the balance that you don't first understand.

• 3:23:04Speaker 01

  I need to know the pillars on which you stand to then be able to isolate and defeat a pillar and then off balance you in the direction I want to take you. So that's where I gave it the life application and entrepreneurial definition of seeking first to understand then to be understood. And there was an example here where I, we, I, one day as someone emails me says, "Hannah, we have a one-star Yelp review disaster. Disastrous Yelp review, full paragraph." Sometimes you get the little pissed off people and nobody worries about them, right? But you guys have seen the paragraphs where they just rip into you and you're like, "Oh, this is, we gotta manage this." So I get this one-star Yelp review, which I take very personally because we work so hard to create such a unique student experience. And I say, "Find me the phone number for who this..." And what the Yelp review says is, "I had my daughter go to her first class.

• 3:23:48Speaker 01

  After years of getting her ready for this, she went to her first class. She was paired up with another girl who was too aggressive. Nobody recognized my daughter in the class. It was a disaster and they didn't take care of her and she, her partner was too aggressive with her and she wanted to quit the class. And I wanted to step on the mat because it didn't seem like the teachers were paying attention to my student. Nobody knew it was her first day. So the mom had incredible anxiety around a negative first class for her five-year-old daughter. And I thought, "Holy cow, this was a terrible experience." And I thought, "What do I do about this?" And then I thought, "Give me the phone number. I'm gonna call." And I called my managers into the room and I got her on the phone on speaker. And the mom's name was Myra. And I said, "Myra, I understand you had a negative experience.

• 3:24:33Speaker 01

  Can you tell me about it?" "Well, oh, hi, Hannah, yeah, yeah." Because I didn't teach the class. It was another instructor of mine. I said, "Tell me everything." She went, boom, took her time, explaining everything I just told you. And I said, "You know what? I said, "First of all, I'm really sorry this happened." And I said, "There's no excuse and know that steps will be taken so that no other student ever experiences what Miranda experienced, her daughter." I said, "But that's not good enough."

• 3:25:04Speaker 01

  Miranda never got the introduction to jiu-jitsu that she should have gotten. And that she deserves. So what I'd like to do is offer her a private class with myself. And I want you to come with her. So that you can also be introduced to jiu-jitsu the way it should be done. Oh my gosh, that's so generous of you. That's amazing. In fact, I only ever wanted to come to the class with my daughter because I wanted to do jiu-jitsu and I never had a chance when I was a kid. This is awesome. I said, great, let's do it. So I set up the class with Bobby, one of our female, amazing female instructors. Me, Bobby, and then Myra and Miranda. We do this private class. An hour long class, boom, just having fun, Gracie games for the girl, techniques for the mom. They're having the best time. Class ends and I said, look, I don't want to go just there.

• 3:25:48Speaker 01

  I also want to sponsor a whole month of private classes with Bobby. You're gonna love her. She's one of our best instructors. She's gonna take care of you guys. Oh my gosh, this is amazing. I said, you know, and then after that, if we earn you back, then we'd love to have you back in group classes or whatever you want. But to me, what matters most is that Miranda gets the introduction to jiu-jitsu that you knew was possible and that you were hoping for when you brought her that first time. She was robbed and we're gonna make it right. This is amazing. And then they did the first, second class with Bobby. The review disappeared, turned into a five-star review. Raving fans and students for lifelong. Now they're training with us. She had another son. He has a newborn baby. He's gonna come in. It's all good. And in all of this situation, it started with, where are you at, Myra? Where are you at? Calling her up and not saying, hey, why'd you write that?

• 3:26:33Speaker 01

  That's not true. But instead, tell me everything so this can never happen again. So if you're in a business where it's customer service, where it's... And sometimes the customers are the employees. As we know, the most important customers are our employees in an organization. Seek first to understand, then to be understood. This is true in business and in personal relationships.

• 3:26:55Jocko Willink?

  Number 12, the reconnaissance principle, believing that the answers you seek do exist and never underestimating the power of new information. Number 13, the prevention principle, accepting that sometimes the only way to win is to avoid losing. We kind of addressed that one already. Uh, number 14, the tension principle, recognizing when tension is an asset and when it's a liability, something you definitely have to pay attention to. Number 15, the fork principle, which I thought was a very unique name for this principle, optimizing outcomes by pursuing win-win equations.

• 3:27:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And jujitsu, right? We always aim to create dilemmas for our opponents such that if they choose A, they lose. If they choose B, we win. That's the whole game, right? It's traps everywhere. And then I'm thinking, well, in life, I'm not trying to trap you and trap you and trap you. So in reflecting how this principle has played out in my life, it became more a matter of recognizing that the most successful organizations and relationships are ones where all the stakeholders are winning. True win-wins. And you have to understand that coming from a family where the entire reputation and prowess and, and, and really

• 3:28:14Speaker 01

  revolution of the Gracie family resulted from the opposite approach. In order for the Gracie family to win, someone had to lose. So you have a karate practitioner, they have to suck in order for us to be good. And so that's what's called a win-lose, right? And I'm not speaking out against that per se, but I'm just kind of letting you guys know and sharing the fact that that's the DNA that I was given. Someone has to lose for someone else to win. And if both people are winning, nobody's winning. That's what I was brought up in. And it didn't limit itself to the Gracie challenge matches. I have to say that some of the entrepreneurial influence of previous generations leaned on

• 3:28:58Speaker 01

  this idea in the workplace where, no, no, no. Has to be disproportionately favorable for us in order for us to be in this relationship at all. And that's when I saw how many relationships fell through. In my previous generations of Gracie family members, how many opportunities were lost? How many relationships were soured? How many partnerships failed as a result of one party seeking that win lose? Because eventually all win loses become lose loses. So I had some very good mentors. I was privileged at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old to be teaching very successful entrepreneurs in every field, right? You can imagine. So I'm asking, I'm learning and I'm always inquiring like, yo, what's your secret?

• 3:29:42Speaker 01

  And he says, Henner, treat your people very good. And this is on more than one occasion, but take care of your people, create win wins. And the irony of it all is that by being trusting, sharing and considerate of other people's needs. We've now grown an organization with two hundred and fifty schools around the world. Sharing, they're making money, we're making money, we're changing lives every step of the way. And in all these cases, the irony of it all is the partners in this win win, in this particular example of sharing Jiu Jitsu with the world are the very people who were the losers on the Gracie Challenge matches so long ago. Right? Those arts and all the other traditional martial artists now are our biggest allies in sharing Jiu Jitsu with the world.

• 3:30:24Speaker 01

  But in order to get to that point, I had to apply the fork principle in pursuing those win wins. Which was very much against my DNA. You guys have been on the mat early on, talking about Fabio, talking about all my uncles. You ask a question, what do they say? Come here, let me show you that you don't know what you're talking about. You had to lose in order for the move to be right, am I right? There couldn't be like, yo, great question, Jaco, and that's a good point and that has validity and so does this. Couldn't exist. Someone had to lose for something to be right. So again, this is the DNA that we grew up in Jiu Jitsu. And so for me, it was very tough to shake that DNA when I became the leader in the business and deciding how I wanted to operate it. And that's where Eve came in and go, no, like, it can be like this too. You can, you can, you can share and you can do this and you can allow other people to win with us. And I think we'll go further.

• 3:31:09Speaker 01

  And we went from a single school with four employees to now two hundred and fifty schools and a headquarters with fifty employees in Torrance who work full time there, all because everyone's winning.

• 3:31:21Jocko Willink?

  Uh, number 16, the posture principle, identifying the source of the problem and then targeting your resources accordingly. Number 17, the false surrender principle, feigning compliance in the face of adversity and then seizing the opportunity when it prevents, presents itself.

• 3:31:41Speaker 01

  So this story is, this story in the book is funny because it's the only chapter where it's kind of written in the first person by my wife. So Eve gives this example and she's brand new on WWE, on tour, European tour, overseas with the big circus of all these guys, you know what I'm saying? And I'm not there and I'm like, this is nuts and like, I'm in a dating relationship, but she's traveling with this circus of crazy people. Some are great people, but some are not so much. And she's overseas and they're in the lobby of the hotel. And they're, the other people, they're drinking, Eve not so much. And there's a guy who's having a little too much to drink, very known wrestler that people know the name of. And he starts getting a little, oh, Eve had only been training for like three months, four months, right? Basic beginner. So this guy starts tussling with Eve in the lobby and everyone's watching and kind of,

• 3:32:25Speaker 01

  ah, is kind of being silly with it. And he's like, oh, jujitsu, ah, and they're tie up and they freaking scramble and they fall to the ground, Eve on the bottom, and he lands in her guard and he's just tussling and twisting and turning and he elbows her in the eye. And in the moment, her eye starts to throb and swell up, black eye on the road. And she's a backstage reporter who has to be on camera. So she's pissed and people are there and eventually they kind of pull each other off each other, like this jujitsu playful banter, too much. They pull her off. So she relaxes for a second. He's freaking walking away laughing. She runs up, she jumps on his back. She inserts both hooks and sinks the rear naked, standing.

• 3:33:09Speaker 01

  He starts to grab at her arm and starting to stumble to the right, stumble to the left. He drops to his knees and he passes out face first on the ground. And she lets him go. The whole place erupts. You got choked out by a girl. Ah, crazy, this and that and the other. Whole thing went crazy. The reputation spreads in the WWE that Eve choked out the guy. This is one of the guys. So, and then Vince calls her to the office and is like, she gets back to Connecticut or wherever the next show, whatever happens, Vince is there and calls her into the office. So Eve, tell us what happened. And she, of course, she's very, he's, he's concerned about the HR aspect of this. She's concerned about keeping her job because of who she choked. Both of them are fearful.

• 3:33:54Speaker 01

  And she goes, are you okay, Eve? And she says, yeah, I'm okay. You know, I just, he was being silly and it got out of hand. And I choked him unconscious and

• 3:34:01Jocko Willink?

  He was being silly. He needed to get choked.

• 3:34:03Speaker 01

  Oh dude. And by the way, false surrender. So she, after the thing, she kind of calmed down and got pulled off. This was a literal false surrender. This is not like a life and business application. This is a jujitsu application of the false surrender principle that she used overseas. She did this and then she says, no, I just choked him out. Everything's okay and I'm no problem. He went, bah! Vince McMahon, that's the funniest thing I've ever heard. That's awesome. And I'll tell you what, like, I was so happy because after she choked him out, I'm not on tour with them and like all the guys were on notice. And like, everyone was like, yo, she's a shooter. She knows how to fight. Like she can choke someone for real. And that was my insurance policy, dealing with that circus for the next five years. And I couldn't have been happier, even though she was pissed about the black guy.

• 3:34:43Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Eighteen, depletion principle, overcoming resistance through patience, persistence and pressure. We talked about that one. Isolation principle, leveraging the influence of a crowd and the power of isolation. Number 20, the sacrifice principle, giving up something of actual or perceived value to gain a tactical advantage in another form.

• 3:35:07Jocko Willink?

  21, the momentum principle, recognizing where things are heading and knowing where things need to go. Number 22, the pivot principle. We talked about this one. You, you, you have to adjust sometimes. You have to make some other moves, changing your perspective on a person, product or process to increase your effectiveness. Number 23, the tag along principle.

• 3:35:32Jocko Willink?

  Identifying trends, innovations and opportunities that will help you reach your goal with greater efficiency. This is, you know, similar to using what other people are doing and making it a win-win. It's a beautiful way to operate.

• 3:35:47Jocko Willink?

  Number 24, the overload principle.

• 3:35:50Jocko Willink?

  Identifying where you have a unique advantage, then doubling down to maximize your success.

• 3:35:58Jocko Willink?

  Number 25, the anchor principle. Committing wholeheartedly to people, principles, and processes that optimize your effectiveness and impact. It's a good one. And look, I'm obviously, I'm just reading sort of that tagline for each one of these. And each one of these has one of these stories that, you know, you've already given a couple of examples. That's what this book is. So you can really start to understand these things from a couple of different perspectives. You get the QR code for the jujitsu kind of combat perspective. Then you'll get sort of an explanation of what the principle is. And you do give a brief verbiage about the jujitsu principle as well. And then you get into some of these stories that reveal and explain the principle really clearly. Number 26, the ratchet principle.

• 3:36:42Jocko Willink?

  Believing that small, persistent advancements will add up to significant gains over time.

• 3:36:50Jocko Willink?

  The buoyancy, the buoyancy principle. Leveraging the predictability of human behavior to build your allies and break your enemies. This one's interesting. The fact that people want to get up, like this is like an interesting principle in jujitsu. People want to get back up. So you kind of know what they're going to do.

• 3:37:06Speaker 01

  Very predictable. And the less training they have, the more predictable they become. And that can be used to your advantage in a massive way when you just know how humans behave. And in the life and business application, we had a situation where we were running a beautiful business with tons of students who are having a great time and phones started disappearing from the locker room. Cell phones, smartphones. And one time it happened, oh, that's interesting. A second one happened a week later. I'm like, holy cow.

• 3:37:38Speaker 01

  This is now becoming a pattern. A third phone goes missing on a Saturday morning. The third phone was the phone of Billy Graziani, who is a biohazard, the biohazard lead singer. Yeah, stud, amazing guy, Black Belt Billy. So Billy's phone was the third phone missing. So what I did-

• 3:37:59Jocko Willink?

  And when you're in Brooklyn, you best watch your back, people. Billy biohazard's phone.

• 3:38:04Speaker 01

  Don't steal Billy's phone, dude. So when Billy came to me saying, "My phone's missing." So what had been happening is when your first phone is gone, I look at a roster of eighty-five students in a class. And I'm like, "It could be any one of them who went to the bathroom." The second phone is gone. I'm like, "All right, let me cross-reference the people who attended both those classes." When a third phone was gone, there was only one name on all three lists. A seventeen, sixteen or seventeen-year-old boy named Daniel. So that Saturday, Billy said, "My phone is gone." I said, "Bro." I looked at the roster, I said, "I got you." I called the dad. I got the number from the emergency contact information. I said, "Hey, you know, Mr. Andrade, I want to come over and say hi. I need to talk about something." "What's going on?" I go to the house. Daniel's there.

• 3:38:48Speaker 01

  The mom is there, the little sister is there, and Daniel's older brother, who's like twenty-three, twenty-four, you know. And we all sit at the dinner table. And I say, "Guys, so we have a situation. And some phones have gone missing at Gracie University. And we think that, you know, Daniel is the one who took possession of them." "No, no, no, no, you know, no, no." "Daniel, did you?" "No, I didn't. I don't know what you're talking about." I said, "Well, we need to find those phones. And I'm certain that you're the one who took them. So we either need to find those phones,

• 3:39:30Speaker 01

  or you're never going to train at Gracie University again." Silence.

• 3:39:38Speaker 01

  Got up, walked away.

• 3:39:41Speaker 01

  Well, interesting, before he walked away, his brother said, when he was denying it initially, his brother said, "Hanner," I know, older brother, "I know my brother, he didn't take the phones." So like, his brother's denial got doubled down by the older brother. So they were like backing each other up.

• 3:39:54Jocko Willink?

  Did the older brother train too?

• 3:39:55Speaker 01

  No. So we didn't have that relationship. The older brother was just, you know, low stud. And he says, "Hanner, if he says he didn't take it, he didn't take it." I say, "Bro, I respect the brotherliness."

• 3:40:04Speaker 01

  But he took the phones. But I appreciate the support you're giving him. And I said, "We either find those phones, or you never train with us again." He stood up, he walked away.

• 3:40:16Speaker 01

  And came back with a phone.

• 3:40:20Speaker 01

  And their parents were like this, "Oh."

• 3:40:23Speaker 01

  So embarrassed, right? Like, they were like so embarrassed. And I said, "I appreciate you being honest, Daniel, and bringing this back."

• 3:40:33Speaker 01

  I said,

• 3:40:38Speaker 01

  "Is this all you have?"

• 3:40:42Speaker 01

  And then I said, he said, "No." Got up, went and got the other one.

• 3:40:50Speaker 01

  And then I said, "Daniel,

• 3:40:53Speaker 01

  what about the rest?"

• 3:40:57Speaker 01

  He said, "First, he said, 'There's only two.'" I said, "Daniel,

• 3:41:02Speaker 01

  whether another one or another two, after these two." He said, "Two?"

• 3:41:10Speaker 01

  So now we know the answer, it's one more. Even though he was denying the third one, big time. And then he said, "Yeah, I sold the other one already." I said, "Okay. So here's the situation we have.

• 3:41:24Speaker 01

  The bigger problem than the phones being lost is the

• 3:41:29Speaker 01

  disastrous effect this had on the culture of the school, where there's nothing but trust, from the locker room to the arm bars. Trust is the core value amongst all students and teachers here, and you broke that." I said, "So, we only have two options.

• 3:41:49Speaker 01

  You either return the phones, pay for them, and never train again, or you have to help me repair what was taken in the form of trust.

• 3:42:01Speaker 01

  And you have to do it with your peers, from whom you stole."

• 3:42:09Speaker 01

  And the dad said, "Hanner, do you think they're gonna hurt him?" I said, "No, they're not gonna hurt him. I'll be there. It's gonna be fine."

• 3:42:21Speaker 01

  I said, "You guys can think about it. Monday night is class at 6:30.

• 3:42:27Speaker 01

  If you're there, we do the talk."

• 3:42:32Speaker 01

  "Okay, we'll let you know." Very tense.

• 3:42:36Speaker 01

  But Monday morning comes, Monday afternoon, the dad texts me, "We're coming to class." They show up. Daniel gets up in front of everyone, 85, 100 guys, and says, "You guys, I'm sorry, but I stole phones from the locker room. I shouldn't have done it, and it was a violation of trust.

• 3:42:57Speaker 01

  And I love this school. Hanner has been nothing but good to me. He don't. I love training with you guys, and I hope I can still train with you guys." Bro.

• 3:43:11Speaker 01

  I said, "You guys, if you'll have him back," I said to everyone, "if you'll have him back, I'll have him back." And they all, "Ah." I said, "All right, there you go." After class, the guys he stole from and others come up, "Hey, bro, that was really cool that you did that. It's all good." And man, Billy, the other guys, "Hey, bro, don't worry about it, man. We all made mistakes for sure. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good." The guy never stole again, continued training. And he is in the book. They interview him for the book. My co-author Paul interviewed a bunch of other people to bring in other stories, and he interviewed Daniel and said, "Yeah, how are you been?" "Bro, I was mixed up with the wrong people, doing the wrong things, needing money for the wrong reasons, sell a phone for 500 bucks, get the cash. Terrible idea. I never stole again after that."

• 3:43:55Speaker 01

  And the fact that Hanner brought me back in and let me do that and let me make it right, I was very scared. But man, it changed my life, and I'm so grateful for that. This is the buoyancy principle, because predictability of human behavior was what allowed me to catch him. Where after the first phone, I could have blown up and tried to do X, Y, or Z, but instead I was patient, right, and let basically it play out. And after three phones and cross-referencing those rosters, we got him. We got that rear naked joke. And then it turns out it was just a major life lesson that ultimately benefited him in the long run, which I'm grateful for.

• 3:44:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Uh, 28, the head control principle, identifying the primary source of influence in an organization and targeting your efforts accordingly.

• 3:44:40Jocko Willink?

  Number 29, the redirection principle, using unfavorable circumstances to create favorable outcomes. Chapter 30, or number 30, the mobility principle, accepting, accepting the things you cannot change while having the courage to change the things you can.

• 3:45:02Jocko Willink?

  Isn't that an AA saying?

• 3:45:04Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 3:45:05Jocko Willink?

  I think it is an AA saying, Alcoholics Anonymous, the courage to accept that.

• 3:45:10Speaker 01

  I think it is.

• 3:45:10Jocko Willink?

  There's something along those lines.

• 3:45:11Speaker 01

  It is, it is, yeah, I've never been to that group or discussion, but I've heard it just in passing and I'm like, that's, because in jujitsu, right, how often are we stuck in a position where the opponent is immovable?

• 3:45:23Speaker 01

  We move ourselves, right? And that's something so heavily reinforced every day that, yo, it's all good. This doesn't move, I can move relative to it and I can still make my effectiveness as a result of that. And talking about it in life and business, once you realize that something is the way it is and it's gonna be the way it is, guess what? You have two options. Move relative to it, or keep butting heads with it and, and, and reduce your effectiveness that way. So, um, in this chapter, I talk about the need for me to adapt to the, the state kind of mandates surrounding law enforcement and my resistance initially for all the reasons I thought were right. But no, when you get in and you speak the language and you become part of this law enforcement kind of state regulating process, um, you can accomplish so much more.

• 3:46:05Speaker 01

  So I, I yielded to the state's requirements in many ways. And as a result, the impact has been exponential on the other side of that. So I just wish I was more mobile sooner, yield sooner to the reality of things than here we are.

• 3:46:21Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Uh, 31, the centerline principle, owning your life by setting boundaries wherever they're needed. Absolutely. And then the last and final of the principles, the Grand Master Principle, living with the confidence of a black belt while learning with the humility of a white belt. And in that chapter, you refer to your grandfather, who

• 3:46:47Speaker 01

  The ultimate white belt.

• 3:46:49Jocko Willink?

  The ultimate black belt and the ultimate white belt.

• 3:46:51Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 3:46:52Jocko Willink?

  The ultimate guy created it, but still has and goes through life with an open mind and still learning his whole life.

• 3:46:59Speaker 01

  To the end, 95, and this guy's like, Yo, Henry, let me show you this new detail. I'm like, what are you doing, dude? So always humble, always open to improvement and opportunities. And I think that we all get to a point of effectiveness in our fields and in our crafts and in our martial arts and in our businesses that we think we know, you know? And this is just a constant reminder of, you know, using the principles to constantly evolve in every way possible. And I just, as we were kind of documenting these principles, we got to the end and I had 31 principles documented. And I'm like, 31 is not a good number to end on. Swear, this is exactly what happened. I was in the shower and I'm like, what the heck do you end a book with?

• 3:47:40Speaker 01

  Well, not a book, but even the original 32, the 32 Principles video course that was intended to share these with the world. I'm like, all right, we got 31 solid principles that are micro principles and all very actionable in Jiu Jitsu, um, long before the book was contemplated. We need a 32nd principle, eight times four is 32. I'm like, but it can't just be another principle. It has to be one principle that encapsulates all the principles and their continuous and constant deployment in every aspect of our, or in this case in Jiu Jitsu. Essentially always using the principles to constantly refine your deployment of the principles in every single way. And I thought, yes, that's what it is. It's the everything principle and that we had to just pay homage and call out the Grand Master Principle because that's what he embodied.

• 3:48:25Speaker 01

  He had all these, he didn't label them all like we did, but he embodied all of them his entire life. And we benefit today from the amazing art of Jiu Jitsu because of his constant and never ending deployment of these principles to evolve the art that we all now love so much.

• 3:48:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you're actually in, in the book here. This is a pretty interesting point. You say he didn't have a teacher for much of his life, so he had to be his own teacher. And he was able to do this because he embodied all the core principles of the art, even though he hadn't named them. Even though he'd helped to invent the art of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Elio never stopped seeking knowledge. He never believed that he knew it all, or that he was bigger than the art itself. Those types of thoughts never crossed his mind. Instead, he was constantly trying to evolve the techniques to accommodate his frail physique in approaching larger, stronger opponents. My grandfather was driven by an unyielding pursuit of efficiency, the apex principle of the art and the staple of every core principle we've explored.

• 3:49:24Jocko Willink?

  And then you say this, "These principles are now yours to explore, experiment with, modify, and use to create solutions or techniques to overcome the obstacles and adversities that inevitably await you down the road. Please give yourself the permission to be your own teacher, so that you may evolve into the grand master of your own life."

• 3:49:48Speaker 01

  You know, at the end of the day, I feel like, you know, the computer is only as good as the operating system, right? And we all have an operating system that is a result of our upbringing, right? All of your history, all of your past is who you are today. Same is for you, same is for me. And the way I look at it is that there are many people out there who are not particularly thrilled about their operating system, about how they react and how they respond to adversity, right? Personal and professional. And my thought was, I'm very proud of the operating system that I have. It took a long time to develop this operating system. I'm very, I'm very proud of how it's applied, not just in Jiu-Jitsu,

• 3:50:30Speaker 01

  but in every aspect of my life. And now that I've observed and kind of cataloged how these principles have applied in so many areas of my life, I thought, man, it would be cool if people around the world who have, if you do Jiu-Jitsu...

• 3:50:48Speaker 01

  It's very likely that you aren't even aware the extent to which these principles can improve your personal and professional life outside of the training on the mats, right? So there's one population where I felt like they just need to be told and given permission to apply jujitsu to everything. That's the people who do jujitsu. Then there's the people who don't do jujitsu, who are not particularly proud of their operating systems and their way of dealing with adversity. And since we deal with adversity every minute of every day in jujitsu, and we develop very healthy, you know, operating systems as it pertains to dealing with adversity, I would like to give my operating system to anyone who wants to improve theirs,

• 3:51:32Speaker 01

  particularly as it pertains to adversity. And that is what the kind of, certainly ambitious attempt of this book is, "Hey, you don't do jujitsu, but guess what? Let me show you some videos in every chapter where you'll understand what it is, so you're absolutely clear on the physical application, and then let me explain the personal and professional application." And if this type of, you know, fluid and effective, efficient way of living and dealing with adversity is sounds intriguing to you and it sounds attractive to you, then adopt it as your own. It's here. Read about it, learn about it, and become about it. And like I said in the beginning, I think that people who will read this book

• 3:52:14Speaker 01

  will, if they were on the fence of like, "Should I try jujitsu or should I not?" By the time they read this, they're gonna go, "Holy cow, like this isn't even about fighting." Right? Like, we always talk about it. Honestly, when's the last time you had a threat of a real street fight? It's very rare, especially because of our de-escalation and our confidence and our boundary-setting capabilities that is, of course, emboldened by our techniques and our skill sets. But let's be honest, we're not worried about a fight, right? Like, we're capable, we're ready, something happens, even if it's someone else, we go put out the fire if we need to, we're very proud of that ability. And to do so without hurting someone is amazingly humanizing and allows us to be compassionate souls that we are in a violent physical altercation, but... For most people, it's not even about the fight. It really is, people start jujitsu for self-defense.

• 3:52:59Speaker 01

  But they stay with jujitsu because it makes them better people. And everyone knows that, but no one has really ever explained exactly how and why that is. And once I identified that for myself and the direct and, you know, the explicit ways in which the jujitsu principles I've applied in life and business, I went, okay, I think that some people can benefit from this.

• 3:53:25Speaker 01

  And if they end up trying a class at the end of all of this, they find a local school and go give it a shot. I hope it's a good school. I hope they take care of them. I hope they don't break them on the first day. You know, that's my only hope in all this. I'm like, I'm gonna attract some people to jujitsu. I can't promise that the school you go to is gonna do things in a safe and structured and a contextually relevant way. But my hope is that, you know, through more educating and discussions like this, jujitsu schools around the world also make improvements, right? They also make changes that ultimately protect the beginners. Because the guy who's had a school for seventeen years and has a hundred and twelve students, I don't think he wants that. I think he wants to have five hundred, six hundred, seven hundred students.

• 3:54:07Speaker 01

  Because besides the financial benefit of having a successful, growing business where you actually retain your students, there's also a community service component to this, which is imagine the level of fulfillment that we feel by servicing the community in such a profound and vast way in terms of just the sheer numbers of people that we're impacting, whether it's children, women, or men. So for all those reasons, I hope that people continue to, in the wild, wild west that is Brazilian jujitsu right now, I hope that people, you know, really try to take the steps that we took so many years ago to improve that student experience so that jujitsu, as popular as it is, is more sustainable and is more retentive of these students who are giving it a chance than it historically has been.

• 3:54:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I think it has improved a lot. Um, and I just so if you're out there listening like, well, it almost sounds scary what you're saying, right? Like, I don't want to go to this, all these schools. Most schools are good. Most schools you go into and you should be able to tell pretty quickly, you should get treated well. You should get welcomed. You should get taught. You shouldn't get beat up. You should, you should feel like your first day was pretty relaxed and, and depending on what your attitude goes going into this. Now, Echo and I were talking about this earlier and you know, we were all talking about this earlier. When I was freaking starting jujitsu, I wanted to get roughed up. I wanted to fight people. And so guess what happened? I've got, I got roughed up. That's what happens. When you go into academy with an attitude like you want to be aggressive

• 3:55:34Jocko Willink?

  and you wanna, you wanna fight, you're, you're gonna, you're gonna receive that. If you go in to a jujitsu academy, because you want to learn and because you want to expand your horizon, you should be immediately reciprocated with that type of attitude. And that's what you should get. If it's not like that, you should be able to smell it in four minutes. And if it's, if it's not an open, accepting environment, just get on your shoes and walk out. You have no point in being there. People that are mature instructors, they want to take care of you. They want you to train. They want you to be at their school. They want you to do jujitsu. All, we all want you to do jujitsu. It's gonna make your life better. So don't be nervous. Go out and try. And the other

• 3:56:17Jocko Willink?

  thing is, but what school should I go to? Go try, you'll go to the schools in your area. Try two or three of them. Try four of them if they're there. Don't think that the first school you go into is where you have to commit. You want to go on a few dates.

• 3:56:29Speaker 01

  Great advice. Good, very good advice. It's a, it's a real relationship. And that's what I always say, if I don't have a school, if I have a school there, I can tell you what they're gonna teach you. I can tell you what curriculum they're gonna do and what the safety protocols are. Doesn't mean it's the best school for you. It just means I can promise that. If you, if I don't have a school there, my advice is always this. Try, don't, do not sign an agreement. Do a class and even before doing a class, I say, watch a class. And if as you watch, you cannot see yourself doing that thing, or you cannot make sense of the thing that you're witnessing, don't even do the class. But if you do it and say, man, I wish I would have suited up today and did that, then the next time you do the class. And then once you do that at two, three, four schools, then you make your decision. Who makes you feel the best?

• 3:57:13Speaker 01

  Who speaks about jujitsu in a context that makes sense to you and to your objectives? Because some want competition from day one, some want fitness. The vast majority want self-defense, at least in the beginning, to feel safer in their own skin, right? Who don't have that confidence to protect themselves and their family. And if they don't speak to those needs and wants that you have when you show up, don't expect it to change in 60 days or six years. They are, that school's identity is what you see on day one. So be very careful what you trust, because if they say, yeah, you're gonna learn those things later. You're gonna learn self-defense and down the line. Where, when do we learn how to block a punch between two standing people in a violent verbal altercation that turns physical? Where is that encounter discussed? And if they can't give you a straight answer, on Tuesday at 7:30 PM, we're gonna talk about that.

• 3:57:58Speaker 01

  Be careful because they're making promises that they can't keep. And then when you sign that year agreement, now you're financially stuck, which I've seen so many of, dude, gotcha, gotcha for the year. So just be careful what you sign.

• 3:58:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. But go change jujitsu, people. Go change jujitsu.

• 3:58:16Jocko Willink?

  Does that get us up to speed? I think we covered, I think we covered your, some of your activities. I think we're, we're doing pretty good.

• 3:58:23Speaker 01

  Tell me about this red energy, pink mist.

• 3:58:25Jocko Willink?

  The energy. Well, it seemed to have worked today. You had a lot of energy.

• 3:58:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it kept me fired up this whole time. And I didn't know I needed this in my life.

• 3:58:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, there's, you know, it's good for you. It's truly good for you. It's got no sugar in it. It's sweetened with monk fruit, which is a beautiful thing for you. It doesn't have a ton of caffeine in it. It's got 95 milligrams of caffeine. It's all good, man. There's no, no artificial flavors. It's, in fact, we went to the length of, instead of putting chemicals in it to keep its shelf life, we pasteurized it. So it just gets heated up to kill whatever might be in there to keep its shelf life good. So we went as, as pure as we could possibly go.

• 3:59:05Speaker 01

  Congratulations.

• 3:59:06Jocko Willink?

  That's what we're doing, yeah.

• 3:59:09Jocko Willink?

  Where can people find you? We got Quickflip, we got Sleeperhold, we got GracieUniversity.com. That's sort of the hub, right?

• 3:59:17Speaker 01

  That's the hub. Yeah, GracieUniversity.com for all jujitsu, men, women, children, law enforcement, Gracie Survival Tactics, all the course dates, all the opportunities are there, all the online courses. And what I'll say to anybody out there who, right, they've heard enough of your podcasts, enough recommendation to try jujitsu, they're still not showing up at a school because they're scared. Like we talked about in the beginning, they don't believe they can do it. My recommendation is go to GracieUniversity.com, watch two, three, four free lessons. And if you can't immediately say, wow, that only makes sense what they're saying, I could see myself doing that, then, then you didn't pay anything, so it's all good, it was free. But if you see it and you go, man, I totally see myself doing this. Go find a school, whether it's one of ours or any school, start learning jujitsu.

• 4:00:00Speaker 01

  And if there's no school that you like, start a Gracie Garage or find one near you or just find a person online and just start practicing, going through these techniques, learning these skills. The way I look at it and the way it's kind of communicated in the Gracie family is you need to learn how to, you know, read and write, you need to learn how to ride a bike, you need to learn how to swim in the ocean, and you learn how to fight. Like when you're a kid in this family, there's some basic skills you have to learn. And back in the day, it was horse riding too, not so much anymore. But the point is, you just have to know some things as a human being. And the fact that so many parents allow their kids to grow up in a world where they teach them how to swim in a pool, but they never teach them how to swim in a fight. And you can drown in a street fight, in a bullying encounter, as quickly and severely as you could in a pool.

• 4:00:43Speaker 01

  So, these are skills that are real, that everyone should have growing up. And the fact that some parents let their, unleash their kids on the world without the ability to protect what's theirs, even if that means their space, right, their, their, their state of mind, their physical possessions. When someone's gonna take something from you, you should be able to say, no, you're not gonna take this. And if you attempt, it's gonna be a bad day for you. Simple conversation, but you can't say that unless you can back it up. And you do so at the highest level of love and compassion. Then you get the people who say, you've all heard this, I'm a lover, not a fighter. No, Jaco, I'm not going to come to the studio. I don't want to learn jiu-jitsu. I'm a lover, not a fighter. No, you don't understand. All the biggest lovers are on the mats right now. Because if you get into a fight, let's say, without jiu-jitsu, either one of you studs,

• 4:01:28Speaker 01

  with your athleticism, how much of a liability are you to yourself and to the person that you fight? You're an absolute atomic bomb of liability because you're going to over-aggress, like any police officer who's untrained. You're going to go absolutely violent on this guy, punch his face into the pavement, brutalize his skull, break your hand. Everyone goes to the hospital and you get a lawsuit. So if that's what lovers do, then I don't want to be a lover. Instead, if you learn jiu-jitsu, no, no, no, no, you can attack me. I'm not going to hurt you. I'm going to tie you up. He don't go so far to say, Henry, if I get into a street fight, it shouldn't be called a fight. It's the wrong classification. Because there aren't two violent people trying to hurt each other. There's one aggressor who's a mental case and the other person is physically de-escalating that encounter.

• 4:02:10Speaker 01

  That's what my fight should be called, a physical demonstration of de-escalation. And that's what it actually is. So when you think of it that way, the biggest lovers should learn jiu-jitsu. So if you're a lover, not a fighter, you need to learn jiu-jitsu. Because if not, you're the biggest liability to yourself. So graceuniversity.com, quickflipapparel.com for quick flips are great. But any organizations, any, anyone out there who wants to do quick flips for the whole team, we're happy to do that. We can sample one, show it to the team, see if you guys like it. And then sleeper hold is travel pillows, right? Sleeperhold.com. It's if you travel on a semi-regular basis for work and you suffer from bobblehead in the flight, this is the best thing you're going to ever have in your life. I sleep for two and a half hours straight on commercial flights, economy, just strap in, full head support, I'm gone.

• 4:02:55Speaker 01

  And then there's optional patches you can put on the forehead. One says, do not disturb. One says, wake for food. And one says, sorry for snoring. So while I'm gone, the flight attendant always knows the appropriate method of interaction based on my request versus, hey, do you want to eat right now? Don't wake me up. I just taught an eight-hour seminar. I'm trying to sleep. I don't need your airplane food right now. But she doesn't know that. She's trying to be polite. So anyways, so that's what's going down. And then, of course, on social media, at Henry Gracie everywhere. And stoked, yeah. Thank you, guys.

• 4:03:25Jocko Willink?

  And you have at Gracie University HQ. You got your YouTube channel, don't forget about that.

• 4:03:29Speaker 01

  YouTube, Grace, at Gracie Breakdown. Yeah, that's the one that started it all. And like those breakdowns really are the driver of traffic and awareness to everything else that we're doing in jiu-jitsu. One day it was like, hey, Gi Valente called me, he's like, "Hunter, Dan Hardy GSP arm bar. Why didn't the arm break? People don't know why Dan Hardy's arm wasn't broken when GSP caught him. You guys should do a breakdown, Gi said, and explain that. I'm like, "Cool, easy work, like, let's call it the Gracie Breakdown." And we did one, got like, I don't know, 10, 20, 30,000 views. The next one, I think was Fedor and Doom. A massive triangle win. We did that one on a Sunday.

• 4:04:09Jocko Willink?

  I was there.

• 4:04:10Speaker 01

  You went to the fight?

• 4:04:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was there.

• 4:04:11Speaker 01

  Dude, that was the best. I did that breakdown on a Sunday. By Wednesday, it has, you know, 300, 400,000 views. I'm like, "People like this." They like understanding what the beauty of jiu-jitsu application in MMA, where it's kind of chaotic, but they can understand and dissect. And then send them to the website at the end of that, gracieuniversity.com, if you want to learn what we just explained. And it just became that funnel for us. And now, it's what people recognize. "Hey, I love the breakdowns." TSA agent at the airport, like, "Yo, I've been loving the breakdowns." I'm like, "Cool, do you train?" He's like, "No, I just love the breakdowns." I'm like, "All right, cool, man, like, do a class one day, GU Online, go check it out."

• 4:04:44Jocko Willink?

  Right on. Echo Charles, any questions?

• 4:04:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. Speaking of breakdowns, right, remember the OG breakdown, how to tie your belt?

• 4:04:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:04:53Speaker 02

  That was the OG breakdown, how to tie your jiu-jitsu belt. The best one I like, by the way.

• 4:04:58Jocko Willink?

  Is it the same way that I tie it?

• 4:04:59Speaker 01

  Hollywood Super Lock, classic, the original.

• 4:05:02Speaker 02

  Actually, what was the original one called? It was like the...

• 4:05:04Speaker 01

  I think it's classic. Yeah, something simple like that. It was like classic, and then the Hollywood, and then the Super Lock, and I just, yeah, people loved it, dude.

• 4:05:13Speaker 02

  You know why they call it Hollywood? Or you think you can guess? It's actually one of the best breakdowns there is, to be honest with you.

• 4:05:19Speaker 01

  It's really funny.

• 4:05:20Speaker 02

  It's one of the OG ones.

• 4:05:21Speaker 01

  It's really funny. It's on there.

• 4:05:22Jocko Willink?

  I haven't seen that one.

• 4:05:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's old school.

• 4:05:24Speaker 01

  How to tie your jiu-jitsu belt. And then there's that one, and then there's the pant tying video, where the Gi pants, you know, some people don't know. Bro, people, when they tie the pants in a weird way, and it kind of gets all bunched up, and they don't know to pull the strings laterally, right? They don't do this. They just tie it up, and it's all bunched up, and then the pants start to fall off. So I created a video where I explained the pant tie and people love those and um.

• 4:05:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, you have a few breakdowns with that kind of stuff because you have the one where this one, the string comes out of the pants.

• 4:05:51Speaker 01

  How to put it back through the piping.

• 4:05:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's pretty, yes, very innovative.

• 4:05:55Speaker 01

  We were just making random videos. People just gravitated and just before you know it and then you do a Conor McGregor, Habib Nurmagomedov breakdown and it gets, you know, two million views overnight because people want to know like what happened and they see and. So i- i- we just kind of, and we talk about the momentum principle in the book and how that led to that. Then we started doing street fight breakdowns. And then it went one step further where there's a bullying incident in Indiana. And a kid gets beat up in the locker bay at his school. We see the video and then I was just like, yo, I'm gonna reach out.

• 4:06:24Speaker 02

  You're like, yo, Gracie breakdown.

• 4:06:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so in that case, you gotta be sensitive, right? So in that case, I said, wait a minute, this is crazy. Normally I would just explain what he could have done it. But I'm like, hold on, let's go one step further. And then Austin McDaniel, that was like a critical moment. We reached out to the family and said, hey, we want to do this. The mom called me back like six months later. Hey, we saw you tried to reach out to our attorney that you want to train this, that and the other. I said, listen, this is what we do. Your son, Austin, uh, sorry that happened. We want to fly you, the mom, the dad and the son, all of you guys to California. To train him for a week. Please let me do this. We brought Austin to California. Twelve year old, just overweight, like just this big kind of like, twelve year old kid who just got annihilated at school and I got him in there. Train him for a week.

• 4:07:07Speaker 01

  Day one, you see the progression and we filmed the whole thing and we did this progression, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. And by the last day, this kid is a different human being, like power push, verbal assertiveness with me and Hedo on training several hours every day. Boot camped him and then we sent him back and we posted that video, three, four, five million views of different platforms. And now people are like, this is amazing. And then basically because we did that, every bowling video that goes online, they're sending it to us. And then every six months to a year, we're recruiting another kid to come out and we're doing these transformations. We're recording it. And this is just showing parents that this exists out there because bullying, the challenge is if you don't take steps to, right, to address the challenges that these kids are facing, it's like a balloon.

• 4:07:52Speaker 01

  If kids getting harassed every day, verbal, physical, psychological, cyber, if they're getting harassed, it's like air being injected into a balloon. Indefinitely and continuously over time for that same child. And unless they build their confidence and start to deflate that balloon and like get back to a normal state, it just keeps going and then eventually it pops. We don't know when, we don't know where, we don't know what that looks like and every kid is different. Sometimes the pop is a Columbine. Sometimes the pop is a suicide. Sometimes the pop is any range between those two extremes. But almost always, what do you see? It's tied back to incessant bullying that was unchecked and uncommunicated and they leave a note and now you know. My gosh, this is why he was doing this. These kids were making fun of him. He didn't have an outlet.

• 4:08:34Speaker 01

  So for me, every time I see those, the same way when I see a cop video go viral for excessive force, all I'm thinking is, in many cases, poor cop, they didn't get the training that they needed. They're a victim as much as they are the culprit here. In a, in a youth suicide or a school shooting of a kid, I'm always like, holy cow. I wish I would have had this kid for a week, two weeks, three weeks. So I make these videos hoping that other parents go, man, my kid's getting bullied. Let's open up the discussion, get them the training that they need. And all of this is momentum from the UFC and from awareness about MMA and the Gracie breakdown. And then using that as much as we can for good, doing these breakdowns, changing lives with these jujitsu transformations. So that people on the outside go, all right, you know, it's one thing to talk about jujitsu, another for people to see.

• 4:09:17Speaker 01

  Problem, transformation, new human being. This guy Austin, that was like eight to 10 years ago. Austin went back, never had a problem with that bully or any other bully again. Graduated high school, enlisted in the Marines immediately after, shredded up, full stud. Went to the Marines, 100% good to go. I think he's now transitioning to the army or another military branch. And he's fully good to go. And they interview him for the book and his dad as well about the reservations they had in coming to California. And Austin, where he's at now and just the pivotal role that played, he's just like, yo, that was the beginning of the rest of my life. Was to be told that I can look at someone and say, don't take one more step. I didn't know that. No one taught me that. So, you know, there are certain skills that we expect people and kids in the world to know,

• 4:10:01Speaker 01

  but unless they're taught, unless it's talked about, it's largely, you know, unknown to the people who need it most. So, you guys do great work and just constantly drawing attention to it. And I benefit, the number of people who've shown up and said, "Yo, I heard Jaco and I wanted to try Jiu-Jitsu", just from some random discussion you guys have had, has been awesome and I always wanted to get here to say thank you guys for being just such ambassadors and pushing it, you know, with the, with the video here and not being able to put the mask down and actually show. I mean, of course, you practicing it, people love seeing those videos as well, but, thank you.

• 4:10:32Jocko Willink?

  Any other questions, Echo?

• 4:10:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, your dad did martial arts consulting for like movies, right? Like Lethal Weapon 1.

• 4:10:40Speaker 01

  The triangle. Yeah, Gary Busey and the Gary Busey and the Mel Gibson triangle in the rain, dude. The most classic, yeah. So, he did some, he got here, was working, he was cleaning houses for some people and one of the people there was a producer of movies and, "Oh, you do Jiu-Jitsu and this and that", and then he's teaching out of the garage at the same time. "Okay, come choreograph this scene", he met the director and boom, boom, boom, and he was in Lethal Weapon 4 as one of the bad guys and Rene Russo.

• 4:11:04Jocko Willink?

  I had to go watch that scene in preparation for this podcast, both those scenes.

• 4:11:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, Rene Russo slams him on the glass.

• 4:11:10Jocko Willink?

  I forgot that was your dad in the Rene Russo getting tossed.

• 4:11:13Speaker 01

  In the glass, yeah. He gets smashed in the garage.

• 4:11:16Jocko Willink?

  It's the classic scene, Mel Gibson is like all like, just so happy watching his girlfriend beat everybody up. It's kind of like you and you're hearing about your, your wife like choking dudes out.

• 4:11:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great scene and I remember that particular scene when he was filming, he's like, "Yo, this is the alligator pad", I think it's the name they called it, which is what he wears on his body underneath his shirt to get slammed in the glass. And it was like this really thin but very durable thing and I'm like, "Oh, that's bad", I was like, "I don't know, 12, 13, 14", and I'm like, "Dude, you're gonna be in a movie, that's cool."

• 4:11:43Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Henner, any closing thoughts?

• 4:11:46Speaker 01

  No, I, um, just what an honor and thank you guys for helping us increase the awareness about not just Jiu-Jitsu, but the life application of it and, um, I appreciate you guys.

• 4:11:58Jocko Willink?

  Awesome, man. Uh, thanks for joining us. Thanks to you and thanks to your family for bringing Jiu-Jitsu to America, for bringing Jiu-Jitsu around the globe. Thanks for all that you do to continue to, you know, spread the sport, the martial art, and, and the philosophies of Jiu-Jitsu around the world. It is much appreciated. Thank you.

• 4:12:19Speaker 01

  Thank you, bros.

• 4:12:21Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Henner Gracie has left the building.

• 4:12:27Jocko Willink?

  That we could have done multiple podcasts, but still, still four hours or something like that, right?

• 4:12:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, fully. But even going deeper into the principles could have been kind of cool.

• 4:12:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know, I know.

• 4:12:40Speaker 02

  Actually, the forking one, it was a twist on it, but that's a chess technique as well. It's called forking. And it's just what, how you explained it before, his actual principle, his actual principle is a win-win, which is, it's a different take on it, but forking is like the jujitsu slash chess version where it's like.

• 4:12:56Jocko Willink?

  The jujitsu version is triangle arm lock.

• 4:12:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, like they have to make a decision and every, any decision they make is, is the outcome that you want, you know? So chess, yeah, you, you basically threaten two people with one guy. And then when this guy moves, you just take the other one, kind of a thing. See, I know that.

• 4:13:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, awesome, awesome discussion. Super, super cool. And we're doing jujitsu, by the way.

• 4:13:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 4:13:20Jocko Willink?

  We should be doing jujitsu. Hey, if you weren't convinced to do jujitsu yet.

• 4:13:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:13:25Jocko Willink?

  Come on.

• 4:13:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:13:26Jocko Willink?

  You have to get there. When you get there, you're gonna need some fuel. You're gonna need Jaco fuel. You're gonna need to rehydrate. You want to get Jaco hydrate. It's so good to go. It is such a win. The Jaco hydrate. And also similar greens. Jaco greens. Greens do not have to taste like dirt and mowed grass shaken in a mixer. They don't need to taste like that. They can taste like Jaco greens.

• 4:13:56Speaker 02

  What's funny is you kind of say it kind of with this joking tone.

• 4:13:59Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 4:13:59Speaker 02

  But that is literally the standard for greens. You know, they'll, they'll put the greens in there and hopefully maybe put up, I don't know, pineapple or apple, you know, some, something in there to make it taste good because it doesn't taste good. I know this because my mom's is a greens person. And even growing up, she had the greens and I was like, I have no idea how you eat this kind of stuff. Or put this in a smoothie, whatever, whatever you're doing. And so I know, but yeah, your greens actually taste good.

• 4:14:26Jocko Willink?

  Your mom likes my greens.

• 4:14:27Speaker 02

  Yes, she did. Yeah, she totally approved them. The whole gig.

• 4:14:30Jocko Willink?

  If they're good with Echo's mom, you know they're good. She's been, she's been drinking greens forever. Now she knows the best kind of greens.

• 4:14:39Jocko Willink?

  So yeah, jockofuel.com, get greens, get hydrate, get the milk. Get the milk powder. Get the joint warfare, get the super curl. You're probably gonna want some. You start training the jujitsu, you're gonna want that joint warfare.

• 4:14:54Speaker 02

  Bruh, I actually, I meant to tell you, and it's not about that, it's about Cold War. So, my, I'll keep the story short. So, my wife, my lovely wife, she was, she was going on like a little girl's trip in town. She is, or she's currently on it right now.

• 4:15:09Jocko Willink?

  Staycation?

• 4:15:10Speaker 02

  Staycation-ish, but it was some girls that came in and one of them is, let's say, for lack of a whole long story and explanation, she's immune compromised. So, she was like, hey, I kinda feel a sickness coming on right now. My wife is saying this, so I can't be going down to this hangout for a week or however long, sick, cause you know, for all these like very important reasons. So, she's like, oh, just give me the Cold War. She's, so she, she, she did her own protocol. Two, two and two. So, two in the morning, two for lunch and two at dinner, right? And she was like, hey, I am for real getting sick, like, you know.

• 4:15:43Jocko Willink?

  That's a game, that's a lot of Cold War going on. Like, that's a full frontal assault.

• 4:15:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:15:48Jocko Willink?

  On that sickness.

• 4:15:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's it. But that's what she did. So, I was like, yeah, alright. I mean, good luck, you know? And that's your staycation. So, I'm like, you know, good luck. And boom, knocked it out. Nothing. She was getting sick, not sick. Currently on the staycation right now with her immunocompromised friend, right now.

• 4:16:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Uh, that's, that's Cold War, by the way. Hey, you can get this stuff. You can get it at jockofuel.com. You can get a subscription on jockofuel.com to this stuff. Get a subscription to like Joint Warfare. Get a subscription to Krill Oil. Get a subscription to Greens. Those are things that you're gonna wanna take every single day. So, anyways, check that out, jockofuel.com. You can save a little bit when you do that subscription as well. That way, you're getting hooked up. If you wanna buy it in a store, go to Vitamin Shoppe. Go to Wawa. Look in the bottom right at Wawa. Go to Vitamin Shoppe. Go to GNC, Military Commissaries, Afees, Hannaford, Dash Doors, Wakefern, ShopRite, HEB.

• 4:16:48Jocko Willink?

  Thank you, Texas. Thank you, HEB. You guys are crushing. Will you go in there and support? It pays off. We appreciate it. That allows them to bring even more product in, allows us to get into more stores. So, thank you. Same thing with Meyer up in the Midwest, Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, Shields. And by the way, small gym, we were out at CrossFit, at the CrossFit Games. So many people came by and that owned CrossFit gyms. They want, they're gonna sell, they're gonna sell Jaco Fuel in their CrossFit gyms. Jiu Jitsu gyms, same thing. Why not help out the people that are coming to your school or coming to your gym? If you want to sell our stuff in your gym, go to [email protected].

• 4:17:32Jocko Willink?

  And you can sell it, set up a wholesale account. We'll hook you up. But we're making the clean stuff. We're making the good stuff. It'll help you in everything that you do. JacoFuel.com, also Origin USA. When you do Jiu Jitsu, you're gonna need a gi. I mean, look, there are other gi's you can get. It is a thing that you could do. Wouldn't be a good move, though. It would be not, it'd be, it'd be against the principles of Jiu Jitsu. You'd be getting a secondary, a tertiary, just like a bad gi. Don't do that. Get an Origin gi, Origin USA, Origin USA.com. Also, you can't go to a club in a gi.

• 4:18:13Jocko Willink?

  Technically, once again, you could do it. Be breaking some principles, some legit principles. Don't do it. Instead, get a pair of Origin jeans, made in America. Get an Origin t-shirt, made in America. Get an Origin hoodie, made in America. That's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. All made in America. We got the Hunt gear. We got the, the RTX gear, which is like your workout clothes. We got what you need, all made in America. Bringing manufacturing back to America, not supporting slave labor.

• 4:18:43Jocko Willink?

  That's not what we're doing here. So, check it out. There you go. Um, that's what we're doing.

• 4:18:49Speaker 02

  OriginUSA.

• 4:18:50Jocko Willink?

  OriginUSA.com.

• 4:18:51Speaker 02

  It's true. Also, Jaco has a store called Jaco Store. So this one is JacoStore.com. It's where you can represent on this path. Jiu Jitsu path. We've got some Jiu Jitsu stuff on there. Shirts, Jiu Jitsu shirts, Jiu Jitsu rash guards on there as well. But if you just want to generally represent, Discipline Equals Freedom, you can get your, you know, shirts and hats and hoodies. Um, also, a thing called the Shirt Locker. This is a subscription scenario. Where you get a new shirt every month, new designs, interesting designs coming out, by the way, heads up. And if you care, you want to check out a peek of the designs, JacoStore.com, click on the top right where it says Joint Shirt Locker. I'll give you a little, little peek on, on the current design that's going on.

• 4:19:32Jocko Willink?

  Right on.

• 4:19:32Speaker 02

  If you care. If you want to, if you want to see what up, otherwise it can be a surprise. Up to you.

• 4:19:37Jocko Willink?

  Where you give a, you give a peek before you release?

• 4:19:40Speaker 02

  Of the, of the month, like, what's this month? August, right?

• 4:19:43Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so you can see what got issued.

• 4:19:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's called the August Shirt, or whatever. It, they have names to them too, with different layers and some of the designs. But, on the site, it says the August Shirt, and you can see, it doesn't have the whole thing, it'll just show like parts.

• 4:19:57Jocko Willink?

  You know, there's a chance, let's say, this was set up in a different way. There's a, if you were isolated, if you were just locked in this room all the time.

• 4:20:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:20:06Jocko Willink?

  There's a chance that you could be making these shirts, thinking that they're cool.

• 4:20:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:20:10Jocko Willink?

  And thinking that these designs, there's a chance that like, no one else was getting them. If, if you didn't know that, there's a chance that could be.

• 4:20:17Speaker 02

  Wait, what do you mean, no one's getting them? They don't get?

• 4:20:19Jocko Willink?

  Let's say, you were just, you had no communication with the outside world.

• 4:20:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:20:23Jocko Willink?

  Right? And you're just doing what you're doing. And so you're making these shirts, and you're putting these layers in, you're giving them names, and you think it's super cool.

• 4:20:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 4:20:32Jocko Willink?

  But like, no, no one else cares. Right? That could be happening. I mean, this, it's kind of interesting that that's not happening, and that like, people love the freaking Shirt Locker, but that's the situation that you're in.

• 4:20:45Speaker 02

  It's very possible.

• 4:20:46Jocko Willink?

  You know, you're, luckily, you can see the, the fruits of your labor.

• 4:20:51Speaker 02

  Yep. Well, let's say, the, the fact of the whole matter, the whole matter is, is if you listen, you know. And, you know, it'll be fun, and look, are, is every single person gonna get every single design and get what's behind it? And the layers, every single one, every single person?

• 4:21:09Speaker 02

  Probably not. But.

• 4:21:12Jocko Willink?

  But enough, I mean, it's pretty profound how many people, like at the Jaco Live, so many people were representing. And it's weird too, same thing, similar thing. When I'm putting together what I'm gonna talk about at Jaco Live, I have no idea what anyone's gonna think about it. Like, I literally am just, I could go out there and it could just, people could go, dude, um, they could be walking out. You know what I mean? I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing. You know, like a comedian, they do a bunch of club shows in a small club. And they try this joke, they try that joke, they try another joke, they try them together, they hone it, they fix it, they add another one.

• 4:21:51Jocko Willink?

  They do little, they do hundreds of little eight-minute, little six-minute gigs, and they get that feedback and they hone it all.

• 4:22:00Jocko Willink?

  And then they, by the time they go record one for a Netflix special, they've got it, they already know. I don't have any of that experimentation, dude. I'm just rolling in. It's like a tripwire, or no, uh, what's that balance wire? What's that thing called?

• 4:22:15Speaker 02

  Tightrope?

• 4:22:16Jocko Willink?

  Tightrope. I'm walking a high wire, no net. No net. I could just go out there and just, things could fall apart.

• 4:22:23Speaker 02

  On the big stage.

• 4:22:25Jocko Willink?

  So, that could be happening to you with the shirt locker. Luckily, it's not. Luckily, it just so happens that what you make lands. So, nicely done. Um, don't forget about Primal Beef. You need steak. You need steak in your life. I mean, you definitely do. And so, we got primalbeef.com. The, this is farm-raised beef. It's grass-fed and it's finished on fruit and grain. It's a different gig.

• 4:22:58Speaker 02

  Do you know the whole, are you, I mean, how much of a, I don't know, farmer, I guess, in this case, are you? Cattle person? Like, do you know how that's gonna translate into like dextrous?

• 4:23:09Jocko Willink?

  I, I know now.

• 4:23:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, hell yeah.

• 4:23:12Jocko Willink?

  I didn't know. I'd never even heard of it before.

• 4:23:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:23:14Jocko Willink?

  I'd never heard of it. I've heard, of course, you've heard of grain-fed, grain-finished, you heard of grass-fed only. You heard of grass-fed, grain-finished, but you've never, I never heard, grass-fed.

• 4:23:27Jocko Willink?

  Fruit and grain finished.

• 4:23:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:23:29Jocko Willink?

  Man, it's good. Even like the fat, like when you look at it, it has like a different color to it. It's, it's freaking amazing.

• 4:23:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's a fun little, not fun little, but that's a crazy how it's so procedural like that. Where like, you know how like eggs are like that too, where like certain kind of eggs are super like orange, you know, because of how they're raised and all this and like, um.

• 4:23:52Jocko Willink?

  Has an impact.

• 4:23:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, or if you, if you cook, uh, I don't know, fish or steak or beef on like the grill, but you burn a certain kind of wood, you know, it's gonna taste different, you know, like all that kind of stuff. That's interesting.

• 4:24:05Jocko Willink?

  Well, Sean Glass, teammate from the team. Who also has five kids, by the way, so you know, he, you know, he needs to feed them kids good food. But he put, he gave a little recipe on the gram and it's like salt, pepper, butter in the pan, in the, in the cast iron pan. Two minutes aside, flip, flip, flip, eight minutes.

• 4:24:35Speaker 02

  So you go two sides, two, two.

• 4:24:37Jocko Willink?

  Two minutes, flip, two minutes, yep. I just did this last night.

• 4:24:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:24:42Jocko Willink?

  Freaking legit.

• 4:24:44Speaker 02

  So my, I actually look, am I a chef? Am I Jack Arnold? No, I'm not Jack Arnold. You know this about me. I'm only me.

• 4:24:52Jocko Willink?

  I got a feeling there's a huge but coming. For those of you that don't know, we've never talked about this, but we, Echo and I have a running joke. Echo will make a huge disclaimer. And then say, but blah, blah, blah. He's gonna say what he's gonna say. So you're not a chef, you're not a cattlemen, you're not really pretty much anything.

• 4:25:11Speaker 02

  My, I'm not a mind reader.

• 4:25:13Jocko Willink?

  You have no reason to say what you're about to say, but you're gonna say it anyways. Okay, so go ahead. You're not a chef.

• 4:25:19Speaker 02

  But I do. The steak that I cook most of the time is pretty good. Like restaurant quality.

• 4:25:28Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I'm better.

• 4:25:29Speaker 02

  You're better than me, you think?

• 4:25:30Jocko Willink?

  No, better than a restaurant.

• 4:25:32Speaker 02

  Oh, better than a restaurant. Okay, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:25:33Jocko Willink?

  So it's tough to, and now with the primal beef, it's tough. The restaurants can't compete with the grain and fruit.

• 4:25:41Speaker 02

  Shoot, I wonder, actually, I'm gonna go on there. But, so I will say, I have a protocol. It's, it's two and a half, two and a half, but it's only on a certain heat. I don't know the temperature of the heat. I just know the eyeball it, you know? And it works, but that's interesting. I might do the two and two and two and two.

• 4:25:58Jocko Willink?

  I recommend it.

• 4:25:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:26:00Jocko Willink?

  I recommend it. So there you go. Primalbeef.com, go on there, get yourself some steak, some beef. Let's go. Get strong. Also subscribe to this podcast. Also subscribe to Jaco Underground. Also subscribe to our YouTube channels. Jocko Podcast Channel, Origin USA Channel, Jaco Food Channel. Also Psychological Warfare, also FlipsideCanvas.com. Dakota Meyer making cool stuff to hang on your wall. Books, 32 Principles, You Know the Deal, order this book. Henner Gracie. Really cool read, really good information and really good principles. Final Spin, Leadership Strategy. You know all the books I've written. The Way of the Warrior Kid books, by the way, all the bullying stuff that we talked about today, it's in the book.

• 4:26:44Jocko Willink?

  It's in the books, different types of bullies, as a matter of fact, are covered in these books. So Way of the Warrior Kid, one, two, three, four, five. Get them all. And also we have a leadership consultancy. It's called Echelon Front, go to echelonfront.com. If you need help inside your organization with leadership, that's what we do. We have a bunch of live events as well. Our next event is in Dallas, it's sold out. The one after that is in San Diego. If you want to come out to Dago, come and get it.

• 4:27:18Jocko Willink?

  That's called the muster. We have the FTX, we have council, we have battlefield. All kinds of stuff going on. We have a women's assembly. Our Chief Operating Officer, Jamie Cochran, she's running an event for women. September 14th through the 16th in Phoenix, Arizona. Anything you want to do with that, echelonfront.com. We also have an online training academy. Everything that I said today, talking about you, you can learn online. Like we learned this at Echelon Front that we could teach.

• 4:27:47Jocko Willink?

  Through an academy, through an online academy. So we have an entire series of courses that you can go through, you can learn. We have live sessions, we interact. Go to extremeownership.com. And you know, jiu-jitsu is like a, jiu-jitsu is like a magic trick for fighting. What we talk about at extremeownership.com, this is a magic trip, magic tricks, maneuvers, techniques for leadership in life. Go on there and learn about them. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee, she's got a charity organization. If you want to donate, or you want to get involved, go to Americas MightyWarriors.org. And also, don't forget

• 4:28:27Jocko Willink?

  about Micah Fink up there in the mountains, currently doing jiu-jitsu on a mountain lion. And winning, by the way, heroesandhorses.org. Micah takes people, veterans, up into the hills so that they can find themselves. If you want to connect with us on the interwebs for Henner Gracie, go to gracieuniversity.com, Instagram, at Gracie University HQ, YouTube Gracie Breakdown, Facebook Gracie University, Henner, he's also on Instagram and Twitter, he's at Henner Gracie, and of course Echo is at Echo Charles. I am at Jaco Wink. Just watch out for the dang algorithm, because it is a sneaky jiu-jitsu practitioner, and it will choke you out,

• 4:29:12Jocko Willink?

  waste a bunch of your time, and take a bunch of your money. So watch out for it. Thanks again to Henner Gracie for coming out here to share his experiences and lessons. Thanks to the Gracie family, and all the jiu-jitsu practitioners around the world, out there, learning and sharing the gentle art. Also, thanks to our people in uniform, in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, who protect freedom around the world so we can live in peace. Same thing goes to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all first responders. You all protect us here

• 4:29:53Jocko Willink?

  at home, and we are thankful for your service as well. And we hope that you all train jiu-jitsu. It will make you better. To everyone else out there.

• 4:30:07Jocko Willink?

  Remember the message from the Black Belt, the Grand Master. The true Grand Master, Ali O'Gracy, you should always be learning.

• 4:30:19Jocko Willink?

  You have to stay humble, you have to keep an open mind, you gotta try new things and learn new maneuvers. And as the Grand Master Principle says, "Live with the confidence of a black belt, while learning with the humility of a white belt."

• 4:30:36Jocko Willink?

  That is a good call.

• 4:30:38Jocko Willink?

  And train some Jiu-Jitsu while you're at it. And until next time, Zeko and Jaco, out.