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

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

Rener Gracie is a 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 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

This is Jocko podcast number 399 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Jiu-Jitsu is life. 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. 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. 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 I was dumbfounded It didn't make sense. No matter what I did, I could not survive from 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.

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 jujitsu. 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 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 so began my jiu jihitsu journey I continued to train with Master Chief Bailey on deployment when I got back to the States I found a jiu jihitsu instructor named Fabio Santos whose jiu jiu jih Tzu 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. Over time, I learned how to fight, but I also slowly began to recognize that jujitsu 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 jujitsu 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 jiu-jitsu

were not just a way of fighting. They were a way of thinking. I saw the correlations between the principles of jiu-jitsu, 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. So that right there is an excerpt from the forward of a book. It's a forward that I wrote for a book which is called The 32 Principles, harnessing the power of Jiu-Jitsu 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 his life his lessons learned and his book the 32 principles. Henner, thanks for joining us. 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, Jocko, for that amazing forward.

Well, it's an honor to be able to write it. And as I was telling you before, Jiu-Jitsu gave me so much in life. And it's an honor for me to have the opportunity to give back. And it's also kind of weird for me to say that, Jiu Jitsu gave me a lot in life because for you, I can't even imagine what it's like growing up in your family 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 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 Horry and Gracie, your dad, son of Aeio Gracie. A. Leo Gracie, the creator of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. A significant part of that is that your grandfather, Aalio, 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 turned into something that worked for him. What do you think? Yeah. 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 mom he 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 brother's practice and teach. 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 Elu my grandfather had showed up to observe the class but Carlos wasn't there. So Elu 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 a little mat rat 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. 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, love that he was able to perform what techniques he was able to perform, but then realized soon thereafter that there were 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 head first. 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. 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

Vali 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 that can get their hands on to demonstrate the efficacy of Jiu-Jitsu. And like you said, he was a small guy, right? I guess 5-9, 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 Vallitudo and these Gracie challenge matches in Brazil. And he was successful. And the name became very, the Gracie name, 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 Kimuda.

And I think my father was born in 52, born into this legacy of fighting. And this is what we do. 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 rabbits everywhere. 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 Jiu-Jitsu for everyone from day one. Everyone's choking each other all the time from as early as they can remember. 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. 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. His 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 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 going to, 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. 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 Davy, his partner, who were like, dude, if this is so powerful of a display of Jiu-Jitsu 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 paper view television and UFC 1 you know

November 12th 1993 and the rest is history it is crazy to watch and those the the first video Gracian action I think yeah I think that's fully on YouTube by the way yeah I think you should 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 was mind blowing, mind blowing. And I was very lucky in that I saw, I did Jiu-Jitsu before I ever saw any video of Jiu-Jitsu before the first UFC, so I knew what was going to 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 Jiu-Jitsu, they're 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 jiu-jitsu 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. Be like, okay, cool. And you roll and you tap them. And then they're like, oh, oh, let's go one more time. And you go again, you tap them again.

And then they go, oh, uh, 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. And 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 them down and chokes them. So 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 Jiu-Jitsu.

It's an unbelievable change in the course of events. 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 fan. family changed the distance from which a fight is fought. Right? When you talk about Hollywood and you talk about Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris and like the era of the 70s, the 80s, early 90s 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 in trade blows 50-50 and risk getting knocked out. We stay too far where you can't hit us. And then when you think you're going to hit us, we get too close where those hits have no more power. So we change 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 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 just pleading so fast. And then it's 30, 60 seconds later. We just pick up the pieces and decide what opportunity we want to take advantage of. And, you know, so that's, to me, that was the biggest shift. It changed what was acceptable in terms of the distance.

a fight looked like changed and to me it's like when you talk about what makes jiu jiu jitsu so 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 as jiu jih Tzu 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 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. 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, 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. 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, scenarios 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. And when you talk about kind of the evolutionary way of things and you look at members of a species, 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. Such that if two people saw, if people the world saw a standing side by side 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 Hoyce and UFC 1, what did you feel? Poor Hoyce. But if you were in the family, what did you feel? Poor Taekwondo guy. Poor Art Jimerson. Poor Gerard Gordo. 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. And then the third one is how you face yourself, right? 99.9% conservative estimate of the world has never tried a jujitsu class. because they don't feel capable. I'm too old.

I'm too young. I'm too old. 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 at nauseam over so many podcasts, right? Like they hear about it, but they're still, I'm not good enough. Now what's crazy is for the lucky few who take your advice and venture onto the mat. 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. 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 jujitsu, 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 sewing jujitsu. and they realize that they are too a Swiss Army knife. 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-sitsu 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. And then it changes eventually how they live their life. 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. And 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, 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 wrote 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. And I thought, man, what if I could write a book where the reader doesn't have to go through that first three, four, 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 give 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 hey you now love the principal so let's go do some jujitsu i'm just saying the last page of the book might nudge them in that direction yeah uh i think is miha the other day one of our jiu jitsu 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 jiu jiu jitsu and, you know, he had his black belt in his hand. He's like, no, this is not the hardest belt to get in jiu-jitsu. The hardest belt to get is the white belt.

The biggest step you're going to take as a human being is actually showing up at the Jiu-Jitsu Academy 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 Jiu-Jitsu. So my jiu-jitsu is a little bit.

different than Echoes Jiu-Too, a little bit different than your Jiu-Jitsu. We all develop our own Jiu-Tzu and it all works for our size and our shape. And it's classic, your grandfather, he had to focus 100% on being on the bond, not 100% 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. 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 pinned, you know, it's a 30s. It's a long pin, but you can get pinned. You can't get pinned in Jiu-Jitsu. 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 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 going to learn leverage and you're going to learn these techniques that are functional regardless of how big that other person is. Because no matter how big you are, there's always going to be someone bigger. There's always going to be someone stronger. So you've got to learn to do the technical moves. And that's what's so powerful about it. the other thing that's interesting about Jiu-Jitsu is 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 see would be like this this this discipline Right. Oh, you have to have discipline. You see like 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. 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 time like you will learn discipline in jitzu because there's going to be nights you don't want to go down and get on the mat mat this is going to be you work just nine hour 10 hour 11 hour day you get home you're tired You're sore from the two days of working out and you don't want to go train 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 small than you people that are weaker than you people that haven't been training as long as you're gonna catch you in a move You're gonna 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 have been at least 40 at the time

So I'm thinking like who's his old man What's he gonna do? And he could win And he could win every single time It wasn't like a chance No he was gonna win So these Matt 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 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 of those disciplines that are squared away and and respect to them but there's also a bunch of bullshit there you know there's a bunch of schools that don't have that kind of stuff and juchitu 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 actually have it, but you had to earn it. You had to earn it. So your dad moves up here, 1978. He's growing that gym to 120 students.

They have a waiting list. This is the seals used to go from San Diego, from Coronado, go up and train. And I know a bunch of them. This is awesome to talk to those guys about those old days. And Master Chief Steve Bailey was one of them. You're born in what? 1983. 1983.

You're born. How old are you? Okay, so you're age zero when you start doing jih Tijuana. You're just doing jih Tijuana. birth. How old are you when you realize what your last name is and what it means? UFC 1. Okay. So 1993. Because 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 jujitsu in their garage. This is a normal family thing. Little did I

know. That was totally not the case. And growing up around this and seeing these challenge matches is 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, 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 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 going to be on television and I'm like 10 years old and I remember begging to go to the UFC, UFC One. He don't 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, Hedon got to go. And Hennar 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 Hedon's over there. And then, to make the matters worse, in between the fights on UFC 1, Hidon and Huxon, Hickson'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. Ah! And then 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, 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 of those early UFCs, 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, that's my uncle. So then I'm like, all right, 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 it's a real 10, 11, 12 years old. You really start to say, okay, something's happening here 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 what we've been doing as normal for the last 80 years, 70 years, it's magical to them for some reason. And everyone thinks Hoyt is going to 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 pretty Brazilian guy in a ghee, 6-1-178 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. How many hours a day are you training in jiu-tzeo? At 10, 11, 12, 13 years old?

So, yeah, as a kid, it's an interesting thing. And I'm dealing with this with my own kids right now. We're careful 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 8 years old, and the kid's motivated and wants to go do it and falls head first 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 10, 11, 12 years old, I'm training, you know, every day, an hour or two doing a class, a kid's class. But there was around 12 years old, there was a time where I would go to the class 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 2, UFC 3, like Gracie Family Legacy. I got to defeat everyone.

This is crazy. No one can beat me in the gym. I got to be number one. And her name was Terry. 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 it would be times where I say, Dad, I don't want to go to Jiu-Jitsu.

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 10 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 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 going to 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. Junior, 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 going to 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 to be effective in Jiu-Jitsu. The other is what I can do to empower other people. So now I'm like, I kind of 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 with 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 with my age are not having this opportunity. And then soon after, around, yeah, 18 years old, he'd almost 20 is when my hoist and my father split. Hoyce decided I'm going to go do my own thing, have his own organization, and move on, they were teaching kind of shoulder to shoulder that whole time, post-UFC all the way until like 2001, 2002. And then when Hoyst went to do his thing, now it's me and Hedon, who are 18 and 20, essentially, who are thrust into leaderships of head instructors of the Gracie Academy in Torrance

and were 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 going to go over? So naturally we lost a couple students,

but it was a very testing time for me and he don't and for the business for a hoist to leave. Were you going to school, like high school and stuff like this? So you're doing normal school? Normal school and I was wrestling in high school, you know, my junior and senior year. Did you only wrestle your junior and senior year? Yes, I played basketball for two years,

and my wrestling coach, who's Tom Hazel, who's an Oklahoma State stud, like, you know, All-American several times, Tom Hazel is the wrestling coach of the school, but also fought him. Hickson on Gracie jujitsu in action. He's the wrestler in El Camino College, who Hickson him grapple, he looks like a grizzly bear.

Love the guy, and he ends up in Hickson's guard and Hickson arm, boy. He had a Hickson in a front headlock on Turtle. Hickson slips out and pulls guard, and then Tom is in the guard, natural wrestler equation. We're going to be on the bottom. They're going to be on top, and Hickson arm bars him from the guard. And anyways, 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 defeatson 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 like that. And then after two years of wrestling, every single day, Coach Hazel saw me on campus.

He would come to me and say, Hennar, when are you going to play a man's sport? Every single time he saw me because he wanted me to wrestle. Henner, when are you going to play a man sport? Just always digging in. And finally, after two years, 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. How did you do in wrestling?

Good. 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 Champ. I got cradle. I'm like, dude, these guys know what they're doing.

So at the local in California and Southern California level, I was able to hack the whole system because I'm over here with my butterfly guard and 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 an 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. I leave school. I have lunch. And I go to the class at 4 o'clock I'm teaching kids all the way till 9 o'clock group classes and private classes because I'm running this business with my brother. And he goes, all right, Hannah, 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 meats, 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, jujitsu and hooks. And there were many times where I would pull guard, he's like, don't lay on your bag. And I'm like, butterfly sweep into mount.

And he's like, yeah, hold them. So I basically just kind of hacked that 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 jujitsu pace. Totally different.

Jitsu all lay down for 90 minutes, bro, and I'll just choke you at the very end. Wrestling, it's 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 a beneficial shift in my timing,

in my energy, and my explosiveness that I was grateful for that to show up what it did. When you go to a wrestling tournament in California right now, like this day and age, you will see Jiu Jitsu. Oh, yeah. Like, 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. Right. But it is in Southern California. You go 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, are you have any normal normality in your life? Do you, are you into music? No music. Nothing else. No music. It was that particular time as Hoyst kind of stepped out.

and me and he don't 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. He don't, not so much, but that was his choice.

So 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. And then I graduated.

And the idea of going to college or not was a very tough decision as well. Because here I am running this family business, but also I'm in a position where academically I would qualify. I 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. Conclusion was jujitsu. I couldn't leave for four years. At that critical time, the whole business would have suffered and might have been,

it might have been the end of the rainbow there for the Gracie Academy as a standalone jiu-jitsu business. So I chose to stay. I learned everything just running that business. I made every mistake imaginable. And then, you know, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22,

23. After four or five years. Wasn't your dad like overseeing the business side or was he kind of like... Yeah, it's tough, right? Because it's such a, it's such a huge. human interaction-based business that he was already, I think, in his 50s or late 40s. Hoyse 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 he don't fill 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 Jiu-Jitsu, and those connections matter so much.

So he was there as a supervisory role, but in terms of what are we going to 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 jiu-jitsu, which is like 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, 18 years old, we started running it. By 22, 23, I had kind of 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 225 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 where are we losing them? 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 wrote how we introduce people how we talk 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 right of that location we moved to the Artesia after 17 years in the first location, we moved to Artisia, and it was a larger school, 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, and that was in 2008, 2009, and now we're 250 schools deep, and our school in Torrance has 2,000 students. So we figured out. We jujitsu jiu-jitsu 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. So your competition life, I think, did you really compete that much before Brown Belt? Because 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 I beat JJF, right? Is that, or did you compete before that, but it was just kind of... Yeah, no, there was... Were you competing the whole time, and I just don't know about it. 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. How'd you do? I beat him. Oh. Yeah, he was cool. He was really kind, but I think I choked him a couple times. He was a strong guy, man. He's awesome, yeah, yeah.

He's awesome, yeah. He's a great base and just, like, so stable. So, Jeff a couple of times, and then the Pan Am's. 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. You know, I scratched that itch. And then it was interesting because around 19 years old, I actually suffered a herniated disc from training incidents.

And in my L5S1, lower back, and I had surgery. And then that prevented me from doing it through for 10 months. So that was kind of for me, a big paradigm shift where I said, wait a minute. I suffered an injury as a teenager, as a late teenager here, that will affect me for 10 months. What happens if this happens when I'm 30 or when I'm 40, 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 jitsu teacher, your body is the only tool you need and the only tool you can't be without. So at a very early age, I started asking questions about, wait a minute, 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 kind of the reality of our family is fighting, hoist is fighting, UFC's 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.

You entertain and you fight and you train every single day to go fight some other guy and you beat them. Is that my destiny to do that until I'm 40 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. 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 jujitsu. It was karate, taekwondo, and jujitsu, 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 kind of upbringing in martial arts. So I'm fighting against guys who very much believe what I believe, which is jujitsu is the best.

And historically in the Gracie family, went 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. 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 jujitsu 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 going to 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, but there is no really structured dissemination of this art. Anybody can teach, anybody knows this. If I know a friend who has a friend from Brazil, he'll teach you over here. This guy knows that.

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,

then someone can log in and see Henner's path through Jiu-Jitsu and Hidon's path through Jiu-Jitsu and learn the art very much the way we learned it. And it's forever, right, immortalized in this online linear curriculum. And that's where Gracie University was born. fueled by this fear that if something happens me where I can't do Jiu-Jitsu anymore, how can I preserve everything that I've ever learned, especially in the wake of that accident and 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, 390,000 students in 196 countries, learning, they open up a room, they put some mats down, and they do Jiu-Jitsu. 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 So you Focke 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 jih Tzu and so this starts in your academy The Gracie University used to be the Gracie Academy right and now it's gracey university

The headquarters is up there in L.A. And so then from there, what came, did you start with the training centers, the Gracie training centers, the Gracie certified training centers, and then the Gracie garages? What are those two things about? Yeah. So once we refine the curriculum internally for one school in Torrance to a degree where we felt comfortable, this is how beginners should learn jujitsu for the greatest retention and for the greatest preservation of these, right, fledgling jujitsu 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 crack 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. Now, were those things that you first gave out? Like, let's say it was 2006. Was these things going on in 2006? 2008, was the problem. Yeah, we changed it internally, 2005. 2006, we change it, it was successful for a couple years, and then we licensed it out. So 2008, if I want to, I want to be a Gracie certified gym or whatever, 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? 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. You're not a master, you're not a black belt, but you can teach someone a beginner curriculum. And then as you evolve your skill set and grow, you can grow your level of certification.

So someone comes in, says, hey, I want to offer 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. 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 one certified training center. Now many of these schools are brown and black belts, much higher skill level, but they don't have the structure. They suffered from what we suffered from, which is, Hennar, 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 Jews? 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 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. So then once you have that thing going, well, so hold on, what's a Gracie Garage?

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 watch 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 jujitsu 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. 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 the 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.

So it's like a networking. 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, 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 through 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's 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 Vasquez is a great example. Corporate America, full-on, well-paying job, starts a Gracie Garage, starts training,

moves out of it to open his 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 8 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. 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 got to 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 he don't had to do 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 going to do it right. They're going to violate this. They're going to break that. They're going to. to do it wrong, they're going to water 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 going to grow more effectively. And then at the end of the day, we just box ourselves out of the entire Jiu-Jitsu growth opportunity because of this feeling of it. 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. And we have to delegate and we have to permit and we have to trust that they're going to 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 jiu-jitsu. How did you come about with the online Gracie University? So gracie university.com? Yeah. This is your online training protocol. One thing I will say is, you know, from the perspective of the rest of your fans, 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 yeah Evan Tanner they're like hey where'd you learn jih Titsu he's like the videos like the gracian action video like he was a wrestler but he learned jiu jitsu from watching those Gracian action videos that's where you learn from and so now and then you've got other other fighters out there that have learned moves and learned jiu jitzu 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 from this category you know you think how did i learn jihitsu that must be the only way to learn jihitsu to have somebody

grab your arm and put it over here and get your weight over here and physically do it with you not understanding that you could sit down you could watch a video and you go hey come here for a minute buddy let me do this do it to me do it try it again oh they said oh they're real specific about putting your wrist over here okay how's that feel oh that oh that's that you all that Oh yeah, that definitely, okay. So you can do it. It takes a little bit more effort. It takes a, 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 jih Tzu class and you're going to learn. Like you're going to learn it. When you start, because 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?

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've 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. 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. He had some VHS, his 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. misinformation 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. There wasn't there also like let's keep this stuff for us? I mean, I mean, there was. So let me tell you about this one. So Gracie combatives is was our as 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? 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 or 30 students,

and you're just having 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 chokes. I'm going to watch Jocko's tutorial and learn guillotines. You already know what you need when you went to Jocko'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.

Lesson one has to be high. Welcome to jujitsu. 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 going to do for a room full of paying students. When we filmed our linear curriculum, me and he don't 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 going to offer what they needed. 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, because 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, 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 want. Just share jiu-jitsu 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. 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. Because on one hand, I don't want to disappoint my uncles and feel like I'm the black sheep that's doing something that's going to take food off their table. No way. I just want people who don't have access to

my uncles to be able to learn jiu-suitu 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-suitzoo online and on DVDs at the time that we went ahead with it. Now, what I now know in retrospect, and to all those people who said, no, you can't learn online and this is crazy. And I think Some of them really believe 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 the training partner that they found on a website

off a website through a linear online curriculum. One out of 20 people have the discipline, the studious personality, engaged ability of block it out, and I'm going to 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. site, five of them see it through and go all the way.

95 out of those 100, many things happen to them, but it's my belief that they watch the first three, four, five 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 daughters.

So let me go find a school, 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 a 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 Hitoon 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 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 sent them to the website.

They'd watch the lessons online. And then right after, they go find a school near them. So I took great pride in being an ambassador for Jiu-Zitsu who, who, you know, sucks people into the art with very good breakdowns and then guided them on how to 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? At 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 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 Jitsu online, and I'm just like, cool, all right, they came around, especially post-COVID, right? Post-COVID, everyone was like, he don't have had it, we're onto 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 and but there's a lot of other great resources you can find whatever you're looking for now and our focus 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 in 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 the the the skeletalic 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 change that. So you keep talking about Gracie combatives. We'll explain Gracie combatives. Yeah. So post-UFC, one, two, U. U.S. 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, Hoyce, other members of the family are going down there teaching these Rangers. And lo and behold, right, as you know well, over time, the entire U.S. Army Modern Army Combatives program is rewritten to incorporate, 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. 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 going to 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 going to survive against someone 20 pounds heavier than them who's trying to just punch their head into the pavement? So that same mindset that we have with the

army, 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 going to 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. 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 these class three times. And the genius of the program was, you didn't have to do those 23 classes in one.

order. You could do them out of order, any sequence. Every class you came to, if it's class 17 today, we're going to see the leg hook takedown from standing clinch and we're going to see the Kimura from the guard. Done. That's the curriculum. And if you've already done this class, great, you're going to get it again. If you haven't done this class, we're going to teach it in a way that requires no prerequisites to make sense of that class. So now you have this beginner program where someone can show up any time 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, kind of educationally stimulated society. Brazil wasn't like that.

Brazil is go to the beach, feet sandy show up, you know, white dust them off on the mat and do some jujitsu. 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 where it was clear what you needed to do. There was a set number of techniques different techniques than Gracie Combatos, 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 going to get and is this stimulated to show up and it's almost like it gamified it because there's a checkmark 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 and you keep filling all of this up and at the end of this, once you complete all of this, which is typically eight 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 Combative's 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 jujitsu and in the for the best analogy you go from playing checkers to chess you go from gracie combatives for another beginner at someone who doesn't know jiu jitsu to the complexities that we love so much about infinite jiu jutsu and that chess match that we're so addicted to 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 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 in a desk eight to ten hours a day joints are stiff ligaments are like their age ligaments and then they sign up because they see a podcast and they hear you enthusiastically praised jiu jutsu 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 guys are about the same size cool welcome to jiu jihitsu 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 going to spar now. What does that mean, coach? Well, just try to beat him

and you try to beat him. But I don't understand. Like, 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 want to care and you want to go win in that engagement because the coach is watching and it cares to be effective and you want to be successful, but your joints aren't ready. You're not 12 years old. You're not 15 years old. You're 21 where those joints are just kind of pliable still, right? You're stiff, you're old. So now you're 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 jujitsu.

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, dislocates and damages his labrum, and he's going to have to have surgery. So this is his first day trying jujitsu. 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. 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 of 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. So this. 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 forgiving and so and so contextually relevant, that's another thing. B.J.J. Class first day. Exguard. Lapelle. Feeding through the leg and doing this. And a beginner is saying what to themselves? I don't understand what's happening.

What does this have to do with UFC 1? That's true. What does this have to do with hoists 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, make 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. This is it. I want nothing more than more of this in my life. Contextual relevance,

and that's what the Gracie Combatus 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, bullyproof. These other programs, all of them, there's contextual relevance with every technique taught. So the kid who's nine years old, here's a discussion about a bullying encounter or an exclusionary bullying situation or cyber bowling, which are discussed in the classes. They roleplay these scenarios in addition to doing jujitsu. And so many schools, they teach jujitsu, 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 as 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. How long is the bullyproof program?

So, Gracie, bullyproof, 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, they're 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 and say, hey, I guess we're not friends then. Kids need to roleplay this. Kids need to hear their voices saying these things. Because to assume that they're going to 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 escape, those are rehearsed techniques to build muscle memory and confidence in their execution. The verbal aspect of jiu-jitsu in 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. 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, Jocko. 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. If they take one more step, you triple your escalation and your intensity and 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 Jutitsu, 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 will be 70 women doing beginner jiu-jitsu and 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. objecting someone's encroachment and speaking assertively and potentially disrespectfully to another human being because all their lives they might be taught don't ruffle feathers don't do this don't do that don't be it 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. 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 going to 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. That's the truest self-defense statement if there is one. People only set boundaries they feel capable of enforcing. You're not going to say, don't take one more step. If they take another step, you don't know what the hell you're going to do. You're completely like, oh my God, panic, what are we going to do?

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 engaged with this person because they don't want. And they don't know what they would do should things get out of hand rate. 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 going to get hurt I'm not going to get hurt and we're going to 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 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 I'm drunk but I'm not that drunk

I know this guy means what he says right now because the 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 and my not Air Force base one time to go teach a huge course of a hundred plus airmen sexual assault awareness prevention defense techniques and I went to the base of the commander of the office of the commander and he shows me the map on the wall and he 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, 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 my knot, 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 said, 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, Jiu-Jitsu.

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 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 raised their kids to be so sweet and so kind which is what we all want for our kids but the bullies sniff that out and the bullies sniff out the weakness and they sniff out the kindness and they go up 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 this is literally last week and the 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 maxes actually said hey man leave him alone 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 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 him, you have a problem with me. And the bully goes. And he just turns and he walks away. And Max's mom came to me the next day with our private class in jujitsu and she says, Hannah, 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. 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 punch you in the face. They're going to go, they want the easy target. So when you show that you're that hard target, it's not going to 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. 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 survive and I'm like this is crazy the very art that was a design to empower the week those people are precluded from learning it largely because of the culture that exist 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 a lot of times

when I talk about jujitsu from a self-defense perspective, one of the things that plays a huge part is if you do jih Tzu, 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 jih Tijitu, someone grabs you, You actually are 100% comfortable and okay with it, and you have a plan. You know what you're going to do. You're going to make something happen. There's no psychological barrier that you have to break through to 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 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? First of all, what you already mentioned is part of it.

if that guy approaches her and he sees that she's going to 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 put in her car?

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 going to 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 7, 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 that time that you will buy yourself 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 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 so that just 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 care 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 it was kind of a kind of became like a thing right this loud voice this assertive voice And yeah, sure, that's going to 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 here. I don't this is 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 You a license plate being seen on someone else intervening you, that person just saying, I'm not putting up with this. So very important to think about that. Is the woman empowered? Is that a course?

Is that the same thing? Are we talking check marks? Yep, exactly the same. Every beginner course is the same in the sense. There's a card. There's 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 lesson 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% is 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 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? 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 the path to the car from the grocery store to the car and he's waiting in the car right next to hers. No one else is there at 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, by going to the ground, by tangling up his leg, 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. And just think of what a reduction in burden this places on the student. In this case, we're talking about women in 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? Hayah, punch, kick, annihilate, chop, poke his throat, rip his heart out of his chest. You've got to 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. 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-defense 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 could be a big guy it's it's 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 so that's the that's the women empowered we have the the the gracey survival tactics and 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 yeah it's a card type thing it's an online course I say 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 torrents at all of our certified training centers and and hundreds of thousands of people online learning parent teaching child the gracey bully proof online curriculum is very much teaching the parent how to interact with the child the way that i would

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 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. Rule number three, if verbally attacked, follow the three T-steps, talk, tell, tackle. Rule number four, Never punch or kick the bully.

Establish 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 a kid could be 12 years old and is learning adult curriculum with their parent from home. Now, now hold on a second. second, how do you know anything about getting bullied? Holy cow, bro. Good question. Or is this inherent in the Gracie household?

Yeah. 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 the reality is the bully was in the house. He don't was the bully. My older brother.

That's two years older. Because he seemed so super freaking nice. 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. It 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 jiu-jitsu and fighting from day one. So he has essentially two more years of jiu-zitsu at every phase of my life. So we're growing up in this crazy family, fighters everywhere, 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. Because, 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 the 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 Machadoes, the Hansu Hoyer, my dad. When they all came here for the famous Chuck Norris seminar where Chuck recruited my dad to bring some graces, 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. And you guys, he don't 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, hold on. So what is this? Like you guys are having? Punches. But you guys are having, like, lunch. You guys are all hanging out.

And all of a sudden he just hits a double. So here's the thing. Here's the thing. Here's the thing. And how old are you? I'm nine. He's 11. Okay.

Right. So, or like 10 and 12. So the problem is. is that I'm pretty sharp intellectually and verbally. Heon is less sharp in both of those categories, but more physical, very sharp and very athletic and very strong and very good at Jiu-Jitsu 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 I was not innocent in every encounter. I wasn't just minding my business doing homework and I get beat up. Like I was a little sharp with the tongue and I would say, and the bim-b-b-bum-b-b-bum-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-m-b-b-b-b-b. But at the end of the day, my final play was always one of intellectual, you know, like making him feel stupid stupid. Right? And then his final play was, all right, you want to do that, and you're going to get it. Cool. So I wasn't entirely interesting. 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, 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. Nine years old. I will never forgive. I'll 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 in 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 13 and 15. 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. So as he's getting off and he just let me have it, relentless beating me up because 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. 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 then our parents divorced. And they said, who do you want to live with?

And I said, I want to live, 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 my dad. 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 now. At the academy, we're doing our thing. And then one day we're training.

I'm 17, he's 19. Downstairs, old, old academy, Carson Street, the original Steve Bailey Academy. And we're freaking doing our thing over there. and we're sparring, blah, blah, blah, blah, and this is still when we think like we're going, there's 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 17 and 19, and I'm freaking going hard, and he freaking guard. I jump up, a triangle, 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. triangle, hiding his arm, like shrugging to slip that out of the center area. And it gets stuck. And I grab his wrist, like Fador, Verdum, and I arm bar him in the triangle.

And he, quicked out. 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, did no emotion on his face.

Shake hands, bump, fist. He beat me 10 more times right there in 10 minutes. someone on that way. 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 crack 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. 10 taps to one. And then out of 10, I would get two. And then out of 10, I would get three.

and now out of 10, 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 pretty good. Yeah. So, and then what happens is I'm just waiting now because there will come a day where two years advantage becomes two years of disadvantage over like 57 and 59. 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 Hedon's defense, he did help back me up when it happen and he'd almost say like I tell this story all the time and he laughs and now Henner's tough because of that 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 is standing up for yourself and it's a real thing for me and by the way the whole not forgive him forever once we freaking took the helm of the ship together when Hoyst left and we took over the family

business and we were running it and we created grace of university and we write these curriculums and we're spending countless hours together documenting all of the jiu-jitsu 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 kind of the brain behind the engineering of some of these. If not for Hedon standing right next to me saying, hell yeah, let's go.

I got you. 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. But two of us, it was like, wow, yo, it's not, he's 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 so did you did he ever say anything about it

or did you just have the mutual understanding that of what the tap out or the beating me up the beating you up and being like hey man he never apologized but he'll very make very clear that I'm as tough as I am because of him today so he's actually he's actually taking credit for

that's classic he'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 just I feel I'm so lucky and I feel like people who don't have what we have it's just a different existence

now we have kids together so when we first shot Gracie bully proof 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 borrowing kids

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. Speaking of principles,

I learned a principal 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 got to

be going 110% because they are going to freaking go ham on you and it sounds like that's what Huron did to you 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 it 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 So your races are with other adults who were other... It wasn't even in my makeup that this would ever happen. So it was a big breakthrough. That's hard to imagine. Honestly, 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 respect me and he never beat me up. There's no more... At 17, 18, 19, we were already older. And we had so much other things to worry about as a united front 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 human like me, and it's all good. 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 the current environment that we're in right now, where did Gracie survival tactics come from? Where is it right now? Yeah, honestly, it traces back. to the Rodney King incident, right, early 90s when, you know, that happened.

And then LAPD right afterwards, we 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 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, 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 1, like 93, 94, 95, 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 the police officers started going for it. And little by little, 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 2000s scheduled to teach a course in Texas Arlington Texas near Dallas and he couldn't make it was had a situation with health situation with his family and he said, Henner you're going to go teach us and I was like 19 years old and he's like Henner you're going to go run this yeah 19 2002 he said you're going to go run this GST or this Gracie Survival Tactics course had since changed the name and I I'm like sweating bullets. I'm going to go to a room full of law enforcement trainers in Texas. They expect Horriy on Gracie, the creator of the UFC, to show up,

and some kids going to 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 50, 50, 60 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 work. with us to this day 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 Henner 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 here he's not coming here's the 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 it doesn't have to be second day let's have some fun by the first day I learned everyone's first name in the room by literally the first six hours so that was connecting with

everybody 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 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. There's 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.

it's, does anybody want their money back? Not one claim 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 teaching of Jiu-Jitsu to law enforcement. And 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 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 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 is disastrously, embarrassingly low. 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 skill sets. 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 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 and quickly escalates their level of force to what is often perceived as excessive force. 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. in the power that they have. But in many cases, the officers are escalating because they're having an amygdala hijack. 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, because they only got zero, one, or two hours a year of a skill set 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 rakey, 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, right? 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 these they're forced so rapidly and the public is now scrutinizing them so heavily. And the public is now scrutinizing them so heavily. because every incident is being recorded on 17 cameras.

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 listen, people aren't saying that cops should not be using force and people should, 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 prone out outside of a mall that she was accused of shoplifting 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 him 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 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. But all of us are 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 going to 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 in 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 in literally all you have to do is rip away from a grip and you just flipped that officer's switch because they're panicking and now they're going to do everything necessary within the law to neutralize and subdue you and this all came to a head in marietta Georgia a couple 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 interacting with from a GST, Gracie's survival tactics, train 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 did they do this? Why did 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 the training that they never received? 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 and say, 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 one of these. So I have always heard the reasons why command staff will not approve regular weekly training. 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 should be. Let's be honest. You lift twice a week. Everything you do, if you do a thing, you better do it twice a week or you don't do that thing. 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 jih jihadts twice a week, you're not doing jihad.

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 had been known us for 11, 12 years, decided we're going to pilot a program where we're going to get new police recruits and we're going to allow them to train at a local civilian-owned Brazilian jiu-jitsu school, carefully vetted, Brazilian jutsu school where they can do regular classes a couple nights a week 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, then 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 jujitsu.

Simple, clean, takedowns, arrests, and senior officers are looking, saying, yo, where'd you learn that? And they're like, yo, that's practice last week. Like, this is what we do. This is a jujitsu, super chill. 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. 95 out of 145 officers opted in to this training program at this jujitsu 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 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, 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 it tell you? All you got to do is get the other 50 officers on board. And you should pull no punches to make that happen because that's how much safer it is. Fifty-three percent 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 hospitalize a civilian in a use of force encounter. This is common sense to us, but there was

never data to substantiate it 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. 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. 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 Henner. 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 training injury was a crack nose when one of the guys was rolling.

Zero workers' comp claims attributed to the training at this agency. 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 $4,000. $40,000 for the agency at the end of all this and more than paid for itself. So this is the type of relationship. Police Department, civilian-owned Jiu-Jitsu 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 private type of

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 Sagando Police Department, two neighboring cities. 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 They're wearing a ghee. 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 goes against everything I feel. to outsource this type of training because 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 close society. And he said, Hennar, 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, 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 an environment familiar to them, and they're training with people familiar to them,

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. We're three months in. And last, last Saturday, two Saturdays ago, Chief Jaime Bermudas of the El Cigundo Police Department came to Torrance at the Academy on a

Saturday morning. And he authorized the pinning of a Gracie triangle pin, a bronze Gracie triangle pin on the right pocket uniform, duty uniform, of Officer Sergeant Alex Levitt, the first officer of El Saganto 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. 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 Elsigando officers wearing a Gracie pin driving around and I call it a 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 jiu-jitsu, and we're touching it. But until you enter this type of partnership with a civilian-owned school,

you're never going to get the officers, the culture and the training environment that they need to get these skills sharp so that when Officer Levin encounters, it's just another day of class. It's the only way. So we couldn't be happy with it, And I look forward to more of these partnerships

and more agencies all over the country. 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 Jiu-Jitsu 100%. There's a, I also want to say this. You know, I started off reading my little excerpt

and I described Jiu-Jitsu as magic, right? Oh, it's magic. 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's going to 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 you know you put it out there as as uh two hours a week i've been saying that police officers should train 20% of their time.

And that's not just pure jih Tjitsu. 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, 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. 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 got to deal with these civilians. How do you deal with the 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 were taught a technique called a muzzle strike. The muzzle strike is you basically, you have your weapon and 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 doing jit-to. I already understood all this stuff. They're teaching like, hey, when you do this to someone, they're going down.

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 or to hit them in the face 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 would cause this acute, really heinous acute damage. So they 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. So what does the practitioner do?

Muscle 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. You don't know Jiu Jitsu. So it's just a disaster. Jiu 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 skill set. 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 Hollywood bone in it and they die. That terrible, right? If you, if you know Jiu-Jitsu, you know exactly what's happening when you're choking someone. You feel them, you feel them, um, 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.

Let me do. 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 a 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 It you can kill somebody very easily doing that if you kill someone with a choke You really you really made a huge mistake and you don't understand what's happening Or you intentionally did it it takes a long time to kill someone with a choke you can't kill someone with a choke you can't kill someone 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 from police? 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 for. a room of jujitsu practitioners, right? And that's always the message from people who train regularly to invest in this skill set and know this technique intimately. The problem is we're talking about a population of, you know, however many, you know, 100,000, 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 happen, 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, 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 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 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. It's like, 25 years ago, I was like, oh, we got to 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 years ago has this thing. They finally do the model that we've been touting for however long in terms of, of regular weekly practice, 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 it's very gradual. So my point is, I used to advocate much more strongly than I do now. And now I fall into the line of, 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, oh, GST, they teach vascular. neck restraints as an offensive tool, can't do it. In fact, in California, I was on a, I was on a Zoom call with the California Post Police Officer Standards of Training Commission about precisely this. They said, now that we're taking out vascular neck restraints by law, you cannot teach them 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? 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, Henner, 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 they said, look, Henner, 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 many words, he said, Henner, 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. And I talk about this in the book. And I did just that. And I got California post-certified for Gracie's 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. 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. And I said, man, it's not worth a fight. The whole country is 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. 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 so in that sense they're doing it but they're doing it in the right under the yeah well they have to learn to defend themselves because people people know how to do it's exactly right MMA and everyone's watching it so everyone and we've seen chokes I've seen officers get choked in rear nakeds 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 yeah I have a question real quick is that for all chokes, like all, what do you call it, vascular neck restraints? Yeah. Is that for all of them, like a head and arm choke, for example? 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, a dars choke, anything, if it's 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. I've worked with some departments where it's lethal force.

There you go. And if you're going to choke, it's lethal force. And that's kind of, and that's the thing. 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 are some agencies now in many states where they say, no, you can't even teach it. So if the guy takes your gun and is running towards someone else, you could run them over with your car before you could neck restraint him. Like it's crazy how restrictive it is. Do you understand? Like it's nuts.

Well, there's a huge uphill battle to re-educate the world on 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 looked great. 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. So here's the thing we don't hear about you guys. We don't hear about the unremarkable uses of force. 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's state of

live. But it saved lives. It saved my life. Save the suspect's life. Because we use that to Arlington has a great example. They enter a house. They're clearing rifles out, SWAT team. The guy jumps on his bed, the suspect, 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, 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. 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 kind

of stress, his family's freaked out, like things are going on and you send him a jitzu 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 anywhere that picks this up and starts moving this direction. And you know what? My theory of 20% for training, that means, you know, 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. And people say, well, we can't afford that because, you know, 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 a 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 from that aspect. And listen, it's just a numbers game now, you guys. Every single agency, we have Marietta, we have El Cigando, we have Manhattan Beach, we have other agencies around the country that are engaged in 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. It's like deliberate indifference, right?

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, it's 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 thinks that officers are training, I think if you would have, to ask, survey the general public, right? This is, and the very general public and say, hey, how much training would you say, and 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 arrest 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 skill set, 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? 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 really, it's a real thing. 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 amygdala 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 between civilians and law enforcement right now is at an all-time low. In the history of the world, in America for sure, never has there been so much distrust and just 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. Every jiu-jitsu guy watches those videos and goes, you've got to be kidding me. At some point, you know what's going to change? At some point, some civilian whose family member was killed, shot, whatever runover is going to sue their police department because their police officers weren't trained. There you go. And once that happens, and I would, if I was on a jury, I'd give that all day long.

Like, you know, your mother, father, brother, son, whatever, you know, drunk, shoplifting, mouthing off, all of a sudden gets shot and killed. Somebody's going to 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 going to do? Like, there's going to be a lawsuit like that. And 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 some munition and figuring out when they can actually pull their weapon out or when they shouldn't. All those things. The people are going to at some point is going to sue these police departments for not training their personnel properly and there's going to be a seismic shift in what's going on. At least they're I agree. And the more this data exists with more agencies, the more the stronger the case, right, the plaintiff will have in that, in that situation.

I agree 100%. 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,

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, Hothorn, 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 going to do. So literally, whatever is 18, I don't know how many, 18, 20, 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 goes viral on some video, that we dot 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 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. is because one agency performed poorly and has zero hours of in service a 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 jiu-jitsu. Even in that two or four hour block, they're not doing jiu-jitsu. 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, an officer who uses excessive force. And I think that's wrong. And I think that the public should be aware 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.

Well, glad you're doing it. 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 got to break down, man. Freaking outstanding idea. And and when I saw that thing, I was like, dang, that's a good idea.

Did I tell you about that? Yes, you did many times. 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? Draw string backpacks. You made this hoodie.

I mean, I take 20 seconds to tell the story of how you thought of it because it's so obvious. Especially, especially if you live in Southern California. Oh, my gosh. In California, in Southern California, in Southern California, you, when you leave, you bring a hoodie with you. Because as soon as the sun goes down, it gets cold. It gets cool, let me say. It cools off.

It cools off because we're in a semi-arid desert. What's known as a semi-arred desert. So as soon as the sun goes down, it goes from 80 degrees to 54 degrees or 70 degrees. So totally comfortable in the 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. So yeah, it's in the book. It's the river principle. And in Jiu-Jitsu, the river principle, which you guys know well, it's this concept that, right, when an obstacle presents itself, right? When 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. Where is the opportunity, ignores the obstacle, and on it goes.

And in Jiu-Jitsu, 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. 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 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 going to 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't 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. It was just, so anyways, I was pissed off. I threw it over one shoulder like this. I did like the lofty tossover. 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. And this is what they come up to. Inside goes my hoodie. One turn, out comes my fully functional backpack. And they're like, so it functions as a backpack. You can put things inside of it. It has an extra little pocket for your wallet keys or cell phone. 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 drawstring 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 paper clip 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, jiu-jitsu. This thing is not coming off no matter what. You can even shadow box because I watch your videos. You seem to go on

shark tank. I did it on shark tank. Dude, they loved it. So I did jujitsu with heat on on shark tank with it. So then it goes in. And now when you get cold, 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. 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 backpack. 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 called when they saw the Vennus. 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 lo and behold, we're selling direct to consumer doing a great job and things are 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.

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. 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 check it out

so inside goes the Jock Fuel and once this tucks in one turn and look at that what's going to happen on the outside look at that he came prepared man came prepared boom hard work clean fuel no excuses that's good one for you oh man thank you one for you and I made one extra since this is the only jaco fuel oh I get the extra for sure 100% for your number one jaco fuel slash jaco podcast fan in the world you guys figure out who that is and this goes to them

The only Jock Fuel Quick Flips out there. So cool. So anyways, that's the river principle. And this idea that I could have. I'm not an apparel guy. Do you guys have to understand? Jiu-Jitsu 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 arm bar 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 opportunity?

obstacle of this rock. And I jujitsued the hoodie 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. And I attribute it 100% to jiu-jitsu. 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 going to 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. And it's a similar story with sleeperhold, right? Which is your travel pillow. Yes, a sleeper hold. It's freaking nuts. Dude, you're like a comedian with a prop comedian over here, just whipping out your stuff. So, again, sleeper hold was crazy. I'm flying traveling GST courses every month I'm flying and my wife Eve worked for the

W.W.E. Vince McMahon, 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 bobblehead. And I'm sitting next to this guy, and I took a little selfie footage of that. And 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. 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 seatback 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 bobblehead at the neck. 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 ahead from bobbing is that you need the longest lever, which is right here.

That's a much longer lever and will require much less forced to prevent the head from bobby. The problem is there is no mechanism that holds your head up in efficient 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, and fast forward, you know, six months, we finally figured it out, we patented it,

and then we got busy with Quick Flip. Around the same time I invented Quick Flip and I had to choose, which invention am I gonna take to market, and I chose Quick Flip. I felt it had a more widespread use. So we sat on Sleeper Hold for three or four years, And then Quick Flip blew up, did his thing. And then COVID struck.

And then I'm like, thank God we didn't launch Quick Flip because now no one's traveling. This thing has completely fell asleep for a year and a half or so. No one was traveling. And then post-COVID, we finally said, man, I'm going to do this. I was using it traveling to Cincinnati for a keynote at Procter & Gamble, 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 us roll. We film our first infomercial in flight in a commercial flight 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. She says, Henner, this is crazy. Why don't you produce these? Because this is, everyone needs this. And I said, well, Patty, I 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 send that to Eve. I said, babe, we're going to 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 32,000, 31,000 pillows in 40 days on Kickstarter, a million dollars raised, and it's the number one travel pillow ever crowdfunded, and the shipment of 50,000 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 Jiu-Jitsu, 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 do it? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Sweet. At what point, so you did a video about Jiu-Jitsu that is called, also called the 32 principles, right? Yes. Now, was that on Gracie University? Yes. Yes, it's an online course, and this was 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 classifying as a curriculum, it's just a known thing. 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-sitsu.

And then the macro principles are leverage, timing, and control. What we realize is that there are micro-principals, right? And what we found were there are 32 micro-principals, you know, the clock principle, distance principle, detachment principle, connection principle, reconnaissance principle. There's all these ones that are communicated in the book that are all, like, it's almost like 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 Hedon kind of realize that there were these 32 micro-principals, we thought, wow, this is beautiful. 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 at 20 years old, you realize there's an alphabet that makes sense of all of that. I feel like these 32 micro-principals are the alphabet for Jiu-Jitsu. There is no 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. 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? 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 is remaining after all that 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 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, it's singular, right? It's for one specific situation. So this is true in Jiu-Jitsu. 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, diagnose the situation, the threat, the concern, the challenge, and then run a 32 principles diagnostic.

Now, for large part of my life, this was unconscious effort. It was just the natural way I operated because Jiu-Jitsu 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 have my operating system without having to spend 30 plus years doing Jiu-Jitsu, I think it'd be a great

service. The big challenge in all of this is that jiu-jitsu 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, 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 the personal and professional application of the same principle, you know, in life and business. And they said, Hannah, 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've got to 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 jiu-jitsu techniques and these principles in a combat application. And even if you're not a practitioner, by the time with this book, you're going to walk a little bit taller, you're going to understand some concepts of personal protection and self-defense that could effectively save your life in a fight. 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. Yeah, yeah.

Get the book. I can't read this whole book on the podcast. Did you do the audio book too? Yeah, bro, that was the worst experience of my life. Yeah, some people have a real hard. I'm surprised you didn't just love that thing. Don't give me a script. I'll talk for three days straight.

Got it. Give me a script and watch me struggle. Was it painful? Yeah, I'm sitting in the studio one quarter of this size and I'm reading the pay. Hennar, 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.

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've got so many notes, but I'm just going to burn through these things and go through these principles. principles. Chapter 1, 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. 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 Jiu-Jitsu and I use these different tools.

And not only connect myself with the world, but connect them with each other. And in Jiu-Jitsu, 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, in step, toes. All of these are little tools in jiu-jitsu, 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 optimizing what's available? Two, the detachment principle. Recognizing when holding on does more harm than good and when letting go. does more good than imagined. 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 we're 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 years ago and how after she struck with the form of cancer and literally everything was fine, stomach a little bit of pain. One night she was going to babysit my sons, mine and Eve's sons. Henner, my tummy hurts a little.

I don't think I can watch the boys tonight. Like straight out. And we live next door 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 him, Henner. And lo and behold, a couple days past she goes over,

get some scans, get some things, a couple weeks past. She thought it was goldstones, 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 a 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 single going to Chipsa in Mexico and do this alternative therapy

and everyone kicks into gear. And my mom, she's really rapid decline in and real discomfort. 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 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 husband, my stepfather in that case, who equally was so committed no, no, no, no, we got to do everything with her. And as long as he needed her, she would not let go. So to talk with him to say, hey, Mark, 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, 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, 60, mid-60, 67, 65 years old. But 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 him, I'm okay. Then I went, wow, we got to shift everything to now support her the way she needs to be supported, not the way we want to support. And the attachment 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. 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 the 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.

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 1 hit. and this is true in relationships as well, right? You got to be careful because in a fight, the way we explain it is jujitsu 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. 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, 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 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. 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 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 got to get in posture. You got to push that thing down. Once you get there, you got to staple that. You got to give them all these little specific. You can tell a kid, get out from between their legs. And they like just, 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. Reminding me of the creation principle. Yeah, 100%. And in jujitsu, right, we talk about this concept of you want to be first and you want to be third. Yeah. You know? So this idea of deliberate, targeted action. to get the reaction from the opponent that you're looking for and then capitalizing on that reaction of theirs.

And it's a powerful concept there and it's a powerful concept in life and business as well. Number six, the acceptance principle, recognizing when it's better to yield than to resist. Big one. The example in the book was marriage. Yeah. Right? So for me, it was, you know, I tell the story about my wife and my now wife, then girlfriend, and the struggle that we had regarding my beliefs.

And this is like generational beliefs, Brazil, macho, crazy 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, you know. That's not what you married. That's not what I married, dude. Holy cow, you called it. 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 of 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. successful and she says well I had all I saw was my mom work 40 50 60 hours a week every week of my life and I had nothing but admiration it's all I grew up with and we're perfectly healthy and we grew up and all of us are successful and 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 12 years of 13 14 15 years and her parents are still married after 50 years so I'm in a tough situation I have a belief about what it needs 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 11 or 12. That went until 4.30. Morning, morning time. 11 or 12 p.m. to 4.30 a.m. Fair to say, I tapped out. And the result is now evident.

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 woman 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. Save my marriage.

Big time, Jiu-Jitsu 101. Number seven, the velocity principle. Adapting your speed to maintain balance and optimize outcomes. 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 is a 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. so many factors coming into the public launch of this pillow that COVID came in and then we stopped and then I plan 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, Hannah, no, we can't launch right now because it's the wrong month and timing of when to go and when you go, go. But when it's not time to go, pull, right? And just being able to be flexible in the velocity and in jiu-jitsu, we do so much

of the changing of our pacing. And I talk about that in great length there. And it's a critical principle and it comes into the clock principle, which is 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 book, I talk about an example of a young man, a 16-year-old boy named Shane, there was a psychologist who trained with us and called in and said, Hennar, 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. 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 4 o'clock class, It's like four, five, four, ten, 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 ghee, I walk out, and I hear the most abdominally enforced cry I've ever heard in my life. 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 mouth it to her, and I go around the passenger side. I get in the car and I sit down. And he's crying, you guys, folding over with every breath and crying and punching it out. And I'm like, I've never seen this before in my life.

This is a situation like Jiu-Jitsu. 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. 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 breathing normal and he's not hysterical anymore. And I said, hey, Shane, what do you like to do for fun? And he says,

video games i said tell me more blah blah blah blah about 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 here's 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 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 the reception is, hi, we walk by, tour the mat. All I'm thinking is there can be no chance that he leaves this building without doing

Jiu-Jitsu. Zero, because the chance that I get 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 going to get this guy on the mat and not cause a vomiting fit in the middle of this building? So I'm giving them 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, nothing else, no exit. 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 Jujitsu. I mount on top of him. And I say, how would, we're bros now? I said, how would you escape?

And while I push you off, I say, go give it a go. Blah, blah, blah. I'm laughing. I'm keeping the energy very friendly. Blah, come on, bro, give it a chance. Let's go. My friends are coming. 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. Six techniques, one hour later. 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 Hannah I need 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 jiu jitsu in a group he eventually graduates high school his dad is a captain at LAPD 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 principal the right move at the wrong time is the wrong move I didn't know what principle I was going to 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 going to work. Jiu-jitsu worked in that situation. I had faith. I threw my chance. I threw my opportunity. I mounted on him.

I didn't know what reaction it was going to be. And today he's a different man because of it. And the doctor cannot believe it who referred him. Hennar, 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. The clock principle.

Number nine, the river principle, which you already talked about, overcoming obstacles by flowing around them. You got it. Number 10, the frame principle, increasing effectiveness by enhancing systematic efficiency. So in Jiu-Jitsu, we aim to substitute muscular strength with skeletal structure everywhere we can. It's helpful to be strong, right? 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.

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. And it's one that, again, found it's rooted on the mats, but is equally effective in life and business.

Number 11. The Kuzushi principle. Yeah, so the Kuzzi, seeking first to understand, then to be understood. That's the life application of the Kizushi principle that my kind of definition that I gave it For Jiu-Jitsu, this is the Kizushi, the term Kuzhi, is literally the breaking of balance, right?

It's a known principle in judo and jiu-jitsu. And, right, every sweep, every trap and roll, every takedown, you're breaking the balance and then you're driving their way 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 Kizushi 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, 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.

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, one day as someone emails me, says, Hannah, we have a one star Yelp review. Disasterous 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 got to 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. 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 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? Give me the phone number.

I'm going to 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. Can you tell me about it? Well, oh, hi, Henner. 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. 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 the class ends and I said look I don't want to go just there I also want to sponsor a whole month of private classes with Bobby. You're going to love her. She's one of our best instructors. She's going to 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 going to 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 gets a newborn baby. He's going to come in. It's all good. And in all of the situation, it started with, where are you at, Myra?

Where are you at? Calling her up and not saying, hey, why did you write that? 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 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 address that one already. 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.

Yeah. And Jiu-Jitsu, 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 really 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 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 have some very good mentors. I was privileged at 17, 18, 19 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? And he says, Henner, treat your people very good. 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 250 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 jutsu with the world are the very people we're 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-Zitsu with the world. 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, Jocko, and that's a good point. 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 share and you can do this and you can allow other people to win with us. And I think we'll go further. And we went from a single school with four employees to now 250 schools. and a headquarters with 50 employees in Torrance who work full time there, all because everyone's winning.

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 presents itself. So this story in the book is funny

because it's the only chapter where it's kind of written 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 other people that are 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 that 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 jiu-jitsu, playful, bantered, went too much.

They pull it 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. He starts to grab 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 crazy. It's crazy. This and that and the other. The whole thing went crazy. The reputation spreads in the WWE that Eve choked out.

The guy. This is one of the guys. 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 tells us. us what happened. And he's, 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. And she goes, are you okay even? 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. He was doing silly. He needed to get choked. 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 jiu-jitsu 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, Bha, 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 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. Awesome. 18, 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.

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

Number 24, the overload principle, identifying where you have a unique advantage, then doubling down to maximize your success. 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 a 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 examples. That's what this book is. So you can really start to understand these things from a couple different perspectives. You get the QR code for the jiu-jitsu kind of combat perspective. Then you'll get sort of an explanation of what the principal is.

And you do give a brief verbiage about the jih-jitsu 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, believing that small persistent advancements will add up to significant gains over time. 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. This is like an interesting principle in judicious. People want to get back up so you kind of know what they're going to do. 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, this is now becoming a pattern. A third phone goes missing on a Saturday morning.

The third phone was the phone of Billy Graziadi, who is a biohazard. The biohazard lead singer. Yeah. Stud. Amazing guy, Black Belt Billy. Yeah, yeah. So Billy's phone was the third phone missing. So what I did.

And when you're in Brooklyn, you best watch your back, people. Don't be still Billy Biohazard's phone. Don't still Billy's phone, dude. So when Billy came down, my phone's missing. So what had been happening is when you first phone is gone, I look at a roster of 85 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 16 or 17-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? Like, go to the house.

Daniel's there. The mom is there. The little sister is there. And Daniel's older brother who's like 23, 24, 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, no. Daniel, did you? No, I didn't. I don't know what you're talking about, huh? I said, well, we need to find those phones. And I'm certain that you're the one who took him. So we either need to find those phones, or you're never going to train at Gracie University again.

Silence, got up, walked away. Well, interesting, before he walked away, his brother said. When he was denying it initially, his brother said, Henner, I know, older brother. I know my brother. He didn't take the phone.

So, like, his brother's denial got doubled down by the older brother. So they were, like, backing each other. The older brother trained too? No. So we didn't have that relationship. The older brother was just, you know, a little stud.

And he says, Henry, if he says he didn't take it, he didn't take it. I say, bro, I respect the brotherliness. 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.

walked away and came back with the phone so embarrassed right like they are like so embarrassed and I said I appreciate you being honest Daniel and bringing this back I said is this all you have he said no got up went and got the other one and then I said Daniel what about the rest he said that first he said there's only two I said Daniel whether another one or another two after these two he said two So now we know the answer. It's one more, even though he was denying the third one, a big time. And then he said, yeah, I sold the other one already. I said, okay.

So here's the situation we have. The bigger problem than the phones being lost is the 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. 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. And you have to do it with your peers from whom you stole. And the dad said, Hennard, do you think they're going to hurt him? I said, no. They're not going to hurt him. I'll be there. It's going to be fine.

I said, you guys can think about it. Monday night is class at 6.30. If you're there, we do the talk. Very tense. Boom. 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. I love this school Henner 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 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 I said all right there you go after class the guys he stole from

and others come up hey bro that was really cool you did that it's all good and man no 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, that 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. And the fact that Henner 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 trying 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 them. 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.

Yeah. 28, the head control principle. identifying the primary source of influence in an organization and targeting your efforts accordingly. Number 29, the redirection principle, using unfavorable circumstances to create favorable outcomes. Chapter 30, or number 30, the mobility principle accepting the things you cannot change while having the courage to change the things you can. Isn't that an AA saying? I think so. I think it is an AA saying.

Alcoholics anonymous. The courage to accept that. I think it is. It is. It is. Yeah, yeah. I've never been to that group or discussion, but I've heard it just in passing. And I'm like, because in jujitsu, right, how often are we stuck in a position where

the opponent is immovable? 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 going to be the way it is,

guess what? You have two options. Move relative to it or keep budding heads with it and reduce your effectiveness that way. So in this chapter, I talk about the need for me to adapt to the state kind of mandate 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 regulation, You can accomplish so much more so 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. And here we are. Yep. 31, the center line principle owning your life by setting boundaries wherever they're needed. Absolutely. And then the line. Last and final of the principles, the Grandmaster 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. The ultimate white belt. The ultimate black belt and the ultimate white belt. There you go. The ultimate guy created it, but still has and goes through life with an open mind and still learning his whole life. To the end, 95.

And this guy's like, yo, Hannah, 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. And this is just a constant reminder of 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's 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? Not a book, but even the original 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 jujitsu

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 art, 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 it the Grand Master principle because that's what he embodied. 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. Yeah, you're actually 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 had helped to invent the art of Brazilian jiu jrilo 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. And then you say this. 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. 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 proud of how it's applied not just in Jiu-Jitsu, 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,

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. So there's one population where I felt like they just need to be told and given permission to apply jiu-jitsu to everything. That's the people who do jiu-jitsu. Then there's the people who don't do jiu-jitsu 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 jiu-jitsu, 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, 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 Jiu-Jitsu, 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 fluid and effective, efficient way of living and dealing with adversity 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 will, if they were on the fence of like, should I try jiu-jitsu or should I not? by the time they read this, they're going to 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 jiu-jitsu for self-defense, but they stay with jiu-jitsu 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 jih Tjitsu principles I've applied in life and business, I went, okay, I think that some people can benefit from this. 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 going to attract some people to Jiu-Jitsu. I can't promise that the school you go to is going to do things in a safe and structured and a contextually relevant way. But my hope is that, you know, through more educating and discussion, like this, jiu-jitsu 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 17 years and

has 112 students, I don't think he wants that. I think he wants to have 500, 600, 700 students. 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 were 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 jiu-jitsu 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 jiu-sitsu, 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. Yeah, and I think it has improved a lot. And I, it 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 jiu jit too I wanted to get roughed up I wanted to fight people and so guess what happened I got I got roughed up that's what happens when you go into academy with an attitude like you want to be aggressive and you want to you want to fight you're you're going to receive that if you go in to a jihitsu academy because you want to learn 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 jiu jitsu all we all want you to do jiu jitsu it's going to make your life better So don't be nervous. Go out and try. And the other thing is, what school should I go to? Go try, you know, 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. Great advice. Very good advice. 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 going to teach you. And I can tell you what curriculum they're going to do and what the safety protocols are. It 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, 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 or three, four schools, then you make your decision. Who makes you feel the best? Who speaks about Jiu-Jitsu 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. That school's identity is what you see on day one. So be very careful of what you trust. because if they say, yeah, you're going to learn those things later. You're going to learn self-defense down the line. 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 p.m., we're going to talk about that. 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 signed.

Yeah. But go train jih Tutsu people go train jitza. Does that get us up to speed? I think we covered some of your activities. I think we're doing pretty good. Tell me about this energy, pink mist. The energy. Well, it seemed to have worked today.

You had a lot of energy while you were here. I kept me fired up this whole time. And I didn't know I needed this in my life. Yeah. Well, 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 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. Congratulations.

That's what we're doing. Yeah. Where can people find? you. We got quick flip. We got sleeper hold. We got Gracie University.com. That's sort of the hub, right? That's the hub. Yeah, Gracie University.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 podcast, 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 Gracie University. dot 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 jiu-jitsu 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 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. 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 state of mind, their physical possessions, when someone's going to take something from you, you should be able to say, no, you're not going to take this. And if you attempt, it's going to be a bad day for you. Simple conversation, but you can't. You can't say that unless you can back it up. And you do so with the highest level of love and compassion.

Then you get the people who say, you've all heard this. I'm a lover or not a fighter. No, Jocko, I'm not going to come to the studio. I don't want to lose it. I'm a lover or 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, 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-egettes. regress, 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, enter. If I get into a street fight, it shouldn't be

called a fight. It's the wrong classification because there aren't too 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. That's what my fight should be called, the 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 his jiu-jitsu.

So if you're a lover or not a fighter, you need to learn jiu-jitsu, because if not, you're the biggest liability to yourself. So graceuniversity.com, quickflip apparel.com for quickflips are great, but any organizations, 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. Sleeperhold is travel pillows, right? Sleeperhold.com. If you travel on our 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. 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. And you have at Gracie University H.Q. You've got your YouTube channel. Don't forget about that. YouTube, that's the 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.

And one day it was like, hey, Guy Valente called me. He's like, Henner, 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, Guy 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 Verdum, a massive triangle win. We did that one on a Sunday. I was there. You went to the fight? Yeah, I was there. Dude, that was the best. I did that breakdown on a Sunday.

By Wednesday, it has, you know, three, 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. Gracie University.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. say agent at the airport like oh I've been love with the breakdowns I'm like cool do you train he's like nah I just love the breakdowns I'm all right cool man like do a class one day do you online go check it out right on echo Charles any questions oh yes speaking of breakdowns remember the OG breakdown how to tie your belt yeah that was the OG breakdown how to tie

your jiu jitsu belt the best one of Hollywood oh yeah Hollywood is it the same way that I tie it Hollywood super lot classic the original there is actually what was the original one called it was like the I think it's Classic. Yeah, something simple like that. It was like classic and then the Hollywood and then the Superlock. And I just, yeah, people loved it, dude. You know what they call it Hollywood?

Or you think he can guess? It's actually one of the best breakdowns there is, to be honest with you. It's really funny. It's really good. It's one of the OG ones. It's really funny. It's on there. I haven't seen that one.

Yeah, it's old school. How to tie your jihitsu belt. And then there's that one. And then there's the pant tying video where the ghee pants. You know, some people don't know. Girl, 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 the pants start to fall off so I created a video where

I explained the pant tie and people love those and um yeah you have a few breakdowns with that kind stuff because you have the one where this one the string comes out of the pants too how to put it back through the pipe back through yeah it's pretty yes very innovative we were just making random videos people were just gravitated and just before you know it and then you do a cona mcgregor habib namaga made off breakdown and it gets you know two million views overnight because people want to know what happened and they see. So 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 going to reach out. You're like, yo, Gracie breakdown. Yeah, so in that case, you got to 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 way and the other. I said, listen, this is what we do. Your son, Austin. 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. 12-year-old, just overweight, like just this big kind of like 12-year-old kid who just got annihilated at school. and I got him in there, trained him for a week. Day one, you see the progression. We filmed the whole thing, and we did this progression. Pop, 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 heat 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 challenges, if you don't take steps to address the challenges that these kids are facing, it's like a balloon. 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 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. You didn't have an outlet. 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 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 jiu-jitsu transformations so that people on the outside go, all right,

you know, it's one thing to talk about jiu-jitsu, another for people to see problem, transformation, new human being. This guy, Austin, that was like eight to ten 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's certain skills that we expect people and kids in the world to

But unless they're taught, unless it's talked about, it's largely 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 Jocco 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 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. Thank you. Any other questions, Echo? Yeah, your dad did martial arts consulting for, like, movies, right? Like lethal weapon, Juan. And triangle. Yeah, the Gary Busey and the Meri 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 Four as one of the bad guys. And René Russo.

I had to go watch that scene in preparation for this podcast, both those scenes. Yeah, and René Russo slams him on the glass. I forgot about that was your dad and the Renee Russo getting tossed. In the glass. Yeah. She gets smashed in the garage. It's a 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 wife like choking dudes out. It was great scene. And I remember that particular scene when he was filming. He's like, yo, this is the alligator pass. 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 going to be in the movie. That's cool.

Awesome. Hennar, any closing thoughts? No. Just what an honor. And thank you guys for helping us increase the awareness about not just jujitsu, but the life application of it. And I appreciate you guys. Awesome, man. 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 the philosophies of Jiu-Jitsu

around the world. It is much appreciated. Thank you. Thank you, Brose. And with that, Hennar Gracie has left the building. We could have done multiple podcast. But still four hours or something like that, right? Yeah, yeah, fully. But even going deeper into the principles could have been kind of cool. There's a few of them. 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. The J-Jitsu version is triangle arm lock. Yeah, like they have to make a decision, and any decision they make is the outcome that you want, you know? So chess, yeah, 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. Yep. Well, awesome, awesome discussion. Super, super cool. And we're doing Jiu-Jitsu, by the way. Yes. We should be doing Jiu-Jitsu. Hey, if you weren't convinced to do J-Jitsu yet, go on.

Yeah. You have to get there when you get there You're gonna need some fuel. You're gonna need jocco fuel. You're gonna need to rehydrate Yep. You want to get jocco hydrate It's so good to go yeah. It is such a win the jocco hydrate and also similar Greens yeah jaco greens Greens do not have to taste like dirt and mowed grass shaking in the mixer. They don't need to taste like that they can taste like jocco greens or

What's funny is you kind of say it kind of with this joking tone. No. But that is literally the standard for greens. You know, 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 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 or whatever you're doing. And so I know. But yeah, your greens actually tastes good.

Your mom likes my greens. Yes, she did. Yeah, she totally approved them. The whole gig. There you go. If they're good with Echo's mom, you know they're good. She's been drinking greens forever. Now she knows the best kind of greens.

I know. So, yeah, joccofuel.com, get greens, get hydrate. Get the milk. Get the milk powder. Get the joint warfare. Get the super girl. You're probably going to want some. You start training the jitz.

You're going to want that joint warfare. But I meant to tell you, and it's not about that, it's about Cold War. So my, keep the story short, so my wife, my lovely wife, she was going on like a little girl's trip in town. She is, or she's currently on it right now. Staycation. Stacation-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 compromise. So she was like, hey, I kind of 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 because, you know, for all these like very important reasons. So she's like, oh, just give me the Cold War. She's just so 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.

That's a game. That's a lot of Cold War going on. Like that's a full frontal assault. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's it. But that's what she did.

So I was like, yeah. All right. 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.

Yeah. That's what I'm talking about. It counts. That's Cold War, by the way. Hey, you can get this stuff. You can get at joccofuel.com. You can get a subscription on joccofuel.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 want to take every single day. So anyways, check that out, joccofield.com. You can save a little bit when you do that subscription as well. That way you're getting hooked up. If you want to buy it in a store, go to vitamin shop.

Go to Wawa, look in the bottom right in Wawa. Go to vitamin shop. Go to GnC, military commissaries, Afees, Hanifer, Dastores, Wakefern, Shoprite, H.E.B. Thank you, Texas. Thank you, H.E.B. You guys are crushing. When 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 in a more store. So thank you. Same thing with Meyer up in the Midwest. Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, Shields. And by the way, small gym, we're out at CrossFit at the CrossFit games. So many people came by and that owned CrossFit gyms, they want, they're going to sell, they're going to sell Jock 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 JF Sales at joccofuel.com 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 and everything that you do. joccofuel.com.

Also origin USA. When you do jiu jitza, you're going to need a ghee. I mean, look, there are other geese 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 against the principles of jiu jitsu you'd be getting a secondary

tertiary just like a bad ghee don't do that get an origin gie origin usa origin usa.s.a.orgian usa.com also you can't go to a club in a ghee you well 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 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 that's not what we're

doing here so check it out there you go um it's what we're doing origin USA or origin USA dot com It's true. Also, Jocko has a store called Jocco store.com. So, we 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, and get your, you know, shirts and hats and hoodies.

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 peak of the designs. JakuStore.com, click on the top right where it says joint shirtlock. I'll give you a little peek on the current design that's going on. Right on.

If you care. If you want to see what a, otherwise it can be a surprise. Up to you. Where you give a peak before you release. Of the month, like what's this month? August, right? So the August shirt. Yeah, it's called the August shirt or whatever.

They have names to them too, which have layers and some of the details. 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 part. You know, there's a chance,

let's say this was set up in a different way. Sure. If you were isolated, if you were just locked in this room all the time, there's a chance that you could be making these shirts thinking that they're cool. Yeah.

And thinking that these designs, there's a chance that like no one else was getting them. If you didn't know that, there's a chance that could be. Wait, what do you mean no one's getting them? They don't get it. Let's say,

You had no communication with the outside world, 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. Yes. But like no, no one else cares, right? That could be happening. I mean, 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. It's very possible. You know, luckily you can see the fruits of your life. Labor. Well, let's say the fact of the whole matter, the whole matter is if you listen, you know. And, you know, it'll be fun. And look, is every single person going to get every single design and get what's behind it and the layers of every single one, every single person?

Probably not. But. But enough. I mean, it's pretty profound how many people, like at the Jocco 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 Jocko live I have no idea What anyone's gonna think about it yeah like I literally am just I could go out there and it could just People could go dude I'm they could be walking out

You know what I mean? I don't know I don't know what I'm doing Yeah, you know what like a comedian? They do a bunch of club shows in a small club right 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 they do little they do hundreds of little eight minute little six minute gigs and they get that feedback and they hone it all and then they by the time they go record one for a netflix special they've got it they already know yep I don't have any of that experimentation dude I'm just rolling in it's like a trip wire or no uh what's a balance wire what's that thing called the tight rope tightrope I'm walking a high wire no net no net no net I'm walking a high wire no net

I could just go out there and just things could fall apart. I'm on the big stage. 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. 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. This is farm raised beef. It's grass fed and it's finished on fruit and grain. It's a different gig. 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 going to translate into like texture and taste? I know now. Yeah, yeah. I didn't know. I'd never even heard of it before. Yeah. I've never heard of it. I've heard, of course, you heard of grain fed, grain finished.

You heard a grass fed only. You heard a grass fed grain finished. But you've never, I never heard. Yeah. Grass fed fruit and grain finished. Yeah. Man, it's good. Even like the fat, like when you look at it, it has like a different color to it.

Oh, damn. It's freaking amazing. 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 were raised and all this. And like, um, has an impact.

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 going to taste different, you know, like all that kind of stuff. That's interesting. Well, Sean Glass, teammate from the team. Yeah.

Yeah. Who also has five kids, by the way. So you know he, you know he needs to feed the kids for good food. Sure. But he put, He gave a little recipe on the gram.

And it's like salt, pepper, butter in the pan, in the cast iron pan. Yeah, yeah. Two minutes aside. Flip, flip, flip, flip, eight minutes. So you go two sides. Two, two cooks first side. Yep. I just did this last night.

Yeah. Freaking legit. So my, I actually, look, and my chef. Am I Jack Arnold? No, I'm not Jack Arnold. You know this about me. I'm only me. I got a feeling there's a huge butt coming.

So those either don't know. We've never talked about this, but we, Echo and I have a running joke. Echo will make a huge disclaimer. Yep. And then say, but, blah, blah, blah. He's going to say what he's going to say. So you're not a chef. You're not a cattleman.

You're not really pretty much anything. I'm not a mind reader. You have no reason. You have no reason to say what you're about to say, but you're going to say it anyways. Okay. So go ahead. Not a chef. But I do.

The steak that I cook most of the time is pretty good. Like restaurant quality preparation. You're better than me, you think. No, better than a restaurant. Oh, better than a restaurant. Okay, okay, yeah, yeah. So. It's tough to.

And now with the primal beef, it's tough. The restaurants can't compete with the grain and fruit finish. Shoot, I wonder. Actually, I'm going on there. But so I will say, I have a protocol. 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. Eye ball it, you know, and it works, but that's interesting. I might do the two and two and two and two. I recommend it. Yeah. 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 Jocco Underground. Also, subscribe to our YouTube channels.

Jocko Podcast. Podcast channel, Origin USA channel, JockoFu 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. Henry Gracie.

Really cool read. Really good information and really good principles. Final Span, Leadership Strategy, and Tech. You know all the books I've written. The way the Warrior Kid Books, by the way, all the bullying stuff that we talked about today, that's in the book. It's in the books. Different types of bullies, as a matter of fact, are covered.

these books. So wave the warrior kid, one, two, three, four, five. Get them all. And also we have a leadership consultancy. It's called Eschlamfront. Go to eshlamfront.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. That's called the muster. We have the FTX. We have counsel. 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. Eshlamfront.com. We also have an online training academy

Everything that I said today talking about you can learn online like we learned this at Eshlam Front that we could teach 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 extreme ownership dot com and and you know jiu jih Tzu is like a magic trick for fighting What we talk about at extreme ownership.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 retire you want to help their Families, Gold Star Families, check out. Mark Lee's got a charity organization if you want to donate or you want to get involved. Go to America's Mighty Warriors.org. And also, don't forget about Micah Think up there in the mountains currently doing Jiujitsu on a mountain lion.

And winning, by the way, heroes and horses.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 gracie university.com. Instagram at Gracie University, H.Q, YouTube Gracie Breakdown, Facebook, Gracie University. Henner, he's also on Instagram and Twitter. He's at Henner Gracie. And, of course, Echo is that Echo Charles? I am at Jocka Williams.

Just watch out for the dang algorithm because it is a sneaky jiu-jitsu practitioner. It will choke you out and waste a bunch of your time and take a bunch of your money. watch out for it. Thanks again to Henner Gracie for coming out here to share his experiences and lessons learned. Thanks to the Gracie family and all the jiu jitzy 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 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 Remember the message from the black belt the grand master the true grandmaster

Elio Gracie you should always be learning you have to stay humble you have to keep an open mind you got to try new things and learn new maneuvers and as the grandmaster principal says live with the confidence of a black belt

while learning with the humility of a white belt that is a good call and train some jiu jitsu while you're at it and until next time Zecco and Jocco out